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

Preface

Preface THIS BOOK EXPLORES, through a study of Husserl, the relationship between transcendental philosophy and what might be called history-oriented philosophy. The choice of such a broad theme, as well as its relation to Husserl, needs some advance justification and clarification in general terms. A glance at some of the ironies of the contemporary scene in philosophy suggests a need for such an exploration. Heirs to the British tradition, which had little use for anything called "transcendental philosophy" during its several heydays on the Continent, now often embrace the term or some of the leading ideas associated with it. In 1960 Erik Stenius interpreted Wittgenstein in the Tractatus as essentially a transcendental philosopher of the Kantian sort, i.e., one whose aim "is to indicate the a priori form of experience which is 'shown' by all meaningful language";1 a similar interpretation was extended by Specht,2 and more recently by Toulmin,3 to the Investigations as well. While the approval of the patriarch was thus being assured, contemporary lights were more or less openly pursuing a philosophical program in the transcendental manner. Strawson, for example, introduces his project in Individuals with a paraphrase of Kant's very definition of transcendental philosophy-"to deI . Erik Stenius, Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Oxford: Blackwell's, I960), p. 220. 2. Ernst Konrad Specht, The Foundations of Wittgenstein's Late Philosophy, trans. D. E. Walford (New York: Barnes & Noble, I969), pp. I76 ff. The book appeared in German in I963. 3. Stephen Toulmin, "Ludwig Wittgenstein," Encounter, XXXII, no. I (Jan., I969), 62. [xvii] xviii / PREFACE scribe the actual structure of our thought about the world" 4_ then goes on to honor Kant with a whole book.5 Hampshire6 argues , in effect, to the conditions of the possibility of language in a way which obviously owes a great deal to the founder of the transcendental tradition.1 Meanwhile, Continental philosophy has for some time been characterized by a movement not toward but away from transcendental philosophy. Present-day currents have their common source in a critique and rejection of the two forms of transcendental philosophy which dominated the philosophical scene in the first decades of this century: Neo-Kantianism and Husserlian phenomenology. Heidegger, Jaspers, and Scheler attacked their teachers and predecessors in Germany. They were followed by the younger existentialists across the Rhine, where a simultaneous left-wing Hegel revival lent ammunition to the anti-transcendental attack. A similar Hegel-and-Marx revival in Germany's Frankfurt school (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse) was quickly isolated and exiled during the Nazi years, but has recently achieved a position of considerable importance in its native country. The Frankfurt school has made it clear that it is no friend of Heidegger's or of the French existentialists' but shares with them its historic point of departure in the criticism of transcendental philosophy. Thus, with transcendental philosophy, or some variation of it, apparently coming into vogue into the Anglo-Saxon world, it might be wise to ask why some leading European philosophers have long since thought it depasse. It would be an oversimplification , of course, to suppose that all the reasons are the same, just as it is overly simple to range Husserl and Rickert, not to mention Wittgenstein and Strawson, together under the banner "transcendental philosophy." Heidegger and the Frankfurt school are poles apart, while Merleau-Ponty and later Sartre, with their ambiguous Marxism, perhaps belong somewhere in the middle. 4. P. F. Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959), p. 9. 5. The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966). 6. Stuart Hampshire, Thought and Action (New York: Viking Press, 1960). 7. S. Korner summarizes what he calls "the recent remarkable revival of Kantian ideas and modes of thought in analytiC philosophy ," in "Transcendental Trends in Recent Philosophy," The Journal of Philosophy, LXIII, no. 19 (1966), 551-61. Preface / xix Still, in the matter of their common rejection of the transcendental tradition, these disparate figures also agree on a fundamental reason for that rejection. Expressed in widely differing terms, and with different emphasis, it comes down to this: transcendental philosophy in all its traditional forms is rejected primarily because of its inability to come to terms with history or historicity. This is what was meant at the beginning by the term ''historyoriented philosophy": the philosopher's attempt to come to terms with history or historicity, to take history seriously as a philosophical problem. Naturally, transcendental philosophy is able to treat...