Das Subjekt als moralische Person. Zu Husserls späten Reflexionen bezüglich des Personenbegriffs

In this essay, I will attempt a systematic reconstruction of the general shape of Husserl’s late philosophy, insofar as it centers on the concept of personhood. The systematic concatenation of this and other themes in Husserl’s late work – the method of epoché and reduction, ethics, personhood, and teleology – has only recently begun to be explored in Husserl scholarship, and this article is a modest contribution to the further elucidation of their mutual relation-ship. One of the most striking results of this reconstructive analysis is Husserl’s final concept of “person“, which goes beyond the traditional distinctions, such as “heart“ and “mind“ or “reason“ and “emotion“. For Husserl to conceive of the subject as moral person implies, then, the demand to not only conduct oneself morally (in a novel sense of “moral”), but also to have an ethical view of the world as a world that bears meaning and harbors values despite its apparent absurdities.