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including the personal body, with its scars and wrinkles. This history is the infinitehorizon of the, in principle, re-enactable experiences of my personal past. The other historyis that of others, either singular or in communion, or of a community consisting ofmyself and others. It necessarily includes experiences which I have never had. To thishistory, I stand in a mediated relationship. It is given to me, initially, as a story told bysomebody else about how it was or what happened. Thereafter, I can of course, to a greateror lesser extent, try to find out for myself what actually took place. But whichever wayI go about this, the knowledge will be mediated by some kind of cultural object; a manuscriptof some kind, or a photographic image, but it could also be an artwork, a building,or simply the material remnants of a human body. In this way, history is handed down bymeans of different kinds of signs. History, in the broader sense of non-personal history,is not something that is primarily remembered; it is something heard or read, and as suchsomething learned from another by means of a signifying act. And this is, of course, particularlytrue of the philosophical-scientific history of which Husserl speaks in The Crisis.History is the life of others, mediated to me by means of signifying objects that were composedby others. History, I would dare to say, is essentially other.But if this is the case, how can phenomenological reflection expect to have directaccess to it? On what ground can Husserl claim that “a historical backward reflection ...is thus the deepest kind of self-reflection.” 18 If the self can only appropriate the other intheir otherness, as essentially non-present, how could it possibly get around this situationin the case when the other appears as history? In order to address these questions I thinkit is necessary to look again, more closely, at the structure of the transcendental ego thatis implied by the description of the encounter with the other.The account of the sense of the being of the other is ultimately an account of thestructure of intersubjectivity. The transcendental is intersubjective; it represents a level ofconstituting subjectivity in which every human being partakes and to which everyone, atleast in principle, has reflective access by means of the transcendental reduction. Thus,when Husserl analyzes how another person appears to the reflecting subject, he speaks notin the name of himself, but in the name of any possible human center of experience, exposedto any possible other human being. In a sense, this is obvious, but it is still importantto keep in mind. For, the question at issue -- viz., the possibility of a phenomenologicalphilosophy of history -- points precisely to the problematic notion of a center ofreflection.When the other appears within the sphere of ownness, it is always as a “there,” asanother possible center of reflection. This other center is one which I, from my centeredpoint of view, could in principle occupy as another possible orientation. In this sense, theother is another I. His perspective of the world is in principle open to me, as just anotherversion of my own. And yet he (or she), in his (or her) sphere of ownness, is notpresentable by me. This relation is of course reflexive, i.e., from his or her point of view,it is my sphere which constitutes an appresented apperception, which is not open tofulfillment by presentation.On the face of it, this reflexivity is perfectly consistent and in line with the generalattitude of phenomenological analysis. Phenomenology concerns itself with essentialstructures of subjective life, and among these one finds the experience of the other, which-- on one basic level -- is the same for all. But at the same time, it points to certainproblems with regard to the relation between the individual ego and transcendentalsubjectivity. Before the relation to the other is brought up, it is not necessary to distinguishtranscendental subjectivity itself from the individual ego in the transcendentally18Ibid., 72.241