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Kant and Husserl on the Synthetic A Priori

by Kenneth T. Gallagher, New York Among the most important challenges to Kant's Interpretation of the synthetic a priori has been that issuing from the camp of Husserl and the phenomenologists. Tlieir case is especially interesting because, unlike the empiricists, who deny the occurrence of synthetic a priori judgments altogether, they contend that Kant has unduly restricted the rnge of such judgments. Far from applying only to the relatively narrow field which he granted them, there is an enormous rnge over which such judgments are possible; only because Kant misunderstood the nature of the synthetic a priori did he fail to grasp this. This was the conviction of Husserl himself, and it was echoed by many of his disciples and collaborators, especially among the earlier phenomenologists. Now, the problem of the synthetic a priori is not, in spite of appearances, a technical wrangle among grammaticallyaddicted philosophers, but is rather one point at which the question of the nature of truth comes to focus. It should therefore prove worthwhile to determine s clearly s possible just what is at issue in this dispute. To begin with, we ought to understand how Husserl takes himself to be differing from Kant. He is quite certain in the Logical Investigations what Kant's mistake was. There is no indication on his part that he differs from Kant in his way of stating the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. The former is defined by Kant s a judgment in which the predicate is contained in the concept of the subject, the latter s one in which the predicate is not so contained. "All bodies are extended" is an example of the first; "All bodies are heavy" an example of the second. Husserl does not indicate any quarrel with this way of putting things. He does formulate matters much more generally, but this is meant to be a refinement of Kant, rather than a modification. "We may define analytically necessary propositions", he says1, aas propositions whose truth is completely independent of the peculiar content of their objects", and he adds: "In an analytic proposition it must be possible, without altering the proposition's logical form, to replace all material which has content, with an empty formal Something" That this really is a generalization of Kant and not a modification, can be readily shown. For any proposition in which the predicate is contained in the subject would be a proposition in which this Containment is apparent when that
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Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen, S.Auflage, Tbingen, Niemeyer, 1968, II/l, p. 255.

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proposition is completely formalized, and both subject and predicate content rcprcscnted by symbols alone. Take the judgment "All bodies are extended". However "body" is defincd, Kant evidently assumes that one of the defining notes is that which is expressed in the predicate by the term "extended". Then if any set of defining characteristics of "body" were substituted for the term "body" in the subject-place, it would include the characteristic of "extended" within it. If the predicate, "extended", were symbolized by, say, the letter "d", then this letter would appear amohg the set of letters which represented the subject's content, and this fact would be evident upon inspection of the result. It would turn out something like this: "Everything which is a, b, c, d, e, is something which is d." Once this point is reached, however, it is clear that the containment is purely formal. For any re-definition of the symbols a, b, c, d, e, would leave the validity of the proposition unaffected; no reassignment of content for the symbols would alter the truth-value of the proposition. Husserl therefore asserts that an analytic proposition derives its validity from form alone and prescinds from content. In saying this, he is not disagreeing with Kant, but bringing out the same point. Where Husserl does disagree with Kant, however, is in the latter's view with respect to propositions which are not purely formal. It is obvious that every analytic proposition is necessarily true no possible experience could controvert it. The famous problem of Kant is whether only analytic propositions can be necessarily true, or whether there can be synthetic propositions which are likewise necessary. This amounts to asking whether there can be propositions in which a predicate which is not contained in a subject nevertheless applies to it necessarily. Now it is well known that Kant's answer to this is in the affirmative, but in a manner which has peculiar results. For, while he was quite convinced that there actually were such judgments, in mathematics and physics, he was simultaneously convinced of a thesis which he thought Hume had held: that necessity cannot be derived from experience. Experience gives factual conjunction, but never necessity. If, therefore, there are synthetic judgments which are necessarily true, their necessity cannot be derived from experience but must be a priori in respect to experience. An equation is thus established between the necessary and the a priori. A similar equation is established between the a priori and the formal. For, Kant saw, the only way in which a factor can be prior to experience is not s a content, but s a form. The a priori factors in experience are therefore the formal conditions of experience either the twelve categories, or the pure forms of sense Intuition, space and time. On this view the exclusive conditions under which there can be necessary synthetic judgments are those in which the predicate's application to the subject-term is rooted in the formal conditions under which a judgment is possible. Certain propositions in mathematics and physics fill the bill, since they express aspects of the synthesis of thought and Intuition according to which reference to objects takes place. These judgments are necessary, because they rest upon the necessary synthesis which is presupposed if there is to be exper-

