Late in life, faced with the social and political crises of the 1930s, Husserl turned, for the first time, to a sustained analysis of the concrete problems of his own historical present. In the ‘Vienna Lecture’ and the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl finds the origins of the contemporary crisis of European humanity in the Galilean and Cartesian insights that originally instituted modern philosophy yet continue to obscure their own origins in transcendental subjectivity. Husserl’s new historically oriented phenomenology, however, has been much criticized for its uncritical Eurocentric teleology of world history. Not only does Husserl discover the origins of philosophy in ancient Greece, understood as the historical origins of European civilization, but he sees Europe as the only civilization in which philosophy has, or even possibly can have, an ‘archontic’ function. This vision makes the Europeanization of the world an ethical imperative of the highest order. Despite this blatant Eurocentrism, Husserl’s early critique of skeptical relativism and late work on the rooting of rationality in historically concrete lifeworlds can help us think through the sort of locally situated universalism powerfully defended in the recent work of Ato Sekyi-Otu.^[1]

In this paper I would like to discuss a somewhat overlooked figure who might be relevant to this task: the Vietnamese Husserlian phenomenologist and Marxist anti-imperialist Tran Duc Thao. Thao’s work from 1945-1950, prior to his turn to a rather orthodox form of dialectical materialism and return from Paris to North Vietnam, involves a very creative rethinking of Marxism through phenomenology and an innovative use of phenomenology to elucidate the destruction of the possibility of rational communication by the colonial situation. Thao’s argument mobilizes Husserl’s concept of horizon in relation to differing interpretations of the concept of possibility by the colonizer and the colonized, which involves him in problems of what Sekyi-Otu calls the ‘ontology of possibility’. I will argue that though Thao proposes a concept of actual possibility that opens up a future horizon beyond the colonial relationship, he remains within the modern Galilean ontology so strongly criticized by Husserl, which understands being entirely through the methods of modern mathematical natural science, instead of developing a new ontology of possibility in which creativity and novelty would play a fundamental role. This connects to certain weaknesses in Thao’s proposal for a postcolonial critical rethinking and transformation of the European philosophical tradition. Nevertheless, Thao’s work provides an interesting example of a phenomenological rethinking of Marx in connection with the problems of postcolonialism, even if this rethinking must ultimately be articulated within a different kind of ontology of possibility.

To begin with Husserl, I would argue that his radical renovation of phenomenological method in the Crisis does not have merely external motivations but ultimately stems from the inner paradoxes of his earlier neo-Cartesianism. Cartesian Meditations, Husserl’s last systematic attempt to enact the Cartesian ideal, is notorious for the obscurity of its analysis of intersubjectivity in the Fifth Meditation (1999, pp. 89-151). This fault is arguably intimately linked to its interpretation of transcendental subjectivity through certain implicit Cartesian ontological assumptions, despite Husserl’s claim to have excluded all presuppositions, including philosophy’s own history, from his philosophical praxis (1999, pp. 7-9). Husserl’s new method in the Crisis, to the contrary, is a critical historical inquiry into the origins of the present crisis of philosophy from the perspective of the possibility of intellectual and moral renewal. The new method, rather than abstracting from tradition, undertakes a critical questioning back [Rückfrage] into the European philosophical tradition to unearth the basic intuitive insights that form its original institution [Urstiftung]. This is a renewal of a meaning that has been eroded through institutionalization, traditionalization and formalization, a renewal that ultimately aims at philosophy’s final establishment [Endstiftung] as a perfectly clarified method of knowledge (1970, pp. 17-18, 71-72). This problematizes the basic elements of Husserl’s neo-Cartesianism: its foundational order of apodictic evidence; its relegation of the cultural-historical sciences to regional sciences of purely factual truths; its attempt to analyze intersubjectivity from the point of view of a solipsistic ego stripped of its real historical-social content; and, arguably, its implicit dualistic ontology. Rather than beginning with an apodictic self-grounding in a solipsistic ego, the new method begins from the difficulties and obscurities of the transcendental subject’s own historical situation, which motivates a questioning back into this situation’s ultimate historical origins.

