Husserl Stud (2007) 23:247–260

DOI 10.1007/s10743-007-9021-3

REVIEW ESSAY

Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism

Husserl, Edmund. Transzendentaler Idealismus: Texte aus dem
Nachlass (1908–1921) Edited by Robin D. Rollinger and
Rochus Sowa. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2004
(Husserliana, vol. 36.), ISBN 1-4020-1816-9. e115.00, $127.00 US
(hardcover)

Thane M. Naberhaus

Received: 1 August 2006 / Accepted: 3 August 2006 / Published online: 28 March 2007

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

... he who demands a knowledge which should be more than a perfectly

connected and consistent system of ideas about the thing, a knowledge
which should actually exhaust the thing itself, is no longer asking for
knowledge at all, but for something entirely unintelligible.
—Rudolf Hermann Lotze, Logic
Also im Denken selbst muss sich alles ausweisen (wie doch schon Lotze
bemerkt, ohne den rechten Gebrauch davon zu machen).
—Husserl, manuscript from 1908 or 1909
It has long served the interests of certain partisans to paint Husserl as a
Cartesian philosopher of consciousness, as a man who, like his early modern
predecessor, was obsessed with demonstrating that the ‘‘data’’ of conscious
experience constitute an epistemological fundamentum inconcussum. Husserl
thus becomes a stock character in those narratives of modern philosophy which
see it as having been dominated by a poisonous Cartesian subjectivism prior to
the arrival of one or another of philosophy’s great twentieth-century saviors
(typically one chooses either Heidegger or Wittgenstein here). On the other
side, it has long been common for Husserlians to brush aside this character-
ization of Husserl as a gross oversimplification and indeed fundamental mis-
understanding of his thought, one resting on a lack of any real familiarity with
his writings and ideas. We are thus presented with the paradox that while many
of the most conscientious of Husserl’s expositors could read him as an anti-
Cartesian philosopher, other, generally less sympathetic but often not less
intelligent readers could come to the exact opposite conclusion, taking his
expressions of kinship with the ‘‘father of Modern philosophy’’ as evidence of a
hopelessly outdated Cartesianism pervading his entire thought and corpus.

T. M. Naberhaus (&)
Department of Philosophy, Mount St. Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, MD 21727, USA
e-mail: naberhaus@msmary.edu

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In retrospect the fact that such an interpretive gulf should have emerged is
all too understandable, for the widespread hostility toward all things Cartesian
that has characterized philosophy for going on a century now is shared by both
parties in the dispute. Still, the uncertainty over the degree and nature of
Husserl’s Cartesianism has made it difficult to achieve consensus about many
of the most basic questions of interpretation, a circumstance which has not
only served to hamstring Husserl scholarship to some extent but which has
also helped limit his appeal in the broader philosophical world. It has been
difficult, for example, for both scholars and beginning readers of Husserl alike
to know exactly how to explain his stand on that most basic of epistemological
and metaphysical issues, the realism–idealism question. Similarly, the well-
known debates about the proper understanding of the Husserlian concepts of
constitution and the noema are plainly bound up with the question of Hus-
serl’s Cartesianism.
The publication of Transzendentaler Idealismus: Texte aus dem Nachlass
affords us a unique opportunity to revisit these fundamental questions and
furnishes us with fresh material that can contribute to answering them.1 As the
texts in this volume show, the truth about Husserl’s view lies somewhere
between the interpretive extremes sketched above. Or at least that is what I
will try to suggest in what follows.

***
Husserl begins the first text of this volume with what on first glance
appears to be an unequivocal rejection of the entire Cartesian approach to
knowledge:
I cannot say: ‘‘Only phenomena are given to me; the things themselves
are not. I do not know anything more than that there are phenomena,
that I have such and such appearances. I can only reach the things
themselves by beginning with these phenomena; I must, that is to say,
infer [the existence of] the things, which are not given, on the basis of the
phenomena, which alone are directly given.’’ (4)2
This remark is followed by a brusque dismissal of the view articulated in the
sentences enclosed in quotation marks: ‘‘The things are not given? I do not
perceive them? They stand there before my eyes. I see them and grasp them’’
(5). Here we have a clear expression of that widely acknowledged realist or

1
As the editors explain in their introduction, the texts in this volume are all devoted to clarifi-
cation and demonstration of a single thesis: ‘‘that the existence of real objects, and therewith the
existence of the real world, is inconceivable without relation to an actually (aktuell) experiencing
consciousness’’ (IX). It is worth noting that the selection of texts that make up this volume was
largely determined by Husserl himself, many of the manuscripts having been collected together by
him from diverse sources und bound together in the convolute B IV 6, which he furnished with the
label ‘‘Zur Lehre vom transzendentalen Idealismus, aber auch Blätter über den Widersinn des
transzendentalen Realismus’’ (cf. X n).
2
All translations from Hua XXXVI are my own.

