The Crisis texts have had a checkered history and a widely varied reception. As many readers will know, only parts of the original book were published in an obscure exile journal in Belgrade during Husserl’s last years. The real history of its influence began when its unpublished parts, smuggled out of Germany by H. L. van Breda, were consulted by the young Maurice Merleau-Ponty at the newly founded Husserl Archive in Leuven in 1939. The long Part III of the Crisis, together with the unpublished Ideas II, were the texts that impressed Merleau-Ponty the most. In Husserl’s concept of the life-world, he found support for the existential version of phenomenology, strongly influenced by both Sartre and Heidegger, that he presented in his thesis, Phénoménologie de la perception, published in 1945. It wasn’t until 1954, with the posthumous publication of the more or less full text of the Crisis in the Husserliana edition, that the larger philosophical audience was able to get beyond the somewhat slanted interpretation imposed by Merleau-Ponty to see the concept of the life-world in its original context, and to get a proper sense for its role in the development of Husserl’s thought. Nevertheless, the Crisis was still read primarily as a document in the history of continental philosophy, as that term was used throughout most of the last half of the twentieth century. As someone with a long association with this text, I am pleased to see that the Crisis is finally being taken seriously as a contribution to the philosophy of science, which is clearly one of the things Husserl intended it to be.
But that is obviously not all he intended. Husserl thought of the projected work as a final, comprehensive statement of his philosophy as a whole, a sort of philosophical testament, and there are many facets to it. Since I am not a philosopher of science, I will leave it to others to assess the work from that point of view. Instead I shall consider it primarily in my capacity as a philosopher of history. Emphasizing the life-world, Merleau-Ponty tended to portray the Crisis as Husserl’s deathbed conversion from transcendental philosophy, or “intellectualism” as Merleau-Ponty called it, to existentialism. But it seemed to me from the start of my own acquaintance with this text that its preoccupation with history was what was genuinely novel about it, at least in comparison to Husserl’s earlier work. I addressed the theme of history in Husserl’s late work some years ago; now I want to return to it, after some long detours, and examine this theme again.
What I want to ask is: How is this preoccupation with history to be understood? Does it constitute a philosophy of history, and if so in what sense? How does it compare with other approaches to history? Husserl’s approach is, I think, very hard to classify. There are many aspects to this preoccupation with history, as many readers will know. He advocates a historical approach to epistemology in general and to the philosophy of science in particular.1 He deals with the history of science and of geometry; he devotes a long discussion to the history of philosophy; and he tries to develop the “philosophical-historical idea of Europe” (The Vienna Lecture, p. 269). He puts forward some very interesting but extremely difficult reflections on his own historical method of investigation. Does any of this qualify as philosophy of history in any recognizable sense?
It is customary to distinguish between the substantive or speculative philosophy of history on the one hand and the critical or analytical philosophy of history on the other. The former is supposed to belong to metaphysics, making claims about the historical process itself, and the latter to epistemology, since it is about historical knowledge. This distinction, which dates to the analytic philosophy of the 1940s and 1950s, was of course unknown to Husserl; it was made in order to establish the analytical philosophy of history as a respectable enterprise and to put the speculative form, along with other forms of speculation, and indeed of metaphysics, out of business. For this and other reasons, I think this distinction may have outlived its usefulness, but it may be helpful to examine Husserl’s text in light of it. There are in fact elements of both approaches to history in the Crisis; but its most interesting contribution to the philosophy of history, I believe, belongs to neither of them. It is found, rather, as I shall try to show, in the concept of Geschichtlichkeit, or historicity.
Let us first consider the Crisis texts as substantive philosophy of history. Is Husserl advancing claims about history itself, in the manner of the classical philosophies of history? One’s first impression, I think, is that this is exactly what he is doing. He seems to be attributing a teleological structure, a direction, to history as a whole, in the manner of the grandiose nineteenth-century theories of Hegel, Marx, or Comptean positivism. From his Viennese background, Husserl had inherited a certain disdain for Hegel, mentioning him rarely, and he seemed genuinely uninterested in the fact that Hegel made important use of the term phenomenology . As far as I know, he never mentioned Marx. The positivist link is more plausible, since we know of Husserl’s connection with the German branch of Mach and Avenarius. And yet the figure who looms largest here is Hegel, who was in any case the paradigmatic philosopher of history in the modern period.
