Danish Yearbook of Philosophy, lo!. 48-49(2013-2014 ). 139-152 HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT Geological Tropes of Historicity in Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty JACOB MARTIN RUMP Many twentieth-century accounts of history have used geological tropes to describe the phenomenon of historical knowledge, and such terms have been of particular importance in the phenomenological tradition. In Heidegger's references in Being and Time to the "soil of history," Husserl's account in his later work of "sedimentation" in the lifeworld, and the reformulation of this notion in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, geological tropes are used to illustrate important insights into the relation between contingency, a priority and historicity. This paper seeks to contribute to an understanding of history understood phenomenologically as historicity through an analysis of these geological tropes. Our findings can be summarized as follows: such geological tropes help the phenomenologist to describe the way in which history is always determined within a complex interplay between only temporarily fixed determining structures such as riverbanks, insoluble sediment, soil, etc. and free-flowing praxis, a situation in which historical events are at once determinant of and themselves determined by human activity. Paradoxically, the constant and "grounding" element in such conceptions of history is not the sediment and hard rock of historical fact, but the the constant change and variability-despite the sense-giving continuity of human experience structured by historicity. We begin with a brief overview of the landscape on the philosophy of history in which these views arose, and then continue to an analysis of the tropes themselves. I. A Schematic History of Historicity This conception of history has a history. 1 The philosophy of history in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries in both Anglo-American and Continental traditions like other branches of theoretical philosophy was marked by a characteristic epistemological turn.2 This more '"critical" philosophy of history, as the moniker suggests, eschewed the speculative idealist pronouncements 140 JACOB MARTIN RUMP of thinkers like Hegel, Croce, and Collingwood, whereby we can inquire into the nature and destiny of history in itself, arriving at timeless truths concerning the historical, and sought instead to focus on the nature and limitations of historical knowledge by means of careful methodology. But as this episterriological tum continued on toward the middle of the twentieth century, some philosophers notably though not exclusively3 those engaged in self-described phenomenological projects nonetheless felt that, as unanswerable as seemed those timeless and speculative questions concerning the essence of history, the fact of historicity that we are and experience the world as historical beings is not simply present in our everyday lives but indeed definitive of human ways of being in the world. Thus, while sharing in the more general resistance to the speculative conception of history as an autonomous and self-enclosed area of inquiry about which universal and timeless truths can be discovered, these phenomenological thinkers of history also resisted the positivist and neopositivist views that arose in immediate reaction to it. For the recognition of historicity implies that historical inquiry is not simply continuous with the sciences, and does not consist exclusively of inductive generalizations on the basis ofhistoricalfacts, since historicity is not something that happens but rather a character of the happening or event itself; a characteristic form of human experiencing independent in some sense from its content. The thinking of history through the phenomenon of historicity is further distinguished from other twentieth-century approaches in its insistence, a corollary to the claim above, that the recognition of historicity as a fundamental element of the human condition demands a rethinking of the character epistemological inquiry as such. Because of the centrality of historicity, the problem of historical knowledge can no longer be seen as merely a specialized subquestion within the larger discipline of epistemology, to be left aside for separate treatment; the problem of historical knowledge becomes according to these phenomenological currents of thought not merely one domain of epistemological inquiry among others, but a fundamental problem for any account of knowledge, because a fundamental element of human experience. 4 And since the philosophers responsible for the development of the phenomenological conception of historicity all saw themselves working to some degree in the post-Kantian Critical tradition, they remained insistent on the ongoing interrogation of historicity and historical knowledge Critically, as phenomena of experiential life manifesting the limiting structure of subjectivity. As Kant recognized, reason including historical reason must be kept in HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT 141 check through the insistence that its claims be constantly submitted to the tribunal of experience. Thus taking the liberty of characterizing their varied methodologies in common terms, though we should not forget that there remain important differences Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty all proceeded by investigating the