Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

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Does Husserl have a Philosophy of History in the

Crisis of European Sciences?

Doug Mann

To cite this article: Doug Mann (1992) Does Husserl have a Philosophy of History in the Crisis
of European Sciences?, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 23:2, 156-166, DOI:
10.1080/00071773.1992.11006984

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Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Vol. 23, No. 2, May 1992

DOES HUSSERL HAVE A PHILOSOPHY OF

HISTORY IN THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN
SCIENCES?
DOUG MANN

The Early Hostility of Phenomenology to History

The traditional assumption concerning the relationship of

phenomenology and history is that it is one of hostility. Husserl's early
formulation of phenomenology was in terms of an eidetic science, i.e. a
science of essences, and he proposed using the famed epoche to unlock the
door barring his way to this pure science. The general purpose of this
unlocking was to provide a philosophy that could act as a rigorous science, a
philosophy able to ground both the natural and the human sciences with
apodictic certainty. The quest for this certainty led Husserl to propose the
idea of intentionality as a solution to the riddle of epistemology as
bequeathed him by the empiricists.
Husserl's notion of intentionality attempts to explain how in the act of
perceiving particular things in the world we at the same time perceive them
as essences, as universals. The meaning of an object lies in how we intend it.
In a sense, the human mind constitutes the objects intended a La Kant
according to time, space, and the categories; but, more accurately, we exist in
a constituting-constituted interrelationship with the objects of our
consciousness. And this interrelationship is largely impenetrable by the realm
of the temporal: it takes place in time, but its logical structure is atemporal. In
this atemporality of intentionality we see the first great contradiction between
phenomenology and history.
The second (and more obvious) contradiction between phenomenology
and history lies in the early attitude of the former towards the proper
relationship of philosophy and history. Against Hegel, Marx, and their
successors, early Husserlian phenomenology treated philosophy as a
discipline not dependent on changing social, political and ideological
structures . It stood on its own merits. Opposing the Hegelian search for truth
in the historical evolution of Spirit, Husserl sought truth (echoing Descartes)
in a fastidious attention to the way we perceive ourselves and the world.
From this fastidiousness came the notions of intentionality, the
phenomenological reduction, and the epoche.
When Paul Ricouer asks the question:
How can a philosophy of the cogito, of the radical return to the ego as founder of all
being, become capable of a philosophy of history? (Ricouer, 145; fuller documentation
found in bibliography)
his initial inclination is to say that it cannot. He goes on to note the
mistrust of Husserl's early philosophy of essences of genetic explanations,
156
concluding that the "eidetic reduction" is in fact a reduction of history itself
(Ricouer, 146). That these essences remain unchanged by the flux of history
is a "given" to the Husser! at the time of the Logical Investigations. It is the
phenomenologist's job to perceive them as clearly as possible, as free from
presuppositions as the rigorous science of phenomenological philosophy will
allow.

Teleology in the Crisis. Phenomenology Enters the Flux.

An important (although hardly essential) element of the philosophy of

history in general is teleology: the sense that history has meaning, and is
going somewhere. The very question of the meaningfulness of history was
ignored by Husser! in works published prior to the Crisis. Yet, as Ricouer
notes, in his last work we begin to get the sense that Husser! no longer
thought of history as a "vain detour", but instead saw it as a "privileged
revealer of a suprahistorical sense" (Ricouer, 155). Early in the Crisis,
Husser! asks (despairingly) the following rhetorical question concerning the
value of natural science and history to the philosopher:
But can the world, and human existence in it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences
recognise as true only what is objectively established in this fashion, and if history has
nothing more to teach us than that all the shapes of the spiritual world, all the conditions
of life, ideals, norms upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves like fleeting
waves, that it always was and ever will be so, that again and again reason must tum into
nonsense, and well-being into misery? Can we console ourselves with that? Can we live
in this world, where historical occurrence is nothing but an unending concatenation of
illusory progress and bitter disappointment? (Husser!, 6-7)
However, this quite existential sense of despair quickly evaporates. The
general gist of the remainder of this work can be found in an attempt to give
sense to history, to preserve philosophical reason from the ravages of
prejudice and time.
This attempt to reawaken an embalmed philosophical reason is effected
largely by means of a critical analysis of the historical relation of philosophy
and science since the Renaissance. The results of this analysis, feels Husser!,
will make it apparent "that all the philosophy of the past, though unbeknown to
itself, was inwardly orientated toward this new sense of philosophy" (Husser!,
18). More specifically, Husser! defines his modus operandi as follows:
Our task is to make comprehensible the teleology in the historical becoming of
philosophy, especially modem philosophy, and at the same time to achieve clarity about
ourselves, who are the bearers of this teleology, who take part in carrying it out through
our personal intentions. We are attempting to elicit and understand the unity running
through all the (philosophical) projects of history that oppose one another and work
together in their changing forms. (Husser!, 70)
Here is the Hegelian motif in Husser!' s last work: that history is really
the history of Spirit/thought, that it contains within itself a telos, a goal, that a
cunning reason directs human achievements towards this goal, and that the
role of the philosopher is to discern the outlines of this unity of history, this
movement of history towards a goal (be it pre-determined and independent of
the desires of the participants of history, as with Hegel, or evolutionary, the

