Handing Down Meaning. Generativity, Historicity, and the Maternal as a Quasi-Transcendental Field

Abstract

This paper proposes a phenomenological reconfiguration of the relation between transcendental constitution and historicity, especially through the notion of the “maternal”, “natality” and “fecundity”. Rather than approaching these features as a thematic object, symbolic figure, or empirical domain, the paper reconstructs them as a generative field in which meaning is instituted, transmitted, and renewed across time. Starting from Edmund Husserl’s late analyses of teleology, intersubjectivity, and generativity (especially in The Crisis of European Sciences and the manuscripts on intersubjective inheritance) the paper argues that the validity of sense depends not on ahistorical formal conditions, but on historically operative processes of transmission and reactivation. This framework is developed through the Milan School’s reception of Husserl. Enzo Paci’s interpretation of phenomenological rationality as an infinite, ethically charged task of reactivation discloses the temporal and intersubjective conditions of reason, while Giovanni Piana’s analyses of tradere, generativity, and intersubjective inheritance show that historicity is not external to transcendental life but constitutes its very mode of existence. Within this context, the maternal emerges as a structural configuration that articulates continuity without identity, inheritance without automatism, and renewal without rupture. The paper further clarifies this generative structure through a dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s notion of natality and Emmanuel Levinas’s analyses of paternity, fecundity and diachrony. While Arendt does not thematise the maternal in the sense proposed here and Levinas develops the maternity primarily as a figure of ethical substitution, I argue that their accounts of beginning, plurality, fecundity, and responsibility articulate complementary dimensions of the generative field reconstructed in this paper. On this basis, the maternal is finally characterised as a historical a priori and, more precisely, as a quasi-transcendental field: historically variable and embodied, yet structurally constitutive of the possibility of meaning, responsibility, and historical continuity. The paper concludes by suggesting that this reconceptualisation allows phenomenology to address its own historicity without abandoning its critical ambitions, opening a path toward a generative critique of transcendental reason.