The transcendental reduction and transcendental idealism: does the epoché yield a constituting subjectivity that grounds the world, or does it lose the world it brackets?

Edmund Husserl, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The phenomenological reduction (epoché plus transcendental reduction) brackets the natural attitude's positing of the world to bring into view the constituting subjectivity whose intentional achievements make any experienced world possible.12 The transcendental idealism that follows — explicitly so named from Ideen onward — is not Berkeleyan subjective idealism, not solipsism, not denial of the world's existence.

It is the thesis that any world that can be experienced is constituted by transcendental subjectivity in its intentional achievements. The world is not a mental construction; the world is what is constituted in transcendental life as the objective pole of intentional acts that are not private but intersubjectively shared.345

Sources

  1. Natural hfe, and its natural world, finds, precisely herein, its limits (but is not for that reason subject to some kind of illusion) in that, living on in its " naturality," it has no motive to pass over into the transcendental attitude, to execute, therefore, by means of the phenomenological reduction, transcendental self-reflection.
    Ideas II, p. 439
  2. But great difficulties had to be overcome in order not only to begin the method of epochē and reduction but also to bring it to its full understanding of itself and thus for the first time to discover the absolutely functioning subjectivity, not as human subjectivity, but as the subjectivity which objectifies itself, [at least] at first, in human subjectivity.
    The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pp. 317–318
  3. This implies, however, that transcendental-phenomenological idealism is not simply a particular philosophical thesis, one theory among others, but that transcendental phenomenology, as a concrete science, is in itself universal idealism carried out as science, even if in it not one word is spoken about idealism.
    Ideas II, pp. 438–439
  4. It is now evident that the apperceiving conscious life-process, wherein the world and human being in its particularity within it are constituted as existentially real, is not what is /340/ apperceived or constituted <in it>; it is not the mental which as human mental being or human mental life-process comprises the apperceptive make-up of the real world.
    Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, pp. 273–274
  5. It is now evident that the apperceiving conscious life-process, wherein the world and human being in its particularity within it are constituted as existentially real, is not what is /340/ apperceived or constituted <in it>; it is not the mental which as human mental being or human mental life-process comprises the apperceptive make-up of the real world.
    Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, pp. 435–436

Where the argument is made

  • Ideas I §§31-46 on the epoché and the natural attitude
  • §49 on the residuum of the reduction
  • §§88-96 on the noematic correlate
  • Cartesian Meditations §§7-11 on the way to the transcendental ego
  • §40 on transcendental idealism
  • Crisis §§38-43 on the various ways into the reduction (Cartesian, life-worldly, ontological)

How the argument was received

The most heavily contested move in Husserl's authorship. The Munich-Göttingen realist phenomenologists (Reinach, Conrad-Martius, early Stein) refused the transcendental turn and held that the eidetic reduction without the transcendental reduction is sufficient. Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) refuses the reduction in favor of a hermeneutic ontology of Dasein-in-the-world; Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) refuses the transcendental ego as illegitimate; modern realists charge that the idealism is metaphysically extravagant. The defenders (Carr, Zahavi, Drummond, Bernet) argue that the transcendental idealism is misread when assimilated to subjective idealism and that Husserl himself made the distinction explicit. Eugen Fink's Sixth Cartesian Meditation (drafted 1932) extends the project from inside the collaboration.