Husserl's pure ego

ACADEMIC PAPER

In this paper, I contrast – but also compare – Husserl’s philosophy of the Self, first, to Kant’s and, second, to Descartes’, with particular focus on its transcendental iteration, and its relationship both to the empirical and to objective reality.

It can be challenging, when reading the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, to discern any clear conception of the Self, either in its transcendental or in its empirical forms, so that when, on the occasion such a conceptual clarity is found, it is clung to by the reader all the more eagerly. The Husserlian ego is, at once, the independent “centre of all relations”[1], and co-present within each of them as their justifying element; enmeshed with the world under one aspect[2], and under another separate from it[3]; imminently discoverable by means of phenomenological reduction, and yet also curiously unlocatable by any conventional reflective act[4]. In any case, however nebulous the founder of Phenomenology may tend to be, the compelling nature of his arguments is undeniable, both for their originality and for their meaningful engagement with their historical influences. Arguably more than any other continental philosopher, Husserl wrestles directly and explicitly with the legacy of Titans who, well before him, laid out their very own philosophical ‘psychologies’ – foremost among these, Descartes and Kant. To the first, Husserl owes no less than the idea of his epoche. Indeed, he went so far as to call his philosophy a ‘Neo-Cartesianism’[5]. In regard to the second, it may be said that Husserl’s debt is even more extensive. In fact, I will make the bold suggestion that the German transcendental idealist is never completely absent from Husserl’s thought processes, and even when his influence is faint, it is still decisive. The notion of the Transcendental Self, first suggested – indirectly – by Descartes, then fully fleshed out by Kant, provides a necessary psychological point of departure for Husserl, since it lends him fuel to develop his own arguments both positively and negatively, that is, as a reaction against some of Kantian transcendentalism’s evident limitations. In response to the idea of a transcendental impasse, or Kant’s notion that the cognition of the pure ego is beyond all empirical reach, Husserl utters – for the most part, at least – an emphatic “I object”. And to Kant’s other great diremption, the one rending in twain the noumenal and the phenomenal, the world in itself and the mind gazing over it, Husserl would appear to redouble his objection (again, for the most part). In Husserl, we see a rather more Hegelian intimacy between Self and the object, between the ‘rational’ and the ‘real’; a more fluid network of phenomenological pathways connecting the mind both to itself – that is, its transcendental to its empirical counterpart – and also to the world around it. In this sense, the Self for Husserl is very critically ‘unitary’, perhaps more fundamentally so than in any other philosopher since Descartes (whence the claim that he was practicing neo-Cartesianism’). The ego is ‘one’ but also omnipresent, necessary in all the mind’s operations. This Cartesian re-affirmation, which Kant was able to arrive at only indirectly and after a great deal of speculative toil, Husserl makes with a refreshing ease which, though it is never fully justified by him, allows him to implement it as the foundational presupposition of his entire psychological philosophy. It is the objective of this paper, therefore, to contrast – but also compare – Husserl’s philosophy of the Self, first, to Kant’s and, second, to Descartes, with particular focus on its transcendental iteration, and its relationship both to the empirical and to objective reality.

