312 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHENOMENOLOGY
sciences also requires phenomenological clarification.
The basic question concerns how nature is a necessary
and indispensable part of the cultural world and the
lifeworld.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Boeckh, August. Enzyklopădie und Methodenlehre der
philologischen Wissenschaften [1877/86]. Ed. Ernst Bra-
tuschek. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1966 (reprint); abridged trans.
as On Interpretation and Criticism. Trans. Jean Paul
Prichard. Norman, Oklahoma: University Press, 1968.
Dithey, Wilhelm. Der Aufhau der geschichtlichen Welt in den
Geisteswissenschafien. Gesammelte Schrijien 1, 1914.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. 2nd. ed.
Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1965; Truth and Method. Trans.
Garrct Bardcn and John Cumrning. New York: Seabury
Press, 1975.
Husserl, Edmund. Phănomenologische P.1ychologie. Ed.
Walter Bicmel. Husserliana 9. The Hague: Martinus
Nijhoff, 1962; 2nd rev. ed. 1968; Phenomenological Psy-
chology: Lectures, Summer Semeste1; 1925. Trans. John
Scanlon. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.
- . Zur Phănomenologie der Jntersuhjektivităt. 3 vo1s. Ed.
Iso Kern. Husserliana 13-15 Dordrecht: K1uwer, 1973.
Mohanty, Jitcndra Nath, ed. Phenomenology and the Human
Sciences. The Hague: Martnius Nijhoff, 1985.
Orth, Ernst Wolfgang, ed. Dilthey und die Philosophie der
Gegenwart. Freiburg: Karl Alber, 1985.
Ricceur, Paul. Le conflit des inte1pretations: Essais
d 'hernu!neutique. Paris: Editions du Seu il, 1969; The Con-
flict o( lnte1pretations. Trans. Don Ihde. Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 1974.
Seebohm, Thomas M. Zur Kritik der hermeneutischen Ver-
nunft. Bonn: Bouvier, 1972.
THOMAS M. SEEBOHM
UniversitătMainz
HISTORY In order to understand the complex
relationship between phenomenology and history, the
best place to begin is doubtless EDMUND HUSSERL 's essay
"Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft" ( 1911 ). Husserl
stands ready to unveil the "phenomenological grasp of
essence" (die phanomenologische Wesense1jassung) as
the culmination ofthe EIDETIC METHOD that will enable
philosophy to be at last what is has always wanted
but has so far failed to be: strict or rigorous science.
But readers are told very little there about that method;
they will have to wait for the ldeen zu einer reinen
Phanomenologie und phanomenologischen Philoso-
phie l ( 1913 ). Instead, the essay is polemic, deal ing
Lester Embree, Elizabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, Jose Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. McKenna,
Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology.
© 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
primarily with what Husserl considers the two greatest
threats in his day to the ideal of philosophy as rigor-
ous science and its realization. The first is "naturalistic
philosophy," which "falsifies" the ideal, i.e., pursues
the idea of rigor in the wrong way; and the second is
"historicism and Weltanschauungsphilosophie,"which
"weakens" and ultimately calls into question the pur-
suit ofthe ideal altogether.
In the latter case, some philosophers look at the his-
tory of thought and only see a series of failed attempts
to ascertain eterna! truth. With this assessment Husserl
wholeheartedly agrees. But then they move from that
to the conclusion that philosophy can never be more
than the expression of the Weltanschauung of its eul-
ture and its historical period. (Though he does not say
so directly, Husserl implicates WILHELM DILTHEY in this
move.) For Husserl this is an invalid inference and an
instance ofthe self-refuting relativism he had attacked
in the Logische Untersuchungen ( 1900-190 1). Philos-
ophy should stop mulling over its own past and get
on with its task. The history of philosophy is fine as
a branch of history, but should not be substituted for
philosophy itself. This is part of the meaning of the
injunction "to the matters themselves." It is reinforced
in the ldeen where Husserl tells us, even before intro-
ducing phenomenological bracketing, that we should
in effect "bracket" the entire history of philosophy.
Philosophy may in fact be in history, but its aim is to
transcend history toward the timeless essences that are
tobe grasped by phenomenology.
Of course, this does not prevent phenomenology
from attempting to grasp the essence of history itself,
and Husserl makes some early efforts in that direction.
"Geschichte" refers, like its English equivalent, both to
the course ofhuman events, principally in the past, and
to the discipline whose aim is to know those events.
