Ideas I

Pure phenomenology is the science to which we are here seeking the way. We shall characterize its unique position with respect to all other sciences, and we intend to show that it is the fundamental science of philosophy. It is an essentially new science. By virtue of its distinctive character in principle, it lies far from natural thinking, and for that reason it is only in our own day that it has been pressing toward development. It calls itself a science of “phenomena.” Other sciences, long familiar, are also directed at phenomena. Thus one hears psychology described as a science of psychic “appearances” or phenomena, and natural science as a science of physical ones. Likewise, history occasionally speaks of historical phenomena, and the science of culture of cultural phenomena; and similarly for all sciences of realities.

In the last decade there has been a great deal of talk about phenomenology in German philosophy and psychology. In supposed agreement with the Logical Investigations,¹ phenomenology is taken to be a lower level of empirical psychology, a sphere of “immanent” descriptions of psychic lived experiences, descriptions which—this is how the immanence is understood—keep strictly within the bounds of inner experience. My objection to this interpretation² has, it seems, done little good; and the accompanying explanations, which sharply delineate at least some of the main points of difference, have not been understood or have been heedlessly pushed aside.note

It will be the foremost task of this first book to seek out paths by which the excessively great difficulties of penetrating into this new world can be overcome, so to speak, piece by piece. We shall start from the natural standpoint: from the world as it stands over against us, and from consciousness as it presents itself in psychological experience. We shall lay bare the presuppositions essential to that standpoint. We shall then develop a method of “phenomenological reductions.” By this method we can remove the barriers to knowledge that belong to the essence of every natural way of investigating, and turn aside the one-sided direction of regard that is proper to it, until we have finally gained the free horizon of “transcendentally” purified phenomena—and with it the field of phenomenology in our own peculiar sense.

Let us draw these preliminary outlines a little more definitely. And let us take psychology as our point of departure, as the prejudices of the time demand, but also as inner affinities in the subject matter itself require.

Psychology is an empirical science. Given the usual meaning of the word “experience,” this implies two things:

1. It is a science of facts, of matters of fact in David Hume’s sense.note

2. It is a science of realities. The “phenomena” that it deals with as psychological phenomenology are real 4 occurrences. As such, if they have actual existence, they take their place, together with the real subjects to which they belong, in the one spatiotemporal world as the omnitudo realitatis [the totality of reality].

Over against this, pure or transcendental phenomenology will be established not as a science of facts but as a science of essences (as an “eidetic” science): as a science that aims to establish exclusively “knowledge of essences” and absolutely no “facts”. The corresponding reduction, which leads over from the psychological phenomenon to the pure “essence”—or, in judging thought, from factual (“empirical”) universality to “essential” universality—is the eidetic reduction.note

Secondly, the phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be characterized as irreal. Other reductions, the specifically transcendental ones, “purify” the psychological phenomena of what lends them reality and with it a place in the real “world.” Our phenomenology is to be a doctrine of the essence not of real phenomena but of transcendentally reduced phenomena.note

What all this means in more detail will become clear only in what follows. For the time being it marks out a schematic framework for the introductory series of investigations. I consider only one remark necessary to add here. The reader will notice that above, in the two points marked, the generally customary single division of the sciences into real sciences and ideal sciences (or into empirical and a priori sciences) has been replaced by what appear to be two divisions, corresponding to the two pairs of opposites: fact and essence, real and non-real. This distinction of a twofold opposition, in place of the one between real and ideal, will receive a thorough justification later in the course of our investigations (namely, in the second book).

In the first book, however, we shall treat not only the general doctrine of the phenomenological reductions, which make transcendentally purified consciousness and its essential correlates visible and accessible to us. We also want to try to gain definite conceptions of the most general structure of this pure consciousness, and, by way of these, of the most general groups of problems, directions of investigation and methods that belong to the new science.

In the second book we then treat in detail some particularly significant groups of problems. Their systematic formulation and typical solution are the precondition for bringing real clarity to the difficult relations of phenomenology to the physical natural sciences, to psychology and to the human sciences, and on the other hand also to all the a priori sciences. The phenomenological sketches drawn up in the process also offer welcome means for considerably deepening the understanding of phenomenology gained in the first book, and for acquiring an incomparably richer knowledge of its immense spheres of problems.note

A third and concluding book is devoted to the idea of philosophy. It will awaken the insight that genuine philosophy, whose idea is to realize the idea of absolute knowledge, is rooted in pure phenomenology—and this in so serious a sense that the systematically rigorous grounding and development of this first of all philosophies is the indispensable precondition for every metaphysics and every other philosophy “that will be able to come forward as science.”note

Phenomenology is to be established here as a science of essences—as an “a priori” or, as we also say, eidetic science. It is therefore useful to let all the efforts devoted to phenomenology itself be preceded by a series of fundamental discussions of essence and the science of essences, and by a defense of the original right of knowledge of essences against naturalism.