distance between accounts of historical knowledge and the lived historicity of actual experience, which is never a mere account or representation of fact, thereby building into their conceptions of history a recognition of the ways in which the theoretical account ultimately has fallen short of fully doing justice to history as a phenomenon of experience, and thus protecting their inquiries not only from the excesses ofrational speculation but also from the preconceptions of a neo-positivist history of brute facts. The phenomenological attempt to grapple with the phenomenon of history qua historicity was thus framed by (varied versions of) two basic and opposed positions: 1) The implicit speculative idealist reliance on a form of determinaccording to which history is understood, roughly, as the series of rational structures which by virtue of their containment determine all historical events in a way that allows at least sub specie aeternitatis or from the standpoint of "absolute knowing," complete predictability of all events and historical meanings; and 2), the positivist and neo-positivist's relativism regarding the historical in its own right, according to which, outside of our scientific generalizations on the basis of historical facts, there is no determinant order in history as such, and history does not itself make sense in its unfolding but is made sense of through imposed external forms of explanation. Phenomenological conceptions of history as historicity sought to describe historical knowledge in a way that recognizes the legitimate insights of both extremes while simultaneously avoiding the complete ascription to either ofthem.5 Geological tropes function as a unique means of approaching such a middle ground. They are employed in descriptions that avoid both of these extremes not as we might expect by staking a substantive middle ground, but by constantly retracing iterations of an intermediary strategy that resists the move to stake any ground at all. This strategy is open to the phenomenologist because of her locating of history in historicity, conceived within a schema defined by the temporal difference between subjective and objective manifestations of the historical. These accounts of historical knowledge are best characterized not in terms of a sought after ground, but in terms of a formally definable movement; a constant reassessment of historicity that takes the place of grounding. The result is thus a peculiar sort of "groundless grounding"6 142 JACOB MARTIN RUMP based in individual and collective lived experience, understood not as a set of atomic historical facts or partial intuitive givens of a greater whole but as the revelatory and constantly shifting temporal structure of our historical being-inthe-world. II. Heidegger and the Soil of History: Historicity as Temporal Difference Heidegger's Being and Time presents a sustained phenomenological discussion of historicity in terms of such a structure of temporal difference, revealingly described in terms of "the soil of history." In describing the "stretching" of Dasein through time. the fact that Dasein experiences the world as a series of '"nows" but is still a single, continuous being in being-towards death, Heidegger writes, "the question of Dasein's 'connectedness' is the ontological problem of Dasein 's historizing. To lay bare the structure of historizing. and the existential-temporal conditions of its possibility, signifies that one has achieved an ontological understanding of historicality."7 For Heidegger, regular "world" history presupposes a prior relation rooted in the historical nature of Dasein's existence: "Historicality, as a determinate character, is prior to what is called "history" (world-historical historizing). "Historicality" stands for the state of Being that is constitutive for Dasein's 'historizing' as such; only on the basis of such 'historizing' is anything like world-history possible or can anything belong historically to world-history."8 This historicality of Dasein is differentiated from that of mere objects belonging to the world, which are "world-historical," by means of a structure of what we above called "temporal difference." The objects of everyday history are considered by Heidegger to be "secondarily historical," whereas Dasein is "primarily historical."9 The distinction between primary and secondary historicality expresses the relation between the rapidly shifting system of historically determined human meanings, on the one hand, and on the other hand the sensegiving structures of the world that determine what we do and how we live while themselves continuing to change but at a comparatively glacial pace. According to Heidegger, ordinary ''factual'' conceptions of history have reversed this priority, regarding the historicality of objects as primary and attempting to understand Dasein's historicality secondarily on the basis of this objectivity. Historicity is exhibited by restoring the primary historicality of Dasein while continuing to respect the irreducible temporal difference between lived time and secondary "world-historical" time. HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT 143 It is no accident that this difference between temporalities, if we notice it at all, tends to become evident when familiar spatiotemporal objects in our lives suddenly shift to describe it in Heideggerian tenns from being ready-to hand to revealing aspects that appear to us