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One of the standard objections to transcendental phenomenology as it was developed by Edmund Husserl is subjectivism. As is well-known, Husserl's development from the descriptive phenomenology of the Logical Investigations and his early lectures to the transcendental idealism of the Ideas left even many of his early followers endorsing this charge. In its strongest form, this charge of subjectivism finds Husserl's methodological turn to the ego, the transcendental ego, as solipsism. On this view Husserl is inescapably entwined in the very strictures that enmeshed the Cartesian cogito. Husserl, unlike Descartes, invokes no veracious God to save his effort. No deus ex machina appears in the Husserlian philosophical drama. His transcendental phenomenology, on this view, is subjectivistic, solipsistic, and unable to satisfy its own demands for well-founded and ultimately grounded truth. Though this essay cannot fully address this substantive critique, an examination of Husserl's treatment of time contributes substantially toward an understanding of the role of the subject within transcendental phenomenology and, thereby, toward an assessment of the charge of subjectivism. Let us look first at the role of the subject in transcendental phenomenology and then turn to the theme of time.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-9446-2_4

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