It is easy to find echoes of Hegel’s philosophy of history in Husserl’s text. It is in Europe that humanity has really come into its own. Europe, Husserl assures us, is not a geographical expression but an idea, and while the citizens of the United States and of the “British Dominions” are accorded the status of honorary Europeans, the Eskimos, Indians, and Gypsies who inhabit those precincts are not. Other non-Westerners, such as the Chinese and “Negroes in the Congo” are mentioned, not necessarily disrespectfully, but clearly as outsiders. The term Geist occurs frequently in this work. Husserl’s ideal Europe begins with Greek philosophy and culminates in the present. He employs the term teleology copiously to describe this trajectory, from the Urstiftung (primal establishment) of European humanity in Greece to the Endstiftung (final establishment) embodied in phenomenology itself. This culmination is viewed by Husserl as the triumph of reason in history.
There are obvious dissimilarities, of course. Husserl’s description of this trajectory is, if anything, even more idealistic than Hegel’s. For Husserl, history is driven by or even consists entirely in the progression of ideas. There is no attempt, as there is in Hegel, to relate political and cultural forces to these ideas. The drive toward freedom, which is central to Hegel’s philosophy of history, does not figure prominently in Husserl’s account. The dialectical movement, the cunning of reason, the role of human passions—all those flourishes that are distinctive of Hegel’s account of the course of history seem to be missing here. Reason alone, in the form of Wissenschaft, or science in the wide sense, is the solution to humanity’s problems; and we find no positive role for religion here either. In this respect, Husserl seems closer to the Enlightenment conception, where reason overcomes the forces of superstition, or to its later, positivist counterpart, where science (in this case phenomenology) supplants both religion and metaphysics.
But the larger contours of Hegel’s system seem to find their counterparts in the Crisis. The Greeks discover the distinction between reality and appearance, nature and convention. Man moves toward the outside world, captures it in modern objectivism, meanwhile forgetting the subjective accomplishment that made it possible. The stage is set for a return to subjectivity, in the transcendental phenomenological turn. Spirit others itself, returns to itself, in the familiar Hegelian pattern. History is the story of that departure and return. Thus we are being told that history has a meaning, purpose, direction, in the manner of the classical, speculative philosophy of history.
Though Husserl gestures in the direction of such a philosophy of history, it would be a great mistake to read him in this way. In fact, this classical account of history, which places its hopes for the salvation of mankind in reason, philosophy, and science, is evoked by Husserl, in the early pages of the Crisis and elsewhere, as an object of bittersweet nostalgia and with a sense of loss. The European sciences trace their origin to a time when these ideas could still be taken seriously, when knowledge was supposed to make us wise and give meaning to life. But now they have been separated from each other, from the guiding ideal of unity represented by philosophy, and above all from the ordinary human life to which they were supposed to give meaning. This is the crisis of European sciences: the loss of their meaning for life.
The term crisis is the telltale sign that Husserl is not presenting a Hegelian-style philosophy of history. The idea of crisis has no place in the Hegelian scheme. Hegel assures us that reason has triumphed, or is about to. We have emerged from the excesses of the French revolution and the Napoleonic wars and can construct constitutional states that achieve the freedom promised by the Enlightenment while preserving the best of the ancient monarchies. Even religion, which the Enlightenment wanted to sweep aside, can find its place in the new order. The crisis is over. For Marx, the revolution is not a crisis; we know how it will turn out.
Again Husserl may seem to be closer to the milder form of the substantive philosophy of history associated with the Enlightenment and with Kant. The French philosophes believed in progress and affirmed that it could be achieved through human agency; Kant very much wanted to believe in it, but with his usual caution argued only that it could not be ruled out and thus could legitimately be hoped for and, especially, striven for.
