It is well known that Husserl and Foucault use the striking phrase “the historical apriori” at certain key points in their work. Most commentators agree that the two thinkers mean very different things by this expression. It would be a valuable project to examine these terms and their uses at close range in the light of their immediate textual contexts. But this is not what I want to do here. Instead I want to look from a broader perspective at the views of history that are reflected in the different uses of this expression. To do this, I will look at different senses in which teleology figures in Husserl’s reflections on history, and at Foucault’s opposition to teleological views of history and of philosophy itself. At the end of the paper I will come back to Husserl’s and Foucault’s uses of the expression “historical apriori,” and discuss them briefly in light of what I have said.

In a very broad sense Husserl and Foucault may be seen to represent teleological and anti-teleological views of history respectively. Foucault often says that phenomenology represents the view to which he is most opposed, and in most of these remarks it is the subject-centered character of phenomenology to which he most objects. But I think he also sees Husserl as the latest representative of a teleological view of history and of knowledge that descends from Hegel and the enlightenment and is characteristic of modernity as a whole. Foucault’s work mounts a full-scale attack on this view of history, and this is one of the ways in which Foucault’s thought is post-modern and anti-modern. I would call Foucault’s view anti-teleological rather than simply non-teleological, since almost invariably he develops his view by uprooting the assumptions of his opponents.

1 Husserl’s “Crisis” and its reception in France

In the 1950s and 1960s, in France and elsewhere, Husserl’s Crisis, the late text which had been published posthumously in 1954, was viewed as the culmination and definitive statement of Husserl’s phenomenology. What it revealed was Husserl’s emphatic reaffirmation of transcendental phenomenology, wrapped in a sweeping account of historical destiny. It seems to me that this text arrived in France at just the moment when a teleological view of history was beginning to come under suspicion, and that as such it was lumped together with other manifestations of the same view. In the process, I would also assert, phenomenology as a whole was discredited in retrospect, since it seemed so clearly to culminate, in the eyes of its founder Husserl, in this teleological view. It may be that phenomenology was ripe for attack on other grounds as well, in view of the structuralist revolution under way in France at that time. But the Crisis lent itself to this role, and for good reason.

Let’s recall the broad framework in which Husserl presents his new “Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy” as it’s called in the subtitle. Most striking are the words “Crisis” and “Europe” in the title. These terms are present in the titles of the lectures Husserl gave in Vienna and Prague in 1935, and the larger work grew out of these two texts. Of course, it was obvious that Europe was in crisis at that time. Even though in retrospect we can say that the Europeans of 1935 hadn’t seen the half of it, there was plenty to justify this talk. Vienna and Prague were still outside the German Reich—that’s why Husserl was still able to lecture there—but Hitler already had his eye on them, and rumblings of a “second world war,” barely 20 years after the first, were already in the air.

But the “crisis” talk was not new to the 1930s. Charles Bambach points out that the term “Krisis” figured in the titles of several earlier studies Husserl probably knew about. Bambach refers to the “crisis-mentality of Weimar” marked by “the style and signature of apocalypse” (Bambach 1995, 37n), For Europeans of Husserl’s generation, it was the First World War that had brought on the crisis. The end of that war brought economic and political upheavals to central and eastern Europe, along with the collapse of the three great monarchies of Germany, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Germans of the 1920s saw themselves ruled by a constitution imported from the west, while Bolshevism threatened from the east and fascism from the south. So the term “crisis” was a historical topos that belonged to the whole interwar period. But by 1935 fascism and anti-Semitism had arrived in Germany, and Europe seemed headed for the abyss.

Thus the talk of Europe’s crisis is certainly topical, but the tone and emphasis here are so foreign to that of Husserl’s earlier texts that one is inclined to suspect that they are merely window dressing, meant to draw in the reader. But that interpretation won’t hold up, since Husserl obviously believes that the teleological and historical approach is integral to his presentation of phenomenology. As he says in his preface to the original publication of the Crisis, his new work “makes the attempt, by way of a teleological-historical reflection upon the origins of our critical scientific and philosophical situation, to establish the unavoidable necessity of a transcendental-phenomenological reorientation of philosophy” (C, xxiv).

