Transcendental Ego Research Articles

Intentionality and Autonomy in Husserl’s Phenomenology: A Comprehensive Analysis of Conscious Decisions and the Transcendental Ego

This essay embarks on a thorough exploration of Edmund Husserl’s seminal contributions to the philosophical discourse on consciousness, with a particular focus on the dynamics of conscious decisions within the framework of phenomenology. By delving into Husserl’s nuanced examination of consciousness—its temporal structure, the nature of self-awareness, and the foundational concept of intentionality—the analysis reveals the intricate ways in which Husserl posits the transcendental ego as the nexus of meaning, judgment, and perception. The discussion illuminates how Husserl’s theory of intentionality and the intentional act’s matter and quality serve as the cornerstone for understanding the will’s engagement with the world. Through a detailed exposition of Husserl’s ideas on the phenomenological reduction, the essay articulates the active role of consciousness in constituting reality and the ethical dimensions underpinning the exercise of free will. The paper argues that Husserl’s insights into conscious decision-making challenge conventional views by framing free will within the contexts of knowledge, ethical deliberation, and the ego’s autonomy. This essay contributes to the ongoing dialogue between phenomenology and contemporary philosophy of mind by highlighting Husserl’s profound impact on our understanding of consciousness, agency, and the existential significance of human decisions. Keywords: Edmund Husserl, Phenomenology, Conscious Decisions, Transcendental Ego, Intentionality, Free Will, Consciousness, Epistemology, Temporality, Rationality, Autonomy, Phenomenological Reduction (Epoché), Intersubjectivity, Self-awareness

The Life of the Transcendental I in Husserl’s C-Manuscripts

The following paper traces Husserl’s late time-analyses (concentrated especially in the so-called C-manuscripts) in the context of the problem of the life of the transcendental ego. We proceed from the constitutive stage of primal life (Urleben), in which the streaming living presence is constituted as lasting now (nunc stans). Then we trace further the structural connections of the constitution of the so-called first transcendence, that is, the transcendence of the immanent stream of consciousness, and the second transcendence, in which life is constituted as living-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Leben). It turns out that the life of the transcendental I is of the character of a striving life (strebendes Leben) and that the first and second transcendence belong to it essentially.

Anthropocentrism and Two Phenomenological Approaches to Animal Life

This article analyzes two phenomenological approaches to animal life in the context of criticism of anthropocentrism. The first part considers the question of anthropocentrism. Beginning with the posthumanist criticism of anthropocentrism as an ideology of human exceptionalism, the article proposes to reflect human anthropocentricity phenomenologically as a condition of experience. The second part discusses San Martín and Pintos’ approach, which, grounded in Husserl’s analysis of transcendental ego, considers the human-animal relation in terms of egotic subjectivity, corporeality, and the constitution of sense. San Martín and Pintos’ position is very important in the criticism of anthropocentrism, and yet it is considered insufficient when reflecting the diversity of human-animal relations. The third part analyses Depraz’s four-stage structure of empathy and aims to determine the conditions and limits of access to animals as liminal subjects. Corporeality is considered as the most general layer; the accessibility of animal consciousness, the approach to their experience, the possibilities and limits of it are analyzed. Finally, it is concluded that the two positions can contribute to the understanding of the limits of anthropocentrism and its failures.

