The Place of Early Ethics in the Phenomenological Project of Edmund Husserl

The article attempts to show the place of Husserl's early ethics within the project of phenomenology. Although it is a commonplace to consider phenomenology as epistemology or methodology, there is a great number of Husserl's works on ethics. The author thinks that Husserl's early ethics works (which coincide with the transcendental stage) are devoted to the solving of the problems related to the practical turn. The practical turn correlating to the metaphysical turn of the beginning of the 20th century includes a number of radical modifications that eliminated the border between practical and theoretical areas. Since this eliminating affected the whole of the philosophical tradition of the past century, the study of Husserl's ethics is a relevant task. This article is one of the attempts to start this study. First of all, the author addresses the main ideas and concepts of Husserl's Lectures on Ethics and Value Theory (1908-1914): the notion of practical and normative discipline (Kunstlehre), the idea of parallelism between logic and ethics, the concepts of formal practice and formal axiology. Considering the key ideas of Husserl's early ethics, the author notes the connection of these ideas with Husserl's previous works, shows their differences with the previous philosophical tradition (Aristotle), and briefly presents the essence of Husserl's disagreement with the ethical concepts of Hume and Kant. The author suggests solving the problem of the place and role of early ethics in phenomenology taking into account the involvement of formal ethical disciplines in consciousness as the main field of phenomenological research. Therefore, the author raises the question: how is it possible to study the a priori structures of consciousness which relate to practice and assessment? In order to answer it, the author of the article refers to the concepts of "a priori", "experience" and shows that Husserl understood these concepts differently from Kant. An experience within phenomenological tradition might be presented as a non-predicative and non-discursive structure of consciousness; the functioning of this structure displays universal conditions of cognitive subjectivity (pure I). Phenomenological research consists in referring to the process structures subjects do not have direct access to, but in which they find and recognize themselves. Thus, the aim of Husserl's formal ethics was to provide the possibility of a full coverage of all the "fundamental articulations of experience".

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