157
end product of a collection of individual human acts, the view towards which
Husser) leans). It is within the confines of this motif that the question of
whether the Crisis propounds a philosophy of history must be decided.

The Evolution of Philosophy as the Evolution of Man

After even the most cursory reading of the Crisis, one is struck by
Husserl's situating of phenomenology within the general historical framework
of European philosophy, notably within the empiricist tradition that culminates
and is overturned in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Quite uncharacteristically
(when comparing this work with his earlier views), Husser) castigates those who
artificially separate historical and epistemological elucidation in his fragment
'The Origin of Geometry' (Husser), 370). Contrary to this view, Husser) sees the
"essence" of history as a dialectical struggle between competing ways of
thinking, following the Hegelian motif previously introduced:
The true struggles of our time, the only ones which are significant, are struggles between
humanity which has already collapsed and humanity which still has roots but is struggling
to keep them or find new ones. The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as
such take the form of struggles between the philosophies, that is, between the sceptical
philosophies - or non-philosophies, which retain the word but not the task - and the
actual and still vital philosophies (Husserl, 15).
On the one side Husser) arrays the forces of a decaying empiricism and
its ally psychology (understood as a natural science); on the other,
phenomenology. Naturally, it is the latter that Husser) sees as that which is
truly vital in European thought.
Some commentators have interpreted the Crisis in a radically historicist
vein: thus James Morrison attributes to the later Husser) the view that all self-
reflection is, of necessity, historical reflection (Morrison, 315). In a less
extreme fashion, but representing no less of a break with Husser)' s earlier
view of philosophy, Ricouer interprets the Crisis thus: "The idea of
philosophy, this is the teleology of history. This is why the philosophy of
history in the end is the history of philosophy, itself indistinguishable from
philosophy's coming to self-awareness" (Ricouer, 153). That Husser)
believed that philosophy develops historically, that it moves in a zig-zag
fashion towards a true understanding of consciousness and the world, is
difficult to deny after reading Part II of the Crisis. It remains to consider
some of the concrete content of this analysis, and to see whether a philosophy
of history is as evident as the commentators quoted above suggest.

The First Crisis in the Dialectic: Galileo and the Mathematisation of Nature

In keeping with the general opinion of cultural and philosophical

history, Husser) sees the Renaissance as the great reawakening of classical
knowledge and the true beginning of the modern world. It is at this time that
the great dialectic of contemporary thought makes its first appearance. The
opposing poles of this dialectic Husser) defines as follows:
What characterises objectivism (my emphasis) is that it moves upon the ground of the

158
 world which is pregiven, taken for granted though experience, seeks the 'objective truth' of
this world, seeks what, in this world, is unconditionally valid for every rational being, what
it is in itself. It is the task of episteme, ratio, or philosophy to carry this out universally ....
Transcendentalism, on the other hand, says: the ontic meaning of the pregiven life-world is a
subjective structure, it is the achievement of experiencing, pre-scientific life (Husser!, 68-9).
The new scientific theories of the Renaissance, freeing themselves from
the traditions of a dogmatic religion, sought to "measure the life-world .... for
a well-fitting garb of ideas, that of the so-called objectively scientific truths"
(Husser!, 51). Galileo resurrected Euclidean geometry, and by arithmetising it
and applying this new tool to nature, made the latter a "mathematical
manifold" (Husser!, 23). The ideal shapes of geometry became the "limit-
shapes" of nature, of an idealised nature, of a nature forced into an
objectivistic strait-jacket. Lastly, the world is transformed from a totality to a
whole by means of the presumption of universal causal regulation:
everything in the world is related through a causal nexus to everything else,
in strictly physical terms (Husser!, 31 ). Of course, this included human
subjectivity, or, as it was then termed, the soul, although it was not until the
seventeenth century that the idea of this relation of the soul to the physical
world was given its first intellectually honest and radical exposition.
The significance of Galileo's achievement does not escape Husserl's
attention. The Italian philosopher of nature acts as the symbolic starting point
of the modem dialectic of objectivism and transcendentalism, a dialectic that
had yet to play itself out in Husserl' s own time. The new way of thinking
which he inaugurated objectified the world: the totality of phenomena
become an enclosed cosmos of facts. Insofar as Galileo's achievement took
place at a discrete historical moment, and insofar as the legacy he left behind
developed temporally (i.e. its fullest implications were not encountered until
Hume's scepticism came to light), the mathematisation of nature with which
Husser! credits him can be seen as the first stage in the proto-dialectic of
objectivism and subjectivism, or transcendentalism.