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ience at all. When I judge that "A straight line is the shortest distance between two points", "Seven and five are twelve", or "Every event has a cause", these are synthetic judgments in the mode of necessity, since they are grounded in the synthesis without which no assertion about objects (and that is what a judgment is, in Kant's view) would be possible at all. This way of seeing things, however, while it accounts for necessity, severely circumscribes its rnge. It reduces all necessity to form, and ultimately it reduces all necessity to the form of subjectivity, even though that be considered s transcendental subjectivity. Only those synthetic judgments which are grounded in the formal conditions of experience can be necessarily true. Judgments based upon the content of experience never have strict or true universality, but only "comparative, universality, through induction"2. Kant goes on to say: "If, then, a judgment is thought with strict universality, that is, in such a manner that no exception is allowed s possible, it is not derived from experience." It is just here that Husserl accuses Kant of having misconceived the nature of necessity. Rather than being restricted exclusively to formal factors, there is another mode of necessary connection much more important for philosophical purposes which is grounded upon material factors, upon content. "Each pure law, which includes material concepts, so s not to permit of a formalization of these concepts ... is a synthetic a priori law*3. Propositions, that is, which no longer exhibit their necessitous character when the content of their concepts is replaced by formal symbols are not analytic. Their necessity is a synthetic necessity. Husserl is willing to continue using the phrase a priori here, but it no longer means "prior to" experience, except in the sense that synthetically necessary judgments are independent of the need for repeated "verification" by experience. What Husserl is holding for is a necessity which is based upon insight into essential connections between the content of subject and predicate. In this sense, the insight into necessity, far from being a formal condition for the experience of objects, is rendered possible through the .experience of certain objects. He is, therefore, simply rejecting the Kantian view that universality and necessity cannot be founded upon experience. When one judges, for example, that "Everything colored is extended", "Every tone has a pitch", or "Nothing that is red is green", he is not uttering an analytic Statement, and yet he is uttering a necessary truth4. No formalization could ever reveal that the predicate is contained in the subject, and yet we know that these Statement must be true, that they are without exceptions and are strictly universal. Our knowing in this case is not based upon anything formal, but upon a grasp of the meaning-content of the subject and predicate and of the essential connection between these meaning-contents. If we wish to use
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Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B 4. Logische Untersuchungen, II/l, p. 255. Logische Untersuchungen, II/l, pp. 2534. Cf. Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch, herausgegeben von Walter Biemel, Haag, Nijhoff, 1950, pp. 1617. (Henceforth Ideen I.)

