In its full concretion’ (Hua XIV...

In its full concretion’ (Hua XIV: 26), it is a self with convictions, values, an outlook, a history, a style, and so on: ‘The ego constitutes itself for itself in, so to speak, the unity of a history’ (CM IV, p. 75; Hua I: 109). It is present in all conscious experience and ‘cannot be struck out’ ( undurchsteichbar ). It is more than a formal principle of unity (in the sense of Kant’s unity of apperception), since it has a living, growing, unifying nature.

It is also grossly misunderstood if it is treated as a ‘piece of the world’; it is not a ‘thing’ or res at all, rather it both as anonymous source of all meaningfulness and as a growing, developing self, with a history and a future, in relation to other selves, possessing life in the fullest sense of the word. The transcendental ego covers ‘the universe of the possible forms of lived experience’ (CM § 36).

Husserl sees the ‘self-explication’ ( Selbstauslegung XXXIV 228) of the transcendental ego as a set of ‘great tasks’ (CM § 29), but it is beset by paradoxes such as: How can the ego be that which constitutes the world and also that which is concretised, mundanised and corporealised in the world? How can the transcendental ego, the source of all meaning and being, inquire into itself as a meaning- and being-constituting entity?

Part of the complexity stems from the very self-referentiality of the ego’s self-knowledge. How can I inquire into what founds me as a self? When I as investigator turn to examine the ego, I am in fact doubling back on myself, inquiring into what constitutes me as functioning self. This necessarily involves a ‘splitting of the ego’ ( Ichspaltung ), and is extraordinarily difficult to carry out without lapsing into various forms of transcendental illusion.

Indeed, Husserl acknowledges, even to say that I who reflects is ‘I’ involves a certain equivocation (VI 188). Yet, there is both identity and difference in this I. The reflecting ego is in a different attitude and different temporal dimension from the ego reflected on, yet there is a consciousness of the unity or ‘coincidence’ ( Deckung ) of the two.

Husserl’s transcendental idealism claims that the objectivity of the transcendent real world outside of us is an achievement of ‘transcendental intersubjectivity’. This is already articulated in his 1910/1911 lectures (e.g. Hua XIII: 184) but it is constantly reiterated in later works, e.g.