What stands between Aquinas’s Aristotelian intentionality and Husserl’s intentional starting point is far more than 700 years and is perhaps the start of his embrace of the Renaissance ideal, namely the cogito. The cogito is a methodic isolation of the thinking self from the world, though within the world; it is an exclusion of the world from thought. How does classical intentionality grounded in a world that cannot be reduced, that is trans-subjective, blend with the isolationist subjectivism of the thought-centric cogito?

Husserl wanted the fruits of an idealism, a humanity noble in its clarity and communion of ideas, but he also wanted the world. Idealism and its science had not gone far enough, it did not have the world; perhaps it had a mathematized res-extensa, but it did not have the phenomenological “lived-world.” To maintain the lived-world is to maintain the dependency that man has for being, the intentional other, as the world. Without a dependency, man has lost the unique union of the world and the subsequent knowledge that only arises from such a union. Again, without dependency all man has is a world of positivistic facticity, an illegitimately closed society entering barbarity.

For Aquinas, I do not as a knower constitute the world, I constitute my knowledge of the world. For Husserl, this is a naive realism, and does not lend due justice to the “I”/ego and to existential man, or explain self-knowledge. What it does give, though, is a kind of dependency. For Husserl, I constitute the world but I am dependent on that which I constitute for my knowledge. His intentionality asserts a dependency that gives man the background for which his ideas may reverberate from spirit to spirit and back, all within the noetic framework of the “I.” The world, “the surrounding world,” his life-world is the intentional other, it is that which we are dependent upon for knowledge but that which we have ultimately constituted. For Husserl, this intentionality encompasses the primacy of self-knowledge and thus does not fall prey to what he believes is a kind of näive realism: it is näive to explain self-knowledge by a dual transcendence with the other, with neither being primal. Being qua Being asserts the other as real: this is so-called näive realism.

Spirit qua spirit has the dependency of the “I” but does not fall into this näive realism because it never steps outside of the “I.” For Husserl, the intentional move outside oneself is actually to embed oneself deeper into the “I.” The spirit cannot be classified like objective being, it has replaced Being’s mysterious and participatory nature as the irreducible other, with an autonomous spirit. This is a distinction with a radical difference, and cannot lay claim to the same dependency that man and real otherness share. The “I” as spirit is the “I” transcendent to its deepest origin as an autonomous self-thinking thought. This is the transformation from Phenomenology to Transcendental idealism. Husserl has expanded the cogito to include the world but at the price of its reduction to a product of consciousness and the loss of its irreducible metaphysical otherness.

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The structure of Husserl’s lived-world (Lebenswelt) is strangely akin to Bergson’s. Henri Bergson (1859–1941) is Husserl’s exact contemporary, and as a French Jew is as broken as Husserl by Europe’s decline into barbarity. (The intellectual-philosophical similarities in interests and, to some degree, in method and conclusion, have yet to be explored in adequate depth.) Bergson’s last major published work, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), in which he describes and distinguishes the open and closed societies, can help ground an understanding of Husserl’s world of the natural attitude (custom and nomos) and that of the open world of the scientific-philosophic attitude or spirit. For Bergson, where the closed society or morality is purely social, the open is human; the rule of the closed is to love a few, excluding others, the impetus of the open is to love all; the closed is natural where the open is supernatural or mystical; the closed is static, the open is dynamic; the closed works through pressure, compulsion, or necessity, the open works through attraction or aspiration or freedom; the closed insures society’s self-preservation, the open drives human progress; the closed requires a universal acceptance of a law, the open a common imitation of a model; the closed is infra-intellectual (traditio), while the open is supra-intellectual (ratio); the characteristic feeling of the closed society is well-being/security, that of the open society is joy. Let us clarify that at first glance, for Husserl, these two societies are not opposed to each other; rather the birth of the open society, of the scientific attitude and the application of its insights, is seemingly traceable to the natural phenomenon of the closed society, the society of tradition.

The open society of reason is a breakthrough not a breakaway, a reorientation not a revolution.⁹But the question will be, even though the two societies are not opposed to one another, are they actually (in the end) existentially compatible for Husserl? Can both societies thrive simultaneously, indeed symbiotically, or will the closed society, by virtue of the autonomous structure of transcendental reason, become subsumed and/or displaced by the spirit and society of the scientific attitude? Let us ask: if Husserl is in his own way an idealist, can there be room for any other society than that of the “spirit,” that of the “I”/ego? The question of the balance between these two societies and their mutual survival in confrontation with one another is, once again paradoxically, the question of the legitimacy of Husserl’s notion of intentionality, that very notion which permits him to have a world, in contrast to the older idealisms which are mired not in subjectivity but in subjectivism.

If the autonomous spirit (the transcendental ego) is not acknowledging the same ontological dependency one encounters in a real world constituted by the real existential confrontation with real being in the world, then is the ideal of philosophy as universal science a distinction without a difference from the grand idealisms of Hegel and his followers? What was happening in Europe in 1935 if not a struggle between left-wing Hegelianism (the Bolsheviks) and right-wing Hegelianism (the Nazis)?