Among Husserl’s aims in the Crisis, one is particularly urgent, namely his search for the origins of meaning. These origins are at the same time the origins for thinking, understanding, and for knowledge.1 He uses two very similar notions in German for origin. One is Ursprung and the other one is Urstiftung. Ursprung is used in the context of evidence and justification, whereas Urstiftung appears in the context of datable events. Husserl very often runs these two together.2 There is a tension between them that runs through his whole discussion of the notion of origin or original evidence and experience. The tension I am speaking of is the one between historicity and ahistoricity (of meaning). Because of this longing for original experience, we have to try, according to Husserl, to go back to historical experiences in order to get back to the original meaning and the original experience. Another source for original experience is consciousness. One aim of this chapter is to show to what extent consciousness as an origin for original experience is also subject to the same tension between historicity and ahistoricity. The other aims are to show how far this tension runs through all of the other sources for original experience and meaning he is speaking of.
There are three philosophically important origins for meaning for Husserl and one personal one. The philosophically relevant ones are (1) consciousness, (2) the life-world, and (3) European philosophy and the history of the sciences. The fourth and rather private origin of meaning concerns the crisis of Husserl’s life in the 1930s in Germany and is related to the meaning of one’s own life. This crisis started when the Nazis came into power. This rather private topic is (4) his own origin as a Jewish person and a German thinker.
Corresponding to these three or four origins are three,3 or respectively, four ways or “methods” to arrive at origins.
It is not only the word origin that makes this comparison plausible. There are deeper, and as I think, more meaningful parallels to the other three topics, as I will show later on.
The tension between historicity and ahistoricity (of meaning) is more or less evident in all of the philosophically important origins but one, namely that of absolute subjectivity or consciousness. In spite of this, I will argue that all three of the philosophically relevant origins mentioned are subject to this tension. Before turning to this point later on, I shall merely hint at the line of argument: Concerning the notion of absolute consciousness, one can show that it is linked to historicity because, even if one conceded that an epoché was possible, and that it could reveal an ahistorical origin of evidence (which one may not be obliged to do), one would still have to posit a concept of historicity as part of the concept of consciousness. Therefore all Husserl can get to is historically valid origins of evidence and meaning. Before discussing this point at length, I want to examine how far Husserl’s private crisis and the concern for his own personal origin are linked to the three philosophical origins mentioned above. We shall see that the parallels between the philosophically relevant origins and the concern for his personal origin are quite revealing.
There exists a letter addressed by Husserl in 1936 to the Austrian philosopher Gustav Albrecht in which he reflects on being a member of the German nation and its blood (!) through his thinking and writing: “And it is a difficult thing at our age to find a possible mode of existence once the rug has been pulled out from under one’s feet. It requires much spiritual energy, and in order to deal with it, I must counter it with a powerful and superior force of philosophical concentration—thus this extreme struggle in the composition of the last work”4 (namely, the Crisis). Further on he writes: “I have finally at least to make clear for myself that I am no stranger in German philosophy (and therefore in this nation) and that all of the great thinkers of the past, whom I admired so much, and whose thoughts have grown in mine into new kinds, would have had to rank me as a true heir of their spirit, as blood of their blood.”5
We can find the same tension between historical approach, sedimentation, and ahistoricity in this quotation as we find in his characterization of Greek philosophy as the origin of philosophy and in his description of the life-world. He sees the historical dimension of his own origin as a philosopher as inhering in his being an heir and a continuer of past German philosophy. But in mentioning the German blood that he shares by continuing this heritage, he is employing an ahistorical, biological concept. I do not think that Husserl became a victim of Nazi ideology by doing so. I rather think that he uses this term as a metaphor in order to show that he is not only part of a historical development (in being an heir and continuer of German philosophy) but that he is a German philosopher. He does this for his own sake. And he does it because he wants to safeguard his own identity, in order to avoid becoming a mere object for the supposed representatives of the nation he belongs to. His own crisis of identity is due to the historical development in Germany, as is his effort to demonstrate that he is a German philosopher by writing the Crisis.