In severa! ways Husserl is like Dilthey and the neo-
Kantians ofhis time: he abjures Hegelian-style specu-
lation about the grand sweep ofhistory, aims instead at
the clarification of historical knowledge, and consid-
ers history a HUMAN SCIENCE that cannot be reduced to
Of integrated with the NATURAL SCIENCES. History is an
empirica! discipline and thus deals with facts. But the
facts it is concerned with are not those of the natural
world. In ldeen ll [ 1912-15] Husserl works out the no-
tion ofthe spiritual or cultural world (geistige Welt) as
a distinct region of reality with its own a priori ontol-
 HISTORY
ogy and its way ofbeing constituted in consciousness.
Husserl 's approach throughout is to trace the basic con-
cepts ofscience back to the prescientific WORLD and the
attitudes we take toward it. The "natural attitude" of
ldeen 1 is subdivided in ldeen Il into the "naturalistic"
and the "personalistic" attitudes, and it is in the Jatter
that the human sciences have their source. The basic
entities here are not things, but persons and communi-
ties of persons, and the basic occurrences are experi-
ences, thoughts, and actions that stand under relations
of motivation rather than causality.
When these structures of personal and social exis-
tence are related to TIME, they reveal features we think
of as historical. Persons are not "in" time in the same
way that things and natural events are in time. They do
not simply persist through time, and the events of one
moment in one's life do not simply produce those of
the next causally. Rather, the past has meaning for the
person, and forms an intentiona! background or hori-
zon for present and future. Persons "survey" time and
think ofthemselves and the communities to which they
belong in terms of their past and fu ture.
By the time of the Cartesianische Meditationen
[ 1931] Husserl was sufficiently attentive to both the
social and historical aspects of conscious experience
that he attributes them to transcendental and not merely
to empirica! or "personal" consciousness. Constitution
is cumulative and requires GENETIC PHENOMENOLOGY;
the EGO is not merely an empty subjective pole but is
the substrate ofhabitualities. The ego constitutes itself
for itself, he says, "in the unity of a history." While
this statement suggests something like a personal or
individual history, Husserl goes on in the Fifth Med-
itation to a discussion of "personalities of a higher
order," i.e., social groups or communities conceived as
collective subjects that likewise constitute themselves
through their history (a theme already touched on in
the "Gemeingeist" manuscripts of a decade earlier).
This growing appreciation for the historical char-
acter of even transcendental subjectivity achieves its
fullest expression in Husserl 's last work, Die Krisis
der europaischen Wissenschaften und die transzen-
dentale Phanomenologie (1936). In part this may re-
flect the renewed influence of Dilthey. Though the lat-
ter had died in 1912, his collected works were being
published posthumously. In 1927 volume 7 appeared,
containing Dilthey's late manuscript on Der Au/bau
313
der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften
(The make-up ofthe historical world in the human sci-
ences, [ 191 0]). Husserl was acquainted with this vol-
ume at Jeast through the work of his assistant LUDWIG
LANDGREBE and of GEORG MISCH, who both pubJished
significant studies of Dilthey in relation to phenomen-
ology in those years. There is some irony in the fact that
Dilthey should have played a positive role here, since
he was the intended target of Husserl's early polemic
against historicism.
In any case, Husserl's concern with history emerges
in his last work out of his reflection on the sta tus and
significance of science. It is a mistake to think that the
scientific consciousness can simply transcend its con-
crete social situation and go directly to the TRUTH. The
pursuit oftheoretical truth is itself historical. Even if it
is the nature of consciousness to engage in this pursuit,
the individual always inherits it as an ongoing activ-
ity of the society in which he or she takes it up. The
incipient scientist also builds on the results already ob-
tained by others. Thus although a cognitive endeavor
such as science - even a "pure" or ideal discipline
like geometry - is pursued by individuals, it owes
its undertaking in each case, as well as its capacity to
advance, to the social context in which it exists. Each
inquirer depends on the sedimented acquisitions ofhis
or her predecessors.While the cognitive life ofthe indi-
vidual owes its birth to the social context, and depends
on the same context for its success, there is a negative
side to this dependence. The concepts and methods
taken over from the tradition can equally function as
prejudices that skew the individual 's perspective on the
subject matter. It can happen in any field that theoret-
ical progress requires not building on, but criticizing
and rejecting what is handed down. But even this takes
place against the background ofthe discipline's tacitly
accepted goals, problems, methods, and basic concepts.
Thus even conceived as a critica! enterprise opposed
to accepting anything on authority, science belongs to
a historical tradition.