2 “Europe” as seen in 1935

What does it mean to philosophize about Europe in the way that Husserl does? Early in the Crisis Husserl raises the question of whether “Europe” is “merely an empirical anthropological type, like ‘China’ or ‘India’” (C, 16). Well, why not? What more should it be? Of course, Europe is more than a merely geographical entity, as Husserl says, with its shifting boundaries and its colonial outposts, including North America. But couldn’t we say the same of “China” and “India?” They too are certainly more than just geographical. We could even add that Europe is more than just anthropological—comprising language, culture, religion, etc.; it is also historical, exhibiting a continuity over time and embodying certain large-scale social and political transformations. But China and India likewise have their own histories. What is Husserl after?

What is at stake for Husserl is an idea of “humanity” that begins as Greek humanity, is renewed in the European Renaissance, and is the “breakthrough to what is essential to humanity as such” (C, 15). European humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, and we who philosophize under this idea are “functionaries of mankind,” acting on behalf not just of Europeans but of all human beings (C, 17). And tellingly, Husserl believes that what he calls “the spectacle of the Europeanization of all other civilizations bears witness to the rule of an absolute meaning, one which is proper to the sense rather than to a historical non-sense, of the world” (C, 16).

These features of Husserl’s late thought, together with what appears to be a condescending dismissal of China and India, seem to place him squarely in the camp of what would later come to known as Eurocentrism. How should we react to Husserl’s views of Europe? Is he just expressing the prejudices of his generation and his class, leaving his philosophy intact? It is true that until this late stage in his career, Husserl has presented his philosophy without clothing it in the teleological-historical reflections that focus so intently on the “European” origins of philosophy. Perhaps Husserl thinks that since Europe is so clearly caught up in crisis, he needs to attack the European crisis by exploring its European roots. But Husserl devotes so much attention to the idea of Europe in these late writings that it is it is clear that much is at stake.

In order to understand this turn in Husserl’s reflections, it is important to remember that he is not the first to attribute “universal” and teleological-historical significance to Europe. For Hegel the essence of human existence is freedom, but freedom comes to its realization only through history. Like the trajectory of the sun, history arises in the east and ends in the west. It is only in the modern world of the Christian European states that freedom can be more than merely potential. Here for the first time, all can be free and the essence of humanity can become real. Like Husserl, Hegel will not include the great civilizations of China and India in this realization, relegating them to merely preliminary stages of human history.

Many readers have felt the influence of Hegel’s philosophy of history in Husserl’s late work, and those who know Husserl are surprised by this. Husserl had very little interest in and knowledge of Hegel’s work, and was not concerned to pursue any similarities there might have been, including, of course, the important use of the term “phenomenology.” Husserl’s background was in eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and positivism, and in Kant and neo-Kantianism. By emphasizing reason and science rather than freedom, Husserl was perhaps closer to the Enlightenment and early positivist sense of history than he was to Hegel. But in the Enlightenment conception the reference to Europe was at most implicit, and here Husserl puts great emphasis on it.

3 Europe and the birth of science

Two features of Husserl’s thought about Europe need to be pointed out here. In the Vienna lecture, Husserl traces the origin of European “humanity” to Greece, and then he asks what is essential about Greek “humanity” that makes it the “birthplace” of Europe. Not epic or drama, not democracy or the polis, as some might expect, but philosophy conceived as universal science, science of the universe (C, 276). Plato is for Husserl the father of science (he says this also on the first page of FTL). Connoisseurs of Greek philosophy may find it hard to square this idea of Wissenschaft with Plato or even Aristotle, but this is what Husserl sees. As it becomes clear in the Vienna lecture, what this represents to Husserl is knowledge for its own sake, rather than for any practical (or “religious-mythical”) purpose (C, 283); knowledge of universal rather than merely particular truths; and an idea of “humanity” that is itself universal, that is, rational humanity capable of attaining to these universal truths. There is something paradoxical in the result of these reflections. Science has a birthplace in Greece, Husserl thinks, but the idea which is born there is that truth is universal and not limited to any time and place. Scientists and philosophers are “functionaries,” says Husserl, not just for European humanity but for humanity as such. European science is thus a kind of self-cancelling particularity which is destined to outrun its Greek origin and its European home. The European idea that is born in Greece is that truth is neither Greek nor European.

