Comparison of Kant and Husserl's theories on the problem of the other

The comparison of Kant’s and Husserl’s theories of the Other turns on a decisive question: whether other consciousnesses are real beings beyond the world, or only meanings through which a subject organizes experience. Husserl improves on classical accounts by recognizing that objects refer to a plurality of consciousnesses, yet the argument concludes that his retained transcendental subject leaves the central problem unresolved. Knowledge of the Other cannot substitute for the Other’s own existence and self-knowledge.

Shared Ground and Husserl’s Advance

Husserl’s account moves beyond the idea that an object is constituted through a simple relation to a subject. An instrument or other encountered thing is already referred to an indefinite plurality of consciousnesses; the world appears as shared, with objects situated within systems of reference extending beyond any one observer. The meaning of the Other, moreover, cannot be derived from experience alone or from an analogy drawn after encountering another person. Experience is interpreted in the light of the concept of the Other.

This gives Husserl’s theory a real advantage over classical positions, but it does not settle whether that concept is a priori or whether the Other exists as a being beyond the world. The author’s criticism is that Husserl preserves a transcendental subject sharply distinct from the empirical Ego, resembling the subject in Kant’s account. The problem is therefore not simply whether empirical selves can be compared or doubted in parallel. It is whether transcendental subjects can be connected as real consciousnesses rather than treated as elements in a structure of meaning.

The Transcendental Subject and the Limits of Meaning

The argument distinguishes the empirical person encountered in experience from the transcendental subject to whom that person refers. If the Other enters the constitution of the world only as a meaning, the Other risks becoming a supplementary category: a conceptual condition that helps unify experience, but not a real being existing beyond the world. The category points toward a subject on the other side of the world, yet that reference may remain hypothetical, valid only within the world and its laws.

A further difficulty follows from Husserl’s account of being through knowledge. Even if being is measured by knowledge in general, the Other’s reality must be measured by the knowledge the Other has of himself, not by what another subject knows of him. Reaching the Other as he knows himself would require an impossible identification of one consciousness with another. Since knowledge valid within interiority can occur only in interiority, it cannot disclose the Other’s own being from the inside.

Absence and the Solipsist Challenge

Husserl recognizes that the Other, as revealed in concrete experience, is an absence: the Other is approached through empty intentions and in principle refuses full presence. Yet the comparison asks how a philosophy can offer a full intuition of an absence. If the Other remains an empty noema corresponding to an intention directed toward him, the reality securely established is the intending consciousness and its operations of unification, not an independently known Other.

Husserl maintains that the Other’s existence is as certain as the world’s, including the perceiver’s own psychophysical existence. The solipsist can grant that comparison while denying that either existence is more certain than the subject’s knowledge of it. If the world’s existence is measured by the knowledge available to one subject, the Other appears to be measured in the same way. The claim of equal certainty therefore does not, by itself, establish the Other’s reality beyond that subject’s experience.

Why Abandoning the Ego Does Not Resolve the Problem

The author recounts having once believed that rejecting Husserl’s transcendental Ego would defeat solipsism: with consciousness emptied of a privileged subject, nothing would remain to give one consciousness precedence over another. He remains convinced that the transcendental subject is unnecessary and damaging to the account, but he now rejects the proposed solution. Removing the Ego does not explain how the existence of Others is secured.

Even if consciousness outside the empirical Ego is understood as a subjectless transcendental field, affirming another person still requires the existence beyond the world of a similar field. Escape from solipsism would require showing that one’s transcendental consciousness is, in its very being, affected by the extra-mundane existence of other consciousnesses of the same kind. Because Husserl reduces being to meanings, however, the connection established between self and Other remains a connection of knowledge. On this account, Husserl cannot escape solipsism any more than Kant.