10 - The intersubjective foundation of transcendental idealism: the immanent transcendency of the world's objectivity

Summary

Eidetic analysis of the self-constitution of transcendental Ego

In the second stage of Husserl's phenomenology, the distinction (as we have seen) between the empirical Ego and pure Ego is made. To the being of the former the “index of existence” that characterizes all the objects given in the natural attitude remains inseparable, while to the being of the latter this index has been annulled subsequent to the phenomenological reduction. The result of this reduction is the “merely intentional” being of the essentially empty pure Ego. In Husserl's third stage of phenomenology, the discovery of the pure Ego's concreteness complicates considerably the phenomenological status of the Ego. Husserl speaks, first of all, of the Ego as “himself existent for himself in continuous evidence; thus, in himself, he is continuously constituting himself as existing” (CM, 100). By the “Ego” here he evidently means the transcendental Ego, as his marginal note to this passage reads “Transcendental Self-Constitution”. He also speaks of “I, the reduced ‘human Ego’ (“psychophysical’ Ego)” (CM, 129), who is constituted, “accordingly, as a member of the “world’ with a multiplicity of “objects outside of me’”. And, again, he refers to “the transcendental Ego, who constitutes in his constitutive life everything that is ever objective for me – the Ego of all constitutions, who exists in his actual and potential life-processes and Ego-habitualities and who constitutes in them not only everything objective but also himself as identical Ego” (CM, 130).