People commonly say that contemporary phenomenology has nothing to do with the Hegelian variety, but it is not that simple. […] contemporary phenomenology has a lot to do with Hegel—not with his Phenomenology, but with what he called logic. With certain reservations, we can identify that logic with contemporary phenomenological research. –Heidegger, 1925 Marburg lectures (Heidegger Reference Heidegger2010: 28)
I. Introduction
Idealism is back on the mainstream philosophical agenda.Footnote 1 Recent studies have developed revisionary readings of idealism and have shed new light on neglected chapters of its history. In this spirit, this essay highlights hitherto overlooked continuities between Husserl’s phenomenological idealism and Hegel’s absolute idealism.Footnote 2
I argue that Husserl’s account of essences reproduces key commitments of Hegel’s account of the concrete universal, on which the structure and unity of finite objects is explained by an immanent ideal principle. After outlining basic features of Hegelian concrete universals (Section II) and Husserlian essences (Section III), I make a case for their proximity: like concrete universals, essences exemplify a structure of identity-in-difference; what is more, eidetic ideality is necessarily grasped in light of some particular (Section IV). To highlight the philosophical implications of this similarity, and to show how Husserl employs the model of essences that I attribute to him, I consider the ego’s self-constitution, widely seen as among his most transcendental—and subjectivist—commitments (Section V). The transcendental ego, I maintain, is likewise governed by essential necessities irreducible to consciousness’ acts. This model is broadly consistent with Hegel’s account of the determination of the Concept. It suggests that Husserl’s theory of constitution can be viewed as a dialectical relation between a universal, or an essence, and a mind that instantiates a universal through its meaning-forming activity.
These results are consistent with Husserl’s anti-psychologism and his account of the fact-essence relation. But they have further implications. While no single interpretation of Husserl’s idealism can successfully account for all relevant textual evidence, appreciating the similarities between concrete universals and essences suggests a strategy for reconciling realist and idealist strains in Husserl’s thought in a way that competing metaphysical, epistemic and transcendental interpretations of Husserl’s idealism fail to countenance (Section VI). As Tanja Staehler observes, ‘If both realism and idealism are understood literally, then Husserl’s philosophy is a realistic idealism or an idealistic realism; it goes back to the things (Latin: res) themselves and questions them regarding their essence (Greek: idea, eidos)’ (2016: 110). The argument advanced here develops this insight and demonstrates that Husserl’s phenomenological idealism secures consciousness’s place in reality without reducing world to mind or mind to material nature. On this proposal, Husserl can escape charges of subjectivism or solipsistic idealism while retaining the thesis that consciousness plays a decisive constitutive role: his version of phenomenological idealism affirms the necessity but not the sufficiency of finite minds for the disclosure of the basic structure of reality. This shows that Husserl’s phenomenology straddles transcendental and absolute versions of idealism, and occupies a distinctive place in post-Kantian thought.
II. Hegel on concrete universals
The concrete universal is one of the most important tenets of Hegel’s idealism. For Hegel, the thesis that ‘the finite is an idealization defines idealism’ (SL: 124).Footnote 3 This formulation distinguishes absolute from subjective varieties of idealism. On the latter, reality is ultimately reducible to the structures or activities of a finite mind, either because the concepts needed to grasp it have subjective origins, or because reality can only be grasped using conditions (e.g. representations) that are essentially subject-referential. On the former, objects are not self-sufficient, metaphysically autonomous, or mind-dependent in any strong sense. Each finite thing ‘is not truly an existent’ because it is a moment ‘of processes or unities’ that exceed it (Houlgate 2022: 248). On this view, to define something is to specify its place in a range of possible determinations, whose scope is given by the universal or concept of an object.
Hegel formulates the theory of concrete universals to avoid a basic problem with a rival and still widespread view of objecthood, one consistent with subjective forms of idealism. On this view, an object is a collection of distinct properties. A ball, for example, is a determinate thing in virtue of possessing a set of specific properties, like redness or roundness. This, in outline, is the bundle theory, on which objects are clusters of properties.
Hegel wants to avoid a weakness with the bundle theory that he thinks also plagues Kant’s account of objecthood. If objects are mere bundles of properties, what explains their properties’ unity? Why can redness, roundness and matter combine to form a distinctive kind of whole? The bundle theory fails to explain why a set of properties can form a specific kind of unity; it merely confirms that they do, in fact, form such a unity.
Hegel’s concept of a universal, or a substance-kind, promises to resolve this problem.Footnote 4 For Hegel, individual objects are integrated wholes rather than aggregated unities of properties. An object is a unified individual in virtue of exemplifying a substance-kind. The ball instantiates a specific set of properties because it is a certain kind of whole. Its distinctive form of unity allows its properties to be combined in a determinate way. As an instance of a universal kind, the red ball enjoys specific possibilities of organization.
Unlike abstract (and Platonic) universals, which are opposed to or wholly distinct from particulars, concrete universals are coextensive with and inseparable from particulars (EL: §80, 113). A concrete universal is known through its instances:
What is universal about the Concept is indeed not just something common against which the particular stands on its own; instead the universal is what particularizes (specifies) itself, remaining at home with itself in its other, in unclouded clarity. (EL: §164A, 240)
For Hegel, universals and particulars stand in a mutual or co-dependent relationship.Footnote 5 For example, we know that this four-legged furry animal before us is a dog because we have a general sense of dog-hood. But our general sense of dog-hood is still vague: short of the most abstract characteristics (possible weight, shape, paw structure, etc.), we must invoke some particular breed of dog to grasp the general characteristics of this category.
Hegel goes as far as to suggest that the very structure of thought implicitly commits us to the existence of concrete universals. This is clear in his analysis of disjunctive judgements. A disjunctive judgement of the form ‘A is either B or C’ presupposes ‘reciprocal determination’ between terms, a process that lends determinate content to the proposition’s subject and predicates (SL: 580). Consider the judgement ‘this Rose is either a Flutterbye or a Santana’. Here, the genus refers us to a species, but fails, on its own, to clarify the individuation conditions of the various species of rose. Variations in the species of rose require a more refined sense of difference, which can capture the individuality of a rose and its relation to its species. In so far as different kinds of roses belong to a genus, the distinctive ways that each instantiates the genus establishes a more complete conception of what it is to be this Flutterbye or this Santana.