Husserl thereby wants to prove that he is still part of the German nation by writing the Crisis, but as a philosopher he also wants to show that he is part of the European philosophical spirit—a spirit that was founded by the Greeks and that was, as Hegel claimed, continued by German philosophy. European philosophy is one of the origins of rationality for Husserl. Therefore it is also a foundation for a responsible critique of contemporary scientific developments:
For we are what we are as functionaries of modern philosophical humanity; we are heirs and cobearers of the direction of the will which pervades this humanity; we have become this through a primal establishment [Urstiftung ] which is at once a reestablishment (Nachstiftung) and a modification of the Greek primal establishment [Urstiftung]. In the latter lies the teleological beginning, the true birth of the European spirit as such.
This manner of clarifying [Aufklärung] history by inquiring back into the primal establishment [Urstiftung] of the goals which bind together the chain of future generations, insofar as these goals live on in sedimented forms yet can be reawakened again and again and, in their new vitality, be criticized; this manner of inquiring back into the ways in which surviving goals repeatedly bring with them ever new attempts to reach new goals ... this, I say, is nothing other than the philosopher’s genuine self-reflection on what he is truly seeking, on what is in him as a will coming from the will and as the will of his spiritual forefathers. It is to make vital again, in its concealed historical meaning, the sedimented conceptual system, which, as taken for granted, serves as the ground of his private and non-historical work. It is to carry forward, through his own self-reflection, the self-reflection of his own forebears and thus not only to reawaken the chain of thinkers, the social interrelation of their thinking, the community of their thought, and transform it into a living present for us but, on the basis of the total unity thus made present, to carry out a responsible critique. (Crisis, § 15)
The European philosopher is described as a member of a spiritual community that has evolved over time. He is dependent on the concepts he has inherited, but in reflecting on their true historical sense, he is able to criticize contemporary developments. According to Husserl, this activity is the true work of the philosopher. Again, one can see that Husserl is describing the work of a philosopher in the same way in which he writes about his own efforts in the letter to Gustav Albrecht cited above. And one can also say that criticizing as a task of philosophy is also one of the main tasks of the Crisis. And as criticizing is part of the project of enlightenment, one can also say that the Crisis itself is an attempt at enlightenment, which is to be arrived at by examining origins and thereby finding a neutral standpoint from which one is able to criticize the intellectual developments of one’s own times. But criticizing intellectual developments is only one part of the project of enlightenment. Since Kant, self-reflection is the other one. This second way of enlightenment is what Husserl calls in the Crisis the true self-reflection of a philosopher in succession of his spiritual predecessors. But as he mentions in the letter to Albrecht, the Crisis itself is an attempt at personal self-reflection for Husserl and at finding his own new ground.
Husserl does not only think that sedimented forms of thinking can be reawakened and criticized, but that this enterprise is a most important part of the philosopher’s self-reflection. This is because in digging up the sedimented forms and conceptual systems, the philosopher is finding a ground of his private and nonhistorical work. Therefore he is carrying forward his own self-reflection through the self-reflection of his own forebears, as Husserl says. This is at once a reflection on why and how a philosopher should work in a historical perspective and a finding out of a ground for (self-)reflection on his own situation as a philosopher in his specific historical situation.
One way of considering Husserl’s thinking here is to compare it to a similar line of argument in the work of Michel Foucault. Husserl, one might say, is deliberately conflating the two notions of Auf klärung that Foucault tries to distinguish in a number of his essays that attempt to answer the Kantian question “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” (“What is enlightenment?”) anew.6 Foucault points out that Kant was the first to ask this question in a historical-critical dimension, in other words in one that is not linked to the epoch of modernity, as it would be if one asks it only in the context of a so-called “philosophy of consciousness.” The historical-critical dimension consists in asking for the historical conditions of the development of rationality, as opposed to merely inquiring into its timeless nature. On this new conception, enlightenment (Aufklärung) is not primarily a topic for the first person, for the creature who is able to say “I am,” for it concerns historical conditions that lead to criticism, and that antedate the thinker posing the question. Asked in this later manner, our question is freed of its dependence on the particular historical epoch in which it is asked, at least to the extent that the origin of the question is now correctly situated in the historical sequence that gave rise to it, and in the sense that we may ask for the historical conditions of the development of any rationality.