as merely present-at-hand. Suddenly I notice the wear-and-tear on the armchair I sit in every day, and remember the time when it was new. But it did not age with me I did not encounter its aging with every sitting, and it did not seem as might, e.g., my own body -to be getting a little older each day. It is only suddenly. now, that it strikes me as having aged. Its historical change crept up on me, so to speak, so slowly that I did not (could not) notice it in the intervening instances of use. Because of the position of the inquirer within history, the character of historicity remains hidden from ordinary objective analysis. Heidegger suggests that this is at least partially responsible for the conceptual difficulties of an account of historical knowledge. Any analysis of history from the objective perspective of the scientist will ultimately fail because the objects the scientist would treat are already themselves historical and thus cannot tell us anything about the underlying conditions of historicity. Even if the problem of history is treated in accordance with a theory of science. not only aiming at the *epistemological' clarification of the historiological way of grasping things (Simmel) or at the logic with which the concepts of historiologial presentation arc fonned (Rickert). but doing so with an orientation towards 'the side of the object.' then. as long as the question is formulated this way. history becomes in principle accessible only as the Object of a science. Thus the basic phenomenon of history. which is prior to any possible thematizing by historiology and underlies it. has been irretrievably put aside. 1" The basic phenomenon of history must be prior to al I particular historical objects because historicality, as an "essential constitutive state" of historical subjects. ultimately concerns historical ontological conditions not only for the objects of the world but also, and more primarily, for Dasein. The positivist, in conceiving history as an object for scientific analysis akin to any other, ignores the fact that history is a phenomenon that occurs for me not primarily as an object in the world but as an actively temporalizing subject engaged in basic relations of equipmental use, relations whose immediate possibilities are structured by the broader horizon of historical objects present at hand. We must recognize both the independent historicity of the object the armchair's aging "when I wasn't looking'' and the fact that it is nonetheless an historical artifact only in relation to me: "What is primarily historical is Dasein. That which is secondarily historical, however, is what we encounter within-the-worldnot 144 JACOB MARTIN RUMP only equipment ready-to-hand, in the widest sense, but also the environing nature as 'the very soil of history'" 11 • It is no accident that Heidegger refers here to the "soil of history" [geschichtlicher Boden]. Moving away from Heidegger for a moment, we can easily recognize that geology, viewed as a field of scientific inquiry in the everyday sense, takes as its object a set of natural spatiotemporal structures in which nothing is completely fixed. Even the soil that is most compacted, even that which is "set in stone" will not, from the strictest physico-chemical standpoint, last forever. Even the oldest of geological formations are changing from the standpoint of the "long duree." Indeed, the study of geology has been of great value to branches of human knowledge far removed from its own arena of inquiry precisely because of its ability to> function as a measure of change and of time from the standpoint not of days years but of millennia or eons. Importantly, it is only capable of measuri these broad changes through evidence presented in the changes to itself: sedimentary layers of rock represent geological change by themselves ma festing it. They serve as a yardstick of the passing of time only because they also themselves affected by it, albeit at a scale very different from the temp experience of individual human beings. If the geological were not itself c ble of historical change it could not serve as a record of history, but comp to the more "primordial" temporality of Dasein, "nothing present-at-hand' time,' whether passing away or still coming along, could ever by its o logical essence be temporal in such a way." 12 The geological tropes are illustrative of this temporal difference prec because they are an immediately recognizable but at the same time ex case. As beings of the modern scientific world, we recognize that the a * the rockface is in principle not different from the aging of my easy chair. the sublimity of the rate of change, as we might put it, in the geological, ly present-at-hand case makes it all the more striking in relation to ou historical being as equipmentally involved subjects in the world. For logical manifests its wear and tear only on the scale of eons, whereas the in the condition of my armchair is noticeable in the space of just a few of use. Stated schematically, then, geological tropes point to a temporal di between two levels or systems of historical entities. On one level we immediate and meaningful experience as historical subjects. At the level we have those relatively constant and relatively determinant pers.