Navigating The Psychoanalytic Symbol

Nicolas Abraham (1919–75) rethinks the symbol as the very fabric of being. The author examines how this notion challenges the limitations of Husserl’s phenomenology and its reliance on a transcendental ego that can apprehend hyletic data in its purity. For Abraham, the symbol is worldly and resonates with its emergence from intersubjective foundations to constitute subjectivity impurely as a Dyad. It is born from trauma, a cut that differentiates Ego from Other but also generates anxiety (and Time) to keep its operation unfinished. This projection into the future implicates intention (agency) that builds upon origins that are opaque and immemorial. Abraham denotes this origin as the Arche, conceiving of it as a primary symbolism that renders the traumatic cut but without temporal or structural guarantee. It is a beginning that is beyond the phenomenal, requiring exploration through a radical transphenomenological perspective derived from psychoanalysis. Here, trauma is both the debilitation of the symbol and (potentially) the impetus for its transformation, (re)iterating structures of subjectivity that have greater complexity and degrees of freedom. This is, of course, as circumstances allow. Abraham’s construction of symbolic subjectivity is stratified as the symbol negotiates levels of existence from basic Ego-integration to sophisticated social organizations, none of which can individually capture its operation. The journey to a fulfilling existence is riddled with obstructions that could be physiological, relational, cultural or otherwise. The author highlights this multivalence as a complexity that must be carefully navigated – especially when there is suffering – by attending to the symbol and its resonances where creative transformations cannot be mapped in advance.

The Metaphysical Magnificence of Reduction: The Pure Ego and Its Substrate According to Phenomenology and Vedanta

This article examines relationships between the absolute being of the universal ego (Ātman-self) according to the Indian religious philosophy of Vedanta (V) and the phenomenological, irreal being of the transcendental ego in Husserl’s phenomenology (P). Both Ātman and the transcendental ego are accessed in the first-person perspective by onto-phenomenological reductions. Such reductions, as stated by Husserl, have absolute freedom of positing and, thus, can reveal or conceal states of being. In contrast with P-reduction, which renders the being of the ego-pole invisible, V-reduction penetrates into the being of the ego-pole and opens a horizon of unique, non-intentional mental states. Following the dialectics in pre- and post-reduction givenness of being, there emerges a picture of connection between the intentional phenomenological being of the transcendental ego and the non-intentional being of the pure ego of Vedanta (Ātman-self). The pure ego of Vedanta manifests as a substrate for the transcendental ego of phenomenology. From this, we can conclude that reductions function as the loci of dialectical syntheses of being, whereby the unity of being has a fuller, more complex and multi-sided sense than the one intended in the natural attitude. In their breaking of theoretical habits conditioned by the substance metaphysical tradition, reductions are truly indispensable in the revelation of being that grounds the theory of knowledge.

Взаимната обусловеност между ейдетичния и генетичния метод в Хусерловата философска логика

The principle characteristics of Husserl’s eidetic and genetic method have been elucidated in connection to transcendental criticism, intersubjective constitution, various types of evidence, fulfilled intentionality, and eidetic intuition. The mutual interdependence of both methods is discussed stressing the leading role of the eidetic method. Special attention is paid to the term “deceptive evidence”; it is explained how through the combined efforts of both methods the deceptive evidence can be identified and overcome. The primordial function of circular teleology based on transcendental Ego’s inherent teleology is underlined.

Alter-ation and Ethical Reduction

ABSTRACT In this paper, I suggest an ethical reading of Husserl’s theory of primordial reduction, which has been criticized for excluding the other from the outset and not doing justice to genuine alterity. I propose to interpret primordial reduction as a “putting into question” not only the intentional relatedness with the other but also transcendental ego’s activity that confers meaning upon the other, so as to understand the other’s primordial givenness that precedes egoic act. I argue that this reading can reveal two correlated issues: first, primordial reduction essentially alters the transcendental sphere by decentralizing the transcendental ego; second, primordial reduction is radical only to the extent that it is existentially motivated by a transcendental other. I suggest that Husserl’s theory of primordial reduction implicitly comprises of an ethical aspect that is of fundamental affinity with Levinas’s methodic operation in Totality and Infinity.

On the Full Concretion of Subjectivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology: Contingency and the Transcendental Person

ABSTRACT This paper argues that Husserl’s personalist ethics provides a new way to understand the meaning of the full concretion of the transcendental ego in his mature phenomenology. Husserl’s late ethics introduces, at the core of his thinking, a notion of contingency that he associates with irrationality and facticity. This central aspect of human life, namely that contingency traverses it through and through and which ethics makes painfully visible, is usually obscured by the phenomenological attitude, insofar as the phenomenological reduction brackets all matters of fact. Yet the concrete is not the same as the factual, for Husserl. This paper shows that, when fully concretely understood, the transcendental ego is a person who is correlated to a practical world, whose life as a whole has a personal style, and who struggles against what Husserl calls the contingency of destiny.

