Every time I pass Fink on his lonely walks through the Lorettoberg parkland, he mutters something entirely unintelligible — a habit of his, and none of my business, except that yesterday the wind was strong enough, and the air damp enough, to carry the words to me regardless of whose business they were. The trinity, he said. The unity of the three I’s, he said. Now, one ought to be cautious when Neoplatonists start speaking of trinities — and so I was, enumerating, somewhat slowly, on my own account: there is the human I, standing in the natural attitude; there is the transcendental constituting I; and there is a transcendental phenomenologizing I — three, at any rate, in the structure of the reduction. Whether this was truly everything the man kept repeating to himself on that hill, I could not then say, and, if I am honest, cannot say now either.
The theory of the method of the phenomenological reduction, so his muttering seemed to insist, has to treat thematically the problem of the unity of the three I‘s.
***
No argument occurs to me — none sufficient — for why phenomenology should take a special interest in history, preferring it above all the other sciences that comb through the world of the natural attitude. Sooner should one suspect the historians of philosophy themselves: driven either by bad taste (the itch to reduce everything, somehow, to domestic banality, and so to discover in phenomenology’s transcendental claim nothing more than the psychic constitution of its practitioners), or by the fashions of contextual reading (which report that philosophy of history has won a modest synchronic popularity, and a devastating diachronic one, in certain faculties during interwar years), or simply by vanity — these are the ones to suspect first, the ones who want to find in phenomenology a special interest in history because, of course, history could never be uninteresting!
Let it be granted, then: not the history of historians — the ontic world sliced out of the natural attitude — and not history as explanatory genesis, should be of any specific interest at this point. Why, then, any interest in history for a phenomenologist? To the extent she aims at transcendental philosophy — and if we assume, as we should, that the first transcendental move is that from a straightforward consideration of the world to a consideration of the structure of our thought about the world; if she accepts that “objects must conform to our knowledge” rather than the reverse — she ought rather to be concerned that it is precisely these structures which are subject to historical change. If she does not want to hypostatize structures that belong to a concrete historical situation, what is she about to do instead? Is there truly no way for transcendental philosophy to yield to the compelling demand that it take history seriously, without seeing itself destroyed in the process? — I have walked around this question twice now without answering it, which the reader will have noticed, and which is itself a kind of answer, though not the one required. Very well, then, plainly: it seems that either the philosophical importance of history must be denied — a difficult task, in our day — or the transcendental inquiry itself must be given up. And yet, once again: these questions, however legitimate on their face, look suspiciously like questions of professional prestige rather than questions of the transcendental inquiry as such.
And beyond that — since I am confessing things — if asked outright, I would take the natural sciences over any Geisteswissenschaft, should the conversation really reduce to a preference among Gegenstände. Charming, all of it.
Already in Ideas I, Husserl: “We are not talking here in terms of history. This word for origins neither forces nor authorizes us to think of any genesis understood in the sense of psychological causality or in the sense of a historical development…” Origin, once it reappears, reappears only at another stage of thought — properly transcendental — where it no longer means historico-causal genesis, but something else; and this new meaning, introduced beyond the preliminary, ahistorical treatment of phenomena, would in fact hold a promise of yielding a truly phenomenological notion of history — the one discovered as necessary only after the reduction has been properly performed. If there is any reason to speak of history beyond and over the ontic, that reason ought to be clearly stated; so far I have mostly encountered a preferential treatment of the ontic domain, from which history has benefited disproportionately, and without warrant. Taking history “seriously” does not mean granting some ontic region more weight than any other, for a project of transcendental philosophy. Taking history “seriously” means refraining from admitting any “history” at all, until it has been properly obtained after, and beyond, the reduction.
Here, reader, a rule — let it stand alone a moment, unaccompanied by argument, the way rules prefer to stand: I have carried this one about with me longer than I have carried most of my opinions, and unlike most of my opinions it has never once needed revising. Never operate with a notion you have not yourself obtained as necessary.
In its preliminary stage — the one still content with an object-oriented reading of the intentional act, of intentionality’s own act-orientedness — the reduction serves mainly as a correction to the naivete of the natural attitude. Here let Ricoeur speak for me, since he says it better than I could — probably in a fit of sentimentality, but better nonetheless: “In correcting itself about this naivete , consciousness discovers that it is itself giving, sense-giving (Sinngebende) (I, § 55). The reduction does not exclude the presence of the world; it takes nothing back. It does not even suspend the primacy of intuition in every cognition. After the reduction consciousness continues seeing, but without being absorbed in this seeing, without being lost in it. Rather, the very seeing itself is discovered as a doing, as a producing, once Husserl even says ‘as a creating.’ Husserl would be understood — and the one who thus understands him would be a phenomenologist — if the intentionality which culminates in seeing were recognized to be a creative vision.”