But here too the idea of crisis has no place. We can distinguish three different narrative strategies, as we might call them, in the modern substantive philosophies of history. Hegel and Marx give us closure, a fairly clear-cut End of History to go with its beginning and its middle. The Enlightenment’s future is still open, but the idea of human salvation is pretty clearly implied, even if we cannot give it a full-fledged definition. Kant thought a league of nations might do it. But the idea of crisis places us in the middle of a fateful drama, at a turning point where the possibility of a reversal of fortune looms large before us. The metaphor is medical, of course: The patient is ill; things could go either way. Something must be done. Human agency is called for in all three of these models, even the Hegelian-Marxist one, though it is often portrayed as deterministic. But in the case of a crisis, the need is urgent: Emergency intervention is called for.
Husserl’s choice of metaphor may seem entirely apt, given the situation he was in, lecturing in Vienna and Prague in the years leading up to the Anschluß, or annexation, and the Munich conference. But in fact, as Charles Bambach points out, the term “Krisis”figured in the titles of several much earlier studies Husserl probably knew about: Rudolf Pannwitz, Die Krisis der Europäischen Kultur (1917); Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Krisis des Historismus” (1922b); and Die Geistige Krisis der Gegenwart (1923) by Arthur Liebert, the same man who later edited the journal Philosophia in Belgrade, where Husserl was to publish his own Krisis text. And Heidegger had spoken of the crisis of the sciences in his lectures of 1925, and again in his 1927 Sein und Zeit. Husserl indeed admits, at the beginning of the Vienna lecture, that the theme of the European crisis has been much discussed. Clearly the “crisis” as a historical topos belonged to the whole interwar period, at least in central Europe, and tells us a lot about how its intellectuals thought about what they were going through. This third narrative strategy, typical of the early twentieth century, and even beyond into the cold war period, was lacking in the nineteenth.
Still, this book is Husserl’s crisis in more senses than one. Clearly he thinks the fate of German philosophy, as he conceives it, hangs in the balance. His defenders after World War II were eager to deny Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation by showing that he never let go of his ideal for philosophy and that he did not himself assert that the “dream” of “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” was exhausted, as some passages seemed to suggest. Yet the poignancy of the text as a cri de coeur, its tone sometimes close to despair, is unmistakable. And indirectly, as we know, it is deeply personal. It is not only that Husserl identified himself completely with philosophy. Like many of the assimilated Jews of his generation, he considered himself a loyal champion of Western culture and a citizen of Europe. He had converted to Protestantism at an early age, under the influence of his youthful friend Gustav Albrecht and his mentor Thomas Masyryk. By all accounts, he took it seriously: Husserl took everything seriously, and it is almost impossible to think of cynical or self-interested motives in his case. He seems to have focused on the ethical teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. Later he was a conservative, probably a monarchist, and he bore the archaic title Geheimrat (privy councillor) with great pride. One of his sons died on the field of battle in the First World War. In a bitter disappointment, his most gifted follower, who once addressed him as “lieber väterlicher Freund,” (dear fatherly friend) had deserted phenomenology and was now representing the forces of irrationalism as a philosophical storm trooper. His dismay at what was happening was echoed in the later testimony of other Jewish intellectuals, of his sons’ generation, like Karl Löwith, who lost one of his lungs for the Fatherland, and the famous diarist Viktor Klemperer, a professor from Dresden and another veteran of the first war.