Peace Needs to Embrace the Anthropocene

The current climate crisis and related extreme weather phenomena massively influence everyday human life and thus also armed conflict and peace. Acknowledging the human origin of these biospheric instabilities introduces the geological era of the Anthropocene. While it is built around the acknowledgment of the human ability to indelibly alter Earth’s physis, it does not celebrate humanity’s sovereignty, but rather indicates the dissolution of agency within the complex interrelationships between the human and the nonhuman world. The Anthropocene and the issue of peace obviously interrelate. This essay describes the Anthropocene not only as a useful conception in approaching peace, but as its conditio sine qua non. Its ontological implications highlight the substantial share of nonhuman agency and complexity through extreme weather phenomena in armed conflict and peace, while its epistemological innovations reveal the indispensability of the dissolution of the modernist transcendental ego for reasoning about and practicing peace. Peace in the Anthropocene means to let the world and its myriads of human and nonhuman inhabitants speak and to take them seriously.

SECRET OF “ALWAYS ALREADY” (OF THE LOST TRACE OF PHENOMENOLOGY) IN DECONSTRUCTION OF DERRIDA

Based on key texts of Derrida as well as his interviews and recently published seminars the article presents a “micrological” analysis of deconstructivist thought in the context of its appeal to phenomenology of Husserl and fundamental ontology of Heidegger. Derrida begins his intellectual path with a reflection on the most important topics of Husserlian phenomenology and discovers in the descriptions of temporalization a paradoxical movement of the immanent self-deconstruction of phenomenology. It from within undermines its own basic principle of the primordial givenness of the living present to itself in its whole presence. From the point of view of Derrida’s deconstruction, the living present of self-presence of the transcendental ego, like itself, is no longer the original source of sense, meaning, knowledge and experience but rather the effect of difference. Derrida discovers the radical constitutive dependence of the present on the trace of the inevitably lost past, thus, his thought resolutely destroys the primordial nature of the present and roots it in the true “origin” as a game of delays and differences. Similarly, Derrida criticizes the project of fundamental ontology. While Heidegger conceives of the ontological difference between being and Being as the last hidden basis of any question in the discourse of metaphysics, Derrida insists that this differentiation is derived from différance as an even more primordial movement of difference. And although Derrida claims to have a more essential comprehension of the core of metaphysics compared to Husserl and Heidegger and even confidently classifies their philosophical work ones to the field of metaphysics, he continues to use the resources of phenomenological and transcendental discourse again and again, leaving them without any criticism. The most telling example here is the use of the phrase “always already” (toujours déjà, immer schon), incredibly common in the works of Heidegger and Husserl (as well as most other most famous modern phenomenologists) and accompanying most of Derrida’s texts. In this article we seek to draw attention to the mystery power of this phrase, which hides the secret of the origins of phenomenological, fundamental-ontological, transcendental, and deconstructivist discourses as such, and also to demonstrate the possibilities of self-deconstruction of deconstruction, which with new urgency returns us to the problem of defining the limits of metaphysics and the “margins of philosophy”.

From transcendental egology to orientation theory: Toward a mereological foundation for the different senses of the "self" in conscious experience.

In the present work, we aim to make a contribution to the origins of the notion of "minimum self" in Husserl's phenomenology. Starting from the difference between the philosophy of the subject and the philosophy of the self, the aim of this research is to show that the Cartesian association between both philosophies would not exactly correspond to the conception of the self, as we find it in Edmund Husserl's works. With this, we intend to nuance Heidegger's accusation of Husserl's "Cartesianism," At the same time, we show how a detailed analysis of the "senses of the self" in Husserl's phenomenology allows extracting the notion of "minimal self" as it has been introduced in the current and lively debate between psychiatry and phenomenology. In our research, we also show that in order to move the theory of the transcendental ego toward the theory of the orientation of the life of consciousness, it is necessary to consider the foundation of the concepts of ego in the technical vocabulary of the formal mereology of the Husserl's third "Logical Investigation."