Importantly, this constraint is not merely discursive. It is grounded in the world’s metaphysical structure:
the nature, the specific essence, that which is truly permanent and substantial in the manifold and accidentality of appearance and fleeting externalization, is the concept of the thing, the universal which is present in it just as there is present in each human being, although universally unique, a specific principle that makes him human (or in each individual animal a specific principle that makes it animal): if this is true, then there is no saying what such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed from him, no matter how many the predicates with which he would still be otherwise adorned. The indispensable foundation, the concept, the universal which is thought itself (provided that with the word ‘thought’ one can abstract from figurative representation), cannot be regarded as just an indifferent form that attaches to a content. (SL: 16–17)
An object’s concept or universal is a deep fact about a certain region of reality: it is not a mere means of subjective representation. Rather, the universal is the object’s ‘foundation’: it makes the object what it is. Without it, ‘there is no saying what such an individual could still be’. As this text shows, an object’s individuality is grasped in distinction from other individuals of the same kind, that is, according to the specific way that it instantiates a universal. To be an object is to lie at the intersection of a universal and a particular.
This sketch of concrete universals highlights some distinctive features of Hegel’s idealism. First, talk of immanent universals suggests a commitment to conceptual realism, namely, the view that concepts (or ‘the’ Concept) are mind-independent, constitutive features of reality.Footnote 6 Contra Kant, Hegel rejects a separation between intuition and concept, and maintains that finite objects, including natural organisms, are conceptually determined.
Second, Hegel maintains that being (Dasein) is ‘determinate universality’ or ‘kind’: reality is structured by universals that make things what they are (PhG: ¶55, 26). If a universal is inconceivable absent its concrete manifestation, then universals can only be grasped as immanent (or ‘particularized’) in things. Accordingly, a sophisticated account of objecthood explores the reciprocal relations between universal, individual and particular that explain object-level unity.
Third, consistent with conceptual realism, Hegel rejects a psychological or subjective analysis of universals. The ‘content of our consciousness’ that defines the cognition of objects does not reflect mere facts about our minds (EL: §45, 88). In the biological context, for example, Hegel denies that natural kinds are ‘an abstraction made by us’; rather, they reflect facts about nature’s structure (PN: §246A, 10).
While Hegel maintains that finite objects are determined by ideal kinds and are moments of dialectical processes of individuation, his idealism nevertheless reserves an important role for finite minds. He notes, for example, that ‘what governs the particular’, viz. the ‘universal’, ‘cannot be grasped by means of the senses’ or ‘perceived’, in any empiricist or psychological sense (EL: §21A, 53). A distinctive form of cognitive activity is needed to grasp an object’s conceptual structure. In this process, consciousness raises ‘the form of universality’ out of the ‘individuality’ of sensation (EM: §402A, 84). As Hegel observes, the key role that finite consciousness plays in disclosing the universal (and non-sensory) structure of finite objects partly justifies Kant’s emphasis on the importance of apperception and subjective synthesis (SL: 516). However, he maintains that Kant is ultimately wrong to conclude that the subjectivity of thought fails to disclose real, or genuinely extra-subjective, facts (EL: §41A2, 81–83). For concepts put us in touch with the very structure of reality.
III. Husserl on essence
Husserl maintains that objects have essences (Hua 9: 92).Footnote 7 For Husserl, an object (Gegenstand) is anything that can in principle be intended by a mind.Footnote 8 An object can be a real, ideal, formal, logical, actual or counterfactual entity. Every object exemplifies or instantiates some essence.Footnote 9
An essence is ‘an invariant […] the necessary general form [die notwendige allgemeine Form] without which an object such as this thing, as an example of its kind [Art], would not be thinkable at all’ (EU: §87, 411/341). On this definition, an essence is a general kind that ranges over a set of objects. Differences in essence or form provide the meaningful contours that delimit one kind of object from another.
This definition suggests that a triadic relation obtains between an object, a kind the object ‘exemplifies’, and a mind that intends the object. An object is graspable as a particular thing because it instantiates a general kind. An object’s kind has a ‘necessary general form’ that determines how we intend the particular objects that fall within its extension.
For Husserl, essences are given in a special form of intuition, or seeing (Hua 9: 69–76). To grasp an essence, a subject must shift from everyday perceptual attitudes to a sui generis phenomenological attitude, one available only after the phenomenological reduction is performed. While everyday perception is chiefly concerned with actuality (objects as they appear), eidetic intuition explores (pure) possibility and necessity, and considers the features an object could lose or gain while retaining its identity (EU: §90, 427–28/352–53).
To grasp a table’s essence, for example, one varies its appearance, imagining how it might change while remaining the table that it is (Hua 1: 105). A table with one leg is still a table. Were it to lose its legs, or top, however, it would no longer be a table. Thoroughly entertaining an object’s possible permutations yields its essence, the necessary or ‘invariable’ set of features it must satisfy to count as a particular kind of thing (Hua 9: 72–73, 76).
Two results can be noted here. First, Husserl’s theory of essence entails that objects are never mere things, but instances of ‘pure’ essential possibilities (Hua 1: 105). In addition to their specific features, objects are analysable in terms of the types they exemplify. These types are universals: ‘as presenting in pure intuition the possibilities themselves as possibilities’, the ‘correlate’ of an object (or a ‘fact’) ‘is an intuitive and apodictic consciousness of something universal [Allgemeinheitsbewusstsein]. The eidos itself is a beheld or beholdable universal [erschaubares Allgemeines], one that is pure, ‘unconditioned’ that is to say: according to its own intuitional sense, a universal not conditioned by any fact’ (Hua 1: 105).Footnote 10 In eidetic variation, one grasps a universal irreducible to the set of particular facts through which it is brought to intuitive givenness.