Husserl’s ‘pure’ ego

We would do well, before embarking on any direct contrast with Kant’s own, to first outline Husserl’s conception of the transcendental Self as clearly as possible, at least in broad strokes. We have already mentioned that Husserl’s ego is essentially unitary. Now we must ask: “In what way is Husserl’s Ego unitary?” And the answer to this at first may seem relatively straightforward: Husserl’s transcendental ego – or ‘pure’ ego, as he often calls it – is a “necessary centre of all relations”[6]; a transcendental control centre of sorts, a necessary and universal kernel of consciousness from which all the mind’s cognitive operations are directed. It is unitary because it is an “unmoving point of reference”[7], “absolutely identical in the course of every actual and possible change of experiences”[8]. It is “fixed and abiding”[9]’ it remains stable and unchanging among consciousness’ ever-fluid states. It is imminently comparable, in this sense, to the Cartesian cogito and to Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, and operates much like the director missing from Hume’s theatre of impressions. It is perhaps the most explicit and straightforward iteration of this ego conception in the history of philosophical psychology, in fact. Taken at face value, one might draw many if not all of the following conclusions from these preliminary Husserlian affirmations: that the pure ego constitutes its own unique, independent realm of consciousness; that it stands apart from all cogitations; that it supersedes these in phenomenological import; that it may even predate them; and that it ‘sits’ in the ‘middle’ of consciousness as might a buoy in the sea. None of these conclusions is in itself wrong, and yet taken no further than this, they may be mistaken for a more-or-less simple reiteration of either the Kantian or the Cartesian cogito.

For Kant as well as for Descartes, there is a ‘purity’ to the universal and necessary ego that places it in opposition somehow with the rest of consciousness. For Descartes, this opposition is light, and yet all the same discernable. It sets apart the ‘thought of thoughts’, the very form of thinking from all those operations which necessarily flow from and depend on it. The ‘I think’ is, in fact, the ‘I think that I think’, the ‘first thought’, the thought of nothing but itself, the quintessential, supremely immanent cogitation; and pure also for this very reason. Since it constitutes not only a mental operation but the source, simultaneously, of all mental operations, it can at the same time be said to be no thought at all but an absolute thought-subject in the Kantian, paralogistic sense: that which is the subject of all my cognitions but can be the predicate of none[10] – in this case, pure rational substance. Descartes’ pure ego ‘sits’ in consciousness quite comfortably, and yet is not co-extensive with it, since, as we descend from its lofty turrets, we find ourselves mired all too quickly in that rather more fallible realm of consciousness, that ‘ego’ of the everyday, which, far from ‘fixed and abiding’, is all-too susceptible to vicissitude, both external and internal: the empirical self. For Kant, the self-containment of the transcendental ‘ego’ is stronger still. Where Descartes ‘doubts’ his way up the cognitive chain and makes his transcendental landing rather effortlessly, Kant’s process is altogether more belaboured, unfolding only by the painstaking ‘deduction’ of certain pure concepts, and their necessary employment in the synthesis of the ‘manifold of intuitions’. If there is a transcendental unity of apperception in Kant, a “pure, original, unchanging consciousness”[11], it is because he’s clawed and clambered for it. It lies beyond all empirical reach, no amount of doubting will get you there, and yet since there is a universal and necessary structure to our mode of cognition, this pure, unitary realm of consciousness must exist, if for no other reason, than as this structure’s necessary and universal precondition.

And here we come to one of our first, critical Husserlian divergence from Kant: the de jura/de facto distinction, as Sartre would call it[12]. Where Kant’s enterprise is a critical one, Husserl’s is essentially descriptive. For Husserl, the pure ego is something of a fait donné, posited as necessary without any deductive legitimation and then justified retrogressively, that is, by taking its phenomenological signals (cognitions and intentionalities), themselves already elucidated on the assumption of its existence, as its necessary biproducts. There is a pure ego. In order to affirm this, we are not necessarily reliant on the understanding that our thinking is unitary, but since it is unitary, we can rest assured that the pure ego, which is selfsame throughout it all, has an all-encompassing role to play in this. To Kant, this line of reasoning would have amounted to an unacceptable bypass of critical procedure. He is rather less inclined to take the pure unity of consciousness for granted, and proceed to organize his psychological assertions around it. Kant refuses, in fact, to assent to any clear and systematic ‘egology’ on the very basis that the pure ego can be posited only speculatively as a transcendental precondition but never cognized directly as a datum of certain knowledge. To adopt Sartre’s terminology, the Kantian pure ego is a ‘set of logical conditions’, whereas the Husserlian is an ‘absolute fact’[13]. The result is in any case curiously similar: Kant and Husserl, each in their own way, both posit the pure ego as the necessary and universal agent involved in all thought. For Husserl as well as for Kant, the transcendental ego is involved in all our representations[14], necessarily present in all our cognitive processes. However, here again we see at play the Sartrian methodological distinction. Where Husserl simply affirms the ego’s all-encompassing reach as a self-evident truth – “every cogitation belongs to the pure ego”[15] – Kant words his equivalent statement rather more normatively: “The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations”[16]. That is, if the pure ego is worth the price of its ticket, it must be so built that there could be no representation wholly or even partly insusceptible to its synthesizing operations, since it can hardly be conceived how such an ego-less representation might have any meaning or existence for me at all. Again, with Kant we are reasoning critically, with Husserl, descriptively.

