Acknowledging the historicity of understanding brings validity to a critical juncture. If validity requires transcending understanding’s historical horizon, historicity forfeits its foundation. Yet if every claim is reduced to the historical conditions of its emergence, the claim to historicity cannot sustain its validity. The issue is not an external relation between historicity and validity, but a tension internal to the logic of the claim to historicity. Immanent analysis shows that preserving historicity’s philosophical standing presupposes understanding’s critical return to its historical horizon. This article formulates this possibility as “intrahistorical self-transcendence,” arising from historicity’s internal logic, not an external principle. Yet intrahistorical self-transcendence is only the condition of possibility of validity, not a sufficient account. The article therefore introduces “the irreducible” as understanding’s normative dimension and argues that validity, though arising within history, cannot be reduced to its historical conditions, but requires responsiveness to reasons and objections and openness to revision.