The paper examines the question if the phenomenological inquiry can undergo complete historization without abandoning the husserlian method of reduction. The question is motivated by what seems to be the irreconcilable contradiction between the irreducible historical facticity and contingency of the phenomenological tradition itself and the reduction as an occupation of the position of the disinterested spectator above the world and the disclosure of the transcendental dimension beyond the worldly horizon.
In Crisis, where the theme of the historicity of the life-world acquires central methodological significance, Husserl criticizes the Cartesian justification of the phenomenological method in Ideas and outlines a different way to phenomenological reduction. However, an alternative way from the Cartesian path to reduction in the Crisis did not at all imply the historicization of the reduction itself, despite Husserl's emphasis on the historicity of the life-world, science and philosophy.
I will try to consider the possibility of a historical way to reduction, which would also imply going beyond the horizon of the world – however, not from the outside, but from within. My main thesis is that the historicity can be regarded as a "self-transcendence" of the world, through which we can go beyond the world without occupying an external position above the world, because the world itself as historical one goes beyond its limits. This self-transcendence of the historical life-world consists, as I will try to show, in the double bookkeeping of historical tradition – history as tradition makes up the very stability of the life-world as meaning-foundation but, at the same time, tradition as history is the very movement of the foundation, which destabilizes and problematizes it. The historically held pregivenness of the world desubstantiates itself from within, making possible the unity of historical facticity and the phenomenological epoche.