Abstract
Philosophy did not begin with humankind but has emerged with the passage of time and the evolution of intercultural relations. In his fifth Kaizo article, Edmund Husserl describes the birth of philosophy in Greece. However, it is some of the manuscripts added to the Kaizo articles, published today as Beilagen, that reflect in greater detail the philosophical life to which Husserl aspires. Moreover, in Crisis and in his last manuscript, known as Husserl's 'philosophical testament', the role of the philosopher is historically and culturally contextualised as revolutionary as opposed to a non-philosophical life. The attempt of this paper is to present some of the ideas of these texts and to analyse them from a cross-cultural point of view in order to identify four perspectives from which to look at the role of the philosopher. Through these, some of the most essential characteristics of the 'philosopher' emerge: that of (1) being an involuntary revolutionary, (2) a scientist in becoming (werdender Wissenschaftler), (3) living the vocation of the philosophical profession as the call to tragedy and, at the same time, (4) constituting the community of philosophers, called 'Europe' by Husserl. After the presentation of these constitutive aspects of the idea of the philosopher, an interpretation of his figure as a pre-form of ethical life (Vorform des ethischen Lebens), according to Husserl, will be proposed in the third article Kaizo. The suggested Husserlian view will necessarily lead us again to ask: What is the meaning of the term 'revolution' in phenomenology, what is the meaning of ethics?