Ego na fenomenologia. Crítica de Sartre ao Ego transcendental de Husserl

This study approach the critique of the transcendental ego in phenomenology in La transcendance de l’Ego, where Sartre confronts the “consistency” of a psychic and psychophysical ego. The research is directed towards understanding how a consciousness that does not have, a priori, any egological structure ends up, as “artificial functionality” and “in interiority”, constituting it as an “object”, to then identify with him, affirming himself as being him, in a sui generis relationship of «identity and indistinction». Therefore, throughout the reflection, as he reveals what he claims to be a «pre-personal» character of consciousness, the philosopher questions the reason for this movement by which it ends up «reifying», identifying itself with the psychic ego which it itself constitutes as a transcendent object. The aim here is to approach the existential inferences – not subscribed by the reasoning that is developed –, of Sartre when he concludes that this ego is a «product» of the conscience itself, which constitutes it, projects itself and identifies with it as a subterfuge to escape its full spontaneity and freedom that are a reason for her anguish. In this context, it is thought that, due to the “doxic character” they contain, all existential positions cannot be confirmed in the light of transcendental phenomenology. The egological approach to subjectivity in Husserl’s phenomenology is considered to be a continuous process of self-appropriating unfolding. However, this does not imply an undue multiplication of “I’s”, but refers, above all, to “modalities” of a consciousness that unfolds in a multiplicity of acts and subjects.

Metaphysical metaphor

The aim of the research is to determine the meaning of metaphor for identifying the metaphysical foundations of aesthetics, to analyze how the ways of this definition are drawn in the philosophy of Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida, Mamardashvili. Their works help to understand how a metaphysical metaphor is constructed, its aesthetic matrix. Since ancient times, aesthetic thought has considered the concept of the language of metaphor with its double ambiguity, various metaphorical figures as structures internally connected with categorical reflection on the system of art, and the metaphor itself was conceived as a form of semantic perception and the creation of an artistic landscape. Revealing the place of aesthetics in the structure of metaphysics, the author examines the aesthetic role of the metaphorical within metaphysics, the complexity of the relationship between the concept of metaphor and the fundamental metaphysical category of being In the world scientific literature, there is an infinite number of works in which metaphor is considered as a rhetorical figure. But studies of metaphysical metaphor are rare. For the first time in the Russian-language literature, the article outlines approaches to the aesthetic understanding of metaphysical metaphor, as they developed mainly in the philosophy of Heidegger and Derrida. In their concepts, the intuition of the metaphor itself as metaphysics is revealed, the idea of the metaphysical metaphor of light is revealed, the understanding of the transcendental ego as a metaphor is revealed, and the concept of the substance of the metaphor itself is clarified. Special attention is paid to the aesthetic and metaphysical interpretations of metaphor in modern Russian philosophy.--

Phenomenological reduction of E. Husserl through the prism of Buddhist meditation

The subject of this research is the method of phenomenological reduction developed by E. Husserl. The article examines the difficulties faced by this method, as well as observes the reception of Husserl’s ideas by the adherents of phenomenology in the XX century. It is substantiated that the phenomenological reduction is unrealizable by theoretical means due to impossibility to comply in the with the initial requirements of directness and non-prerequisiteness in the verbal expression. At the same time, the author proves that the phenomenological reduction could be implemented as a practice. Buddhist meditation is taken as an example. The goal is set to examine the phenomenological reduction through the prism of meditative practice. The research methodology is based on the comparative study of phenomenological and Buddhist philosophy with regards to the subject matter. The scientific novelty lies in examination of the problem of implementation of phenomenological reduction in the context of a completely different, non-Western tradition. The analysis demonstrates that Buddhism and phenomenology, proceeding from similar ideological prerequisites and studying the same subject, come to the markedly different conclusions. The examination of meditative practice indicated the differences between the phenomenology and Buddhism in their interpretation of the problem of consciousness. The fundamental difference pertains to the problem of “Self”: Buddhism does not recognize the apodictic evidence of the empirical and transcendental ego. This opinion is grounded on observation of the variable nature of the mind in the process of meditation. Other differences considered in this article consists in the discrepancy between the phenomenology and Buddhism regarding the interpretation of such concepts as “intentionality” and “ideation”.