Second, while eidetic variation is free, essences introduce a special kind of necessity into eidetic intuition (Héring Reference Héring, Seifert and Gueye2009: 324).Footnote 11 Eidetic descriptions can begin from any arbitrarily chosen example. Imaginative variation, however, eventually turns up ‘intentionally explicatable types [Typen]’ that enjoy an ‘essential necessity [Wesensnotwendigkeit]’ and which are ‘essentially determined [Wesensmässig]’ (Hua 1: 103). Eidetic intuition encounters thick constraints on how objects can be possibly varied. Eidetic necessity is irreducible to our concepts or languages; it pertains to the very structure of essential kinds.Footnote 12 Similarly, Husserl observes that variations in perceptual givenness are explained by the essential structure of different modes of perceptual experience (Hua 36: 91).
This observation challenges a metaphysically deflationary interpretation of essences. Thomasson argues that ‘in treating essences as “objects”, Husserl is only committed to their being objects in a logical (syntactic, formal) sense: as subjects of a true (categorical, affirmative) statement’ (Thomasson Reference Thomasson2017: 441). In Carnapian fashion, she argues that ‘Essences and other Ideal objects, for Husserl, are not metaphysical “posits”, nor do they form part of a metaphysical theory. […] Instead, what Husserl gives us is simply a story about how thought and talk about essences is introduced in such a way that they are able to become objects of true predications and of knowledge’ (Thomasson Reference Thomasson2017: 445). While Husserl certainly defines an object as a subject of true predication, his view of objecthood has wider scope. Essential truths are not mere descriptions; they directly bear on the underlying structure of empirical reality. Thomasson’s suggestion is clearly consistent with Husserl’s account of formal essence, but falls short as an explanation of his account of material essence (Hua 19: 256).Footnote 13 Were Husserl to hold a deflationary view, he would deny that there are thought- or discourse-independent facts about essences. But his account of the relation between essence, region, and evidence suggests otherwise.Footnote 14
The latter point is clear in Husserl’s account of constitution or meaning-formation. Constitution is the central function of transcendental subjectivity. Without consciousness, there is neither meaning nor existence (Hua 1: 118). In the final lecture of the Idea of Phenomenology course, Husserl observes that every intentional object is constituted in consciousness ‘according to its essential kind’ (Hua 2: 73). The possible appearance of an object is anticipated by its kind, and by the particular region of reality to which the object belongs: ‘Whatever exists, whether it has a concrete or abstract, real or ideal, meaning, has its manners of self-givenness [hat seine Weisen der Selbstgegebenheit]’ (Hua 6: 169/166; Hua 1: 92–93; Hua 8: 227–28). In a subtle observation, Levinas notes that for Husserl, ‘each category of objects has its particular type of self-evidence, a self-evidence not connected to the empirical constitution of our minds but to the structure peculiar to its object’ (Levinas Reference Levinas1998: 67).Footnote 15 A building appears perspectivally, in depth, and progressively, because it belongs to the region of physical things, which are necessarily given in this manner. Numbers or imaginary creatures belong to regions whose objects are non-perspectivally given, and which are grasped in lower degrees of clarity. Objects in the region of nature are necessarily encountered through external spatial perception, or some version thereof (Hua 17: 144/161). In sum: different kinds of objects are constituted in accordance with the necessary constraints of their essential kind.Footnote 16 While subjective constitutive acts are needed to bring an object’s possible modes of givenness to our notice, essential kinds remain irreducible to finite minds.
Given this account, Husserl faces the challenge of reconciling the claim that consciousness is the privileged term in the constitutive relation between mind and world with the claim that essential forms are irreducible to constitutive acts. Hegel’s concept of a concrete universal, I will now suggest, points to a possible solution.
IV. Essence, fact and the concrete universal
To substantiate the proximity between Husserlian essences and Hegelian concrete universals, here I will focus on Husserl’s accounts of hybrid essential unity and fact-essence relations. In the next section, I argue that reading essences as concrete universals suggests a strategy for reconciling competing interpretations of Husserl’s idealism, and casts his claim that consciousness enjoys constitutive priority in new light.
Before proceeding, however, I want to consider an objection. Husserl seems to have had a scant familiarity with Hegel until late in his career, and it is unclear to what extent he deliberately adopted any Hegelian tenets (Moran Reference Moran, Manca, Magrì, Moran and Ferrarin2019: 6). What historical or textual grounds, then, legitimate the comparison pursued here? The link I develop is conceptual: key expositions of phenomenological essences suggest that Husserl endorses Hegel’s claims that (i) universality and particularity stand in a dialectical or complementary relationship, and that (ii) universals are immanent to facts or particulars.
(i) Experience and Judgment offers an important exposition of Husserl’s theory of universals and essences. It observes that essences exhibit a ‘remarkable’ form of ‘unity’ (merkwürdige Einheit) (EU: §87d, 417/345). In eidetic variation, we notice a ‘congruence […] in the coincidence of the multiplicities of variation’ (viz. in different facts) together with a ‘difference [Differenz] in various aspects’ (EU: §87e, 418/346). By comparing instances of the colour red, the colour’s essential commonalities emerge. Eidetic unity is remarkable because it presupposes a ‘difference’ that is ‘only to be understood in its involvement with the idea of the identically common element which is the eidos’. In short: an essence is an identity that contains difference within it.Footnote 17 While essences are not reducible to facts, they are not strictly separable from them either; Husserl rejects an empty or abstract view of universals, and claims that it is impossible to intuit an essence without invoking facts (Hua 3: §2).
When describing the intentional consciousness of universals, Husserl observes that the special form of unity they enjoy, namely, the ‘arbitrary in general’ (beliebiges Überhaupt) (EU: 97a, 452), fundamentally ‘includes in its sense the idea of a particular “in general” and raises it to a higher form’ (in ihrem Sinne das partikuläre Überhaupt in sich schliesst und höher formt) (EU: §97a, 453/372). His aim in this passage is to show that an essence can clarify any arbitrarily chosen fact falling under its extension; no specific object fully exemplifies an essence. A second important point here, however, is that eidetic universality ‘is a universality which admits the particularization of its sense and which can find, in everything thought under the particular form “an A”, its immediate particularizing fulfilment’ (EU: §97a, 453/373). As in Hegel’s account of concrete universality, eidetic universality is distinguished by its inclusive relation to particularity: qua universals, essences necessarily refer to some fact or set of facts. The intentional consciousness of essences just is a grasping of a general kind in light of its instance(s). The inverse also holds: in Husserl’s phenomenological method, eidetic description begins from concrete cases (imaginary or real) and works up to the highest or most general kinds. Eidetic kinds are graspable only through intuitive evidence that presents a fact as an instance of a universal.