We conclude these introductory words with a short terminological discussion. As already in the Logical Investigations 6 , I avoid as far as possible the expressions a priori and a posteriori. I do so because of the confusing unclarities and ambiguities that attach to them in general use, and also because of the disreputable philosophical doctrines entwined with them as an evil legacy of the past. They are to be used only in contexts that make them unambiguous, and only as equivalents of other terms placed alongside them, to which we have given clear and univocal meanings—especially where it is a matter of letting historical parallels resonate.

Things are perhaps not quite so bad, as regards misleading ambiguities, with the expressions idea and ideal, but on the whole bad enough, as the frequent misinterpretations of my Logical Investigations have made me painfully aware. I am also led to change my terminology by the need to keep the highly important Kantian concept of the Idea cleanly separate from the general concept of (formal or material) essence. I therefore use, as a foreign word, eidos, which is terminologically unworn, and as a German word, “Wesen” [“essence”], which is burdened with harmless, though occasionally annoying, equivocations.note

I would most gladly have eliminated the badly burdened word “real” as well, if only a suitable substitute had presented itself to me.

In general, I would further remark the following. It is not admissible to choose technical terms that fall entirely outside the framework of the historical language of philosophy. Above all, basic philosophical concepts cannot be fixed by definition through firm concepts that can be identified at any time on the basis of immediately accessible intuitions; rather, their definitive clarification and determination must as a rule be preceded by long investigations. For these reasons, combined ways of speaking are often indispensable: ways of speaking that bring together several expressions of ordinary speech used in roughly the same sense, while singling out particular ones as terms. In philosophy one cannot define as one does in mathematics. Any imitation of mathematical procedure in this respect is not only unfruitful but wrong, and has the most harmful consequences.

To every science there corresponds a domain of objects as the field of its investigations. To all its cognitions—i.e., here, correct statements—there correspond, as the primal sources of the grounding that establishes their legitimacy, certain intuitions in which objects of the domain come to self-givenness and, at least partially, to originary givenness. The giving intuition of the first, natural sphere of knowledge and of all its sciences is natural experience; and the originarily giving experience is perception, the word being understood in its ordinary sense.note

¹ No stories are being told here. In this talk of originality one neither needs to nor should think of genesis, whether psychological-causal or developmental-historical. What other sense is meant will only later be brought to reflective and scientific clarity. From the outset, however, everyone senses that the priority of empirically concrete knowledge of facts over every other kind—for example, over all mathematical-ideal knowledge—need not have a temporal sense, and is intelligible in a non-temporal one. 8 To have something real originarily given, and to “become aware” of it and perceive it in simple intuition, are one and the same. We have originary experience of physical things in “outer perception,” but no longer in memory or in anticipatory expectation. We have originary experience of ourselves and of our states of consciousness in so-called

The world is the sum total of objects of possible experience and of knowledge through experience—of objects that can be known in correct theoretical thinking on the basis of actual experiences. This is not the place to discuss what the method of the empirical sciences looks like in more detail, and how it grounds its right to go beyond the narrow framework of what is directly given in experience. Sciences of the world, and thus sciences of the natural attitude, are all the so-called natural sciences in the narrower and the wider sense: the sciences of material nature, but also those of animal beings with their psychophysical nature, and hence also physiology, psychology, etc. Likewise, all the so-callednote

Empirical sciences are “sciences of fact.” The founding cognitive acts of experiencing posit the real as individual. They posit it as existing in space and time, as something that is at this point in time, has this duration of its own, and has a content of reality that, by its essence, could just as well have been at any other point in time. They posit it, again, as something that is at this place, in this physical shape (or is given in one with something bodily of this shape); whereas the same real thing, considered according to its own essence, could just as well be at any place whatever, with any 9 shape whatever. Likewise it could change, while in fact it remains unchanged, or it could change in a different way from the way it in fact changes. Individual being of every kind is, quite generally speaking, “contingent.”

