Dasein - Monoskop

112 PART II
ego. We know already, however, that transcendental egos have their
windows of empathy open to each other. Thus it is possible—in
principle if not in practice—that one makes just any object accessible
to oneself; by way of empathy one can adopt the viewpoint of
any transcendental ego and look—with its eyes—into its world:
It can be easily shown that, if the assumed unknown cause [viz.,
the Ding an sich] exists [¿si] at all, it must be in principle perceptible
and experienceable, if not by me, at least for other Egos
who see better and farther than I do. ... For me to be forced ...
to admit the possibility of a cause of the kind in question, I must
be able to conceive of the possibility of an ego that experiences
this very cause. But thus there would also be the possibility of
empathy .. . 422
In these passages Husserl formulates his anti-Kantianism in
terms of perception. To deal foremost with the case of perception
was a natural move for Husserl, since semantical Kantianism was
beyond his philosophical horizon. But this does not mean that the
arguments Husserl employs against (perceptual) Kantianism do not
carry over so as to apply against the semantical Kantianist: they
will also work against the idea according to which reality an sich is
principally inaccessible to us since our language shapes and distorts
it.
Husserrs first argument against Kant—namely that stating a
relativistic notion of truth implies the use of an absolute notion of
truth—would also work against the semantical view: to formulate
the semantical relativism would presuppose that language can after
ail grasp—without causing any distortion—the relation between
language and the world. Leaving aside the question of God's use
of language, on which the reductio argument would have to turn,
it is easy to formulate a semantical parallel to the third argument
as well: to say that one's language distorts reality implies the possibility
that there is a language that does not distort reality but
mirrors it faithfully. Put in transcendental-phenomenological terms,
this would have to be the language (plus the corresponding semantics)
of some other transcendental ego. But if we accept empathy in
general, we are committed to allowing for the learning of new lan-