HUSSERL AND NEO-KANTIANISM

Abstract

The suggestion of thematic and methodological affinities between the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and the philosophies of Descartes and Kant appears repeatedly within the expansive secondary literature on the origin's of transcendental phenomenology, as well as in the actual publications of Husserl himself. Husserl's indebtedness to Cartesian thought reveals itself throughout these writings, attaining its most explicit formulation in a series of lectures given in 1929, published under the title of Cartesian Meditations. Within this work, Husserl refers to his own phenomenology as a type of neo-Cartesianism, pointing to Descartes' Meditationes as the impetus generating the movement from a developing phenomenology to a genuine transcendental philosophy. Descartes' conception of philosophy and science, as well as his insistence upon absolute certainty with respect to fundamental principles, strongly parallels Husserl*s own sense of the nature and task of philosophy. But despite the importance of such similarities, which do indeed animate the subsequent lines of advance within transcendental phenomenology, the bond between these two thinkers remains largely a spiritual one. The Husserlian divergance from the Cartesian enterprise occurs early along the path to phenomenology; a transition necessitated . . . precisely by (phenomenology's) radical development of Cartesian motifs—to reject nearly all the wellknown doctrinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.1