Monadology and Intersubjectivity

Husserl’s description of the transcendental subject as a monad has been seen as problematical. For some, such as Klaus Kaehler, it involves basically “incompatible positions”—namely, those involving metaphysical and phenomenological accounts of the self. For others, for example, Karl Mertens, it flounders on the fact that, in Husserl’s account, monads remain “windowless.” For both these scholars, the fundamental problem is how monads, understood as independent existences, can come into contact. Leibniz, a metaphysician, solves this by an appeal to God. Husserl, however, if he is to remain within the phenomenological context, must rely on our individual experience. He has to show, based on this experience, how we have access to an intersubjective world and the sense of objectivity based on this. According to Mertens, Husserl cannot, within the framework he sets for himself, namely that imposed by the epoché and transcendental reduction, account for such access. At most, he positions the Other as an analogue, as a modification of oneself. The Other as other remains inaccessible. My article questions this conclusion. It claims that this objection does not take account of the view of the subject as a process. To see the subject as such is to regard it as continually proceeding from the living present, which forms its core, to the developed self that each of us is. So conceived, the subject cannot be identified with any particular stage of the process. It has its being in the process itself. It is this view, I argue, that moves us beyond the sense of the Other as an “analogue” of ourselves to one of an actually co-constituting subject, one who is co-responsible for the objective world.