Book, Europe Crisis and Renewal[LS]

Although relatively late, Husserlian reflection on culture and, in particular, the meaning of the West is complex and nuanced. For Husserl, Philosophical culture is the culture of Reason. In this sense, Philosophy is not European. On the contrary, it is Europe that is philosophical. And the greatness of philosophical Europe, its status as “archon” of Humanity, is not to be confused with any project of domination carried out by a people, but with the way in which it, in the finiteness of its forms of culture, is the phenomenon of the idea infinite sense of a rational culture that can, without limits, become the culture of a universal Humanity. European supranationality will not, therefore, be a project of domination for the use of “Europeans”, but the idea of ​​an authentic humanity, united in the infinite tasks of realizing Reason, which can never reach a final and definitive form, suitable for a regular repetition or for purely external imitation. The booklet on the crisis of European humanity, from 1935, together with the articles for the Japanese magazine Kaizo, from 1923-24, on renewal, are essential pieces of Husserl's reflection on Western culture and on the determining role played in it by idea of ​​Philosophy. They are the ones offered here, in this first translation into Portuguese, under the generic title of Europe: Crisis and Renewal.