The categories of experience and the transcendental

Abstract

The article seeks to renew phenomenological categorial analysis by conceiving the phenomenon as an event that appears by itself and experience as a passive process. Against Kant, Tengelyi argues that categories designate neither ontological structures nor a priori conditions, but tendencies toward concordance that make a world possible despite contingency, divergences, and antagonisms within experience. Their necessity is the «necessity of a fact»: it depends on the contingent, yet apodictically certain, fact of the world’s existence. The author distinguishes categories of appearance, such as embodied presence, space, and time, from categories of horizon, such as causality. Through analyses of Husserl and Kant, he demonstrates their role in the intersubjective articulation of experience. Finally, he defends a phenomenological transcendentalism: it retains transcendental arguments while assigning their principles to reflective judgment rather than to an a priori determination of what can occur, thereby preserving openness to unexpected events and possible experiential conflict.