* ~++i..: rnrwlrl-historical on the basis of which the continuity of meanin HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT 145 sci~us experience depends, even as this objective historicality is ultimately denved .from our own. This temporal difference is from a phenomenological standpoint the very structure of historicity. But this structure is also never completely closed off or determined: it holds open a place for the characteristic contingency of lived experience in the face of historical determination. HI. Sedimentation in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: Historicity as Determined and Spontaneous In addition to the formal structure defined by temporal difference, geological trope~ also help to further specify the role of the contingent in the historicity of expenence: for the historical is always manifested through a particular content that is never completely determined by the historical formations from which it a:os~. In H~sserl's Cri~is, this interplay of historical determination and expenential cõtmgency anses in descriptions of the relative constancy that pervades the hfeworld despite its constant alteration: ""the world of lice * t b 11 ••• 1s, o e sure, related to subjectivity throughout the constant alteration of its relative aspects. But however it changes and however it may be corrected, it holds to its essentially lawful set of types, to which all life, and thus all science, of which it i~ the "ground," remain bound." 13 Historicity is for Husserl, as for the early Heidegger, the structure of temporal difference through which we understand the constant alteration of the relation between the lifeworld and subiectivit • J ~ esp1te the constant flux of experience, the historical phenomena of the Jiferld nonetheless hold to an essential for Husserl this means ultimately tranndental lawfulness. But this "a priori of history" is only visible to us bese ~fthe historical sedimentation oflayers of meaning built up according to gam, then, as for Heidegger, history can be understood only as a phenomn/or us, as ~ubjectivities, and in this sense history is "from the start nothing er than t~e vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of origfõmatwns and sedimentations of meaning" according to a structurally rmmant formal law. 14 ut, as Husserl acknowledges in one of the Beilagen to the main texts of The is, this seems to suggest a sort of paradox: ~ere a pecu'.iar_qu~stion arises. When we methodically and systematically bring to recognit10n the_ a pnonof history, is th'.s itself a facticity ofhistory'l Does it not then presuppose :ea pnonofh1sto7? .The a pnon 1s related to the being of mankind and the surrounding orld that is valid for It m experience. thinking, and acting. But the a priori is something 146 JACOB MARTIN RUMP ideal and general, which on the one hand refers to men themselves as objects and on the other hand is a structure within men, in us who form it. 15 If meaning only exists within our subjective and intersubjective lifeworld, which is itself a result of the conceptual possibilities established by the sedimentation of meaning structures acquired throughout history, the determining structures for this lifeworld could never themselves have distinguishable discrete meanings. Indeed, Husserl generally refers to this all-important, underlying a priori lawfulness in very broad and nonspecific terms, as a "general ground" or "immense structural a priori" or something "ideal and general." In a sense, its structuring role relegates it to the status of mere posit. Like Heidegger's "historicality, as a logical structure underlying both history and the lifeworld, the a priori of history is prior to both, and thus, it would seem, prior even to any categories needed to further define it. The account of"Galileo's mathematization of nature" in the first part of The Crisis is an illustration of this conception of historicity. Despite the fact that we each perceive the world somewhat differently, and have different "ontic validities," we nonetheless tacitly agree about some qualities of the world we share. The subject of this agreement is in a given "thematic" reflection usually a specific element of cultural formation or of our now habitually scientific lifeworld, but in each case the regularity depends upon more basic universally accepted structures ascribed to the pre-scientifically self-given and "obvious" characteristics of the world ofexperience. 16 Husserl's principal point is not so much that the "original geometer" is capable of discovering such self-evident structures, but that geometry itself can only be understood insofar as it is built upon them. As he puts it, "The whole of the cultural present, understood as a totality, 'implies' the whole of the cultural past in an undetermined but structurally determined generality." 