Call this reduction what, from here on, it will have to be called: incomplete. Preliminary, and nothing more. Talk of history, at this stage, stays exactly there — preliminary — and at its very best clarifies only the relations between the transcendental ego and some given region of objects, without ever saying why this region, and not another, gets to be privileged today.
Let’s go back for a second to the reduction — we left it, if the reader recalls, in a condition it did not much enjoy being left in: incomplete, and merely preliminary. If one is not in a sentimental Ricoeurian mood, one would also recall another important definition — that the reduction signifies “reduction to ‘pure’ consciousness,” the “‘purifying’ of my humanity” — and especially “of my psyche” — “to the pure something of the ‘psychic side’ of that object, ‘I as man,’ which holds good for me in the natural attitude.” How extensive is that purifying, and what falls after it? And of no less importance is the question of who, or what, accomplishes this “purification” — who is performing the reflection in which all of this is realized?
Fink replies: this “purification” “nullifies man himself; man un-humanizes [entmenscht] himself in performing the epoché.” In performing this same “epoché,” in following “the transcendental tendency that awakens in man and drives him to inhibit all acceptednesses,” there also emerges the function of the “transcendental onlooker,” who both performs the epoché and reflects upon that performance; and this “onlooker” is also actual in the person of the very same human who is attempting to exercise the epoché and reduction, and yet is the one whose humanness the epoché places under annulment. In a word: the humanness of the human “object” being reflected upon, and of the very act of thought that exercises the epoché and then turns to reflect methodically and critically upon the whole action of phenomenological disclosure, is to be — in some methodologically robust way — undone.
Beyond the preliminary phenomenology lies post-preliminary phenomenology.
Amusing.
In the world beyond the preliminary, the reduction runs in both directions, and the action of un-humanization — which takes place in myself, as actual, living, reflecting agent — is equivalent to the suspension of acceptance of the being of the human entity that I normally am.
Reduction as a reversal of constitutive origination.
In the preliminary reduction — and for this text, let old pal Ricoeur be stuck exemplifying it — the dialectic seemed intractable between the transcendental ego and the sense that binds and unites history, of which it is itself an agent; in other words, between the encompassing and the encompassed, between historical man constituted as absolute consciousness on the one side, and, on the other, “the sense that history develops includes the phenomenological man who effects this consciousness.” Let us name the error first: the great error of preliminary phenomenology, Fink says and we repeat after him, is its tendency to explain the originative out of the features of the originated — to explain the historicity of the transcendental ego, of absolute consciousness, on the basis of properties that belong to the history this very consciousness constitutes: relativity, singularity, entanglement with politics and the past, however accidental these may appear. This is, in fact, the exact line Husserl pursues when he denies that any philosophy of history could apply to phenomenological procedures and findings properly executed. And here, too, he is wrong. In post-preliminary phenomenology, we push the reduction further, and are thus finally able to explicate the originated by seeing, constitutively, within it a moment of antecedency that — as originating — is in principle free of any features belonging to the originated, save that of its originativity.
Can the speculative proto-relationship of origin and originatedness be decided, in principle, with the methodological resources of Husserlian phenomenology as such? We are not going there yet. A promise — and an author’s promises are worth exactly as much as his reader’s patience allows, which is why I will not dwell on it — let us first explore the decisive move that comes before.
The most radical reading of historicity discoverable within the incomplete, preliminary reduction is the one uncovered by pursuing Rückfrage properly — only in the one direction evidential intuition allows: the regressive direction — and which therefore finds, at the end of its questioning, nothing but the lebendige Gegenwart, the living present: a streaming now, thick with retentions and protentions, populated by a universe of monads co-existing in the present tense. History(-icity) — and although one could write several monographs on the proper application of terms in this debate, I dare say it hardly matters at this point — gets let into this present only because the present already carries sediment: habitualities, prior acts, a style. But sediment is not historicity as a constituting move. Sediment is what historicity leaves behind once it has already happened elsewhere, in a dimension the regressive reduction was never built to reach. Husserl’s own vocabulary for that elsewhere — Urstiftung, Endstiftung, the Sedimentierung of sense across generations, tradition as the forgetting of its own origin — gestures at exactly this. But the gesture stays ontic.
