Ludwig Landgrebe
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Today is the 121st anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Landgrebe (09 March 1902, Vienna — 14 August 1991), who was born on this date in 1902.
In last year’s post on Landgrebe I noted that Landgrebe oriented himself in the philosophy of history by rejecting speculative (implicitly, Hegelian) philosophies of history — a philosophy that asks “whether a general law can be observed or established in these historical movements” — but his alternative was not the familiar analytical philosophy of history, but rather a phenomenological approach to historical knowledge. In his paper “The Life-world and the Historicity of Human Existence,” Landgrebe takes a distinctively phenomenological perspective in asking about the presuppositions of history:
“The being of the world is presupposed as a steady becoming, in which nothing is fixed. But this presupposition likewise presupposes a history of this world in which the becoming of ‘humanity’ is only a short and ‘late’ moment in a great cosmic becoming. Thus it presupposes that ‘there is’ such a history which encompasses this short moment.”
Landgrebe interestingly suggests that the presuppositions of history imply a conception of history not unlike that of big history:
“But where and how ‘is’ there such a larger history, and how can we be justified in speaking of it? ‘History’ is only there for those who themselves stand within it and who remember what happened earlier in their lives, or who can be taught about still earlier times through some sort of tradition. One can even theoretically reconstruct, as cosmic history, much earlier times before the beginning of mankind. In view of this, natural understanding will say: this cosmic occurrence of nature is both earlier and older than man. In the immeasurable time of nature, man is only a passing shadow.”
Today this is a conventionally scientific view of time and history that we might call Copernican. This is interesting in several respects, partly because Husserl seems to have rejected this quasi-scientific view of history for something more like Collingwoodian idealism in history (though even this is a stretch, as Husserl’s phenomenological perspective often took him on paths that diverged from conventional distinctions within philosophy). Partly also because where Landgrebe writes “‘History’ is only there for those who themselves stand within it and who remember what happened earlier in their lives,” I was immediately reminded of a passage from Husserl, Ideas I, § 28, in which Husserl wrote: “The arithmetical world is there for me only if, and as long as, I am in the arithmetical attitude.” (The 1950 German text of this passage is considerably altered to reflect Husserl’s later marginalia.)
Whether or not Landgrebe was implying a parallel between his conception of history and Husserl’s conception of the arithmetical world, we can see a consist phenomenological perspective at work in Landgrebe’s conception of history. The later version of this Husserl text is an elaboration of the earlier idea: “The arithmetical world is there for me only when I have studied arithmetic, when I have systematically formed arithmetical ideas, when I have looked into it and thereby acquired something permanent with a universal horizon.” All of this can be stated, mutatis mutandis, for history: the historical world is there for me only when I have studied history, when I have systematically formed historical ideas, when I have lookinto history and thereby acquired something permanent with a universal horizon. This is close to the spirit of what Landgrebe wrote in the above quote.
Much of Landgrebe’s “The Life-world and the Historicity of Human Existence” is an exposition of Husserl’s last work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. In a review of Landgrebe’s The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, Richard T. Murphy writes:
“What strikes Landgrebe about the Crisis is its unique interweaving of historical and systematic investigations. By this time Husserl had become more fully aware that the life-world as ultimate horizon is historical. This introduction of history and historicity raises the specter of historical relativism. In an ongoing dialogue with Husserl Landgrebe boldly meets this challenge Genetic constitutional analysis of the deepest levels of self-experience by the reflecting ego reveals the a priori temporal self-constitution of the ego and its historical world-horizon. The a priori of history is ‘the concept of an invariant style of life-world existence.’ This life-style is that teleological movement of transcendental life which marks the free praxis of the ego. This solution to the problem of history and historicity Husserl could not envision because of his ‘archaeological,’ re-presentifying theory that sought to establish phenomenology as the ultimate foundational science rooted in the apodictic evidence of the cogito. Landgrebe has shown convincingly that the transcendental-genetic reduction must rather be dynamic and teleological. It must strive to reveal the deepest levels of the a priori temporal self-constitution of the historical ego and its life-world in the dynamic, telelogically praxis of the ‘ethical ego’.”