The “running together” of the two notions of Aufklärung by Husserl is quite subtle, because he invokes a historical prototype for the philosopher who starts from self-reflection as the source for criticism. At the beginning of the Crisis, we find a short paragraph where Husserl presents his undertaking in the Crisis as similar to Socrates’ approach to philosophy:
I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence. (Crisis, § 7)
This could well be a description of Socrates’ way of philosophizing (leading, not instructing, only pointing out ... ) and, in applying this description to himself, Husserl situates himself in the ongoing history of European philosophy and implicitly puts himself at a new beginning of this tradition. We can very well interpret this move as an attempt to give philosophy a new start all while relating it to a historically evolved prototype of the philosopher—one that, as a prototype, is paradoxically ahistorical.
But to identify self-reflection and responsible critique as the main tasks of European philosophy is as much an arbitrary act as is his sublimation of the history of European philosophy. Husserl justifies his method by hinting at the exceptional historical position of Greek thinking. But this supposed exceptionality and uniqueness can only be proven by showing that Greek, and therefore European, philosophy is not one historical datum among others, but that it is exceptional in its being nonhistorical, a paradigm for all time. Husserl touches on other, non-European ways of philosophizing, but only gives hints about why he considers them to be less important, and in so doing, he is following Hegel’s History of Philosophy.
A further element of ahistoricity or nonhistoricity can be seen in what he calls the “sedimentation of concepts.” A sedimented conceptual system is said to serve as the ground of one’s private, nonhistorical work, and this despite its concealed historical meaning. This is so because the concealed historical meaning is thought to be an original one and therefore one that is truer. The tension between historicity and nonhistoricity is obvious: One has to look for the most basic historical grounds in order to find nonhistorical ones for one’s own systematic work.
I turn now to point three from my list above: European philosophy and the sciences. According to Husserl, a reflection on the history of Greek philosophy and the history of the sciences in Europe permits us to de-objectify or, better, to de-idealize positivist scientific thinking. One way to do this is by reflecting on the sedimentation of philosophical (and scientific) concepts in such a way as to lead us to the original meaning of the concepts. Sedimented concepts and thoughts include the original meanings that are passed on over time, but that are not always immediately at our disposal. For we have to reflect on them. Their historical sedimentation explains why we should be able to grasp them in principle and why we are still linked to them—why they can still mean something to us.
This is a process that Husserl takes for granted in the history of European philosophical thinking and in the history of the sciences. In using concepts and thoughts that transport a sedimented meaning, we participate in the original evidence that they transport. Reflecting on this sedimented meaning and its evidence is a way of self-reflection for Husserl and therefore (again) a philosophical task of particular importance. Once we have access to the sedimented (original) evidence, we are also able to criticize ongoing thinking and work in the contemporary sciences. The sedimented truth gives us a standpoint from which we are able to criticize our own time and to reflect on it—again the most relevant work for a philosopher, especially one who sees himself as standing in a Kantian tradition.
But why does Husserl need the concept of the life-world in addition to the concept of scientific sedimentation? This is an important question, for the life-world need not be our life-world. It might well be a historical one. In the case of the sciences, Husserl therefore assumes two forms of historical access to an original meaning.
If the life-world is a historical one, then it is the source that allows us to detect the original, and now sedimented evidence. We cannot have access to sedimented meaning without going back to the former life-world. In Husserl’s terms, the mathematician does not possess the actual meaning of the mathematical method he works with, nor of the “implications of meaning which are closed off by sedimentation or traditionalization, i.e., of the constant presuppositions of his [own] constructions, concepts, propositions, theories” (Crisis, § 9h). But the mathematician can make them self-evident again, just as he can reactivate the so-called self-evidence by reactivating its meaning. This is achieved by reflecting on the life-world, which Husserl calls the forgotten meaning-fundament of the natural sciences. Let me touch briefly on this point.
In the Crisis, a work whose concept of a life-world differs from his other works in that it is the natural world,7 Husserl argues that returning to the life-world will also give access to original evidence. But might he not be mistaken? For life-worlds are themselves already forms of lives in which we find historically evolved and developed concepts, practices, and planning. Thus they cannot be conceived as entirely free of historicity. This becomes evident when we examine Husserl’s example of geometry.
