Interrogating Kant and Husserl on the Ethico-Political Implications of Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract

Transcendental philosophy is characterized by the attempt to understand the fundamental structures of our ordinary experience- it is in a sense ‘metaphysics of experience’. In the history of western philosophy we find various conceptions of the transcendental. Of these varieties three traditions stand out: The Greek, the Kantian and the Phenomenological traditions. These traditions differ considerably; yet they all contend that philosophy is ‘a search for the radical and foundational structures of experience and reality’. This paper focuses on the second and third traditions. Within the Kantian tradition, the transcendental is understood as the objective condition of knowledge and experience. Unlike the Greek tradition, Kant does not take the transcendental to be the object of knowledge rather as ‘the immanent structure of knowledge’. Phenomenological transcendentalism discloses a conception of the transcendental which is radically different from the objectivistic approach of the Greeks as well as from the Kantian conception. While the latter takes the transcendental to be immanent to the subject, phenomenology takes it to be both transcendent and immanent. This article examines the two latter traditions to analyze the ethico-political implications of transcendental philosophy. The essentially ‘dichotomizing structure’ of transcendental philosophy gives rise to a problematic of inter-subjectivity. I shall discuss the problem of intersubjectivity in light of the three ethico-political implications of transcendental philosophy viz. epistemological determinacy, the elimination of the body and the primacy of the theoretical. The analysis hopes to show the essential relation between transcendental philosophy and structures of domination and oppression.