17 What does it mean for the generality of our present as a totality to imply our pastagain, as a totalityin a way that is at once undetermined but structurally determined? Is this not an obvious contradiction, another version of the paradox of the a priori of history noted above? For Husserl the paradox is only apparent, and arises from a failure to distinguish between the dual temptations of historical relativism and historical determinism. The relation of our cultural present to our cultural past is undetermined, insofar as we can never establish perfect one-to-one correlations or exact causal links between past events and present ones. This is a phenomenon very familiar to the historian: to say that HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT 147 Great War was "caused" by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is not to say that this was its sole and exclusive cause. Indeed, many historians would claim that it is impossible, even in principle, to map out completely the complex interplay of causes that led to such an event, and perhaps, by extension, to any event. To think that such a perfect mapping of causes to effects is possible is to succumb to a version of historical determinism, since it implies that the present is nothing more than the totality of properly understood past causes. Husserl's claim that the cultural present stands in a relation of undetermined generality to the cultural past instead admits the contingency of history and of happenings; the fact that historicity as a lived phenomenon does not consist of a series of one-to-one causes and effects but is structured not only by past horizons (retentions) but also by future possibilities (protentions). At the same time, Husserl claims, the cultural present in its totality is related to the cultural past in its totality in a structurally determined way. Despite the indeterminacy of individual relations between past objectivities and present subjective experience, there is still a general dependency: in a very general sense, it is correct to say that my cultural present is structurally dependent upon my cultural past. Meaningful experience does not exist in a vacuum, and does not amount to an historical relativism of "one damn thing after another" only to be made sense of by means of the generalizations of an external observer. As Heidegger showed, the temporal difference between the primary historicality of subjects and the secondary historicality of objects holds open a horizonal structure of anticipation for the subject, who experiences history from within history. Husserl emphasizes that this structure in each case depends upon the actual events of the past despite the specific relations within the structure never being completely predetermined, or even similarly determined for different individual subjectivities. The relation between the cultural present and the cultural past is thus formally fixed because of sedimentation, which manifests the structural determinacy of the historical, but never completely detennined in its content: in the case of any specific subject's tracing back of evidences, an undetermined element the specific material that fulfills the structurally determined meaning intention in a given case is always something there to be discovered. It may seem strange to refer to a "content" or material here, since we are not dealing directly with fixed meanings or objects but with elements in an experiential relational structure. But Husserl recognizes that this structure must in a logical sense have material as well as formal components, and it is pre148 JACOB MARTIN RUMP cisely this insight that distinguishes these accounts of history from speculative accounts described above. Since our phenomenological investigations always begin from the now-moment, there is not even in principle any final God's eye view from which historical events could be exhaustively explained in terms of an unfolding of fully determinant ideal laws. The understanding of historicity in its constantly changing manifestations in lived experience is thus a central and defining element of the broader project of phenomenology as an ongoing methodological movement or "infinite task." For Husserl, transcendental logic is never fixed, and we cannot rest content with a once-and-for-all deduction of the categories of meaning because this contradicts the evidence oflived experience. To the suspicious critic, such formally defined but materially open space in the structure of history will look like a loophole in the theory; an unjustified posit that ''lets in" an outside element or an undesirable "opening" in what is expected to be a closed logical system. But such suspicion arises from an expectation that the relation between that which is historically determined and that which does the determining must be fixed in all respects, either as decided through a process of external scientific observation or as intuited from within as a momentary glimpse of the whole. Husserl's phenomenological investigation of history recognizes not only specific experienced historical facts but also the structural, "formal" regularities of the experiencing itself, the characteristic historicity that governs the sedimentation of meaning in time. This recognition of the complex interplay of the formal and the material manifests phenomenology's radical break with the way history and epistemology were previously understood: as Husserl writes, "the ruling dogma of the separation in principle between epistemological elucidation and historical, even humanistic-psychological explanation, between epistemological and genetic origin, is fundamentally mistaken ... " 18 In The Crisis, historicity thus plays a central role in the phenomenological analysis of constitutions, "the tracing of the historical meaning-structures given in the present, or their self-evidences, along the documented chain of historical backreferences into the hidden dimension of the primal self-evidences which underlie them." 19 History consists of sedimentations on the basis of self-evidences, but these sedimentations can be examined both in terms of their specific content and in their structural and formal generality, but in a way that never