UNIVERSAL TELEOLOGY*
by
Edmund Husserl
The intersubjective drive in each and every subject viewed
transcendentally: Relative worlds of monads, each constituting for
itself an objective temporal world and, ultimately, the human
monadic world and the temporal world of men.
The being of the monadic totality as flowing being which
arrives at self-consciousness and which is already in
self-consciousness, gradual process in inflnitum — universal
teleology.
Marginal note:
The intersubjective drive (particularly the sex drive) viewed
transcendentally. The existence with and in each other of all
monads in the unity of a universal development, development in
the form of relative worlds of monads. Every such world has
intentionally constituted within itself an objective world
(temporal world) with ego-subjects living in it. Ultimately, the
existent, monadic humanity or the humanity of the world, which
is always in the process of constitution. The being of the monadic
totality as flowing being coming to universal self-consciousness
and already present in self-consciousness in an infinite gradual
process — universal teleology.
Text:
The internal of procreation. The drive towards the other sex.
The drive in one individual and the reciprocal drive in the other.
The drive can be in the stage of the indeterminate hunger that
does not yet contain within itself its object as its goal. Hunger in
the ordinary sense is more determinate when there is a drive
toward the food — determinately directed in the original mode
*This is a translation of manuscript E-III-5. It was transcribed
by Marly Biemal in August 1952. It has appeared as an
"Appendix" to Enzo Paci, Tempo e Verita nella Fenomenologia di
Husserl (Bari, 1961), pp. 256-269.
Universal Teleology 177
(even before the hunger has been satisfied by such a food and this
food already has that certain character which allows its
re-cognition, the typical character, of course, of a "food," of a
familiar object which can satisfy a hunger). In the case of sexual
hunger which directs itself in a specific way towards its enticing,
exciting goal, this goal is the other. This determinate sexual hunger
has its modality of realization in the mode of copulation. In the
drive itself lies the relation to the other as other and to its
correlative drive. Both drives can be present in the mode — in the
modified mode of abstinence or of repugnance. In the original
mode the drive is "uninhibited", an unmodified drive, which
forces itself within the other and has constituted its own
intentionality through the correlative intentionality of the other.
In the simple fulfillment of the primary mode we never have
two separate fulfillments of each drive in the one and in the other
primordiality, but rather one unity arises through the reciprocal
fulfillment of the two primordialities. If I, in my worldliness,
explicate this in its most profound originality, I can do so only as
a sexual man — i.e., as a man, as a man in the actual reciprocal
feeling (Einfiihlung) with the woman (which, generally speaking, is
naturally already mediate).
We go from there through a mediate interpretation to "higher"
animals, which I can and must view as bound to one another
through reciprocal feelings, essentially through the motivation of
the "perceptions of the strange", precisely as it happens among
men. It is, therefore, according to a representation of their world
in which the animal experiences itself as having a world, as an
animal of his species.
We are also faced with the question whether the intentionality
of the drive, including that directed towards others (sexual-social),
does not necessarily have a preceding stage obtaining before a
developed constitution of the world — even if this constitution
does not reach so far as it does for humans who are "reasonable
creatures" ( Vernunftwesen). Here I have in mind the problems of
parents, above all those of mother and child. These problems,
however, arise also in connection with the problematic of
copulation.
Primordiality is a system of drives - and if we understand it as
an originally constant stream, every drive in it is also in other
streams, and eventually it is together with the drive of other
ego-subjects. This intentionality has its transcendent "goal",
transcendent insofar as it is felt as foreign in reciprocal feeling.
178 TELOS
Yet, primordially, this goal is its own - i.e., it is the goal of the
originary modal intention which simply emerges and constantly
fulfills its own nucleus. In my old theory of the internal
consciousness of time, I have dealt with the intentionality
introduced here precisely as intentionality — set up as protention
and retention, self-modifying yet preserving the unity; but I did
not talk about the ego, and I have not characterized this
intentionality as egological (in the broadest sense of intentionality
of the will). Later I have introduced the latter as founded in an
egoless intentionality ("passivity"). But isn't the same ego of
actions and of habits deriving from it, a developing ego?l
Shouldn't we or mustn't we posit a universal intentionality of the
drive which unifies every original presence as permanence of a
temporalization which concretely moves it forward from presence
to presence in such a way that all content is the content of the
realization of the drives and it is determined by the goal toward
which the drive aims and in such a manner that the superior drives
in every primordial presence are transcended and force themselves
within every other presence thus connecting all of the presences as
monads, while they are all implied in each other — intentionally?
