Description:

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Husserl developed a method of historical reflection (Besinnung) meant to guide and realize his transcendental eidetic project. This method of critique, which falls within the purview of Husserl's framework of transcendental clarification (Klärung), is a response to what he saw as the crisis of science, philosophy, and, ultimately, humanity. This paper offers a deep dive into three core aspects of Husserl's Besinnung: restoration (Restitution), reactivation (Reaktivierung), and reorientation (Umwendung). Whereas restoration focuses on the pre-givenness of experiential evidence, reactivation targets the sedimented layers of this evidence. My main contentions in this paper are threefold. 1) Restoration and reactivation condition, in a performative manner, the possibility of a radical reorientation toward the historicity of this evidence.
2) This sustained reorientation qualifies both the attitudinal shift of the phenomenological reductions and our grasp of transcendental necessity. 3)
This transcendental-historical reorientation, in turn, has self-referential implications: critique is eo ipso radical self-critique - a self-critique (Selbstbesinnung) that necessarily entails the (re)evaluation of methodological commitments and theoretical accomplishments (Leistungen) alike. In short, the performativity we see at work at the level of domain-specific analyses also unfolds at the higher-order, meta-phenomenological level. The paper closes with reflections on the implications of this self-referentiality for understanding transcendental phenomenology as a qualitatively distinctive kind of radical immanent critique.