Alhassanain(p) Network for Heritage and Islamic Thought

Immanence, Self-Experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers

Dermot Moran

(University College Dublin)

Table of Contents

Phenomenology and Transcendence: The Problem   4

Immanence and Transcendence in Husserl’s Phenomenology  8

Transcendence in Husserl’s Ideas I (1913) 11

Karl Jaspers on Transcendence 16

Edith Stein’s Starting-Point: Natural Experience 19

Phenomenology and the Meaning of Being  21

Edith Stein and the Recognition of the Eternal at the heart of the Finite 22

Notes 26

In memory of Gerry Hanratty

Phenomenology and Transcendence: The Problem

Phenomenology’s relationship with the concept of transcendence is not at all straightforward. Indeed, phenomenology, from its inception, has had an ambiguous, uneasy relationship with transcendence, with the wholly other, with the numinous. Phenomenology, as the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion has recently emphasised, ispar excellence the philosophy of givenness, reflecting specifically on the ‘givenness’ of the given, on what Husserl speaks of as the ‘how’ (Wie ) or ‘mode’ (Art ,Weise ) of givenness.[1] Phenomenology deliberately restricts itself to describing carefully and without prejudice whatever isgiven to experience in the manner in which it is so given. Marion frames the essential question of phenomenology as: ‘Can the givenness in presence of each thing be realised without any condition of restriction?[2] But, if phenomenology is restricted to givenness, what becomes of that which is withheld or cannot in principle come to givenness? As such, and from the outset, then, theepoché of Husserlian phenomenology brackets the transcendent, and, specifically, traditional metaphysical or ontotheological conceptions of God as a transcendent being outside the world. Is, then, the relation between phenomenology and transcendence always one of distance and renunciation, or is another way of relating possible?

In this paper[3] I want to re-examine the role of the concept of ‘transcendence’ in phenomenology, focusing explicitly on the work of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Edith Stein (1891-1942), but I shall also refer briefly to the German philosopher of existence Karl Jaspers (1883-1969),[4] precisely because he made transcendence a central theme of his philosophy, and because of his influence on Martin Heidegger (1889-1976).[5] Heidegger’s conception of the transcendental and of transcendence appears to have come from hisAuseinandersetzung with his mentor Husserl,[6] but also from his close personal relationship during the 1920s with Karl Jaspers, the medic turned philosopher, who himself was greatly influenced by Kierkegaard and existential philosophy. Following a discussion of the Husserlian problematic of transcendence, I shall examine Edith Stein (1891-1942), specifically her work attempting to relate phenomenology to Thomistic ontology. Here I shall be concentrating on her understanding of being asfullness and of theego as the primary sense of being, as somehow encapsulating the mystery of being. Stein sees a way of combining the insights of Husserlian eidetic phenomenology with traditional Thomistic talk about the divine, to find a new way of articulating transcendence. What unites Husserl, Stein, Jaspers, and Heidegger is that they all accord a special place to the transcendence of the self, the transcendence of human existence, or the transcendence of Dasein. The paradox at the centre of their philosophies is that the most immanent self-experience is precisely that which reveals transcendence.

Transcendence means literally ‘going beyond’. In one sense, transcendence refers to the region of ‘otherness’, whatever lies beyond or is other, especially other than one’s self.[7] In this regard the French phenomenologist Natalie Depraz has claimed, for instance, that phenomenology isthe philosophy of otherness.[8] But, in Husserl’s

phenomenology, transcendence as going-beyond is intrinsically related to a deeper experience of selfhood or ‘self-experience’ (Selbsterfahrung ) such that, paradoxically, genuine transcendence has to be discovered in immanence. The original transcendence, for Husserl, is the living ego itself, in that it is directly experienced, and is temporally constituted and hence never completely capturable in a totalising view. The self is essentially self-transcending. Heidegger makes this ‘transcendence of Dasein’ into an essential part of existential analytic of human existence.

Both Husserl and Stein begin, as do in their own ways Saint Augustine and Descartes, with one’s own first-person experience of one’s own being. Self-experience, as Husserl argues in theCartesian Meditations [9] has to be the starting point and the measure for all other experiences if these experiences are to be captured purely under theepoché . Of course, that is not to say that self-experience ought to be considered as self-enclosed and solipsistic. Quite the reverse. Husserl and Stein both saw subjectivity as a one-sided abstraction from the interrelated nexus of concrete intersubjectivity. On the other hand, it would be phenomenologically inaccurate to deny that experience is deeply ‘egoic’ and first-personal in its core originary nature.

