Abstract
The concept of the transcendental ego is the fundamental concept of Husserl’s phenomenology. it is the foundation on which, in Husserl’s own view, the entire edifice of transcendental phenomenology and scientific philosophy rests and which is thus of crucial importance for the understanding of his doctrine.1 It is to be expected that a concept of so great an importance would be of considerable complexity and rather difficult to understand and that Husserl would warn us, on many occasions, against various possible misunderstandings of it. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to critically examine the concept of transcendental ego in order to find out whether frequent misunderstandings of it on the part of many philosophers and other thinkers are due to their intellectual inability to think profoundly or perhaps to the serious, if not fatal, difficulties involved in the logical structure of this concept itself.
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Notes
Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, trans. Peter Koestenbaum (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), Introduction, p. lv: “... Husserl feels justified in saying that the transcendnetal Ego is the source and basis of all knowledge,” a feeling to which Husserl gives a repeated expression in his writings.
Edmund Husserl, “Phenomenology,” Edmund Husserl’s Article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1927) in Husserl Shorter Works, ed. Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press; Brighton, U.K.: The Harvester Press, 1981), p. 33: “If we take the universe of all possible empirical sciences whatever and demand a radical grounding that will be free from all `foundation crisis,’ then we are led to the all-embracing a priori of the radical and that is (and must be) phenomenological grounding.”
Edmund Husserl, Husserl’s Inaugural Lecture at Freiburg im Breisgau (1917). trans. R. N. Jordan in Husserl Shorter Works, op. cit., “On the other hand, he can convert his natural attentional focus into the phenomenologically reflective one; he can make the currently flowing consciousness and, thus, the infinitely multiform world of phenomena at large the theme of his fixating observations, descriptions, theoretical investigatins…, which, for short, we call ”phenomenlogical.“; ”... pure reflection excludes everything that is given in the natural attitude and excludes therefore all of Nature.“
Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures, op. cit., p. 14: `Before the epoché,I was a man with the natural attitude and I lived immersed naively in the world. I accepted the experienced as such, and on the basis of it developed my subsequent positions… but I did not focus on the experiencing of my life, on the act of being interested, on the act of taking a position…. I was a transcendental ego even while in the living natural attitude, but knew nothing about it.“
Ibid., p. 15: “In order to become aware of my true being I needed to execute the phenomenological epoché… the phenomenological attitude, with its epoché,consists in that I reach the ultimate experiential and cognitive perspective thinkable. In it I become the distinterested spectator of my natural and worldly ego and its life.”
Ibid., p. 15: “The phenomenological reduction… tends to split the ego. The transcendental spectator places himself above himself, watches himself, and sees himself as the previously world-immersed ego… The natural man (in whom the ego, in the last analysis, is a transcendental one, but of which he knows nothing) possesses a world and a science which he naively takes to be absolute. However, the transcendental spectator who has reached the consciousness of a transcendental ego conceives the world merely as a phenomenon…
Ibid.,p. 3; “... phenomenology might almost be called a new, a twentieth century, Cartesianism.”
René Descartes, Meditation I, in Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. I, trans. E. S. Haldance and G. R. T. Ross (New York: Dover publications, 1955), p. 148: “... I consider that I shall not be acting amiss, if, taking of set purpose a contrary belief, I allow myself to be deceived, and for a certain time pretend that all these opinions are entirely false and imaginary….”
René Descartes, The Fifth Set of Objections by P. Gassendi, in Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Haldene and Ross (Cambridge: The University Press, 1967), p. 136: .. why you should not have preferred to indicate simply and with few words that what you previously knew was uncertain… rather than by regarding everything as false, not so much to dismiss an old prejudice, as to take up with a new one.“
Immanuel Kant, The Impossibility of an Ontological Proof of the Existence of God, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), p. 504: “... but in that case… we have presupposed an existence as belonging to the realm of the possible, and have then, on that pretext, inferred its existence from its internal possibility — which is nothing but a miserable tautology.”
It may be objected that the failure of the inference process to produce the required ego or “I” does not mean that it does not exist. Quite true. But then an ego which is unknown and may not even exist surely cannot serve as a fundamental concept in developing phenomenology.
Gilbert Ryle, “Descartes’ Myth,” The Concept of Mind (New York: Barnes Noble, 1971), pp. 11–24: It would be “ridiculous to construct the disjunction `She came home either in a flood of tears or else in a sedan-chair.’ Now the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does just this. It maintains that there exist both bodies and minds; that there occur physical processes and mental processes;….”
Husserl, The Paris Lectures,op. cit., p. 19: “Phenomenology always explains meanings, that is intentionality, by producing these sense-ful-filling syntheses. The tremendous task placed upon description is to expound the universal structure of transcendental consciousness in reference to and creation of its meanings.”
Gilber, Ryle, op. cit., p. 165: “... even if it is claimed that in introspeating we are attending twice at once, it will be allowed that there is some limit to the number of possible synchronous acts of attention, and from this it follows that there are or must be some mental processes which are unintrospectable… But if this knowledge [knowledge of one’s own mental processes] does not always rest on introspection, it is open to question whether it ever does.”
Ibid.,p. 166: “No one could introspectively scrutinise the state of panic or fury, since the dispassionateness excercised in scientific observation is, by the definition of `panic’ and `fury,’ not the state of mind of the victim of those turbulences.”
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Riukas, S. (1999). The Problem of the Transcendental Ego in Husserl. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) Life Scientific Philosophy, Phenomenology of Life and the Sciences of Life. Analecta Husserliana, vol 59. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2079-3_32
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