ABSTRACT
In the context of Husserlian phenomenology, the concept of teleology is best known from Husserl’s late works. The concept itself, however, was already introduced as a part of his early analyses of consciousness in which it referred to the synthetic or associative structure of our conscious life. This chapter traces the development of the concept of teleology from Husserl’s early static analyses to his later, genetic (or generative) analyses. I argue that the basic sense of the concept of teleology remained the same; what changed was a new awareness of the implications of teleology for philosophy itself. Husserl began to acknowledge the historical situatedness of all thinking, and the concept that teleology played a key role in the rearticulation of phenomenology as historical critique. To say that our present is teleological means that it depends on a number of conceptual and normative choices that we have inherited as part of our historical situation. By doing so, Husserl’s concept of teleology differed quite radically from the historical teleology of German idealism. Instead of a deterministic concept signifying the inevitable progress of historical development, the phenomenological concept of teleology was to be understood as a fundamentally critical tool of philosophical reflection.