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the word a priori to apply to this necessity, we must realize that we are speaking of a material a priori, a necessity based upon content, not of a formal a priori. All this Husserl fcels to be not simply a defensible position, but apodictically evident. No doubt his conviction is based upon his belief in "eidetic Intuition", but this in turn is not so much a belief for him s an expression of what he also takes to be an apodictically given fact of our mode of consciousness. That we are conscious of universal objects in acts which differ essentially from those in which we are conscious of individul objects, is something which is perspicuously clear and resistant to all dissolvents of empiricism5. The eidos "red* or tftriangle" is simply not reducible to empirical factuality, although it is intended through empirical factuality. This remained something which was "plain s day" for Husserl, from the earliest to the latest stages of his phenomenology. The essence or ideal object is a content grasped in its universality. Because we can grasp universal essences, we can also grasp the necessary compatibilities and incompatibillties between these essences. This is most thoroughly propounded in the discussion on "independent" and "non-independent" objects in the third Logical Investigation, but it is summarized and renewed in the first chapter of the Ideas, and is basically intact in the Formale und Transzendentale Logik, s well s being taken up in the works of other phenomenologists, such s Reinach, von Hildebrand, and Scheler. It is Kant's failure to see how there can be a "universal validity" which is "rooted in essences" (and hence in content, not form), which leads Husserl to criticize him s having "lacked the phenomenologically correct concept of the a priori"*. It is his own exhilaration at the revelation of the. material a priori which leads him to project a whole new science of material ontologies, based upon the mapping out of the indefinitely rieh region of essences grasped in their essential relationships7. The issue between Kant and Husserl, then, seems at first to be drawn in a fairly clear way: can there be judgments in which the predicate's application to the subject is synthetic and yet necessary, and in which the necessity is based upon content? Otherwise put: can necessity and universality be known through experience, rather than merely being a condition of experience? Whose answer to this question is preferable Husserl's or Kant's? One way to make short shrift of Husserl's position, of course, would simply be to deny that we do have an irreducible consciousness of universals to re-affirm the empiricist position. This way will not be followed in the present discussion. Not only is it fairly clear that it would not be congenial to Kant himself, but Husserl's arguments in this case seem to have been conclusive. That they are resistant to the attacks of empiricists is made plain by the decisive rebuttals to the latter advanced by those whose philosophical position is quite different from Husserl's own philosophers such
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Logische Untersuchungen, II/l, pp. 108116. Logische Untersuchungen, II/2, p. 203. Ideen I, pp. 2326.

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s Pap, Kneale, and Ewing8. At any rate, in what follows, it is assumed that Husserl was right in Holding that (1), there is an irreducible consciousness of universals (2) there is, consequently, a consciousness of non-analytic and yet necessary relations between universals. Does this immediately concede the palm to Husserl? Not quite, for the problem still to be considered is: to what extent does acceptance of HusserPs position conflict with and demand rejection of the Kantian thesis in respect to the synthetic a priori? It may be said at once that if Kant's presentation of the analytic-synthetic distinction in Introduction IV of the first Critique is taken at face value, then HusserPs view teils decisively against it. For what Kant would seem to be concerned to show there is that no necessary relationship of predicate to subject can be founded upon a content derived from experience. Judgments in which the connection between subject and predicate is based upon experience are all a posteriori which, parallel to Kant's equation of a priori with necessary, may be translated s "contingent". Now if Kant were construed here to be posing the problem of the basis upon which a predicate-concept which is not already contained in a subject-concept may be applied to it with necessity, there would seem to be undeniable force in HusserPs claim that this necessity is often based upon a content precisely derived from experience. There is a v/hole indefinite wealth of materially necessary connections in which this application can be seen, and Kant has simply overlooked them. That, however, is the catch. So persuasive is HusserPs argumentation, so convincing does he make the case for the synthetic a priori in his sense, that one is moved to ask: how could a thinker of Kant's stature have overlooked this? While such an oversight is not impossible or unprecedented, it is at least remarkable, and must give us pause in rendering the verdict too quickly in HusserPs favor. For the only satisfactory explanation of why Kant did not see the obvious truth which Husserl was pointing out, is that he was looking in a different direction. This should also alert us to the possibility that the distinction s he presents it in the Introduction does not actually convey his true mind on this subject. He does, indeed, speak there s if he is wondering how a predicate-concept is linked to a subject-concept which does not contain it and, to repeat, if he does mean that, HusserPs view (that a necessary link between them may be discerned through experiential content) is right. Kant's actual concern, however, is quite different. Remember that the discussion of the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic does not come at the very beginning of the Critique. The very first page of the Critique (whose importance it would be difficult to overestimate) sets forth Kant's real problem: how is knowledge of objccts possible?
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William Kneale, Are Necessary Truths True by Conventiont, and A. C. Ewing, The Linguistic Theory of A Priori Propositions. Both articles appear in Clarity Is Not Enough, edit. H. D. Lewis, London, Allen & Unwin, 1963. Arthur Pap's work Semantics and Necessary Truth, New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1958, amounts in its entirety to a trendiat refutation of all attempts to deny the synthetic a priori.

