Ludwig Landgrebe and Phenomenological Philosophy of History
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Saturday 09 March 2024 is the 122nd anniversary of the birth of Ludwig Landgrebe (09 March 1902, Vienna — 14 August 1991), who was born in Vienna on this date in 1902.
In the chapter on “The World as History” in Landgrebe’s Major Problems in Contemporary European Philosophy: From Dilthey to Heidegger (Philosophie der Gegenwart, Wissenschaft der Zeit, 1952; English translation 1966) Landgrebe says:
“According to a still widely held opinion, the philosophy of history is a speculation on the course of world history as it has been explored by the science of history, in the form of subsequent reflection. This reflection — in separation from the course of history — seeks to answer the question whether there is any ‘meaning’ to be found in the course of historical events, either in the sense of a progress toward a definable goal or, conversely, in the sense of a process of decline, or in the sense of a cyclical movement of the return of identical formal structures (Gestalten). This question thus asks in the final analysis whether a general law can be observed or established in these historical movements.”
This gives the appearance of critically assessing several different kinds of speculative philosophy of history, but I take it as primarily a repudiation of Hegel. (I could be wrong about that.) Once a philosopher of history has reached the point of a ritual renunciation of Hegel — and most do usually reach this point — sometimes throwing other “speculative” philosophies of history into the bargain, so that in the same gesture they distance themselves also from Spengler and Toynbee (and this may be Landgrebe’s purpose in his formulation quoted above, which is broad enough to include Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee), the next step is crucial, since it reveals the alternative path the philosopher will take.
One of these paths is analytical philosophy of history, which, it should be noted, is different from analytical philosophy when this is contrasted to continental philosophy. There are continental examples of analytical philosophy of history, like Georg Simmel and Raymond Aron. Another pathway is that of providential philosophy of history, which must take special pains to distance itself from speculative philosophy of history, for which it might be mistaken. The path that Landgrebe took was phenomenological philosophy of history, which is as distinctively different from providential or naturalistic or speculative philosophies of history as these latter are different from each other.
But there was never really any question what direction Landgrebe would take. Landgrebe had already set out on the path defined by phenomenology. Landgrebe was Husserl’s personal assistant from 1923 to 1930, and it was Landgrebe who edited some of Husserl’s manuscripts to create the volume we now have as Experience and Judgment: Investigations in the Genealogy of Logic. Several of Landgrebe’s papers on phenomenological philosophy of history were collected in his book Phänomenologie und Geschichte (1968). This has not been translated into English, and I have not been able to obtain a copy of the German original. This volume includes nine papers — Das Problem der Geschichtlichkeit des Lebens und die PhanomenologieHusserls; Vom geisterwissenschaftlichen Verstehen; Geschichte im Denken Kants; Hegels Systembegriff; Das Problem der Dialektik; Die Phainomenologieder Leiblichkeitund das Problemder Materie; Das Problem der transcendentalen Wissenshaft vom lebensweltlichen Apriori; Merleau-Pontys Auseinandersetzung mit Husserls Phenomenologie; and das Problem der Ende der Geschichte — but it does not include three papers available in English on Landgrebe’s philosophy of history, “Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory of History,” “A Meditation on Husserl’s Statement: ‘History is the Grand Fact of Absolute Being’,” and “The Life-world and the Historicity of Human Existence.” In this latter paper, 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.”
The identification of presuppositions was central to the phenomenological method, with the ideal being the convergence upon a purely presuppositionless philosophy. Husserl called this the Principle of Freedom from Presuppositions:
“An epistemological investigation that can seriously claim to be scientific must… satisfy the principle of freedom from presuppositions. This principle, we think, only seeks to express the strict exclusion of all statements not permitting of a comprehensive phenomenological realization. Every epistemological investigation that we carry out must have its pure foundation in phenomenology.”
This is from Husserl’s Logical Investigations, an early work. Many philosophers have declared the ideal of a presuppositionless philosophy to be impossible, but Husserl viewed it as fundamental. Presumably, a philosophy of history formulated on this fundamental principle would seek to identify and then set aside the presuppositions of history, bracketing them, as Husserl said, so as to get at the things themselves of history, whatever these things might be. There is also in the passage quoted from Landgrebe a hint of naturalism, complete with a Copernican reflection on the smallness of humanity in the universe, which here becomes the smallness of human history within the vast history of the cosmos. Humanity is, Landgrebe says, short and late in cosmic becoming. Another passage from Landgrebe makes a similar point:
“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.”
