is given directly through experience.44 For Husserl, “phenomenological explication does nothing but explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philosophizing, and obviously gets solely from our experience—a sense which philosophy can uncover but never alter.”45
Husserl’s lifework is traditionally thought of as developing in three stages: first, his early philosophical work with psychologism (1887–1901); second, the development of descriptive phenomenology (1901–1913); and third, phenomenology as transcendental phenomenology (1913–1938).46 Other scholars characterize Husserl’s thought in four stages: psychologism, (1891); the critique of psychologism (1900–1901); transcendental phenomenology (1913); and the final work on the transcendental I as immersed in the everyday social reality of the life-world (1935–1938).47 Still others think of Husserl’s development in terms of two major stages: pretranscendental and transcendental.48 It is primarily the final stage of transcendental phenomenology that will be discussed in this chapter.
Phenomenology, for Husserl, is the science of the essence of consciousness.49 Husserl seeks to return philosophy to the life of the living subject and to allow the meaning of an object of experience to emerge from the manner in which the object appears to consciousness. Central to Husserlian phenomenology is the understanding of consciousness as intentional. Consciousness is, simply put, the consciousness of something: the consciousness of the experiencing subject is intentionally directed toward the object of experience. Phenomenology describes various structures of experience—perception, memory, imagination, judgment—through which meaning emerges and a world is constituted for the experiencing subject.
Throughout Ideas I, Husserl begins to carefully define a distinction between two fundamental attitudes corresponding to habits of thinking: the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. The human person is most often engaged in the world (the life world, or Lebenswelt) in what Husserl defines as the natural attitude, that is, the everyday absorption in the objects and experiences of the surrounding world. In the natural attitude, we unquestioningly find the world presenting itself “as a factually existent actuality and also accept it as it presents itself . . . as factually existing.”50 The natural attitude gives rise to the natural sciences, which set out to investigate, as Kockelmans suggests, this “objectively existing, fully explainable world that can be expressed in exact, objective laws.”51 What is taken for granted is the possibility—the mystery—of cognition.
Husserl suggests that philosophy must approach the world differently: “Instead of remaining in this attitude, we propose to alter it radically.”52 To the natural attitude, Husserl contrasts the phenomenological attitude, in which “[w]e put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude.”53 The phenomenologist parenthesizes or brackets the type of positing that underlies scientific inquiry and judgments; phenomenology refrains from judgments. The “principle of all principles” guiding Husserl’s phenomenological method is that “every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there.”54 Husserl insists on a return back to “the things themselves” as they present themselves in experience through a philosophical method constituted as a rigorous science.55
For Husserl, this return to the things themselves—that is, the return to the phenomenon itself as it is directly experienced by the consciousness—requires a first step: the exercise of the phenomenological epoché (έποχή) which “completely shuts me off from any judgment about spatiotemporal factual being.”56 The phenomenological epoché is a suspension—or bracketing—of judgments and beliefs that are derived from the surrounding world when observed through the natural attitude; it is a disconnection of the self from the natural attitude through the bracketing of everyday beliefs. What remains after the epoché, Husserl suggests, is “the acquisition of a new region of being never before delimited in its own peculiarity,”57 namely, the being of pure consciousness itself as “transcendental consciousness.”58
Here, as Moran suggests, Husserl is beginning to ground phenomenology in transcendental consciousness: “Phenomenology must explore not just the essential structures of all conscious experiences and their intentional objects, but the rootedness of these essences and objects in a transcendental realm and in the transcendental ego as their ‘absolute source.’”59 This investigation of consciousness is the hinge connecting the various stages of Husserl’s lifework. For Husserl, consciousness is the “wonder of all wonders”60—the place where truth happens, where meaning is given to experience. This region of consciousness is accessed by the experiencing subject through the practice of the phenomenological method.
The adoption of the phenomenological attitude through the epoché is the first stage of this method. Once the natural attitude is suspended in the epoché, the experiencing subject may then exercise the phenomenological (or transcendental) reduction through which the experiencing consciousness reflectively turns to the act of experiencing itself. Through the series of exclusions exercised by the epoché and the reductions, the experiencing subject reaches what finally remains as the “phenomenological residuum.”61 The phenomenological epoché and reduction, Husserl argues, “make ‘pure’ consciousness and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us.”62 The experiencing subject focuses reflectively not only on the object of perception, but also on the act of perception itself by the (subject’s own) experiencing consciousness.
The reductions, for Husserl, are the step-by-step means for the experiencing subject to return to the experiencing consciousness as the original ground of knowledge. Similar to the epoché, the reduction is a change in attitude from the everyday to the phenomenological. It is through the adoption of the phenomenological attitude and the subsequent reflection upon consciousness, Husserl argues, that the experiencing consciousness demonstrates a certain directedness: consciousness, as consciousness of something, is intentionally directed (the noesis) toward that particular something (the noema). The pure I is directed toward the intended object; the intended object is given to the pure I in the experience of consciousness. Through the eidetic reduction, the essence of the phenomenon is presented to the experiencing consciousness. As Kockelmans observes, the eidetic reduction “is the procedure through which we raise our knowledge from the level of facts to the sphere of ‘ideas.’”63 The experiencing subject moves from the instance to the essence of the phenomenon.
Through the phenomenological or transcendental reduction, the experiencing consciousness is turned toward the experiencing subject’s own transcendental subjectivity as it constitutes the experienced phenomenon. What is given, then, in the experience