But the sense of this contingency, which is called factuality, is limited in that it is correlatively related to a necessity. This necessity does not signify the mere factual existence of a valid rule for coordinating spatiotemporal facts; it has the character of essential necessity, and thereby a relation to essential universality. When we said that every fact could be otherwise according to its own essence, we were already expressing that it belongs to the sense of everything contingent to have precisely an essence, and hence an eidos that can be grasped purely; and this eidos now stands under essential truths of various levels of universality.

At first, “essence” designated what is to be found in the very own being of an individual as its what. But every such what can be “put into the idea.” Experiencing or individual intuition can be transformed into seeing of essence (ideation)—a possibility that is itself to be understood not as an empirical possibility but as an essential one. What is seen is then the corresponding pure essence or eidos, whether it be the highest category or a particularization of it, down to full concretion.

This seeing, which gives the essence, possibly originarily gives it, can be an adequate one, such as we can easily procure for ourselves, e.g., of the essence tone. But it can also be a more or less imperfect, inadequate one, and this not only in respect of greater or lesser clarity and distinctness. It belongs to the peculiar character of certain categories of essence that the essences belonging to them can be given only “one-sidedly,” “many-sidedly” in succession, and yet never “all-sidedly.” Correlatively, then, the individual singularizations corresponding to them can be experienced and represented only in inadequate, “one-sided” empirical intuitions. This holds for every essence relating to things, and indeed for all the essential components of extension, or

For the time being it suffices to point out that even the spatial shape of the physical thing can in principle be given only in mere one-sided adumbrations. Moreover, even apart from this inadequacy, which persists continually, despite every gain, however far a series of continuous intuitions is carried, every physical property draws us into infinities of experience; every manifold of experience, however widely extended, still leaves open closer and new determinations of the thing; and so in infinitum [to infinity].note

Whatever the kind of individual intuition, whether adequate or not, it can take the turn into seeing of essence; and the latter, whether correspondingly adequate or not, has the character of a giving act. But this implies:

The essence (eidos) is a new kind of object. Just as what is given in individual or experiencing 11 intuition is an individual object, so what is given in intuition of essence is a pure essence.

What we have here is not a merely external analogy but a radical commonality. Seeing of essence, too, is precisely intuition, just as an eidetic object is precisely an object. The generalization of the correlatively connected concepts “intuition” and “object” is not an arbitrary notion but is compellingly demanded by the nature of the matters themselves.¹ Empirical intuition, specifically experience, is consciousness of an individual object. As intuiting, it “brings the object to givenness”; as perception, it brings it to originary givenness, to the consciousness of grasping the object “originarily,” in its “in-person” selfhood.note

Certainly, it lies in the peculiar character of intuition of essence that it rests on a main component of individual intuition, namely an appearing, a being-visible of something individual—though admittedly not on any grasping of it, and not on any positing of it as actuality. Certainly, as a consequence, no intuition of essence is possible without the free possibility of turning one’s regard to a “corresponding” individual and forming an exemplifying consciousness. Conversely, too, no individual intuition is possible without the free possibility of carrying out an ideation and, in it, directing one’s regard to the corresponding essences that are exemplified in what is individually visible. But this changes nothing in the fact that the two kinds of intuition are distinguished in principle; and in propositions of the kind we have just stated, only their essential relations are made known.

The eidos, the pure essence, can be exemplified intuitively in data of experience—data of perception, memory, and so on—but just as well also in data of mere phantasy. Accordingly, in order to grasp an essence itself and originarily, we can start from corresponding experiencing intuitions, but just as well also from intuitions that are not experiencing, that do not grasp existence, but are rather merely imagining.note

Suppose we produce in free phantasy any spatial shapes, melodies, social processes and the like, or feign acts 13 of experiencing, of liking or disliking, of willing and the like. Then, on that basis, through “ideation,” we can originarily see manifold pure essences, and possibly even adequately: whether the essences of spatial shape, melody, social process, etc., in general, or those of shape, melody, etc., of the particular type in question. It makes no difference here whether anything of the kind was ever given in actual experience or not. If free fiction, through whatever psychological miracles, were to lead to the imagining of data that are new in principle—e.g.,

Essentially connected with this is the following. The positing and, first of all, the intuitive grasping of essences does not imply the slightest positing of any individual existence; pure truths of essence do not contain the slightest assertion about facts. Hence from them alone not even the most trivial “truth of fact” can be inferred. All thinking and asserting about facts needs experience for its grounding (insofar as the essence of the validity of such thinking necessarily demands it). In the same way, thinking about pure essences—unmixed thinking, which does not link facts and essences—needs seeing of essence as its grounding basis.