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The analytic-synthetic distinction is made in an attempt to help elucidate the answcr to that problem. The result is that Kant is not really asking what he scems to be asking in this distinction. He is not asking how we apply a predicateconcept to a subject-concept whidi does not already contain it. For his interest is not at all in concepts, or in the relation between concepts, but in the relation of concepts to objects. His real concern is: how do we know that our concepts apply to objects? He is really asking: how do we know that an object whidi is genuinely grasped through the subject-concept must also be grasped through the predicateconcept? He is not asking how the predicate-concept applies to the subject-concept, but how we know that both subject and predicate concepts are coincidentally applicable to the saine object. In his own eyes, the two questions are not equivalent. For Kant, "knowledge* does not consist in any insight into the relation between concepts; it consists in the relation between concept and object. So mudi does he equate "knowledge" with "knowledge of objects" that actually the latter phrase is redundant for him. "Knowledge" just is knowledge of objects. This is taken for granted from the very first paragraph of the Critiqney where a reciprocal reference is set up among his key words, "experience ", "knowledge", and "object*. They are mutually significant. What Kant is really interested in, then, is how our judgments constitute knowledge whidi is experience of objects. The key issue in the present consideration then becomes that of determining what he means by an "object". True enough, s the first sentence of the Critique indicates, "There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience*9. But "experience" N is not a vague or merely honorific word for Kant, indicating that some sort of content must correspond to concepts. Experience, he first states (perhaps in a vestigially realist fashion), is awakened by objects whidi "affect* our senses. Conversely, experience is knowledge of sudi objects. Objects are the unities correlative to a synthesizing of the manifold of Sensation. For, our understanding is said to "work up the raw material of the sensible impressions into that knowledge of objects whidi is entitled experience"10. This opening discussion, then, makes it quite apparent that Kant means by an "object" more or less what common-sense means by an object: an individual entity whidi I s an empirical knower encounter s over against me and presumably s independent of me and not a figment of my Imagination. Sudi an object is something philosophically akin to the Aristotelian conception of an individual substance. Even "if we remove from our empirical concept of any object, corporeal or incorporeal, all properties whidi experience has taught us, we yet cannot take away that property through whidi the object is thought s substance or s inhering in a substance"11. In other words and to employ HusserPs terminology
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10

Kritik, B 1. Ibid. 11 Ibid., B 6.

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Kant takes the "natural world-view" for granted, and begins within it. This means that an object is a thing external to me, or an aspect of a thing external to me. The "me" in question here is also a thing which is included in this collection of things. It is doubtless a special sort of thing, a knowing thing, but it is part of the furniture of the world which it knows. His entire development of the problem of the first Critique can be seen s an effort to lay bare the transcendental conditions of the natural world-view. He seeks for the conditions of knowing, but he understands "knowing* from within the vantage-point of that "knowledge of objects" which the natural world-view assumes and exemplifies. In this connection it is extremely instructive to read HusserPs depiction of the outlook of the natural world-view, s we find it in the Ideas. Surprisingly (at least it is surprising on the assumption that it is a coincidence), we find that his very first words tally with Kant's first words: "Natural knowledge begins with experience and remains within experience"12. This is the thesis of the natural standpoint, for which the knower is one real being within a given world of real beings. As an empirical knowing subject within this world, I find myself confronting corporeal (or incorporeal) things which are simply there. "I find continually present and Standing over against me the one spatio-temporal fact-world to which I myself belong, s do all other men found in it and related in the same way to it"is. This world is something "out there". It is this world which provides the criterion of "reality" by which I assess the putative reality of the object of any assertion whatever. It is also, of course, the world which Husserl in the Ideas specifically puts into brackets. Kant, however, far from putting it into brackets, accepts it s the touchstone for all assertion, for knowledge itself. What he then does is to seek the transcendental conditions under which the natural world-view (experience) is possible. In doing so, he transforms its ontological Status into something phenomenal, but knowledge continues to be identified exclusively with that relationship to objects which is accomplished within this natural worldview (within "experience"). "Objectivity" therefore derives its paradigmatic meaning from the kind of objectivity which is achieved within this natural worldview. This is evidently a different tack from Husserl. The latter does not restrict the meaning of "object* in Kant's manner. It is an oddity that Husserl nowhere in the Logical Investigations brings into relief an unambiguous definition of "object". There is no doubt, though, that its use is permitted, in fact required, in respect to that which is the correlate of our consciousness of universality. There are universal "objects* (like "red", "mangle", "tone", etc.) just s there are individual objects. Far from raising the issue of how concepts apply to objects, Husserl regards what others, would call concepts (number, for example, or the meanings just cited), s themselves objects of consciousness14. They are essences, i* Ideen I, p. 10. Ideen I, p. 63. " Ideen I, p. 50.

