David Carr on Phenomenological Philosophy of History and the Historical Reduction
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Friday 28 June 2024 is, to the best of my knowledge, the 84th birthday of David Carr, who was born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1940, and who, again to the best of my knowledge, is still alive, making him an exception among most of the figures I have covered in these episodes.
In 1974, Carr published Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy, and then 40 years later he returned to philosophy of history with Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World published in 2014. Of course, he wrote other books in the intervening years, and many papers on philosophy of history, but these two books offer a detailed presentation of his philosophy of history spanning almost half a century, and I will focus on them.
In my episode on Ludwig Landgrebe, I said that once a contemporary philosopher of history gets past his ritual renunciation of Hegel, which usual also takes other speculative philosophers of history such as Vico, Spengler, and Toynbee in its train, the next step is crucial, since we then learn the alternative path they will take. I mention Landgrebe in this connection because Landgrebe’s next step after distancing himself from Hegel was to pursue a phenomenological philosophy of history. Like Ludwig Landgrebe, Carr is a phenomenologist. Here is a brief sketch of how Carr understands a phenomenological philosophy of history:
“Rather than asking: What is history? Or: How do we know history? a phenomenology of history inquires into history as a phenomenon, and into the experience of the historical. How does history present itself to us, how does it enter our lives, and what are the forms of experience in which it does so?” (Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World, p. 1)
While both Landgrebe and Carr formulate phenomenological philosophies of history, their approaches are not identical, since they emphasize different aspects of the phenomenological program even while there remains an underlying unity in virtue of which we can call both phenomenologists. Landgrebe was much influenced by Heidegger, while Carr stayed much closer to Husserl. Also, Landgrebe places greater emphasis upon freedom from presuppositions, whereas Carr places greater emphasis on the phenomenological reductions.
So what are the phenomenological reductions? This is a question that even those who have devoted their entire careers to studying phenomenology do not agree upon. There is disagreement among phenomenologists among how many reductions there are, what the significance is of each reduction, and how each relates to the others. Of the reductions Richard Schmitt wrote:
“Phenomenology, according to [Husserl], can begin only after the ‘transcendental-phenomenological reduction’ has been performed by the beginning phenomenologist. Descriptions not preceded by this ‘reduction’ are not phenomenological. Anyone who wants to understand the claims made by Husserl for his ‘Transcendental Phenomenology’ and, even more, anyone who wants to employ the phenomenological method must first understand and practice the transcendental-phenomenological reduction. But such understanding is difficult to achieve; Husserl’s own descriptions are quite perplexing and the commentators differ widely in their interpretations of these descriptions.”
And here is what Izchak Miller wrote about the reductions:
“The phenomenological reduction is described by Husserl, in part, as a methodological procedure the carrying out of which is a necessary condition for gaining phenomenological knowledge, or for doing phenomenology. As there is disagreement among phenomenologists about the nature and role of the noema in Husserl’s theory, so there is a not unrelated disagreement among them about the nature and significance of the phenomenological reduction.”
Miller adds the following in a footnote to the above:
“In fact, Husserl delineates not one but a number of phenomenological reductions. It is clear, however, that one of them is the ‘basic’ reduction, in terms of which the other phenomenological reductions are defined.”
Immediately after writing this, Miller tells us why Aron Gruwitsch was wrong in his exposition of the reductions, illustrating differences in the interpretations of the reductions. So who you read about phenomenology is going to shape your impression about what’s going on. Someone could easily write a book, or a series of books, about expositions and interpretations of the phenomenological reductions, and I’m not going to do that.
Here’s my version, admittedly too brief to be accurate, but only intended to give a rough and ready sense of what’s going on. Ordinary experience begins in what Husserl called the natural attitude. The natural attitude involves naïve beliefs about the ordinary world and all the things that populate the ordinary world. For example, we believe that the world exists. We believe that the objects that populate the world exist. To do phenomenology it is necessary to suspend the natural attitude. This suspension is also called bracketing, since the idea is to put our ordinary beliefs in brackets and set them to one side, so that we can pay attention to what manifests itself to consciousness without preconceptions. We see, then, that there is an integral relationship between the reductions and freedom from presuppositions.
