ABSTRACT
Introduction The overall framework of ideas that we examined in the last chapter is one of transcendental solipsistic idealism. It concerns, that is, the a priori conditions of the possibility of objective experience in general; and, it turns out, the conditions on which that possibility depends make no essential or ineliminable reference either to the independent existence of an extra-mental world, or to the existence of a plurality of conscious beings. ‘The existence of a world is the correlate of certain complexes of experience’ (Ideas §49/p. 150). ‘The term “object” is for us always a name for essential connections of consciousness’ (Ideas §53/p. 164). And these complexes of experience and connections of consciousness are such that they can obtain within, and determine an objective world for, an individual ego considered in isolation. In Ideas Husserl maintains that transcendental subjectivity is ‘the absolute, within which everything transcendent, and thus the entire physical and psychological world, is constituted’ (ibid.). And yet some sixteen years later, in Cartesian Meditations, he was to write: ‘The intrinsically first being, the being that precedes and bears every worldly objectivity is transcendental intersubjectivity’ (CM §64/ p. 156). The present chapter concerns the nature of this move from solipsism to intersubjectivity, from the transcendental ‘I’ to the transcendental ‘we’ (CM §49/p. 107), and in particular it concerns the consequences this shift of perspective has for Husserl’s solutions to problems concerning the nature of objectivity-to problems concerning such notions as rationality, evidence, knowledge, truth, existence, transcendence, and reality.