The reconsideration and the reconstruction leads us to the
permanent centrality of every primordiality through the ego-pole:
the pole that remains permanent in the constant movement of
objectivication in which, from the side of the world, stands the
objectified ego with its body.
That could lead us to the conception of a universal teleology
as a universal intentionality always in the process of fulfilling itself
in accordance with the unity of a total system of fulfillment.
The question then is how to conceive of the centrality of the
ego (Ichzentrierung) in the universality of the intentional
implication, in the constantly constituted, all-primordial, original
living presence, in the absolute "simultaneity" of all monads, of
the changing immediate and mediate reciprocal transcending of
the drives of the community of the monads. This open infinity, as
open infinity of the mediacy of transcendence, has the essential
characteristic that an infinity of monadic degrees belong to it — as
degrees of the development of the ego and of the world. Here also
belong the infinity of the degrees of animal monads of the animal,
pre-animal monads up to man, of the infantile and pre-infantile
1 The ego, as a pole in which it operates in temporalization constantly
constituting objectivity in the process, temporalizes and objectifies itself,
along with its peers, in corresponding degrees.
Universal Teleology 179
monads — in the permanence of the "ontogenetic" philogenic
development.
The new awakening of the egoes as self-sufficient, as the center
of acts which are realized in a surrounding world and therefore the
awakening of the constitutions of "beings", and lastly of an
horizon of the world — as teleology included in the universal
teleology, as a universal intentionality which is always "prior" in
the continual vitality of a unitary and conscious community of
monads. This is the community of universally constituted drives
which has, corresponding to it, a world which always brings anew
the monads to a new formation and to their "development". In
this form the totality of the monads gradually comes to
self-consciousness and attains its maximum universality as a
human community.
This community has the unique universal world in which it
finds itself as world-perceiving and in which it has climbed to the
will of the knowledge of the world in the cultural european
humanity, which has created a universal positive science. Only
from this follows the possibility of a transcendental reduction
through which the monads discover themselves as human-monads
and therefore in the form of the generative connection of all
degrees of monads: the higher and lower animals, the plants and
and their lower forms and all in the connection of their
ontogenetic development. Every monad is essentially in such a
development and all monads are essentially in the generative
development.
I start from myself as a man and from my human monad
which contains implicity my immediately surrounding human
world. The question concerning the intentionality of copulation.
In the fulfillment of the drive, immediately viewed, there is
nothing concerning the child which is created, nothing concerning
what will have the well-known consequences in the other subject:
the fact that the mother will give birth to the child.
But the fulfillment of the drive as penetration into the other
"soul" is not a reciprocal feeling oneself in the other as an
uninterrupted experience of the life of the other, of what follows
as the act of reproduction as a worldly event, and thus it is not all
related to the other, as an act of compenetration which is in the
life of the world.
The unity of my concrete being as constant being based in the
temporalization of the ego is also a unity of intentionality and,
considered from within, it is such that the originally constitutes
180 TELOS
itself in it. However, it does not come into question since it is in
the world and becomes explicit in the experience of the world and
in knowledge. "Before" the world there is the constitution of the
world, my self-temporalization in pre-time, the intersubjective
t e m p o r a l i z a t i o n in p r e - t i m e , and the intersubjective
temporalization of intersubjective pre-time. The intersubjective
"act of reproduction" "motivates" natural processes in the life of
the other — processes that are different from self-temporalization
and, in the explication from the side of my being in the world as
man, I experience what in the world reveals itself through further
inductions, I experience what concerns the physiology of
pregnancy.
Teleology encompasses all of the monads. What occurs in the
motherly domain (in der mutterlichen) is not limited to it, but "is
reflected throughout". But I arrive at this only as an ego that
recognizes itself as a scientific man in mundane life and questions
my and our monadic being and from there goes systematically
further.
The reconsideration begins from me and from the world in
which I live concretely and naturally — the world of my and of
our experience, which is at the same time the world for the
sciences, which in turn belong to my world and in their own way
they can be experienced and are experienced as the being
(seiendes) of this world.