In the Krisis Husserl recognizes that this analysis is
no less true of philosophy itself than it is of the other
disciplines. In the modern era philosophy has taken
over from the sciences its mathematical-physical con-
ception ofthe world and then failed to understand sub-
jectivity because it has tried to explain it causally as an
element within that world. Even KANT, who recognizes
314 ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHENOMENOLOGY
the constitutive role of subjectivity, sti li conceives of
the latter purely in relation to a scientifically construed
world. Thus there is a need to return to the LIFEWORLD
in which subjectivity has its home prior to science,
and in which the activity of science, and every other
cognitive activity, including philosophy itself, has its
point of departure. While the sciences do not need to
understand themselves philosophically in order to suc-
ceed, it is philosophy's task to understand them, and
this means tracing them back to their prescientific ori-
gins. But philosophy must likewise understand itself,
and must accordingly circle back on its own origins in
the lifeworld.
lfthe world-as-portrayed-by-science turns out tobe
a historically developed and thus in some sense contin-
gent phenomenon, the prescientific lifeworld, by con-
trast, seems universal and necessary. Yet Husserl rec-
ognizes that the lifeworld is itself historical in a less
obvious but more important way. Like the common-
sense world evoked by other philosophers with sim-
ilar concerns, the lifeworld turns out to contain the
sediments of past scientific accomplishments. The pre-
given, naively intuited world of any individual, inno-
cent of explicit theoretical interpretation, is therefore
a historically sedimented cultural world that may dif-
fer radically from the similarly naive world of another
culture or historical period.
Thus Husserlmoves from his early, rather hasty dis-
missal ofthe importance ofhistory, at least for philos-
ophy, to an almost obsessive preoccupation with it, to a
conception of consciousness as deeply and pervasively
historical at every level - prescientific and scientific,
individual and social. And he is led in this direction by
phenomenology itself, in his usual relentless pursuit
of die Sachen selbst. Yet this result is bound to raise
serious questions about the original idea of phenomen-
ology as rigorous science- that is, as the inquiry that
rises above historical contingency to attain universal
eidetic structures. Though Husserl in the Krisis is far
from giving up on the ideal - indeed, he presents
phenomenology with even more missionary zeal than
ever before- it is clear that he is struggling mightily
with some of the more disturbing implications of his
own conception of history.
Most of Husserl 's successors in the phenomenologi-
cal movement take over and develop further the con-
ception of historicity found in his late work. MAURICE
MERLEAU-PONTY especially, as well as PAUL RICCEUR, are
strongly inftuenced by the Krisis in their approach to
phenomenology. In their work and in that of JEAN-PAUL
SARTRE - especially after L'etre et le neant ( 1943)
- and SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR, the inftuencc of HEGEL
and MARX leads to a heavily historicized conception of
consciousness and human existence. For these thinkers
the acknowledgment ofhistoricity is not fatal to pheno-
menology, but it does contribuie, together with other
considerations, to a substantial curtailment of its pre-
tensions. The capacity to grasp timeless esscnces, and
thus to attain the status of a rigorous scicnce, is no
longer touted as phenomenology's chief virtue, as it
was by the early Husserl, but phenomenology itself.
somewhat more modestly conceived, survives.
The case is somewhat different for MARTIN IIEI-
DEGGER, whose ideas on historicity developed con-
currently with those of Husserl. In a late chapter of
Sein und Zei! (1927) Heidegger takes up the topic of
Geschichtlichkeit (historicity) and reveals that he too
has been inftuenced by Dilthey. Up to this point his
discussion of authentic human existence has empha-
sized DASEIN's relation to the future and to the prospect
of death. Now he turns his attention to birth and ori-
gins. His previous discussion of social existence or
being-with-others as a dimension of Oase in had tied it
primarily to inauthenticity (das Man ), suggesting that
authenticity means isolation. Now he suggests that we
derive possibilities of authentic existence by choosing
heros and taking over existing traditions from the past.
For many readers of Sein und Zeit, especially those
inftuenced by the Sartrean EXISTENTIALISM it helped to
inspire, one is struck by a sharp contrast when one
arrives at this chapter: the authentic self, which had
seemcd a figure oficonoclastic rebellion from the mass,
now emerges as a stern and proud traditionalist paying
homage by obedience to the authority ofthe past.
But this conception of the historical character of
Dasein is really only a reflection of a much deeper
and more thoroughgoing notion of historicity that en-
compasses the nature of understanding and ultimately
that of truth itself. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger is not
content to raise questions about the historical character
of knowledge, reason, and understanding. He is con-
vinced that human existence is radically finite, under-
standing is a projection of Oase in 's facticity, and truth
is something like a historical occurrence ( Geschehen ).
 HUMAN SCIENCES
Such a conception is bound to conflict with the mani-
festly "transcendental" project of Sein und Zeit to artic-
ulate the general, i.e., the presumably timeless and tran-
shistorical, structures of human existence. This leads
Heidegger, not long after the publication ofthat work,
to what most interpreters see as an abandonment of
phenomenology, at least in any form that could appear
continuous with Husserl or even with the phenomen-
ological tradition in FRANCE. And it may be largely the
influence ofthis !ater Heidegger in France that leads to
the decline of phenomenology in that country during
the POSTMODERN phase. It remains to be seen whether
phenomenology will be done in by a conception ofhis-
tory that originally arose from phenomenology itself.
