Husserl's Phenomenology as an "Historical" Science

Robert Welsh Jordan

ABSTRACT. Edmund Husserl's phenomenology was, like that of Martin Heidegger, a quite appropriate aprioristic science of the historical. Husserl's work retained serious (antirelativist) acknowledgment of a priori truths (both material and formal, i.e. both "synthetic" and "analytic") as well as of factual (a posteriori) truths. The approach that Husserl took was quite the opposite of naturalistic, of historicist, and of psychologistic approaches. Every human consciousness is historical, cultural, personal, civilized,l and social. Everyone who has these traits acquired them after having existed as an intrinsically temporal psyche who had none of them. A very plausible sketch of how the consciousness of these traits is acquired and of how the awareness of the simpler of them is required for acquiring the less simple ones. There has been for almost a century now a widespread, even very prevalent hoax to the effect that Husserl's phenomenology is ahistorical and even anti-historical. That hoax was nurtured by the editing of the initial publication of Husserl's work on these subjects. Paraphrasing Nietzsche, what was a lie in the parent (editor, teacher) is a conviction in the offspring (reader, student).

During his lifetime Edmund Husserl did not publish any of his extensive treatments of the human person, the historical world, and the historical sciences. Indeed, apart from brief and widely scattered references, the first intimations of Husserl's interest in these subjects to appear in print were contained in Transcendental Philosophy and the Crisis in the European Sciences, Part I, which was published in Belgrade, 1936, just two years before his death. The first explicit, published treatment of history appeared posthumously. It was published by Eugen Fink in 1939 under the title “The Question of the Origin of Geometry Considered as a Problem of Intentional History” and appeared in the issue of the Revue internationale de philosophie dedicated to Husserl. Between 1901, the year in which the first volume of the Logical Investigations appeared, and 1939, a tendency developed among commentators on phenomenology to regard Husserl as a fundamentally ahistorical philosopher, as having-in contrast to Heidegger, for example-no interest in or relevance for the philosophy of history. This tradition has been overcome in France; it is still being overcome in Germany.

In the English-speaking philosophical community it is still very much alive. Its vitality has scarcely been affected by the manner in which attention is currently being concentrated upon Husserl's conception of the “life-world.” The recognition that this world is somehow historical tends to be regarded as the full extent of Husserl's bow to the fact that as a being in this world man himself is somehow historical, a fact which Husserl may have learned, one thinks, from Martin Heidegger. The tendency is to regard the life world and being in it as hard data, in the last analysis unanalyz-<246>able, before which the phenomenologist can only stand not just astonished but speechless or else raving. Such a view, if anyone did in fact explicitly hold it, would do justice neither to Husserl's conception of “the historical,” nor to Heidegger's, nor to the relation between the two. The relationship is in fact so close as to make it seem a fairly easy matter to derive much of Heidegger's treatment of “the historical” from Husserl's handling of the same subject matter, although—judging by the comparative paucity of commentaries on the latter—the reverse seems not to be the case. Be that as it may, a thorough understanding of this relationship will not be possible until its terms are themselves understood. Whereas Heidegger's interest in problems of history is evident in all of his published works, at least since the appearance in 1916 of his essay on “The Concept of Time in the Science of History,” Husserl's works on the subject are still largely unpublished. Nevertheless, the publication of his Collected Works has by now reached a point at which a new preliminary sketch can and-in view of the current situation of Husserl scholarship-should be attempted.

The following attempt at such a sketch is based upon the treatment of the general theme of “the historical” in the essay on “The Question of the Origin of Geometry Considered as a Problem of Intentional History” referred to above. It would be more accurate however to say that our interpretation is based upon the text published as “Appendix III, to §9a” of Transcendental Philosophy and the Crisis in the European Sciences. [1] According to Walter Biemel, the book's editor, this text, which stems from 1936, is that published by Fink in 1939. [2] This is something of an exaggeration, but it is repeated in Professor Biemel's “Critical Remarks on the Text,” where he also says that the division of the essay into paragraphs is taken over from the 1939 publication. Appendix III re-<247>produces Manuscript K 111 23 of the Husserl Archives, and this manuscript is said to have survived in Fink's typewritten transcription. [3] Actually, the division of Appendix III into paragraphs frequently differs from that of the 1939 publication. Far more important, however, are Husserl's own addenda to Fink's transcription that were not included in the 1939 publication. [4] Some of these are of great importance for understanding the meaning of the passages in which they occur. Indeed, the following interpretation of Husserl's conception of “the historical” is based very largely upon one of these addenda. [5]