But now the following must be noted. Judging about essences and essential states of affairs is not the same as eidetic judging in general, given the breadth we must give to the latter concept. Eidetic cognition does not in all its propositions have essences as “objects-about-which”. And, closely connected with this: intuition of essence—taken as hitherto—is a consciousness analogous to experience, to the grasping of existence, in which an essence is grasped as an object, just as an individual is in experience. But it is not the only consciousness that harbors essences within itself while excluding every positing of existence. Essences can be intuitively conscious, and in a certain way even grasped, without their becoming “objects-about-which.”

Let us start from judgments. More precisely, it is a matter of the difference between judgments about essences and 14 judgments that, in an indeterminately universal way and unmixed with positings of anything individual, do judge about the individual, but purely as a singular instance of the essences, in the mode of the in general. Thus in pure geometry we do not, as a rule, judge about the eidos straight line, angle, triangle, conic section and the like, but about straight lines and angles in general or “as such,” about individual triangles in general, conic sections in general. Such universal judgments have the character of essential universality: of pure or, as one also says, “strict,” absolutely unconditioned universality.

For simplicity’s sake we assume that we are dealing with “axioms,” with immediately evident judgments, to which, after all, all other judgments lead back through mediate grounding. Such judgments—provided that, as is here presupposed, they judge in the way indicated about individual singulars—require for their noetic grounding, i.e., for being made insightful, a certain seeing of essence, which (in a modified sense) could also be called a grasping of essence. And this seeing too, like the intuition of essence that makes objects of essences, rests on having individual singulars of the essences in view, but not on experience of them. For this too, mere phantasy representations, or rather phantasy-visibilities, suffice: what is visible is conscious as such, it “appears,” but it is not grasped as existing. If, for example,note

Conversely, every judgment about essences can be converted equivalently into an unconditionally universal judgment about singular instances of these essences as such. In this way pure judgments of essence (purely eidetic judgments), whatever logical form 15 they may have, belong together. What they have in common is that they posit no individual being, even when they judge about the individual—precisely in pure essential universality.

The following ideas evidently belong together: eidetic judging; eidetic judgment or eidetic proposition; eidetic truth (or true proposition); as the correlate of the last-named idea, the eidetic state of affairs pure and simple (as that which obtains in eidetic truth); finally, as the correlate of the first-named ideas, the eidetic state of affairs in the modified sense of what is merely supposed, in the sense of what is judged as such, which may obtain or may also not obtain.

Every eidetic particularization and singularization of an eidetically universal state of affairs is called, insofar as it is that, an essential necessity. Essential universality and essential necessity are therefore correlates. Talk of necessity, however, wavers, following the correlations that belong together: the corresponding judgments too are called necessary. But it is important to observe the distinctions and, above all, not to designate essential universality itself (as is usually done) as necessity. The consciousness of a necessity—more precisely, a judging consciousness in which a state of affairs is conscious as a particularization of an eidetic universality—is called apodictic. The judgment itself, the proposition, is called the apodictic (also apodictically “necessary”) consequence of the universal proposition to which it is related.

Very important, too, is the combination of eidetic judging about the individual in general with the positing of the existence of something individual. Essential universality is transferred to an individual posited as existing, or to an indeterminately universal sphere of individuals (which receives its thesis as existing). Every “application” of geometrical truths to cases in nature (posited as actual) belongs here. The state of affairs posited as actual is then a fact insofar as it is an individual state of affairs of actuality, 16 but it is an eidetic necessity insofar as it is a singularization of an essential universality.

One must not confuse the unrestricted universality of laws of nature with essential universality. The proposition “all physical bodies are heavy” admittedly posits no determinate thing within the whole of nature as existing. Nevertheless, it does not have the unconditioned universality of eidetically universal propositions, since, in accordance with its sense as a law of nature, it still carries with it a positing of existence—namely, that of nature itself, of spatiotemporal actuality: all physical bodies—in nature, all “actual” physical bodies—are heavy. By contrast, the proposition “all material things are extended” has eidetic validity and can be understood as purely eidetic, provided that the thesis of existence carried out on the side of the subject is excluded.

