Phenomenology and the Problem of History: A Study of Husserl's Transcendental Philosophy

Preface to the New Edition

Preface to the New Edition I am pleased that Northwestern University Press has decided to reissue Phenomenology and the Problem of History, first published in 1974. The book grew out of my work on the translation of Husserl’s Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology), published by Northwestern in 1970. In the same year, J. N. Findlay’s translation of Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) was published. Husserl’s most important early work and his most important late work were thus made available to the English-speaking public in the same year. It marked the beginning of a flood of Husserl translations that has continued to the present day, reflecting the ever-growing interest in Husserl’s work in English-speaking countries. It also set off a series of Anglophone efforts to figure Husserl out. Phenomenology and the Problem of History was (I think) the first book in English to focus on the Crisis text. The act of translating, as anyone who has done it knows, establishes an intimate connection to a text that the mere reader can never experience. What struck me first about the Crisis was that, though it looked like a finished book in the handsome Husserliana edition of 1954 and was cited and referred to as such by commentators, it was actually a fragment , a text in progress that Husserl was struggling with in his very last years. The more I thought about the problems of the text— the rough shape it was in, the incoherence of structure brought about by the insertion of long sections into previously composed chapters, right down to grammatical difficulties and word-forword repetitions—the more it seemed to me that the problems were deeper than they first appeared, that Husserl’s struggles with this text were not just compositional but conceptual. Immersing himself in the problem of history and reflecting on the historical character of science and philosophy as a way of justifying the turn to transcendental phenomenology, Husserl had opened the door to the kind of historical relativism he had rejected in his earlier [xi] work. Though he may not have realized it explicitly, his reflections on history were threatening to undermine the very idea of transcendental phenomenology he was trying to justify by their means. Thus, as I put it in the preface to the original edition, “In his thoroughly honest and disinterested way, Husserl, in reflecting on consciousness, was finally forced by the Sache selbst to take history seriously, and . . . his death found him only at the beginning of the effort to combine the results with phenomenology in its transcendental interpretation.” This realization lends to the difficult text of the Crisis a dramatic and poignant character that Husserl may not have envisaged when he started it. Here he is fighting for the life of his phenomenological project, not only against its enemies from without but against problems inherent in the project itself—or so I argued in this book. Yet Husserl’s observations and investigations of history and historicity retain their validity and importance , whatever their relation to his transcendental project. Many other excellent studies of the Crisis in English have followed . Especially worthy of mention are Husserl and the Question of Relativism by Gail Soffer; Husserl, Heidegger and the Crisis of Philosophical Responsibility by R. Philip Buckley; and Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s “Crisis of European Sciences” by James Dodd. These and other authors have not all been convinced by my interpretation , but I hope my book has at least encouraged a careful study of Husserl’s remarkable work and an awareness of some of its problems. Husserl’s efforts certainly had an effect on the development of my own work in subsequent years. His studies set off a reflection on history and its relation to phenomenology that has not ended yet. They led to my conviction that phenomenology could contribute to the discussion of narrative that had taken center stage in the philosophy of history in the 1970s and ’80s—something I argued for in Time, Narrative and History. In this book, in many of the essays I have written since, and in my current work on the relation of experience and history, my attention has moved away from Husserl interpretation toward a more systematic approach to the philosophy of history. But I have remained convinced that phenomenology has an important contribution to make to the understanding of...