Husserl’s Transcendental Turn

Abstract

The term ‘transcendental’ refers to a wide variety of philosophical approaches which draw their inspiration, however remotely, from Kant’s decision to search for the foundations of rationality in the a priori structures of the experiencing subject. Although there has been considerable debate in the subsequent tradition about the status of subjectivity, transcendental philosophers agree that the principal source for an investigation into human rationality is provided by the subject’s deductive or reflective access to its own invariant operations and structures. Husserl uses the term ‘transcendental’ to refer to the unique status of rationality, to the philosophical attitude that permits appropriate thinking about the relationship between knower and known, and to the method and language of the philosopher engaged in such thinking. Like Kant, he claims that such thinking takes place within a universal zone of intelligibility, which he often describes as a plane or dimension which cannot be located within the coordinates of the empirical world. He also characterizes his version of transcendental philosophy as the fulfillment of the original project of Greek philosophy. Referring to his first intimation of the interplay between transcendental and empirical dimensions, he even goes so far as to say that it had been given to him “to see what had never before been seen, to think what had never before been thought.”¹