Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology

7. From Being to Givenness and Back: Some Remarks on the Meaning of Transcendental Idealism in Kant and Husserl

185 7 From Being to Givenness and Back: Some Remarks on the Meaning of Transcendental Idealism in Kant and Husserl Kant’s oeuvre contains gold in rich abundance. But one must break it and melt it in the fire of radical critique in order to bring out this content. —Husserl, from a manuscript from ca. 1917, Hua XXV, 206 Essentially, already the phenomenological reduction, correctly conceived, implies the marching route to transcendental idealism , just as phenomenology in its entirety is nothing other than the first rigorous scientific form of this idealism. —Husserl, from the lecture Erste Philosophie, 1923/24, Hua VIII, 181 Introduction In a letter to Cassirer written in 1925, Husserl reflects on his philosophical journey. Influenced in his early development by his teacher Brentano and his school, he was initially “adverse to Kant” and “unreceptive to the genuine sense of Kant’s philosophy.” After forging his method of the phenomenological reduction, however, “I had to realize that this science further developing in me encompassed, in an entirely distinct method, the entire Kantian problematic . . . and that it confirmed Kant’s main results in rigorous scientific founding and in their limitation” (Hua-Dok III/V, 4).1 Like many philosophers who succeeded Kant, the mature Husserl both recognized Kant’s towering genius and saw himself in the tradition 186 H U S S E R L , K A N T , A N D N E O - K A N T I A N I S M of Kantian philosophizing, though he never wanted to become a member of a school. Instead he intended, in his way, to wrest the true kernel from Kant’s philosophy, even if this meant reading him against the grain and “understanding the author better than he understood himself” (Kant 1998, 326, B 370). As the date of the letter quoted above shows, it was very late in his career that Husserl realized that he was furthering the true intentions of Kant’s thought. Indeed, in Ideas, book 1, dating from 1913, he explicitly conceived of his phenomenology as a form of transcendental philosophy with a reference to Kant’s critical philosophy.2 He espoused, even embraced, the Kantian concept of transcendental idealism and utilized this term frequently to describe his philosophy, though he pointed out that his phenomenological idealism was different from all traditional idealisms.3 Husserl’s transcendental idealism, like Kant’s, allegedly solves all one-sided -isms through a new method, with the difference that Husserl believed that he was finally doing it instead of merely announcing it.4 In what sense is Husserl’s phenomenology a transcendental idealism ? Indeed, such a notion seems curious when we look back at the founder of this doctrine, for Husserl rejected what was precisely the main tenet of Kant’s transcendental idealism, that is, the distinction between thing-in-itself and appearance, as “mythology.”5 Instead, the manner in which Husserl conceived of his phenomenology as transcendental was by grounding all knowledge and, more broadly, all experience of being in constituting, meaning-bestowing subjectivity. This was the sense—the correlational a priori—in which Husserl believed that his phenomenology could be interpreted as transcendental idealism: that all being receives its meaning in meaning-bestowing acts of transcendental subjectivity . So from the standpoint of phenomenology, a distinction between a thing-in-itself, to which we have no access and about which we can know nothing, and its appearance, of which we have experience and knowledge through our cognitive apparatus, makes no sense. With his distinction, Kant might have opened the door to a “science of appearances,” phenomenology ,6 but the very distinction is a mythical construction. The “gold” in Kant’s genius was the Copernican turn back to subjectivity. In this endeavor, Husserl saw Kant acknowledging Descartes’ turn to the Ego cogito and expanding upon this ingenious first beginning.7 Moreover, Kant’s philosophy presented to Husserl the ideal of scientific philosophy, that is, philosophy as a metaphysics that would henceforth emerge as science, as “rigorous science” grounded in human lived-experience of the world. This is the sense in which elements of Kant’s philosophy can be adopted and others shunned. Only in this way is the promise of Kant’s Copernican revolution fulfilled. 187 F R O M B E I N G T O G I V E N N E S S A N D B A C K So much...