J. N. Mohanty on Self-Evidence and the Possibility of Transcendental Subjectivity

This article argues that J. N. Mohanty's phenomenological interpretation of Husserl's thought sought to retrieve the possibility of transcendental subjectivity from the criticisms made by Heideggerian hermeneutical philosophy. Mohanty argued that none of the three bases of critique, that of body, time, and language, were strong enough to disqualify the possibility of transcendental subjectivity. In this article, I claim that Mohanty's arguments in favor of the possibility of transcendental subjectivity depend on his conception of self-evidence. If there are two senses of self-evidence for Mohanty (self-evidence1, which is consciousness' awareness of its own existence, and self-evidence2, which is the experience of truth as normally considered by philosophers), then, I argue, that a theory of transcendental subjectivity that would exceed corporeality, historicity, and linguisticality depends upon self-evidence1 as non-intentional and hyletic. The consequences of this decision are that a theory of transcendental phenomenological subjectivity must abandon the fundamentality of intentionality to that subject.