Das Ich als Form und Inhalt

Since Kant, theories of subjectivity seem to revolve around what David Carr, following Husserl, calls the paradox of subjectivity: that the I is both a subject for and an object in the world. This paper reexamines two attempts to address this problem, emerging at the intersection of Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology – Richard Hönigswald’s ‘Denkpsychologie’ and Wolfgang Cramer’s ‘Denkontologie’. Both seek to concretise transcendental subjectivity without relinquishing its unconditional claim, by conceiving the I as both principle and fact. Yet they arrive at different results. Hönigswald’s monadological account remains largely neo-Kantian in treating subjectivity as the concrete ground of the validity of judgments, whereas Cramer reinterprets the ‘I think’ as an expression of transcendent knowledge, advancing toward a transcendental ontology and speculative metaphysics of subjectivity. I conclude with a reassessment of Kant’s critical idealism as an adequate response to the paradox of subjectivity.