The following presentation then is based upon the essay on “The Question of the Origin of Geometry” as published in the Crisis.. However, to explain the concept of “internal historicality” which is crucial for this essay, it has been necessary to refer to relevant passages in the Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (1905), [6] Books I and II of the Ideas, [7] the Analyses of Passive Synthesis (1918-1926), [8] the Formal and Transcendental Logic(1929), [9] and the Cartesian Meditations (written in 1929). [10] We shall be concerned not with Husserl's treatment of geometry as such in this essay but with what he has to say about cultural data generally and the cultural senses of things.

Every cultural datum is essentially historic. To understand any such fact is implicitly to be aware of its historicality. Every historic fact is the result of productive human activity and bears a reference to such activity as a part of its meaning or sense. What-<248>ever has such a reference is a subject for possible investigation by the historical sciences. But any artifact has this reference, its historicality, as a part of its sense prior to all historical investigation. The task of historiology is to explicate, not to create, the historicality of cultural facts in a “scientific” way. Any awareness of artifacts, even if it is an awareness of them merely as facts of experience, is a co-awareness that they are results of human activity. To experience any cultural fact whatsoever is to uncover its historical tradition. A mathematician engaging in geometry or a physicist engaged in thermodynamics is uncovering the tradition of his science even though he may have no interest in this tradition as such but engages simply in his chosen subject matter. He is nevertheless engaged in a specifically human *and historic activity that not only has its tradition and its place in history but is a constitutive element in the generating of this tradition and history. However obscure or merely implicit” the historicality of this activity and its products—geometry'. thermodynamics, or any artifact whatever*—may be, there is always an evident possibility of making it distinct, clarifying and explicating it.

In this sense then the artifact “implies” its history through its historicality or its reference to human producing. In the same sense, the entire cultural present, considered as a totality, “implies” the entire cultural past. It refers to this past obscurely but nevertheless as having or having had a determinate and explicable universal structure. Understood as a totality, the cultural present implies a continuity of past cultural presents. The continuity is that of a unitary generating of tradition. The generating of tradition occurs through productive human activity and has its universality, its unity and continuity, by virtue of the “flowingly static vivacity” (in strömend-stehender Lebendigkeit) of such activity. The possibility of a science of history, even the very project of seeking and establishing any cultural fact at all, is founded upon the universal structure of human productivity <249> whether consciously and systematically or as an unconscious presupposition. [11]

The world in which man lives, the world of his experience, is always given to his consciousness as a socio-historical world including social and cultural institutions that antedate his birth, will last—with more or less radical changes—throughout his life and will survive his death. Singly and as a whole, these institutions have their history and tradition. But the subject of their historicality, the bearer of tradition, is neither a single universal mind or spirit nor a collective consciousness; it is rather the plurality of persons who, functioning within the totality “productive personal humanity,” produce these cultural formations. The world is historical only on the grounds of the internal historicality of each of the individual persons who is socialized together with the other persons in the community—each by virtue of his internal historicality. [12]

Husserl writes that genuine historical investigation is nothing <250> else than tracing historic sense or meaning formations that are given in the present--or, more precisely, the evidences of them back to the obscured dimension of the original and first evidences (Urevidenzen) on which they are founded. [13] By evidence, Husserl usually: means consciousness of something as “giving itself” in person or directly to consciousness. Such consciousness is said to be evidence of its intentional object and, if it is experiential, its object' is -said to be given “originally.” Thus, seeing is evidence of the -seen,' hearing is evidence of the heard, using something as a tool is evidence of its utility for a given purpose, etc. Since Husserl conceives all historical and cultural senses of objects to be products of practical reason in a maximally broad sense, [14] the original and, first evidences sought by genuine historical investigation would be the acts in which these senses were formed for the first time.