These personal themes, inextricable from the text of this work, give a special flavor to Husserl’s historical reflections. Nevertheless, insofar as they are philosophical reflections on the course of European and even world history, they can be considered as belonging to the substantive philosophy of history. But as I have already suggested, they are far indeed from the themes and metaphysical claims we associate with the classical models of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
So far we have examined Husserl’s text against the background of the substantive philosophy of history. Can it also be regarded as a contribution to the critical philosophy of history? Husserl can indeed claim some credentials as an epistemologist of historical knowledge, at least indirectly. Though the analytic philosophers of the 1950s tended to ignore it, the epistemology of history didn’t begin with Carl G. Hempel. Debates about the status of historical knowledge began at about the same time, in the nineteenth century, that history established itself in the academy and historians began to claim that it was a Wissenschaft, rather than merely an entertaining and edifying literary genre. Members of the “historical school” (Ranke, Niebuhr, Droysen) had a lot to say about critical methods for evaluating sources, interpreting documents, and justifying their assertions. But the larger question for philosophers, of course, was how the newly flourishing historical knowledge related to that of the natural sciences, which had served as the paradigm for epistemology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The positivist tradition, inaugurated by Comte and Mill, argued for the unity of all knowledge and tried to assimilate history to science. Just as physics formulated laws of nature, and explained events by their means, so the science of society would seek out social laws; history was just a case of applying these laws to the past.
Led by the neo-Kantians (Windelband, Rickert) and by Dilthey, German philosophers opposed this view of historical knowledge, focusing on the fact that its objects are not natural occurrences but human actions. It was with history in mind that they began to work out the idea of the Geisteswissenschaften or humanities, maintaining the idea of the autonomy and independence of disciplines concerned with human affairs against the attempt to reduce them to something more basic. This opposition between the positivists and the humanists continued to shape the debates about the status of historical knowledge well into the twentieth century.
Husserl always sided with Dilthey and the neo-Kantians on the matter of reductionism; but he wanted to work out the distinction between the Natur- and the Geisteswissenschaften, the natural and the human sciences, on his own phenomenological terms. Given his differences with the neo-Kantians, he drew more heavily on Dilthey, whom he regarded as a man of “ingenious intuition,” but unfortunately not of “rigorous scientific theorizing” (Ideas II, p. 173). Husserl began his work on this topic in the studies for the second volume of Ideas, by developing the idea of constitution. Though he did not deal with historical knowledge directly, he did concern himself with the difference between knowing objects in nature and knowing persons and understanding and interpreting their actions. He developed the idea of Natur and Geist as distinct ontological regions, each with its own material a priori repertoire of concepts, determining basic entities, principles of individuation, and relations of temporality, spatiality, and causality. Moreover, he conceived of the area of transition between these two traditional realms as a distinct region of its own, that of “animalische Natur,” or Seele, where animals and humans shared certain bodily properties, sensations, capacity for movement, and rudimentary intentionality. His investigations here on the lived body, or Leib, as “center of orientation,” as bearer of will, movement, and habit, and of visual and tactile intentionality, served as Merleau-Ponty’s inspiration, and these and other unpublished manuscripts of the period are coming to be recognized as surpassing in subtlety and sophistication those of the French philosopher who later appropriated them.
To each of these regions belongs, on the side of the observer-scientist, a distinct Einstellung, an attitude or frame of mind that brings to the experience of each domain certain basic concepts, expectations, and forms of inference. The general “natural attitude” of Ideas I is now subdivided into the “naturalistic attitude” underlying the natural sciences, the “personalistic attitude,” corresponding to the Geisteswissenschaften, and a third, which Husserl does not name, that underlies the science of psychology. One of the most important discussions here concerns the distinction between causation in the natural realm and motivation in the human world. The concepts of Umwelt and Welt, environment and world, also play an important role in the discussion of persons.
