Invitations and Becomings

Husserl thought he had gotten beyond the traditional realism/idealism debate, but he consistently held the view that phenomenology implied a transcendental idealism.
In this very dense post, which I actually wrote a long time ago (June 2006), I try to cash out how transcendental idealism differs from its traditional/mundane cousin, and explain why Husserl's transcendental phenomenology isn't dependent on formal justification for its legitimacy, and so can't be ignored by rebutting any or all of these justifications, no matter how regrettable they may be.

A traditional or mundane idealism suggests that the only beings are subjects and their immanent states - e.g. ideas, impressions, etc. Mundane realism, by contrast, claims that the only things that exist are real transcendent objects and their properties - e.g. tables and chairs, or the atoms, quantum fields, etc that they comprise of).

Transcendental idealism can be summarized by the claim that subjectivity is a condition for the possibility of the constitution of objects. This is not like either mundane idealism or realism. Transcendental idealism does not deny we find both immanent and transcendent objects - we find ideas, memories, etc as well as real tables and chairs, in the world around us, nor does it claim that transcendent objects like tables are "really" just collections of immanent objects like ideas and memories.

However, while in this sense we may deny both realism and idealism by affirming that there really are entities on both sides of the distinction, idealism is affirmed at a transcendental level; which is to say that the distinction between immanent and transcendent beings is a difference in constituted meaning, and like all meaning remains relative to some kind of subjectivity. Not a psychological subject, to be sure (that would be to affirm traditional, mundane idealism), but a transcendental subject.

The difficulty is cashing out what this transcendental subject could be. Now Kant resorts to granting it a purely formal existence, as the unity of apperception, but this leads to all sorts of problems, not the least of which is how there could be more than one - i.e. how intersubjectivity is possible.

Husserl is interesting in that he offers a methodological approach to the problem of cashing out transcendental subjectivity. It is something we disclose through phenomenological inquiry. Because it has a full-blown existence for him, Husserl can speak of a transcendental Ego (rather than merely a unity) and it is possible for there to be multiple such Egos, and even for them to develop in their constitution of the world over their lives ('genesis'), and even over generations ('generativity').

Because transcendental subjectivity is not purely formal, and since Husserl's approach is not a transcendental deduction, but a sustained phenomenological inquiry (i.e. because it is a 'looking for' or descriptive task, rather than a 'showing that' or demonstrative task), his transcendental idealism does not rest on a particular argument. It is gradually confirmed through the results of that inquiry. An argument may be used to justify the search, but it can hardly guarantee that anything will be found. In this sense, Husserl's transcendental philosophy is more "scientific" in this sense than Kant's.

The whole "annihilation of the world" argument (Ideas I §49, Hua 91ff) is one that Husserl regretted, and shouldn't be taken as exemplary of his approach. At best, it was meant to justify looking for such a transcendental Ego. However, Husserl discovery of the transcedental Ego can't be denied by criticising this argument, any more than the discovery of Australia can be denied by criticising Cook's superiors' belief that there must be a great southern land to balance the landmass of Eurasia.