Abstract
In the present essay, I will compare Hegel’s and Husserl’s conceptions of the history of philosophy. I will show how Hegel and Husserl recast Kant’s idea of a philosophizing history of philosophy in two different ways. Both Hegel and Husserl share the conviction that reason unfolds itself in history. Nonetheless, whereas Hegel identifies the history of philosophy with the contingent manifestation of the self-actualization of the Idea, Husserl develops a critical history of ideas. On the one hand, Hegel conceives of the history of philosophy as a complex whole and each determinate philosophy as interpreting a specific articulation of the logical deduction of thought-determinations. On the other hand, perhaps influenced by Windelband, Husserl appropriates the Kantian thesis according to which the objects of the history of reason represent specific constellations of problems.
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Notes
- 1.
Yovel (1980, 6) distinguishes two different sense of Kant’s conception of the history of reason. The first is practical; according to it, the history of reason coincides with the process whereby “human reason imprints itself upon the actual world, reshaping its empirical organization in light of its own goals and interests”. The second sense is manly theoretical, since it identifies the history of reason with the process through which “human reason gradually explicates its latent paradigm, articulating its essential concepts, principles, and interest within a coherent system”.
- 2.
On reason’s history in connection with Kant’s idea of system in philosophy see Ferrarin (2015b, ch. 1).
- 3.
Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition.
- 4.
On the significance of Kant’s historiographical project see Micheli (2015).
- 5.
See Hegel (1994, 1–10).
- 6.
On the relationship between existence and actuality in Hegel see Marcuse (1987, 80–111).
- 7.
- 8.
By pursuing this idea, in Manca (2015b) I have outlined Hegel’s position regarding the quarrel between the ancients and the moderns.
- 9.
On the relationship between determined philosophies and the universal idea of philosophy see Ferrarin (2001, 31–54).
- 10.
In the introduction to his Logos article, Husserl evidently misunderstands Hegel’s perspective when criticizing it, because even though “Hegel insists on the absolute validity of his method and his doctrine, still his system lacks a critique of reason, which is the foremost prerequisite for being scientific in philosophy” (Husserl 1987, 5/168). By using a metaphor that Husserl adopted a page before this statement, we may say that Husserl erroneously suggests here that Hegel’s system keeps the traditional form of a system in metaphysics, according to which a system appears “like a Minerva springing forth complete and full-armed from the head of some creative genius” (Husserl 1987, 4/167). Instead, Husserl thinks that a philosophical system should be understood as the product of “a gigantic preparatory work of generations, really begins from the ground up with a foundation free of doubt and rises up like any skilful construction, wherein stone is set upon stone, each as solid as the other, in accordance with directive insights” (Husserl 1987, 4/167). Think of Hegel’s idea that spirit inwardly works in history like a mole. It would be enough to realize that the model that Hegel adopts for his system in philosophy is not the traditional one. On Hegel’s metaphor of the mole see Bodei (2014). For a comparison between Hegel’s idea of a thinking historian, which inspires his Phenomenology of Spirit, and Husserl’s depiction of the philosopher as a functionary of mankind see Manca (2016, ch. 2.3).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
In Halle and Göttingen Husserl taught classes in the history of philosophy yearly. In Freiburg he taught two courses in the history of philosophy between 1916 and 1918 before that of 1923/1924 concerning the critical history of ideas.
- 14.
Sokolowski (2000, 62) held that “phenomenology restores the possibilities of ancient philosophy, even while accounting for new dimensions such as the presence of modern science. Phenomenology provides one of the best examples of how a tradition can be reappropriated and brought to life again in a new context.” However, the way in which Husserl justifies his re-introduction of the term “first philosophy” shows that a re-appropriation can never be considered as a restoration, but rather as a re-elaboration, which always presupposes a sort of misunderstanding.
- 15.
- 16.
On Klein’s understanding of Husserl’s theory of the history of philosophy see Hopkins (2011, 11–32).
- 17.
See Lawlor (2002, 11–33).
- 18.
Dealing with the awakening of philosophical reason, in his Sixth Meditation § 11c Fink (1988) insists on the crucial role that the natural attitude of mundane subjectivity plays in the formation of a phenomenological method. When he writes that “transcendental subjectivity becomes for-itself in the constitutive dimension of ‘being-outside-itself’,” Husserl comments in the margin: “good.” Accordingly, the constitutive dimension of “being-outside-itself” coincides with the self-objectification of transcendental intersubjectivity in the teleological dimension of the history of human reason.
- 19.
I deal with this issue in an article where I have discussed Husserl’s use of Aristotelian notion of hexis for the account of the phenomenologizing subject. See Manca (2017).
- 20.
With the reference to the powers of reason, I naturally intend to evoke Kant’s project. However, notice that, as Kern 1964 and Ferrarin 2015a have already stressed, Husserl tends to expunge the adjective ‘pure,’ which in his view coincides with formal, since the limit of Kant would be that of overlooking the sphere of material a priori. In so doing, Husserl unwillingly finds himself to be close to Hegel’s re-elaboration of Kant’s project, even if the final solutions of the two thinkers are the antipodes of each other. I mean that, similarly to Hegel, Husserl thinks that philosophy should not deal with pure reason only, but it should strive to overcome the opposition between the sphere of the a priori and that of experience. On the other hand, while this conviction leads Hegel to speak of a speculative and objective thinking, Husserl introduces the alternative idea of a transcendental experience. On this point see Manca (2015a) and (2016).
- 21.
As Moran (2012, 146) has explained, here Husserl maintains that “philosophers engage with their history as poets do with their tradition, reconstituting it and re-founding it through their own creative activity and engagement in a kind of poetic invention or ‘poetizing’”
- 22.
It is probable that Windelband’s approach influenced that of Husserl. In a letter to Rickert from December 20, 1915, Husserl states that the reading of Windelband’s Geschicte der Philosophie makes him feel longing for the “old romantic land of German Idealism” (Husserl 1994, 179).
- 23.
For instance, Ferrarin (2011) demonstrates that Hegel’s interpretation of Aristotle is not compatible with his claim according to which philosophy is and remains its time grasped in thought. Nuzzo (2003) shows the limits of the idea according to which there is a strict parallelism between thought-determination in logic and the determined philosophies in history.
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Manca, D. (2019). Hegel and Husserl on the History of Reason. In: Ferrarin, A., Moran, D., Magrì, E., Manca, D. (eds) Hegel and Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_3
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