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indeed even ‘‘commonsensical’’ strain of Husserl’s philosophy which distin-

guishes it from classical empiricism, with its focus on sensory data and its
belief in the mediated character of empirical knowledge.
But Husserl complicates the issue considerably by going on, immediately
after this apparent dismissal, to ask what is ‘‘true’’ about the approach he is
criticizing and then presenting a formulation of the problem of knowledge in
terms that seem classically Cartesian. The motivation for the rejected view, he
explains, lies in the thought that however certainly a thing may be given,
however unambiguously it may stand there before us, it is not ‘‘really given’’
since it is possible that it does not really exist as perceived; the positing of the
existence of a perceptual object ‘‘lacks that ‘certainty’ that ‘excludes every
doubt.’’’ Or, to use another formulation—one that contains the germ of the
theory to be developed in detail later in this volume—the existential positing
of the perceptual object lacks ‘‘a complete and final legal title [Rechtsgrun-
des].’’ The situation is different, Husserl tells us, with regard to the perceptual
experiences themselves, the cogitationes. If something appears to me, then I
have an ‘‘adequate perception’’ of this appearing itself: I do not merely posit
what I perceive but really grasp it in the strictest sense. ‘‘The perception does
not merely represent itself as present,’’ he writes. ‘‘It is there; it exists. To
doubt this would be absurd [widersinnig]’’ (5–6).
This discussion is typical of many in this volume, where Husserl seems at
times almost to vacillate between a Cartesian approach to knowledge and an
outright rejection of such an approach. To cite another instance: while the
passage last quoted stresses the indubitability of our conscious experiences in
contrast to the doubtfulness of the objects of those experiences, a little later in
the same text Husserl writes, in a way that suggests the complexity of the view
he is struggling to articulate, ‘‘We do not doubt the existence of the things. But
we also do not and cannot presuppose their existence. ... We are not skeptics,
but we put the positing of [the existence of] things in question’’ (8). Or again,
in these texts Husserl repeatedly poses the question, ‘‘How can I go beyond
[komme ich über ... hinaus] my own lived experiences?’’ (23) and refers to
cognition or knowledge (Erkenntnis) as an ‘‘enigma’’ (Rätsel) because of its
apparent ability to take us beyond the sphere of our own experiences to
transcendent things (language that recalls the very Cartesian-inflected Idea of
Phenomenology lectures from 1907).3 And yet in a text from 1908 we also find
him claiming that to say that we want to understand how it is that we are led to
posit the existence of a spatio-temporal world of things and people ‘‘does not
mean’’ that we are trying to understand ‘‘how I can come out of myself, how I
can get beyond solipsism’’ (14).

3
This and similar passages (e.g. on pp. 24, 25, 42, 43, 48) render problematic the editors’ sug-
gestion that Husserl simply rejects the Cartesian question of ‘‘how in cognition I can go beyond
the immanent sphere of what is immediately in my consciousness to a transcendent reality existing
‘in itself’’’ as ‘‘falsely posed’’ and ‘‘burdened with false presuppositions’’ (XIV). What Husserl
does clearly reject, as I discuss below, is the theory that we infer the existence of external things on
the basis of our immanent perceptions.

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There is, then, a tension in these texts between some quite Cartesian for-
mulations of the basic problem of knowledge and a seeming desire to move
beyond the entire Cartesian problematic.4 Part of the difficulty here lies in the
fact that we are dealing with lecture notes and research manuscripts, in which
Husserl’s trademark dialectical method (‘‘thinking on paper’’) is very much in
evidence, with the result that it is hard at times to determine when he is and
when he is not speaking in propria persona. The groping nature of these texts
cannot, however, be attributed solely to their unfinished character, for similar
problems of interpretation attend Husserl’s published works. Indeed, perhaps
the greatest value of the present volume is that topics which are treated
cryptically in the Ideas and other, better-known texts are developed here in
greater detail and with considerable argumentative amplification. Rather than
giving us a definitive statement of Husserl’s position, however, what these
texts show us is a Husserl who is working his way toward a position, struggling
among other things to articulate the epistemological problem as he under-
stands it and to explain how his understanding of the theory of knowledge is
both similar to and different from Descartes’s. Our task as interpreters is to
try to reconstruct his itinerary.

