The Method of Phenomenological Constitution

Abstract

Husserl’s life’s work can be regarded as an exhaustive attempt to answer the most fundamental of Kant’s questions in another way. How, Kant asked, are objects of experience possible? In asking this question, Kant deliberately set himself against any empirical philosophy which simply took for granted the reality of an objective world and so restricted its enquiry into the scope and limits of human knowledge to an examination of the way in which the mind might come to know such a reality. The so-called ‘opernican revolution’was inspired by a characteristic reversal. Instead of asking how objects of experience make knowledge possible, Kant proposed to ask instead how knowledge, more specifically a certain kind of transcendental knowledge, makes objects of experience possible. His answer is too well known to require elaboration. Working out of the basic duality of a passive faculty of sense and an active faculty of understanding, Kant argued that certain a priori forms,located in a distinctively transcendental dimension of the mind, had first to be applied to a manifold of appearances, given in sense, in order that this material should then present itself, for understanding, in an objectively unified fashion.