These two quotes remind me of the later work of Karl Löwith, which could be called naturalism with overtones of existential phenomenology. But the implicit naturalism of these two quotes is hard to square with Landgrebe’s phenomenology. I have mentioned in other episodes that Husserl’s phenomenology is built on the idea of a non-naturalistic foundation for natural science, and Landgrebe seems to have a view like Husserl’s. A couple more quotes from Landgrebe’s paper “Phenomenology as Transcendental Theory of History” further flesh out this ambiguity:
“…history is in no way merely a history of nature. True indeed: ‘natural occurrences’ form its ground; but not at all in the sense of ‘matters’ that could not be further defined. Rather, they are known to us as the ‘earth,’ that is, as the totality of the conditions which set the boundaries for all the activities of man and consequently for his history in the sense of ‘res gestae’.”
And…
“‘Earth’… is a transcendental limiting concept. It is a fundamental structure of the human lifeworld and denotes, at the same time, the limit with reference to which all our talk of ‘nature’ can gain only for us an intuitively fulfillable sense.”
Here again we see the apparent naturalism of natural occurrences as the ground of all history, but in the context of Earth as a transcendental limiting concept. What if we were to transcend Earth itself, as we do when we go into space, and we experience natural occurrences that are not limited by Earth? Does that mean that our transcendence of Earth falsifies this conception, or that “Earth” as used by Husserl and Landgrebe means something different from our planet, or that the human lifeworld has transcended Earth and has been forced to expand, the spatial equivalent of the expansion of our historical consciousness as we have learned about prehistory and have projected ourselves into the distant future? I don’t think Landgrebe gave us a definitive answer to any of these questions. Husserl anticipated them without answering them, but I will leave that for another time. But I will say that this aspect of Landgrebe’s thought bears comparison with Husserl’s anti-Copernican essay, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origins of the Spatiality of Nature,” which I mentioned in a previous episode.
So far, I have been emphasizing Landgrebe’s relation to Husserl, but Kant and Heidegger were probably equally significant influences for Landgrebe. In all the posts I’ve written for my philosophy of history space on quora over the last several years, I have not attempted to write about Heidegger and the philosophy of history, even though in my episode Philosophy of History before Augustine I argued for the legitimacy of implicit philosophies of history based on the principles any given philosopher espouses. This is because Heidegger is not simpatico for me, so I find it impossible to give a fair exposition of his work. Here I will only touch on Heidegger in passing, because the influence is so prominent in Landgrebe.
The chapter on “The World as History” that I quoted earlier begins on a thoroughly Heideggerian note: “…historicity is a fundamental structure of Dasein as ‘being-in-the-world’ and therefore of ‘world’ itself.” Dasein serves as a kind of surrogate for the person or the self in Heidegger. Landgrebe goes on to say:
“To elucidate this concept of historicity and to investigate its connection with the fundamental structures of the world, is one of the basic problems with which contemporary philosophic thinking is preoccupied. However, the problem becomes articulate only gradually, in the process of the repudiation of opposite tendencies.”
I assume that the opposite tendencies include speculative philosophies of history that I earlier characterized as a repudiation of Hegel. We have to get past traditional conceptions before we can break new ground with what Landgrebe calls “a new style of questioning.” Landgrebe continues:
“Hand in hand with this development goes a new conception of the nature and the objectives of the philosophy of history, and from the central significance which attaches to ‘historicity’ within the total contexture of the structures of human Dasein derives the insight that the philosophic inquiry into the nature of history ceases to be merely one special problem among others but presents itself as a fundamental problem which determines the structure of philosophy as a whole.”
As I read this, Landgrebe is saying that philosophy of history gets absorbed into philosophy as a whole, which is then going to be the analysis of human Dasein, which is essentially the Heideggerian project. The historicity of being then becomes co-extensive with the philosophy of history. This can also be given a more phenomenological and less explicitly Heideggerian formulation. Landgrebe takes the title of his paper “A Meditation on Husserl’s Statement: ‘History is the Grand Fact of Absolute Being’,” from the final paragraph of addendum XXXII to Husserl’s Krisis, which is not translated in the English edition. Here is the German original:
“Absolut betrachtet, hat jedes ego seine Geschichte, und es ist nur als Subjekt einer, seiner Geschichte. Und jede kommunikative Gemeinsehaft von absoluten Ich, von absoluten Subjektivitaten — in voller Konkretion, zu der die Konstitution der Welt gehört — hat ihre ‘passive’ und ‘aktive’ Geschichte und ist nur in dieser Gesehichte. Die Geschichte ist das große Faktum des absoluten Seins; und die letzten Fragen, die letztmetaphysisehen und -teleologisehen, sind eins mit den Fragen nach dem absoluten Sinn der Geschichte.”