The geometry of idealities was preceded by the practical art of surveying, which knew nothing of idealities. Yet such a pre-geometrical achievement was a meaning-fundament for geometry, a fundament for the great invention of the ideal world of geometry.... Thus it could appear that geometry with its own immediately evident a priori “intuition” and the thinking, which operates with it, produces a self-sufficient, absolute truth, which, as such ... could be applied without further ado. (Crisis, § 9h)
According to Husserl, to regress from geometry back to the life-world it arose from would mean to reflect on the art of surveying. But what he calls the art of surveying might also be called a science. Historical research on the Egyptian art of surveying doesn’t provide a justification for why we should not call this science. In fact, historians do call it a science nowadays. And it is equally well a way of idealizing the world and not merely an “applied” science.8 This example indicates why there is no “science-free” life-world, no world in which we can find an original meaning for the sciences, if we mean by that one that is not already scientifically formed.
Husserl’s claim is that in reflecting on the art of surveying, we can see that mathematics and the sciences did not arise merely because they involve a priori knowledge just waiting to reveal itself to the human mind. They were rather developed to help us meet some special need. And I think this is what Husserl also wants us to keep in mind, that is to say the sense in which history of the sciences is supposed to help our understanding. The problems that drove the development of mathematics and the sciences might change over time. Therefore it would not necessarily serve a practical purpose to remind a mathematician nowadays of the purpose geometry once had. But it might be a meritorious feature of good history of science that it reveals how a science was once helpful. Keeping in mind that it took its sense from being useful might make us reflect on the manner in which the contemporary sciences add something useful to people’s lives.
Husserl’s search for the grounds of original evidence is therefore at least twofold. One side is his reflection on sedimented philosophical and scientific conceptual systems. And the other one is his turning to the lifeworld—what is supposed to be the empirical, natural world in the Crisis. This empirical world is the world of simple causalities, as Husserl says, the one to which one must have access if one is to be able to bracket the scientific theories that order our expectations.9
But even if I am right to conclude that there is, in fact, no access to those grounds of original evidence, one still might hold that it is useful to reflect on the original problem a science was meant to help with. Such a reflection might, for instance, be motivated by our identifying, as does Husserl, a crisis or general discomfort with scientific development and its impact on our lives and our self-understanding. Think, for example, of modern medicine, biology, or neurobiology. If we reflect on the philosophical implications medicine had as a science in its beginning, we might see contemporary medicine in a very different light. The philosophical notion of a good life was one that defined the aims of a physician and his science. And the notion of a good life also includes the notion of autonomy and self-determination. This is not the place to dilate on this subject. And there is no doubt that Husserl wanted more than that. He wanted to get back to original evidences. But still, we might think it useful to get to a standpoint that enables us to criticize the contemporary sciences by doing history of the sciences—even if this standpoint is not an absolute one.
We ought to keep in mind that the reflection on a life-world is described differently from the bracketing of the epoché, which I will try to describe in the following. What I mean is that Husserl tries to find the original evidence of scientific work by going back to the life-world, but by “bracketing” the life-world in the case of the epoché, he tries to get to the original meaning of subjectivity and consciousness. It is important to recognize that, in the Crisis, Husserl tries both to arrive at origins via abstraction—namely the epoché—and that he is at the same time criticizing mathematics and physics for being too abstract, and thereby objectifying life. As we shall see, the epoché is described as a way of bracketing, and I think it is not too far-fetched to claim that this is a metaphor Husserl has taken from logic and mathematics.