Considered as contributions to the epistemology of the Geisteswissenschaften , these discussions, from the 1920s and shortly before, are certainly relevant to the philosophy of history. However, not much of this turns up in the Crisis itself. In fact, some of the subtlety and detail of Husserl’s manuscripts on these subjects, especially on the distinction between Seele and Geist, gets lost during the late period, when Husserl develops the idea of a phenomenological or intentional psychology mainly in order to discuss its relation to transcendental phenomenology. This is the subject matter of Part III B of the Crisis text, which takes its point of departure by criticizing Kant and his successors for misunderstanding the distinction between psychology and epistemology. Husserl wants to advance the idea that if intentionality is pursued to the limit, a psychological investigation of consciousness, properly understood, can transform itself into a transcendental philosophy with a mere “change of sign” of the sort brought about by application of the full-fledged phenomenological reduction. An intentional psychology can thus function as a way into transcendental phenomenology—a problem that concerns Husserl during this period. He explicitly criticizes the Cartesian approach of his earlier works and is looking for alternative ways of presenting his method. These sections of the Crisis are thus devoted to two related problems that come up elsewhere in the work: first, what he calls the “paradox of human subjectivity: being a subject for the world and at the same time being an object in the world,” (Crisis, § 53) that is, the problem of transcendental versus empirical subjectivity; and second, the status of phenomenology as a “first philosophy” or self-sufficient philosophical method.
As so often happens in Husserl’s programmatic texts, the detail and subtlety one finds in the manuscripts are sacrificed to large-scale methodological issues. What is missing here is a treatment specific to the Geisteswissenschaften, of the sort that might include history, as well as the specifically epistemological interest that guided Husserl’s studies on constitution. As a contribution to the epistemology of the human sciences, the value of the Crisis is limited.
As a contribution to the philosophical reflection on history, however, the chief value of the Crisis lies in another direction. Underlying the whole approach of these texts is a concept that Husserl employs frequently during this period, namely that of Geschichtlichkeit, or historicity. As we know, this term also figures prominently in Heidegger’s work as well. An important late chapter in Sein und Zeit bears the title “Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit.” In fact, since Being and Time was published in 1927, and Husserl’s work on the Crisis dates from the 1930s, it is possible that Husserl picked up the term from Heidegger, in spite of his negative feelings and very critical attitude toward Heidegger’s work. A likelier story is that the importance of this term is testimony to the influence of Dilthey on both Husserl and Heidegger. Though Dilthey had died in 1911, the seventh volume of his collected works, which contained the author’s late manuscripts on the Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt (the construction of the historical world), was published in 1927. Heidegger explicitly pays homage to Dilthey at the beginning of his chapter on historicity. Husserl was acquainted with Dilthey’s late work through his assistant Ludwig Landgrebe, and through Georg Misch, both of whom published studies on Dilthey from a phenomenological perspective. Though Husserl had been critical, in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” of the historical relativism he saw in Dilthey’s work, he later paid him tribute as a theorist of the Geisteswissenschaften and for his attempts to found a humanistic psychology.
A clue to understanding the concept of historicity, and its relation to the epistemology of the human sciences, is found in a passage from Dilthey’s Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt. “We are historical beings before we become observers of history,” Dilthey writes, “and only because we are the former do we become the latter” (1968, 277–78). For both Husserl and Heidegger, the concept of historicity is the result of elaborating on what it means to say that we are “historical beings.” The epistemology of historical inquiry gives way to an account of the historical character of experience and existence—Bewußtsein for Husserl, Dasein for Heidegger.
But Husserl’s actual development of the concept of historicity, whatever it may owe to Dilthey or even to Heidegger, is rooted ultimately in his own earlier work. Specifically, it derives from his treatment of temporality and of intersubjectivity. As we know from the lectures on internal time-consciousness, consciousness at any level, whether perceptual, imaginative, or conceptual, whether passive or active, is a temporal flow with a retentional-protentional form. The present is experienced against the background of a past and in anticipation of a future. Whatever its intentional objects may be at any given moment, the intentionality of consciousness takes in the past and future of those objects, of the world, and of itself. The subject is not a substance persisting through time, or a timeless ego hovering outside of time, but a self-constituting synthesis of temporal relations. As Husserl later developed his notion of genetic phenomenology, he portrayed consciousness as a process of accumulating abiding convictions and habitualities, building up a sense of world and of self. “The ego constitutes itself for itself, so to speak, in the unity of a Geschichte,” as Husserl writes in the Cartesian Meditations (§ 36). Here Geschichte can be taken in the sense of an individual story or narrative of one’s own life, rather than history in the usual sense. Similarly, Dilthey had compared the constitution of self to the composition and constant revision of an autobiography.