***
One key for understanding the difference between the Husserlian and the
Cartesian approaches to knowledge is a certain displacement of the central
question to be answered. Like Descartes, Husserl distinguishes between
transcendent things and the mental experiences or cogitationes in which such
things appear to us. But whereas for Descartes the crucial task is to explain
how the cogitationes can faithfully represent the transcendent things, and
hence to explain the relation between the former and the latter, Husserl trains
his focus on the cogitationes themselves, noting that it is in them alone ‘‘that
the positing [Setzung] of the world, of other people, etc. is carried out’’ (7).
Thus the question for him is not whether my mental experiences are adequate
representations of the transcendent and experientially inaccessible things, but
whether the positing of those things in consciousness is carried out legiti-
mately or justifiably:
Thus I do not ask how consciousness can go beyond itself but rather how
it can be sure about the legitimacy [Rechtmäßigkeit] of its judgment.
How does the ‘‘real world,’’ which is not a cogitatio in consciousness,
authenticate its being in the cogitationes—i.e., before that tribunal before
which it must authenticate itself, if it is justifiably [rechtmäßig] to count
for this consciousness as the real world? (7–8)

4
After a discussion (from 1915) of the fundamental problem of knowledge with particularly
strong Cartesian overtones, Husserl says that he wants to ‘‘take what has just been elaborated as a
mere prelude,’’ going on to say, ‘‘[w]e do not here set for ourselves the task of constructing a
theory of knowledge,’’ but adding that his discussions ‘‘perhaps can also contribute something
relevant toward the solution of epistemological questions’’ (83–84; see also 108–112).

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What we have here might be thought of as a shifting of the question of

knowledge from one of the possibility of a correspondence between our
thought and transcendent things to one of the legitimacy of our talk about
those things. Over and over in these texts the point is made in different ways
that any attempt to judge, to make an assertion, about the existence of any-
thing, is an activity that necessarily takes place in consciousness.5 The question
of whether and how we can have knowledge about things lying beyond con-
sciousness is thereby transformed into the question: With what right do we
make pronouncements about being in itself? In other words, it becomes a
question of how we are to justify (rechtfertigen) or ground (begründen) our
claims about such things and their putative existence, about what makes those
claims legitimate (rechtmäßig).
The terms begründen, rechtfertigen and rechtmäßig appear repeatedly in the
present volume, and when used in this context they are essentially synony-
mous with another key and frequently employed term, ausweisen, which I
have translated as ‘‘authenticate’’ in the preceding passage. The basic thesis in
that passage might therefore be formulated thusly: the question of our
knowledge of transcendent things is equivalent to the question of whether our
claims about those things can be justified or authenticated. The point is well
expressed in a passage that begins a text from 1913:
The statement ‘‘A exists’’ and the statement ‘‘There is a way to construct
a path to a possible authentication of the existence of A,’’ ‘‘There is an
ideal possibility of such an authentication, one that can be seen with
insight’’ are equivalences. Likewise in general the ideas ‘‘truth’’ and
‘‘ideal possibility of authentication with insight’’ are equivalent ideas.
(73; cf. 15, 41, 59, 65, 117, 146)
As the editors rightly point out in their introduction (XV), this ‘‘principle of
authentication’’ forms the basis of the transcendental idealistic position that
Husserl argues for in these texts. How this principle is related to transcendental
idealism is not hard to see, for since authentication can only occur in con-
sciousness, the principle of authentication implies that any attempt to talk about
the existence of things outside consciousness leads us back to consciousness.
In a moment I will examine more closely what authentication involves, but
whatever it is, it is crucial for Husserl, as the passage quoted above indicates,
that it be carried out ‘‘with insight’’ (einsichtig) or—to use an equivalent
term—with self-evidence (Evidenz), without which we have no way of mea-
suring the legitimacy of any existence claim. The justification of any such
claim, in other words, must ultimately rest on the conscious experience of
seeing that the claim holds; Evidenz is, Husserl says, the ‘‘final measure of all
surety (the unit of measure)’’ (10).
***

5
It is perhaps worth noting that Husserl is influenced here by his mentor Brentano’s theory of
judgment, according to which the basic feature of every judgment is a positing of existence
(Seinssetzung).