This “universalist” idea of Europe differs from that of Hegel, in part because it seems not to imply urging political forms on the rest of the world. Above all it is important to see Husserl’s idea in the context of the rise of National Socialism, whose only idea of the destiny of Europe was that it be conquered and subjected to the domination of a “master race.” The ideas of “universal reason” and “humanity as such” had no place in Nazi ideology, where even physics and mathematics were classified as Aryan and non-Aryan. Husserl’s stress on these ideas can be seen as an act of defiance.

Still, many see something disingenuous in this idea of “European” rationality. If it is genuinely universal than why does its factual origin matter? Why not say that philosophy and science could have, and in fact did, arise in other places as well? Why make so much of the European character of all this? Husserl seems to be confronting Nazi “irrationalism” by appealing to a deeply ingrained European sense of teleology and superiority.

This, then, is the Husserl that French readers were absorbing in the 1950s and 1960s. In a moment I will argue that this picture of Husserl is misleading in certain ways, but let’s let that picture stand for now as we turn to Foucault and other thinkers of the generation he represents.

4 Foucault and post-war Europe

When Foucault enters the scene in the 1960s, he is notoriously difficult to classify. He looks, in terms of the topics he treats, like some kind of historian: a historian of medicine, a historian of science, even a historian of ideas. There are several reasons why Foucault is soon recognized as a major philosophical figure, and one of them is surely that his historical practices signal a major upheaval in the concept of history itself, and a radical critique of modern historical consciousness. That historical consciousness is precisely the one apparently represented by Husserl in the Crisis: history as a continuous and cumulative progression of ideas leading up to a telos that is about to be realized in our own day. Here the science of the past, for example, is important only to the extent that it prepares the way for the theories of today. When Foucault speaks derisively of the history of science, the history of ideas, of the philosophy of history, this is what he has in mind. Ultimately his critique is aimed the historical conception of philosophy itself.

In this respect Foucault must be seen as participating in and contributing to a far-reaching and truly momentous transformation of the concept of historical time and change. And Foucault realizes that he is not alone in this. In the pivotal text “Archeology of Knowledge” he appeals, as if for support, to the historians of the Annales school and to recent developments in the history of science. Though the one looks for the “longue durée” of geographical and demographic periods in which little or nothing changes, and the other for epistemological disruptions and discontinuities (here he mentions Bachelard and Canghilhem), they are alike in seeing human history and human knowledge without the perspective of continuity and forward development (AK, 4). Structural linguistics, which abandons the developmental approach of traditional philology in favor a synchronic theory of signs, lends itself to the radical recasting of anthropology at the hands of Levi-Strauss and others, and one of the things being attacked here is precisely the placing of so-called “primitive” societies on a diachronic trajectory in which they represent the remote past and the West is the pinnacle and culmination of human development. While Foucault disavows the structuralist label, all these ideas foreshadow his own theory of epistemes and radical discontinuity in history.

The picture is much broader than the French intellectual scene Foucault mentions directly. Thomas Kuhn’s work on the structure of scientific revolutions fits right in here. Deeply ingrained ideas of scientific progress are undermined by Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts and historical discontinuity. In the English-speaking world Kuhn’s work ushers in a radical transformation of the philosophy of science which bears some resemblance to Foucault’s work. Far beyond the theory of science, the assumptions of Western attitudes toward history are subjected to sustained attack.

5 Löwith and the meaning of history

One version of this attack which became very controversial and unleashed a long debate was presented in Karl Löwith’s Meaning in History (1949). (It later appeared in German under the title Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen.) Defining the philosophy of history as “a systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning,” Löwith immediately states the thesis of his book: “Taken in this sense, philosophy of history is however, entirely dependent on theology of history, in particular on the theological concept of history as a history of fulfillment and salvation. But then philosophy of history cannot be a ‘science’; for how could one verify the belief in salvation on scientific grounds?” (1949, 1). Löwith thus tells us that the modern versions of history claim to be “science” (presumably in the German sense of Wissenschaft), not theology or the expression of religious belief. Löwith aims to show, on the contrary, that philosophy of history “originates with the Hebrew and Christian faith in a fulfilment and that it ends with the seculariztion of its eschatological pattern” (1949, 2).

