The potential plurality of the transcendental ego of Husserl and its relevance to the theory of space

Hiroshi Kojima

pp. 55-61

in: Yoshihiro Nitta, Hirotaka Tatematsu (eds), Japanese phenomenology, Berlin, Springer, 1979

Abstract

So far as we know from the text of Husserl’s Cartesianische Meditationen, the motive for the construction of the theory of “Others” was mainly to repudiate the charge of “solipsism” against him1 He calls this criticism “as it might seem, a very important objection.”2 Indeed, one might think that here lies one of the Achille’s tendons of Husserl’s phenomenology. According to his theory, the world and the nature are as a whole constituted as the noematic meaning by the intentional act (noesis) of the transcendental consciousness. They are the immanent transcendence of the transcendental consciousness of ego. Since this transcendental ego is taken for my ego, we might say, the whole world is here nothing but my world. That is to say, the whole world is only given as a perspective view to me. The wholeness of the world remains only as the unlimited horizontalness of the view, which develops panoramically before my ego.

Cited authors

Husserl Edmund