This introduction of factual historical problems into the centre of phenomenological method has elicited diametrically opposed criticisms. On the one hand, Husserl has been accused of falling into a new form of relativistic historicism, a ‘transcendental historicism’^[2] which would violate the results of his earlier critique of skeptical relativism;^[3] on the other hand, he has been accused of an uncritical metaphysics of world history.^[4] This divergence of critical opinion may stem from the fact the Crisis develops two different ways of studying the lifeworld, our pre-theoretical world of everyday experience and practice. In Part III.A of the Crisis Husserl makes a reduction from the established sciences to the lifeworld in a naive way that avoids the transcendental reduction and its suspension of our natural belief in the world, a naivety which Husserl’s himself admits can lead to relativistic paradoxes. In Part III.B, however, he attempts to transcendentally ground the concept of the lifeworld in a new phenomenology of transcendental intersubjectivity that problematizes the solipsistic starting point of his earlier analysis of intersubjectivity in the Fifth Meditation.^[5] Though the Crisis by no means resolves all the tensions between these two reductions, a sympathetic reading would show that it contains fertile insights for a resolution. Italian Marxist phenomenologist Enzo Paci, for example, back in the 1960s, developed a reading of Husserl that emphasizes the ethical significance of the transcendental reduction, which as a radical self-reflection on the subjective origins of objectively valid knowledge implicitly contains the telos of an intersubjective community based in responsibility to truth. For Paci this ethical dimension of the reduction comes to the fore in the Crisis, which radically rethinks the transcendental reduction in a way that makes it fully historically reflexive. Since this historical reflexivity is achieved through the new reduction to the lifeworld, which itself, as a phenomenological discipline, must presuppose the transcendental reduction, the two reductions can be understood as mutually presupposing one another and as converging in an ethical and political praxis that aims at the historical telos of an ideal community of transcendental intersubjectivity (Paci 1972, pp. 71-73). This interpretation, it may be worth mentioning, resonates strongly with that of Paulin Hountondji, whose project of transculturating the tradition of critical epistemology, especially in its Husserlian form, into his own Beninese lifeworld context is discussed by Sekyi-Otu with keen interest.^[6] It may also be relevant to mention that Paci shows how the new method of the Crisis entails a new ontological perspective, only summarily sketched by Husserl, that decisively transcends modern Galilean-Cartesian dualism and which Paci also connects to Marx’s materialist transformation of Hegelian ontology in the 1844 Manuscripts and to Whitehead’s process ontology (1972, p. 291).

Whatever the ultimate resolution of these theoretical problems, it remains the case that the philosophy of history Husserl develops in his late texts is blatantly Eurocentric. To understand the theoretical basis of this Eurocentrism we can turn to the ‘Vienna Lecture’. Here Husserl describes a number of different attitudes toward the world. The attitude that is directed straightforwardly toward various objects within the universal world horizon he calls the ‘natural primordial attitude’. This is the basic attitude to which all other attitudes refer back. When the world itself is thematized there is a shift to what Husserl calls a ‘universal attitude’ (1970, p. 281). If the thematization of the world is oriented to its mythic-magical manipulation for practical human concerns, Husserl refers to the religious-mythical attitude. If the world is thematized in order to understand its nature independently of all practical human concerns, to discover its truth-in-itself independent of all tradition, we have the theoretical attitude. The theoretical attitude can then be related back to practical concerns to form a new kind of praxis that involves: ‘…the universal critique of all life and life-goals, all cultural products and systems that have already arisen out of the life of man…’. This universal critique aims to transforms humanity: ‘…into a new humanity made capable of an absolute self-responsibility on the basis of absolute theoretical insights’ (Husserl 1970, pp. 282-283). This universal critical attitude, or philosophy, according to Husserl, was originally instituted by the great ancient Greek philosophers, especially Plato. Husserl connects philosophy in this sense to the concept of Europe because its universal critique cannot be bounded by any national community but rather produces a new kind of cooperation of nations, or ‘supernationality’, based in critical thought, which Husserl refers to as the ‘spiritual shape of Europe’. This means that: ‘Within European civilization, philosophy has constantly to exercise its function as one which is archontic for the civilization as a whole’ (Husserl 1970, pp. 288-289). Because of this unique status of philosophy within the unique supernationality of Europe, Husserl sees it as part of his task in the Crisis to decide: ‘…whether the spectacle of the Europeanization of all other civilizations bears witness to the rule of an absolute meaning..’. (Husserl 1970, p.16) In this way Husserl’s new method appears to become imbricated with the justification of European colonialism, though, to be fair, Husserl seems to prefer the Japanese model of an autonomously led Europeanization to a colonial regime.^[7]

