Husserl’s Reinterpretation of Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic Through the A-Deduction

Husserl’s interpretation of Kant’s transcendental Aesthetic stands out as one of the most pivotal moments in his engagement with Kant’s philosophy. Accordingly, numerous contributions in Husserlian scholarship have examined in detail how Husserl develops his own phenomenological transcendental Aesthetic in contrast to Kant’s. However, in certain passages, Husserl also suggests that the transcendental Aesthetic presented as the first part of the Elementarlehre is not the only Aesthetic to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason. This article takes up that suggestion and argues that Husserl reinterprets Kant’s transcendental Aesthetic in light of his phenomenological appropriation of the deduction of the categories in the first edition of the Critique, the so-called “A-Deduction.” First, I examine the two “discoveries” Husserl attributes to Kant: the idea of a synthesis “structured in levels” and the phenomenological distinction between the transcendental Aesthetic and the transcendental Analytic. I argue that, for Husserl, the latter discovery is possible only on the basis of the former. Second, I show that by a synthesis structured in levels, Husserl refers to Kant’s threefold synthesis in the A-Deduction. With the help of Husserl’s marginalia in his copy of the first Critique, I then illustrate how he phenomenologically interprets the three moments of this synthesis as constitutive of the spatio-temporal form of the sensible object.