A classical paradox of historiography lies in the fact that while history can only be made by human action, it is considered the moving force behind humans themselves. To solve this paradox, it is necessary to focus on the way individuals interact with historical developments, both adapting to them and attempting to manipulate them.
The aim of this paper is to show that Husserl’s genetic phenomenology provides a fruitful approach to understand this interaction in depth. Indeed, it is only on the subjective level that it is possible to understand history in its radical sense, namely by considering how the transcendental structures through which the world is apprehended are themselves modified by history. Precisely the laws of this modification of the transcendental structures of individual monads can be described thanks to Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. Macro-historical developments, such as changes in society, appear in this framework as motivating, but not as causal factors; they areprocessed in a non-deterministic manner, leaving a certain margin for maneuver and reflection for the individual.
Concretely, the key structures to explain how the apprehension of the world can shift are horizon, habituality and type. According to this, it will be argued that all three are intertwined with each other and generated in an active interaction with one’s environment, but then sediment into passivity to codetermine the appearing. Thus, their modification changes even the apprehension of pregivenworldly structures, for example of nature or the other person. Simultaneously, it is the surrounding community that plays a crucial role in the active interactions with horizon, type and habituality, hence strongly impacting one’s transcendental structures, without excluding the possibility of dissent altogether. In this way, analyzing the structures of consciousness genetically means to comprehend them as a product of history that at the same time produces history.