Wandering Across the Face of Europe

Article

Abstract

[In English]

«Wandering Across the Face of Europe» is a reconsideration of the Husserl’s the Vienna Lecture in light of both its condemnation and in light of recent European and global history. The paper hinges on a reconsideration of the distinction between scientific medicine and the nature cure that opens Husserl’s essay. The paper argues that it is only through relinquishing the objectivist desire for a natural science of human societies that the problems of the world can be solved. This relinquishing, it is argued, demands not a search for a better system, but the necessary condition of accepting responsibility for the effects of existing systems and the overcoming of the desire for a world wide system. Only through rejecting the objectivist desire for system can there be a true taking up of and a taking responsibility for the European tradition. The paper then involves a re-commitment to Husserl’s notion of the essence of the European tradition.