Husserl’s Other Philosophy of History

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

It is the 166^th anniversary of the birth of Edmund Husserl (08 April 1859 – 27 April 1938), who was born in Proßnitz, in Moravia, then part of the Habsburg Empire, 166 years ago on this date in 1859.

Among philosophers of history we can distinguish, on the one hand, those who are immersed in the tradition, and whose work builds on that tradition in one way or another—meaning that they might take some earlier philosopher’s idea and run with it, or they might react against some earlier philosopher’s ideas—while, on the other hand, there are those who are immersed in their own ideas and who apply these ideas to history. Husserl belongs to the latter camp. In his final years he took the ideas he had been working with his entire life and applied them to history, and this gives us what we might call Husserl’s conventional philosophy history, though it’s unconventional in many respects because it’s an application of phenomenology to history. That is to say, Husserl’s conventional philosophy of history is a phenomenological philosophy of history, and, despite its conventionality in terms of being a philosophy of history, it’s not traditional, because Husserl’s whole approach to philosophy isn’t traditional. Husserl’s relatively conventional philosophy of history was this late work, his Vienna and Prague lectures and the manuscripts that were collected in the posthumously published The Crisis of European Sciences. At least within phenomenology this conventional phenomenological philosophy of history constituted a point of origin in philosophy of history that many phenomenological philosophers have since followed.

In last year’s Today in Philosophy of History episode on Husserl I talked about his conventional philosophy of history, now I want to talk about what we could call Husserl’s unconventional philosophy of history, or, what I’m calling Husserl’s other philosophy of history. Some philosophers have only one philosophy of history, be it conventional or unconventional, but Husserl had both. By an unconventional philosophy of history I mean those ideas that haven’t widely been considered part of philosophy of history at all, like when I talked about Hans Reichenbach’s philosophy of history. This episode on Reichenbach grew out of Reichenbach’s philosophy of time. Husserl wrote voluminously on time, and, in particular, he wrote about what he called internal time consciousness, and Husserl’s unconventional philosophy of history can be reconstructed from his writings on time and time consciousness.

I talked about some of these problems of time consciousness in my recent episode on G. H. Mead, since his book The Philosophy of the Present discusses time consciousness. It’s worth pointing out in this connection that philosophy of time in Anglo-American philosophy has almost completely passed over Husserl’s work on time consciousness in silence, as though it didn’t even exist. This is a manifestation of the division between analytical and continental philosophy, even though Husserl’s work predates the construction of that division. I noticed that there’s a review on Amazon of Blackwell’s A Companion to the Philosophy of Time in which the reviewer noted that this collection of papers largely passes over European thought by neglecting Bergson, Heidegger, and others. There’s one paper on Husserl in the volume, but that’s about it. In some areas of philosophy the disconnect between the traditions is greater than in others, and it might be an interesting project to map out where Anglo-American analytical philosophy and continental European philosophy largely overlap and where they are nearly disjoint. To my unsystematic observation there’s a lot of cross-pollination in philosophy of history, but the barriers seem to be higher when it comes to philosophy of time.

Because of the apparent barriers between philosophies of time, it’s possible that the disconnect between analytical and continental philosophy reinforces the disconnect between philosophy of time and philosophy of history. In many episodes I’ve talked about the need for a rapprochement between philosophy of time and philosophy of history, which was one of the reasons I discussed the philosophies of time of Reichenbach and G. H. Mead in relation to history. Husserl’s phenomenology in general, and his discussion of time in particular, was one of the major influences that sent continental philosophy off in a different direction than analytical philosophers, despite analytical philosophy having its origins on the continent in the work of European philosophers like Frege, and, in the generation after Frege, all the philosophers associated with the Vienna circle—like Reichenbach, but many others as well.

Husserl was a direct influence on both Heidegger and Sartre, both founders of existentialism, and in Heidegger and Sartre the philosophy of time is front and center. Heidegger’s most famous work was Being and Time, published in 1927, and Sartre’s enormous treatise Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, begins with a discussion of time. While both Heidegger and Sartre went their own ways in regard both to phenomenology and the philosophy of time, their work would have been inconceivable without Husserl’s work making a path for them. In addition to being Husserl’s assistant at Freiburg for several years, Heidegger edited the first collection of Husserl’s lectures on internal time consciousness, which mostly consisted of a course of lectures in Göttingen from 1904-1905, along with some supplementary texts drawn from the following five years or so. These writings have twice been translated into English, first by James S. Churchill and published in 1964, and then a larger volume with more supplementary texts translated by John Barnett Brough and published in 1991. This latter collection includes more from what are known as the Bernau manuscripts. None of this material, for all that is now available to us, gives us a finished and complete phenomenological theory of time. These manuscripts were more tentative and exploratory, especially the Bernau manuscripts.

