ABSTRACT
In his Esperienza della ragione: Hegel e Husserl in dialogo (The Experience of Reason: A Dialogue between Hegel and Husserl), Danilo Manca reflects on the affinities between Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenological methods, focusing on a fundamental text for each of them: the Phenomenology of Spirit and The Crisis of European Sciences, respectively. The overall project of the book might rightly puzzle the reader, starting with the counterfactual assumption of its title. A dialogue between Hegel and Husserl? Husserl’s remarks on Hegel are more memorable for their flippancy than for their philosophical soundness. Even in the Crisis—the most apt starting point for a comparative analysis according to Manca—Husserl depicts Hegel as a romantic irrationalist, bound to a style “of mythical concept constructions” and “obscure metaphysical anticipations”. Just as Husserl did not pay much attention to Hegel’s philosophy, Hegel scholars are nowadays more prone to read the Phenomenology through the lenses of contemporary epistemology rather than those of twentieth-century phenomenology. Any attempt to start a “dialogue” between Hegel and Husserl would thus seem to defy the criteria of philological and historical accuracy.
