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It should perhaps be noted that although phenomenology is inherently “antirealist” andalthough Husserl came to speak of transcendental phenomenology as being a “transcendentalidealism,” Husserl’s phenomenology is not for all that a form of idealism in anycustomary sense. A number of Husserl’s early students (e.g., Roman Ingarden andmembers of the “Munich school”) reacted with dismay when Husserl began referring tothe study of transcendental, purified consciousness as a transcendental idealism, but, asHeidegger sought to point out, their realist objections were off the mark. For Husserl’s“idealism” amounts to no more than maintaining (the phraseology is Heidegger’s but theidea is Husserl’s 26 ) that one can never account properly for the being of the world merelyin terms of real relations between real entities within the world (which is to say: the beingof an entity is not itself an entity nor is it of an entitative [substantialist] nature). “If whatthe term ‘idealism’ says,” Heidegger wrote in defense of Husserl’s transcendentalism,“amounts to the understanding that Being can never be explained by entities but is alreadythat which is ‘transcendental’ for every entity, then idealism affords the only correctpossibility for a philosophical problematic. If so, Aristotle was no less an idealist thanKant.” 27 Antirealist though it unquestionably is, Husserl’s “transcendental idealism” isin no way a Berkeleyan-type psychological idealism -- a form of idealism that Husserlheld to be as philosophically absurd as the naïve realism to which it stands opposed. 28Despite Husserl’s sometimes infelicitous manner of speaking (as when in the Ideas hetalked about “the annihilation of the world”), the transcendental-phenomenological reductionis not, as Merleau-Ponty perceptively remarked, the hallmark of an idealist philosophy;it is, rather, that which, by enabling us to set aside metaphysical constructions of whateversort (realist or idealist), enables us to gain undistorted access to the most primordial phenomenonof all: our own everyday being-in-the-world. 29 The only thing that is “idealist”about the phenomenological reduction is the language Husserl oftentimes used to describeit. 30of which he was otherwise such a perceptive critic and was unable to see any meaningful alternative toit. Husserl’s critique of naturalism, one may be inclined to think, might just possibly have helped him todo so. It is in any event unfortunate that Rorty, the “neo-pragmatist,” appears to have ignored the fact thatone of the founders of American pragmatism, William James, was himself an early defender of thephenomenological notion of intentionality (and actually exerted an influence on Husserl in this regard);see for instance: Hans Linschoten, On the Way Toward a Phenomenological Psychology: The Psychologyof William James (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1968); John Wild, The Radical Empiricism ofWilliam James (New York: Anchor Books, 1970); James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Richard Stevens, James and Husserl: TheFoundations of Meaning (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974).26“Sous forme de phénoménologie, elle [la philosophie de Husserl] poursuit essentiellement desintérêts ontologiques.” Emmanuel Lévinas, Théorie de l’intuition (Paris: Alcan, 1930), 178, see also 218.27Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:Harper & Row, 1962), sec. 43a, 251, hereafter BT. In An Introduction of Metaphysics, trans. RalphManheim (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959), hereafter IM, after stating that “Appearing[being a “phenomenon”] is the very essence of being,” Heidegger says: “This punctures the emptyconstruction of Greek philosophy as a ‘realistic’ philosophy which, unlike modern subjectivism, was adoctrine of objective being. This widespread conception is based on a superficial understanding. We mustleave aside terms like ’subjective’ and ‘objective,’ ‘realistic’ and ‘idealistic.’” (BT, 101)28See Husserl’s remarks on this subject in the Preface to Gibson’s translation of Husserl’s Ideas (thisbeing a translation of Husserl’s 1930 Nachwort zu meinen Ideen).29Cf. PP, xiv: “Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, the phenomenologicalreduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ appears onlyagainst the background of the phenomenological reduction.”30For a refreshingly clear description of the reduction and Husserl’s argumentative tactic in The Ideaof Phenomenology, see Richard Cobb-Stevens, “The Beginnings of Phenomenology: Husserl and HisPredecessors,” in Richard Kearney, ed., Continental Philosophy in the 20th Century, Routledge History9