The concept of transcendental ego in Ideas I and II

Bence Marosan
Budapest, HUNGARY
Introduction
“But the question I would like to raise is the following: is this psychical and psycho-
physical me not sufficient? Do we need to add to it a transcendental I, as a structure of
absolute consciousness?” – Sartre raised this question in his famous essay, The transcendence
of the ego (2004: 3). This is the basic conception of non-egological phenomenology, which
latter does not deny the very existence of ego or subject, but regards it as a constituted,
worldly being, something which is transcendent concerning the domain of consciousness. In
this lecture I would like to demonstrate the thesis, why phenomenology cannot get along
without the concept of a transcendental ego. I will have a closer look on Husserl’s notion of
“pure I” in the first and second book of Ideas (1913), and more generally on Husserl’s overall
concept of “phenomenological” or “transcendental I” that could be found in the manuscripts
of this period and little after. I will try to show that Husserl’s conception of transcendental ego
that one could find in this period could be articulated as successful or at least plausible answer
to the non-egological challenge of Husserl’s egological phenomenology.
My lecture is made up of four parts: I. The standing-point of non-egological
phenomenology and its main representatives. II. The development of Husserl’s concept of ego
till the Ideas. III. Husserl’s treatment of the ego in Ideas I and II. IV. The difficulties of non-
egological phenomenology and an attempt to render a Husserlian answer to it.
I. The standing-point of non-egological phenomenology
Perhaps the most famous and most influential articulation of non-egological
phenomenology could be found in Sartre, namely in his above-mentioned study, The
Transcendence of the Ego (1936), and in his later main work, Being and Nothingness (1943).
According to Sartre the concept of transcendental ego, on the one hand, breaks the inherent
transparency of consciousness, that is to say: the transcendental ego reifies the consciousness
and makes a “heavy” and “frozen” entity of it; and, on the other hand, as an absolute center of
phenomena, it implies necessarily solipsism, (Sartre, 2004: 4f, 28f). What does it mean in
Sartre that the transcendental ego makes the consciousness something “dull” and “heavy”? In
Sartre’s interpretation the consciousness has an essentially protean character: it could create
of itself whatever it wants. This means: the consciousness is essentially free. The ego is
something created by the consciousness, and in the very moment the consciousness has
created the ego it transcends the latter already. The consciousness is always beyond the ego.
The ego is the essence of man, and the consciousness is his or her existence. The existence in
man precedes his or her essence. The individual man has the capacity to redefine his or her
essence in every single minute.
In Sartre’s opinion if one places the ego into the absolute centre of the phenomena,
then it necessarily results in solipsism: if my ego is something preferred, any more than any
other ego, then I cannot regard the other subjects as subjects just like me. If I place my ego in
the centre then I cannot ensure this philosophical view against the danger of solipsism.
The consciousness is a completely empty, anonymously functioning power. Every
entity is transcendent in relation to the consciousness. The ego, as human person, is something
constituted, out there in the world, beside every other worldly, empirical thing. It is the basic
idea of non-egological phenomenology. This view was represented in the phenomenological
movement by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Aron Gurwitsch, Jan Patočka, partly by Jean-Luc
Marion. This conception of the ego had also some resonances in the postmodern treatment of
subject, according to which the subject is a decentred being, a web of social and cultural
relations, and there is nothing substantial in him or her; a view that one could find amongst
others in Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Lacan or Žižek.
II. The development of Husserl’s concept of ego till the Ideas
As it is well-known, Husserl treated in the first edition of Logical Investigations
(1900/1901) the ego – my ego as well as other people’s ego – as an essentially empirical,
transcendent object, out there in the world, (cf. e.g. Hua 19/1: 353f, 365). Criticizing Natorp’s
view of “metaphysical ego”, Husserl explicitly told there: “I must frankly confess, however,
that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary centre of relations”, (op. cit.
375). In a footnote to the same place in the second edition of the work Husserl expressly
refers to the later revision of his view concerning the ego: “I have since managed to find it,
i.e. have learnt not to be led astray from a pure grasp of the given, through corrupted forms of
ego-metaphysics”, (ibid.).