History proper enters the picture with the intersubjective dimension of consciousness. Though Husserl is often faulted for his treatment of intersubjectivity, notably in the Fifth Cartesian Meditation, there is no doubt that he considered subjectivity and intersubjectivity to be essentially interrelated. Like intentionality and temporality, intersubjectivity is an essential dimension of experience. It is not as if the subject could somehow exist alone and then encounter others. Intentionality is a perspective or point of view upon the world, and intersubjectivity is the encounter and interaction with a point or points of view that are not my own. Husserl’s brief appropriation of Leibniz’s concept of the monad, in the Fifth Meditation, though it is ultimately misleading and inappropriate, I think, is meant to portray the subject as an element in a vast interplay of points of view in which the objective world is constituted.
Husserl’s account gets much more interesting when he goes beyond the abstract Leibnizian scheme, still in the Fifth Meditation, and conceives of intersubjectivity in the form of concrete communities. He speaks of Vergemeinschaftung der Monaden and coins the expression “personalities of a higher order” to describe such communities of monads (Cartesian Meditations, § 55). In later manuscripts this is further spelled out as “we-”intentionality, where the first-person point of view, inseparable from phenomenology, is shown not to be limited to the first-person singular; it can be exemplified in the first-person plural as well. The background of the past now becomes that of the social or intersubjective past, which now belongs to the individual subject by virtue of membership in a community.
Thus our expanded view of consciousness now includes history, so to speak, as part of its makeup. That is, the social past figures as background of individual and collective experience. And it does this prior to and independently of any cognitive interest we might take in the past or even any instruction we might receive about it. This is what it means to say, in Dilthey’s words, that we are “historical beings”: We are historical beings because we are conscious beings. While the basic elements of this conception of historicity were already in place, it is left to the Crisis texts themselves to develop them and to draw out their implications. As we shall see, some of these implications have problematic consequences for Husserl’s idea of phenomenology.
But we should pause at this point to consider the status of this concept of historicity. Since it concerns not historical knowledge but historical being, it is clearly not epistemological but ontological. This does not place it back in the realm of the traditional, substantive philosophy of history, however, since it is not about the being of the historical process as a whole, but about the being of the subject. But to call it ontological is not quite correct either, at least in Husserl’s usage, since the point here is not to describe persons in their material ontological region of reality, as they might be treated in the Geisteswissenschaften, but to describe consciousness phenomenologically. To put it another way, to say we are historical beings is not merely to say we are in history, that we arrive on the scene and then disappear at a certain point in objective historical time. It is certainly true, not only that each of us is such a being, an empirical ego, but also that we are aware of ourselves as such. But historicity is a feature of our awareness itself, our awareness not only of ourselves but of everything else as well. Indeed, historicity is a feature of transcendental consciousness, as Husserl uses that word. Whatever the term may have meant for Kant, for Husserl transcendental means world-constituting, world-making, world-engendering—though not, of course, worldcreating: Only God can do that! Hence the “paradox of human subjectivity,” mentioned earlier, of being both a subject for the world, transcendental subjectivity, and an object in the world.
There is no doubt that the growing importance of historicity, in Husserl’s late work, is evidence of the increasing concreteness with which he conceives of consciousness. But Husserl’s conception was always more concrete than was generally recognized. We have already mentioned his studies of embodiment, which date back to Ideas II, and which also reappear in the Crisis. Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre as well, were quite right to see and appreciate this aspect of Husserl’s work. Husserl never had a problem with intentionality’s being instantiated in a particular medium or a particular situation. It is for this reason that it can be bodily as well as mental in the usual sense of that word. This is also why its subject can also be the plural we as well as the singular I. The fact is that for Husserl the world is constituted by an embodied and historically situated transcendental subjectivity. Historicity, then, is not an ontological concept, at least in Husserl’s sense, but belongs strictly to phenomenology, indeed transcendental phenomenology.
