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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Immanence, Self-experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers Immanence and Transcendence in Husserl’s Phenomenology There are a number of concepts of transcendence at play in Husserl’s thought and it is not clear that these different senses of transcendence ever get fully resolved in his writing. The term ‘transcendence’ does not occur in the First Edition of the Logical Investigations (1900-01).

It appears in his writing more or less simultaneously with his discovery of the reduction (c. 1905) and is prominent in The Idea of Phenomenology lectures of 1907.[^15] As Stein puts it, Husserl’s ‘absolute starting point’ for phenomenology is the immanence of consciousness to which is contrasted the transcendence of the world.[^16] But in fact this only a first sense of transcendence.

In his mature publications beginning with Ideas I, Husserl explores a deeper sense of transcendence, as we shall see, whereby corporeal things are transcendent because their essence contains a kind of infinity that is never intuitable in a completely adequate and fulfilled way. Every thing is graspable only through a manifold of ‘adumbrations’ ( Abschattungen ) and ‘aspects’ ( Aspekte ), which can never be fully actualised by a finite cognising mind.

Even the corporeal thing, then, is in essence what Husserl calls a ‘Kantian idea’, a manifold of infinite perspectives. As the French phenomenologist Michel Henry has recognised, one of the first places where Husserl tackles the issue of transcendence and immanence is in his 1907 Idea of Phenomenology lectures.[^17] Husserl begins with the classic epistemological problem – how do I know that I know? How do I know that my knowledge is secure?

Husserl characterises this classic epistemological problem as the problem of transcendence (IP, p. 28; Hua II: 36). The ‘riddle’ of knowledge is put in Kantian terms as the possibility of its contact with the transcendent (IP, p. 33; Hua II: 43). Nothing transcendent can be taken as pre-given; as Husserl writes: ‘The transcendence of the thing requires that we put the thing in question’ (IP, p.

38; Hua II: 49) According to Husserl, the very nature of the contact ( Triftigkeit - a phrase inherited from Kant) with the transcendent is precisely what the traditional epistemologist cannot master.