The Second Crisis in the Dialectic: Descartes, Hume, and the Radicalisation
of Doubt

Descartes pushed the dialectic forward by seeking a solution to the

problem of objectivism, i.e. its absence of an absolute ground, while
simultaneously (and unconsciously) providing the means by which
transcendentalism could undermine that very objectivism. Husser! sees
Descartes as wanting to put philosophic knowledge on a "foundation of
immediate and apodictic knowledge whose self-evidence excludes all
conceivable doubt" (Husserl, 75). Cartesian doubt was the first step in the
grounding of philosophy in a certainty that would allow it to develop into a
rigorous science. Yet Descartes' epoche did not end in sterility: for at the
foundation of this universal doubt was the doubting ego. "No matter how far
I may push my doubt, and even if I try to think that everything is dubious or
even in truth does not exist, it is absolutely self-evident that I, after all, would
still exist as the doubter and negator of everything" (Husser!, 77).
159
 Yet, in Husserl's estimate, Descartes failed to carry through the epoche
to its inevitable phenomenological conclusions. He retreats from the ego as
all that is apodictically certain, and posits the soul (to Husserl a mere
residuum) as a pure entity (Husserl, 80). Descartes betrayed himself: he saw
the truth of the physical as mathematical, while his whole "enterprise of
doubt and the cogito served only to reinforce objectivism" (Ricouer, 165). In
the end he accepts Galileo's mathematisation of nature, and abandons
methodical doubt for a theocratic-mathematic world view.
After having glossed over the earlier empiricists, Locke and Berkeley,
Husserl renews his discussion of the second crisis of the philosophical
dialectic in his discussion of Hume. The Scot's role in Husserl's version of
the history of philosophic reason was to radicalise Cartesian doubt within the
context of empiricism: his scepticism saw all cognition to be fundamentally
enigmatic (Ricouer, 165). For Husserl's Hume, all elements of both the
scientific and the prescientific worlds are fictitious. Even identity itself, the
irreducible ego, becomes a fiction (Husserl, 87). The hidden philosophical
motif (or motive?) of Hume's scepticism was the shaking of objectivism to
its foundations, leaving nothing but a series of fictional entities (Husserl, 90).
The cunning of philosophical reason made Hume serve the cause of
phenomenology without him understanding the full implications of his
corrosive critique of the epistemology of his day.
Hume's successor, in Husserl's eyes, was Kant. It would seem evident
that Kant's "transcendental philosophy" would be the direct historical
precursor of Husser I' s own phenomenology, with its emphasis on
transcendental subjectivity. Yet Husserl rejects Kant as a philosophical
magister. He feels that Kant failed to penetrate to the heart of the "world-
enigma", that he failed to fully comprehend the "Humean problem":
The world-enigma in the deepest and most ultimate sense, the enigma of a world whose
being is being through subjective accomplishment, and with this the self-evidence that
another world cannot be at all conceivable- that, and nothing else, is Hume's problem.
Kant, however, for whom, as can easily be seen, so many presuppositions are "obviously"
valid, presuppositions which in the Humean sense are included within this world-enigma,
never penetrated to the enigma itself. (Husser!, 96-7)
In fact, in his refusal to epoche the presuppositions of natural science,
Kant stands more in the tradition of Cartesian-Leibnizian rationalism than in that
of radical empiricism. Thus, the dialectic of philosophical reason leaps more or
less directly from Hume to phenomenology, ignoring the working out of
German idealism after Kant (presumably because Husserl felt this tradition to be
fundamentally polluted with the poison of objectivism, as inherited from Kant).

