HUSSERL'S LATER THINKING CONVERGING INTO A PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY OR THE THEME OF HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS IN HUSSERL'S LATER WRITINGS ESPECIALLY IN THE CRISIS OF EUROPEAN SCIENCES

Abstract

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) is most well known as a matematician, or a logician, and then famed a the initiator of a phenomenological movement. He has been accused of promoting transcendental indealism to the point of solipsism. His focus on pure consciousness has been received as a method which operates above its historical context and straight to the 'seeing essences.' This is partly because of his problematic wording in his earlier writings. However, his last published (yet unfinished) work, The Crisis of European Sciences (Belgrade, 1936), is certainly a very different introduction to his phenomenology. In this publication he struggles with the issue of Life-world, the world we live in, before it gets to be described abstractly, in a scientific way. One aspect of our experience in this Life-world is our consciousness of internal time (not the clock-time, not even a simple measuring of duration). This investigation into the consciousness of internal time, impinges his definition of pure consciousness. Consciousness is embedded in internal-time-consciousness. Consciousness cannot operate "outside" time. In this line of thinking Husserl almost "by accident" came to formulate his philosophy of history, for which is so far much less known. Husserl's 'Philosophy of History' is his last contribution as a philosopher who had failed to systematize his teaching, as in his Erste Philosophie mss. of 1923-'24., and again in Cartesianische Meditationen, mss. 1929. which he has kept revising and ultimately dropping. Just as well in the latter case, since tempora mutantur and nos mutamus in illis, and so, as I will contend, his new conderns with history emerged. This is my thesis presented here, and it is my own original research, that Hussel's philsosphy of history is not only worthy of reconstruction but a very significant aspect of his mature phenomenology.