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Closely connected to the displacement of the epistemological question I

have been describing is Husserl’s argument, developed in several texts in this
volume, for the quite un-Cartesian conclusion that the very notion of a reality
existing ‘‘in itself’’ (an An-sich) that is incapable in principle of being expe-
rienced is a ‘‘fundamental error’’ (21). The underlying problem is set out
clearly in a text from 1908. The natural, naı̈ve view takes the reality it expe-
riences to be the reality, but reflection puts this assumption in doubt. If a thing
is really ‘‘in itself,’’ how can we grasp it? For it would seem to be part of the
very sense of something being a thing in itself that it be separated from
thought. And if by grasping it in thought the thing is to become something
‘‘for me’’ instead of being solely ‘‘for itself,’’ does that not imply that it must in
some way ‘‘enter into consciousness’’? But once it does so, then—so it would
seem—it has become something mentally immanent and is no longer an in-
itself (22–24). As soon as we attribute the being in-itself of an object in any
way to consciousness, it seems to lose the very character of transcendence that
made it to be an sich (26).
One prominent approach in the history of philosophy to explaining the
relation between the mind and nonmental reality is the so-called inferential
theory or Schlusstheorie of cognition. This theory, which Husserl associates
with his teachers Brentano and Stumpf, and which would today be recognized
as a species of indirect realism, comes in for strong criticism in several of the
texts in the present volume.6 The motivation for the theory, Husserl tells us, is
quite understandable. It can seem, indeed, that the only intelligible way to
resolve the enigma of cognition is to say that we must infer, on the basis of
immediately given immanent perceptions, the existence of something that is
not and cannot be given and which stands to those perceptions ‘‘in a causal
relation’’ (39). Is not the ‘‘scientific supposition’’ of the existence of a mind-
independent world justified, he asks, and is there indeed any way to proceed
other than by inferring ‘‘from that which is certain to that which is not’’ (25)?
Yet the problem with this approach is that it leaves completely unexplained
how we should be able to move from an absolutely given conscious content
‘‘to something that is no content’’ (40). Otherwise put: ‘‘From the fact that I
have certain experiences, I can infer that I will have other experiences .... But
that an object will or does exist ‘outside of me’—that I cannot infer’’ (178).
And yet we believe that we can and regularly do see mind-independent things,
things which no one takes to be contents of consciousness. This ‘‘miracle of
seeing’’ must somehow be accounted for; the ‘‘right of perception’’ must be
respected (40). The inferential theory, Husserl believes, offers no help in this
regard.
Husserl, then, faults the Schlusstheorie not for being overly concerned with
gaining secure knowledge, but for failing to be epistemologically radical
enough. In presupposing the possibility that inferences can be made to things
6
Versions of the theory had been criticized as early as the Logical Investigations (cf. Hua XIX/1,
436ff.), but as late as 1921 we see Husserl still arguing against it (cf. 174–182). Unlike in the earlier
arguments, however, he is now able to avail himself of the thesis of transcendental idealism. See
next note.

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which lie beyond possible experience, he is arguing, the theory in effect begs
the central question at issue. Now, taken by itself this criticism seems unfair,
since the existence of the external world is a hypothesis of the inferential
theory, not an ungrounded presupposition. On the other hand, it also seems
clear that since causal inferences can never be more than probable, the
inferential theory could never deliver to us anything even approaching
absolutely justified knowledge of the external world; the skeptic ‘‘could always
find it questionable whether such a world ... exists at all’’ (82).7
Husserl’s own strategy for resolving the problem of the An-sich is to try to
show that all transcendent being presupposes the absolute being of con-
sciousness—that ‘‘the ‘world’ constitutes itself in consciousness,’’ that it is
what it is ‘‘only in relation to consciousness’’ (29). But he sees and faces up to
the central difficulty, viz., that while nothing subjective belongs to the essence
of an empirically real thing, at the same time ‘‘a relation to subjectivity’’ does
also somehow belong to its essence insofar as it is thought to be cognizable
(34). ‘‘How does consciousness come ... to the thing itself, which is supposed to
be in itself, which is supposed to be and always remain transcendent to con-
sciousness?’’ (57), Husserl asks. The very idea of the in itself, he declares, is an
‘‘enigma’’ (46).
In attempting to get around this difficulty, Husserl draws a crucial dis-
tinction between the worldly thing and its being—or, more accurately, the
sense (Sinn) of its being:
being in the sense of the objective sciences is not an ‘‘ultimate being’’ but
rather resolves itself in ‘‘consciousness.’’ The thing itself does not resolve
itself in consciousness. It resolves itself into atoms and molecules. But ‘‘A
thing exists in reality’’ and ‘‘There is a reality’’ and similar cognitions
point back to cognitive connections, to connections of consciousness, and
in these connections the being of the thing and the being of all thing-like
states-of-affairs obtain their sense. (28)
Natural science tells us what a particular object is, in accordance with the kind
of thing it is, etc. But the sense of objectivity, Husserl says, ‘‘lies in another
direction’’ (26). By the sense of a thing he does not mean its essence or kind,
but rather the sense of objective being in general ‘‘in relation to ‘cognition’’’
(26). The sense of the being of an object, in other words, is that in virtue of
which we can experience it as object. And this sense is inextricably tied to
consciousness.
7
The petitio is perhaps more easily seen when we consider the fact that the inference at the heart
of the inferential theory is a causal inference. For, Husserl argues, since causality is a category that
applies only to things in the real, mind-independent world, the existence of which is precisely what
is in question, a causal inference cannot be used as the basis for a claim about the existence of an
external world (40, 176). (In one place Husserl suggests that Brentano and Stumpf ‘‘confuse the
natural-scientific process, which proceeds from perception to perception, with a justification of the
transcendent being by means of inferences on the basis of connections resident in immanent
being’’ (46).) It’s worth pointing out that this version of the argument is entirely dependent on the
transcendental-idealist assumption that, as Husserl puts it in the Ideas, the concept of causality
‘‘only has a sense in the context of the constituted intentional world’’ (Hua III/1, 114).

