article
Vittorio De Palma
Realismus und Idealismus bei Husserl
Volume 18 (2022), Numéro 3, p. 1-32
Abstract: I aim to show that Husserl’s thinking contains both realistic and idealistic doctrines, which are in conflict with one another. Husserl identifies the real with the sensuous contents, whose structure is grounded in their objective peculiarity. However, he believes that only acts and sensations are sensuously given in a proper and original way, while things spring from the animation of sensations by acts. In this way his anti-idealism, according to which only the sensuous is real, changes into idealism, according to which only the psychical is real. The article has following structure. After some clarifications on the concepts of idealism and realism (§ 1), I show that at the basis of phenomenology are the realistic primacy of real objects over ideal objects and the idea of a material lawfulness of experience (according to which the world-constituting connections do not originate from the dative, but from the content of the givennesses) and that in Husserl’s view the transcendental Ego has not an ontological, but only an epistemological primacy (§§ 2-3). For, according to Husserl the principle of sensuous constitution lies in the pre-given ego-foreign contents and the world-annihilation can occur also due to objective grounds (§§ 4-5). Then I argue that the sensuous relativity is an ontological characteristic of real objects, because it does not depend on the subject that experience them, but on their essence, and that Husserl’s proof of transcendental idealism rests on the equalization of the real with the sensuous, i.e., with the correlate of possible perception (§§ 6-7). Afterward I explain that the ambiguity of phenomenology is connected with that of the word “appearance”, or “phenomenon” (which can be referred to both the appearing, namely to immanent occurrences, and to that which appears, namely to transcendent objects) and that the ambiguity of reduction depends thereon (§ 8). Finally, I show that Husserl’s idealism rests on the view that only what is immanent to consciousness is truly given, for it consists in the reduction of the world to consciousness, i.e., in the dissolution of objects into immanent occurrences, which is why it is nothing but psychologism and it contradicts the principles of phenomenology (§§ 9-11).
Mots-clefs: Husserl, realism, idealism.
