Abstract

For more than a century, phenomenology’s relation to history has remained a problem for phenomenological analysis. This can in part be attributed to the circumstances surrounding the beginnings of phenomenology. As Europe moved increasingly toward world war at the turn of the 20th century, a growing consciousness of the historical relativity of all values and knowledge spread throughout the continent, leading Ernst Troeltsch to speak of the “crisis of historicism” (Rand 1964, 504-5). In this same context, Edmund Husserl framed phenomenological analysis in opposition to history. While Husserl recognized the “tremendous value” that history has to offer philosophical thinking, he believed that a purely historical reduction of consciousness necessarily results in the relativity of historical understanding itself, like a serpent that bites its own tail (Husserl 2002, 280). If phenomenology was to be a genuine science, it had to attempt a phenomenological reduction which would seize upon the essence of our historical being, i.e., our essence as beings that exist within history and are inseparable from it. What was required over and beyond a historical understanding of lived experience was an analysis of the structure of historicity itself (293-4).