In this regard, Descartes sits at a methodological midway point between the two. Like Kant, he refuses to take the ‘I think’ for granted, affirming it only once he’s sheered his empirical Self of all its extraneous elements. But like Husserl, he does not hold back from treating it as an absolute fact once it has been affirmed (Kant hesitates even then, as we’ve seen, permitting himself no more radical an assertion than that it must exist and it must behave in this way and that). Husserl’s equivalent operation to the Cartesian sheer, the epoche, is – I would argue – somewhat superfluous, since he never makes his egological assertions strictly on the basis of its findings. It serves as a means more to uncover something that is already assumed to be there, than to verify the existence of something which may or may not be; more of an edifying thought experiment than a foundational proof.

‘No empty pole’

A far more startling discrepancy between Husserl on the one hand and, on the other Kant and even Descartes, is the ‘identity’ of the pure ego that is discerned once it is finally uncovered. Epoche, or phenomenological reduction by means of the bracketing of all consciousness’ empirical contents, lands us – allegedly – in a realm of ‘absolute being’[17] or ‘pure living’[18], as it is variously described by Husserl. Now, what exactly this realm of ‘absolute being’ amounts to is nebulous in the characteristic Husserlian fashion, and often he limits himself to defining it negatively. The pure ego is not a bare ‘I think’[19], by which Husserl clearly means to attack Cartesian reductionism. It is, likewise, “no empty pole of identity”[20], by which, in turn, Husserl can certainly mean no less than a resolute disavowal of the Kantian critical conceptualization of the transcendental ‘I’ as a mere ‘set of logical conditions’, one allowing us no more than indirect appraisals. The Kantian pure unity of consciousness is precisely this for Husserl: an ‘empty pole’, that is, a preconditional ego-hypothesis constituted only by unactualized mind-forms, somewhat remote and lifeless, existing more as a speculative necessity than as a vivid reality. The Husserlian ego is, on the other hand, teaming with life. It is, much like its empirical counterpart, a ‘system of intentionalities’. Since it is treated as an ‘absolute fact’ rather than a speculative conjecture, and is deemed to be identifiable by relatively straightforward means, this transcendental reality is, predictably, seen by Husserl to be ready-at-hand, accessible, and most importantly, interconnected with the rest of us. It is made of more-or-less the same stuff as the empirical Self: intentional relations and acts. It is a ‘substrate’ of ego properties, that is, foundational in the manner of the Cartesian and Kantian cogito, and yet at the same time separated from its empirical extension no more starkly than, say, the sun’s core is from its outer atmosphere. Just as, in this latter case, there is an inarrestable, organic flux of more-or-less gaseous matter between levels of varying densities, so too in the case of the Self there is a ‘radiating-outward’ of the cognitive act that increases in kinetic energy as it approaches the outer edges, and gathers form as it acquires a positive charge from the object of intentional experience. The ‘substratum’ in question is one of multiple strata: transcendentally ‘heavier’ than its external counterparts, maybe, but essentially composed of the same ‘matter’. Husserl himself uses the metaphor of ‘radiation’, in fact[21], explicitly mentioning the ‘pure ego’ as the direct origin of each radiating intentional act. Such a directness and immediacy is inconceivable in the Kantian system, dependent as it is on a synthetic processing a priori of the object; in order for it to radiate outward in any meaningful way at all, the act here must be charged transcendentally at the outset. In Husserl’s case, there would appear to be no such incontrovertible front-loading. The gaze of the inner ‘I’ is ‘pure’ in this additional sense, that is, it operates without undue transcendental baggage; the Husserlian cognitive act gains intentionality as it is proceeds toward its object. In this sense, it may be said that Husserl’s transcendental ego is rather ‘purer’ than Kant’s, and that Kant’s ‘pure, original, unchanging consciousness’ is by necessity significantly more preconditioned than this description may suggest, and so technically not pure at all.