The theoretical and ethical problems of this strange philosophy of world history are today self-evident. We could ask, for example, whether Europe even forms a coherent civilizational unity from the Greeks to modern times or point out that the philosophical idea, as understood by Husserl, has often not play an ‘archontic’ role in European history, a history which has not lacked strong aspects of irrationality or even traditions of militant irrationalism.^[8] We could also mention Islamic civilization’s central role in preserving and transforming the Greek philosophical tradition, which mediates the European understanding of this tradition not only in case of the Scholastics but also, according to Ernst Bloch (2019, p. 33), with great modern figures like Spinoza or Leibniz. Furthermore, in the twentieth century, the revolutionary socialist and anti-colonialist movements of the non-European world often engaged the European philosophical tradition without accepting that this meant a ‘Europeanization’ of their cultures instead of a renewal of their own.

This leads us to Tran Duc Thao’s dialogue of transcendental phenomenology with Marxism and with his own political engagement with the Vietnamese national liberation struggle. In his 1946 short essay, ‘Marxism and Phenomenology’, Thao undertakes the task of renewing the original intentions of Marxism through the insights of phenomenology. Thao considers this to be a necessary revision demanded by the new configuration of class relations since the late nineteenth century in which large sections of the working class have become bourgeoified and much of the petty bourgeois intelligentsia proletarianized, a situation that makes problems of ideology and culture more pressing (2009 b, pp. 333-334). Thao attacks the mechanistic understanding of the relation of base and superstructure. Rather than a reduction of the world of human meaning to matter in the Galilean sense, Thao understands Marx’s materialism as showing how this meaning is rooted in the complex of real concrete life practices. Referring to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, Thao conceptualizes the ‘base’ as simply a founding, though not foundational, stratum of lifeworld activities that motivates the cultural activities that work on and shape the content given by this fundamental structuring stratum into an ultimate meaning for humanity (2009 b, pp. 327-328). In a critique of existentialism, published in 1949, Thaos writes of class struggle as: ‘…a total struggle that engages the entire meaning of existence..’. (2009 a, p. 294) This means that, in a rather Gramscian way, class struggle involves a clash of basic conceptions of the world that differently determine the horizon of ultimate human possibilities.^[9]

