The transcendentality of the humanities

Abstract

The article regards the principal aspects by which cognition in the humanities is different from that in natural sciences. If the task of transcendental philosophy is the analysis of general conditions of our experience, such status can be prescribed to all disciplines that study human as a subject. General conditions of experience determine our experience even when we make them the object of analysis. Marx’s and Manheim’s sociology of knowledge is used as an example to show that sociology of knowledge as a study of the dependence of social ideas on social interests remains inside the domain of its own laws. This fact gives us the opportunity to treat it not as an objective science, but rather as hermeneutics. Its main purpose is not to unmask other people’s ideological illusions. So­ciology of knowledge is rather a way of self-understanding, which affords us to pay at­tention to our own possible ideological bias. Structuralism and cognitive sciences as at­tempts at a scientific analysis of humans and society try to ignore the transcendental na­ture of their conclusions. If some fundamental structure underlies all our intellectual ac­tivity, it should control the perspective that structuralists take on it as well. If our self is an illusion formed by the objective neuronic dynamics, as cognitivists assert, they lose the right to reason in first person, to put goals of developing our consciousness in a par­ticular direction. As long as we study the man and society in the humanities, our knowl­edge has a transcendental status. The humanities do not study some object that is external to us. They do not give us technical knowledge or technological recipes. Their goal is to make our self-understanding deeper.