Between individual object and essence there obtains a connection (itself eidetic), according to which to every individual object there belongs a stock of essence as its essence, just as, conversely, to every essence there correspond possible individuals that would be its factual singularizations. This connection grounds a corresponding interrelation of sciences of facts and sciences of essences. There are pure sciences of essences, such as pure logic, pure mathematics, the pure theory of time, the theory of space, the theory of motion, etc. Throughout, in all their steps of thought, they are pure of positings of fact. Or, what amounts to the same, in them no experience as experience—i.e., as consciousness that grasps or posits actuality, existence—can take on the function of grounding. Where experience functions in them, 17 it does not function as experience. The geometer who draws his figures on the board thereby produces factually existing lines on the factually existing board.

So it is in all eidetic sciences. On the essential states of affairs (or eidetic axioms) to be grasped in immediate insight are grounded the mediate ones, which come to givenness in mediately insightful thinking—and indeed according to principles that are throughout immediately insightful. Every step of mediate grounding is accordingly apodictic and eidetically necessary. It thus constitutes the essence of purely eidetic science that it proceeds exclusively eidetically. From the beginning, and so in all that follows, it brings to knowledge no states of affairs other than those that have eidetic validity: those, therefore, that either can be brought immediately to originary givenness (as immediately grounded in originarily seen essences) or can be “inferred” from such “axiomatic” states of affairs by pure deduction.

Connected with this is the practical ideal of exact eidetic science, which only modern mathematics has really taught us how to realize. The ideal is to confer on every eidetic science the highest level of rationality, by reducing all mediate steps of thought to mere subsumptions under the axioms of the eidetic domain in question, assembled systematically once and for all—and, unless it is a matter from the outset of “formal” or “pure” logic itself (in the widest sense of mathesis universalis [universal mathematics]!), by drawing in, in addition, all the axioms of the latter.¹note

And connected with this, in turn, is the ideal of “mathematization”. Like the ideal just characterized, it is of great practical significance for knowledge in all the “exact” eidetic disciplines whose entire stock of knowledge (as, e.g., in geometry) is contained, with purely deductive necessity, in the universality of a few axioms. This is not the place to go into it.¹

From the foregoing it is clear that the sense of eidetic science excludes in principle any incorporation of the cognitive results of empirical sciences. The theses of actuality that occur in the immediate findings of these sciences pass, after all, through all the mediate ones. From facts, only facts ever follow.

Now, if all eidetic science is in principle independent of all science of facts, the converse holds, on the other hand, with respect to science of facts. There is no science of facts that, fully developed as a science, could be pure of eidetic cognitions and thus independent of the eidetic sciences, whether formal or material. For, first, it is self-evident that an empirical science, wherever it carries out mediate groundings of judgments, must proceed in accordance with the formal principles treated by formal logic. In general, since like every science it is directed toward objects, it must be bound by the laws that belong to the essence of objectivity in general.

Every concrete empirical objectivity, with its material essence, takes its place within a highest material genus, a “region” of empirical objects. To the pure regional essence there then corresponds a regional eidetic science or, as we can also say, a regional ontology. We assume here that in the regional essence, or in the various genera composing it, there are grounded cognitions so abundant and so ramified that, with regard to their systematic unfolding, it is worth speaking of a science at all—or of a whole complex of ontological disciplines corresponding to the individual generic components of the region. We shall be able to convince ourselves amply of how far this presupposition is in fact fulfilled.

In this way, for example, all the natural-scientific disciplines have as their counterpart the eidetic science of physical nature in general (the ontology of nature), insofar as factual nature has as its counterpart a purely graspable eidos, the “essence” nature in general, with an infinite abundance of essential states of affairs included in it. Let us form the idea of a perfectly rationalized empirical science of nature, i.e., one that has advanced so far in theorization that everything particular included in it has been traced back to its most general and most

From the standpoint of cognitive practice, too, it is to be expected from the outset that the more closely an empirical science approaches the “rational” stage, the stage of “exact,” nomological science—that is, the more fully developed the eidetic disciplines it has at its disposal as foundations, and the more it draws on them for its groundings—the more it will grow in the scope and power of its cognitive-practical achievements.

