ABSTRACT
The days in which the fate of humanity seemed to rest in the hands of the Europeans are long gone, as is the time when one could think that Europe was called to show the way forward to all nations on earth. To consider Europe as a phenomenon in the sense of the objective sciences of spirit, for Husserl, means immediately to evoke the incomplete methodological status of those sciences. The historical phenomenon “Europe” find its place within a preliminary eidetics of cultural formations. Philosophizing about Europe involves a fundamental reflexivity. The chapter highlights to what extent Husserl’s reflections on Europe differ from the analyses that we normally encounter in the historical and sociological literature. The awareness that the fate of European humanity is inseparable from the vicissitudes of modern science and its function for cultural life at large becomes widespread during the Enlightenment.
