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Abstract
This paper takes a fresh look at a classical theme in philosophical scholarship, the meaning of transcendental idealism, by contrasting Kant’s and Husserl’s versions of it. I present Kant’s transcendental idealism as a theory distinguishing between the world as in‐itself and as given to the experiencing human being. This reconstruction provides the backdrop for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a brand of transcendental idealism expanding on Kant: through the phenomenological reduction Husserl universalizes Kant’s transcendental philosophy to an eidetic science of subjectivity. He thereby furnishes a new sense of transcendental philosophy, rephrases the quid iuris‐question, and provides a new conception of the thing‐in‐itself. What needs to be clarified is not exclusively the possibility of a priori cognition but, to start at a much lower level, the validity of objects that give themselves in experience. The thing‐in‐itself is not an unknowable object, but the idea of the object in all possible appearances experienced at once. In spite of these changes Husserl remains committed to the basic sense of Kant’s Copernican Turn. I end with some comments on how both Kant and Husserl view the relation between theoretical and moral philosophy.
Notes
1 Husserliana (Hua) XXV, 206. All translations from the German, unless otherwise noted, are by the author.
2 Hua VIII, 181.
3 Hua‐Dok. III/V, 4; the letter is dated 3 April 1925.
The Kant–Husserl relationship has been a mainstay of both Kant and Husserl scholarship and has attracted a fair amount of attention lately, no doubt because of new publications in the Husserliana that shed new light on the character of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. For some recent interesting comparative monographs, see Lohmar, Citation1998 and Paimann, Citation2002. The first and exhaustive study is by Kern, Citation1964. Welton, Citation2000, though more a detailed account of genetic phenomenology, touches upon Husserl’s relation to Kant in Ch. 6.
Newer Husserliana volumes featuring texts that deal with ‘transcendental issues’ are Hua XXXII, Natur und Geist, lectures from 1927 that show Husserl wrestling with issues from the South‐West German School of neo‐Kantianism; Hua XXXIII, The Bernau Lectures on Time‐Consciousness, the much‐awaited texts from the ‘middle’ phase of Husserl’s analysis of time‐consciousness; Hua XXXIV, On the Phenomenological Reduction, which compiles texts from the late 1920s and 1930s; Hua XXXV, Introduction to Philosophy, lectures from 1922/3 in which Husserl carries out an attempt of phenomenological ultimate foundationalism (Letztbegründung), and finally Hua XXXVI, Transcendental Idealism; it is that volume that is especially interesting here, because it shows the genesis of Husserl’s notion of transcendental idealism (going back to 1908!) and also because of a peculiar ‘proof’ that Husserl provides there.
4 Critique of Pure Reason (cited as KrV with ‘A’ or ‘B’ before the page number referring to the first or second edition respectively), B370.
5 See Hua III/1, 133f.: ‘It becomes evident that Kant’s spiritual gaze lay on this field [i.e., transcendental subjectivity], although he was not capable of claiming it and understanding it as a working field of a genuine, rigorous eidetic science. Thus, e.g., the transcendental deduction of the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason actually already stands on phenomenological grounds; but Kant misinterprets this ground as psychological and thereby loses it again.’
6 See the Epilogue to Ideas I from 1930, where he writes, with reference to transcendental idealism introduced in Ideas I from 1913, that he has ‘nothing to revoke’ (Hua V, 151). On the ‘realism’ of phenomenological idealism, see Hua V, 152f. The way Husserl portrays his idealism here is as a wedge between traditional realism and idealism, which stand opposed to each other in a sort of dialectical opposition.