FOR FURTHER STUDY
Carr, David. Phenomenology and the Prohlem of History: A
Studv o{ Husserl:~ Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
- . Time, Narrative, and Historv. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1986.
Dilthey, Wilhelm. Gesammelte Schnjien. 5th ed. Voi. 7. Ed.
Bernard Groethuysen. Stuttgart: Teubncr, 1968.
Gadamcr, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. Tiibingen:
Mohr, 1962; 7htth and Method. Trans. Garrct Barden and
John Cumming. New York: Seabury Press, 1975.
Hohl, Hubcrt. Lehenswelt und Geschichte. Freiburg: Karl
Alber, 1962.
Janssen, Paul. Geschichte und Lehenswelt. The Hague: Mar-
linus Nijhoff, 1970.
Landgrebe, Ludwig. "Wilhelm Diltheys Theorie der
Gcisteswissenschaften." Jahrhuch fiir Philosophie und
phănomenologische Forschung 9 ( 1928), 237-367.
Misch, Georg. Lehensphilosophie und Phănomenologie.
Bonn: Cohen, J930; 2nd. ed. Leipzig: Teubner, J93 J
Olafson, Frederick. The Dialectic o{Action. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, J 978.
Soffer, Gail. Husserl and the Prohlem o{ Relativism. Dor-
drecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991.
DAVID CARR
Emory Universi(v
HUMAN SCIENCES Also called the "eul-
tura! sciences," the human sciences (die Geisteswis-
senschaften, les sciences humaines) are special or pos-
itive theoretical sciences that are concerned in various
ways with aspects of human cultural life and cultural
worlds. These disciplines are related to practica! appli-
cations as well as to the everyday prescientific life from
Lester Embree, Elizabeth A. Behnke, David Carr, J. Claude Evans, Jose Huertas-Jourda, Joseph J. Kockelmans, William R. McKenna,
Algis Mickunas, Jitendra Nath Mohanty, Thomas M. Seebohm, Richard M. Zaner (eds.), Encyclopedia of Phenomenology.
© 1997 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
315
which they, like ali sciences and also philosophy, origi-
nale. This genus ofsciences currently includes COMMU-
NICOLOGY, ECONOMICS, ETHNOLOGY, GEOGRAPHY, HISTORY,
POLITIC AL SCIENCE, PSYCHOLOGY, and SOCIOLOGY as sin-
gle disciplines, but human or cultural sciences are also
increasingly included in multidisciplines such as EHI-
NIC STUDIES and those re}ated to ECOLOGY, FEMINISM,
RELIGION, and TECHNOLOGY. The rise of sciences of this
kind, which ha ve their prehistories in the medieval and
ancient worlds and were accelerated through the ex-
panding contact with non-European societies in recent
centuries, is as much a distinctive feature ofthe modern
Western wor}d as the rise ofthe NATURAL SCIENCES.
Beyond such chiefly theoretical disciplines there
are what can be called normative, evaluative, or axi-
otic disciplines, which are concerned with ARCHITFC-
TURE, DANCE, FILM, LITERATURE, MUSIC, THEATER, etc.,
and there are also practica/ disciplines, such as ED-
UCATION, LAW, MEDICINE, NURSING, PIIYSICAL EDUCATION,
and PSYCHIATRY. A broader category, CULTURAL DISCI-
PLINES, has been called for and theoretical, axiotic,
and practica! species might then be recognized within
it, although many cultural "sciences" already include
practica! components, e.g., the way psychotherapy is
often considered part of psychology. Practica! action
always has cognitive foundations within it and when
these foundations are scientific, scientific technologies
and technigues can be spoken of. There are also eval-
uational foundations in, e.g., social work, that make
nontheoretical disciplines normative.
The mentioned non-philosophical disciplines have
not only been reflected upon from standpoints in
phenomenological philosophy, but also increasingly
have phenomenological tendencies within them. Non-
philosophical contributors to disciplines affected by or
convergent with philosophical phenomenology include
the psychiatrists LUDWIG BINSWANGER and KARL JASPERS
and the SOCioJogists GEORG SIMML'L and MAX WERER. Dis-
tinguishing philosophy as such from human science is
among the problems of the philosophy of the human
sciences.
A human scientific discipline can be said to be
phenomenological, first, if it is devoted to basing
knowledge on the best possible EVIDENCE ofthe matters
themselves in the relevant region. This evidence can
occur with respect to the ancient Hellenic world, for
example, not only through the study of texts, but also