Consciousness and action Husserl and Marx on theory and praxis

Efraim Shmueli

pp. 343-382

in: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed), The crisis of culture, Dordrecht, Reidel, 1976

Abstract

In the last decades serious attempts have been made to bring together Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology with ‘dialectical materialism’. These attempts to build a synthesis of Husserl and Marx in both communist last non-communist countries intend to break down barriers between two major intellectual trends which were once considered indifferent, or even hostile, to each other. Husserl never mentions Marx or Marxism in all of this writings, but his associates, colleagues and students refuted vehemence my theories of Marx as one-sided ‘materialism’, ‘naturalism’, and ‘economisn’.1 Although some existential philosophers used Marxian insights, they rebuked sharply ‘historical materialism’ as a theory of man and society and as an account of history. However, Husserl’s description of the crisis of Western civilization, and his passionate appeal to transcendental reason, intersubjective and universal, particularly in his great posthumous work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology,2 opened some possible interconnections between phenomenology and Marxism, even for those who strongly believed that these hhpools of thought are irreconcilable.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund

Marx Karl