The line of argument runs thus: from an analysis of how the concept of time is first introduced — ἀριθμεῖν vs. Zeitigung — through the observation that in both cases the activity of consciousness precedes time, or at least precedes any concept of it, to the temporalization of noemata. Before individual consciousness turns to the operations of active synthesis, it always already deals with the objects of the world — not, the sentence had meant to say, as isolated data before an empty gaze, but as something already sorted, already shaped by a hand not its own.
The activity of consciousness, in other words, is always already immersed in an inhabited world.
Which means:
- consciousness operates upon givennesses supplied by passive synthesis — among them not only discrete objects but the very types of connection between objects;
- even the most superficial affection of consciousness by a single object points to a differentiating capacity independent of, and chronologically prior to, the active work of consciousness;
- this fundamental differentiating capacity — the capacity to draw something out of the pre-predicative horizon at all — is nothing other than the mode of existence of the inhabited world itself, always already given in the primal difference of figure and ground.
Our inquiry proceeds from the claim that before individual consciousness, in its active labor, sets out to synthesize the absolute temporal flow, some understanding of time is already available to it — packaged, folded away — in the form of a pre-predicative world that is, first, shared with concrete others, and second, formed by the activity of those others.
Our initial intuition is that it is precisely the mode of existence — the mode of temporalization — of these extra-individual, collective elements of individual consciousness that furnishes the most fundamental experience of history: in just this sense man is historical. The temporality of historical time, at once concrete and extra-individual, is given to consciousness mediately — mediately, since only through the givenness of pre-predicative objects — before consciousness begins its own active labor of constituting the absolute temporal flow that it unconditionally is. Subjects–objects, object–subject: the formula reverses on itself, and whoever traces the reversal can no longer simply coincide with the mundane, historical ego caught inside it —
— at which point, the reader should know, someone has entered the room. Landgrebe, unannounced (phenomenology’s doors never having quite settled whose room it is), takes the chair nearest the formula just closed and worries it like a bone. Subjects–objects, object–subject — he reads it twice, taps the page, and asks the question the formula was built to defer: whose types are these? The differentiating capacity that the third point makes into the very mode of being of the inhabited world — the Unterscheidungsvermögen, if we are to use the word correctly — does not discriminate in a vacuum. It discriminates by type, and the type, as Erfahrung und Urteil was at some pains to show, is never a first appearance: every object given pre-predicatively is given already under a typical familiarity sedimented from prior experience — not necessarily this consciousness’s own, since the second premise has already insisted that the world so typified was formed by the activity of concrete others before the individual ego arrived to inherit it. So far Landgrebe nods; it is more or less his own thesis, handed back to him in a borrowed idiom.
Then the difficulty, and here he leans forward. If the sedimented typicality of the pre-predicative is thoroughly historical — built up generatively, transmitted, revised by generations of concrete others, never a fixed eidetic inventory — then the reduction cannot simply suspend the world’s general thesis and leave the phenomenologizing I standing free of it, as Fink’s meditator is required to do. The Entmenschung Fink asks for — stripping the mundane, anthropological determinations from the I performing the epoché, so that what remains is the disinterested onlooker, no longer a man among men — presupposes a clean seam between the thoroughly worldly mundane ego and the worldless transcendental spectator uncovered beneath it. But the argument has just shown that the material of passive synthesis — the very stuff the spectator inspects once the natural attitude is suspended — arrives already dressed in historical sediment. The epoché brackets the positing of the world; it does not, and on these premises cannot, unpack the typicality through which anything is given at all. Strip away the anthropological man by all means — the spectator left behind still sees by means of types no reduction manufactured and none can fully dissolve, since they are the condition for there being any pre-predicative datum for him to describe in the first place.
Here one ought to let him finish and take one’s leave, but the gloss will not be resisted — for the objection, properly heard, is not a refutation but a promotion. If de-humanizing does not deliver an ego free of history but only an ego whose historicity has migrated one storey down, from the mundane to the transcendental, from the man who has a past to the passive syntheses that already, prior to any man, organize a past for him — then “man is by nature historical” was always too timid a formula, a concession to anthropology when the claim wanted to be transcendental. Fink’s spectator does not escape history by climbing out of the world; he only discovers that history was never a worldly predicate to begin with, but the mode of temporalization of the very apparatus that makes a world — any world, his included — possible.