In the following years, after the publication of Logical Investigations, Husserl
concentrated exclusively on the structures of consciousness as such. Around 1902/03 he even
spoke of the “exclusion of the ego” (“Ausschaltung des Ich”), that is to say: of the empirical
ego, (cf. e.g. Hua Dok III/2: 124, Hua 22: 206f). Till the end of 1907 we can speak of a non-
egological period of Husserlian phenomenology.1
After the introduction of phenomenological reduction in 1906,2 in his 1907 summer
lecture, “The Idea of Phenomenology” there is still no mention of ego, (Hua 2). In 1908 a
fundamental change took place in Husserl’s thinking in this respect: in his research
manuscripts he started to speak of “absolute consciousness” which was organized, structured
and centralized by an “absolute ego”, (Hua 36: 31ff). He started to discover the
transcendental, purely phenomenological aspect of ego, and also the other way round: the
egological aspect of pure consciousness. In parallel with this egological transformation of
phenomenology Husserl also developed the monadological idea of subjectivity, (in 1908).
According to this Husserl began to call the fully concrete I or ego a “monad”, (Manuscript: B
II 2, partly: Hua 13: 5ff, Hua 42: 137ff).
The first time when Husserl presented the egological transformation of phenomenology
and also this monadological conception of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in a systematic
way for a narrower public was in his 1910/11 winter semester lecture, “The Basic Problems of
Phenomenology”, (Hua 13: 111-194). Husserl realized that the Cartesian way of phenomeno-
logical reduction narrowed the field of work of phenomenology; it narrowed the access of
phenomenology of the solipsistic sphere of the living present. That’s why he elaborated in that
lecture the methodological operation of “double reduction” (op. cit. 177ff), which opened the
so-to-say “Leibnizian way” of phenomenological reduction,3 the way to monadological
transcendental intersubjectivity. Through double reduction I am able to describe the apodictic
content of those experiences, whose transcendent correlate is doubtful, such as the correlate of
recollection and empathy. Though it is doubtful whether a particular recollection or a
particular act of empathy is correct, nevertheless the double reduction reveals it as an
absolutely necessary fact that there is past, that I am an intersubjective being after all.
In the phenomenological attitude I am proven to be a “phenomenological ego”. This
ego is not a mere pole of experiences and acts, but through empathy and recollection I gain an

1
See e.g. Shigeru Taguchi, Das Problem des Ur-Ich bei Edmund Husserl, Phae 178, 2006: 33ff, 52f. Cf. also:
Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, London & New York, Routledge, 2002: 138.
2
For the very first time Husserl presented the fully developed idea of phenomenological reduction in his 1906/07
winter semester lecture, „Introduction to Logic and Theory of Knowledge”, (Hua 24).
3
Cf. Françoise Dastur, „Réduction et intersubjectivité”, in Éliane Escoubas - Marc Richir (Hrsg.), Husserl,
Grenoble: J. Millon 1989: 43-64. See also: László Tengelyi, Der Zwitterbegriff Lebensgeschichte, München:
Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1998: 62ff.
access to my personal history and to my intersubjective, social nature. Husserl makes a
distinction between empirical and phenomenological empathy, (op. cit. 190, note). Through
phenomenological empathy I am able to attribute a phenomenological ego to other people
also. Already in 1910 the phenomenological (or pure) ego was proven to be a personal, social
and historical being.
III. Husserl’s treatment of the ego in Ideas I and II
In the first and second book of Ideas (1912) Husserl elaborated and refined further
those ideas concerning the ego he already had in 1910/11, in “The Basic Problems of Pheno-
menology”. Husserl presented the systematic methodology of phenomenological reduction for
the very first time for a wider public in the first book of Ideas. In that work he focuses on the
basic structures and elements of intentional correlation under the phenomenological reflection.
He places the problem of pure consciousness in the foreground, and treats the pure ego only
incidentally, (mostly: Hua 3/1: §§37, 57, 80). He even refers to “the question of the exclusion
of the pure ego”, (op. cit. §57).4 After all he concludes that the pure ego is a necessarily
structural moment of the entire transcendental consciousness, (op. cit. §80). In Ideas I the pure
ego appears just as an abstract, logical pole, as a completely “empty” point of relation of acts
and experiences. As Husserl told it: this ego does not have any “explicatable” content, “any
inner hidden richness”, (op. cit. 179, Hua 4: 104f). However, as we shall see, this pure, formal
ego is just an abstract moment in the fully concrete transcendental ego.
It is an influential view in Husserl-literature that the conception of transcendental
personal ego is basically a result of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology.5 However, in my
opinion, one could find the personal aspect of transcendental ego already in “The Basic
Problems of Phenomenology” and in Ideas II. Husserl treated the details of pure ego and
personhood only in the second book of Ideas. In this latter work it turns out that the
transcendental ego is not just an empty pole: it is a personal, social, historical, incarnated
being – only under the phenomenological reflection. Husserl wrote the first version of Ideas II
in 1912, just after finishing Ideas I, and the second book was undergone several revisions till
1928.6 As far as I know every essential, really fundamental remark concerning the personal,
social, embodied character of transcendental ego could be found in the first 1912 version.
