{"agent_id":"husserl","agent_name":"Edmund Husserl","slug":"the-transcendental-reduction-and-transcendental-idealism","label":"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?","topic":"The transcendental reduction and transcendental idealism","question":"Does the epoché yield a constituting subjectivity that grounds the world, or does it lose the world it brackets?","position":"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. 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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.","n":[1,2]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"It is the thesis that any world that can be experienced is constituted by transcendental subjectivity in its intentional achievements.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[3,4,5]}]],"texts":"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). Reception: Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) §7 on phenomenology and the worldly being of Dasein; Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) — the rejection of the transcendental ego; the Munich-Göttingen realist phenomenologists (Reinach, Conrad-Martius, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the early Stein) who refused the transcendental turn; Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation (drafted 1932, published 1988) — the canonical inside-collaborator extension; David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (1974) and his Crisis translator's introduction; Dan Zahavi, Husserl's Phenomenology (2003), chapter 2; John Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism (1990).","works":["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)"],"reception":"Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) §7 on phenomenology and the worldly being of Dasein; Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) — the rejection of the transcendental ego; the Munich-Göttingen realist phenomenologists (Reinach, Conrad-Martius, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, the early Stein) who refused the transcendental turn; Eugen Fink, Sixth Cartesian Meditation (drafted 1932, published 1988) — the canonical inside-collaborator extension; David Carr, Phenomenology and the Problem of History (1974) and his Crisis translator's introduction; Dan Zahavi, Husserl's Phenomenology (2003), chapter 2; John Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism (1990).","status":"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.","era":"1859-1938","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology","page":"pp. 317–318","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, pp. 317–318"},{"n":2,"work":"Ideas II","page":"pp. 439–440","canonical":"","quote":"The result of the phenomenological sense-clarification of the mode of being of the real world, and of conceivable real world all, is any at that only the being of transcendental subjectivity has the sense of absolute being, that only it is \"irrelative\" (i.e., relative only to itself), whereas the real world indeed is but has an essential relativity to transcendental subjectivity, due, namely, to the fact that…","label":"Ideas II, pp. 439–440"},{"n":3,"work":"Ideas I","page":"p. 91","canonical":"","quote":"It is not as if a blind edict would have made it so that the ordo et connexio rerum [the order and connection of things] had to orient itself to the ordo et connexio idearum [the order and connection of ideas].","label":"Ideas I, p. 91"},{"n":4,"work":"Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger","page":"pp. 273–274","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, pp. 273–274"},{"n":5,"work":"Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger","page":"pp. 435–436","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger, pp. 435–436"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"anti-psychologism-and-the-autonomy-of-logic","label":"Anti-psychologism and the autonomy of logic: are the laws of logic ideal and apodictic, or are they psychological regularities?"},{"slug":"intentionality-and-the-noesis-noema-structure","label":"Intentionality and the noesis-noema structure: is the noema an intensional sense in the Fregean manner, or the object itself in its mode of givenness?"},{"slug":"inner-time-consciousness-retention-protention-and-the-absolu","label":"Inner time-consciousness, retention/protention, and the absolute flow: does the privilege of the living present rest on a metaphysics of presence that retention itself undermines?"},{"slug":"embodiment-leib-vs-k-rper","label":"Embodiment, Leib vs. Körper: is the lived body structurally distinct from the body considered as object, or is this distinction collapsible?"},{"slug":"intersubjectivity-and-the-fifth-cartesian-meditation","label":"Intersubjectivity and the Fifth Cartesian Meditation: does the analogical apperception of the Other avoid solipsism, or did Husserl never escape the transcendental ego?"},{"slug":"the-lifeworld-the-crisis-of-european-sciences-and-the-husser","label":"The lifeworld, the Crisis of European Sciences, and the Husserl-Heidegger break: does the late phenomenology recover the meaning-foundation of science, or is it a relapse into philosophical anthropology that Heidegger's existential analytic surpasses?"}]}