Objective transcendental preconditioning

It is for reasons precisely having to do with this second kind of egological ‘purity’, of course, that we call Husserl a phenomenologist and not an idealist. There would appear to be a very limited degree of internal transcendental preconditioning in the Husserlian pure ego, that is, very little preconditioning that is necessary, universal and subjective – or originating purely in the mind. And this last point is critical. For, when we say there is no Kantian front-loading in the Husserlian intentional experience, we do not mean to say that there is no transcendental preconditioning in it at all. On the contrary, the idea of a pre-predicative ego is fundamental for Husserl[22], but we see all the same that it is for him constituted in a radically different manner. Where for Kant, transcendental logic – and, at the same time, the unity of the transcendental consciousness – is explicated in terms of pure concepts, for Husserl, it refers back immediately to pregiven objects and ‘existents’:

Judgments aim to understand the existent, that which is, and the act of judgement requires something underlying about which it judges, and this existence must be pre-given, so that it can become an object of judgement. (EJ §4, p. 19)

Here we appear to see a reversal of Kant’s Copernican turn, a restoration of the ‘sun’ back to its rightful place at the centre of the planetary system. For, Husserl’s message is clear: we need look for no greater transcendental preconditioning, in order that our judgments – and also our ego – be unitary, than that provided by the world itself, which is pregiven, that is, pre-existent to our cognition, and – what’s more – ‘self-given’, or pregiven as itself[23]. This last point is, arguably, where Husserl departs most radically from Kant, for whom the world, far from self-given, is ‘noumenal’, forever trapped in its ‘in-itselfness’, and inescapably cut off from us – at least to a large degree. Husserl’s world strikes our consciousness as it is; it itself is the reason for our experience of it. Kant’s argument is precisely the contrary: the world arranges itself so that the mind might understand it; or better, the mind is so built, that the world, in passing through its transcendental structures, is irreversibly transformed as a result. If Kant’s transcendental preconditions are subjective, Husserl’s are objective; they are provided by the self-given world. Far from a Kantian ‘formless chaos’[24], the world is, it would appear, readymade for experience. The mind’s operations are, therefore, not dirempt and counter-natural, designed to confer order on an otherwise incomprehensible set of noumenal conditions; they are very much in alignment with the world in itself, having precisely so evolved as to be able to take its contents as objects of its judgement[25]. In this sense, we see a far greater enmeshment between mind and world – one that, on at least one occasion, Husserl explicitly discusses[26] – than we ever could in Kant, and even in Descartes, for whom the cogito is also more a regression into the structures of thinking than into the very realm of being. And to round off the thought, this may finally be (re)iterated: the purity of the Husserlian transcendental ego is set apart from that of the Kantian and the Cartesian in precisely this way: where for these last two the ego is pure when it is absolutely formal and conceptual, for Husserl it is pure somewhat more ‘ontologically’; it is the purity of the order of the self-given world as refracted through the universal structures of our bare consciousness.