We have seen that the foundation for the historicality of cultural facts and of historic and cultural tradition as a. whole is the internal historicality of the persons who are the bearers and makers of tradition. We now find that history itself is “nothing else than, the living movement of the reciprocal involvement (Miteinander und Ineinander) of original forming of sense with sedimentation of sense.” [15] We may say in advance that this movement and internal historicality are unitary, are one and the same, but we have yet to see what they are and how original formation. and sedimentation are related in them. And, to begin with, what on earth is meant by sedimentation? Sedimentation occurs through gradual transformation into memory Of an originally experiential mental process. Every impressional now-phase of my mental life and every particular process in this now-phase is experiential or original consciousness, if only because of the implicit, non-thetic self-consciousness inherent 'in every mental process. That every impressional phase <251> with the various particular processes in it gets transformed into memory means in the first place that I continue to be conscious of my past mental processes and indeed of the past phases of my current experience. This consciousness that I have now of my past Husserl calls retending or retention. The transformation that is involved in it eo ipso is simply a transformation or modalization of the manner of givenness of the retended experience from being given as being now to being given as having been. The remembered mental process passes from now to “just past to more remote past, becoming—so to speak—“paster and paster” until it may cease to stand out for me in memory at all. This does not mean that mental processes can “vanish” from memory or pass into a sphere that is “unconscious” in any literal sense of the word. [16] When it ceases to stand out for me, a past process still belongs to the memorial background of consciousness. This background accompanies every living present as its past horizon from which whatever has once been experienced can, in principle, be reactivated.

Modalization and sedimentation go hand in hand. The past experienced mental process, as an intentional process, is said to be sedimented along with its intentional objective sense in the memorial background or horizon of consciousness. As the horizon of mental processes sedimented in memory, this is the past horizon of the living present, but insofar as the sedimented mental processes are retended in the living present as repeatable, in active memory or recollection for example, they delineate a horizon of possible processes or potential processes, i.e., a future horizon that belongs to the living present as a field of possible or potential future conscious processes.

But the future horizon of mental life is obviously not just a horizon of possible recollections-even though it might be so conceived if the concept of recollection were suitably broadened.. Insofar as the sedimented mental processes are retended as <252> having been like one another, the future horizon is one of anticipated, protended, or—to borrow [17] a term from Heidegger—projected experience of these same objects or of objects like them. The sedimented or retentively intended mental processes tend to repeat themselves, a tendency without which they would remain unintelligible, isolated empirical facts and no unitary world would be possible. [18]

This means not only that the past phases of mental life are assimilated to one another and to each present or impressional phase but that, on the basis of such assimilation, future phases are protended so as to be like as can be to their past. [19] The tendency of experience to repeat itself is not a random groping. That experience repeats itself is not due merely to the conformity of “elements” of mental life to empirically discoverable regularities. That any such regularities are discoverable at all is made possible only through the conformity of the constitution of consciousness itself to eidetic laws of rational motivation. [20] These are principles of passive genesis or associative synthesis. The tendency of experience to repeat itself involves such principles of associative synthesis as identity and continuity or, still more generally, “fusion” (Verschmelzung). It is in accordance with these principles, for example, that, “other things being equal,” consciousness will intend one thing instead of a plurality of things and that, where identification fails, the members of the resulting plurality will be intended as being as like one another as possible. These principles are the most general goals motivating the essentially teleological genesis of consciousness from consciousness of what is strictly given to consciousness of a world of concrete objects. [21]

<253> In this genesis, experience or original consciousness of any object must precede all non-original consciousness of it and all non-original consciousness of objects of the same fundamental kind. There can be no non-original modes of consciousness of objects of a particular kind unless there has already been a consciousness of an object of this kind as given in its original mode. Consciousness of an object as being given in its most original experiential mode is therefore called the originating or the primally instituting consciousness; all non-original ways of intending objects of this kind point back to this primally instituting consciousness. [22]

Only because I have once both seen and handled something, correlating outstandingnesses in my visual and tactual fields, can I see “things” that have tactual properties and feel “things” that have visual properties. But once I have established or instituted such a correlation, there will be an automatic tendency to see everything as touchable and vice versa. This is even much more than a tendency. Since everything given in experience necessarily enters into associative synthesis with sedimented experience, unity and continuity being the implicit “telic sense” of such synthesis, the experience of any outstandingness in my visual field will necessarily motivate the apperception of this outstandingness as the visual appearance of “something” that is also tangible. [23] Here the “something” is said to be presented through its visual “appearance”; its tactual properties however are not themselves presented, or experienced, but are intended in a non-original way; they are said to be appresented, and in this case they are appresented as objects of a possible tactual experience.