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ideal unitics not reducible to the Contents of individual experience, not, therefore, merely "psychological", but having an objectivity that is indisputable. One result of such objectivity, we have seen, is that on the basis of the Intuition of such essences, we may make pronouncements in respect to them which hold with necessity: "Every tone must have a pitch", "Nothing can be red and green", and the like. These truths hold in the realm of what Husserls calls "essence". In one sense, such knowledge prescinds from individual existence. It gives us no Information about any actual state of empirical reality and yet these assertions hold good for any possible state of empirical reality. In knowledge of essences, existents are put in brackets. This becomes explicitly the case in the epoche of the Ideas, but a principle like it is already operative in the Logical Investigations. In knowing essences, we inhabit the realm of what Husserl is quite willing to call the "possible". And yet, in a sense, we do refer ourselves to experience through these judgments, for in knowing what can be, we know in a sense something about individuals. A truth of essence holds for any possible instance of that essence. By intuiting the eidos "red", I do not thereby know that in the empirical world there exist any red entities. Yet, any instance of "red* fulfils all the essential laws which are founded on the eidos "red"15. In this way, an eidetic judgment pertains necessarily to experience, while it does not assert any actual fact to obtain in experience. It is an hypothetical and oblique reference to singulars: "// there is an existent tone, then it must have a pitch". "// there is something red, then it cannot be green." Kant's synthetic a priori judgments, on the other hand, speak thematically about existents. An "object" in his sense is an existent. Knowledge is knowledge of existents. This is the realistic or common-sense context of his thought, within which his whole problematic occurs. It is true that in the long run the very "existence" of objects s they are given to the empirical knower, turns out to be a correlate of a synthesis of transcendental consciousness, and hence to be an "existence" in a distinctly transformed sense, but this does not alter the import of his approach to synthetic a priori judgments. These remain ways in which we grasp individual existents. They are categorical judgments about what does actually exist, and not, in Husseins manner, hypotbetical judgments about meaningcontents. Thus, when Kant says "Every event has a cause", this is a categorical Statement about what is actually, and not a Statement about some eidos "event* or some eidos "cause". One might be inclined to object that the occurrence of experience itself is an overarching assumption which Kant must take to uphold the validity of his synthetic a priori judgments. That is why their validity is confined to the phenomenal realm. "If there is experience, then..." is the indispensable condition which might be thought to underlie the categorical Status of Kant's synthetic a priori judgments. But this would be misleading. For experience is not so much an hypothesis s it is the ultimate unconditional given, within which all
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Ideen /, p. 23.