(ii) Were Husserl to accept something like Hegel’s theory of concrete universals, he would advance a compatible view of objecthood, on which finite objects are permeated by universals. While he does not formulate this point in conceptual realist or absolute idealist terms, already in Logical Investigations, Husserl rejects Kant’s distinction between intuition and concept and maintains that sense is immanent to evidence (Hua 19: 605–606/232). Consistent with conceptual realism, Husserl maintains that ideality is immanent in concrete facts. His account of regions and categories suggests a proximate view of objects’ metaphysical structure.
Experience and Judgment develops a corollary view of particulars: eidetic variation encounters a distinctive kind of individual, or a ‘particular’ that is ‘not in the proper sense an intuited individual as such’ (EU: §87d, 417/345). Unlike in natural perception, in eidetic variation we perceive individuals bound up with the general kinds that they belong to. The ‘unity in the conflict’ grasped in free variation is ‘a concrete hybrid unity’ (eine konkrete Zwittereinheit). The essence of the colour red, for example, retains its identity across individual red-instances. We only grasp its identity as red in terms of its difference from other instances of red.
Ideas II also addresses the metaphysical status of individuals (Hua 4: 297ff.) and makes the striking claim that ‘No thing has its individuality in itself’ (Hua 4: 299). Given that Husserl offers this remark in a discussion of the relation between nature and spirit, it is plausible to conclude that objects lack individuality because they constitutively depend on consciousness, which is the only properly ‘irrelative’ or unconditioned individual (Hua 4: 300–301). This seems to be confirmed by Husserl’s suggestion that individuality in the full sense only pertains to consciousness: ‘Absolute individuation enters into the personal ego’ (Hua 4: 301, 300).
While the text permits this interpretation, another is available. Earlier, Husserl observes that
each thing is an example of a universality; this is already the case as regards the thing on the level of mere ‘sense’ experience thought as concordant. Any thing can be thought of as repeatable at will. (Hua 4: 298)
No object is a mere individual because it is always also an instance of a universal, that is, an essence associated with a region. But if regions are not themselves dependent on minds, some explanation of consciousness’s constitutive role that takes both tenets into account is needed. Earlier in Ideas II, Husserl excludes the possibility that individual things are a ‘pure Objectivity’, or that they are identical across all ‘constitutive circumstances of givenness’ (Hua 4: 299). This concedes that constitution is context-sensitive, and that constitutive contexts, in turn, determine how consciousness grasps particular regions and essences. Objects and their essences are relative to consciousness in the following sense: constitution always presupposes a for-me relation whereby some object appears to and is construed thus-and-so-by a subject. So understood, consciousness only enjoys the status of a necessary or enabling condition for object-individuation; it does not yet enjoy the status of a sufficient condition. I return to the issue of consciousness’s constitutive sufficiency below; for now, note that this suggestion is consistent with Husserl’s observation that essences are ‘open’ and ‘can always take on new properties according to the constitutive circumstances of givenness’ (Hua 4: 299). Since essences are disclosed progressively and under varying conditions of givenness, in all but the mathematical sphere (or the region of a priori nature), they remain ‘fluid types’ whose form cannot be strictly ‘apprehended with exactitude’ (EU: §90, 428n1/352n2). This holds only if essences’ generality, identity and universality presuppose difference, that is, determination by a finite knower (Hua 36: 13). Consciousness provides a necessary condition for differentiation in so far as its constitutive activity is the foil for the instantiation of universals.
A commitment to a view of essences as concrete universals is a precondition for such a claim: it leaves room for the dialectical or complementary relationship presupposed by Husserl’s account of the fact-essence relation. If this is right, then even if essences are open and context-sensitive, they cannot be reducible to minds. While consciousness is always implicated in constitution, it is a privileged but non-sufficient condition of the meaning-forming process.
Given that the interpretation just presented leaves room for fluidity and inexactitude in phenomenological essences, one might think that Husserl’s view is limited by an absence of any methodological guarantee that imaginative variation will reliably turn up the same invariant structure. Relatedly, without clear rules for imaginative variation, one might also worry about the possibility of arbitrariness and relativism in phenomenological definitions, and about the intrusion of personal or cultural prejudice into what are supposedly universal truths. By contrast, since Hegel’s logic begins from a reflection on mere existence itself and generates its categories through a necessary derivation and an internal process of justification, it appears to be less vulnerable to the same sorts of worries.
Husserl’s appeal to intersubjectivity partly mitigates these worries. If the disclosure of essences is ultimately undertaken in a community of subjects, individual prejudices and predilections are less likely to determine a grasp of an object’s essential structure. This feature of constitution also partly addresses worries stemming from an absence of formal rules for the constitution of essences, and from Husserl’s concession that the starting point of eidetic variation remains variable. In both cases, a community of suitably trained subjects is better positioned to evaluate principles and norms used in constitutive undertakings, to correct errors, and to eliminate prejudices. The worries above might also be mitigated by the observation that some classes of essences, especially those that pertain to the lifeworld, are by nature sensitive to historical, cultural and factical conditions.Footnote 18
As some commentators have argued, Husserl leaves significant room for reconstruction in eidetic constitution (Bower Reference Bower2014: 144–46). Here, a distinction between the epistemic starting points of eidetic variation, and the metaphysical status of essences, proves particularly helpful. Given the possibility of multiple entry points to eidetic variation, Husserl leaves its method relatively open-ended. But even if the starting point of eidetic variation is contingent, the proper content of an essence does not enjoy as wide a variability.
