Summary: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (page 8)

Only what inner experience reveals—only our own ideas—constitutes immediately self-evident data. Locke's central concern is the psychological genesis of actual experiences of validity and the corresponding faculties. For him, it is self-evident that sensible data demonstrate the existence of bodies belonging to an external world. He remains blind to the notion of intentionality: for him, the soul is a real entity, closed in on itself in the manner of a body ¹.

In naïve naturalism, the soul is conceived as either a space unto itself or as a canvas upon which psychological data are inscribed ². This conception continues to dominate psychology and the theory of knowledge to this day. The fact that perception is in itself a perception of something—of this tree, for example—is a point left unexamined. This oversight generates a new scepticism: adequate knowledge is held to exist only within our own psychological reality.

Thus, Locke’s empiricism drifts into paradoxical idealism and ultimately into outright absurdity.

Berkeley extends this movement by reducing the corporeal things of natural experience to the very complex of sensible data in which they appear. These sensible data cannot be shown to refer to anything real. Matter thus emerges as a philosophical fiction.

Hume radicalises this position: all the categories of scientific objectivity that posit an objective world outside the soul are mere fictions. The origin of these fictions, he argues, is psychological. Thus, identity itself is a psychological fiction: when we perceive a man, there is in fact no identical I, but merely a collection of data in perpetual flux. Likewise, causality and necessary succession are, for Hume, psychological fictions.

Hume ultimately arrives at solipsism. The problem he raises is this: how could reasoning that moves from data to data ever transcend the sphere of immanence?

Like all forms of scepticism, Hume’s ultimately undermines itself.

With Kant, we witness the emergence of a new form of transcendental subjectivism. Contrary to his own claim, Kant is not Hume’s true successor.

The difficult radicalism of Descartes did not carry over into his successors. What Descartes struggled so intensely to establish was quickly taken for granted: the validity of the objective sciences. Kant’s problem is thus as follows: how can we understand that the truths of purely a priori reason can give rise to knowledge of things?

Kant opposed the Humean positivism of data—this, at least, is how he interpreted Hume. He proposed a new philosophy of science in which the Cartesian orientation towards the subjectivity of consciousness would be realised in the form of a transcendental subjectivism.

For Hume, the enigma of the world lies in the fact that being arises from a subjective performance. Yet Kant never fully experiences the shock of this enigma. He accepts as self-evident numerous presuppositions that, for Hume, remain deeply enigmatic. Kant’s problem remains situated on the same ground as the rationalism of Descartes, Wolff, or Leibniz. The Kantian reaction against Humean positivism—his rejection of data as mere impressions—is what he calls transcendental subjectivism.

Kant never truly engaged with Descartes’ fundamental meditation. He does not seek a radical foundation for all the sciences; instead, he simply assumes their validity. The question he asks is not whether they are valid, but rather: where does this validity originate? On what is this legitimacy grounded?

Transcendental phenomenology is the discipline capable of resolving the insoluble problems just raised. This is the guiding idea around which the third part of The Krisis is structured.

¹ II,22, p.99
² III,28, p.121