ignores the manifest openness of lived experiencing. Husserl's analysis thus shows that the gap between historical facticity as HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT 149 fixed object of study and historicity as fonnal condition of subjective being-inthe-world is filled out by contingent logically material variables, just as, in geology, less "durable" elements such as water and air are gradually compressed out, evaporated, or otherwise expelled in a variety a/processes as the underlying geological layers become more compacted, resulting in an evermore-hardened and more-durable though never eternally fixed layer of the natural historical record. This variety of processes is always partially but never entirely determined by the geological elements that both affect and are affected by it, just as there is never an exact and perfect founding of one level of the geo-historical record upon the other: the geological functions as historical record not only by means of a regular pattern of sedimentation according to the fixed logic of gravity but also through eruptions, through erosions, and even through tectonic shifts. The relationship between the levels of the geological record is thus structurally necessary but not fixed in its content or manner of appearing. Thus, as Merleau-Ponty notes in his taking up of Husserl's seminal historical concept in The Phenomenology of Perception, this word *sedimentation* must not trick us: this contracted knowledge is not an inert mass at the foundation of our consciousness . ., My acquired thoughts are not an absolute acquisition: they teed off my present thought at each moment... The acquired. then. is only truly acquired if it is taken up in a new movement of thought. and a thought is only situated if it itself assumes its situation. The essence of consciousness is to provide itself with one or many worlds. to make its own thoughts exist inji-ont of itself like things. and sketching out these landscapes and abandoning them indivisibly demonstrates its vitality. The structure *world.* \Yith its double movement of sedimentation and spontaneity. is at the center of consciousness ... "' Sedimentation as an historical phenomenon is not primarily an object but a vital activity, one which always involves two movements: that of settling into passivity and that of "spontaneity." Sedimentation is thus never complete determination: '"Were it possible to unfold at each moment all of the presuppositions in what I call my 'reason' or my 'ideas,' then I would always be discovering experiences that have not been made explicit; weighty contributions of the past and of the present and an entire 'sedimented history' that does not merely concern the genesis of my thought, but that determines its sense."c. 1 The result of such a conception of history would be a one-dimensional sedimentary structure, in which the formal laws of the "a priori of history'' were the sole and 150 JACOB MARTIN RUMP exclusive defining feature of historicity. This would be complete historical determinism. At the same time, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes, the constant flux of the playing out of history seen in total abstraction from its sedimented meanings would amount to mere raw action; to the positivist's claim that time simply passes bringing with it an unordered confusion of "one damn thing after another." Thus despite and indeed because ofthe founding of history in the structure of temporal difference, historical knowledge presupposes a certain deference to determining sedimentary structures even as it demands the experiential spontaneity of the subject: [H]ere again, we must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: when an attitude toward the world has been confim1ed often enough, it becomes privileged for us. If freedom does not tolerate being confronted by any motive, then my habitual being in the world is equally fragile at each moment. .. The rationalist altemative--either the free act is possible or not, either the event originates in me or is imposed from outside--does not fit with our relations with the world and with our past. Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears into it: so long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls forth privileged modes of resolution and that it, by itself, lacks the power to procure any of them. 22 The trope of sedimentation illustrates the phenomenological insight that freedom and its containment are always codependent parts in the structure of historicity: experience as an historical structure for individual and collective subjectivities manifests both predetermination and spontaneity. It is the need for such spontaneity, for a contingency in the system, that a phenomenological account of history (as opposed to a deterministic conception) recognizes. It takes it as a given that our experience often has the character of thrownness or subjection to the unexpected. And yet, unlike the positivist's conception of history as a series of otherwise random facts made sense of from the outside, phenomenology recognizes that our accounts of history are always structured by the internal logic of own historicity. The word "sedimentation" is thus not a vague, catch-all metaphor covering up a lack of descriptive exactness, but a description offered in fidelity to the lived reality of the things themselves. IV. Conclusion: Phenomenology's "Grounding" of History in the Movement of