ABSTRACT
Influenced by Franz Brentano and Friedrich Jodl, Husserl proposed a philosophical reading of the history of ethics: it is a battlefield of reason and feeling, two sides that alternately claim to provide the first principle of ethics. According to Husserl, this historical process tends in itself towards the discovery of phenomenological ethics, which proposes a certain reconciliation of the antagonists: in the pre-war period, it took on the form of a complementarity between formal axiology and praxis and its material counterparts, and after the war, Husserl directed himself towards the complementarity of reason and affectivity within an ethics of the person.
The chapter first shows how Husserl is influenced by Brentano and Jodl and it then reconstructs Husserl’s interpretations and critiques of the history of ethics from Socrates to Fichte and ultimately to phenomenological ethics. It ends with the question, whether Husserl’s program of ethics was not in a certain tension with what he actually discovered in his phenomenological analyses of ethical phenomena. Those analyses ultimately seem to lead him to a reconciliation of reason and feeling in an ethics of a striving for rational, and sometimes tragic, desire, instead of a reconciliation in a strict science of formal and material axiology and praxis.