One might recall the dispute over the index to Ideas I, which was first compiled by Gerda Walther, a student of Husserl’s in Göttingen, i.e., from the early ‘realist’ period of phenomenology, adverse to idealism (of any sort). In 1918 she provided this index, in which she created two sub‐entries on ‘phenomenological idealism’, one listing passages where Husserl supposedly speaks ‘contra’ idealism, others where he is ‘pro’ idealism. Husserl was not happy with this division and had his new assistant, Ludwig Landgrebe, work on a new index in 1928, in which this distinction was omitted and replaced by the sole entry ‘phenomenological idealism’. This index was then printed in the third edition of 1928. See Schuhmann, Citation1973: pp. 189–92 for a detailed account of this episode.
7 As Welton rightly says, in his analysis of Husserl’s method of the transcendental reduction, ‘perhaps we can simply say that for him the analysis is the method’ (Welton, Citation2000: p. 289, my italics).
8 See Hua VII, 235 (from 1924), and earlier, Hua XXXVI, 66 (from 1908).
9 It should be pointed out that Kant himself speaks of a phenomenology in the framework of his Metaphysical Grounding of Natural Science; it is the last of the four principles of natural science (the first three being phoronomy, dynamics, and mechanics). This has almost nothing to do with the Husserlian sense of the word. For the sense in which Kant’s first Critique can be construed as a ‘transcendental phenomenology’ see Allison’s interesting essay, where he construes Kant in a Husserlian fashion (Allison, Citation1975), drawing parallels between the two projects. It is not too far‐fetched to say that his defence of Kant’s transcendental idealism in his seminal study Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (Allison, Citation1983) is already a response to critics such as Husserl. In my reading of Husserl’s phenomenological idealism, Husserl is not so much criticizing Kant as developing what he considers to be the correct insights. Allison acknowledges as much when he calls Husserl’s criticisms those that are ‘raised against Kant from within a transcendental perspective’ (Allison, Citation1983: p. 331, my italics).
10 There are two historical accounts where Husserl tells this story in similar fashion: first in the lecture Erste Philosophie (Hua VII, here esp. 63–70, 191–9) and then later in the Crisis (Hua VI, 74–104).
11 One would be wrong to claim that Husserl has nothing to say about moral philosophy. Particularly in his lectures on ethics from the 1920s (Hua XXXVII) and the Kaizo articles from the same period (Hua XXVII), he develops an elaborate account of the moral person and the moral community. These reflections, however, are detached from the context in which he discusses phenomenology as transcendental idealism.
12 The only real practical considerations Husserl has in the framework of his transcendental phenomenology could be described as ethics of scientific conduct – the role of the scientist in her activities and henceforth in her role as ‘functionary of mankind’. Hence, Funke’s attempt to establish a ‘primacy of practical over theoretical reason’ in Husserl merely manages to talk about an individual’s self‐reflection as a scientist or a philosopher and is, therefore, not very convincing as establishing a universal ethics in Husserl similar to Kant’s (see Funke, Citation1984: esp. p. 28). See the conclusion below on Husserl’s reflections on Kant’s practical postulates.
13 I thus follow the line of interpretation of authors such as Allison, Ameriks, Prauss, Pippin, Gardner, and others, whose basic understanding of the Kantian project in the first Critique is that it presents one long and gradually unfolding argument for transcendental idealism; see Gardner’s summary of this reading in Gardner, Citation1999: pp. xiif.
14 KrV, Bxvi.
15 See KrV, Bxix, where Kant elaborates on the ‘altered method of our way of thinking, namely that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them’.
16 Thus, the so‐called ‘third alternative’, according to which things‐in‐themselves might, for all we know, be constituted as existing in space and time (which are by definition exclusively our forms of intuition), is impossible. This would be the position of transcendental realism, which Kant clearly rejects, because the point of transcendental idealism is that it considers the epistemic conditions under which things are experienceable for us. On the third, ‘Trendelenburg’ alternative, see Gardner, Citation1999: pp. 107–11.