While Husserl does not identify Hegel as an influence on his theory of essences, like Hegel, he maintains that essence (or universality) is bound to fact (or concreteness) and is necessarily grasped in some concrete intuitive form, whose distinctive form of unity is perceptually graspable.Footnote 19 Like Hegel, Husserl is committed to the thesis that particulars are structured by universals, and that universality stands in a dialectical or inclusive relation with particularity.Footnote 20
V. The constitution of the ego and the determination of the concept
I now want to suggest that a Hegelian reading of Husserlian essences offers a new lens through which to view Husserl’s account of the ego’s self-constitution. The latter is an important test case for Husserl’s possible proximity to Hegel’s absolute idealism. Ostensibly, Husserl’s account of the ego is most easily assimilable to a transcendental form of idealism. His view that the ego’s self-formation unfolds in accordance with its essence allows for an alternative interpretation.
Cartesian Meditations makes the following observation about the ego’s constitutive activity:
Any ‘Objective’ object, any object whatever […] points to a structure [Regelstruktur], within the transcendental ego, that is governed by a rule. As something the ego objectivates, […] the object indicates forthwith a universal rule [eine universale Regel] governing possible other consciousnesses of it as identical—possible, as exemplifying essentially predelineated types. And naturally the same is true of any ‘imaginable’ object, anything conceivable as something intended. (Hua 1: 90)
Consistent with the results of Section 3, this formulation of intentional correlation identifies transcendental consciousness as a condition for the possibility of objectivity. However, it also indicates that consciousness is not wholly unconditioned: it intends objects according to rule-governed structures that lie ‘within’ it. Essential connections (Wesenszusammenhänge) govern all modalities of intentional activity, and the ego’s constitutive acts unfold in accordance with them (Hua 36: 11). A fundamental insight of eidetic analysis is that the ‘all-embracing laws’ that ‘prescribe’ the scope and character of transcendental acts are not themselves generated by those acts, even if the laws governing the constitution of various regions only come to light through consciousness’s constitutive activity (Hua 1:106).Footnote 21 Rather, modes of appearance are correlated with regions of reality. Husserl’s Encyclopaedia Britannica article observes that ‘eidetic universality’ is not metaphysically dependent on ‘de facto subjectivity’ (Hua 9: 170; Hua 8: 432–33).
This insight applies to the ego’s self-constitution. Husserl’s description of transcendental self-constitution suggests that immanence does not imply subject-dependence: the ego’s intentional structures are governed by ‘essentially predelineated types’ (Hua 1: 90). While the ego is not an object, it still instantiates a universal. Phenomenology, Husserl claims,
can become genuinely scientific, only if I go back to the apodictic principles that pertain to this ego as exemplifying the eidos ego: the essential universalities and necessities [die Wesensallgemeinheiten und Notwendigkeiten] by means of which the fact is to be related to its rational grounds (those of its pure possibility) and thus made scientific (logical). (Hua 1: 106)
In the constitution of the ego, subjects follow laws governing the region of transcendental consciousness: a ‘Restriction [Bindung] of this kind has its grounds in an a priori universal structure, in a conformity to universal eidetic laws of coexistence and succession in egological time’ (Hua 1:108). This points to the ultimate (or ‘absolute’) fact of originary temporality, which permeates all constitutive contexts (Hua 15: 670). The key point, however, is that even in the most immanent and internal of constitutive spheres, Husserl’s essentialism upsets the possibility that constitution could be a mere subjective product.
Here one might object that Husserl unambiguously ties the being of all intentional objects to consciousness’s authentication (Ausweisung), that is, to its positing (setzen) activity (Hua 36: 32, 38, 109). The difference between mere seeming and reality in the full sense depends on our actively taking something to be thus-and-so. One can only justifiably (rechtmäßig) conclude that something is real, true or binding if consciousness performs the requisite positing and authenticating acts. Since ‘absolute positing [die absolute Setzung] affects everything’, and since thinking alone can introduce this kind of activity, then only consciousness could count as the absolutely ‘doubtless’ and firm foundation of the real (Hua 36: 110).
While all ‘objective’ being (reality as studied by the sciences) ‘disintegrates’ (löst sich) into connections of consciousness, the latter are still ‘subject to essential laws’ (unter Wesensgesetzen stehen) (Hua 36: 27). Consciousness is absolute not only because it is unconditioned by any finite or non-transcendental conditions, but also because it constitutes the highest kind of being, namely, sense. The intentional connections through which sense is constituted, however, are themselves governed by essential laws. The immanent constitutive sphere is constrained by the laws of transcendental constitution, which come to light through transcendental (inter-) subjectivity’s self-conscious authenticating and positing activity (Hua 36: 128).
This feature of Husserl’s account of the ego’s self-constitution suggests important similarities with Hegel’s account of the determination of the Concept. On one interpretation, Hegel’s account of the relation between subjectivity and Concept recognizes the importance of self-consciousness for the determination of the categories that constitute reality (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 39). On this view, the Concept takes the form of self-determining thought. Accordingly, Hegel’s logic chiefly aims at detailing the categories through which being is thinkable (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 216). While I cannot consider the merits of this interpretation here, it emphasizes an undeniably central strain in Hegel’s relation to Kant, and in his broader theory of the Concept. Importantly, it is consistent with the Logic’s observation that Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception is one of the most important and profound insights in the history of philosophy, one to which absolute idealism is indebted (SL: 515). And it suggests a means of reconciling transcendental consciousness’s constitutive activity with essential structure.
For Hegel, a persuasive account of any object must take account of the reciprocity between universal, individual and particular; for this relationship explains the object’s unity (SL: 529). The dynamic interconnection between these terms reflects the basic structure of the Concept. The mutually determining relation between the Concept’s moments is evidenced in reflective activity, specifically, in judgement. As Hegel observes, in judgement, subjects particularize the ‘Concept’ that ‘dwells within the things themselves’ (EL: §166). Importantly, the content that becomes particularized through judgement is not itself formed by thinking activity: ‘It is not we who “form” concepts’ (EL: §163A2). Self-conscious thought instantiates and materializes the relation between universal, individual and particular; but this relation is already implicit in an object’s concept, or its immanent universal.Footnote 22
Even those readers who favour more speculative interpretations that emphasize the importance of Hegel’s view of the Concept, negativity or organic life for his logic and metaphysics may find productive points of contact between their views and the account developed here (see, e.g., Bowman Reference Bowman2013 and Ng Reference Ng2020). For Hegel, the method of logic is ‘only the movement of the concept itself’, and its ‘universal absolute activity, the self-determining and self-realizing movement’ (SL: 737). Unlike Husserl, Hegel does not suggest that the processes through which reality is determined are executed by, and hence require an appeal to, consciousness’s finite activity; this marks a significant difference between their respective views.
