ভূমিকা

Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Immanence, Self-experience, and Transcendence in Edmund Husserl, Edith Stein and Karl Jaspers Transcendence in Husserl’s Ideas I (1913) In Ideas I (1913), transcendence is again discussed in a number of places from different points of view. As in The Idea of Phenomenology lectures, the transcendence of the physical thing is contrasted with the ‘immanence’ of the conscious experience apprehending it ( Ideas I § 42, p. 89; Hua III/1: 76).

This transcendence is not merely the fact that the thing is not ‘inside’ the conscious experience. There is also the eidetic insight that a physical thing can never be captured by any Erlebnis and this distinguishes it essentially from any episode of consciousness. This is not the same as the transcendence in which another person’s conscious experiences are recognised in empathy, Husserl says. The physical thing is said to be, in itself, unqualifiedly transcendent. ( Ideas I § 42, p.

90; Hua III/1: 77) There is an essential contrast between the ‘mode of givenness’ ( Gegebenheitsart ) of something immanent and that of something transcendent. A physical thing is adumbrated while a mental process is not. For Husserl, is almost an article of faith that what is absolutely given in immanent consciousness cannot in principle be given in profiles or adumbrations.

However, it is at this point that Husserl’s idealist commitments enter the picture because he goes on to talk about the merely ‘phenomenal being’ of the transcendent as opposed to the absolute being of the immanent (( Ideas I § 44). A physical thing is ‘undetermined’ ( unbestimmt ) as to its hidden sides, but it remains infinitely ‘determinable’ ( bestimmbar ).

The thing is graspable in a highly regulated series of possible perceptions but there always remains a ‘horizon of determinable indeterminateness’ ( ein Horizont bestimmbarer Unbestimmtheit , Ideas I § 44, p. 95; III/1 81). No God can alter that, Husserl remarks. In this sense, the physical thing is really an ‘Idea in the Kantian sense’ ( Ideas I § 143, p. 342; III/1 297-8). The idea of a physical thing has ‘dimensions of infinity’ included in it (III/1 § 143, p. 360; 313).

As Christian Lotz has shown[^18] , Husserl applies the language of regulative ideas in a rather loose manner, namely, to the constitution of perceptual objects , to the unity of the Erlebnisstrom ( Ideas I § 83, p.