THE LEFTOVER OF GOOD SENSE: ON TRANSCENDENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE LIGHT OF THE POSTSTRUCTURALIST CRITICISM

Radically different strategies of interacting with sound common sense, found within three big philosophical discourses of the 20th century (analytic philosophy, poststructuralism, phenomenology), led nearly to the impossibility of communication between those discourses. The judgement by Deleuze concerning Kant's critical philosophy and Husserl's transcendental philosophy seems to be an example of the failed philosophical dialogue, this time between post-structuralism and (classical as well as modern) transcendentalism. Deleuze sees in transcendental philosophy the dominance of the twofold instance of the common sense; the two forms are the sensus communis (which dominated already in Kant) and the bona mens (which crystallized in the Husserlian Urdoxa). Even if one could agree that the poststructuralist reading of transcendental philosophy is likely sometimes too rash, it is still helpful. One can then see that at the center of the research-field of transcendental phenomenology a real nodal point of paradoxes remains: first of all, the so-called «paradox of human subjectivity» — the relation between the empirical and the transcendental, which seems to be paradoxical for sound human understanding. One could contrast here the goal of transcendental research, which consists in sense-building and sense-enrichment, with the poststructuralist art of the forming, inventing and production of concepts. The passion for paradoxes, the provocation of the sound human understanding as a motor of thinking (characteristic of poststructuralism) is still bound to doxa and to the common sense, although it tries to «turn it inside out». Transcendental philosophy tries rather to take a «step back» from the solidification of common sense in order to observe the sense-building in statu nascendi.