Interrogating Kant and Husserl on the Ethico-Political Implications of Transcendental Philosophy

Abstract

Transcendental philosophy is characterized by the attempt to understand the
fundamental structures of our ordinary experience- it is in a sense ‘metaphysics
of experience’. In the history of western philosophy we find various conceptions
of the transcendental. Of these varieties three traditions stand out: The Greek, the
Kantian and the Phenomenological traditions. These traditions differ
considerably; yet they all contend that philosophy is ‘a search for the radical and
foundational structures of experience and reality’. This paper focuses on the
second and third traditions. Within the Kantian tradition, the transcendental is
understood as the objective condition of knowledge and experience. Unlike the
Greek tradition, Kant does not take the transcendental to be the object of
knowledge rather as ‘the immanent structure of knowledge’. Phenomenological
transcendentalism discloses a conception of the transcendental which is radically
different from the objectivistic approach of the Greeks as well as from the
Kantian conception. While the latter takes the transcendental to be immanent to
the subject, phenomenology takes it to be both transcendent and immanent. This
article examines the two latter traditions to analyze the ethico-political
implications of transcendental philosophy. The essentially ‘dichotomizing
structure’ of transcendental philosophy gives rise to a problematic of
inter-subjectivity. I shall discuss the problem of intersubjectivity in light of the
three ethico-political implications of transcendental philosophy viz.
epistemological determinacy, the elimination of the body and the primacy of the
theoretical. The analysis hopes to show the essential relation between
transcendental philosophy and structures of domination and oppression.