There are historical antecedents to the phenomenological reduction, especially in Pyrrhonism, which was the most radically skeptical movement in ancient philosophy. In fact, Husserl used the Greek term from ancient Pyrrhoninsm, epokhḗ (ἐποχή), to describe part of the phenomenological reduction. I should say that this term is pronounced in any number of ways, and that, in transliterating the Greek into a Latin script, the final “e” is sometimes rendered with a macron (ē), sometimes with an accent ague (é), and sometimes with both (ḗ). In this way, the confusion over pronunciation is justified. These kinds of little details can be confusing if you haven’t previously encountered them, so I mention it here, though it’s not relevant to the ideas with which we are concerned.
In any case, there is a sequence of steps involved in the phenomenological reduction that are intended to make us aware of what we are actually experiencing, and not what we think we are experiencing. To add to the complexity and confusion, and the reason I am discussing the phenomenological reductions, is that Carr posited an historical reduction in his earlier book, modeled after the phenomenological reduction, but distinct from it, even more systematic and more universal than the phenomenological reductions:
“Just as the phenomenological epoché is explicitly practiced in the form of a method called phenomenological reduction, so the philosophical epoché must be systematized and universalized to become a philosophical reduction, or what might better be called a historical reduction.” (Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy, p. 117)
Here is a little more from later in the book:
“[The philosophy] is heir to an intellectual tradition, and it is his intellect that is shaped by his historical situation. He inherits certain ways of thinking about the world, and these keep him from attending to and simply seeing the world as it really is. The objectivist tradition, according to this view, never was a way of seeing the world; it was only a conceptual framework for interpreting the world that is seen for purposes of scientific inquiry. The historical reduction, by making us aware of the interpretative and conceptual character of objectivism, has the same function the phenomenological reduction was always meant to have: it returns us to a position of pure seeing. The emphasis on seeing in phenomenology was never as simple as some critics have made out: it never amounted to the claim that we only need to look in order to see. The rigors and dangers of the phenomenological reduction, as described with great emphasis by Husserl, attest to this: it takes great effort to get ourselves into the position where we can see at all. Now the historical reduction, as we have seen, adds to that effort: In order to arrive at this position, it is not only the prejudices of the natural attitude that have to be overcome, but those of the historical situation as well. But the implication is that this position can, at least in principle, be attained. Having overcome the prejudices of modern objectivism, including its hitherto unrecognized effect on transcendental philosophy, Husserl had at last arrived at the lifeworld, and life-world — consciousness, as the realm to be described.” (Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy, p. 241)
Since much of the book is an exposition of what Carr calls the historical reduction I can’t reproduce the exposition without going through the whole book. But Carr’s work is much more comprehensive than the idea of the historical reduction. Both of Carr’s books I mentioned are laser-focused on formulating a phenomenological philosophy of history, though even with this focus the books are different. Carr’s Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl’s Transcendental Philosophy (1974) is a careful reading of history in the light of Husserl’s philosophy, and is “technical” in a phenomenological sense of employing many of Husserl’s locutions not well known outside phenomenology. Carr’s Historical Experience: Essays on the Phenomenology of History (2021) is a much more widely ranging book, drawing on many sources beyond Husserl and engaging with non-phenomenological philosophies of history. This engagement sometimes presents problems.
Carr says that a phenomenology of history (or, if you prefer, a phenomenological philosophy of history) does not address traditional problems in the philosophy of history, and we certainly see this in Husserl’s later work concerned with the history. Husserl does not attempt to engage with the tradition — whether the tradition of history, historiography, or philosophy of history — and he does not recur to familiar themes like historical objectivity or historical explanation, nor with contemporaries like Collingwood or Hempel, and so on. This is a bit disorienting at first, as the philosopher of history may come away from phenomenology of history with a sense that none of his questions have been addressed, but it is also valuable to have a fresh perspective on history that cannot be had through coming at the same questions from the same presuppositions.