Stein received her doctoral training under Edmund Husserl, and was intimately involved in the theory and practice of Husserlian phenomenology (at Göttingen); but she later moved to embrace Catholicism, and in her mature writings offers a very original and independent re-conceptualisation of the Thomistic heritage illuminated by her phenomenological background. This work of synthesis between phenomenology and Thomist metaphysics receives its fullest articulation in herEndliches und Ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being , 1936)[10] , a book written, as she said echoing Husserl’s own view of himself as a phenomenologist, ‘by a beginner for beginners’ (FEB, p. xxvii), to explain Thomistic philosophy for the modern mind. In this work, Stein explicitly acknowledges that she wants to use Husserlian phenomenology as a way of gaining access to Thomistic or ‘scholastic’ thought (FEB, p. 12).Finite and Eternal Being , a vast compendium of speculative commentary on key Aristotelian and Thomistic concepts, including a kind of new cosmology, is at its core a very deep appreciation of the experience of being asfullness , a concept that unites Husserl and Aquinas, albeit that Husserl is attempting to approach being precisely from its experiential meaningfulness as given.

Husserl’s own leanings towards empiricism and his suspicion of Hegelian invocations of the absolute led him to distrust metaphysical speculation that was not grounded phenomenologically. Furthermore, when he embraced the Kantian critical and ‘transcendental’ approach, he further distanced himself from naïve discussions of the transcendent. But transcendence is problematic for Husserl for an even more essential reason, namely because of the methodological strictures phenomenology imposes on itself with regard to the importation of speculative assumptions. Indeed, it is one of the explicit functions of Husserl’s ‘bracketing’ or ‘suspension’ (epoché ) to exclude consideration of the transcendent, at least in the sense of that which may in principle be considered apart from consciousness. If there

is to be transcendence, for the mature Husserl, then this is always transcendence under theepoché ; it is ‘transcendence-within-immanence’ hence not pure ‘transcendence’. As Husserl says in his programmaticIdeas I (1913)[11] , the eidetic attitude of phenomenology after the reduction ‘excludes every sort of transcendence’ (Ideas I § 86, p. 209; III/1 178). Yet, paradoxically, as Husserl will attest in hisFormal and Transcendental Logic (1929)[12] , it is an essential part of phenomenology’s brief to explore ‘the sense of transcendence’ (Sinn der Transzendenz , FTL § 93c, p. 230; Hua XVII: 237), that is, the manner in which we have experience of an objective world as such.

While Husserl always insisted that phenomenology proceeds in immanence, in an important essay on the relation between Thomism and phenomenology, Edith Stein points out that Husserl was seeking a region ofgenuine immanence in the sense of a region of immediate, inviolable self-givenness, from which all doubt is excluded, but no matter how much he attempted to transcendentally purify his starting point, ‘traces of transcendence showed up’[13] . Stein maintains this is because Husserl’s ideal of knowledge is in fact divine knowledge, where knowing and being are one and where there is no transcendence (a version of the ‘view from nowhere’), where knowledge is simply disclosure of the given without mediation or obstruction or slant. In other words, for Stein in her critique of Husserl, his philosophy of pure immanence cannot escape transcendence. The finite and determined has to open up to the infinite, undetermined and indeterminate.

In thinking of ‘transcendence’, Husserlian phenomenology begins by rejecting thinking of transcendence framed in Cartesian terms, paradigmatic in modern epistemology, whereby the central question is how totranscend the closed sphere of subjectivity in order to attain to an ‘external’ objectivity beyond the subject. This conception of trancendence as objectivity opposed to subjectivity is precisely what comes to be challenged in Kantian critical philosophy. Consider the question famously formulated by Immanuel Kant is hisLetter to Markus Herz of 21 February 1772 (translated in Zweig, 1967, 70-76), a letter written some years before the First Critique but still considered to express the essentials of the transcendental turn. Kant asked:

