In his 1922/1923 articles for the Japanese magazine Kaizō, Edmund Husserl identifies a particular “humanity” or human culture by the purposeful idea [Zweckidee] consciously embraced by the community. This purposeful idea is attained through rational self-formation on the part of the community in a manner analogous to the rational self-formation of the individual human being. Thereafter, it can be referenced to distinguish different cultures (or stages of cultural development) from one another through its objective manifestation in communal groups and cultural products, as Husserl retraces in a historical account of the development of Western history. This paper explores the essential character of this conception of the purposeful idea from both an exegetical and a systematic perspective, examining in particular the relationship between such an idea and the values experienced by individual subjects within a culture (which are, according to Husserl, also available at the level of objective culture in relation to a communal subject). The paper argues that Husserl’s basic conception of the purposeful idea is a good model for understanding certain essential characteristics of cultural constitution in general, although some of his fundamental assumptions—especially the strict identity he attempts to establish between a purposeful idea as such and the specific goal of universal, rational self-understanding—turn out to be somewhat more questionable in light of the connection between the purposeful idea and the genuinely felt values underlying it.

在他为日本杂志Kaizō撰写的 1922/1923 年文章中，埃德蒙·胡塞尔通过有目的的想法确定了一种特定的“人性”或人类文化 [ Zweckidee] 被社会自觉接受。这种有目的的想法是通过社区方面的理性自我形成来实现的，其方式类似于个人的理性自我形成。此后，可以参考它通过其在公共群体和文化产品中的客观表现来区分不同的文化（或文化发展的阶段），正如胡塞尔在对西方历史发展的历史叙述中追溯的那样。本文从解经和系统的角度探讨了这种有目的的观念的本质特征，特别考察了这种观念与文化中个体主体所经历的价值观之间的关系（根据胡塞尔，也可以在与公共主题相关的客观文化层面上获得）。这篇论文认为，胡塞尔的目的思想的基本概念是理解一般文化构成的某些基本特征的一个很好的模型，尽管他的一些基本假设——特别是他试图在目的思想本身和特定的思想之间建立严格的同一性。普遍的、理性的自我理解的目标——考虑到有目的的想法和它背后真正感受到的价值观之间的联系，结果变得更加可疑。