In the same way, once an infant has learned to control his voice and thus to utter sounds at will, he will be motivated necessarily to apperceive similar sounds as the result of a willing not his own. These heard sounds then are necessarily apperceived as “expressive,” as effects of a willing in this case. Here, the child <254> is conscious of the appresented willing which is not his own, and is conscious of it not as presenting itself directly to his consciousness but in a non-original way. This non-original consciousness of a willing that is not the child's own necessarily points back to some original consciousness of a willing, viz., the child's consciousness of his own willing.

This is an instance of what Husserl calls empathic apperception or simply empathy, which he holds to be the manner in which we are conscious of other subjects and their mental processes. Empathic apperception of another ego as a psycho-physical being involves a non-original consciousness of mental processes of this other ego; this non-original apperceptive consciousness always points back to an original consciousness of something of the same kind. In our child's case, this was his original consciousness of a willing of his own; and indeed original, experiential consciousness of mental processes is possible only as original consciousness of one's own mental processes. So far as the possibility of empathy is concerned, however, that my original consciousness of mental processes is consciousness of my own mental processes is totally irrelevant. In every instance, it is enough that they be of the same kind as the mental processes which I empathically apperceive.

This is a point which Husserl himself does not always make with sufficient clarity or emphasis. Indeed, he sometimes seems to obscure the point by speaking repeatedly of the apperceived egos of others as “variants” or “modifications” of my own. [24] Thus, Husserl sometimes seems to hold that, since empathy is founded on an original consciousness of my own mental processes, the mental processes I attribute through empathy to others are essentially my own and in no sense other than my own. Husserl, however, does not in fact hold this view; and his conceptions of <255> primal instituting, modalization, sedimentation and of the apperception which they make possible and necessary do not require that he do so.

As a matter of fact, Husserl makes quite clear that the appresented ego is indeed other, is an ego “that I myself am not.” Indeed, he goes so far as to say that my self receives the character of being 'my' self only through the pairing that takes place necessarily between the appresented Other and myself. [25]

What we have said of Husserl's conception of the apperception involved in empathy is true also of apperception in general. It is by no means necessary that the appresented refer to some possible original mode of givenness of the appresented itself for the ap-perceiving subject. Original consciousness—be it actual or possible—of what is appresented as such is neither an essential feature of nor a condition for the possibility of apperception. Apperception need not have the “character of redeemableness” which Fink insists [26] that it have: it need not indicate a possible way of bringing the appresented to original givenness. So far as empathy is concerned, it is enough that the appresented mental processes of others point back to an original consciousness of something that is like them in kind. That I can experience the particular mental process appresented in empathy only through empathy and never in any more original mode of givenness is irrelevant so far as empathy is concerned. [27]

This seems to be Husserl's actual view, however obscurely he may have formulated it. In the second appendix to the Formal and Transcendental Logic, he writes that the primally instituting experience generates experience of a certain type, of a certain category of things. Primal instituting thus has an effect:

in <256> virtue of which anything present in a new but similar situation will be apperceived in a similar way. Thus, on the grounds of antecedent givenness of similar objects and similar determinations in similar situations, there becomes possible a consciousness of objects that themselves were never before objects of consciousness or a consciousness of objects as having determinations of which there has never been consciousness before.” [28]

Needless to say, the sounds that the child apperceives through empathy as expressing a willing that is not his own are also implicitly apperceived as sounds heard by “someone else.” Implicitly, every empathic apperception is consciousness of another's mental life as being like my own. Empathy implicitly attributes to others all of the sedimented qualities and determinations of the empathizing mental life even though this attribution will not be confirmed in all cases. This in turn implies that everything that I experience henceforth will be apperceived as being experienced or at least experienceable by others. It is on the basis of empathy therefore that an objective world, a world that is the “same” for all subjects, becomes constituted for consciousness.

