husserl
The universal, apodictically grounded and grounding science arises now as the necessarily highest function of mankind, as I said, namely as making possible mankind’s development into a personal autonomy and into an all-encompassing autonomy for mankind – the idea which represents the driving force of life for the highest stage of mankind.
CRISIS 272-3
Husserl sees in this instinctive development of monads into conscious constituters of the world a ‘universal teleology’ (eg., C 13 I, 13). Consciousness is innately and essentially directed in its striving life towards increasingly complex, stable unities in experiences. Since […] this is ultimately the function of reason, Husserl sees the development of consciousness as a grand unfolding, or working out, of reason in the world. [Husserl and the Cartasian Meditations, 153]
world
Although Husserl can occasionally speak of the world in terms of a totality of entities, the fundamental phenomenological sense of ‘world’ is that of the horizontal structure of experience without which no perceptual object can come to consciousness. And as we now know, horizons are not objects, but structures of experience without which no perceptual object can come to consciousness. The world is the ultimate horizon for any physical object: the horizon of all horizons, as it is sometimes said. We do not come by an appreciation of the world by perceiving this thing, and that thing, and many other things, and then synthesising them all together with indefinitely many other supposed and remembered things into one big thing called a ‘world’. Phenomenologically speaking, the world is not a big thing. […] The world is not ‘all that is the case’. It is the precondition for anything being the case. [HCM, 170]
transcendental intersubjectivity
No single subjectivity, whatever the nature of its conscious life, entails the existence of a real world. A real world corresponds to nothing less than a harmony within consciousness as a whole. Althought phenomenology, for obvious and necessary reasons, starts out as ‘egology’ – as the solitary explication of my (or for you, your) transcendental ego – phenomenological research leads to the conclusion that no single transcendental life is that absolute beingin reference to which all truth, sense and reality are to be explicated. This honour goes to transcendental intersubjectivity, or the community of monads: ”The intrinsically first being, the being that precedes and bears every world objectivity, is transcendental intersubjectivity’.
[NB. this passage, marked for deletion in CM: ‘Perhaps reduction to the transcendental ego only seems to entail a permanently solipsistic science; whereas the consequential elaboration of this science, in accordance with its own sense, leads over to a phenomenology of transcendental intersubjectivity and, by means of this, to a universal transcendental philosophy. As a matter of fact, we shall see that, in a certain manner, a transcendental solipsism is only a subordinate stage philosophically; though, as such, it must first be delimited for purposes of method, in order that the problems of transcendental intersubjectivity, as problems belonging to a higher level, may be correctly stated and attacked.’]
[…] Only with the dawning of the intersubjective dimension does there occur ‘a universal superaddition of sense to my primordial world, whereby the latter becomes the appearance of a determinate objective world’.
When I reflect, the ‘superaddition of sense’ has always already taken place. Even ‘my’ world is an essentially objective world, shot through with intersubjective meaning.
I said earlier that, from the objective point of view, the physical objects that were ‘real’ for a solipsistic consciousness eventually emerge as merely ‘immanent’ unities of experience. But, on Husserl’s final view, even fully real, objective physical objects remain immanent to consciousness. It is just that now they are immanent to consciousness as a whole: ‘The objective world does not, in the proper sense, transcend that sphere [of inter-monadic subjectivity] or that sphere’s own intersubjective essence, but rather inheres in it as an immanent transcendency’.