Fluidity of consciousness

It is arguably for this reason that there appears to be such freedom of movement for Husserl, such fluidity between the transcendental and empirical realms of ‘consciousness’. There is no clear demarcation between the formal and the ‘contentful’ in Husserl such as is to be found in the philosophies of Kant and Descartes. Kant’s deduction of purity and Descartes’ reduction to purity both set the result of their findings at fundamental odds with their method for achieving it; Kant, because he (ironically) commits a transcendental paralogism, that is, he infers from a ready-at-hand inner reality – that of the unitary form of thinking – to a presupposition he can only posit as a hypothetical precondition – that of the pure, unchanging consciousness – creating an insuperable speculative chasm in the process; Descartes, because of his radical diffidence of sense perception and, more broadly, of our capacity to soundly manage our own experience unassisted, and his proffering of the Method as a dichotomous alternative. In Husserl such stark oppositions don’t exist. In his ‘systems of intentionality’, consciousness is always consciousness – not only of something – but of something pregiven and self-given. The reliance and alignment of the mind’s structures with those of the world – again, in its most basic form, a Hegelian idea – is all pervasive, even and perhaps most so in the transcendental realm, where our intentionalities are most pure, that is, most ontologically proximate to the order of the natural world, as a response to which they surged to begin with. As we proceed from the Transcendental to the Empirical, the engineering of the mind doesn’t experience any dramatic overhaul, but rather undergoes a subtle and smooth transition, in which its phenomenological configuration progressively concretises as its intentional burden becomes heavier and more urgent. There is, in other words, no transcendental impasse here to speak of, but a total ‘fluidity of consciousness’. The ego is pure, not because it is cut off from the rest of consciousness, that is, that which is in theory ‘impure’, but because it represents the most pristine embodiment of it. In this sense, it may be said that Sartre, who argues that the transcendental ego “violently separates consciousness from itself”, and is therefore the “death of consciousness”[27], may have missed this important nuance in Husserl. For Husserl, the transcendental and pure ego doesn’t slice consciousness at all (as it does for Kant and, to a degree, for Descartes); it unifies it.

The knowability of the ego

The main cognitive implication of this fluidity of consciousness, at least in egological terms, is that the ‘I’ is imminently knowable, that is, it can be cognized, tracked, monitored and understood as it is. And here we come to another great divergence from Kant, which amounts, at the same time, to a greater alliance with Descartes. Kant’s Paralogisms of Pure Reason abound with arguments for the fundamental unknowability of the soul and, even if we leave aside the more explicitly religious themes Kant tackles, we are still left with much that is applicable here. We cannot know with any certainty that the soul is a thinking substance, that it is unitary, that it persists through time, that it is a ‘personality’. All of these affirmations are transcendental paralogisms, that is, ‘sophistries of pure reason itself’[28]: mistakes the mind is compelled to make by virtue of its necessary and universal structure alone. We mistake the unity of consciousness, which grounds the categories of the understanding, as an intuition, one whose object is the ego, the unitary “I”, and misapply a category like substance to it. But since, in order to have any meaning at all, the category of substance would require an intuition, and since such an intuition is always absent in the case of the soul, the ego cannot be cognized, no certain knowledge of it can be had.[29] As we have already seen, this line of reasoning has no place at all in Husserl, for whom the pure ego is ‘no empty pole of identity’, that is, no realm of mere forms and concepts, but one of ‘pure living’ and ‘absolute being’. As we regress into the Transcendental, we retreat, not deeper into any cavern of solipsistic subjectivity, but back toward an ontologically more primitive state, to something approximating the original Lifeworld. Husserl may never explicate the ego specifically in the Kantian terms of substance and personality, but addresses these at every turn, and rather directly. The ego is the necessary centre of every intentional act, and therefore a subject-substance; it is also fixed, abiding, and the selfsame over time, and therefore a ‘personality’. And although for the most part Husserl simply lays these assertions out without any presuppositional justification, such a phenomenological basis can be found for them on his behalf within his own philosophy. As one brackets reality by means of the epoche, one finds that the transcendental ego leftover, once the reductions is carried out, is at the same time a realm of pure being, that is, consciousness so configured as to be able to openly and completely receive the pregiven world as it is; privy of any concrete experience, and yet, at the same time, pregnant with the potential for all experiences. Where for Kant the preconditions for an assertion of the unity of the Self stand, at the same time, as an insuperable barrier for the same, for Husserl there is no such paralogistic constraint. When we search for the Self, we find it in the very same structures that have given rise to its intuition. For Husserl, the enmeshment between mind and world, and the latter’s ‘pregivenness’ to the former – which he, rather vexingly, appears at times also to rescind[30] - ensures that, as we suspend the everyday contents of the empirical contents, we find, neither the impenetrable barrier of de jure speculation and hypothesizing, but a vast and expensive field of potentiality; we find an opening rather than a closure. And it is in this ‘opening’ that we understand phenomenology as it was presumably intended by Husserl, as a continuation of Hegel’s legacy and course correction of Kant’s and Descartes’. The transcendental ego exists, it is unitary, and its purity relies, not on its separation from the world, but on its alignment with it.