17 Allison, Citation1983: p. 14.
18 This standpoint has not died out but has been revived – or preserved, however one chooses to look at it – in modern science with the label ‘naturalism’. This is Thomas Nagel’s critique of modern science in striving for what he calls a ‘view from nowhere’. It is the explicit attempt to rid oneself of a perspective in order to have ‘real’, ‘objective’ truth. Nagel’s point is slightly different: while he does see it as an ideal to strive for ‘objectivity’, like Husserl he sees it as an ideal limit. His critique turns on applying this ideal to subjectivity in reducing the experience to brain synapses etc. It is this attempt that is not only wrong‐headed but absurd to Nagel, as it reduces consciousness to objective ‘facts’ that are ‘there’ without viewpoint.
19 Allison, Citation1983: p. 8.
20 See B306: ‘[I]f we call certain objects, as appearances, beings of sense (phaenomena), because we distinguish the way in which we intuit them from their constitution in itself, then it already follows from our concept that to these we as it were oppose, as objects thought merely through the understanding, either other objects conceived in accordance with the latter constitution, even though we do not intuit it in them, or else other possible things, which are not objects of our senses at all [!], and call these beings of understanding (noumena).’
21 See KrV, Bxx, where Kant speaks about ‘things insofar as we are acquainted with them [sofern wir sie kennen] (insofar as they are given to us)’ (my italics).
22 See, e.g., Heidegger, Citation1997: p. 153.
23 See KrV, B59f., where Kant distinguishes between intuition (Anschauung) and experience (Erfahrung), the latter of which has veridical value. It is also the final passage of the Transcendental Aesthetic, before he moves on to the Transcendental Logic, where experience in the ‘thick’ sense (as providing material for a priori cognition) is elaborated.
24 See Langton, Citation1998, who calls this ‘Kantian humility’ and devotes a study to the notion. Her point, however, is that Kant’s epistemological conception of a priori cognition is not Kant’s main point. Her reconstruction of Kant’s distinction contends, rather, that what Kant means by the distinction between appearances and things‐in‐themselves is that we cannot have any knowledge of ‘intrinsic properties’ of things, but only in the manner in which they affect us (see Langton, Citation1998: pp. 205f.). What strikes me as curious, despite this compelling analysis, is that she rejects the notion of idealism for this standpoint. She seems to understand the term ‘idealism’ in a rather Platonic‐Berkeleian sense. I think that it makes perfect sense to accept her analysis and still see Kant’s philosophical standpoint as ‘transcendental idealism’, which is compatible with empirical realism (see KrV, A370: the transcendental idealist is a ‘dualist’).
25 I am focusing here on the positive aspect of the Critique, not the negative, delineating part of the Dialectics, which arguably is equally important to Kant. See the conclusion of this paper for the negative aspect of Kant’s project.
26 See Hua VII, 254, Hua VI, 100f. and 103f., and, more pointedly, Hua XXXIV, 55, where he speaks of ‘the Copernican Turn, enacted in its radical form in the phenomenological reduction’. See also Moran, Citation2004 for a discussion of Husserl’s notion of transcendental idealism.
27 Hua III/1, 60; see also Hua VIII, 36ff. See also the lucid reconstruction in Held, Citation2003: pp. 17–21.
28 See Hua XXXIV, 14n.: ‘The world as universe is in the natural attitude in general no theme; therefore it is properly speaking no attitude. The world is pregiven; it is the region of all natural attitudes in the actual thematic sense.’
29 See Carr, Citation2003: p. 196, who sums up his analysis of this paradox as follows: ‘We must conclude … by accepting what Husserl calls the paradox of subjectivity: that we are both subjects for the world and objects in the world. The transcendental tradition introduces us to this radical opposition and provides us with new means for getting beyond it. It gives us two descriptions of the self which are equally necessary and essentially incompatible. According to my account, neither of these forms of self‐consciousness takes precedence over the other. From the perspective of each, the other appears somehow bizarre, unreal. From that of the natural attitude, the transcendental subject seems artificial, contrived, a mere fiction. From that of the transcendental attitude, the world as a whole, and my empirical self within it, looms as “phenomenon”, its reality placed in suspension.’ To be sure, the ‘intentionality’ in Kant extends not only to intuition but to the pure concepts of the understanding as well, in that they have to be schematized in order to become applicable to objects of intuition. The true sense of ‘transcendental’ in Kant, thus, is not so much that of condition of possibility in general, but that of the condition of the possibility of the categories’ capacity for being applied to the intuition that we as contingent agents are capable of having. Thus, the story to be told for Martians would be completely different – and could only be told by Martians (but only if they are endowed with reason)! Also, we would not be able to understand their story.