Our child now has other subjects in his world, but he is still far from experiencing a historical, cultural, and therefore human world. In this sense, consciousness becomes socialized before it becomes humanized, or civilized. Obviously, the child gets to be civilized through his early childhood “training.” But, on the other hand, animals can be trained and are. A house pet is frequently a remarkably civilized brute. The child does not become human until he begins to realize reflectively that he is being trained or civilized. He becomes human when he begins to be aware that the others who speak to him soothingly or harshly, who supply his needs, praise and punish him are forming his life. On the basis of this reflective awareness of his own life as “having been formed,” or as an “artifact” in a very extended sense of the word, he now apperceives the others who have been <257> training him (usually his parents in our culture) as having undergone the same kind of training. With this apperception, the socialized world becomes at once both human and historiocultural. Now the realization that the grownups-in the first instance the child's parents or trainers but in principle all persons -were once children themselves becomes possible and along with it the realization that the agents of their training, the ones who did it to them, were-again within our culture-grandpa and grandma. Only through the experience of himself as the subject of a process of civilization does the child become not only “social” but human. On the basis of this experience, the child apperceives the other subjects in his surrounding world as persons who have been children once and have been subjected to the same process of civilization as himself. Only with this experience and apperception does the intersubjective world become a human, historic and cultural world. The world now becomes constituted for consciousness as a world for a community of persons who have a unitary and continuous history. To begin with, this history will be constituted for the child as a series of generations extending indefinitely into the past-but always as a process of civilization whose subjects have become bearers of tradition in exactly the same way as the child himself. To begin with, the child will necessarily attribute to every generation the same training that he himself has undergone; he will have to learn that it has not always been exactly the same.

We might add that on the basis of the apperception of his parents and grandparents as having been children like himself, there will then be a tendency for him to apperceive his own projected personal future as historic, as a future in which he will grow older as his parents and grandparents have-once he has learned to regard his parents as “older than” himself and his grandparents in turn as “older still.” This tendency will conflict with the child's “natural” tendency to project for himself a future that is as nearly as possible the same as his present and past.

<258> This entire sequence of stages in the constitution of consciousness, and therefore in the constitution of the objective world as it is for consciousness, results necessarily from the “tendency” of sedimented experience to be repeated in new experience. That is to say: the entire sequence of apperceptions is motivated necessarily through the interaction of original experience with sedimented experience. Such interaction occurs by means of passive, associative synthesis among the temporal phases of internal time. [29] It is only because of this interaction that

life goes on as a motivated course of particular constitutive performances with a multiplicity of particular motivations and motivational systems, which, according to universal laws of genesis, produce a unity of universal genesis of the ego. The ego constitutes himself in, so to speak, the unity of a “history.” [30]

These laws are a genetic or historical a priori governing the genesis for consciousness of whatever has become or is becoming. [31]Therefore, they are also, as I hope the above presentation has shown, the laws governing the genesis or traducing (tradieren) of history. According to Husserl, "The way of Being of the one humanity corresponds in essence to that of the one cultural world and is the way of Being that is current in every historical time and every historical humanity: tradition." [32]

Any historiology that seeks to ascertain the facts of history “as it actually was” presupposes therefore this one humanity and its way of Being and it will utterly fail to understand its “data” if it seeks only to collect and draw conclusions from them without uncovering in them this way of Being. Genuinely scientific understanding of historic facts is made possible only by uncovering the essentially universal structure of present, past, and future <259> historic presents and of concrete historic time-the time of these historic presents as a totality. [33]

Husserl conceives his phenomenology to be a radicalization of the kind of uncovering he believes fundamental to all of the historical or human sciences. By asking back, beyond the original formative activities through which the cultural senses of objects become constituted, to the original mode of consciousness of the objective things that serve as material for these activities, and then on further to ever lower things-ultimately to the constitution for consciousness of the flux of consciousness itself-the phenomenologist uncovers the ways of Being of each fundamental kind of Being. And he does so by uncovering and explicating the “origin” and “genesis” of his conscious life.