It borrows the grammar of founding and forgetting from a mundane model of tradition — guild, archive, discipline — and never asks what founding, what forgetting, could mean for a consciousness that is not, strictly, in time, but constitutive of time’s very taking-place: its own Zeitigung. Which is why Husserl — correctly sensing that the regressive tools cannot ground a philosophy of history — draws from this the wrong conclusion: that no transcendental historicity is available to phenomenology at all, instead of the right one: that a different method is owed.
So: at the preliminary stage, history can exist in only one of two humiliating capacities. As the concrete object-domain of the natural-attitude sciences. Or as a rudiment of the ego’s own development — admissible, this second one, only on condition that we accept the familiar parallelism between the operations of the transcendental ego and the individual psyche. Refuse that parallelism, and what is left in your hands is a mediocre autobiography — biography got up in transcendental costume, and a bad fit at that.
It is from much the same premise that Carr — the devoted reader of Crisis — takes the one-sided reduction and multiplies it, instead of completing it. Instead of pushing the transcendental reduction through to its far side, he breeds reductions. Carr introduces the historical reduction (his term), which makes historical prejudices thematic by reliving the tradition in a specific, critical way — not the “objective” history of ideas, but a reconstruction oriented toward the philosopher’s own situation, aimed at discovering what he takes for granted as “the point” of philosophy. Again, here is the reducing Ego — impeccable! A second regression grafted onto the first is still a regression. It historicizes the philosopher’s own situatedness — what he takes, unreflectively, as the point of philosophy — something rather to the taste of present-day scholarship, I must admit — but it never leaves the sphere of ownness long enough to ask about the constitution of history as such, prior to any philosopher having had a situation worth historicizing. Thus Cartesian-style phenomenology repeats its own gesture, epoché after epoché, never once turning to face the external horizon it keeps declining to name.
We should conclude here that the historicity of the transcendental ego cannot be described in the categories of mundane history. Conversely — and this is the reversal that carries the whole argument — mundane history must certainly be described, in the very manner its objectivity gets constituted, on the basis of the already-established properties of the generative, constitutive, transcendental historicity that produces it.
The functioning of intentionality in the ultimate, post-preliminary sense: the stratum of temporalizing proto-constitution. Intentionality as the structural-dynamic core of originative temporalization. (And here, in this one place, and nowhere earlier, does it make sense to return to Dilthey and to the concept of the stream — the creative stream: the essence of life is creation, world-creation, a constitutive being-forming.) That the stream of experiencing consciousness is essentially temporal does not mean that this experiential consciousness is itself the source and basis of temporality — for consciousness itself is held and embraced by the very temporality that conditions its streaming.
As always, the thing to grasp is the movement being proposed, and to grasp it at the level of principle: movement out beyond.
When I suggest we go OUT BEYOND, I owe the reader an itinerary. Call it a map, if you like — though I’d rather call it directions, since a map pretends to hand you the country itself, and I have nothing so solid to offer:
FROM: The absolute time-constituting flow of consciousness discovered at the preliminary stage — the flow that preceded and conditioned the unity of continuous appearance for all objects in consciousness (and for all acts of intending turned to those objects via their appearances) —
TO: A clear distinction between (1) temporality as experienced time (i.e., as “internal time-consciousness”), and (2) “temporality” as primordial, constituting “action.”
With the question of proto-temporalization standing firm — load-bearing — we would be close to something that resembles a phenomenological concept of history.
The Meditations, Fink says, cover only the first stage of regressive phenomenology, aimed at disclosing transcendental subjectivity to the extent that it is given in and through the phenomenological reduction. What is given in the reduction is simply a universe of monads co-existing in the present: I, as transcendental ego, and the transcendental “others” who are demonstrated and attested to in my experience of someone else. But whether this universe of monads has the structure of a “universe,” whether it represents an open or closed plurality, whether to the fellow humans that are given mediately in the “phenomenon of the world” (others in the past, those not here present in the mode of the present, gegenwärtig-anwesenden) there actually correspond transcendental “others” — we do not know any of that in this first stage.
… we have to move beyond the regressive style of intentional-constitutive clarification. Simply returning to the “internal horizon of constituting life” does not do it <…> What is required here is rather a whole movement out beyond the reductive givenness of transcendental life, what is required is an examination of the “external horizon of the reductive givenness” of transcendental life, an examination that finds its necessary motivation in the at first unresolvable “problems at the margins” of regressive phenomenology, and which is predelineated by that motivation. An examination of this kind, however, insofar as it abandons the basis of transcendental “givenness,” no longer exhibits things intuitively, but necessarily proceeds constructively.
This, and nothing milder, is the price of the historicity we were after.