The Riddle of the Life- World and Its Relation to History

We now tum to an examination of that most enigmatic of concepts in

the Crisis, the Lebenswelt, or Life-World. As one generally sympathetic critic
describes it, the concept "indicates the world of prescientific experience, and
signifies the basic stratum, out of which all meaning contents arise" (Sinha,
64). Opposed to the theoretical-logical substruction of the world by natural
160
science, the life-world, in its subjectivity, "is distinguished in all respects
precisely by its being actually experienceable" (Husser!, 127). It is the world
with which we have contact in everyday life, before the idealisation of this
world by objectivistic science into geometrical limit-shapes, in short, before
the mathematisation of nature. "The life-world is the world that is constantly
pregiven, valid constantly and in advance as existing, but not valid because of
some purpose of investigation, according to some universal end" (Husser!,
382). All goals, achievements, and purposes, including those of science,
presuppose it.
To continue, Husser! sees the life-world as having a general structure,
and to be inhabited by actual bodies, although not in the sense of bodies as
understood by natural science (Husser!, 139). Yet we must steer clear of the
illusion perpetrated by psychology that the life-world consists of "sense-data"
as its intuitive building blocks (Husser!, 125). It is prior to both sense-data
and to bodies considered as objects for scientific perusal and manipulation.
Yet despite the nebulous character of the concept as so far described,
the encounter of the reader of Part IliA of the Crisis with paradox is
inevitable. For not only is the life-world prior to natural science:
.... at the same time, as an accomplishment of scientific persons, as individuals and as
joined in the community of scientific activity, objective science belongs to the life-world.
Its theories, logical constructs, are of course not things in the life-world like stones,
houses, or trees. They are logical wholes and logical parts made up of ultimate logical
elements (Husserl, 130).
And later, at first noting that all sciences presuppose the life-world,
Husser! himself makes explicit this paradox in immediately going on to claim
that "everything developing and developed by mankind (individually and in
community) is itself a piece of the life-world" (Husser!, 382-3). This paradox
is further widened when Husser! states that all human accomplishments,
including objectivistic science, "flow" into the life-world, exploding the
formerly established distinction between scientific theories qua descriptions
of reality and the same theories as mere cultural artifacts (Husser!, 138).
In point of fact, it is difficult to deny the cogency of David Carr's
assertion that Husser! puts forward in the Crisis a pair of mutually
contradictory notions of the life-world. The first and more fundamental notion
sees the life-world as the "constant underlying ground of all .... phenomena,
the world from which the scientific interpretation takes its start and which it
constantly presupposes" (Carr, 335). The second notion of the life-world is
that of the totality of cultural facts, among which are numbered the natural
sciences. Carr attempts to reconcile these two notions of the life-world, as the
world of pure experiences and as the total world of culture, by pointing out
their common qualities: ( 1) science presupposes them both; (2) consciousness
takes both pure experience and culture for granted in its interpretation of the
world; and (3) both are pre-theoretical (Carr, 338-9). However, the structure
Carr builds to house these conflicting notions of the life-world is flimsy, as he
himself admits. It would take more than this brief intellectual exercise to
overcome the paradox of Husser!' s notion of the life-world in the Crisis.
This paradox will shape our discussion of the relation of the life-world
161
to history. In the section on difficulties surrounding the nature of his
transcendental epoche, Husser! notes that the "manifold acquisitions of
earlier active life are not dead sentiments" for consciousness (Husser!, 149).
Consciousness, whether or not related to the life-world, develops in an
evolutionary way. Turning from the ego to that which is pre given to
subjectivity, if we conceive of the life-world as simply the world of
immediate (or pure) experience, we would have to declare it to be irrelevant
to history as it is entirely prior to history. However, if we see the life-world
as the world of culture, and if culture is seen not as static but developmental
(as it surely is), then the concept of the life-world does indeed carry with it
relevance for history. To this problem we now tum.