In conclusion, I will return to the topic I announced at the beginning of this chapter. How ahistorical or absolute can the concept of consciousness be in the Crisis? David Woodruff Smith describes consciousness and nature—the mental and the physical side of experience—as two sides of the same event (Smith, 1995).10 Our neuroscience, he suggests, presupposes our everyday life-world understanding of ourselves, which is indispensable in the practice of science. But experiences, and especially intentional experiences, are a consciousness of something. Therefore they are temporal, although not spatial and not real (337). By describing the epoché as an abstraction from embodied consciousness Husserl is, according to Smith (whose interpretation I am following here), defining the concept of a pure consciousness. However, it is only possible to articulate this notion in conceptual activity, and never in reality (356). “Pure consciousness is thus an abstraction from embodied consciousness in nature and encultured consciousness in the life-world: an abstractable moment or dependent part of the psychophysical I and the human I. The process of abstraction is epoché. But the mind is not ontologically separated from the body, as in Cartesian dualism” (351). By bracketing the object of its experience—by bracketing the whole natural world—the ego comes to focus on the way the object is given in the experience (332). By bracketing the question of the existence of the natural world around us, we turn our attention to the structure of our own conscious experience. We thereby recognize that each act of consciousness is intentional, or a consciousness of something. “With the being of the natural world in brackets, all I can say about the tree before me is that in my perspective in this act of seeing that tree, the tree has being for me in my seeing it. The tree might or might not exist in itself ” (383). We bracket the concrete spatio-temporal event, or one might say, as Smith does, that we abstract from it, we leave it aside and concentrate on the structure of our conscious experience. The goal of that method is to get at consciousness as a domain that has an existence besides nature, but has this existence in an ontological sense not without nature.
Before calling this procedure into question, I will try to clarify its aims, of which there are two. The first is to find the apodictic ground Husserl was seeking, the one that absolutely excludes, as he says, every possible doubt.11 The second is to sublimate the concept of subjectivity as a ground for the exact sciences and for the life-world.
The exact sciences are, as Husserl says, the accomplishments of the consciousness of knowing subjects. Subjectivity and the accomplishments of consciousness are therefore for Husserl that immanent reason (die immanente Vernunft) without which the objectivity of the sciences becomes absurd (widersinnig). As they are not domains of a priori truths, they derive their inherent reason from subjectivity. Subjectivity and consciousness are therefore prior conditions for the sciences and for the life-world. The immanent reason that subjectivity and consciousness impose on the sciences and the life-world is also part of the ground that enables a critique of the sciences.12
We have already seen that the recourse to subjectivity is not sufficient as a ground for critique in the Crisis. But maybe the concept of the life-world, which is also determined as a realm of subjective phenomena that have remained “anonymous,” can help us in reconstructing historically anonymous subjective phenomena as the immanent reason of scientific developments.13
And did this not imply that they all repose upon one single ground, one to be investigated scientifically in advance of all the others? And can this ground be ... any other than precisely that of the anonymous subjectivity we mentioned? But one could and can realize this only when one finally and quite seriously inquires into that which is taken for granted, which is presupposed by all thinking, all activity of life with all its ends and accomplishments, ... This implies first of all the mental accomplishments, which we human beings carry out in the world, as individual, personal, or cultural accomplishments. Before all such accomplishments there has always already been a universal accomplishment.... We shall come to understand ... the world ... as the unity of mental configuration, as a meaning construct (Sinngebilde) as the construct of a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity. It belongs essentially to this world—constituting accomplishment that subjectivity objectifies itself as human subjectivity, as an element of the world. (Crisis, § 29)
The sentence “We shall come to understand ... the world ... as the unity of mental configuration, as a meaning construct (Sinngebilde)—as the construct of a universal, ultimately functioning subjectivity” could just as well have been written by Hegel. Husserl is trying to reconcile the notions of subjectivity or consciousness, the notion of the contingent world and the notion of reason. He tries to link immanent reason to the realm of subjective phenomena. Does this make sense? Does it make sense to try to reconstruct historically anonymous subjective phenomena as the immanent reason of scientific developments?