30 Another way of phrasing this, from the ‘opposite’ angle, would be to say that the thesis of transcendental idealism is already a prototype of the theory of intentionality. This is what Carr has in mind when he speaks of the ‘transcendental tradition’, in which he includes, as its inceptor, Kant (Carr, Citation2003: pp. 181ff.).
31 Hua XXXVI, 32. We can leave aside here the distinction between real and possible consciousness, which becomes instrumental in the concrete ‘proof’ for transcendental idealism that Husserl develops in some of the texts in that volume. For an analysis of this proof, and an alternative version of transcendental idealism that follows from this, see Bernet, Citation2004.
32 Hua XXXVI, 36; my italics.
33 Hua III/1, 351 is the locus classicus: ‘Hence it becomes clear that something like spatial objectivity is intuitable not only for us but also for God – as the ideal representative of absolute knowledge – only through appearances, in which [this objectivity] is given and must be given “perspectivally” in numerous but ordered manners changing and thereby in changing “orientations”.’
34 De Palma’s attempt to refute the idea that Husserl’s phenomenology is a transcendental idealism but instead must be construed as an ‘eidetic empiricism’ (De Palma, Citation2005: p. 200) is therefore completely misguided: eidetic empiricism would just be a different title for what Husserl is doing in his eidetic science of transcendental subjectivity. That means that De Palma’s error lies in trying to sever the transcendental and the empirical in Husserl’s method: this would be to miss the entire point of Husserl’s transcendental phenomeno‐logy.
35 It is clear in this light why to Husserl embodiment belongs necessarily to transcendental subjectivity, which would be completely nonsensical to Kant’s notion of ‘transcendental’. The issue of embodiment will be taken up again very briefly in section III below.
36 See Hua XI, 16ff. See also the analysis of Husserl’s transcendental idealism by Woodruff Smith who proposes that ‘transcendental idealism be renamed “intentional perspectivism” and developed as a many‐aspect monism coupled with a theory of intentionality via noemata…. If Husserl himself took the plunge into idealism, we need not join him. He has shown the way to the Ding an sich’ (Woodruff Smith, Citation1995: p. 384). I agree with Woodruff Smith’s interpretation, which is much more sophisticated than my rather schematic account above. My only contention would be that Husserl can already be construed as professing an ‘intentional perspectivism’, albeit without the consequences Woodruff Smith is trying to work out from this assessment, and I would add my hope that he will overcome his objection to the term ‘transcendental idealism’. It seems to me that he is just replacing Husserl’s ‘‐ism’ with another one. And to add one last suspicion, I feel that he still might not have grasped the radicality of Husserl’s point and that he lapses back into a naïve Kantian (not Kant’s own!) position when he writes: ‘The position [of perspectivism] would be that while the being of natural objects does not depend on the being of consciousness, their being known or intended does’ (p. 384). Husserl’s idealistic point is that one cannot distinguish between the two without lapsing into a naïve idealism that separates being from the notion of givenness – the standpoint of the natural attitude thus.
37 As Kant famously remarks in the B Introduction, the two stems of cognition ‘perhaps spring from a common, yet to us unknown root’ (B29).
38 Hua III/1, 51.
39 Crowell has called the realm of phenomenology, in analogy to Sellars’ idea of the ‘space of reasons’, the ‘space of meaning’. See Crowell, Citation2001, esp. the Introduction, pp. 3–19.
