Husserl’s Transcendental Paradox and an Attempt at Overcoming it

Abstract

The transcendental reduction led Husserl to the “disclosure” of transcendental subjectivity as a carrier not merely of the manifestation of the world for man but, in the final analysis, of his very being as such also. The domain of this transcendental subjectivity is construed by Husserl as a “universal correlative a priori,” wherein for each entity (conceived of as an intentional entity, that is, not a real one) there are corresponding appropriate activities of pure consciousness. This is just the point where Husserl comes face to face with the uncomfortable problem of the “competence” of the two a priori: the a priori of the world and the a priori of transcendental subjectivity. On the one hand, man comes to a pre-given world, and thus, on the other hand, the aforementioned world presents itself as a constitutive and institutive product of man, part and parcel of his transcendental subjectivity. Husserl himself has explicated the problem and it is worth noting how: “Yet how can it be that the constituent part of the world, man’s subjectivity, has to constitute the entire world, that is to constitute it as its own intentional product? . . . The subjective component of the world incorporates, as it were, the whole of the world, whereby it takes up the very self. What a variance!” (12, p. 203)¹