What is the ground of the relation of that in us which we call “representation” [Vorstellung ] to the object [Gegenstand ]? If a representation is only a way in which the subject [subiect ] is affected by the object, then it is easy to see how the representation is in conformity with this object, namely, as an effect in accord with its cause, and it is easy to see how this modification of our mind canrepresent something, that is, have an object. … In the same way, if that in us which we call “representation” were active with regard to the object [des obiects ], that is, if the object itself were created by the representation (as when divine cognitions are conceived as the archetypes of all things), the conformity of these representations to their objects could be understood. … However, our understanding, through its representations, is not the cause of the object (save in the case of moral ends) nor is the object [Gegenstand ] the cause of the intellectual representations in the mind (in sensu reali ). Therefore the pure concepts of the understanding must not be abstracted from sense perceptions, nor must

they express the reception of representations through the senses; but though they must have their origin in the nature of the soul, they are neither caused by the object [vom Obiect ] nor bring the object [das obiect ] itself into being. (Zweig, 1967, 71-2)[14]

Kant is the source of most twentieth-centurty worries about transcendence (in so far as ‘things in themselves’ transcend every possibility of being meaningfully cognised) and his recommendation of a transcendental turn, whereby we reflect on the subjective conditions that make transcendent objecthood possible, has dominated post-Kantian philosophy.

But Kant also recognises the inalienability of the human desire for transcendence, and this recognition inspired philosophers such as Jacobi to attempt to find again a place for a faith that grasped the transcendent in a way inaccessible to reason. As Hegel comments in his ‘Faith and Knowledge’ essay:

Reason, having in this way become mere intellect, acknowledges its own nothingness by placing that which is better than it in afaith outside and above itself, as abeyond [to be believed in]. This is what has happened in thephilosophies of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte. Philosophy has made itself the handmaid of a faith once more.

Husserl actually tries to find a new way to understand transcendence, not by assigning it to a suprarational faculty or to faith, but rather by rethinking it from within the concept of phenomenologicalgivenness , as we shall see.

Both senses of transcendence (as that which cannot be attained but also as that which must be sought) found in Kant continue to play a significant role in Husserlian and especially in post-Husserlian phenomenology (Levinas, Marion, Henry). Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), for instance, speaks of the desire for the absolutely ‘other’,Autre But this tendency in Levinas and recent phenomenology is somewhat at odds with Husserl and Stein who begin with self-experience. Let us now examine Husserl in more detail.

Immanence and Transcendence in Husserl’s Phenomenology

There are a number of concepts of transcendence at play in Husserl’s thought and it is not clear that these different senses of transcendence ever get fully resolved in his writing. The term ‘transcendence’ does not occur in the First Edition of theLogical Investigations (1900-01). It appears in his writing more or less simultaneously with his discovery of the reduction (c. 1905) and is prominent inThe Idea of Phenomenology lectures of 1907.[15] As Stein puts it, Husserl’s ‘absolute starting point’ for phenomenology is theimmanence of consciousness to which is contrasted the transcendence of the world.[16] But in fact this only a first sense of transcendence. In his mature publications beginning withIdeas I, Husserl explores a deeper sense of transcendence, as we shall see, whereby corporeal things are transcendent because their essence contains a kind of infinity that is never intuitable in a completely adequate and fulfilled way. Every thing is graspable only through a manifold of ‘adumbrations’ (Abschattungen ) and ‘aspects’ (Aspekte ), which can never be fully actualised by a finite cognising mind. Even the corporeal thing, then, is in essence what Husserl calls a ‘Kantian idea’, a manifold of infinite perspectives.

As the French phenomenologist Michel Henry has recognised, one of the first places where Husserl tackles the issue of transcendence and immanence is in his 1907Idea of Phenomenology lectures.[17] Husserl begins with the classic epistemological problem – how do I know that I know? How do I know that my knowledge is secure? Husserl characterises this classic epistemological problem as the problem of transcendence (IP, p. 28; Hua II: 36). The ‘riddle’ of knowledge is put in Kantian terms as the possibility of its contact with the transcendent (IP, p. 33; Hua II: 43). Nothing transcendent can be taken as pre-given; as Husserl writes: ‘The transcendence of the thing requires that we put the thing in question’ (IP, p. 38; Hua II: 49)

According to Husserl, the very nature of thecontact (Triftigkeit - a phrase inherited from Kant) with the transcendent is precisely what the traditional epistemologist cannot master. Some philosophers have abandoned the possibility that knowledge can be in contact with the transcendent and, at that point, what remains to be explained in how the prejudice has arisen whereby it is assumed that human knowledge does reach the transcendent. For Husserl, it is Hume who took this latter route. For Husserl, on the other hand, the epistemological reduction must be performed whereby every transcendence is excluded, and intentional connections of meaningfulness are revealed.