We have seen that historicity is not an epistemological concept, but it does have epistemological implications. When Dilthey remarked that we are historical beings, and because we are historical beings we become observers of history, he was saying something about historical knowledge. But he was not addressing standard epistemological questions about grounding, validity, objectivity, evidence, and so forth. Such questions assume that the discipline of history is already in place, with all its interests and standards. Instead he was considering historical inquiry as human activity and how it fits into the larger picture of human existence as a whole. He was addressing the question of why we are interested in the past in the first place, why we should undertake to formulate questions about the past along with methods and procedures for answering them.
Similarly, Husserl’s concept of historicity would have certain implications for our understanding of historical knowledge. Though this is not spelled out in the Crisis, we could interpret his view as running parallel to what he says about the natural sciences and the life-world. Husserl’s argument is that we can only understand the scientific project if we trace its cognitive accomplishments back to their origin in the world of everyday, prescientific experience. Scientific knowledge does not result from the interaction of a priori concepts with passive sense data (this is part of Husserl’s criticism of Kant) but arises out of and is directed back to the “always pregiven” life-world. In keeping with its role as background for modern objective natural sciences, the life-world in the Crisis is portrayed as a prescientific natural world, the world of perception, perceived things, experienced space-time and causality. For Husserl this is the world we inhabit prior to and independently of the cognitive interests and activities that make up natural science and issue in its particular interpretation of reality.
In the same way, we could say that cognitive interests and activities of our historical disciplines presuppose a broader human and historical life-world, which figures in our ordinary experience, whether we are historians or not. Historical claims and accounts do not emerge ex nihilo from the heads of historians, but presuppose a predisciplinary and preobjective sense of the past that we share in virtue of our membership in our community. Thus just as the concept of the life-world enables us to understand better the growth and significance of the natural sciences, so the idea of historicity contributes to our understanding of history as a discipline—not by showing how it explains things or by deciding whether it is capable of making objective claims about the past, but by giving us a sense of the larger context and background from which it emerges and differentiates itself.
But for Husserl in the Crisis, the epistemological implications of the concept of historicity are not limited to its role in historical inquiry. Historicity is an essential feature of all inquiry, including scientific and even mathematical inquiry. What this means is that, for any cognitive project, consciousness does not stand passively before a domain of objects and then undertake on its own a theoretical cognition of that domain. For any given individual, the enterprise of cognition exists as a project before he or she takes it up. The engagement of the individual in such a project presupposes membership in the community and the existence of a tradition of inquiry. In taking up the project, the individual inquirer takes over its questions, goals, concepts, and methods. He also builds on results already obtained by others. Thus a particular science, while it is indeed pursued by individuals, owes its undertaking in each case, as well as its capacity to progress, to the social context in which it exists. There is, of course, a negative side to this: To the extent that research takes the work of its predecessors for granted, it moves further from the original insights that motivated it. Theory can become increasingly abstract or, as Husserl calls it, inauthentic. This can produce the need to return to and reactivate those insights, a need that is harder and harder to meet the further one gets from the original source.
This is the historical and somewhat paradoxical path of inquiry that Husserl describes in the text that has acquired the title The Origin of Geometry. While there is a nod to the mythical, “undiscoverable Thales of geometry,” and to the problem of understanding the initial jump from the practical mastery of space to its conceptual idealization, the primary subject of this text is how a discipline like geometry, once it is launched, continues on its way, how it exists as a historical continuum or tradition, and how the individual’s mastery and eventual contribution to such a discipline depends on the tradition. This is where the geological metaphor of sedimentation comes into play.
