Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity

Extract

Husser believed that Kant's great attempt to achieve and to understand the viewpoint of transcendental subjectivity failed. For “Kant, … so many presuppositions are ‘obviously’ valid, presuppositions which in the Humean sense are included in the world enigma (of how objectivity based on subjectivity is possible), (that he) never penetrated to the enigma itself.” The attempt failed in its origins, because Kant did not fully appreciate the character and extent of Hume's problem of the nature of the self and the possible extent of knowledge. Kant's attempt failed also in its results because Kant created mythical constructions; the noumenal object ‘behind’ sensible appearances, and the noumenal self ‘behind’ conscious describable acts and experiences. “Because he understands inner perception in this empiricist, psychological sense and because, warned by Hume's scepticism, he fears every recourse to the psychological as an absurd perversion of the genuine problem of the understanding, Kant gets involved in his mythical concept formation.”