Overcoming the probematic of traditional epistemology, Husserl defines a new kind of givenness -- ‘absolute givenness’ -- which he attaches to the very act of conscious experiencing itself, to every ‘thought’ or cogitatio. This leads Husserl to declare in the Second Lecture of the Idea of Phenomenology:

Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience whatsoever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is

occurring. And in this act of seeing, it is an absolute givenness. (IP, p. 24; Hua II: 31 )

The stream of experience given in reflection has ‘absolute givenness’. Husserl goes on to discuss the manner in which the given is immanent in our experience while at the same time emphasising that there is no actual thing present or immanent in the actual occurringErlebnis . This leads to a double meaning for transcendence:

…it can refer to the fact that the known object is not really [reell ] contained in the act of knowing (IP, p. 27; Hua II: 35)

But

…there isanother sense of transcendence , whose counterpart is an entirely different kind of immanence, namely,absolute andclear givenness ,self-givenness in the absolute sense . (IP, p. 27; Hua II: 35)

This absolute self-givenness consists in ‘an immediate act of seeing and apprehending the meant objectivity itself as it is’. Only the immanentcogitatio is given. The problem now becomes for Husserl how to safeguard the purity of the phenomenon of thecogitatio from contamination by our prejudices including the psychological reading of thecogitatio (as a psychological fact, a datum in space-time, and so on). This purification for Husserl goes beyond the epistemological reduction and he calls it the ‘phenomenological reduction’ (IP, p. 34; Hua II: 44) whose aim is to purify the ‘psychological’ phenomenon into the absolute givenness of pure phenomenon. Husserl contrasts this absolute givenness of the immanent with the ‘quasi-givennesses’ (Quasi-Gegebenheiten , Hua II: 45) of transcendent objects. The pure phenomenon contains an intentional referring beyond itself but that must be treated precisely as it is given in immanent seeing and this brings us squarely into the phenomenological perspective, or as Husserl puts it, ‘and thus we drop anchor on the shore of phenomenology’ (und so werfen wir schon Anker an der Küste der Phänomenologie , IP, p. 34; Hua II: 45).

Continuing the metaphor Husserl warns that this shore has its share of rocks, is covered by clouds of obscurity and threatened with the gales of scepticism. We have what is given absolutely and purely in immanence:

On the other hand, the relation to something transcendent, whether I question the existence (Sein ) of the transcendent object or the ability of the relation to make contact (Triftigkeit ) with it, still contains something that can be apprehended within the pure phenomenon. The relating-itself-to-something transcendent (Das sich-auf-Transzendentes-beziehen ), to refer to it in one way or another, is an inner characteristic of the phenomenon. (IP, p. 35; Hua II: 46)

It is worth rehearsing Husserl’s first tentative uncovering of the transcendent at the heart of the immanent in these lectures as a guide to what is the relation between phenomenology and transcendence. Not every transcendence is excluded; there is a genuine transcendence recognised that is the counterpart of the pure immanence of absolute givenness. But about this genuine transcendence Husserl has little to say in these years other than to point to the subject-transcending nature of validity, truth and other values.

From out of the ‘Heraclitean stream ofErlebnisse (IP, p. 36; Hua II 47) comes a consciousness of unity, of identity, of transcendence, objectivity, and so on. How is that possible? Husserl furthermore acknowledges that the mere apprehension of thecogitatio in itself is of little value, what matters is the turn towards theeidos . Indeed, the possibility of the critique of knowledge depends on the recognition of forms of givenness other than the singularhic et nunc . We already move beyond thesecogitationes themselves when we make judgements about what is true, valid, and so on.

The first genuine transcendence within immanence is then the intuition of theeidos . In later works, specificallyIdeas I andCartesian Meditations , Husserl is particularly interested in the manner in which the givenness of the world transcends the imperfect type of evidences that display it (CM § 28 Hua I: 61-2) and no imaginable synthesis can bring the world to adequate evidence. The being of the world necessarily transcends consciousness; nevertheless the world is inseparable from transcendental subjectivity.

