摘要
In Krisis,and in many of the preparatory papers for his last published work,Edmund Husserl repeatedly declares his allegiance to the Enlightenment,but,at the same time,always expresses his misgivings about its concrete purport.Like Horkheimer and Adorno,but for somewhat different reasons,he thus succumbs to what Ferrone has termed the philosopher’s conception of the Enlightenment,as opposed to that of the historian of ideas.No doubt Husserl is explicit about not aiming to write a history of ideas,but in so doing he misses the essential thrust of the Enlightenment as being a part of what he himself describes as the European tradition.In accordance with his own notion of generativity,the Enlightenment must be seen as going well beyond the Greek beginnings by epitomizing,in the 18th century,the idea of human rights,as well as that of universal critique.Indeed,it is the discovery of the(rights of the)Other which justifies Husserl’s claim for Europe being the bearer of a universal meaning.These days,however,Enlightenment values,by means of a genuine dialectics,have been brought,in the guise of the so-called Social Justice Theory,to enter into contradiction with themselves,one of the victims of which is Husserl’s notion of Europe.Since the new struggle for Enlightenment,like the classical one,has to be fought out in the Public Sphere,we need to develop a novel Ethics of communication.