In the following passage Carr draws upon Dilthey in the exposition of his phenomenological philosophy of history:
“We exist historically by virtue of our participation in communities that predate and outlive our individual lives. Through the We-relation, historical reality enters directly into our lived experience and becomes part of our identity. Our membership gives us access to a past, a tradition, and a temporal span that is not so much something we know about as something that is part of us. This is the primary sense in which we are, in Dilthey’s sense, historical beings before we are observers of history; this is the sense in which we are ‘intertwined’ with history. This phenomenology of history does not address itself directly to the traditional questions of the philosophy of history, questions of what history is in itself and of how we know it, though it can cast some indirect light on these questions. But it does address the question of why we should be interested in the past at all.” (Historical Experience: Essays on the Phenomenology of History, pp. 57–58)
In this case the engagement with a non-phenomenological conception of history comes more naturally as Husserl and Dilthey knew of each other’s work. In my episode on Husserl I didn’t discuss Husserl’s very public criticism of Dilthey, decrying Dilthey’s thought as a form of historicism, in his “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” also translated as “Philosophy as Strict Science,” which was published in 1911 in Logos, a decade after this Logical Investigations and a few years before Ideas I. Carr, moreover, discusses phenomenology in relation to historicism in both his earlier and his later book.
As I have said in many episodes, everyone has their own definition of historicism, so it shouldn’t be surprising that the historicism of which Husserl accuses Dilthey is not the historicism of Popper in The Poverty of Historicism or the historicism of Georg Iggers in The German Conception of History, or, for that matter, the historicism defined by Hans Meyerhoff in his Philosophy of History in Our Time. Interestingly, after Husserl’s “Philosophy as Rigorous Science” appeared, he had an exchange of letters with Dilthey in which they seemed to reach some kind of understanding that doesn’t appear in the published works of either one. It would be a worthwhile project, from the point of view of philosophy of history, to do a close reading of Husserl’s criticism of what he calls Dilthey’s historicism, then of their exchange of letters, and then Carr’s discussion of Husserl on historicism. I’m not going to attempt that at the moment, as this would be a major project and I’m only hitting a few highlights today. It would also be worthwhile to do a separate episode, or a series of episodes, on phenomenological philosophies of history, which would not only feature Husserl, Ludwig Landgrebe, and David Carr, but also Fritz Kaufmann, Larry Shiner, and Mark Blum, among others.
Neither of the two go-to introductory guides for Anglophone philosophy of history — W. H. Walsh’s Philosophy of History: An Introduction and William H. Dray’s Philosophy of History — mention Husserl and phenomenology even once, so that someone coming to philosophy of history from this point of entry might be forgiven for not even being aware that there is such a thing as phenomenological philosophy of history. But these books are still relevant to us in the present context. In several episodes I have mentioned the distinction between critical and speculative philosophy of history, as the distinction was called by W. H. Walsh. Walsh traces this distinction between approaches to philosophy of history to the distinction between the senses given to history itself, which can mean, “the totality of past human actions” or “the narrative or account we construct of them now,” and speculative philosophy of history corresponds to the philosophical analysis of the totality of past human actions and critical philosophy of history corresponds to the philosophical analysis of the narrative or account we construct of them now.
William Dray uses the same distinction and the same terminology as Walsh; Maurice Mandelbaum called this the distinction between material and formal philosophy of history; Arthur Danto called this the distinction between substantive and analytical philosophy of history. Danto further argues that substantive philosophy of history is not a legitimate form of philosophical inquiry, as it constitutes a parallel to what he considers to be the discredited nature philosophy of the 19th century such as we find in Schelling. For Danto, substantive philosophy of history is to history as nature philosophy is to nature, and we all know that nature philosophy slipped into oblivion and was superseded by analytical philosophy of science. By comparing history to nature in this way Danto manages to avoid what I consider to be the obvious comparison, which is comparing history to the other special sciences like chemistry, geology, biology, and so on. When we do this, we find that in each and every case we can make a distinction analogous to the distinction between two senses of history made by Walsh.
