Functionaries of Humanity: UNESCO through the Crisis

In the 1950s, the newly established UNESCO gave financial support to the publication of the first volumes of the complete works of the German Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). This secured the authority of the editor of Husserl´s complete works, KU Leuven philosopher van Breda, after more than a decade of struggling to rescue Husserl’s estate from Nazi Germany, and to found and protect the Husserl Archives in Leuven. In 1949, after intensive networking during the war, van Breda had prepared the application for UNESCO funding with support letters by 40 international leading intellectuals, among which, to mention a few, Wahl, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Plessner, Ricoeur, De Waelhens, Schütz, and Buytendijck. As antidote to Nazi ideology and associated philosophies, they stressed Husserl’s relevance for Germany’s re-education and democratization, and ultimately for a global humanism also pursued by the UNESCO. The application’s success permitted the posthumous publication of Husserl´s late major work, The Crisis, and put phenomenology at the center of post-war intellectual life. Husserl’s idea of philosophers as “functionaries of humanity” became a cultural program led by the idea of rational (philosophical) federal global governance. 

The aim of this project is to reconstruct this collective ‘intellectual intervention,’ to assess its impact, and to evaluate its potential future significance. The philosophical contribution of the project lies in the consideration of Husserl´s philosophy as a viable response to the current mistrust of practical rationality, in particular regarding the role of education, science and expertise in shaping society and guiding politics. This offers a philosophical contribution to the current discussion about a possible reform of UNESCO.