DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM No.zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA 4 /2018 Andrzej Gniazdowski THE POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF EDMUND HUSSERL ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the relation between phenom- enology and philosophical anthropology by analyzing it in the selected, theoretical as well as historical contexts. The author focuses primarily on the problem of Edmund Husserl's criticism of anthropologism and analyzes the practical meaning of the rejec- tionby him of anthropology as a true foundation of philosophy. The thesis of the paper is that already by rejecting anthropologism in the logic and theory of knowledge, Hus- serl presupposed some idea of philosophical anthropology in the "foundational" sense he criticized, and that this implicit idea was pursued by him not only from pure theoreti- cal reason. In reference to Leszek Kolakowski and the methodology of the Warsaw School of the History of Ideas, which he applies in his interpretation of the idea of phe- nomenology, the author of the article attempts, unlike Kolakowski, to reveal not only the "religious" (in a vague sense), but also the specific political meaning of this idea. What is argued here is that the only possible reconciliation between anti-anthropologism on the one hand and the outspoken humanism of transcendental phenomeno l ogy on the other lies in the adoption by Husserl of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's ideal of humanity as its practical, worldview framework. The practical, if not directly political, motif of Hus- serl's radical criticism of anthropologism is, in author's interpretation, Husserl's attempt to answer, in the reference to this ideal, to the main political question of his times as consisting in the rising racist and anti-Semitic tendencies in the German naturalistic anthropology. Keywords: Phenomenology, philosophical anthropology, practical philosophy, po- litical religion, humanism, naturalism, race theory, history of ideas.