In a 1943 letter to political philosopher Eric Voegelin, Alfred Schutz defends Husserl’s Crisis against Voegelin’s criticism by describing philosophers as historically situated actors. Foreshadowing a criticism that has again become significant in recent years, Voegelin had complained in an earlier letter to Schutz that Husserl’s last published work never left the selective and narrow scope of certain traditions within European history. As a result, according to Voegelin, Husserl had failed to give convincing answers to any truly universal questions about world history, its anthropological foundations, teleological course, and relation to objective truth. In Schutz’s reading, however, Husserl’s “Besinnung” is a conscious reflection upon the inevitably selective standpoint of the philosopher him or herself. For Schutz, the Crisis reflects the anthropologically universal fact that doing philosophy is a form of action and thus, like all human action as analyzed in Schutz’s own social phenomenology, is subject to a complex dynamic of meaning-making. Philosophers stand within historically and culturally specific traditions which are not of their making and which they can only partly oversee from the perspective delineated by their individual goals and interests. From their
respective standpoint within tradition, “critical” philosophers, especially at times perceived to be historical junctures, try to institute new “beginnings” with a certain “telos” in mind. However, only retrospection from a later standpoint will suggest what the actual outcome of that action was. Since such retrospection is itself a form of philosophical action, the process leads to ever new beginnings without reaching an ultimate end. As Schutz argues in their later correspondence, Voegelin’s “monopolistic-imperialistic” insistence on a single truth and normative standard in history stems from a misunderstanding of the nature and role of “relevance” as the most fundamental principle guiding and motivating the production of meaning (Sinn) that shapes experience and action.