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reflection arises. We cannot genuinely say, "If there is experience .. ,n, for it is the actuality of experience which Supports all talk whatsoever. Or, perhaps to put it more clearly: while it is true that experience need not obtain, still where it does obtain, it is a sheer fact for thought, and any truth contained in its obtaining is a categorical truth. It remains true, therefore, that Kant's judgments are categorical Statements in respect to what exists, and Husserl's judgments are hypothetical Statements in respect to whac is possible. In his own eyes, Kant's method restricts the validity of these judgments to that very field of experience whidi certifies their necessity s indisputable. They hold categorically but only of the phenomenal order. That is why Husserl, doubtless inexactly, brings the diarge of being merely "anthropologica!" against the Kantian approach: for Kant all necessity is founded in the structure of (human) consciousness10. His own view, conversely, renders the synthetic a priori judgments absolute and unexceptionable, but confines them to the realm of essential possibility. If we were now to ask what Kant would think about Husserl's view, the answer does not seem hard to imagine. He would probably not have rejected the contention of Husserl ultimately, only a thorough-going empiricist or nominalist could persist in contesting it but he would have regarded it s essentially irrelevant to his own point. Whatever the relationship between meanings may be, they are for Kant equivalent to relationships between concepts and do not constitute knowledge. Much "thinking* can go on in the order of sheer meaning, but knowledge only arises to the extent that this whole order of meaning is shown to be referential to objects. Otherwise, we are simply gliding from one concept to another, and are still locked in the confines of subjectivity. Husserl, for his part, would reject s unwarranted the restriction of the notion of "object" to that Version of it which is supplied by the natural world-view. From the Husserlian standpoint, Kant's essential mistake is to have raised the problem of knowledge exclusively from within the perspective provided by the natural world-view, and to have contented himself merely with seeking the transcendental conditions for this view. From within it, the meaning of "objectivity" is doubtless what Kant said it was, and the problem of knowledge is just that of knowing how "concepts" apply to "objects*. The empirical subject of the natural world-view, since he regards himself s a thing, inevitably regards his thoughts s events occuring in the thing which he is hence s Contents "in the mind" whose application to those things which are *outside the mind* requires confirmation. For Husserl, however, this is simply an inadequate understanding of the relation between thought and that about which thought thinks. Correctly understood, meanings (or, in HusserPs term, "essences") are not in the mind at all. Nor are they something "outside* the mind, as-it-were non-empirical existents. Both manners of speaking about essences are examples of a misplaced
li

Logische Untersuchungen,

/2,

. 196 97.

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psyaological approach to a realm not amenable to that kind of approach17. The point to bc hcld to is that essenccs are objectlve s over against the psychological subjcct which thinks them. No doubt this is a different sense of "object" from that which Kant employed, but it is a more fundamental sense in Husserl's eyes. To be "objective" is to be the non-arbitrary and self-given correlate which fulfils an intentional experience. The essence which is given in this manner does not require to be applied to something further in order to be certified s objective: its objectivity consists in not being given s a real element in the empirical consciousness of an individual knower, and it would be foolhardy to try to substantiate that objectivity by taking an inventory of the Contents of any empirical consciousness. The meaning of objectivity is this ideal, non-psychological Status of the intended vis a vis the subject whidi intends it. Kant's version of an "object" is simply one form of objectivity, the form presented to the empirical subject of the natural world-view, but it is by no means the fll signification of "objectivity". As a corollary of this shift in the meaning of "object", we might expect a corresponding shift in the meaning of "subject". The "subject" which cognizes the "objects" of Kant is the empirical subject of the natural world-view of common-sense (or it is the transcendental basis for this subject). It is an existent encountering existents, even if these are ultimately regarded s phenomenal existents. It is at least understandable why there would be some hesitation on Husserl's part in regarding the subject which cognizes essences s this same empirical-natural ego. The other early phenomenologists apparently did not experience any difficulty in this, since they tended to disregard the problem. Husserl himself was sensitive to the difficulty and it is just his perplexity here which drove him on in his perpetual effort to discover an ultimate foundation for that stream of the apprehension of meaning which he identified s experience. While it may not be immediately evident that the empirical subject may not be the cognizer of essences (indeed, probably all of traditional metaphysics and epistomology had tended to assume that it was), the very movement through whidi Husserl conferred a non-empirical and de-thingified Status on ideal objects tended to confer the same Status on the subject which cognized them. It is hard to see that the knower of ideal essences is adequately understood s a mere empirical thing. In fact, if the very conception of an empirical thing is itself only one specification of the larger field of "objectivity* intended by the subject, the suspicion grows on Husserl that there must be a profounder meaning for "subject" than any available from the side of the empirical ego. Initially, in the first edition of the Logical lnvestigations> this inclined him to espouse a non-egological conception of consciousness, somewhat like Sartre's; apparently owing to the belief that all content of "I" derives from the side of the empirical and thingified, the subject of eidetic knowledge tends to be viewed
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Logische Untersuchungen, II/l, pp. 123125.

