Philosophy of Culture and Cultural Anthropology as Transcendental Phenomenology

Abstract

This chapter considers the relations among the philosophy of culture, cultural anthropology, and transcendental phenomenology. Husserl’s concern was to focus on the nature of rational subjectivity, rather than the human as such, in order to ground the sciences and develop a philosophical science. To the extent that humans are rational beings, Husserl’s philosophy was concerned with humans only as instances of rationality rather than in their existential reality. However, Husserl began his philosophizing with anthropological motives, and his later philosophy realizes an expanded philosophical anthropology or, better, an “anthropological philosophy” that integrates philosophy and anthropology in a manner rising above particular anthropological orientations and thereby clarifying the very notion of orientation itself.