“Person” mostly appears in Ideas II as a synonym for “empirical ego”, as a worldly,
transcendent result of transcendental constitution of the pure ego, (cf. e.g. Hua 4: 251).
Husserl makes a difference between two sorts of natural attitude: personalistic and naturalistic
attitude, (op. cit. §49). The personalistic attitude is more fundamental than naturalistic, which
latter is the attitude of natural sciences. The personalistic attitude is the most basic level of
natural attitude, of everyday experience, which reveals a practical, personal, cultural world
around us. It is due to the personal attitude that I and the other ego could both be manifested
as members of a universal community of people. But this concept of person still refers to the
transcendent empirical domain of the world. Already in 1912 we could find another usage of
person in Ideas II, namely: person as transcendental monadic subjectivity.
It is the transcendental reduction which reveals in the end personal and social features
in the transcendental ego. The key phenomena are again recollection and empathy which have
apodicticity of their own. The pure ego is not just an empty pole: it is also a substrate of
opinions, habitualities, decisions, evaluations, memories, etc, (op. cit. §29). The ego, as
Husserl says, “is not an empty pole, but it is the bearer of its habituality, and that implies that

4
Op. cit. 124. English [1983]: 133. „Because of the immediately essential role played by this transcendency in
the case of any cogitation, we must not undertake its exclusion; though in many investigations the questions
concerning the pure ego can remain in suspenso”.
5
See e.g. Nam-In Lee, Edmund Husserls Phänomenologie der Instinkte, Phae 128, 1993: 19f.
6
Cf. Marly Biemel, „Einleitung des Herausgebers”, in Hua 4, Biemel, „Zur Textgestaltung”, in op. cit. 397-401.
it has its individual history”, (op. cit. 300). Recollection reveals my personal history. Through
empathy I am able to apperceive other people as concrete, personal, transcendental subjects in
the phenomenological attitude. Empathy reveals both me and the other as being parts of
transcendental monadic intersubjectivity. Husserl even spoke the socially situated
independency and dependency, authenticity and inauthenticity of this personal ego; referring
with the term “one” (“man”) to the socially dependent and passive forms of personal life, in
an entirely Heideggerian manner, (op. cit. 268ff).7
IV. A Husserlian answer to non-egological phenomenology
Recollection discloses my personal history, it reveals me as a person; empathy, on the
other hand, discloses me as a social ego, as a member of a community, that has its history of
its own. Why I think that the scope of non-egological phenomenology is very limited and one-
sided? According to non-egological phenomenology there is the clear, empty stage of
consciousness, where everything appears. In the view of classical authors of non-egological
phenomenology this interpretations makes possible in real a non-subjective, purely object-
oriented description. In my opinion the result in the end is just the opposite: if I cannot treat
myself as a transcendental ego in the phenomenological attitude, as a centre of experiences
and acts, then I cannot regard anybody else in this way either; then I cannot consider other
people as centers of their own experiences and acts. In brief: the purely non-egological
consideration of appearances leads to solipsism, at least in my interpretation. Intersubjectivity
refers to a plurality of subjects. But first I must consider myself as a subject, before I would
be able to apperceive the others as subjects like me. If I am not able to regard myself as a
centre of my own acts and experiences, then I am not able to conceive experiences as
appearances of other subjects; then there are only mere appearances and nothing more.
In Ideas I Husserl mainly focuses on the structures of pure consciousness. But
consciousness for him is a relationship. Relationship is only possible between two things.
Consciousness is a relationship between the ego and the objects in general. Speaking of
consciousness without an ego is just like speaking of experiences which do not belong to
anybody. Speaking of fear which is not somebody’s fear, hope which is not somebody’s hope,
seeing which is not somebody’s visual experience, etc. is something completely nonsensical
for Husserl. Non-egological phenomenology is one-sided, at least from a Husserlian point of
view, because it abstracts from the subjective, I-related side of experience. But if we leave
aside this subjective, egological aspect of intentional correlation then we never arrive to a
properly intersubjective account of experience, to a plurality of egos. The real stake of
egological phenomenology is an adequate description of personal and social (id est:
intersubjective) character of experience.

7
Many years before the publishing of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In Husserl’s Ideas II: „Besides the
tendencies which proceed from other individual persons, there are demands which arise in the intentional form of
indeterminate generality, the demands of morality, of custom, of tradition, of the spiritual milieu: ’one’ judges in
this way, ’one’ has to hold his fork like this, and so on”, Hua 4: 269.