Paradox or Contradiction?

Abstract

David Carr's The Paradox of Subjectivity: The Self in the Transcendental Tradition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) argues that recent interpretations of modern philosophy have been disproportionately influenced by Heidegger's reading of the modern tradition. But, Carr claims, "Heidegger ignores the most important division in the modern period, that between the metaphysical and the transcendental traditions" (8). Reading all modern philosophy from Descartes to Husserl as a "metaphysics of the subject," Heidegger's critique of modern philosophy fails to recognize the distinctive character of the transcendental tradition represented chiefly by Kant and Husserl. It thereby loses sight of the fundamental and valuable distinction between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, eventually banishing the subject from philosophy entirely. The Heideggerian reading, according to Carr, assimilates modern philosophy to the history of ancient and medieval ontology by interpreting the modems as engaged in a particular form of ontology centered on the notion of the hypokeimenon. Whereas the ancients and medievals viewed the hypokeimenon as an underlying substance that is the subject (subiectum) of predicates, the modems shift from an ontological to an epistemological notion of subject in their turn to the subject as a subject of cognition. But Heidegger sees in this apparent turn the hidden adoption of the very categories that characterized the older ontological tradition, categories that are uncritically applied by the moderns to the subject of cognition itself. Hence, the subject of cognition is substantivized as the subject of "predicates," in this case, the representations, ideas, and states that inhere in it and are predicated of it. More fundamentally, the subject is privileged in modern philosophy: it is in relation to it that all other things acquire their mode of being as objects. It is the subject that is valorized in the modern tradition, and Heidegger's ontological interest ultimately is to do just the opposite. Heidegger claims that Kant and Husserl too operate with the modern interpretation of the human as a knowing subject. Kant's transcendental "I think" and Husserl's transcendental ego take on the role of the hypokeimenon and the "I" appears as an abiding substance that underlies all changes in our representations. In both cases, according to Heidegger, we are faced with a subject (subiectum) whose predicates are representations and a commitment to a metaphysics of the subject. Even Husserl's adoption of a theory of intentionality, on Heidegger's reading, fails to overcome this metaphysical commitment, for Heidegger believes that Husserl does not adequately account for the being of the intentional and that Husserl's philosophy remains a philosophy of immanence, wherein the ego is enduring substance and intentional objects are immanent determinations thereof. It is impossible to escape immanence, so says Heidegger, so long as one's starting point remains the cognizing subject. Carr rejects Heidegger's painting the history of modern philosophy-indeed all philosophy-with one brush or, better, spray gun. Heidegger's failure to appreciate the distinction Kant and Husserl draw between empirical and transcendental subjectivity, according to Carr, results in his failure to appreciate the valuable conception of subjectivity formulated by the transcendental tradition. This new, transcendental conception of subjectivity can be characterized by what Husserl-echoed by Carr-calls "the paradox of subjectivity," namely, the fact that subjects are both subjects for the world and objects in the world. Kant and Husserl, according to Carr, "[outline] not so much a single theory of the subject, much less a metaphysics of the subject, as alternate views of the subject that correspond to different ways of conceiving and experiencing the relation between self and world" (9). Central to Carr's argument and to his characterization of the novelty and importance of the transcendental tradition is his view that Kant and Husserl each offer "two descriptions of the subject-subject for the world and object in the world-[that] are equally necessary and essentially incompatible" (135). …