Husserl and Ortega: reflections at the bicentenary of Kant’s birth

Abstract

In the bicentenary of Kant’s birth, in 1924, Edmund Husserl and Ortega y Gasset evaluate the meaning and importance of transcendental philosophy. Husserl did it in a conference entitled “Kant and transcendental philosophy”, published only posthumously (with several additions to the original text) in volume VII of the Husserliana; Ortega in two articles, entitled “Reflections of the centenary” and “Pure philosophy: an addition to my booklet ‘Kant’”, now available in volume III of the Complete Works. If, in the case of the first author, one can speak of an approximation to Kantian thought, in the case of the second one must speak of a distancing, on the charge that Kant’s philosophy is but a sophisticated variant of the idealism of modernity. Revisiting Kant’s thought, for Ortega, means the same - as he himself ironically says - as going to the zoo to see the giraffe. The issue, however, is much more complex. Both in the Husserlian approach and in the Orteguian distancing we find the same problem, which both philosophers try to solve with the help of the Königsberg philosopher’s thought. Synthetically, we can identify such a problem as the problem of subjectivity, a problem that we could also call “the enigma of intentionality”, or the problem of the relation of the Ego with its circumstance. Now, from this point onwards the two authors seem to diverge. For if both agree on the diagnosis of Kant’s “failures”, which they find in his inability to constitute a doctrine of the faculties freed from empiricist and associationist psychology, with regard to overcoming of this failure, the paths they propose are not coincident: 1) Husserl, on the one hand, defends the need for phenomenological reduction and, on the basis of this, for a complete reflection on the acts of consciousness and the objectivities that, as their correlates, are constituted in them; 2) Ortega, on the other hand, distances himself from the reflexive procedure (which he finds already in Kant, only to detect it later in Husserl as well), considering it a loss of the executivity of the intentional acts that establish the relationship between the Ego and its circumstance. Thus, if Husserl considers Kant’s reflection to be incomplete, since Kant adopts a regressive procedure that starts from mundane knowledge to grasp its subjective conditions of possibility, equally of a mundane kind; Ortega aims to invalidate the legitimacy of any reflexive procedure, as this procedure transforms the primary consciousness (the “consciousness of ...”) into the object of a secondary consciousness that will never be able to restore the spontaneity of the first. Behind these different interpretations of Kant and the divergence, they entail, between Husserl’s and Ortega’s philosophy, we find two questions that have not lost their relevance: “who am I?” and “what is the world for me?”

Recebido / Received: 22 de abril de 2020 / 22 April 2020
Aceito / Accepted: 30 de abril de 2020 / 30 April 2020.