This exciting rethinking of Husserl and Marx, however, came to a definitive end with the publication in 1951 of Thao’s book Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. In the first half of this book Thao concludes that Husserl’s Cartesian neutralization of the world as a presupposition of philosophizing ultimately leads to a ‘complete relativism’ (Thao 1986, p. 127). Thao traces the origins of this failure to a dualism that locates meaning entirely in an unworldly transcendental subject who is abstractly opposed to the being, in-itself entirely devoid of signification, whose meaning it constitutes. Yet, Thao argues, Husserl’s careful study of transcendental subjectivity, with its ever-deeper analyses of passive synthesis and of the intersubjective genesis of apparently static structures, has demonstrated that this subjectivity envelops the entire content of the real world and its history within itself. Husserl interprets this, according to Thao, as meaning that the content must be subjectivized and knowledge relativized. Thao, however, interprets the situation as demanding the reversal of the entire Husserlian program: what is required is an objective scientific explanation of the transcendental subject through an analysis of its ontological origins in its objective content. He writes: ‘There is no longer any valid reason to refuse to constituting subjectivity its predicates regarding reality. More precisely it is nature itself becoming-subject…[W]e end with dialectical materialism as the truth of transcendental idealism’ (Thao 1986, p. 129). Therefore, in the second half of the book Thao uses evolutionary biology, empirical psychology and historical materialism to try to give a naturalistic explanation of the forms of consciousness investigated phenomenologically by Husserl. Rather than the 1844 Manuscripts, with its rich materialist reading of Hegelian ontology, the reference point is now Engels’ Dialectics of Nature, with its more or less Galilean outlook. Unlike the attempts of Merleau-Ponty or Paci to develop a new ontology while retaining Husserl’s suspension of naturalism, this means a return to the pre-critical natural attitude (de Warren 2009, pp. 271-272), which, as Thao himself clearly shows in an earlier paper on the transcendental reduction (2009c, pp. 336-348), renders incomprehensible the objective validity of the conditions of possibility of both rigorous philosophy and an ethically sound practice.

However, before this turn to orthodox dialectical materialism, Thao brought his early synthesis of phenomenology and Marxism to bear on the problem of colonialism. In his 1945 essay ‘On Indochina’, published in Les Temps Modernes and written while imprisoned for supposedly endangering the security of the French state, Thao argues that the world horizons of the colonizing French community and of the colonized Vietnamese community are entire divergent and incompatible, which makes all communication impossible since the divergent horizons determine entirely different meanings for the common terms used in discussion by the two communities.^[10] The French, for example, always interpret Vietnamese demands for autonomy as solicitation for a renewal and improvement within the horizon of the French national community and the ‘civilizing mission’ of its imperial project (Thao 1946, pp. 883-884). Thao traces the origin of this incommensurability of horizons to different interpretations of the concept of possibility. He writes: ‘The entire conflict comes down to how one understands possibility – not pure possibility, because in this sense everything is possible, but actual possibility, that which almost has the value of reality, that which would be real without a certain obstacle that one takes as responsible for its failure’.^[11] These actual possibilities constitute the background [fond] horizon in which perceived reality is oriented toward its ultimate meaning. Essentially the Vietnamese interpret the possibility of an independent and autonomous Vietnam as a living project and thus an actual possibility within their world horizon, whereas the French, collapsing actual possibility into existing relations of domination, understand this project as an arbitrary supposition, an empty logical possibility, based on bad faith (Thao 1946, pp. 882-883). This fundamental divergence in the horizon of future possibilities results in: ‘…a misunderstanding that is total and without remedy’. It is a conflict: ‘…anterior to discourse, at the very source of existence itself, there where the possible meaning of words already determines itself’.^[12] This total breakdown of the conditions of rational communication makes recourse to armed struggle inevitable.^[13]

It should be noted that Thao understands the political project of an independent Vietnam in a way that disarticulates modernity from the Europeanization of the world and especially from colonialism. For Thao colonialism is an anti-modern force, a reinvigoration of pre-modern forms of direct surplus appropriation and unmediated plunder in the service of a small clique of monopoly capitalist groups, a tyrannical political power that arrests the economic, cultural and social progress of the colony. Modernity, on the contrary, is an active force with its own internal power of expansion, which colonialism can only curb and canalize for the profit of a few narrow interests. It is also not a force containable within its European lands of origin. Thao, like Husserl, refers to the rather problematic example of Japan, though as an autonomous non-European modernization rather than any kind of Europeanization (Thao 1946, pp. 880-81). Despite the ambiguities of this example, in which the forces of modernity interpenetrate with both the techniques of domination pioneered by European colonialism and an atavistic revival of indigenous cultural forms, Thao puts forward, as part of the project of independence, a cultural program for an autonomous Vietnamese modernity in which various currents in traditional Vietnamese culture and modern culture would encounter one another to forge new syntheses (1946, pp. 899-900). This suggests, contrary to Husserl, that philosophy can and must be made archontic for autonomous non-European civilizations. Yet, since Thao understands the actual possibility of an autonomous Vietnam as the possibility of an invariant inner force of modernity that has already been realized elsewhere, it would seem that this projected transculturation of the European philosophical tradition would be narrowly limited in its qualitative transformation of the concept of philosophy.