While Husserl seeks to exemplify the process of sedimentation by looking in this case at one discipline, what he says applies to all endeavors that come under the heading of Wissenschaft. Ultimately, and most interestingly, of course, it applies to philosophy itself, the one discipline that has always been supposed, somehow or other, to encompass all the others. This is why his concern with historicity finds its primary instantiation, in these texts, in discussing the history of philosophy. He wants to make it clear that he is not just a historian of philosophy, discussing the development of some cultural phenomenon “which might as well be Chinese, in the end”—that is, as observed and described from the outside by some Geisteswissenschaftler or anthropologist who is not involved, who is trying to be objective (Crisis, § 15). No, the history of philosophy must be approached precisely by those who are engaged in the project, in order to understand the project and the nature of their own engagement in it.
What Husserl realizes at the time of the Crisis is that philosophy itself is a community with its own historical background, and to engage in it is to take up a tradition that already exists. Rather than a static collection of eternal questions, it exists as an ongoing inquiry; even if one is motivated to reject current solutions and come up with new ones, one has inherited the questions from the past. The most important philosophers, of course, have been those who come up with new questions rather than new answers; but even they depend on the spiritual inheritance of philosophy. This is the chief implication of the concept of historicity for Husserl, and it is a realization to which he comes rather belatedly. As I have said before, the preoccupation with history is that which distinguishes these late texts most of all from Husserl’s earlier work.
His attitude toward the history of philosophy had previously resembled that of his admired model, Descartes. As he wrote in 1910, philosophy had always aspired to be a rigorous science. But so far it had utterly failed. So why waste time with failures? Inquiry should proceed “not from philosophies but from things and from the problems connected with them”—von den Sachen und Problemen (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 146). In Ideas I, before he even got around to introducing the phenomenological epoché, he proposed what he called the “philosophical epoché,” which means that “we completely abstain from judgment respecting the doctrinal content of all pre-existing philosophy, and conduct all our investigations under this abstention” (Ideas I, § 32). Husserl had nothing against the history of philosophy, of course, but like many philosophers before and since, he thought one could draw a clear line between “doing” philosophy and doing its history. Not only that: Phenomenology was originally conceived, I think, as a kind of return to innocence: casting off the prejudices of the philosophical tradition, and even the ultimate prejudice of the natural attitude itself, in order to achieve a pure and unrestricted grasp of experience.
Husserl had always recognized that it is not easy to bracket the natural attitude; hence the laborious attention he pays to refining the phenomenological reduction. Now he has come to recognize that historical prejudices, too, are not easy to overcome. Instead they must be reflected upon and worked through. Now he joins that company of philosophers who believe that philosophy must be done historically if it is to be done responsibly. All theoretical inquiry, even that of the hardest of sciences, is intrinsically historical. This is not usually recognized by those involved; nor should it be, in the case of most disciplines, since the point is to develop theories, not to reflect on them philosophically. But philosophy, unlike other disciplines, is under the obligation to reflect on its own nature as well as that of its subject matter, to try to understand its own procedures even as it practices them.
This, of course, is where the idea of Europe comes in. Reflecting on the historical community of philosophy, Husserl sees it as a European project, tracing its origin to the Greeks. Philosophy has a beginning in a cultural time and place. It is a cultural-historical formation. One of its distinctive features, however, according to Husserl, is its early recognition of the distinction between cultural particularity and universally valid truth. As a particular community, philosophy has always tried to transcend itself and achieve a universal perspective. This paradoxical idea—that of a universal perspective—is really Hegel’s idea of the in-itself-for-itself, the ideal of absolute knowledge, which surmounts its own historicity. Husserl does not affirm anything like this, much as he would like to. How could philosophy ever know that it had freed itself from its historical prejudices? He recognizes that this caution leads him into the vicinity of the historical relativism he criticizes in Dilthey. Perhaps philosophy, along with Europe, is in the end nothing more than a particular cultural formation, its universalist aspirations nothing but a quaint—but also sometimes dangerous—feature of its Weltanschauung or world-view. But just as he rejects an absolutist metaphysics, Husserl also refuses to accept the historicist antimetaphysics that incoherently proclaims the impossibility of any transhistorical truth. Phenomenology was never a metaphysics or an antimetaphysics, but something more like a research program, a project. And there it remains for Husserl: as a project of universality that is aware of its own particularity and historicity.