History, critique, and freedom: the historical a priori in Husserl and Foucault

Cont Philos Rev History, critique, and freedom: the historical a priori in Husserl and Foucault Andreea Smaranda Aldea 0 1 2 3 Amy Allen 0 1 2 0 Penn State, State College , PA , USA 1 Dartmouth College , Hanover, NH , USA 2 & Andreea Smaranda Aldea 3 The co-editors wish to thank the Department of Philosophy, the Leslie Center for the Humanities, the Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Dean of Faculty, and the Office of the Provost at Dartmouth College for their generous support of the This special issue emerged out of an interest in exploring the complex concept of the historical a priori as it is powerfully articulated in the work of Edmund Husserl and Michel Foucault.1 This concept not only forms a bridge between the work of Edmund Husserl and that of Michel Foucault, it also plays a crucial role in the thought of each philosopher. In Husserl studies, the historical a priori raises important questions about the structures and conditions for the possibility of the phenomenological method. This concept has the power to illuminate Husserlian phenomenology as a whole and also to bring out core questions and puzzles that have yet to be resolved within the tradition. Similarly, for Foucault, the idea of the historical a priori is central to his early, archaeological work, but continues to exert a strong influence on his later conceptions of historical ontology and critique. The concept of the historical a priori raises crucial questions about Foucault's distinctive historico-philosophical method. Our hope in putting together this special issue is that a dialogue between these two traditions focusing on the historical a priori would not only help to illuminate our understanding of the relationship between Husserlian - phenomenology and Foucaultian post-structuralism but could also shed light on fundamental questions within each tradition. In this introduction, we aim to stake out some of those fundamental questions—questions regarding critique, method, normativity, and teleology—as they play out in the work of Husserl and Foucault, respectively, in an effort to situate the essays that follow. The difficult notion of the historical a priori is central to any understanding of Husserl’s mature transcendental phenomenology. Many commentators, such as Merleau-Ponty, have questioned the feasibility and coherence of Husserl’s philosophical program as he discusses it in his final work, the Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty 2014, 51–59) . Here, Husserl proposes a radical ‘reorientation’ of the transcendental approach (C, 3–1)— which is now to pursue its eidetic goals through the guidance of ‘teleologicalhistorical reflection.’ As David Carr points out in his translator’s introduction to the Crisis (see also Carr 1974) , rendering the transcendental program dependent on a historical approach that ‘takes our history seriously’ seems to defeat the former’s commitment to uncovering the universal structures of meaning constitution. Is the a priori of correlation historically bound on Husserl’s 1930s view? If so, what necessity does this ‘a priori’ carry if not the universal a-historical kind? Relativism—which Husserl so empathically criticized in Philosophy as Rigorous Science—here looms large. And yet, as Carr discusses in the present volume, doing phenomenology entails beginning with one’s own lived experiences, in their historical, cultural, and socio-political situatedness. Can the threads of this prima facie aporetic bind between the eidetic and the historical be productively woven? Several contributions in this volume suggest interesting ways of answering this question affirmatively. Whether through an unpacking of the a priori through the lens of the conditions for the possibility of a ‘theoretical tradition’ (Crowell), or through a discussion of ‘deep history’ (Dodd), or ‘communalization’ (Moran), Husserlian phenomenology must be understood as a specific kind of transcendental critique: a radical reflection of philosophy (here phenomenology) on its own history, conditions for possibility, conceptual resources, theoretical decisions, normative commitments, and motivations. Such a reflection necessarily entails an examination of the relationship philosophy has to scientific thought, whose ebb and flow do not leave it untouched. What makes this reflection ‘critical’ is the infinite, propaedeutic examination of how philosophy itself—in its dynamic with science and the everyday—constitutes systems of meanings, knowledge, values, and norms. In other words: how it comes to deem its theoretical efforts worthy of pursuit, how it conceives its methods as epistemically potent, and how it delineates its domain as well as its results in terms of what is possible and what is necessary. Phenomenology is to be ‘without a ground, yet not groundless’ (C, 180–181). Therein lies the core of Husserl’s radical ‘reorientation.’ All theoretical thought grounds itself—and be (...truncated)