Transcendence in Husserl’s Ideas I (1913)

InIdeas I (1913), transcendence is again discussed in a number of places from different points of view. As inThe Idea of Phenomenology lectures, the transcendence of the physical thing is contrasted with the ‘immanence’ of the conscious experience apprehending it (Ideas I § 42, p. 89; Hua III/1: 76). This transcendence is not merely the fact that the thing is not ‘inside’ the conscious experience. There is also the eidetic insight that a physical thing can never be captured by anyErlebnis and this distinguishes it essentially from any episode of consciousness. This is not the same as the transcendence in which another person’s conscious experiences are recognised in empathy, Husserl says.

The physical thing is said to be, in itself, unqualifiedly transcendent. (Ideas I § 42, p. 90; Hua III/1: 77)

There is an essential contrast between the ‘mode of givenness’ (Gegebenheitsart ) of something immanent and that of something transcendent. A physical thing is adumbrated while a mental process is not. For Husserl, is almost an article of faith that what is absolutely given in immanent consciousness cannot in principle be given in profiles or adumbrations.

However, it is at this point that Husserl’s idealist commitments enter the picture because he goes on to talk about the merely ‘phenomenal being’ of the transcendent as opposed to the absolute being of the immanent ((Ideas I § 44). A physical thing is ‘undetermined’ (unbestimmt ) as to its hidden sides, but it remains infinitely ‘determinable’ (bestimmbar ). The thing is graspable in a highly regulated series of possible perceptions but there always remains a ‘horizon of determinable indeterminateness’ (ein Horizont bestimmbarer Unbestimmtheit ,Ideas I § 44, p. 95; III/1 81). No God can alter that, Husserl remarks. In this sense, the physical thing is really an ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ (Ideas I § 143, p. 342; III/1 297-8). The idea of a physical thing has ‘dimensions of infinity’ included in it (III/1 § 143, p. 360; 313).

As Christian Lotz has shown[18] , Husserl applies the language of regulative ideas in a rather loose manner, namely, to the constitution of perceptual objects , to the unity of theErlebnisstrom (Ideas I § 83, p. 197, III/1: 166), to the world as such (Hua VII: 276; CM I: 98), to essences of exact types (Hua III/1: 6; also § 74, p. 166; Hua III/1: 138), and, finally, in a certain sense, to his own philosophy and the infinity of the phenomenological task. There are therefore many transcendencies in Husserl but a central intuition is that the experience of time is intimately wrapped up with the experience of the transcendent (Ideas I § 149).

Essentially correlated with the notion of givenness is the notion of a possible consciousness perceiving it (Ideas I § 142). Husserl more and more wants to examine the nature of the transcendental ego as that which is there to apprehend the givenness of thr world. The primary infinity, for the mature Husserl, is the transcendental ego itself, which he calls the most basic or ‘original concept’ (Urbegriff, Hua XXXV: 261) of phenomenology. Moreover, as he will put it in theCartesian Meditations , the science of

transcendental subjectivity is the sphere of ‘absolute phenomenology’ (CM § 35), the ultimate science (FTL § 103). Thus, in 1927, Husserl could write:

The clarification of the idea of my pure ego and my pure life - of my psyche in its pure specific essentiality and individual uniqueness is the basis (das Fundament ) for the clarification of all psychological and phenomenological ideas. (Hua XIV: 438, my translation)

Husserl’s analysis of the ego widened to include a range of related issues: the unity of consciousness, the nature of self, subjectivity, and personhood, the ‘communalisation’ of the self (Vergemeinschaftung , Hua I: 149) with the ‘open plurality of other egos’ (FTL§ 104), amounting to the whole ‘intersubjective cognitive community’ (FTL § 96), or what Husserl in his ‘reconstruction’(Hua XV: 609) of Leibniz, callsmonadology (see CM § 55).