The lectures on which The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness were based date from a few years after Husserl published his Logical Investigations in 1901, which is usually accounted Husserl’s first book that is explicitly phenomenological, and they’re a few years before Husserl’s 1913 Book Ideas, in which phenomenology arguably receives its first mature expression. So the years of the lectures on time consciousness were years of the rapid formation of phenomenology for Husserl. The manuscripts were part of Husserl’s attempt to work through problems in his phenomenology without having in mind any fixed argument or final results to be demonstrated. Husserl’s philosophy of time, then, was very much a work in progress, and we can read these manuscripts, since that’s what they were, as works in progress as we work our own way through the knotty business of understanding time.

Nicolas de Warren has written a book on Husserl and time, Husserl and the Promise of Time: Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology, which I recommend for its detailed discussion of Husserl’s work in the philosophy of time. De Warren quotes Husserl as writing, “…where I remain silent as an author I can therefore speak as a teacher.” (p. 141) This emphasizes the unfinished and ongoing character of Husserl’s writings on time. All of phenomenology has this character of a work in progress. Paul Ricoeur on in his book on Husserl wrote: “He aspired to merit the title of a ‘genuine beginner,’ on the path of that phenomenology which is itself at the ‘beginning of the beginning’.” And in The Crisis of European Sciences Husserl wrote:

“We are absolute beginners, here, and have nothing in the way of a logic designed to provide norms; we can do nothing but reflect, engross ourselves in the still not unfolded sense of our task, and thus secure, with the utmost care, freedom from prejudice, keeping our undertaking free of alien interferences… and this, as in the case of every new undertaking, must supply us with our method.”

This imperative of becoming an absolute beginner, of any being able to become a beginner after much effort, reminds me of a scene from the end of the film Tous Les Matins Du Monde (All the Mornings of the World, 1991), when the former student asks his former master Monsieur de Sainte-Columbe for a final lesson, and Sainte-Colombe says that he will present his former student a first lesson. This is a humbling moment, but also a great achievement to have made it so far as to become a genuine beginner. Husserl is the kind of philosopher who would present a first lesson after a lifetime spent trying to get to the point of being a genuine beginner.

So, how do we make a beginning of the philosophical study of time in relation to history? T. S. Eliot wrote in East Coker, one of the Four Quartets:

In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.

This kind of paradox goes back at least to Heraclitus, who said things like “The way up and the way down are the same.” Paradoxical or not, this is the way that is open to us, perhaps the only way open to us. One of the thematic motives that runs through phenomenology is that we ultimately come to objectivity only through subjectivity, albeit by way of transcendental subjectivity. For phenomenology, objectivity is hidden from us in plain sight, and the only way to get to it is through transcendental subjectivity. It stands to reason, then, given the approach of phenomenology, that if we’re to grasp objective time, which would presumably be correlated with history, it will be through subjective time. But is the objectivity we grasp through subjectivity the same objectivity of the natural standpoint, or, as Husserl also says, of naïve positivity, once known dimly to us—through a glass, darkly, as it were—only now purged and purified, or is the objectivity we ultimately grasp an unsuspected and previously unknown objectivity that was hidden from us by the snares and wiles of naturalism?

I don’t think these two conceptions of objectivity are mutually exclusive, so that the ultimate objectivity we achieve through phenomenology is a purified form of the naïve objectivity we once thought we knew, but the methodology of phenomenology has forced us to see this presumptively familiar objectivity with new eyes, so that it is, in effect, a previously unknown objectivity. But Husserl is at pains to distance himself from objective time in his lectures on internal time consciousness. The very first section of his lectures on time consciousness is titled “The Suspension of Objective Time” and here he begins:

“We are intent on a phenomenological analysis of time-consciousness. Inherent in this, as in any phenomenological analysis, is the complete exclusion of every assumption, stipulation, and conviction with respect to objective time (the complete exclusion of all transcending presuppositions concerning what exists).”