This is confirmed by the development of the rational natural sciences, the physical sciences. Their great epoch in modern times begins precisely when geometry is suddenly, and on a grand scale, made fruitful for the method of physics. Geometry had already been highly developed in antiquity (essentially in the Platonic school) as a pure eidetics. It becomes clear that it is the essence of the material thing to be res extensa [an extended thing]. It follows that geometry is the ontological discipline relating to one essential moment of such thinghood, namely spatial form. But it further becomes clear that the universal (in our terminology, regional) essence of the thing reaches much further.note

If we place ourselves inside some eidetic science, e.g., the ontology of nature, we find ourselves (and this is, after all, 21 the normal case) directed not toward essences as objects, but toward objects of the essences. In our example these objects are subordinate to the region nature. In doing so, however, we observe that “object” is a title for various formations that nonetheless belong together, e.g., “thing,” “property,” “relation,” “state of affairs,” “set,” “order,” and so on. These are obviously not on a par with one another. Rather, each of them points back to one kind of objectivity that has, so to speak, the privilege of primal objectivity, and in relation to it all the others present themselves, in a certain sense, as mere modifications. In our example this privilege naturally belongs to the thing itself, as against the thing’s property, relation, and so on.

“Category” is a word that, on the one hand, in the combination “category of a region,” points back precisely to the region in question, e.g., the region physical nature. On the other hand, it relates the particular material region in each case to the form of region in general, or, what amounts to the same thing, to the formal essence object in general and the “formal categories” belonging to it.

First, a remark that is not unimportant. Formal ontology seems at first to stand in line with the material ontologies, inasmuch as the formal essence of an object in general and the regional essences seem to play the same role on both sides. One will therefore be inclined to speak no longer simply of regions, as we have done so far, but rather of material regions, and then to add the “formal region” to them. If we adopt this way of speaking, some caution is nonetheless needed. On the one side stand material essences, and these are in a certain sense the “genuine” essences.

Let us start from formal ontology (always taken as pure logic in its full extension, up to mathesis universalis). As we know, it is the eidetic science of the object in general. In its sense, an object is anything whatever, and for it infinitely manifold truths can be established, distributed among the many disciplines of mathesis. All of them, however, lead back to a small stock of immediate or “basic” truths, which function as “axioms” in the purely logical disciplines.

Examples of logical categories, then, are concepts such as property, relative quality, state of affairs, relation, identity, equality, set (collection), number, whole and part, genus and species, and so on. But the “categories of meaning” also belong here: the basic concepts, belonging to the essence of the proposition (apophansis [statement]), of various kinds 23 of propositions, members of propositions and propositional forms. According to our definition, they belong here in view of the essential truths that connect “object-in-general” and “meaning-in-general” with one another, and connect them, moreover, in such a way that pure truths about meaning can be converted into pure truths about objects. Precisely for this reason “apophantic logic,” even when it makes assertions exclusively about meanings, nevertheless also belongs to formal ontology in the fully comprehensive sense.

We note further that by categories we can understand, on the one hand, the concepts in the sense of meanings. On the other hand, and still better, we can understand the formal essences themselves that find their expression in these meanings. In the latter sense, for example, the category state of affairs, plurality and the like signifies the formal eidos state of affairs in general, plurality in general, and so on. The equivocation is dangerous only as long as one has not learned to separate cleanly what must be separated everywhere here. On the one hand there is meaning, and that which can find expression through meaning. On the other there is, again, meaning, and the objectivity that is meant. Terminologically, one can explicitly distinguish between categorial concepts (as meanings) and categorial essences.

We now need an important distinction within the domain of objectivities in general. Within the theory of the forms of meanings, it is mirrored in the (purely “grammatical”) distinction between “syntactic forms” and “syntactic substrates” or “stuffs.” This points to a division of the formal-ontological categories into syntactic categories 24 and substrate categories, which is now to be discussed in more detail.

By syntactic objectivities we understand those that are derived from other objectivities by means of “syntactic forms”. The categories corresponding to these forms we call syntactic categories. They include, for example, the categories state of affairs, relation, quality, unity, plurality, number, order, ordinal number, and so on. We can describe the essential situation obtaining here as follows. Every object, insofar as it can be explicated and related to other objects, in short logically determined, takes on various syntactic forms. As correlates of determining thought, objectivities of a higher level are constituted: qualities and objects determined by qualities, relations between any objects whatever, pluralities of unities, members of orders, objects as bearers of determinations by ordinal number, and so on.

