Ha-Young (하영Ha Young) Lee

Edmund Husserl presents eudaimonia as the goal of all ethical existence. He reflects on the meaning of eudaimonia primarily by designating its source. In doing so, his ethics appears to undergo a significant rupture in its development. Before wartime, the subject’s alignment (Konvenienz) with objectively established reasons was what brought about ethical success. The will behind practical rationality did not necessarily represent individual personhood. In contrast, works from the mid-1920s and onwards argue that love, precisely as experienced by individual persons, leads to eudaimonia. I propose that accounts of eudaimonia in the early 1920s can alleviate the apparent radicality of this contrast by connecting rational accomplishment with personhood. Drawing on Husserliana volumes XXVII, XXXV, XXXVII, and XLII, I establish how personhood may, in an ethical context, determine both the form and contents of evidence (Evidenz) as the hallmark of Husserlian rationality. Then, I develop this nascent connection to originally reconstruct Husserl’s conception of personhood in the language of evidence. I redefine personhood as the network of evidence and its losses across different times and domains of the acting consciousness. After responding to objections, I explain how my reconstruction softens the contrast between rationality and love as integral sources of eudaimonia. Compared with other similar attempts, my account can illuminate the role irrationality of accidents (Irrationalität des Zufalls) such as illness and death plays in Husserl’s ethics. Despite appearing ethically irrelevant, irrationality of accidents disrupts genuine personhood understood as the normatively desirable configuration of evidences: the ultimate meaning of eudaimonia (249 words).