This is exactly what we would expect if we were familiar with phenomenology. Husserl goes on to say:

“One cannot discover the least thing about objective time through phenomenological analysis. The ‘original temporal field’ is obviously not a bit of objective time; the experienced now, taken in itself, is not a point of objective time, and so on. Objective space, objective time, and with them the objective world of actual things and events—these are all transcendencies.”

But it doesn’t quite end there for objective time. The objectivity of objective time is no phenomenological datum, but if some intentional object gives itself to us as belonging to objective time, that is a phenomenological datum, and we ought to pay it due regard in our phenomenology of the appearance of that datum. Even as we inquire into what marks off an intentional object as presenting itself belonging to objective time, we make no concessions to objectivity or existence or transcendence or actuality. All of these ontological distractions are suspended, or bracketed, or set aside, or whatever your preferred way of phrasing the task of phenomenology happens to be. This comes out later in section 1. Husserl makes a distinction between being sensed and being perceived. Perception, Husserl holds, regards objective time, but to be sensed is, “…the phenomenological datum through whose empirical apperception the relation to objective time becomes constituted.” Husserl makes a further distinction between what he contrasts as “temporal data” and “tempora”:

“Temporal data—or, if you prefer, temporal signs—are not themselves tempora. Objective time belongs in the context of empirically experienced objectivity. The ‘sensed’ temporal data are not merely sensed; they are also charged with apprehension-characters, and to these in turn belong certain claims and entitlements: to measure against one another the times and temporal relations that appear on the basis of the sensed data, to bring them into this or that objective order, and to distinguish various apparent and actual orders.”

This terminology gives us a hint as to why some philosophers find it off-putting to read Husserl. He writes about “apprehension characters” and these having certain claims and entitlements. What he’s saying is that some experiences of time appear to us as belonging to objective time, or, if you prefer, belonging to the external world, while other experiences of time appear to us as belonging to our subjective experience of time. As phenomenologists, we are unconcerned with the metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality, but we are concerned with what appears and how it appears. Husserl’s verbiage seems circuitous at times, but it does have a point, like evolutionary theorists insisting on expressing outcomes in terms of selection rather than teleology. It takes time and effort to learn to think in these changed terms. What Husserl calls the “apprehension-characters” of objective time are ultimately what allow us to reconstruct a phenomenologically transformed objective time, which is what I earlier called objectivity that is purged and purified by phenomenology and now presents itself in a new aspect. Husserl finishes this paragraph with the following:

“What becomes constituted here as objectively valid being is finally the one infinite objective time in which all things and events—bodies and their physical qualities, psyches and their psychic states—have their definite temporal positions, which we can determine by means of a chronometer.”

Objective time, then, can be phenomenologically constituted, which is to say that historical time can be phenomenologically constituted. But this isn’t Husserl’s interest in his discussion of internal time consciousness. Husserl is primarily interested in how time unfolds in the present. His preferred example to illustrate temporality is listening to a melody:

“When a melody sounds, for example, the individual tone does not utterly disappear with the cessation of the stimulus or of the neural movement it excites. When the new tone is sounding, the preceding tone has not disappeared without leaving a trace. If it had, we would be quite incapable of noticing the relations among the successive tones; in each moment we would have a tone, or perhaps an empty pause in the interval between the sounding of two tones, but never the representation of a melody.”

The “trace” left by the preceding tone Husserl calls “retention.” He eventually makes a distinction between primary memory and secondary memory. Retention is primary memory. Husserl uses the imaginative imagine of a comet to illustrate retention. He writes:

“During the time that a motion is being perceived, a grasping-as-now takes place moment by moment; and in this grasping, the actually present phase of the motion itself becomes constituted. But this now-apprehension is, as it were, the head attached to the comet’s tail of retentions relating to the earlier now-points of the motion.”

And,

“We characterized primary memory or retention as a comet’s tail that attaches itself to the perception of the moment.”