Between Worldview and the World

As the twentieth century opened, the unified vision of the world prized by philosophy disintegrated and shattered into a multiplicity of worldviews. Karl Jaspers and Heidegger both focused on this phenomenon in 1919. Husserl made an attempt to restore the lost unity of the world based on a new phenomenological transcendentalism. This unity in his system does not arise from a synthesis of the multiplicity of private aspects of our perception but from the dependence of the world on a kind of integrity in the ego, an instance of living through those aspects which unites them as one. This transcendental ego is an arena for and bearer of these experiences, which are located beyond any representation and hence are not under the sway of the relational but are absolute. Heidegger replaced Husserl’s transcendentalism with a hermeneutic ontology which condemned any kind of absolute as illusory. Absolutes make sense only as our response to the finitude of our existence. This article considers why Husserl was so persistent in trying to go beyond our particularity and finitude, while Heidegger made them the basis of his philosophy. Of the many possible answers, the article argues that Husserl’s Jewishness consigned him to exclusion from “organic” communities and inclined him to explore pure transcendental rationality, whereas Heidegger sought out the rootedness and concreteness of existence and Dasein that were readily available to him in Germany.

Умеренный фундаментализм в феноменологии Гуссерля

The article deals with the problem of knowledge justification in Husserl's phenomenology. The author of the article shows that, in the matter of justification of knowledge, Husserl's phenomenology does not fully meet the requirements of either foundationalism or coherentism. The fundamentalist way of reasoning assumes the presence of basic beliefs, from which all inference beliefs are derived. One of the most paradigmatic examples of foundationalism is the Cartesian “cogito ergo sum”, and it is this kind of justification that is present in phenomenology. However, the Cartesian method of justification is accepted by Husserl in a truncated form: the ego is the source of apodictic evidence, but it cannot guarantee the adequacy of subsequent conclusions. In this regard, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that Husserl is a moderate foundationalist in the matter of knowledge justification. In search of an explanatory principle for such a position, a hypothesis is expressed about the asymmetry between epistemological and ontological approaches to the interpretation of the ego's experience in Husserl's phenomenology. A non-epistemic understanding of the ego's experience presupposes the recognition of the obviousness of the existence of the ego as a thinking instance, while an epistemic understanding concerns all peripheral superstructures of the ego, which, in fact, are inferential knowledge from the basic belief given by the formulation cogito ergo sum. The presence of these restrictions forced Dagfinn Follesdahl to qualify Husserl's phenomenology as a kind of coherentism. The author of the article objects to this, believing that phenomenology cannot be considered either as a form of coherentism or as a form of (strong) foundationalism. Based on William Alston's thesis on the combination of epistemic and non-epistemic beliefs in a rethought type of foundationalism and on the works of LLaurence BonJour, the author of the article comes to the conclusion that Husserl's phenomenology should be understood as moderate foundationalism. The specificity of phenomenology -its appeal to the experience of the transcendental ego - leads to the fact that the pre-predicative structures of consciousness become the criterion of validity as such. Thus, moderate foundationalism in phenomenology boils down to the fact that Husserl recognized the undoubted evidence of the non-epistemic experience of the ego experience and, on the other hand, saw the possibility of correcting epistemic beliefs that do not affect the fundamental nature of the non-derivative basis.

