Husserl and the Anthropological Vocation of Phenomenology

Abstract

It is possible to show that there is neither a philosophy of Nature nor a philosophy of man in Husserl’s thought. However paradoxical this may seem, we shall see that to a certain extent phenomenology itself had initiated the general movement that has led philosophical research away from the question of “man” toward a radical critique of humanism and anthropologism. This movement, both praised and denounced years later, brought on the “anthropological interpretation” of Husserl’s phenomenology which was to provide French phenomenological thought with its best conceptual resources. Yet this reading of Husserl was a complete misreading, possibly the most serious misinterpretation ever made in the field of phenomenology. (See J. Derrida, “Les Fins de l’Homme,” in Marges de la Philosophie, pp. 131–164, esp. p. 139.)