The Life-World as a Collection of Cultural Relativities. Phenomenology turns

to Historicism

Although he explicitly denies the influence of historicism (notably, the

influence of Dilthey), Husserl's later writings hint at a connection between a
relativistic philosophy of culture and history and phenomenology.
Specifically, despite his evocation of the possibility of an "ontology" of the
life-world and of the structured nature of this pregiven world, Husser! finds it
easy to slip into the plural, outlining the task of future phenomenologically-
inclined historians as one in part of "paying constant attention to the relativity
of the surrounding life-worlds of particular human beings, people, and
periods as mere matters of fact" (Husser!, 147). Historicism, as the
acceptance of the relativity of cultures and historical periods, is in evidence
here. Indeed, on the strength of this and similar comments in the Crisis, one
analyst interprets the later Husser! as espousing a transcendental historicism,
as opposed to the empirical-factual historicism which Husser! sets himself
against (Morrison, 323). The same commentator, however, glosses over the
paradox of the life-world that makes its relation to history so enigmatic: he
concludes that since "the life-world is essentially cultural-historical the a
priori of history is identical with the a priori of the life-world. Hence the
ontology of the life-world is at the same time an ontology of history"
(Morrison, 322).
If the life-world was purely and simply a cultural-historical world, then
an ontology of this world would be historical. Yet to reduce Husser!' s
conception of the life-world to the world of culture is to lose much of the
original signification of the term. The irreducible pregiveness of the life-
world, the sense of its being prior to all human accomplishments, cannot be
cavalierly brushed aside to force the Crisis into a historicist mould. At this
point, we note how Husserl's dialectic of philosophical reason becomes
bogged down in the quicksand of paradox. The enigmatic character of the
life-world reintroduces a degree of hostility into the relationship of
phenomenology and history. Insofar as the structures of this world of
immediate experience are apodictically discernible, the possibility of
discovering in the Crisis a philosophy of history is put into doubt.

162
Does the Life-World Change? The Possibility of a Purely Doxie Science

For Husser), perception is relativistic and phenomenalistic. What we

perceive is in flux: it is the fluid, ever-changing river of existence, made real
by subjectivity only. The life-world is at the base of this perception: in its
primary sense, it is the world of immediate experience, free from the
prejudices of culture and science. Yet, as such, is it historical? To answer this
question, the further question of whether the life-world itself changes must be
answered.
Joseph Kockelmans interprets Husserl's life-world as ascending from
subjectivity to inter-subjectivity to a historical community. Furthermore,
Even though we are objects in the life-world we are also subjects in regard to this world
insofar as it is our common, spiritual life that gives meaning and sense to this world ....
The progressing, changing life of a community subjects its life-world to changes and
affords continually new perspectives from which it is being interpreted. In reflecting upon
this we can become aware of the life-world as something that continuously grows and
develops, as something that carries the impress of the communal history (Kockelmans,
278-9).
The same author goes on to ask whether we need a separate science for
each life-world, for each community in each stage of its development: he
answers this question by repeating Husser)' s assertion that each life-world
has an invariant structure common to the life-world (or life-worlds) in
general (Kockelmans, 284). As previously noted, one can detect a strong
historicist flavour within Husserl' s description of the life-world. But to
follow Kockelmans in viewing the life-world as relative, as historically
conditioned, as in flux, is to ignore the very invariance that Kockelmans
makes use of to shift the notion of the life-world away from relativism. It is
to ignore the distinction between the two "life-worlds" put forward by Carr,
the first being one of pure experience, the second the world of culture. Thus,
in reply to the question whether the life-world changes, I conclude that it
changes in one of its manifestations only: that is, the world of culture
develops through time, according to a general pattern. Husser) thus dissipates
the more fundamental dialectic of philosophical reason through the equivocal
use of the term "life-world", weakening the unity of any philosophy of
history to be found in the Crisis.
To conclude this section, I note Husserl' s intention to make a study of the
life-world the foundation of a purely doxic science, a science free from the
traditional philosophical search for an episteme. Morrison is optimistic about
Husser)' s attempt to tum philosophy from the love of wisdom to the "love of
opinion", about his attempt to immerse philosophy into the "cave" of the life-
world: "Since the latter is the source of all possible 'world-views',
phenomenology as science of the life-world (the episteme of doxa) becomes the
science or typology of all possible world-views: the doctrine of
Weltanschauung or the science of opinions" (Morrison, 330). Insofar as
phenomenology and Husserl's concept of the life-world are truly orientated to
the flux of history, to the changing historical forms of political institutions and
thought, art, literature, and philosophy itself, then such a doxic science is

163
possible from within the phenomenological movement. However, Husser) does
not make any great effort to work out such a science within the confines of the
Crisis, and maintains a deep ambivalence towards the temporal and the
changing throughout this work. To accord Husserl a sense of historicity, we
must go beyond his concept of the life-world, which remains ambiguous to the
end.

