Abstract

The author undertakes the ambitious task of traversing the expanse of Husserl’s conception of transcendental subjectivity by investigating what is perhaps the central nerve of Husserl’s distinctive kind of transcendental idealism: the way in which transcendental consciousness is both an expression—worldly, embodied, historical, finite—and the origin—pure, a priori, infinite—of its world-constituting activity. Organized in nine chapters, Housset’s book is itself constructed like a spiraling movement of concentric circles, sweeps of reflection around the central question of the individuality of transcendental consciousness. For Husserl, the problem of individuation was central for understanding in what sense transcendental consciousness is not simply an abstract subject of knowledge. Transcendental subjectivity, Husserl continually argued, is first and foremost a person, the life of consciousness as reflected in the perspective it brings to itself through self-consciousness. Husserl broadly conceived of transcendental consciousness as an activity that lives through its experience of the world in advance of its own expression of living. Yet what mode of being is distinctive of transcendental consciousness as an experience, as encompassing life in its totality, and in its varied manifestations? The inner logic of Husserl’s radical movement of questioning leads directly to the issue of how transcendental subjectivity itself is given. Undoubtedly, this is the question that perplexed Heidegger about Husserlian phenomenology. Yet as Housset convincingly demonstrates, Heidegger did not awaken Husserl to this question. Instead, an investigation into the development of Husserl’s thought shows clearly that Husserl struggled throughout his career with this question. Indeed, the problem of the individuation of transcendental subjectivity can be seen as animating the entire project of phenomenological philosophy. If the constituting activity of transcendental consciousness is understood as an activity of Sinngebung, the giving of meaning, then in what sense is the singularity of transcendence given, the gift of its own meaningful life? On Housset’s reading, this mode of being turns out to be a kind of responsibility expressed in the self-consciousness of a task, to grasp life as a project of truth that life becomes for itself.