LANGUAGE, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND NORMATIVITY: HUSSERLIAN PHENOMENOLOGY AND JITENDRA NATH MOHANTY'S SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY

Phenomenology, initiated by Edmund Husserl, examines how objects, meanings, and social practices are experienced in consciousness when presuppositions are set aside. It provides a framework for understanding intentionality, embodiment, and intersubjectivity, which collectively explain how social norms and institutions emerge and persist. J. N. Mohanty, one of Husserl’s foremost interpreters, deepened this project by emphasizing the role of language and intersubjective recognition in sustaining social life. For Mohanty, laws, offices, and promises are not arbitrary conventions but ideal structures that guide action while remaining open to critique. He further broadened phenomenological inquiry by engaging with Indian philosophy, particularly the Nyāya emphasis on testimony as a source of knowledge and the Advaita Vedānta view of consciousness as foundational. This intercultural dialogue highlights the universality of phenomenological concerns while sitting them in diverse conceptual vocabularies. The present study reconstructs Husserl’s account of the constitution of the social world, traces Mohanty’s original contributions, and evaluates their combined significance. It argues that together they yield a position best described as transcendental social realism: a view in which social institutions are constituted yet objective, binding yet revisable. Such a perspective avoids the extremes of naturalistic reduction and relativistic skepticism, offering both a theoretical foundation for understanding social reality and a practical framework for assessing its stability, critique, and reform.