Consider the following historical example of subjective phenomena, which is also a case for the history of the notion of consciousness. If we study the notion of thymós (heart, spirit, or anger) in Homer’s writings (Homer, 1925, 23.370),14 we can see that the strongly pulsating thymós is a bodily agitation, which is connected not only with emotions like anger, but also with thinking, intention, and imagination (Rappe, 1996, 218–19). There is no separation between bodily agitation, phenomenal feeling, and thinking as we know it. The division between immaterial being and its bodily basis presupposes an understanding that splits the soul from the body (Arbman, 1926, 168). This understanding has been prepared by the cult of Dionysus and was continued by Plato (Schlesier, 2000), although even for Plato, consciousness (or the soul) is not something internal that can be separated from the body, rather it is the individual and his or her life. There are phrases like those in Homer’s Odyssey (19.454) which indicate that life leaves the body when it is fatally injured, but this is not a sign that the notion of consciousness is available to this way of thinking. It just points to the circumstance that the body ceases to be alive when it is fatally injured. If the conventional interpretation of Homer is right, then it is clear that there is no intention, no thinking that can be “bracketed” for the contemporaries of Homer. They could not have had access to an absolute ego, and this indicates that the notion of an absolute ego is related to a historical time. These considerations indicate that the concept of consciousness has a history, and as this was at least already known in the 1920s, Husserl could well have been aware of this fact. Indeed it appears he was aware of this, as the following quotation of the Crisis shows very clearly:
What the modern period calls the theory of the understanding or of reason—in the pregnant sense “critique of reason,” transcendental problematics—has the roots of its meaning in the Cartesian Meditationes. The ancient world was not acquainted with this sort of thing, since the Cartesian epoché and its ego were unknown. Thus, in truth, there begins with Descartes a completely new manner of philosophizing which seeks its ultimate foundations in the subjective. (Crisis, § 19)
So what follows from my assertion that Husserl was very much aware of the historical origin of the concept of consciousness? Husserl has to claim that the epoché is applicable to the Homeric age but not for Homer’s contemporaries. In other words, we might apply it to Homer’s phenomenal subjectivity, but Homer himself would not have been able to do so. Thus Husserl has to suppose that there is something like a historically evolved concept that stands for an absolute concept. The notion of an absolute ego is applicable, for Husserl, to Homer’s individuals. As Smith puts it, “Pure consciousness is ... an abstraction from embodied consciousness in nature and encultured consciousness in the life-world .... The process of abstraction is epoché. . . . This process is only possible in the conceptual activity, and never in reality” (1995, 351, 356). But on my view, the epoché would not have been feasible even as a conceptual activity for Homer. He would not have been able to perform the abstraction or bracketing that is needed, because to do so, one already needs that concept of subjectivity that starts to evolve only with Descartes.
The reduction to a pure intention or absolute ego is thus a process that is dependent on a historical development. Even if we conceded that the epoché was feasible for us, it would still depend on a historically evolved concept. An absolute ego is only conceivable for those who live in a culture that allows for such an abstraction. If we now recall that subjectivity and the accomplishments of consciousness are, for Husserl, inextricably linked to immanent reason, we should conclude that this kind of immanent reason is only available for those living after Descartes. But how could there have been a life-world as a realm of subjective phenomena that remained anonymous before Descartes?
I would suggest that this is only thinkable from a Hegelian perspective. Only if we suppose a historically developing subjectivity that evolves at a particular time in an absolute ego might we understand what immanent reason could mean (without having pure consciousness in a Kantian understanding at hand). The immanent reason must then be one that is relative to historical developments, as well as being relative to the subjective phenomena of a historically remote life-world. One does not have to insinuate that Husserl was an expert in the writings of Hegel in order to read him in this line, but one can take it for granted that every German student in the 1930s knew that much about Hegel. The implication is that Husserl had not only Kant but also Hegel in mind when he wrote in the letter to Albrecht I cited earlier “that all of the great thinkers of the past, whom I admired so much, and whose thoughts have grown in mine in new kinds, had to rank me as a true heir of their spirit, as blood of their blood.”
From such a Hegelian perspective, we would have the following view: There is an immanent reason of history that is linked to subjectivity and consciousness. But as the immanent reason is linked to historical development, subjectivity and consciousness can only get to that point after an absolute ego is conceivable. In Husserl’s reflections, this particular time is the time after Descartes, because Descartes’ successors are able to distinguish between immaterial being and its bodily basis in a conceptual activity. The life-world, as a realm of subjective phenomena existing before Descartes and that is supposedly accessible without its encultured consciousness, is actually accessible only for his successors. The accessibility is guaranteed by, on the one hand, that immanent reason that binds us to the grounds of original evidences, and, on the other, by that pure consciousness in which the immanent reason accomplishes itself. If, by contrast, one does not share such a Hegelian philosophy of history, one has to conclude that the tensions between ahistoricity or nonhistoricity are not resolved in the Crisis.