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s not a personalized seif at all18. Husserl fairly soon recanted on this opinion, and subscribed instead to the absolute idealism of the Ideas: the seif reached through the transcendental reduction is a non-empirical and non-worldly ego, but it is still an ego. It is the pure ego of absolute consciousness by and for which all meanings, and hence all objects, are constituted including the empirical ego itself. Because Kant had unduly restricted the meaning of "objectivity", he was also unduly restricted in his seardi for the transcendental conditions of that objectivity. HusserPs own enterprise came to be conceived by him s a relentlessly thorough-going pursuit of the transcendental condition for the constitution of the whole universal rnge of objective meaning, which extended far beyond the Kantian domain, and in fact included it s one limited province. Whether this absolute idealism was demanded by this initial position is a highly debatable point; but that some change in his understanding of "subject" should ensue upon the change in his understanding of "object" was natural. Not only that, but it may have illuminating implications far beyond the present question. For what it brings to our attention is that any talk about "object" or "objective truth" must inevitably evoke the question of the seif to which such an object and such truth are present, and that in epistemology, any raising of the problem of the objectivity of knowledge also raises the question of who raises this question. The result of this passage to idealism, however, s Husserl pursues it, was precisely to call into question the whole meaning of an "other" of consciousness. That is, when he finished, he had not only systematically prescinded from raising factual and empirical questions in order to concentrate on the ideal in its essential purity, but he had also reduced the very meaning of existence to one of these ideal meanings. At this point consciousness is absolute and the conception of a being beyond consciousness collapses into nonsense. It is not only the empirical and factual state of affairs which is put out of commission by Husserl in the Ideas and Cartesian Meditations, it is existence in toto, in so far s that is conceived s transcendent to consciousness. In summary, then, the Situation comes to this: Kant reaches a point where the reference to an existent object is guaranteed, but confined to science. Husserl opens up the realm of objective knowledge, but it is all essential, not informative about experience. Kant gives us categorical knowledge of what exists phenomenally; Husserl gives us hypothetical knowledge of what is possible absolutely. On balance, neither seems a very satisfactory vindication of what a realist would want to understand by synthetic a priori knowledge. Kant confines genuine knowledge to that whidi is possible to the scientific knower; Husserl Orients knowledge on essences, whose Status s genuinely "other" than the seif which knows them is ambiguous. In the end, both may be accused of the common fault of dissipating any notion of genuine knowledge, if that is understood s a grasp of what transcends consciousness. From a realist's point of view, the confronta18

Logisae Untersuchungen, U/1, p. 363.

23 Kant-Studien 63

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Kenneth T. Gallagher

tion of the two positions results at best in a kind of aporia which he must exercise himself to overcome. One might aspire to find a way out of the impasse either by seeking to enlarge the Kantian view by admitting a non-sensuous Intuition, or by seeking to enlarge Husseins view in such a way s to embrace existence. Neither move is self-evidently destined for success, but the attempt is legitimate. Kant himself seems to have taken the first path in the Critique of Practical Reason. Moral experience, for instance, is there seen s uncoiiditionally given, and s offering a mode of access to the noumenal which is not provided by speculative reason. Yet Kant withholds from this approach the appellation of "knowledge", on the systematic conviction, it would seem, that it gives no object of knowledge in his sense of that word. To attempt the second alternative, enlarging Husserl in the direction of existence, may seem even less promising. Even its meaning is obscure. How can existence be given through an intuition of essences? Furthermore, what would we know about essences, if we knew they were realized, more than what we already know about them? An instance of red or an instance of triangle underwrites no further synthetic a priori knowledge than does the essence of these things. But perhaps the point is rather this: Is there any point at which the essence-fact didiotomy is surpassed? Are there meanings which are revelations of what does not exist merely hypothetically? If there are, then the eidetic content manifested in them transcends the essence-fact didiotomy and transforms what would otherwise be hypothetical into categorical intelligibility. Perhaps that is something like asking: are there meanings whose ground in existence cannot be put into brackets? One plausible direction in which to seek such meanings would seem to be in reflection upon the seif through which this whole process of questioning is carried on. In some sense the seif must be regarded s a non-hypothetical existent. It would make no sense to say, "If I exist, then.. .* Then in tracing out the rnge over which the merely hypothetical reference to the "I" is nonsense, we would, in effect, be attaining an eidetic grasp of existence.

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