Locke and Husserl on Self, Memory and the Sources of Responsibility

This article takes Edmund Husserl’s assessment of John Locke’s philosophical project as a guiding thread for investigating both the convergences and divergences between their respective accounts of memory and the self. The article reconstructs how each author distinguishes types of temporal awareness – including retention, recollection, and implicit memory as sedimentation – and relates these to the constitution of the self. Particular attention is devoted to recollection: reading Locke’s analyses in light of Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions proves productive for clarifying how, in remembering something, we are conscious of the object as having been experienced by us in the past. The two accounts diverge on the question of what grounds personal identity and first-personal responsibility – a divergence rooted in Husserl’s distinction between questions of fact and questions of validity, which demands a transcendental reorientation of the analysis of subjectivity.