Husserl’s phenomenology as practical/existential reason: the life-world as ground of Husserlian enlightened project of rigorous science

Abstract

This article affirms that phenomenology, realization of the idea of philosophy as rigorous science, is the Husserlian answer to the epistemological and ontological crisis that suffer science and philosophy of his time. But the last meaning of this phenomenological rigorous science is to attend the existential problems of the human being due to the divorce established between reason and existence because of the crisis Fin de Siècle. The phenomenological enlightened project has for Husserl above all a practical/existential meaning: ground the idea of Europe as ideal of human existence based on ideas of reason, with meaning. The answer to the crisis can be only the philosophy as rigorous science founded on the antepredicative experience of the Life-World in which things themselves are given to us, ‘what’ they are (us) primarily. Science will have human meaning again when it is founded on this originary sphere of experience, true source of all meaning and category.