Nevertheless, while it is true that self-consciousness is ultimately a moment in Hegel’s overall exposition of his philosophy, and the main event in Husserl’s, Hegel suggests that the most developed form of reality, the self-determination of the idea, exhibits the kind of self-referentiality that is part and parcel of subjective self-awareness. In the idea, ‘the universal determines itself and is the universal for itself, that is, equally a singular and a subject. Only in its consummation is it the absolute’ (SL: 740). For Hegel, the ‘method’ used to grasp the stages and enabling conditions of this process is ‘the consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of the content of logic’ (SL: 33). Hence, even if Husserl emphasizes the foundational status of a step that Hegel ultimately sees as an instance of a wider process, Husserl’s account of essence constitution can be read as a method for substantiating and explicating the conceptual structure of tenets (e.g. reflexivity, negativity, movement, life, purposiveness) that are emphasized by metaphysically stronger readings of Hegel’s thought. Accordingly, on this interpretation, Hegel’s account of the ‘concept of mind’, which details his views of subjective consciousness, self-consciousness and subject-object relations, can be construed as an instance of his account of the structure of ‘reason’ as such (EM: §417, 146).
Hegel’s approach to the determination of the Concept, then, carves out an ineliminable role for finite consciousness without reducing the Concept to a mere act of mind.Footnote 23 Self-conscious activity is a precondition for the concretization of the Concept: for ‘What is absolutely concrete is the spirit’ (EL: §164). However, self-conscious thinking activity is bound by the pure structure of thought, which reflects extra-subjective conditions. This insight accrues once consciousness recognizes that it can grasp an object ‘beyond its sensory individuality and immediate presence’ (EL: §402Z). In seeing an object as an instance of a substance-kind, ‘consciousness activates its independence from the material of sensation by raising it from the form of individuality into the form of universality, omitting what is purely contingent and indifferent in it and holding on to the essential’. Accordingly, Hegel privileges one distinctive version of self-conscious thought given its ability to disclose the intelligible structure of reality:
if by intuition we understand not merely a sensuous material but the objective totality, then the intuition is an intellectual one, that is, its subject matter is not existence in its externalization but that element in existence which is unalterable reality and truth—the reality only in so far as it is essentially in the concept and is determined by it; the idea, of whose more precise nature more will be said later. (SL: 539)
Thorny interpretive issues notwithstanding, Hegel’s claim that self-determination in a special mode of thought (intellectual intuition) is a precondition for the Concept’s concretization highlights an often-overlooked dimension of idealism in Husserl’s work, one that is implicit in the account of the ego’s self-constitution canvassed above. For Husserl, the transcendental reduction facilitates a passage to the pure sphere of sense. By employing a distinctive mode of intuition, the transcendental ego performs the meaning-forming acts that lend each object its sense, one that falls within the (essential) boundaries given by its region. Seen in a Hegelian light, reduction and constitution are methods for disclosing the intelligibility of a world structured by essential kinds.Footnote 24 Imaginary variation and eidetic intuition yield intuitive concretizations of the general (or universal) principles that make reality intelligible (EU: §90).
This basic model, I suggested, applies to the ego’s own self-constitution, in which it becomes aware of its own self-genesis, according to the ‘subjective essential laws’ of its region (Hua 8: 225). As Luft observes, transcendental consciousness has a dual structure: ‘The Ego is but one, though it comes to be known as one through a split. In terms of Hegel’s Logic, it is both identical and different, and in this difference identical and different in its identity’ (2011: 170). This comes to light if transcendental consciousness grasps itself as a moment of a constitutive process in which a universal form is concretized. Consistent with this observation, in a discussion of the ‘monadic’ character of subjectivity, the Intersubjektivität manuscripts observe that the transcendental ego is an ‘abstract’ identity (‘das reine Ich ein abstrakt Identisches ist’) whose ‘determinations’ or acts in immanent time transform it into something ‘concrete’, namely, into a specific form of conscious life (Hua 15.2: 43–44). Consistent with the account above, the ‘unity’ (Einheit) achieved by subjectivity does not preclude continual transformation or difference (Hua 15.2: 44).
Despite Husserl’s concession about difference and determinateness in the ego, one might object that he faces a challenge that never arises for Hegel, namely, that of integrating the kind of difference that pertains to sociality into his theory of the ego’s self-constitution. While both thinkers suggest that nature depends on spirit, Hegel offers a sophisticated account of spirit’s movement towards the sphere of shared social life. His account of the transition to collective practices of sense-making (e.g. in law, morality, the family, etc.) is already built into his accounts of perception and cognition in individual knowers. By contrast, it is often difficult to find similar claims in Husserl’s account of consciousness’s constitution, which is often centred on the ego. This worry is strengthened by remarks in which Husserl appears to clearly endorse the constitutive sufficiency of consciousness.
While the existence of the latter set of Husserlian claims is undeniable, in my estimation, they do not reflect Husserl’s considered view. Undoubtedly, some of Husserl’s descriptions of meaning-formation focus on a single constitutive agent. However, for him, transcendental constitution can only be completed intersubjectively:
there is only the one, universal ground, standing absolutely for itself and grounded for itself: that of transcendental intersubjectivity, on which all truth and all truthful being has its intentional source. (Hua 8: 448/580)
On Husserl’s view, reality necessarily implies others. The very concept of objectivity, from a phenomenological point of view, presupposes an intersubjective form of validity. By extension, similar constraints apply to the authentication and disclosure of essences.