Here is a highly imperfect rendering of this final paragraph into English:
“In absolute terms, every self has its history, and this history is only as a single subject. And every communicative community of the absolute selves, of absolute subjectivities — in full concreteness, to which the constitution of the world belongs — has its ‘passive’ and ‘active’ history and is only to be found in this history. History is the great fact of absolute being; and the ultimate questions, ultimate metaphysical and ultimate teleological questions, are one with the questions about the absolute meaning of history.”
This shows the radically historical conceptions of the later Husserl, which Landgrebe took as his point of departure. Again, as with the more Heideggerian formulation, history and being coincide, but here the emphasis is on history, and we don’t necessarily see philosophy of history absorbed into a larger philosophical project to which it is merely an adjunct. In his paper on this passage from Husserl, Landgrebe formulates his task in the following way:
“…it remains for us to risk an attempt to think Husserl’s fragmentary and seemingly unsolvable thoughts a step further, in order to be able to understand their inner sense and relation. The question which must thereby be answered is: What is history and to what extent can it become the central subject matter of phenomenological analysis, and what character must a phenomenological philosophy of History have?”
Landgrebe breaks this down into three narrower questions:
“(1) If a phenomenological philosophy of history is to be possible, then it must be capable of making statements about the subject of history. How can phenomenology define this subject?
(2) How is the facticity of history compatible with the claim of phenomenology that it leads to insights into essences which have unconditioned universality?
( 3 ) How can a phenomenological analysis make the unity of history understandable?”
Landgrebe sketches an answer to each of these questions. I am most interested in the third claim about the unity of history, partly because the unity of history can be made understandable only if history does in fact possess a unity. In other words, the unity of history has been presupposed, and, as we have seen, a phenomenological philosophy of history should concern itself with identification and bracketing of presuppositions, not introducing new presuppositions. In his discussion of this third question, Landgrebe formulates yet another question, which I think is on point:
“How does one get from the originary experience of the time of our existence in the world as our history to the representation of the uninterrupted temporal series of succession in which all events are represented as a continuous flowing, which is scientifically grasped through the category of causality?”
In my episode on Philosophy of History before Augustine I argued that there is a disconnect between the philosophy of time and the philosophy of history. Husserl, like Augustine, was a rare philosopher to have formulated both a philosophy of time and a philosophy of history, so he was in a position to overcome this disconnect, or to at least point the way toward its eventual overcoming. I don’t think Husserl did this, but Landgrebe’s question gets us a step closer by making the question explicit, that is to say, identifying the presupposition that events represented as a continuous flow is derived from the originary experience of time. Landgrebe says that Husserl’s response to the problem of unity is through teleology, and he says he won’t attempt to tackle this head on:
“It is not possible here to give a just representation of the concept of teleology and thereby to demonstrate whether it is sufficient to make the unity of history understandable.”
A little further on, Landgrebe drops a hint that I think is the right approach:
“The unity of the time of history exists nowhere as pregiven, but it is rather produced anew by men in their actions and in the remembering which is necessary for this action, and in each case conceived of in a new manner. It depends on the manner in which this unity is produced or lost whether the existence of each man in his time and his era can be a happy existence or one which leads to destruction.”
If in Landgrebe’s third question about making the unity of history understandable, what he really means is the unity of time and history, then that would be an explicit attempt to bridge the disconnect between the two. And if the unity of time and history is nowhere pregiven, all the better, because a pregiven unity would be a presupposition. But I do find it curious that he identifies the way in which this unity is achieved (or fails to be achieved) as a source of human happiness or destruction. This implies that there are multiple ways in which the unity of time and history could be effected (and perhaps multiple ways in which this unity fails), and some of these are conducive to human felicity, while other ways are conducive to human destruction. This is a heavy burden for a philosophy of history to bear, and something I will need to look into further.