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The distinction between transcendent, worldly things and their being or

sense allows Husserl to argue that although a worldly thing (indeed precisely
in accordance with its sense) is not itself part of consciousness, it only obtains
its sense in and through consciousness. For every sense, Husserl points out,
presupposes the activities of sense-giving and sense-authentication, and these
activities in turn rest on certain ‘‘connections’’ in consciousness ‘‘in which the
object ‘stands there,’ determines itself, authenticates itself as true being, etc.’’
In this sense, then, all being is ‘‘contained’’ [mitbeschlossen] in conscious-
ness—not as a genuine part, but rather as a ‘‘unity of validity.’’ And a unity of
validity, Husserl argues, ‘‘is what it is only in relation to the connection in
which the validity ‘asserts its claim’ [sich das Gelten ‘macht’]’’ (28), i.e., in
relation to certain definite connections of consciousness.
Husserl offers the following example to illustrate his point. To be able to
say that there is a house here, with these and those features, we don’t need to
investigate consciousness. But as soon as we examine the way in which the
house is given,8 with all of the conscious perceptions and judgments and
possible future perceptions and judgments that belong to its givenness, we
realize that the house is not something that simply exists alongside of and
without intrinsic connection to consciousness, but that instead the being of the
house ‘‘is so to speak nothing other than another ‘expression’ for consciousness
and certain actually elapsing and possible conscious connections.’’ In this
sense, the house just is a conscious unity, a unity of thought, ‘‘not a second
thing alongside’’ this unity, as if this unity could exist while the thing did not,
or vice versa. Rather, the thing is that unitary pole which is the focus of a
manifold of conscious experiences, ‘‘and unity is inconceivable without a
consciousness to which it is and can be given as a unity’’ (29–30).
The distinction between a thing and its sense in turn makes room for a
resolution of the enigma of the An-sich, of how there can be something which
both is and is not dependent on consciousness. On the one hand, conscious-
ness is ‘‘being in the first and primordial sense’’ (31), and that means that any
putatively existing extraconscious being is dependent on it:
There is only one being in itself outside the absolute being and it is that
which comes to givenness through actual and possible consciousness of
being in itself (of things, of nature, etc.), and moreover in the manner of
that which is valid and legitimately grounded [rechtmäßig begründeten]
in consciousness.... Intentional being is being only in relation to absolute
consciousness. It is only apparently absolute being. (32; cf. 70–71, 110,
124–129)
At the same time, in reflection we also come to understand the meaning of
notions like the ‘‘being-in-itself’’ of the transcendent thing and its concomitant
independence from consciousness (31). We recognize that to say that an ob-
ject is ‘‘outside’’ and ‘‘has nothing to do with’’ consciousness is to say that it is

8
Husserl stresses that it is reflection which reveals to us that intentional being is nothing more
than ‘‘certain actual and possible conscious connections, coordinated with one another’’ (32).

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not genuinely (reell) contained in any conscious act in the manner of an

immanent content (36, 92, 100–105). This is equivalent to saying that the
transcendent thing is not capable of being given with complete adequacy, for
adequate perception of something is possible just in case it is a genuine part of
consciousness, as mentally immanent contents such as sensations are (36).
Paradoxically, then, the transcendence of the thing, its independence from
consciousness, in the end rests on its necessary manner of givenness to con-
sciousness, i.e., on its dependence on consciousness. For it belongs to the
essence of transcendent things that they appear, that they ‘‘are only and can
only be given in appearances’’ (33). In short, ‘‘the being of the thing is not an
act and is not a piece of consciousness, and yet it is only something that is
given and logically justified (logisch zu Begründendes) through perception and
experience’’ (37). Expressed in Kantian terms: the transcendent, worldly thing
is empirically real but transcendentally ideal.