There are, for example, two senses of chemistry: there are actual chemical processes and reactions, and there is our body of knowledge of chemical processes and reactions — the account or the discipline that concern itself with the totality of chemical processes. The same can be said analogously of geology or biology. Partly this is a trick of the English language, and I would be interested to know how well this distinction and its analogies work in other languages. There are other instances in which the analogy seems to fail in English. For example, it would be awkward, though not impossible, to make a distinction within anthropology between the totality of the history of human beings and the totality of knowledge of this history.
Carr formulates a different account of this distinction that I think is helpful:
“According to the traditional classification, philosophy has approached history with metaphysical and epistemological questions. It has asked: What is history? and How do we know history? It is not as if these two approaches stood side by side, however, as separate but mutually respectful branches of the same discipline. Instead they represent a historical sequence and a battleground of dispute. From its high point in the early 19th century (Hegel), the metaphysics of history gradually fell into disrepute. By the mid-20th century the criticism had grown intense; and it was not its results, but its very questions, that were under attack. This philosophy of history was debunked, from different points of view, by such widely diverse thinkers as Karl Löwith, Karl Popper, Arthur Danto, and Jean-François Lyotard. We turn to these attacks in more detail in Chapter IV. The epistemology of history, by contrast, which had already begun in the late 19th century, grew in respectability by the middle years of the 20th.” (Historical Experience: Essays on the Phenomenology of History, p. 74)
Carr makes of this distinction a philosophical distinction between metaphysics and epistemology. Speculative philosophies of history engage with the metaphysics of history, asking what history is, while critical philosophers of history engage the epistemology of history, asking how we know what we know about history. This framework allows us to further elaborate Carr’s distinction, and we could on this basis posit other forms of philosophy of history based on the other branches of philosophy. So, for example, there could be an axiological philosophy of history that engages with the ethics and the aesthetics of history, and a logical philosophy of history that engages with the logic of history. It is relevant in the present context that this well-knowledge distinction widely employed in Anglo-American philosophy has no place for phenomenological philosophies of history.
Carr implies this too. I earlier quoted Carr as saying that, “Rather than asking: What is history? Or: How do we know history? a phenomenology of history inquires into history as a phenomenon…” The two questions that Carr asks here are the metaphysical question — What is history? — and the epistemological question — How do we know history? — and he says that a phenomenology of history isn’t trying to answer either of these questions. By placing a phenomenological philosophy of history in this larger context of traditional philosophical questions, he is placing philosophy of history in a more comprehensive framework than the distinction between critical and speculative philosophy of history. So while on the one hand we can think of Carr’s work as narrowly phenomenological, and therefore a specialized interest with limited appeal, on the other hand we can see Carr’s work as much more comprehensive that philosophy of history has been to date. And I think we need to supplement philosophy of history with the phenomenological perspective, as it connects to other philosophies of history in ways that can broaden our understanding of different approaches.
For example, phenomenological philosophy of history is antithetical to the linguistic transcendentalism that I mentioned in relationship to Paul Veyne and Frank Ankersmit, since linguistic transcendentalism in its strong form (as found in Rorty) denies that there is any experience apart from language. In linguistic transcendentalism, language goes all the way up and all the way down. Phenomenology, on the other hand, is precisely the search for pre-linguistic, pre-predicative experience, which according to linguistic transcendentalism does not exist. If you take issue with linguistic transcendentalism, phenomenology can be one source for conceptualizing an alternative. And the phenomenon of history that phenomenological philosophy of history seeks resembles what Frank Ankersmit calls sublime historical experience, so here we see a relationship between phenomenology and another alternative to linguistic transcendentalism.
As I mentioned, neither Walsh nor Dray even mention the possibility of phenomenological philosophy of history. In their defense, phenomenological philosophical of history is very recent. We could say that it is less than century old if we trace its origins to Husserl’s Krisis, though of course there are historical antecedents to the tradition. Constructing a history for phenomenological philosophy of history ex post facto might draw in the ancient Pyrrhonists, already mentioned in relation to the epoché, Descartes, Kant, Fichte, and of course the German neo-Kantianism which was the context of Husserl’s own philosophical development. With phenomenological philosophy of history still being so early in its development, there remains much to do in this tradition.