40 One could object to this whole analysis that Husserl is oriented at a spatial concept of perception here, and indeed the history of the concept of ‘attitude’ (Einstellung) comes from the experimental psychology of the nineteenth century, when it was mainly used with respect to perception; and, moreover, the examples above are mostly concerned with objects of external perception. However, the same holds with respect to other objects of experience in the broad sense. One can have different attitudes to the war in Iraq or the drugs scandal in professional sport. This, I venture to say, is where Gadamer’s hermeneutical philosophy took its cue with its notion of different horizons and the prospect of ‘fusing’ them.
41 Mohanty, too, makes a connection between the noematic sense and the meaning of transcendental idealism: see Mohanty, Citation1996: p. 29. In his analysis, the shift from thing to noematic sense is precisely the sense of Husserl’s transcendental idealism. The above analysis concurs with Mohanty’s brief assertion, though it expands upon it significantly.
42 I leave aside here the question of optimality, in which a thing is given as optimal in a certain way of experiencing it. For instance, the plant lover will be completely happy when she has a certain aesthetic experience of a flower garden that ‘fully’ pleases her, while the botanist will not stop but merely starts here with his experience. Cf. Hua IX, 120–3, and Hua XI, 23f. Of course, the optimum will only be relative as well the plant lover can begin to refine her knowledge and feel dissatisfied with her current level of knowledge about plants, etc. This would lead into a ‘genetic’ account of the constitution of science from life‐worldly experience of the sort that Husserl provides in §9 of the Crisis or his famous text on the ‘Origin of Geometry’ (Hua VI, 365–86).
43 Concerning the question as to the role of embodiment for the subject’s experience, as condition of possibility of experience of external objects, and the role of the lived‐body in relation to the problem of transcendental idealism (and intersubjectivity!), see Hua XXXVI, 151ff.
44 For a reconstruction of Husserl’s phenomenology of intersubjectivity and its development in social‐political thought (Apel, Habermas), see the concise analysis by Zahavi, Citation1996.
45 See Hua IX, 121.
46 On the dynamic a priori, which was conceived by the neo‐Kantians (Hermann Cohen, Heinrich Rickert, and others) precisely in their interaction with contemporary science, see Ameriks, Citation2006. This dynamization ‘can be understood as having developed a rigorous new kind of Kantian program that uncovers principles that are a priori in the significant framework within a particular era’ (Ameriks, Citation2006: p. 296). The problem with this approach is, to Ameriks, ‘that it has tended to lose touch with Kant’s concerns with ordinary experience, which clearly interested him as much as any particular scientific developments, and which can remain constant throughout scientific change. Edmund Husserl’s later work moved in this broadly Kantian direction’ (p. 296). What is interesting about Ameriks’ observation is that Husserl, in my reading, intends to straddle both issues that Ameriks identifies precisely through a genetic perspective: objective‐scientific claims arise out of life‐worldly experience. Science arrives at a ‘crisis’ once it no longer sees this connection, just as life‐worldly concerns cannot ignore the scientific import and importance for today’s world (e.g., through technology). So Husserl’s attempt (at least) is intended to appreciate these two aspects of Kant’s system as well.
47 See Hua XI, 125f., where Husserl charges Kant with attending only to ‘the higher‐lying problem of the constitution of a spatio‐worldly object’ and not the lower problems of ‘primitive’ object‐constitution. This argument, according to which Kant – and the entire idealistic tradition – started ‘too high up’, is an often‐repeated critique of Husserl’s.
