Abstract
Let us examine Husserl’s view of transcendental idealism in order to discover reasons why we can reverse his position and see it as a new realism, a transcendental “realism.”
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Notes
- 1.
Please see Chap. 6, “Transcendental Idealism Revisited.”
- 2.
Edmund Husserl, Die Haupstücke für den Beweis des transzendental-phänomenologischen Idealismus, in Transzendentaler Idealismus, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1921), eds. R.D. Rollinger and R. Sowa, in Husserliana, vol. 36, no. 8, 146–150.
- 3.
Ibid., 146
- 4.
Ibid.
- 5.
Edmund Husserl, Der Kausalschluss von den unmittelbar gegebenen Bewusstsein auf eine äussere Welt (1921), in Traszendentaler Idealismus, op. cit.
- 6.
Ibid., 174.
- 7.
Ibid., 193.
- 8.
See my book, L’oggettività come pregiudizio. Analisi di inediti husserliani sulla scienza (Objectivity as Prejudice: An Analysis of Edmund Husserl’s Unpublished Writings on Science) (Rome: La Goliardica, 1982).
- 9.
C, section 9c.
- 10.
Argument für den transzendentale Idealismus (Die Umfiktion in Zusammenhang mit der Leiblichkiet und der Intersubjektivität), 1921.
- 11.
Ibid., 156.
- 12.
The discussion about Edith Stein in Chap. 6 is helpful here: Stein holds that nature has an essence in itself and, therefore, it is the in-itself that is the focus of the famous discussion between Stein and Husserl of 1918. She does not understand or, at least, does not accept, the relation between subjects and objects, and nature proposed by Husserl. Many years later, in the Excursus on Transcendental Idealism, found in Potency and Act, she claims that what is understood by Husserl as transcendental with respect to subjects and objects is done so in an irrational manner, that is, it is chaotic and not executed in an ordered fashion. The Husserlian texts I have examined argue the opposite of Stein’s view.
- 13.
- 14.
Jacques Maritain, Distinguer pour unir ou Les Degrés du Savoir (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1932), 149.
- 15.
Ibid., 180.
- 16.
One thinks here of the critique of Descartes in volume I of the Ideas, section 31: the existence of the world cannot be denied; we do not have the power to do so. The existence of the world can be bracketed in order to understand better the meaning of the world’s existence for us.
- 17.
CM, 86.
- 18.
C, § 23, 86. Husserl writes: “Locke’s naïvetés and inconsistencies lead to a rapid further development of his empiricism, which pushes toward a paradoxical idealism and finally ends in a consummated absurdity. The foundation continues to be sensationalism and what appears to be obvious, i.e., that the sole indubitable ground of all knowledge is self-experience and its realm of immanent data. Starting from here, Berkley reduces the bodily things which appear in natural experience to the complexes of sense-data themselves through which they appear.” In any case, the merit of the empiricist form of idealism lies in its criticism ante litteram of the dogmatic objectivism of positivism, which is the main focus of Husserl’s critique.
- 19.
See the important note number 43 in section 6 titled “Actual-Real Being and Essential Being” in Finite and Eternal Being.
- 20.
Husserl comments on Platonic realism: “Blindness to ideas is a kind of psychical blindness; because of prejudices one becomes incapable of bringing what one has in one’s field of intuition into one’s field of judgment”, Ideas I, 41. He rejects the Platonic hypostatization of the ideas, but not the distinction between real and ideal objects.
- 21.
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Bello, A.A. (2015). Phenomenology as Transcendental Realism. In: The Sense of Things. Analecta Husserliana, vol 118. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15395-7_7
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