Correlativistic prejudice and Husserl’s phenomenology

According to Nicolai Hartmann, the correlativistic prejudice is the claim that a being must be a correlate of a subject, and this, he argues, is the main prejudice of Husserl’s phenomenology taken as an eidetic science of transcendental consciousness with its correlates. In contrast to Hartmann, the author of this article claims that Husserl’s conception of the noetic-noematic correlation does not lead to the correlativistic prejudice. Husserl distinguishes between two concepts of object: the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ (the pure X) and the ‛object in the How of its determinations’ (a noematic sense), and he demonstrates that the noematic ‛object simpliciter’ transcends the limit of actual noetic-noematic correlation, it is a correlate of the Idea in the Kantian sense of the term and this idea cannot be intrinsically given in its content. In the article the author shows that Husserl’s concept of the noematic ‘object simpliciter’ as a pure X is similar to Kant’s concept of transcendental object as ‛something in general = X’. In analogy to a transcendental object, noematic ‛object simpliciter’ is partially knowable and it appears to be an irrational fact in its unknowable rest. As a consequence, the ‛object simpliciter’ is something more than a correlate of consciousness and retains always its extra-noematic content. Therefore, the world is only partially correlative to the possibility of experience.