48 Hua VII, 271.
49 See Hua XXXVI, 191–4, and Hua III/1, 301–4.
50 Mohanty also makes this point: see Mohanty, Citation1996: p. 20.
51 See KrV, Bxxx.
52 Hua‐Dok. III/V, 6.
53 As Kern says, correctly though rather casually: ‘It seems that Husserl did not wish to go beyond the factical existence of the phenomenon of world constitution in transcendental (intersubjective) consciousness purely on the basis of theoretical reason; but instead he sought to ground metaphysics, like Kant, through the postulates of practical reason’ (Kern, Citation1964: p. 302). As Kern indicates, spelling out this idea would lead to a type of ‘phenomenological metaphysics’. The relevant Husserlian texts on such a metaphysics remain unpublished, but an edition of them is planned.
54 Hua VIII, 354f. (dating from 1923, less than two years, hence, prior to Husserl’s letter to Cassirer: see n. 3 above). Given all this, he asks, ‘Is this bearable?’ Indeed, to an ‘idealistic’ thinker such as Husserl, such a pessimistic view is itself a moral failure! Cf. what Kant says about the virtue of optimism (Frohsinn) in his Metaphysik der Sitten: it is not a moral demand or an imperative, but rather a prescribed ‘attitude’ accompanying the moral person (p. 626).
55 Hua VIII, 354.
56 Hua VIII, 354f.
57 It is pure speculation whether Husserl had Schopenhauer in mind here, of course, though it may be pointed out that Husserl knew Schopenhauer’s work very early on. Husserl’s earliest lectures from 1892 were on Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation. Schuhmann has explored this connection – the little that one can make out about it, since Husserl’s lecture manuscripts from this time are lost – in Schuhmann, Citation1988: pp. 33–5 and, in relation to Husserl and Indian thought, in Schuhmann, Citation2004: pp. 137ff. While I cannot agree with Schuhmann that Husserl’s concept of transcendental idealism is inspired by Schopenhauer (see Schuhmann, Citation1988: p. 33), I find the connection with Buddhist thought intriguing. Concerning the Buddhist ideal of resignation and letting go, in the latter article Schuhmann reconstructs Husserl’s later thought (from the 1920s and 1930s) on these matters and highlights the fact that Husserl himself made a connection between the method of the reduction and Buddhist thought. The result is the same as in his encounter with Kant in the context above: while one could presume that the reduction is equally a move from action to mere contemplation, its true task is to work out philosophy as rigorous science – to become active in this manner. Thus, while the attitude of the phenomenologist might be akin to Buddhism, the latter does not get to work actively. Schuhmann writes: ‘Buddhism did not [according to Husserl] establish itself as transcendental; this label had to be attached to it by Husserl and from the outside. Thus Buddhism was a philosophy malgré lui, it did not work out the idea which in fact, and in fact alone (but not in essence), was hidden in it [sc., rigorous science]’ (Schuhmann, Citation2004: p. 159).
58 Hua, 355.
59 In this sense I cannot agree with Höffe, who places Husserl amongst others (Peirce, the early Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Russell) who merely emphasize the positive intent of Kant’s critique (legitimization) and follow Kant exclusively in this manner, while ignoring the negative part (limitation). They ‘fall prey to an optimism concerning reason that is alien to the Critique and remind one more of a fundamentalism of Descartes and German Idealism than of Kant’ (Höffe, Citation2004: p. 332). Given what I say above, it is clear that the limiting function of a critique of reason is present in Husserl as well, though of a different type from Kant’s. Husserl’s optimism concerning reason is more a spiteful reaction to the crisis of reason in the twentieth century than the expression of unalloyed confidence.
60 Shorter versions of this paper were delivered in Castilian at the University of Barcelona in June 2006 and in English at the International Husserl Circle Meeting in Prague in April 2007. I thank all the participants in the discussions for their helpful input and their questions, especially Francesc Perenya Blasi, Robert Dostal, Thomas Nenon and George Heffernan. I would also acknowledge the receipt of interesting questions and suggestions from other readers of the full version: Andrew Cutrofello, Dermot Moran, Sebastian Kaufmann, Thane Naberhaus, Henning Peucker, and Michael Ystad. Michael Ystad also read this text for grammar and style; special thanks go out to him.