The Crisis of European Man and the Philosophy of History

By introducing the idea of a crisis of European man as a central theme

in the Crisis of European Sciences, we come full circle back to the idealist
element in Husserl's thought, his view of the history of civilisation as in truth
the history of philosophy, taken in its widest sense (i.e. as the queen of both
the natural and human sciences). For this crisis of European man is a crisis of
the European sciences: it is "the collapse of the belief in a universal
philosophy as the guide for the new man" representing "a collapse of the
belief in 'reason', understood as the ancients opposed episteme to doxa"
(Husser), 12). It is a crisis of the meaningfulness of European culture in
general. As Ricouer notes in commenting on Husser), Europe has a spiritual
unity that encompasses universality and thus the rest of mankind. And
reason, as embodied in philosophy, is the "innate entelechy" of Europe, the
"proto-phenomenon" of European culture (Ricouer, 152). Ricouer concludes
his interpretation of Husser) by asserting that "Man is the image of his ideas,
and Ideas are like the paradigm for existence. This is why a crisis which
affects science in its intention, in its Idea, .... is a crisis in existence"
(Ricouer, 159). As history is in essence the history of Ideas, a crisis in this
temporal continuum is a crisis for humanity in general.
Yet the potential of the transcendental reduction to solve this crisis must
be questioned. As Paul Thevenaz concludes from his comparison of the
respective radicalisms of Descartes and Husser), Husserlian
transcendentalism, "in spite of its very real intention of being radical, does
not feel this (i.e. Descartes') fundamental threat directed at the very status of
reason in man and in the world." Instead of a loss of meaning of reason in
general, Thevenaz sees Husser) substituting a crisis of European sciences
(Thevenaz, 112). Thus, from the standpoint of the transcendental reduction,
one can arrive at a much more limited sense of crisis from Husserl's last
work, an intellectual crisis.
The implications of either notion of crisis for a Husserlian philosophy
are uncertain. Carr, in his introduction to his translation of the Crisis, points
out that by "insisting on the reality of the crisis as a turning point for man,
Husser) is being consistent with the indeterminism he elsewhere attributes to
consciousness in its relation to the world and to its own reason" (Husser),
xxxv). In the sense that we have a choice as to whether we help resolve this
crisis or not, its actual, historical resolution is uncertain and left dependent on
the actions of well-meaning men. Viewed thus, the "crisis" is at antipodes
with the Hegelian motif in Husserl's thought pointed out earlier in this paper.

164
 But in yet another sense, the notion of crisis can fit within the general
structure of a philosophy of history without assuming any sort of
determinism. For both philosophers of progress like Condorcet and Saint-
Simon, and for philosophers of the decline of civilisation like Spengler and
Toynbee, the determinism in their thought is linked to a call to action. If we
really have no choice as to the immediate (or distant) future of our culture or
civilisation, then the arrival of a crisis must be seen by and large as a matter
of inconvenience. However, if the possibility of change effected by acts of
human will exists, then the notion of crisis can be contained within a non-
deterministic philosophy of history.

The Reduction of History as the Extinction of Historicity

We now come to the end of our meanderings through Husserlian

phenomenology as presented in the Crisis. To conclude, the transcendental
reduction, in reducing both the world of facts and the life-world itself, is also a
reduction of history. History, the story of the human past, is in essence a doxic, a
posteriori discipline. Any rigor pertaining to it is to be found in its examination
of "facts", of past human actions and their evidences. In itself, it cannot be the
rigorous science which Husserl intended phenomenological philosophy to be. It
cannot cut the cable from the flux of existence, conceived not as a collection of
essences, but as individualities. Our attempts to unify the past are often the
result of aesthetic or pragmatic impulses, and not "scientific" necessity.
Despite the evocation of the history of philosophy as the history of
mankind in general. Husserl's sense of history is at best a quite limited one:
descriptions of political events, modes of social existence, economic trends, and
so forth are notable by their total absence from the Crisis. Husserl's philosophy
of history in the Crisis is in fact just a skeleton holding together a rather
selective history of philosophy, and a quite summarily sketched out skeleton at
that. The important (but also separate) question of determinism in this history of
philosophy must be left open, for Husser) gives indications of holding positions
on both sides of the fence on this issue (although the anti-determinist view
would seem to be the most consistent with phenomenology in general).
As Ricouer himself concludes of Husserl's sense of history, "although
the unity of history is forcefully conceived by Husserl, the historicity, to the
contrary, is understood by him with some difficulty" (Ricouer, 170). History,
to be history, must have both a degree of unity and the sense that it is an
"unforeseeable adventure" (Ricouer, 170). Although Husser) is often able to
fulfil the former criteria, he gives few indications of even being interested in
fulfiling the latter. In his failure to do so, he fails to make the perhaps
impossible leap from phenomenology to a philosophy of history.
Brock University, Canada

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