Key

CM:     Cartesian Meditations (Husserl)

CRP:     The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant)

EJ:        Experience and Judgment (Husserl)

ID1:      Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First

            Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (Husserl)

LI:        Logical Investigations (Husserl)

TE:       Transcendence of the Ego (Sartre)

Bibliography

Husserl, Edmund. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Volume XII of Collected Works. Ed.

by Rudolf Bernet. Trans. by Ingo Farin & James G. Hart. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2006

Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Trans. Dorion Cairns. Dordrecht, The Netherlands:

            Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999

Husserl, Edmund. Experience and Judgement. Trans. James S. Churchill and Karl Ameriks.            Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1972

Husserl, Edmund. Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. First

Book: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom.

Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014

Husserl, Edmund. Logical Investigations, Vol. II. Trans. J. N. Findlay. London and New York:          Routledge, 2001

Sartre, Jean-Paul. The Transcendence of the Ego: A sketch for a phenomenological            description. Trans. by Andrew Brown. London and New York: Routledge Classics,        2004

[1] LI, p. 91

[2] “Individual consciousness is interwoven in a dual manner with the natural world.” (ID1 §39)

[3] CM, p. 26

[4] “I must frankly confess, however, that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary centre of relations.” (LI §8, p. 92)

[5] CM, p. 1

[6] LI, p. 91

[7] ID1 §84

[8] ID1, §57

[9] CM, p. 67

[10] CPR: A348, p. 415

[11] CPR: A107

[12] TE: “We must therefore recognize that phenomenology is a de facto science, and that the problems it raises are de facto problems —and this is something that can also be seen from the way that Husserl calls it a descriptive science. The problems of the relations between the I and consciousness are thus existential problems.” (p. 2)

[13] TE: pp. 2-3

[14] CPR: “The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.” (B132)

[15] ID1 § 78

[16] CPR: B132

[17] ID1 §76, p. 136

[18] CM, p. 20

[19] LI, p. 92

[20] CM, p. 66

[21] ID1: “In every currently actual cogito, a “focus” radiating from the pure ego is directed at the “object” of the respective correlate of consciousness (at the thing, the state of affairs, and so forth), achieving the quite diverse sorts of consciousness of it.” (§84)

[22] EJ: “The theory of pre-predicative experience, of that which gives in advance the most original substrates in objective self-evidence, is the phenomenological theory of judgment…The investigation must begin with the pre-predicative consciousness.” (§6, p. 27)

[23] §4, p. 19

[24] EJ §16

[25] EJ §4, p. 19

[26] ID1 §39

[27] TE, p. 4

[28] CPR A337/B387

[29] CPR B421-2

[30] CM: “Thus the being of the pure ego and his cogitationes, as a being that is prior in itself, is antecedent to the natural being of the world...” (p. 21)