This points to the weaknesses in Thao’s concept of possibility and, more generally, to problems in the ontology of possibility (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p. 98). For Thao actual possibility is what would be if there were not certain contingent conditions in place that prevent a necessary force from exercising its power. This is a rather Galilean and non-dialectical concept of possibility. The ontological sources of this concept can be teased out of Thao’s reply to a letter from Alexander Kojève elicited by Thao’s very critical 1948 review of Kojève’s famous book on Hegel (1971, pp.91-110). In response to Kojève’s attempt to reconcile their views, Thao suggests that their differences likely originate in fundamentally divergent philosophical sensibilities, confessing that before turning to phenomenology he had been a committed Spinozist, part of the great rationalist tradition that, contrary to Kojève’s existentialist definition of freedom as the negation of necessity, identifies freedom with necessity (Thao 2009, p. 353). Ironically both thinkers appear trapped in the same modern Galilean ontology: while Kojève posits an ex nihilo act of existential freedom in abstract opposition to mechanistic nature, Thao dissolves the subject into this nature in the expectation that understanding its laws will lead to an effective revolutionary action.

Rather than Spinoza, there may be more promise in a return to Leibniz of the sort we find not only with the late Husserl but also, in a more ontological key, with thinkers like Whitehead and Bloch. It is interesting to note that Leibniz’s monadological ontology not only anticipates a post-Galilean concept of nature but is also a kind of rationalist perspectivism that allows Leibniz to develop a philosophy of inter-civilizational dialogue. This is based on the assumption that identical universal rational principles can be intuited and comprehended quite differently from very different cultural perspectives without compromising their objective validity.^[14]

Furthermore, in contrast to Thao’s Galilean interpretation of possibility, which flattens out the horizon of the future into a repetition of a past that has happened elsewhere, in the neo-Leibnizianism of Whitehead or Bloch present actuality contains a manifold of fundamentally novel real possibilities. These are structurally shaped by the historical past and define an indeterminate future horizon whose actualization into a determinate reality requires an act of subjective creativity, though one informed by certain transcendental conditions of knowledge and action.^[15] In The Principle of Hope, for example, Bloch distinguishes four concepts of possibility. Thao’s actual possibility, a real existing force whose manifestation is blocked by certain contingent circumstances, falls under what Bloch calls the fact-based object-suited Possible (1986, pp. 229-231). Unlike the formally Possible (that which is logically consistent) or the factually-objectively Possible (that whose material conditions are partially known), this is an objective form of possibility (Bloch 1986, pp. 224-226). It is a matter of the real ontological structures of the object, including its potency as an active possibility (involving partial internal conditions) and potentiality as a passive possibility (involving partial external conditions).^[16] Yet it is still not what Bloch calls the objectively-real Possible, which, to the contrary: ‘…does not reside in any ready-made ontology of the being of That-Which-Is up to now, but in the ontology…of the being of That-Which-Is-Not-Yet’ (1986, p. 237). In bringing this aspect of future novelty into the concept of possibility, Bloch not only avoids a deterministic teleology but also, by giving this novelty a formal transcendental shape, a blind pluralist openness. This involves a rereading and refunctioning of Kant’s ethical doctrines in which the categorical imperative becomes: ‘…an anticipatory formula directed toward a non-antagonistic society, that is, to a classless one, in which the real generality of moral legislation is possible for the very first time’ (Bloch 1995, p. 874).