Doubtless, when compared to Hegel, Husserl does not develop as integrated an account of the transition from egoic, to intersubjective (or monadological), and ultimately, to socio-historical levels of reality. While there are some non-trivial differences here, Husserl’s account of transcendental intersubjectivity affords him the resources to generate an analogous account of the passage from a unitary to a plural view of constitution. This is especially clear in the generative phase of Husserl’s thought, which further widens the collective scope of constitution. Generative phenomenology recognizes the constitutive significance of essentially other-regarding attitudes, like love, for the full constitution of human persons (Heinämaa Reference Heinämaa2020: 432). It even assumes that constitution begins prior to birth (Serban Reference Serban2024). While Husserl recognizes that his theory of constitution must be refined to accommodate these shifts, the results of his research into intersubjectivity set him the task of establishing ‘the inseparable unity of individual subjectivity and intersubjectivity as constituting in community’ (Hua 8: 291/495). Ultimately, an intersubjectively grounded view of constitution is required if a rigorous, or eidetic, knowledge of the world is to attain a genuine ‘universality’. Hence, even if the constitutive significance of intersubjectivity is not always stressed in Husserl’s writings, properly understood, the subjectivity that intends the ‘open endless […] range of possible but not explicitly realized appearances’ is really an ‘open intersubjectivity’ (offene Intersubjektivität) (Hua 15.2: 289). A community of subjects, then, constitutes the world in accordance with a shared grasp of essences.
VI. Husserl’s hybrid idealism
I have argued that Husserl is committed to the view that essences are immanent in facts, that he accepts two key Hegelian theses about the relation between universal and particular, and that his account of the ego’s self-constitution is broadly consistent with Hegel’s account of the determination of the Concept. These commitments reveal significant absolute idealist elements in Husserl’s thought. To conclude, I want to suggest that the line of interpretation pursued here allows Husserl to reconcile his transcendental and realist philosophical commitments, while also insulating him from an unsophisticated and unattractive form of subjectivism. I develop this point in two steps: first, by indicating how the account of essences developed above differs from that advanced by classical phenomenological realists; and second, by showing how the proposal defended here can navigate between competing strains of Husserl interpretation.
The interpretation of essences advanced here might strike one as highly proximate to the accounts of essence developed by the Munich and Göttingen phenomenologists and their followers. For Reinach, for example, all things (qualities, material or ideal objects, persons, etc.) have an essential, law-like structure that makes them what they are (Reinach Reference Reinach, Seifert and Gueye2009: 437–38). Our knowledge of some object, and our ability to define it, are both grounded in its essence (Reinach Reference Reinach, Seifert and Gueye2009: 441–42). Similarly, Héring observes that an ‘essential core’ (Wesenkern) immanent to an object yields the account of what that an object really is (Héring Reference Héring, Seifert and Gueye2009: 324). To think of an object as total randomness (zusammengewürfelte Zufälligkeit) blocks us from grasping its underlying unity.
Despite clear similarities with views defended by realist-oriented phenomenologists, some non-trivial differences distinguish Husserl’s ‘idealistic realism’ from the approach to essences defended by members of the Munich school (Staehler Reference Staehler2016: 110). While I cannot explore relevant differences in detail here, Conrad-Martius’s account of essences offers a characteristic example of the distance between the two approaches. In addition to accepting the positions by Reinach and Héring noted above, she observes that an essence ‘as a universal’ is immanent to (‘in rebus’) what it structures, but also exists ‘ante res’ (Conrad-Martius Reference Conrad-Martius1957: 60). While essences are instantiated in objects, essences in the full sense are self-standing ‘objectiveless objects’ that enjoy a ‘beingless’ mode of being (Hart Reference Hart2020: 63–64). Properly understood, the eidetic and spatiotemporal spheres are separate. Despite recognizing that essences have a ‘this-such’ structure and are given ‘in rebus’, a claim that Aristotle and Hegel both accept, Conrad-Martius’s account of essence is ultimately more Platonic (Hart Reference Hart2020: 30).
A second important difference concerns the relation between essences and the transcendental sphere. While Conrad-Martius accepts the need for an eidetic reduction, in her estimation, there is no genuine motivation for the transcendental reduction, in so far as essences are immanently given in perception and appear already formed (Breuer Reference Breuer2022). For Conrad-Martius, to think of essences in intentional terms robs them of one of their most characteristic features: mind-independence. For Husserl, by contrast, the eidetic reduction is decisive for the disclosure of the essential structure of reality. A special activity of mind is needed to bring an entity’s eidetic structure—its meaning and individuation conditions—to our notice. Only in the self-conscious intention of the relation between universal (essence) and particular (fact) is it possible to grasp essences. Hence, on Husserl’s view, transcendental activity is an eliminable condition for the constitution of essences.
This latter commitment motivates a widespread strain of Husserl interpretation that emphasizes the metaphysically strong character of Husserl’s idealism. It defines constitution as a form of metaphysical construction. In some texts, Husserl claims that ‘every sort of existent itself, real or ideal, becomes understandable as a ‘product’ of transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that performance’ (Hua 1: 118). This kind of claim appears to index reality as such to consciousness’s activity. For A. D. Smith, this shows that Husserl is an ‘absolute’ idealist, for whom ‘if consciousness did not exist, nothing would’ (Smith Reference Smith2003: 179; 159–60). Similarly, Ingarden contends that the ‘main thesis of transcendental idealism’ holds that
the being of the real world, given to us in an experiential way is dependent on the being and process of the pure constituting consciousness without which it would not exist at all and, secondly, that it is generally awkward even to ask about the existence of the world ‘in itself’ as it transcends the real sense of transcendental constitution whose results create the basis for every inquiry and determine the sense of our questions. (Ingarden Reference Ingarden1975: 27)
On this interpretation of Husserl’s idealism, the meaning and being of the world derives from consciousness’s meaning-making activity. Were Husserl to defend this view, he would be committed to the claim that the structures of reality derive from the structures of mind.