***
By now it should be clear that the driving idea in these texts is the
dependence of all extraconscious being on consciousness, and it is this idea
which issues in the numerous explicit statements of the idealism thesis in this
volume, such as when Husserl claims that a time existing before any actual
consciousness is ‘‘nonsensical’’ (20), his claim that ‘‘[t]he world, and every
conceivable world whatsoever, is only conceivable as relative, relative to the
reality of consciousness’’ (78), his categorical denial that ‘‘the being of things,
the being of a nature that is what it is whether anyone perceives, presents,
thinks it or not, is conceivable though there were no consciousness whatever’’
(53), and, perhaps most directly, his claim that if we were to imagine that
every I was struck out of existence, ‘‘the world, the sum total of transcendent
realities, would also be annulled’’ (121).
In support of such claims Husserl offers a number of formal or semi-formal
‘‘proofs,’’9 one of which, slightly reconstructed, goes something like this (cf.
54–56). Let there be a unique natural world W, with arbitrarily chosen
properties, and let there also be an actual consciousness C that stands in a
relation of knowledge, or justified cognition, to W: on the basis of its various
interconnected experiences, perceptions, judgments, etc., C justifiably posits
W. Let us now also assume, as a thesis to be disproved by reductio, that W is
‘‘absolute,’’ i.e., that it is what it is and would be so whether or not C or any
other consciousness existed. Now consider what happens when we attempt in
imagination to modify or vary C. At first it seems that, by varying the con-
texture of interconnected judgments, perceptions, etc., we can produce at will
countless logically possible variations of C. But we also notice that when we

9
Although, as the editors point out in their introduction, Husserl continued to characterize his
view as ‘‘transcendental idealism’’ on into his later years, at some point he seems to have aban-
doned the attempt to devise a proof or Beweis of the thesis of transcendental idealism in favor of a
less rigorous Erweis of the thesis, one that, as they put it, no longer has the ‘‘closed form of a self-
contained argument’’ (XXXVIf.) but is, as Husserl says in the Cartesian Meditations, coextensive
with phenomenology itself (cf. Hua I, 119).

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do so, we correspondingly modify the world posited by this consciousness:

‘‘A variation of consciousness, a logically possible variation, implies a varia-
tion of the world that is the legitimate, true, actual world for this conscious-
ness.’’ And further, by the principle of authentication, if a consciousness does
posit a world in a justified, legitimate way, then the world it posits exists.
Given our assumptions, then, we must now acknowledge the astonishing fact
that our ability to vary C in imagination is in fact severely limited. For if we
were to replace C with another consciousness C¢, then the latter’s posited
world W¢ would have to exist, whereas by hypothesis only W exists. This points
to a basic functional correlation between consciousness and world:
The content of a factual consciousness dictates that exactly this world
exists .... The content of a factual world dictates that if a consciousness
exists, it cannot be an arbitrary, logically possible one, but instead its
factual content must be such that it does not negate the being of this
factual world.
Hence the hypothesis that W is absolute must be false, since it is now clear
that W is not independent of consciousness after all, as was supposed. ‘‘Things
that are completely separate, that only coincidently co-exist, are independently
variable,’’ Husserl writes; but since consciousness and world are not like that,
‘‘they must somehow hang together.’’10

***
Husserl recognizes that more must be said on this head; how exactly con-
sciousness and world hang together must be explained. Or, what comes to the
same thing, we must address the question of what it means for the existence of
something to be authenticated, for an existential positing to be justified. In this
connection Husserl draws a contrast that comes to take on ever greater sig-
nificance as his thoughts about transcendental idealism develop over the
period covered in this volume.
To understand this contrast, it is helpful to begin by noting an important
qualification which must be made to the principle of authentication, viz., that
for something to exist (i.e., for it to be justly posited as existing), it need not be
presently experienced by an actual consciousness. I posit, and do so no doubt

10
It should be obvious that the crucial premise of this proof is the principle of authentication. The
reliance of Husserl’s proofs of transcendental idealism on this principle is even more explicit in a
shorter version of the proof that immediately follows:
‘‘For the thing to exist, there must be a certain law-like structure of consciousness belonging
to its factual make-up. Let us imagine a consciousness with this law-like structure and this
factual make-up as given. If, then, in addition something else should be supposed to exist,
namely, the thing itself, to which the consciousness relates and which is not exhausted
through the actual and logically prescribed conscious connections, it would ... have to be
conceivable that that which exists in itself be eliminated while all of these connections
remained intact. And this is absolutely out of the question, since the only self-evident
justification for the assertion ‘A thing is’ resides in these connections ....’’ (57)