As we might expect, Löwith describes Hegel’s philosophy of history as a “secularization” of Christianity, with reason taking the place of faith and “realizing the Kingdom of God on earth.” Löwith sees in Marx the same jarring combination of elements as in Hegel: the presentation as scientific truth of what is in essence a deeply religious message. “Marx may explain the fact of exploitation ‘scientifically’ by his theory of surplus value; exploitation, nevertheless, remains an ethical judgment.” In Marx’s outline of universal history, exploitation is “the radical evil of ‘prehistory’ or, in biblical terms, original sin.” “The secret history of the Communist Manifesto is not its conscious materialism and Marx’s own opinion of it, but the religious spirit of prophetism” (1949, 43). Marx’s ultimate struggle between bourgois and proletariat “corresponds to the Jewish–Christian belief in a final fight between Christ and anti-Christ in the last epoch of history” (1949, 44). The outcome of Marx’s “historical messianism” is communist society as a “realm of freedom,” “a Kingdom of God, without God and on earth” (1949, 42).

The modern philosophy of history in its most illustrious form is thus a secularized version of the salvation story, religion masquerading as reason and science. Löwith attempts to back up his thesis by tracing the modern conception of history back to its theological (Augustinian) and biblical roots. Throughout his presentation he contrasts this Judeo-Christian view of history with the Greek conception, based on eternal recurrence and on the idea of Fate. He clearly believes that this non-religious conception, which dispenses with the idea of ultimate purpose and of salvation, is not only more internally coherent but also more in accord with our actual experience of time and events.

Löwith’s book must be understood at least partly as a document of its time. His critique of the classical philosophy of history is moral as well as conceptual, in light of the holocaust and other mass sufferings as a result of the war. “The interpretation of history,” he writes, “is, in the last analysis, an attempt to understand the meaning of history as the meaning of suffering by historical action” (1949, 3). This attempt to present a theodicy by means of history is the novelty of modern thought, and its biggest mistake, according to Löwith. For the Greeks evil was not even conceived as a problem for which there could be a solution. The moderns can be understood as believing that suffering could be justified by the higher purpose that was being served. But according to Löwith, “historical processes as such do not bear the least evidence of a comprehensive and ultimate meaning. History as such has no outcome” (1949, 191).

Löwith and Foucault may seem far apart, but they share a common inspiration: Nietzsche. Löwith is an avowed Nietzschean and “pagan” who reads Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal return as an attempt to uproot the ideas of teleology and eschatology deeply rooted in Western thought. Löwith’s reception in France was less than positive because Marx’s thought, in one form or another, still dominated French intellectual life. But that dominance was being steadily undermined, not least by Foucault himself. I see Löwith as a precursor of Foucault, and especially of Jean-François Lyotard, who describes the “postmodern condition” as being characterized by incredulity toward “grands récits” (Lyotard 1984, xxiv). It is the mega-narrative of European progress culminating in the modern age that has lost its plausibility after Europe devoured itself in the flames of the second world war. What Foucault and Lyotard add to Löwith’s critique is the idea that capitalism and positivism are similar to Marxism in being committed to a teleological conception of history. Furthermore, as Frenchmen who had lived through the time of the Algerian war, they saw the struggles of colonial liberation as more evidence against any European triumphalism. And to them Husserl’s late work looked like just another affirmation of this implausible mega-narrative, a last gasp, perhaps, of the nineteenth century optimism now rendered senseless by the awful realities of history.