Witold Gombrowicz and Philosophy

The author of the article examines Witold Gombrowicz’s literary texts, diaries, lectures, essays, interviews and letters, as well as memoirs about him, trying to reconstruct the most important philosophical issues that concerned the writer and to describe the nature of his philosophizing. Gombrowicz’s philosophyzing is placed in the very broad context of the Western philosophical thinking tradition. Subsequently, that context is narrowed down to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism which was closest to Gombrowicz and from which he specified his own position by strictly limiting Sartre’s concept of activistic freedom and self-creation and introducing the issue of pain and suffering.Gombrowicz fundamentally modified Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological conception of the transcendental ego, paradoxically identifying it with his own self. The author of the article also draws attention to the philosophy of life, mentioned neither by Gombrowicz nor the authors who researched his philosophy, which is important for understanding the foundations of writer’s thinking. He also analyzes the relationship between philosophical and literary thinking, the personality or even privacy of philosophizing, the “implementation” of philosophical thinking, and other issues.

Apodictic Evidence in Phenomenology: A Correlative Approach

This article is devoted to a phenomenological analysis and interpretation of the basic concepts involved in phenomenology. The first concept that deserves our attention is that of “apodicticity” along with the related concept of “apodictic evidence”. The next concept is that of “correlation,” which manifests its apodictic character in bringing together all transcendental facts. With the transition from traditional discourses to modern discourse, the concept of apodicticity continues to deepen; at the same time, it is accepted that some metaphysical presuppositions continue to lurk at the foundation of this concept. Apodicticity, as the principle of knowledge, is an idea that lies in the infinity of universal experience, which includes both agreed and mismatched moments. This mismatch, in turn, refers to correlative connections between the transcendental Ego, the world and intersubjectivity. Transcendental subjectivity has a correlative nature, which is due to its self-transcending character, resulting in gaps and distinctions being found within subjectivity.

Notion of Intentionality in Vijňānavāda

The paper aims at bringing out a valid comparison between the notion of intentionality portrayed in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and that of Vijňānavāda in general. One of the crucial objectives of the Husserlian phenomenology is to understand the nature of consciousness. To Husserl, Consciousness is always intentional, that is, intended or directed towards something. It constitutes the world in the sense of bestowing meaning and being to the world. The object intended by consciousness may or may not be there, but it certainly has a sense. Husserl makes a distinction between empirical and transcendental consciousness. To him, the empirical ego is momentary whilst the transcendental ego survives all reduction and presides over all epistemic acts. To explore whether the Vijňānavadins propose a similar notion of Consciousness and its intentionality would be the primary objective of the paper. On the other hand, to Vijňānavāda, the apparent external world is projected by the Absolute Consciousness, the Ālaya, not by the individual consciousness or Vijňāna. Vijňānavāda distinguishes between individual consciousness (pravritti Vijňāna) and absolute consciousness (Ālaya Vijňāna). All intentional acts are performed by the individual consciousness having the Ālaya Vijňāna as its background. The Ālaya manifests itself as subject and object as well as seven pravritti Vijňānas. They are intended and constituted by the Ālaya. It, therefore, follows that Ālaya is always intentionally correlated with the pravritti Vijňānas. Vijňānavāda appears to be a kind of constitutive phenomenology rather than idealism.

On what matters. Personal identity as a phenomenological problem

This paper focuses on the connection between meaning, the specific field of phenomenological philosophy, and mattering, the cornerstone of personal identity. Doing so requires that we take a stand on the scope and method of phenomenological philosophy itself. I will argue that while we can describe our lives in an “impersonal” way, such descriptions will necessarily omit what makes it the case that such lives can matter at all. This will require distinguishing between “personal” identity and “self” identity, an idea well-established in the phenomenological literature – for instance, in Husserl’s distinction between the “transcendental ego” and the person -- but I will argue that self-identity is a normative achievement whose clarification requires a move into second-person phenomenology. The argument moves through three sections. First, I will discuss Aron Gurwitsch’s “non-egological” conception of consciousness and will explain the most important reason Husserl rejected this view in his transcendental phenomenology. Second, I will discuss some contemporary approaches to Husserl’s distinction between person and ego (personal identity and self identity). Third, I will argue that these approaches testify to an ambiguity in Husserl’s account of being “true” to oneself that requires us to understand selfhood as having the structure Heidegger called care. The importance of this will be demonstrated phenomenologically in a critical examination of Paul Ricoeur’s ontology of selfhood, particularly his interpretation of the second-person phenomenology of conscience.