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justifiably, that there are tigers in Burma, that the moon has a back side, that
the lamp is switched on in the adjacent room. But I am not presently expe-
riencing these things, nor indeed am I likely to, at least in the first two cases.
What is necessary for a legitimate positing of existence is not current or actual
(aktuell) experience of it, but possible experience of it; it must be ‘‘capable of
being experienced by an I’’ (152). What is required, therefore, for me to be
able to make the rational assertion that a thing exists is ‘‘a contexture of
possible experience, one which hangs together with my actual [aktuellen]
experience in such a way that in principle the possibility exists of justifying
(rechtfertigen) the being of the unknown thing on the basis of experiential
motives and in this contexture’’ (115). Thus the basic thesis of transcendental
idealism, reformulated to include this qualification, should read: ‘‘if a thing
exists, then the experiential and justificational possibilities corresponding to it
must obtain’’ (60). Or more simply: ‘‘it must lie within the domain of my
possible experience’’ (115).
However—and this is the key point—not just any possibility will do here.
As noted in the passages quoted above, we can imagine a great variety of
forms of consciousness, and, correlated with them, of posited worlds. For
example, I can imagine a contexture of consciousness which would posit a
world in which there was a diamond as large as the sun. The existence of such
a world is logically possible, to be sure, but it is not real. Why? Because, as
Husserl says, ‘‘[a]ll actual experience speaks against it’’ (60). If mere logical
possibility were the standard to be used in deciding which positings could be
grounded or authenticated in consciousness, then ‘‘all manner of things [alles
Mögliche]’’ (61) would be capable of authentication. But if we focus our
attention on an actual, concrete consciousness, we must say that these other
possibilities are excluded as ‘‘groundless, precisely as contrary to experience’’
(118). When an actual consciousness in actual experience posits a thing as
really existing, Husserl writes, ‘‘the possibilities are no longer free. Countless
parallel possibilities can no longer be put forth [sind nicht mehr ansetzbar];
they would have to undergo a cancellation through conflict with the actual
thesis’’ (76) of the thing.
What is needed, in short, is not mere logical possibility but real possibility.
That is to say, the possibilities that are associated with an existential positing
must be motivated by prior experience: ‘‘there must be in the experience of
consciousness some place from which that consciousness can be logically
compelled, through paths of legitimate justification that it can carry out, to
assume [the existence of] the thing’’ (61). In short, the assumption that a thing
exists requires not merely the ideal possibility of a consciousness that would
experience it but ‘‘an actually [aktuell] experiencing consciousness, i.e., a really
existing I in an experiential relation to the thing’’ (76). The very idea of the
existence of a thing ‘‘prescribes that a really experiencing consciousness ex-
ists’’ and that in this consciousness ‘‘real motivational possibilities for possible
further authentications are predelineated’’ (77).
The notion of real possibility leads into another important theme that
surfaces in several of the texts included here, viz., that of the embodiment of

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subjectivity. Embodiment, Husserl argues, is a necessary element of the

subjective side of the unbreakable correlation between consciousness and
world. One might try, for example, to imagine an experience that was not
bodily; I might try to imagine that my body ‘‘shrinks down to nothing’’ while I
nevertheless ‘‘maintain hold of the images of the things.’’ But these images
could then no longer be images of a transcendent nature, for to the possibility
of nature belongs the possibility of there being a ‘‘continuous authentication’’
(165) of that nature, an authentication which includes a priori a continuously
unfolding kinesthetic series, and hence a body. Thus, embodiment is not a
contingent fact about human consciousness but rather a necessary condition
on the perceptual experience of something transcendent.11
In a similar fashion, Husserl also makes clear in some of the later texts here
that a really experiencing consciousness of the actual world must necessarily
be an intersubjective consciousness. In one text from the 1920s, he says of an
earlier attempt to prove the thesis of transcendental idealism ‘‘without taking
the transcendental intersubjectivity of constitution into account’’ that it leads
us into ‘‘transcendental solipsism’’ by confining itself to the ‘‘transcendental-
egological sphere’’—an oversight which constitutes ‘‘a main point of the
criticism of Descartes and modern philosophy’’ (130).12 But the connection
between intersubjectivity and transcendental idealism did not first emerge in
the 1920s. As early as 1914—around the same time as the lecture at which the
foregoing comments are aimed—we see Husserl already insisting that the
constitution of a transcendent natural world requires an ‘‘an essential relation
to an open plurality of subjects’’ (135), as well as the embodiment of sub-
jectivity (and along with it birth and death). In this text, and again in 1921,
Husserl attempts to weave these requirements into his formal proofs of
transcendental idealism.