Murphy quotes Landgrebe in the above as saying, “The a priori of history is ‘the concept of an invariant style of life-world existence’.” Here is the passage from The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays in which Landgrebe makes this claim:
“Contained in the primitive evidence of the self-experience of transcendental subjectivity is not only the awareness of the facticity of itself as Heraclitean flux but also the evidence of not being anything other than the condition of the possibility of having a world as historical world, so that ‘every establishment of a historical fact which lays claim to unconditioned objectivity likewise presupposes this invariant or absolute a priori.’ With this insight we stand, as Husserl said, before ‘the great and profound problem-horizon of reason, the same reason that functions in every man, the animal rationale, no matter how primitive he is.’ This means that facticity of each type has ‘a root in the essential structure of what is generally human, through which a teleological reason running throughout all historicity announces itself.’ This a priori of history is different from the objective, logical a priori which is itself historically generated, taken from the projects and tasks of natural life. The a priori of history, to make the contrast clear, is the concept of an invariant style of life-world existence. It does rest upon induction. But the propositions about this a priori are not to be taken as probable but rather as essential propositions of unconditional universality.”
This passage demonstrates the limits of Landgrebe’s implied realism from the earlier passage in which he said that, “In the immeasurable time of nature, man is only a passing shadow.” The next step beyond the idea of an invariant style of life-world existence would be to recognize that, as a passing shadow upon the face of cosmological history, the human life-world, too, is a passing shadow, and not invariant, but subject to repeated iterations as human ancestors approximated the form of anatomically modern human beings, and their minds, in parallel, more closely approximated our minds. And at the other end of this process defined by the shadow of humanity passing over the depths of the cosmos, our descendants will be similarly iterated in a series of minds and bodies that gradually diverge from our own. The life-world of these beings will change with them.
The philosopher Thomas Nagel famously asked, “What is it like to be a bat?” Analytical philosophy had one answer to this (in brief, having bat-like qualia, but this is an answer still disputed), but phenomenology would have another answer to this question: what it is like to be a bat is to have the life-world of a bat. Bats and human beings, both being mammals, share a common ancestor, but our life-worlds are distinct, as the life-world of a bat and the life-world of a human being are both distinct from the life-world of the common ancestor of bats and human beings. So this is a further step toward naturalism, but still recognizably within a context of phenomenology, using the concepts of phenomenology, but abandoning the kind of a prioritistic universalism and invariance that were touchstones for Husserl. If I could have a conversation with Landgrebe, I would ask him about this, and see what he had to say about abandoning this idea of an invariant life-world for a concept that could be reconciled with the evolutionary history of our species, and the other species which make up the biosphere, and which therefore mutually constitute the life-world of which we are all a part.
Landgrebe did write other observations that seem to be consistent with a more naturalistic phenomenology, as in the following passage when he discusses the succession of the forms of human culture:
“The task of the phenomenological science of the a priori of the life-world can… be formulated in this way: it must make use of the materials offered to it by the empirico-historical science of the forms of human cultures, but it cannot restrict itself to this, as does the historian when he researches the actual course and changes of history and describes the succession of ever new forms of human culture in terms of their similarities and differences. For a description of common structures only attains to the level of empirical generalities and not to the level of that which makes history as such and the change of its forms in unqualified universality possible. Our analysis, therefore, must transcend the configuration of history as a flux, in which there is nothing permanent and abiding, and in which all cultural worlds are life-horizons relative to the ones living in them, by a reflection upon the conditions of the possibility of this relativity, conditions discovered in transcendental subjectivity. From within this reflection, the objective sciences with their claims to truth are also seen as historically relative constructions.”
I think it would be possible to transcend history and flux and to identify invariant life-horizons that are defined and delimited by natural science as we know it today, but since Landgrebe ends the above passage by noting the historical relativism of the objective sciences, I suspect that we would not ultimately reach any accord on this point. But that conversation will have to wait until we meet beyond the present life-horizon.
Further Resources
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Last year’s post: https://philosophyofhistory.quora.com/Ludwig-Landgrebe
Hart, S. L., & Landgrebe, L. (1969). Phanomenologie und Geschichte. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30(1), 155. doi:10.2307/2105940
Hart review of Landgrebe
Die Phänomenologie als transzendentale Theorie der Geschichte
Dreyfus, H. L., Elliston, F. A., & McCormick, P. (1980). Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals. Noûs, 14(2), 259. doi:10.2307/2214866
Dreyfus review of Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals
Murphy, R. T. (1993). The Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Six Essays, by Ludwig Landgrebe, edited with an introduction by Donn Welton. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 24(3), 286–289. doi:10.1080/00071773.1993.11007030