Historicity In our brief treatment of phenomenology's use of the geological trope, we HISTORY AS SOIL AND SEDIMENT 151 have seen the same basic conception of historicity expressed in Heidegger's explication of the structure of temporal difference in tenns of the "soil of his- " and in Husserl's and Merleau-Ponty's reflections on "sedimentation" as the structure of the past's "undetermined but structurally determined generali- "23 We have argued that these geological tropes point to a middle path in the philosophy of history, one that avoids both positivist conceptions of history and the speculative historical determinism they arose in reaction to, but does so by orienting its account to the internal movement of temporality instead of an external and immutable ground. This internal movement oftemporality occurs in a context of temporal difference, but one in which, as Heidegger shows, the lived temporality of the subject is always primordial against the background of the secondary historicity of objects and facts. This temporal difference resists a complete determinism about history, leaving itself partially open to the spontaneous character of lived human experience while remaining grounded by the hardened sedimentation of past events. Considered reflectively, history is thus a structure of constraint, since it has always-already limited what counts as meaningful and valuable in what we say and do, but this constraining role is never complete: As Merleau-Ponty insists, our spontaneity "gears into" our determined situation. It is the inherent inconstancy of the geological as much as its durability and duration that is definitive of its use in phenomenological accounts of history. It is only because of the internal temporality of geological processes the fact that the long-lasting determining structures themselves erode, compact, shift and sediment that allows them to function as a measure of the much more rapid change of other elements of our lived environment. The geological, despite its glacial pace of change, represents an ultimately shifting "bedrock." These two opposed and complementary aspects of the geological trope suggest a characterization of history that is not metaphysically grounded in something external, objective, and timeless. Phenomenology's "grounding" of historical knowledge is thus ultimately "Copernican'' in the Kantian sense: while it acknowledges the (relative) fixity and historical facticity of objects and events, it argues for the dependence of this historicity on the more primordial historicity of the experiencing subject. But since this very primordial historicity is understood in terms of the ongoing task of investigating the changing structures of lived experiencing, and not in terms of categories determinable once-and-for-all, this is no simple stable ground, but a movement, an infinite task whose center of gravity is not any object "out there," but the lived tempo152 JACOB MARTIN RUMP rality of human historical experience: the always-eventful sedimentation of the soil of history. Notes 1. The historical overview offered here is indebted to that ofW. H. Walsh, Philosophy of History: An Introduction (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1960), pp. 42ff. 2. Cf. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), p.l. 3. I take this description to also apply, for example, to the work of Foucault, with his accounts of the "shitting sands" and "fault lines" of historical epistemes in The Order of Things, and even to the later Wittgenstein's description of the "riverbed of thoughts" in the manuscripts collected in On Certainty Although not phenomenologists per se, it is no accident that both authors bear important and complicated relationships to the phenomenological tradition. I explore their uses of the geological trope alongside more extended discussions of Heidegger, Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty in a longer paper on this topic currently in preparation. 4. Cf. S0ren Gosvig Olesen, 71-anscendental History, trans. David Possen (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 108. 5. As Carr has put this goal in his recent and largely phenomenological work on history, "descriptively we must strike a balance between two extremes: over-stressing our inherence in the present by treating it as an isolating/ram past and future, and over-stressing our openness to past and future by treating it as a supra-temporal perspective" (Time, Narrative, and History, p. 42). 6. A conception investigated at great length, though in a manner different from that presented here and not directly concerned with questions of history, in Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds:A Study of Wittgenstein and Heidegger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 7. Martin Heidegger. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962), p. 427, italics in original. 8. Ibid, p. 41. 9. Ibid, p. 433. 10. Ibid, p. 427, italics in original. 11. BT 433, my emphasis. 12. Ibid, p. 433. 13. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. and ed. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 173. 14. Ibid, p. 371, my emphasis. 15. Ibid, p. 349, my emphasis. 16. Ibid, pp. 23-24. 17. Ibid, p. 371, my emphasis. 18. Ibid, p. 370. 19. Ibid, p. 373. 20. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Donald A. Landes (New York: Routledge, 2012), pp.131-132. 21. lbid,p.416. 22. Ibid, pp. 466-467. 23. Ibid, p. 371.