***
The kind of analysis described above gives rise to a potentially quite serious
objection to Husserl’s transcendental idealist position, however, one he does
not shrink from posing. All of this, someone might say, has failed to do justice
to the basic fact that in comparison to the world, my own existence is
‘‘something accidental’’: the world could exist without me (and no doubt did
so for quite a long time, and will again). ‘‘What does the world itself care about
my possible authentication?’’ (116), Husserl asks. There could well be many
things, ‘‘indeed whole worlds’’—perhaps nonspatial or nontemporal ones—-
that exist ‘‘without being capable of authentication.’’ Husserl answers this

11
As Rudolf Bernet explains (in his ‘‘Husserl’s Transcendental Idealism Revisited,’’ The New
Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, IV [2004]), the same theme is
present in Husserl’s reworked version of the Sixth Logical Investigation (published in Hua XX/1),
even if the thesis of the necessity of a consciousness that is embodied (or, as Bernet puts it, ‘‘has a
flesh’’) for the existence of empirical reality ‘‘is not yet formulated expressis verbis’’ (17).
12
Anticipating the constitutional analyses of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl wonders aloud
whether the solipsistic account should not be regarded as constituting a ‘‘subordinate level’’ of the
full analysis, one that would need to be supplemented by a ‘‘higher level.’’

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challenge by returning to what is implied by the notion of positing a world as

existing and reaffirming the principle of authentication: ‘‘The idea of the
existence of something in general is correlative to the idea of an authentication
of its existence’’ (117). To say, therefore, that there is ‘‘possibly a world’’ is to
say that there is ‘‘possibly an I with a quite determinate stream of con-
sciousness, one that would really hold within itself the relevant experiences.’’
Hence to posit the existence of a merely logically possible world that is
incompatible with our own would presuppose the existence of the corre-
sponding logically possible consciousness, and the thus fictionally imagined
correlated pair would necessarily—per impossible—exclude the actual world-
consciousness correlate-pair. One can, of course, dream up connections of
consciousness that would have unexperienced and unexperienceable worlds as
their correlates. But a world so imagined is ‘‘precisely a fiction,’’ a merely
logical possibility. And a merely logical possibility, one in which ‘‘no actual
experience at all’’ contributes to its being posited, is ‘‘groundless,’’ just as
much as the existence of satyrs or nymphs is. It is therefore ‘‘nonsense [ein
Nonsens]’’ to say that a world could exist without there being an I to expe-
rience it (119; cf. 138–140).
One may ask whether this argument really settles the issue, since it quite
clearly rests on the principle of authentication, which the challenger may well
not accept. Indeed, it would seem to be in the nature of his challenge not to
accept it, and he might well regard Husserl’s response as an elaborate evasion
of the question.13 But Husserl has at least put the onus on the challenger by
pointing out that even his own attempts to conceive of logically possible
worlds other than and incompatible with the familiar one are carried out by
and within a real consciousness (the challenger’s own), one that must of
necessity posit the real world as the actual one and that hence can never
regard an ideally possible world as anything more than a fiction.
In any event, this discussion of the notion of possibility certainly throws
welcome light on the brief and cryptic section of the Ideas entitled ‘‘The
Logical Possibility and the Material Countersense of a World Outside Ours,’’
which reveals itself, in the light of these richly detailed discussions, to be the
tip of a rather large iceberg. The distinction between real and mere logical
possibility also recalls another controversial passage from the Ideas, viz., the
notorious ‘‘annihilation of the world’’ passage. Husserl repeats this thought
experiment in two of the texts in the present volume, both from the period of
the Ideas. As in that text Husserl’s claim is that a consciousness is conceivable
in which ‘‘the perceptions and other experiences were not ordered in the way
that is prescribed by the real existence of a world,’’ which if true has the
significant implication that the existence of consciousness is ‘‘not relative to
the existence of an actual reality,’’ or in other words, that with regard to the
existence of consciousness, the existence of a real world is ‘‘accidental’’ (79).
‘‘The world does not need to be,’’ Husserl writes, and should it fail to exist,

13
Kant, for example, seems to have had little problem imagining a world of things in themselves,
and he did not seem to regard this possibility as ‘‘nonsense.’’

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that failure would ‘‘in no way affect the existence of consciousness’’ (124).
This is another way of saying that the correlation between consciousness and
world is asymmetrical; the dependency relation between them flows in only
one direction. Nothing essentially new is added here, though in the second
passage, from 1915, Husserl appends the important reminder that the con-
sciousness whose existence is here declared to be absolute is not psychological
but transcendental consciousness. Indeed, the confusion of transcendental
with psychological consciousness explains, Husserl says, ‘‘why the paths to
transcendental philosophy were passed over again and again’’ (125). It also
helps explain why it has been so hard to distinguish Husserlian transcendental
idealism from its Cartesian cousins.

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