6 Husserl’s subjectification of teleology

And yet this characterization of Husserl’s work misses something of its subtlety. If we look more closely we can see elements that undermine his identification with Hegelian teleology. In the course of his “historical-teleological” account Husserl pauses to reflect on “our historical manner of investigation.” He is asking, in effect, why an investigation like his should require reference to the history of philosophy and science from Greece to modern Europe. His investigation, he says, “regards the total historical complex as a personal one…attempting ultimately to discern the historical task which we can acknowledge as the only one which is personally our own” (C, 70). We look for this task “not from the outside, from facts…Rather, we seek to discern it from the inside.” We obtain this “not through the critique of some present or handed-down system, some scientific or prescientific “Weltanschauung” (which might as well be Chinese, in the end), but only through a critical understanding of the total unity of history—our history” (C, 71).

Another disparaging reference to China, then? Not exactly. To look at Europe and its history from the outside would be to treat it as a mere anthropological type, just as we (Europeans) might look at China and India, as anthropologists or sociologists, or even historians. But we (Europeans), Husserl is saying, are not looking at Europe from the outside, but from the inside, and for us the idea of universal science, rational humanity, is not a fact but a task in which we share, one that we take up as participants—or at least some of us do. That is why Husserl’s inquiry here is “teleological–historical.”

So it comes down to a joining of the universal and the particular. Like the birthplace of philosophy in Greece, our current situation is particular, and we are individuals in a situation of crisis. That’s why the question is personal for us. But must one be a “European” in order to take up this task? I don’t see that this follows. The matter is “personal” for anyone who shares in the idea of rationality and wants to realize it. Still, it must be said that if this is a possible interpretation of his view, Husserl doesn’t seem to acknowledge it. Though he does not say so directly, he seems to think that it is up to Europeans to take up the task of realizing reason. In this sense, for him, Europe retains its central role in the destiny of philosophy.

This conception of the relation between the particular and the universal is an important way in which Husserl’s conception of Europe differs from that of Hegel. For Hegel the teleology of Europe is a process that happens outside of us individuals, and goes on whether we are for it or against it. With the well-known “cunning of reason,” the world-spirit’s push toward freedom uses us for its purposes; even world-historical individuals, like Alexander and Napoleon, who may think they drive history, are for Hegel only pawns in the strategy of spirit.

On the basis of what we have said, we can distinguish three different narrative strategies, as we might call them, in the modern approaches to history. (1) The Enlightenment’s future is still open, but the idea of human salvation is pretty clearly implied, even if we cannot give it a full-fledged definition. Kant thought a league of nations might do it. (2) Hegel (and Marx) give us closure, a fairly clear-cut End of History to go with its beginning and its middle. (3) But the idea of crisis, as Husserl portrays it, places us in the middle of a fateful drama, at a turning point where the possibility of a reversal of fortune looms large before us. Something must be done. Human agency is called for in all three of these models, even the Hegelian-Marxist one, though it is often portrayed as deterministic. But in the case of a crisis the need is urgent: Emergency intervention is called for. Europe is perched on the edge of an abyss. It can still survive, but only if we intervene on its behalf.

At the heart of the idea of Crisis, of course, is a medical metaphor. At the beginning of the Vienna lecture he develops exactly this metaphor, starting with the contrast between scientific medicine and Naturheilkunde—the so-called nature cure. While the latter derives from tradition and the life of the people, scientific medicine draws on insights from purely theoretical sciences like physics and chemistry. The medical crisis is a turning point in the illness; the patient in critical condition may live or die. Something must be done; intervention is called for. Scientific medicine offers our best hope.

Then Husserl turns his attention from the human body to the human spirit. Here too, he says, the concepts of health and sickness apply, not only to individuals but to “communities, peoples, states.” “The European nations are sick; Europe itself, it is said, is in crisis” (C, 270). At this level there is no shortage of nature-doctors and quacks; we are inundated by their pseudo-cures. We need a genuine science of the human spirit. This is phenomenology.

