13 - The historicity of both the intelligibility of ideal meanings and the possibility of actual history

Summary

The historical problem underlying Husserl's concept of intentional history

In the foregoing we have indicated that for Husserl the transcendental enquiry into the problem of the intentional history of the categorial formations of the meaning making up an object's identity reveals the essential necessity of its involvement in a history in the usual sense of the term. That is, the transcendental enquiry into the intentional history of the categorial unity of an object discloses an essential connection between the origin of this unity and its historical development within natural time.

For Husserl the connection between the problem of enquiry that underlies historical reflection and intentional history is established when he – in the works that present the final phase of his thought – once again takes up a task that psychologism cannot solve on its own terms but has addressed in its own way: the investigation of the origin of the unity of the meaning formation of any intentional object. In these works Husserl showed that the enquiry into the constitution of any meaning formation as an invariant that transcends the natural time presupposed by psychologism is itself but a mode of “objective omnitemporality” (CM, 156). As such, its identity is an intentional product of the continual accomplishments of transcendental subjectivity, which bring about the combination (Verbindung) constituted through the medium of recollective representations that yields the objectivity belonging to the ideal determinations of the unity of meaning.