197, III/1: 166), to the world as such (Hua VII: 276; CM I:...

197, III/1: 166), to the world as such (Hua VII: 276; CM I: 98), to essences of exact types (Hua III/1: 6; also § 74, p. 166; Hua III/1: 138), and, finally, in a certain sense, to his own philosophy and the infinity of the phenomenological task. There are therefore many transcendencies in Husserl but a central intuition is that the experience of time is intimately wrapped up with the experience of the transcendent ( Ideas I § 149).

Essentially correlated with the notion of givenness is the notion of a possible consciousness perceiving it ( Ideas I § 142). Husserl more and more wants to examine the nature of the transcendental ego as that which is there to apprehend the givenness of thr world. The primary infinity, for the mature Husserl, is the transcendental ego itself, which he calls the most basic or ‘original concept’ ( Urbegriff, Hua XXXV: 261) of phenomenology.

Moreover, as he will put it in the Cartesian Meditations , the science of transcendental subjectivity is the sphere of ‘absolute phenomenology’ (CM § 35), the ultimate science (FTL § 103). Thus, in 1927, Husserl could write: The clarification of the idea of my pure ego and my pure life - of my psyche in its pure specific essentiality and individual uniqueness is the basis ( das Fundament ) for the clarification of all psychological and phenomenological ideas.

(Hua XIV: 438, my translation) Husserl’s analysis of the ego widened to include a range of related issues: the unity of consciousness, the nature of self, subjectivity, and personhood, the ‘communalisation’ of the self ( Vergemeinschaftung , Hua I: 149) with the ‘open plurality of other egos’ (FTL§ 104), amounting to the whole ‘intersubjective cognitive community’ (FTL § 96), or what Husserl in his ‘reconstruction’(Hua XV: 609) of Leibniz, calls monadology (see CM § 55).

From Ideas I onwards, Husserl characterises the ego as an ‘I-pole’ ( Ichpol ) or ‘I-centre’ ( Ich-Zentrum ), ‘the centre of all affections and actions’ (IV 105). It is a ‘centre’ from which ‘radiations’ ( Ausstrahlungen ) or ‘rays of regard’ stream out or towards which rays of attention are directed.

It is the centre of a ‘field of interests’ ( Interessenfeld ), the ‘substrate of habitualities’ (CM Hua I: 103), ‘the substrate of the totality of capacities’ ( Substrat der Allheit der Vermögen , Hua XXXIV: 200). This I ‘governs’, it is an ‘I holding sway’ ( das waltende Ich , Hua XIV: 457) in conscious life (IV 108), yet it is also ‘passively affected’.