NOTES

[1]Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Philosophie, Walter Biernel, ed., Vol. VI of Husserliana (Husserl's Collected Works) (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1954), pp. 365-386. The book will be cited hereafter as Kr. <SUBSEQUENT NOTE: An English translation of the book was published in 1970 with the misleading title, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press): misleading since the nominative case of “die transzendentale Philosophie” makes clear that it is conjoined with “die Krisis” and not with “der europäische Wissenschaften” whereas the English translation suggests an interpretation which would declare Husserl’s transcendental philosophy to be in crisis along with the positive European sciences. That latter reading has been fairly widespread in the English speaking world ever since phenomenology was introduced there in the mid twentieth century by French thinkers who seem to have preferred Hegel’s dialectical speculations about masters and slaves over Husserl’s transcendental philosophy.>

[2]Ibid., p. 365.

[3]Ibid., p. 551.

[4]Ibid., pp. 551ff.

[5]See footnote 12 below.

[6]Republished in Vol. X of Husserliana (1966).

[7]Husserliana, Vols. III (1950) and IV (1952). Hereafter cited as Id. I and d. II, respectively.

[8]Husserliana, Vol. XI (1966). Hereafter cited as PS.

[9]Formale und transzendentale Logik (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1929). Hereafter cited as FTL.

[10]Husserliana, Vol. I (1950). Hereafter cited as CM.

[11]Kr., pp. 379f.

[12]Kr., pp. 380, line 43-381, line 5 and 381 n. 1. Neither this passage nor the footnote to it are given in the publication of 1939. In his "Textkritische Anmerkungen," Biemel notes that the footnote is one of Husserl's addenda to Fink's transcription (Kr., p. 552.) This addendum, which we have taken as our clue to Husserl's conception of "the historical" reads somewhat as follows: "Obviously, the historic world is given antecedaneously (vorgegeben) as socio-historical world to begin with. Yet it is historical only by virtue of the internal historicality of each individual person who, as individual, is communized together with other persons through his individual historicality. Think of what we have said in a few inadequate initial expositions of memory and the unvarying historicality inherent in it."

Had this passage and its addendum appeared in the 1939 publication, some of the criticism of Husserl's notion of "personal unities of a higher order" might have been avoided or at least otherwise formulated. See, for example, A. Schutz, Collected Papers III,, I. Schutz, ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), p. 73, and Quentin Lauer, The Triumph of Subjectivity (New York: Fordham University Press, 1958), p. 162, n. 26.

Instead, the following sentence appears to have been substituted for both passage and addendum: "Even to be developed as inquiry, inquiry into the origin of geometry must be guided by a knowledge of the principal structures such as 'primal instituting', 'primal evidence', 'primal matter', 'sedimentation', 'reactivation.’” (Op. cit., p. 221.)

[13]Kr., p. 380

[14]CM., § 38.

[15]Kr., p. 380.

[16]FTL, p. 280; PS, pp. 165-172.

[17]To speak of borrowing here is actually to split a terminological hair. The verb entwerfen in Heidegger's works is usually translated by "to project." Husserl has used the verb projizieren to designate the same phenomenon. See PS, p. 186.

[18]CM, § 27.

[19]PS., p. 186.

[20]Id. II, p. 223; CM, p. 114.

[21]PS, pp. 130, 151, 159 f., 185, 407 ff., 412 ff.

[22]FTL., p. 279.

[23]Id. II, p. 226.

[24]As in CM. §§ 41 and 52. This obscurity gives rise to many of the criticisms of Husserl's conception of empathy in Alfred Schutz's essay on "The Problem of Transcendental Intersubjectivity in Husserl" in Collected Papers III, Studies in Phenomenological Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), pp. 67 ff. and 71 f.

[25]CM., pp. 144 f.; compare Id. II,, p. 167. See also Hermann Zeltner, "Das Ich und die Andern: Husserls Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Sozialphilosophie" in Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung XIII, 2 (Meisenheim/Glan, 1959), p. 299.

[26]As quoted in the "Discussion" following the essay by A. Schutz cited above.

[27]CM., p. 148.

[28]FTL., p. 279; see also CM., p. 141.

[29]CM., § 36.

[30]CM., p. 109; see also PS., p. 219. The English translation is that of Dorion Cairns, Cartesian Meditations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).

[31]Kr., p. 380.

[32][Ibid., p. 378.

[33]Ibid., p 380.