Recollection, on the other hand, is secondary memory that involves a kind of re-living of an experience afresh, rather than the retention of an experience as it is being pushed down into the past. In addition to retention, we also have the temporally symmetrical experience of protention, which is primary expectation, analogous to primary memory: “Every process that constitutes its object originally is animated by protentions that emptily constitute what is coming as coming, that catch it and bring it toward fulfillment.” To elaborate on Husserl’s comet metaphor, we could liken temporal experiences to the passage of a comet around the sun, with the sun as the present and the comet’s tail always streaming out away from the sun as it approaches. This doesn’t work well as a literal interpretation, but I think you can probably get the right impression.

Another way to think about this account of time consciousness is in terms of the punctiform present. In my episode on G. H. Mead I mentioned the idea of the punctiform present and its contrast to the specious present, that is to say, the distinction between the present as an ideally dimensionless instant that is the boundary between past and future, the punctiform present, and the apparent width of the present, which is the specious present. In a strict interpretation of the punctiform present, there could be no perception of a melody as a melody, that is to say, a sequence of musical tones that stand in relation to each other, because only one musical tone at a time could occupy the present, and it would occupy the present to the exclusion of all else, in splendid isolation. There’d be no melody, only a sequence of disconnected musical tones. In the conceptual framework that Husserl constructs for time, we could define the specious present as the present extended into the past as far as retention, and extended into the future as far as protention. Outside the scope of the specious present, Husserl writes of temporal phenomena receding and being pushed deeper down into the past:

“…the now changes into a past; and as it does so, the whole running-off continuity of pasts belonging to the preceding point moves ‘downwards’ uniformly into the depths of the past.”

And Husserl makes the connection between this settling of the present into the depths of the past and constituting objective time:

“…in the flow of time, in the continuous sinking down into the past, a nonflowing, absolutely fixed, identical, objective time becomes constituted” (section 31)

This downward movement of former nows into the past Husserl later describes as sedimentation. His discussion of sedimentation isn’t directly tied to his writings on time consciousness, but we can easily see how the two are connected. This is one bridge between Husserl’s two philosophies of history. In another manuscript often included as an appendix to The Crisis of European Sciences, and known as “The Origin of Geometry,” Husserl wrote:

“…all of [our results] have the mobility of sedimented traditions that are worked upon, again and again, by an activity of producing new structures of meaning and handing them down. Existing in this way, they extend enduringly through time, since all new acquisitions are in turn sedimented and become working materials.”

And Husserl makes explicit the connection between the sedimented past and history:

“…history is from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning.”

So now we’ve made it from time consciousness to history, through the descent of former nows into eventual sedimentation as objective time. In another manuscript, this known as “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” Husserl described the experience of the limits of the individual’s experience unified with the experiences of others to extend the individual’s scope:

“…knowing that I have finally arrived at the borders of Germany, then arriving at the French, Danish, etc. territories. I have not paced off and become acquainted with what lies in the horizon, but I know that others have become acquainted with a piece further on, then again others yet another piece—objectivation of a synthesis of actual experiential fields which mediately produces the idea of Germany, Germany within the boundaries of Europe, and gives rise to an idea of Europe itself, etc.—ultimately of the earth. The idea of the earth comes about as a synthetic unity in a manner analogous to the way in which the experiential fields of a single person are unified in continuous and combined experience. Except that, analogously, I appropriate to myself the reports of others, their descriptions and ascertainments, and frame all-inclusive ideas.”

The reports of others may come to us as geographical dispatches that relate to us that which we have not ourselves experienced since it lies beyond our scope of acquaintance, but the reports of others may also come to us from the past. What Husserl has here described as the idea of Earth as a synthetic unity is what Spengler called “the world as nature,” and which he contrasted to “the world as history.” The same Husserlian observation about geography concerning the world as nature holds for reports of the past for the world as history. History is a synthetic unity of the world of the past, reconstructed from continuous and combined experience. I appropriate the past reports of others and I frame all-inclusive ideas drawing from them, i.e, all inclusive ideas about the past, i.e., history.