To turn to Sekyi-Otu’s work, in his reflections on the ontology of possibility we find Bloch’s philosophy brought into dialogue with the thought of Ayi Kwei Armah. Both Bloch and Armah recognize that ontology must involve the concept of moral causality in which regulative ethical imperatives enter into the resolution of a field of open possibilities (Sekyi-Otu 2019, pp. 93-98). Yet Sekyi-Otu also articulates Armah’s ontology through the concept of teleopoiesis, understood as: ‘…an unending activity of fashioning and attending to ends’.^[17] This allows for a critique of Bloch’s position for containing lingering teleological elements that may compromise the autonomy of the ethical (Sekyi-Otu 2019, p. 106). Despite this possible point of contention, a Husserlian reading of Bloch might permit us to describe the content of teleopoiesis as a creative refunctioning of the materials of one’s own local historical lifeworld through a renewal of their universal meaning, a renewal demanded and guided by a perspective informed by the transcendental idea of a good ethical community.^[18] Here renewal means, to quote Sekyi-Otu: ‘…return as remembrance of the future’ (2019, p. 96). And perhaps a return to Thao’s early writings could help us remember a future in which Husserl’s historically oriented phenomenology is a resource for developing a critical epistemology suitable to an ontology of possibility of this sort. This would not be the epistemology of the esoteric theory of a vanguard elite, so sharply critiqued by Sekyi-Out (2019, p. 129-131), but rather the kind of critical phenomenological epistemology we find in thinkers like Paci or Hountondji. These thinkers aim to revive the genuine meaning of the formalized, fetishized and traditionalized idealizations of universal knowledge by tracing their origins back to the concrete lifeworld contexts in which they find their ultimately significance. This would be a universal ‘rigorous science’, to use Husserl’s phrase, but not one that neglects its essential dialectical relationship to the full multiplicity of relative worldviews [Weltanschauungen] in which the lifeworlds [Lebenswelten] of the different peoples of the world find their various universalizing religious-mythical expressions.^[19]

Considered in this light, the figure of Tran Duc Thao may help us imagine a future in which the innermost intentions of the European philosophical tradition are renewed through an encounter with demands for a return to the lifeworld sources of the universal found within indigenous cultures that have been suppressed by Europe’s narcissistic, and therefore relativistic, interpretation of the universal task. Could this perhaps even enact the Endstiftung of the European philosophical tradition demanded by Husserl precisely through a relativization of the Eurocentric mythology that this tradition has generally uncritically presupposed, yet also renew Europe itself by creating a new and more reasonable form of connectedness to what is beyond itself through a critical rethinking of one of its own founding traditions? Here we refer, following Sekyi-Otu, to Armah’s concept of connectedness and his vision of the world progressive community as a great ‘sea of ideas’ into which the different rivers of thought of all the peoples of the world flow without any one tributary imposing its identity on the common sea.^[20] This ideal resonates strongly with Bloch’s concept of the multiverse containing the all world’s diverse cultures and civilizations, in which each finds its own unique path toward the humanum, as the objectively real possibility of the ultimate reconciliation of their internal and external antagonisms, in a counter-punctual harmony threaded together by the universal principles each apprehends from its unique perspective.^[21] The problem that both Armah and Bloch raise is that of a genuinely universal form of critical supernationality in which all civilizations and cultures participate as equals, a problem that Husserl raises in the Crisis but immediately obscures through his Eurocentric mystifications. However difficult to imagine, our present situation demands such an intercultural renewal. Beyond an economic crisis, a crisis of reason or even a crisis of European man, we are also living through a crisis of humanity as a concrete whole insofar as global capitalism, increasingly sustaining itself through the capitalization of its own pathologies, destroys not only humanity’s common ecological foundations but also its diverse progressive cultural heritage – what Sekyi-Otu calls the ‘civil commons’.^[22] This is a cultural wrecking that involves jettisoning even the most elementary norms of ethics and knowledge as part of a very different kind of return: a globalized recrudescence of the most obscene bigotry and radical irrationalism of Europe’s most demented past.

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