Husserl and the “Constant Universal Teleology”

Husserl has always willingly confessed his fidelity to a fundamental Cartesian inspiration, that can be easily traced from his Ideas I to the Cartesian Meditations and the Crisis of European Sciences. Nonetheless, his account of transcendental subjectivity adopted spontaneously Leibniz’s monadological vocabulary, more fruitful, undoubtedly, to express the passage to a transcendental intersubjective community. Similarly, while Descartes firmly rejected any explanatory value to finality, in Husserl’s late thought, teleology becomes omnipresent. It is his multi-leveled recourse to a teleological reasoning, concerning subjective and intersubjective life, instinctual drives as well as history and rationality, that this chapter will examine.