Response to Drummond and Zahavi

Abstract

I'd like to thank the organizers of this session for choosing such perceptive and discerning readers of my book, and to thank John Drummond and Dan Zahavi for their comments and challenging questions. I have long considered these two excellent colleagues as my allies in the effort to rescue Husserl's idea of transcendental phenomenology from the misunderstandings, distortions and caricatures to which it has been subjected, especially (though certainly not only) by the later Heidegger and his enormously influential post-structuralist successors. This is what Dan Zahavi calls demythologizing transcendental subjectivity. So I am glad that they both endorse this aspect of the overall project of this book. But The Paradox of Subjectivity tries to do more than just interpret and defend Husserl. It also challenges the Heideggerian reading of the whole of modern philosophy. It does this by linking Husserl and the founder of transcendental philosophy; by seeking out and emphasizing what Husserl and Kant have in common, and by distinguishing between the meta? physical tradition, which Heidegger rejects, and the transcendental tradition, which Heidegger neglects or totally misunderstands. What Heidegger misses, in my view, and what Husserl and Kant have in common, is that instead of a metaphysics of the subject they offer us a complex view of subjectivity which is non-metaphysical and, in the end, ineliminably paradoxical. It is primarily with these broader aspects of my project that Drummond and Zahavi have problems. I shouldn't complain, of course, for I would have re? ceived much harsher treatment if SPEP had instead chosen a Kantian and a Heideggerian. And I should say right away that I think their points are all well taken. My interpretation is a strong one, like the Heideggerian view it opposes, and as such it is vulnerable. It walks that familiar thin line between what Kant and Husserl actually said and what I think they ought to have said, between conclusions they actually drew and conclusions that in my view follow from what they wrote. So what I am claiming here is not the defini? tive version of Husserl or Kant or transcendental philosophy, but a plausi? ble reading, a likely story as Plato might have said, an interpretation with enough strength to undermine the credibility of the monolithic Heideggerian interpretation which has been so widely accepted in certain precincts, in? cluding those of SPEP.