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educed state. As soon as the reflecting ego performs the necessary reductions, it obtainsaccess to the elementary levels of constituting subjectivity. And speaking in the reducedstate, the subject is, so to speak, the autobiographer of transcendental subjectivity itself.And as such, the individual ego is interchangeable with any other intelligent ego. Everyrational human being has part in this structure, and anybody (who is sufficiently trainedin reflective thinking) can articulate it.But, with the introduction of the theme of the other person, this structure is immediatelymade more problematic. The other constitutes, so to speak, a gap or a void within transcendentalsubjectivity itself. The aspect of the other, which can not be made present frommy subjective point of view, is precisely their subjectivity. This subjectivity, which to meis in principle inaccessible, is, on the other hand, what is most accessible to the other.What is obvious in this situation, is, of course, that the same structure of subjectivity cannotbe realized or fulfilled in the same individual subject at the same time. I cannot fail tohave both my own and the other’s perspective on the world, present in evident intuition.But more importantly, what this means is, that even on the level of transcendentally reducedintuition there is a distinct stratum of experience whose meaning is never immediatelygiven, viz., the content of the other’s mind. By means of analogical representation Ican produce an “empathic” understanding of what is going on within the other’s subjectivity,on the basis of bodily manifestations. But this content can never be given with the samecertainty as my own inner experiences.Thus one could actually say that the transcendental ego produces from within itself anunsurpassable level of uncertainty, which is experienced as a certain absence or lack ofpresence in human encounters. This, in turn, points to a further question: to what extentdoes this unsurpassable uncertainty contaminate experiences that are not directly experiencesof the other person as present in the visual field of the ego? The other can be presentin mediated ways, e.g., in the form of a written statement or a material creation of somesort. In all such cases, the ego encounters a bodily manifestation of some kind, whichpoints beyond itself to a known or unknown alien subjectivity, from whose internalhorizon the ego is essentially excluded. Ultimately, the whole of nature is colored by thisalien subjectivity, something which Husserl readily recognizes, when he speaks of an everpresent “appresentational stratum,” viz., “the same natural Object in its possible modes ofgivenness to the other Ego.” 19It is with these considerations in mind that I now wish to turn back to the problem ofhistory and the possibility of a historical Selbstbesinnung. If history is indeed the bodilyand spiritual activities of other people, as reported and inherited by means of signifyingobjects, what are the possibilities of a radical unifying intuition of this heritage?In one of the introductory paragraphs of The Crisis, entitled “The ideal of universalphilosophy and the process of its inner dissolution,” Husserl speaks of his philosophicalattempt as on a par with that great movement of a “humanity struggling to understanditself.” 20 He claims that it is possible to “gain self-understanding, and thus inner support,only by elucidating the unitary meaning which is inborn in this history from its origin.” 21Further on he says that, what we need to do is to “inquire back into what wasoriginally and always sought in philosophy, what was continually sought by all the philosophersand philosophies.” 22I have tried to argue that these extremely general claims, bold as they are, are naturallygenerated from within the original ambitions of phenomenology. Now it must be shown19202122Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 125.Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences, 14.Ibid.Ibid., 18.242