FromIdeas I onwards, Husserl characterises the ego as an ‘I-pole’ (Ichpol ) or ‘I-centre’ (Ich-Zentrum ), ‘the centre of all affections and actions’ (IV 105). It is a ‘centre’ from which ‘radiations’ (Ausstrahlungen ) or ‘rays of regard’ stream out ortowards which rays of attention are directed. It is the centre of a ‘field of interests’ (Interessenfeld ), the ‘substrate of habitualities’ (CM Hua I: 103), ‘the substrate of the totality of capacities’ (Substrat der Allheit der Vermögen , Hua XXXIV: 200). This I ‘governs’, it is an ‘I holding sway’ (das waltende Ich , Hua XIV: 457) in conscious life (IV 108), yet it is also ‘passively affected’. In its full concretion’ (Hua XIV: 26), it is aself with convictions, values, an outlook, a history, a style, and so on: ‘The ego constitutes itselffor itself in, so to speak, the unity of a history’ (CM IV, p. 75; Hua I: 109). It is present in all conscious experience and ‘cannot be struck out’ (undurchsteichbar ). It is more than a formal principle of unity (in the sense of Kant’s unity of apperception), since it has a living, growing, unifying nature. It is also grossly misunderstood if it is treated as a ‘piece of the world’; it is not a ‘thing’ orres at all, rather it both asanonymous source of all meaningfulness and as a growing, developing self, with a history and a future, in relation to other selves, possessinglife in the fullest sense of the word. The transcendental ego covers ‘the universe of the possible forms of lived experience’ (CM § 36).

Husserl sees the ‘self-explication’ (Selbstauslegung XXXIV 228) of the transcendental ego as a set of ‘great tasks’ (CM § 29), but it is beset by paradoxes such as: How can the ego be that which constitutes the world and also that which is concretised, mundanised and corporealised in the world? How can the transcendental ego, the source of all meaning and being, inquire into itself as a meaning- and being-constituting entity? Part of the complexity stems from the very self-referentiality of the ego’s self-knowledge. How can I inquire into what founds me as a self? When I as investigator turn to examine the ego, I am in factdoubling back on myself, inquiring into what constitutes meas functioning self. This necessarily involves a ‘splitting of the ego’ (Ichspaltung ), and is extraordinarily difficult to carry out without lapsing into various forms of transcendental illusion. Indeed, Husserl acknowledges, even to say that I who reflects is ‘I’ involves a certain equivocation (VI 188). Yet, there is both identity and difference in this I. The reflecting ego is in a different attitude and different temporal

dimension from the ego reflected on, yet there is a consciousness of the unity or ‘coincidence’ (Deckung ) of the two.

Husserl’s transcendental idealism claims that the objectivity of the transcendent real world outside of us is an achievement of ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’. This is already articulated in his 1910/1911 lectures (e.g. Hua XIII: 184) but it is constantly reiterated in later works, e.g. the 1928Amsterdam Lectures :

Transcendental intersubjectivity is the absolute and only self-sufficient foundation (Seinsboden ). Out of it are created draws the meaning and validity of everything objective, the totality of objectively real existent entities, but also every ideal world as well. An objectively existent thing is from first to last an existent thing only in a peculiar, relative and incomplete sense. It is an existent thing, so to speak, only on the basis of a cover-up of its transcendental constitution that goes unnoticed in the natural attitude.[19]

Everything we experience as transcendent has the ‘value’ written on it ‘valid for all’,für Jedermann . Everything I experience outwardly is in principle what someone else could experience. This is the very meaning of objectivity (note that Husserl reconstrues the assertions of ideality of LU into the language of intersubjective constitution in later works). The world of spirit coheres into a unity, for Husserl. It is a goal-oriented, rational, communicative world, a ‘community of monads’ (Monadgemeinschaft ), a ‘world of development’ (eine Welt der Entwicklung ), where, according to one lecture, as in Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy, everything takes place for the sake of the Good.[20]

According to Husserl, the discovery of the transcendental brings with it a responsibility to live life on a new level. One remains a ‘child of the world’ (Weltkind , VIII 123; XXXIV 12), but one is also a disinterested spectator grasping this natural life as the unfolding work of the transcendental ego. The meditator must live thereafter in the very splitting of consciousness brought about by theepoché . There is no going back from theepoché , no healing of the split in consciousness. Genuine transcendental idealism requires livingboth in the natural attitude and in the transcendental philosophical attitude, and somehow achieving a ‘synthesis’ of these two attitudes (Hua XXXIV: 16-17). For Husserl the adoption of the transcendental attitude is like a person born blind who recovers his sight as a result of an operation (Hua VIII: 122). The newly disclosed world looks completely new and one cannot rely on any of one’s previous habits and convictions with regard to this entirely new landscape. We have left behind the childhood of naïve natural existence and have entered, to invoke Husserl’s own frequent religious imagery, ‘the kingdom of pure spirit’ (Reich des reinen Geistes , Hua VIII: 123).

