Human Culture and the One Structure: On Luft's Reading of the Late Husserl

This article presents and discusses Sebastian Luft’s recent interpretation of Husserl’s late phenomenology. Luft argues that Husserl envisioned a hermeneutic phenomenology of the cultural world, thereby articulating a project that can be considered complementary with Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. Three of Luft’s claims, in particular, are assessed and criticized: (1) the Cartesian Husserl and the life-world Husserl pursue two separate agendas; (2) Husserl’s genetic phenomenology is fundamentally compatible with Paul Natorp’s project of a reconstructive psychology; (3) Husserl’s late work is oriented towards hermeneutical understanding of the world of culture.