Husserl’s Phenomenology: Philosophia Perennis in the Crisis of European Culture

This essay takes up a recurring theme in Husserl’s phenomenology: the crisis of European culture and, more specifically, the crisis of reason that manifests itself in the failure of the positive sciences to understand their origins and their lack of a fully scientific methodology. Husserl’s phenomenology attempts to return to those origins—to things and states of affairs simply as they present themselves to experiencing subjects—and to proceed with a rigorous methodology to examine them and articulate their essential structures. Only in this way are we able to understand higher-order cultural achievements of the sort we find in the positive and formal sciences. The chapter notes how Husserl extended his analyses to consider the formation and transmission of traditions, including the dangers lurking in tradition when we passively accept its results without actively appropriating their truth.