HUSSERL’S ETHICS OF RENEWAL: A PERSONALISTIC APPROACH Sara Heinämaa In the early 1920s, Edmund Husserl published a series of essays on renewal (Erneuerung) in the Japanese journal Kaizo, discussing human life, its goal-directed, teleological nature and its possibilities for self-regulation. Husserl focused on the problems of individual transformation and social-cultural development and argued that human life should not be modelled on biological life. There is a crucial difference between human action and animal behaviour, according to Husserl, but this difference is not material, it is structural and based on the reflective potentials of human beings. In other words, human life and animal life include similar elements, such as drives, needs and feelings, but these moments can become objects of reflection and critical inspection only within human life, and can thus receive a rational justification. 1 In the Kaizo essays, Husserl argues that to reach the highest form of life requires that we learn to reflect critically on our lives as wholes and all the elements included in them: our volitions and actions, but also our acts of thinking and valuing, desiring and feeling (Hua37: 247–253). He sees all types of intentional acts as objects of ethical reflection and cultivation, so not just practical actions and volitions, but also all axiological acts of feeling and desiring and our theoretical acts of believing and thinking, and in this respect he is nearer to Aristotle than to Kant. On the other hand, 1