The essay from which I just quoted, “Foundational Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” is known for its paradoxical critique of Copernicanism. Husserl knew he was trolling his readers, and this gives the essay an interesting flavor, but I’m going to use it to make a Copernican point, I don’t think Husserl would entirely disagree with me. First, I have return to the earlier problem I described of finding the objective within the subjective, which was our point of departure, and which indeed is the point of departure for all phenomenology. This problem dogged Husserl throughout his work, and it returned again in section 53 of The Crisis of European Sciences, where Husserl called it “the paradox of human subjectivity”:

“Universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity, everything that exists at all, is resolved, can obviously be nothing other than mankind; and the latter is undeniably a component part of the world. How can a component part of the world, its human subjectivity, constitute the whole world, namely, constitute it as its intentional formation, one which has always already become what it is and continues to develop, formed by the universal interconnection of intentionally accomplishing subjectivity, while the latter, the subjects accomplishing in cooperation, are themselves only a partial formation within the total accomplishment?”

After laying out the paradox, Husserl attempted a resolution in section 54b, where he wrote:

“As primal ego, I constitute my horizon of transcendental others as cosubjects within the transcendental intersubjectivity which constitutes the world.”

This is another example of Husserl’s phenomenological jargon which, to non-phenomenologists, seems too self-referential to be helpful. I’m going to try to put this in my own terms, and that’s where Copernicus comes in. In this year’s episode on Copernicus I discussed what I call Copernican complementarity. When we de-center ourselves from the world we’re able to identify familiar parts of our world with the distant and unfamiliar, which, prima facie, doesn’t seem to be relevant to us. In this way we come to understand that our sun is a star, seen near to hand, and every star is a sun in turn, seen from a great distance. Our sun and another star—I should add the qualification of another star of spectral type G on its main sequence—are qualitatively identical, though they are numerically distinct and lie at a great distance from each other. Similarly, Earth is a planet, and every planet is a potential Earth, in the sense of being a potential perspective from which to view the universe. This reciprocity of sun and star, or Earth and planet, is what I call Copernican complementarity, and we can also apply this Copernican complementarity to the de-centering of the self from an account of the world from the point of view of subjectivity, which is the beginning of the beginning that is phenomenology.

In this way I can formulate a response to Husserl’s paradox of human subjectivity by asserting that I am a self, and every self is an “I.” That is to say, the other selves that I encounter are each an I for himself or herself, and for them, seeing the world as I do from the perspective of being an “I,” I am one of the selves that they encounter in the world. These selves and their sense of being an “I,” of being a locus of subjective self-awareness, is complementary: What is true of me as an “I” is true of them as an “I” and, vice versa, what is true of them as an “I” is true of me as an “I.” This Copernican de-centering of the self, and the de-centering of the world constructed from the point of view of an individual experience of constituting internal time-consciousness, is what makes it possible to formulate the synthetic unity of history derived from the reports of other selves, many of them long dead, and many yet to be born. And this, I think, is Husserl’s “other” philosophy of history, his unconventional philosophy of history derived from his phenomenology of internal time-consciousness.

I found it to be intellectually fruitful to think about Husserl’s phenomenology of time from the perspective of philosophy of history. In preparing this episode I worked through a lot of ideas, some of which may someday appear here if they eventually prove their value as analytical instruments. That is to say, there are many opportunities here for expansion and elaboration of this unconventional philosophy of history. At the same time, the account that I’ve given of Husserl’s treatment of time in relation to history is not without its problems and there’re numerous ellipses in the account that we would want to make good if this philosophy of history were to be further developed. For example, a much more detailed account is necessary of the sinking of past nows below the threshold of retention, and subsequently becoming available for recollection and eventually sedimentation.

Also, speaking more generally, thinking about Husserl’s phenomenology of time in relation to philosophy of history has made me aware of the need for a philosophical account of memory, which is a connecting link between time and history. Husserl’s distinction between primarily and secondary memory, which we can also call the distinction between retention and recollection, is a useful contribution to the articulation of memory, but much more remains to be done. On a final mythological note, in classical mythology, recall that the nine Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, that is to say, the children of Zeus and the goddess memory, and one of these children was Clio, the Muse of History. For the ancients, memory was the mother of both the arts and the sciences—recalling that, in addition to Clio, the Muse of History, there was also Urania, the Muse of Astronomy.

---

Video Presentation

geopolicraticus

A post shared by @geopolicraticus

https://rumble.com/v6rud3l-husserls-other-philosophy-of-history.html

https://odysee.com/@Geopolicraticus:7/Husserl%E2%80%99s_Other_Philosophy_of_History:6

Podcast Edition

---