In theCartesian Meditations it is precisely the realisation that all being and sense comes from the transcendental ego that provokes the profound meditation in the Fifth Meditation on the meaning of the experience of the other. How can the other in principle show itself within the horizons of my self-experience? Husserl here talks of an ‘immanent transcendence’ (CM V, § 47):

Within this “original sphere ” (the sphere of original self-explication) we find also a “transcendent world”… (CM § 47, pp. 104-5; Hua I 135).

The puzzle is that the objective world, the ‘first transcendence’ is always already there for me as fully formed, but at the same time it is somehow a result of constitution by the transcendental ego.

As I mentioned at the outset, one of phenomenology’s tasks is to explore ‘the sense of transcendence’ (Sinn der Transzendenz , FTL § 93c, p. 230; Hua XVII: 237). Again:

If what is experienced has the sense of ‘transcendent’ being, then it is the experiencing that constitutes this sense, and does so either by itself or in the whole motivational nexus pertaining to it and helping to make up its intentionality. (FTL § 94, p. 233; XVII: 240).

Husserl makes the very important point inFormal and Transcendental Logic § 99 that nothing (neither world nor any existent) comes to me ‘from without’ (he uses the Greek adverb:thúrathen ) Rather

Everything outside (Alles Aussen ) is what it is in this inside (in diesem Innen ), and gets its true being from the givings of it itself (Selbstgebungen ), and from the verifications (Bewährungen ), within this inside - its true being, which for that very reason is itself something that itself belongs to this inside: as a pole of unity in my (and then, intersubjectively, in our) actual and possibile multiplicities (Mannigfaltigkeiten ), with possibilities as my abilities, as ‘I can go there’, ‘I could perform syntactical operations, and so on. (FTL § 99, p. 250; XVII 257)

Transcendental phenomenology, according to theCrisis of European Sciences (1936)[21] even expresses the inner essence of religion (Crisis § 53, Hua VI: 184) and provides Husserl as a deeply religious in unconventional Christian - with the only philosophically justified basis for comprehending God, given the ‘absurdity’ of thinking of Him as an item in the factual world (seeIdeas I § 51Anmerkung ). As he puts it in FTL:

Even God is for me what he is, in consequence of my own productivity of consciousness. (FTL § 99, p. 251; Hua XVII: 258).

Husserl goes on to insist that this does not mean that consciousness ‘makes’ or ‘invents’ (erfinde ) God, this ‘highest transcendence’ (diese höchste Transzendenz , XVII 258).

As we have seen, the concept of the transcendent in Husserl is multifaceted. In his mature writings it is most often encountered in relation to discussions of transcendental philosophy. InCrisis § 14 for instance, Husserl contrasts traditional objectivism in philosophy with what he calls ‘transcendentalism’. Here he defines transcendentalism as follows:

Transcendentalism, on the other hand, says: the ontic meaning of the pregiven life-world is a subjective structure [Gebilde ], it is the achievment of experiencing, pre-scientific life. In this life the meaning and the ontic validity [Seinsgeltung ] of the world are built up - of that particular world that is, which is actually valid for the individual experiencer. As for the “objectively true” world, the world of science, it is a structure at a higher level, built on prescientific experiencing and thinking, or rather on its accomplishments of validity (Geltungsleistungen ). Only a radical inquiry back into subjectivity - and specifically the subjectivity which ultimately

brings about all world-validity, with its content, and in all its prescientific and scientific modes, and into the “what” and the “how” of the rational accomplishments - can make objective truth comprehensible and arrive at the ultimate ontic meaning of the world. (Crisis , p. 69).

Husserl sees the traditional, Cartesian problematic of epistemology as the problem of transcendence (CM IV, p. 81; I 115): how can the certainties I arrive at in the immanent stream of my conscious life acquire objective significance? (CM IV, p. 82; I 116). How can evidence claim to be more than a characteristic of consciousness and actually build up to the experience of an objective world as a whole? What the reduction shows is that this is a non-question because all transcendence is constituted within the domain of transcendental subjectivity:

Transcendence in every form is a within-the-ego self-constituting being-sense. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent, falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. (CM IV, p. 83-84; Hua I: 117, trans modified).

The transcendental ego is the ‘universe of possible sense’ and hence to speak of an ‘outside’ is precisely nonsense (CM Hua I: 117).