Edmund Husserl
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 163rd anniversary of the birth of Edmund Husserl (08 April 1859–27 April 1938), who was born on this date in 1859.
Husserl is primarily remembered as the founder of phenomenology, and he began his academic career as a mathematician. His early philosophical work focused on the the philosophy of logic and mathematics (he was among the correspondents of Frege, and Frege’s criticism of Husserl’s psychologism may have been a turning point that led to the foundation of phenomenology, which is explicitly anti-psychologistic), but in his later life Husserl turned to problems of the philosophy of history, which he had only touched upon in his earlier life.
Husserl gave a talk now known as the Vienna Lecture (May 1935), and prepared another for Prague that was not delivered. These two talks became the basis of a longer text posthumously published, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Husserl in this work was both concerned with a re-founding of science on a radical philosophical basis, including the detailed inquiries into the origins of knowledge that such a task would require, as well as being concerned with the highest aspirations of the human spirit. This dual concern with foundational radicalism and spiritual edification comes across throughout the book:
“The whole history of philosophy since the appearance of ‘epistemology’ and the serious attempts at a transcendental philosophy is a history of tremendous tensions between objectivistic and transcendental philosophy. It is a history of constant attempts to maintain objectivism and to develop it in a new form and, on the other side, of attempts by transcendentalism to overcome the difficulties entailed by the idea of transcendental subjectivity and the method it requires. The clarification of the origin of this internal split in the philosophical development, the analysis of the ultimate motives for this most radical transformation of the idea of philosophy, is of the utmost importance. It affords the first insight into the thoroughgoing meaning fullness which unifies the whole movement of philosophical history in the modern period: a unity of purpose binding generations of philosophers together, and through this a direction for all the efforts of individual subjects and schools. It is a direction, as I shall try to show here, toward a final form of transcendental philosophy — as phenomenology. This also contains, as a suspended moment, the final form of psychology which uproots the naturalistic sense of modern psychology.” (Crisis, section 14)
Several of the appendices to the Crisis have become better known than the text of the book, and many of these appendices are imbued with the same spirit of coming to terms with the historicity of knowledge:
“There is no doubt, then, that we must engross ourselves in historical considerations if we are to be able to understand ourselves as philosophers and understand what philosophy is to become through us. It is no longer sufficient to grasp, in the midst of the naive pressure of life and activity, so to speak, though out of the existential depths of personality, at certain working problems we have run up against in our naïve development, to treat of them with our working partners, with those who, in the same course of a living tradition, have run up against the same problems. This suffices no longer in the dangerous situation in which today’s philosophy knows itself to be — must know, must admit to itself, in order to secure a future threatened by the suggestive force of the ‘spirit of the time.’ To the philosopher and to a generation of philosophers, acting responsibly in a human and cultural space, there accrue, also deriving from this cultural space, responsibilities and corresponding actions. It is the same here as it is generally for men in times of danger. For the sake of the life-task that has been taken up, in times of danger one must first let these very tasks alone and do what will make a normal life possible again in the future. The effect will generally be such that the total life-situation, and with it the original life-tasks, has been changed or in the end has even become fully without an object. Thus reflection is required in every sense in order to right ourselves. The historical reflection we have in mind here concerns our existence as philosophers and, correlatively, the existence of philosophy, which, for its part, is through our philosophical existence.”
For analytical philosophers Husserl’s idiom is a strange one — so strange that even when Husserl makes his position explicit (as in his rejection of psychologism), one finds arguments that Husserl, after having condemned psychologism and subjectivism, fell victim to them in his later transcendental idealism. The root cause of the incomprehension of Husserl’s thought, more often than not, is that Husserl explicitly rejects naturalism, and accordingly his conception of science is not the natural science that we have come to accept since the scientific revolution. Indeed, this is one of the central themes of the Crisis: how our conception of science has been shaped since Galileo. For the later Husserl, science as we know it today is a mistake, and we need to go back to the foundations of science and start anew.
As strange as this sounds, idealism in the philosophy of history is not at all new to us: Collingwood’s philosophy is a species of idealism, and his philosophy of history is founded on his idealism; all the philosophers of history that have subsequently been influenced by Collingwood incorporate some of Collingwood’s idealistic presuppositions to a greater or lesser extent. That being said, Husserl’s non-naturalism is not the same as Collingwood’s idealism, and, accordingly, their philosophies of history different quite profoundly.
Nevertheless, Husserl’s later thought, including his philosophy of history, has come to be influential in its own way. Recently I wrote about the work of Ludwig Landgrebe, an assistant of Husserl’s who wrote extensively on the philosophy of history. Others have also pursued this avenue. David Carr has worked on a phenomenological philosophy of history given exposition in several volumes. 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. 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.” (pp. 57–58)
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 the distinction between analytical philosophy of history, which analyzes historical knowledge and how we construct it, and speculative philosophy of history, which seeks principles and patterns in history. 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.
Further Resources
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Husserl
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Husserl
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Edmund_Husserl