One may legitimately ask whether Husserl’s way of confronting the crisis, by urging a transcendentalized version of the enlightenment project, is an appropriate response, but at least Husserl was not naively optimistic about the situation he and his fellow Europeans were in 1935. For our purposes, an important question remains: Is Husserl’s conception of history still teleological? He may have rejected the Hegelian objective teleology, but by making the crisis personal and its resolution depend on a subjective decision, he may have retained the idea of teleology in another form. He could be said to have exchanged an external for an internal teleology. In any case, his phenomenology remains what it always was, and what Foucault most despises, namely a philosophy of subjectivity. It remains loyal to the decisionism that Foucault calls the “heroism of the present moment” and which he identifies as the heart of the Enlightenment in his famous essay on that topic. Husserl’s historical reflections are designed to uncover the obscure origins of the crisis of modernity, to bring it into the light of day so we can do something about it.

7 The attack on the subject

Foucault, of course, is very suspicious of such notions. Like other contemporaries he thinks that practice is guided by hidden rules and principles of exclusion, that the surface manifestations of consciousness are driven by forces deep below the surface. What Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion” has much older origins, of course, anticipated in the false consciousness of Marx and the unconscious of Freud. The very idea of man, born of the Enlightenment as sovereign, self-transparent and self-possessed, the transcendental/empirical double that triumphs in modernity, is for Foucault an illusion destined to pass away “like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (OT, 387).

In such passages Foucault flirts with the apocalyptic vision he shares with Derrida and the late Heidegger. But it is precisely this vision that makes his anti-subjectivism hard to sustain, as many critics have pointed out. Who is being duped by this illusion, and more importantly, who sees through it? To whom does the disappearance of man’s face reveal itself? If Foucault is to avail himself of the language of appearance and reality, then he is implicitly assuming a subject who is deceived and a subject who is not. Somebody is telling us about all those obscure forces, deep structures, and systems of exclusion that are hidden from the unsuspecting subject who foolishly thinks he is sovereign and self-transparent, who thinks he knows what he is doing and thinking. Who is unveiling this vast deception, who is telling us the truth? Freud is telling us, Marx is telling us, and now Foucault is telling us. It is Foucault himself, and those who are persuaded by his claims, that now occupy the “place of the king” in Las Meninas, as he calls it, or that of the all-seeing eye in the panopticon. Unless, of course, he and his followers are themselves just the unwitting dupes of a new, post-modern episteme waiting to be unveiled by some future truth-teller, who in turn…etc.

Obviously I find Foucault’s anti-subjectivism, which he shares with many of his contemporaries and compatriots, less than persuasive because it is internally incoherent. By contrast, his idea of the epistemological field, or episteme, which he also calls the historical apriori, is a very useful tool for intellectual history, as long as it is not used in support of historical relativism and of striking but unsustainable metaphysical conclusions about the fate of “man.”

Foucault’s participation in the generalized rejection of the teleology of history, to which he contributes a significant dimension, seems to me altogether salutary, and does not depend on his anti-subjectivism for its validity or value. Nor does it imply his conceptual relativism.

As for Husserl, while he seems at first glance to subscribe to a teleological view of history, his position, as we’ve seen, is actually much more subtle. He sees that his own historicization of the philosophy of science could open him to the charge of historical relativism, as if he were arguing that each historical epoch or people has its own truth and can never escape its boundaries. On this view, “every people has its ‘logic’ and, accordingly, if this logic is explicated in propositions, ‘its’ a priori” (C, 373). What Husserl describes here is, I think, very close to Foucault’s idea of the “historical apriori.” Husserl’s use of scare-quotes makes clear that such a historically limited a priori is for him a contradiction in terms. For him such historical configurations would be instances of a genuine historical a priori, that is, an essential structure of any and all historical configurations: “historical present in general, historical time generally” (C, 372). That is, any array of historical a prioris in Foucault’s sense (he uses the plural) would presuppose the historical a priori which is not itself historically variable. “Even the claim of their factualness presupposes the historical apriori if this claim is to have a meaning” (C, 374).

Thus the true a priori lying behind this view is simply Husserl’s essentialism. There is no real argument for this view, just the ability to show that any factual claim presupposes an essence. Foucault’s own concept of historical a priori, and generally his anti-teleological and discontinuous view of history, is likewise unargued, and serves as presupposition for his investigations. This is his real historical apriori that never gets articulated as such. These two very different versions of the historical a priori are at work, as we have shown, in Husserl’s and Foucault’s treatment of history and their practice of historical reflection.