A second strand of interpretation defends a broadly epistemic reading of Husserl’s idealism, one consistent with a realism about objects (Ameriks Reference Ameriks1977). For Ameriks, the belief that ‘the mind makes things’ contravenes Husserl’s most basic philosophical motivations (Ameriks Reference Ameriks1977: 504–505). On this proposal, Husserl accepts that objects are mind-independent, even if he maintains that subjective structures are needed to intelligibly grasp them. If correlation or constitution are interpreted epistemically, then ‘it is “absurd” though not necessarily logically contradictory to posit beings which are in principle uncognizable by any mind’ (Ameriks Reference Ameriks1977: 510). Similarly, Moran contends that ‘Husserl’s idealism […] is primarily concerned with the inability to conceive of an object independent of a subject. One must rather think of the object as constituted out of activities and structures of consciousness, according to predetermined essential laws’ (Moran Reference Moran2005: 180). In Kantian spirit, objects are unknowable (or inconceivable) absent subjects: knowability derives from subjective structures. To explain our meaningful grasp of reality, we must appeal to consciousness’s structures, since the world’s appearance depends on them.
The metaphysically constructive reading of Husserl’s idealism undoubtedly finds ample textual support. Two basic worries, however, raise doubts about its philosophical plausibility. If world really does depend on mind, then it is unclear in what sense Husserlian phenomenology puts us back in touch with the things themselves. More significantly, this view seems to trap Husserl in a solipsistic or subjectivistic form of idealism, which quickly leads to scepticism about our ability to know the world beyond the mind.
The epistemic reading can assuage these worries. While it secures the mind-independent existence of the world, there is reason to think it does not go far enough. The epistemic approach contends that the intentional appearance of reality derives from structures of mind. But this arguably reintroduces a different kind of subjectivism: it entails that the intelligibility of reality is ultimately explained by the structures of one of its parts. Avoiding subjectivism or psychologism, namely, the reduction of validity, normativity or meaning to mind, is one of Husserl’s most enduring philosophical goals. In so far as it does not exclude the possibility that conceivability or intelligibility ultimately have subjective origins, on this score, the epistemic approach arguably leaves us wanting.
A compelling interpretation of Husserl’s idealism should resist the charge that Husserl is a subjectivist while taking account of the claim—rejected by classical realists but defended by Husserl throughout his mature writings—that transcendental consciousness enjoys constitutive primacy. It should also explain why Husserl maintains that consciousness’s constitutive activity is constrained by the essential kinds that structure various regions and kinds of intentional objects. As I have suggested, viewing Husserl’s idealism as a successor to a Hegelian strain of idealism allows us to meet these interrelated desiderata.
According to Hegel, Anaxagoras was the first thinker to formulate the insight that being is best understood ‘determinately as eidos or idea, that is, determinate universality, kind’ (PhG: ¶55, 26). For Hegel, only mind (‘nous’) can grasp universal kinds: for the logic of concrete universality only appears to a rational being. Husserl defends a version of this thesis. In denying the empiricist view that essences are abstractions from perception, and the psychologistic thesis that essences reflect the structure of human thought, Husserl affirms their mind-independence: in transcendental constitution, it is ‘not the essence, but the consciousness of it [that] is something generated’ (Hua 3: 42–43).
But Husserl also maintains that reality’s essential structure is only available to transcendental (inter-)subjectivity. Consciousness evidences the meaningful structure of reality through its constitutive activity; nevertheless, it does not invent this structure ex nihilo (Hua 2: 74).Footnote 25 Instead, a necessary correlation obtains between an object’s possible modes of givenness, which are grounded in essential necessities, and a subject’s active grasp of them. Reality is relative to consciousness because its basic structure is made manifest through the mind’s activity. Consciousness’s privileged status stems from its role as the only entity capable of disclosing an object’s essential structure and instantiating the eidetic laws of egological constitution. But its activity is itself governed by the eidetic laws pertaining to the region of transcendental consciousness. Hence, conscious acts cannot enjoy unconditioned constitutive primacy: these claims are consistent thanks to Husserl’s commitment to an idealist view on which reality is structured according to kinds, essences, or universals. By embracing absolute idealist assumptions about essences, Husserl blocks the reduction of metaphysics to psychology. Given that correlation, constitution and transcendental subjectivity are all essentially governed, charges of Husserlian subjectivism motivated by unqualified claims to spirit’s ‘absolute’ status break down (Hua 4: 300–301). Of course, this defence is only available to Husserl if his proximity to Hegel’s conceptions of universality and dialectical mediation are sufficiently recognized.
By showing that consciousness’s constitutive priority does not threaten the mind-independent integrity of reality, this interpretive proposal captures a core impetus behind metaphysically constructive readings of Husserl, while assuaging a core worry stressed by epistemic readings. By showing that Husserl overcomes subjectivism by embracing commitments of an absolute idealist variety, it also demonstrates why metaphysically deflationary readings of his essentialism remain incomplete.Footnote 26 Importantly, it also has the advantage of vindicating the core insight behind the view that Husserl’s transcendental idealism is best understood as a thesis that emphasizes the foundational correlation between mind and world, and that it accords each term important constitutive import.Footnote 27
Like other thinkers in the post-Kantian tradition, Husserl builds into his view an emphasis on the primacy of (self-)consciousness. Among his idealist predecessors, in addition to Kant, Hegel stands out as an important progenitor to Husserl’s approach, given that his brand of idealism pairs an emphasis on self-consciousness with a realism about universals, and affirms the world’s mind-independent intelligibility. While Kant argues that being is not a predicate and can only be grasped through judgement, Hegel pushes this argument one step further, and maintains that universal kinds, in addition to subjective categories, presuppose self-conscious determination. He criticizes rival versions of idealism for failing to adequately integrate subjectivity into their accounts of substance (Spinoza) or the absolute (Schelling) and instead privileges a dynamic theory of intelligibility and rationality that places a primacy on the activity of spirit (PhG: ¶18, 11). While there are non-negligible differences between their respective projects, Husserl’s account of consciousness’s constitutive activity adds to Hegel’s idealism a method for intuitively demonstrating the reality of concrete universals and develops a more concrete account of Hegel’s descriptions of spirit’s self-determining intellectual activity. And while I cannot explore this link here, Husserl’s compatibility with basic tenets of Hegel’s idealism is also suggested by the expanded conception of rationality pursued in Crisis-period discussions of teleology, spirit, history, and the lifeworld, whose Hegelian resonances are often conspicuous (Moran Reference Moran, Manca, Magrì, Moran and Ferrarin2019: 16–23).Footnote 28
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