GIVING SHAPE TO THE HUMAN

The First World War revealed the inability of scientific knowledge to prevent disasters in history. Husserl attributed this to two omissions that characterize the positivistic way of doing theory in natural and human sciences: the questions of essence as well as judicative and valuation issues. This article aims (1) to show how these two issues are interconnected in Husserl's concept of theory, which provides practical possibilities to humanistic knowledge. In order to show them, (2) we will ask for the conditions of the exercise of rationality in human beings and we will therefore introduce the notion of emotional background. From this background (3) some typical social phenomena will be judged and hence withdrawn some aprioristic proposals on the link between rationality and affectivity. From these aprioristic proposals we will deduct normative propositions on a rational society which will enable us to judge the structures of the given world. Finally, (4) the practical application of these principles points to a moment of philosophical work, which is different and complementary to the purely theoretical one, that Husserl called rational technique: a type of normative judgement that should be the application of the pure principles for a rational organization of the praxis.