The following should also be noted. One also arrives at the ultimate, syntactically formless substrates from the side of the theory of the forms of meanings. Every proposition and every possible member of a proposition contains, 25 as substrates of its apophantic forms, the so-called “terms.” These can be terms in a merely relative sense, that is, they can themselves contain forms in turn (e.g., the plural form, attributions and the like). In any case, however, we come back, and necessarily, to ultimate terms, to ultimate substrates that contain in themselves nothing more of syntactic formation.¹

We now need a new group of categorial distinctions belonging to the total sphere of essences. Every essence takes its place in a graded series of essences, a graded series of generality and specificity, whether it is a materially filled essence or an empty (thus purely logical) one. Two limits that never coincide necessarily belong to this series. Descending, we arrive at the lowest specific differences or, as we also say, the eidetic singularities. Ascending through the essences of species and genera, we arrive at a highest genus. Eidetic singularities are essences that necessarily have “more universal” essences above them as their genera. Under them, however, they no longer have particularizations in relation to which they themselves would be species (proximate species, or mediate, higher genera). Likewise, the highest genus is the one that no longer has any genus above it.

In this sense, in the purely logical domain of meanings, meaning in general is a highest genus. Every determinate propositional form, every determinate form of a member of a proposition, is an eidetic singularity; proposition in general is an intermediate genus. Likewise, number in general is a highest genus; two, three and so on are its lowest differences or eidetic singularities. In the materially filled sphere, for example, thing in general, sensuous quality, spatial shape, lived experience in general are highest genera. The essential contents belonging to determinate things, determinate sensuous qualities, spatial shapes, lived experiences as such are eidetic singularities, and materially filled ones at that.

These relations of essence, designated by genus and species (not relations of classes, i.e., of sets), are such that in the 26 particular essence the more universal one is “contained,” immediately or mediately. This is meant in a definite sense, whose peculiar character can be grasped in eidetic intuition. Precisely for this reason some researchers class the relation of eidetic genus and species to eidetic particularization among the relations of “part” to “whole.” “Whole” and “part” here simply have the broadest concept of “what contains” and “what is contained,” and the eidetic relation of species is a special case of it. The eidetically singular thus implies all the universalities lying above it. These in their turn lie within one another in stages, the higher always within the lower.

The relations of generalization and specialization must be sharply distinguished from relations of an essentially different kind. These are the universalization of something materially filled into the purely logical-formal, or conversely, the materialization of something logically formal. In other words: generalization is something totally different from formalization, such as plays so large a role in mathematical analysis, for example. And specialization is something totally different from deformalization, from “filling in” a logico-mathematical empty form, or a formal truth.

Accordingly, the standing of an essence under the formal universality of a purely logical essence must not be confused with the standing of an essence under its higher genera of essence. Thus, for example, the essence triangle is subordinate to the highest genus spatial shape, and the essence red to the highest genus sensuous quality. On the other hand, red, triangle, and indeed all essences alike, homogeneous as well as heterogeneous, are subordinate to the categorial title “essence.” For all of them, however, this title by no means has the character of a genus of essence; rather, it has that character in regard to none of them. To regard “essence” as a genus of materially filled essences would be just as wrong as to misinterpret object in general (the empty something) as a genus for objects of every kind. One would then naturally take it, simply, as the one and only highest genus, the genus of all genera.

Likewise it is clear that every determinate inference, say one serving physics, is a singular instance of a determinate purely logical 27 form of inference. In the same way, every determinate proposition of physics is a singular instance of a propositional form, and so on. The pure forms, however, are not genera to which the materially filled propositions or inferences belong. They are themselves only lowest differences, namely of the purely logical genera proposition and inference. Like all similar genera, these have as their highest genus simpliciter “meaning in general.” The filling in of logical empty forms (and in mathesis universalis there is nothing but empty forms) is thus an “operation” totally different from genuine specialization down to the ultimate differentiation. This can be established everywhere. Thus, for example, the transition from space to the “Euclidean manifold” is not a generalization but a “formal” universalization.

To confirm this radical separation, one must, as in all such cases, go back to the intuition of essence. It teaches us at once that logical form-essences (e.g., the categories) do not “lie” in the materially filled singular instances in the way that universal red lies in the various nuances of red, or “color” in red or blue. It teaches us, too, that they are not “in” them at all in the proper sense. A proper “in” would have to have enough in common with a part-relation in the usual narrow sense to justify talk of being contained.

It needs no detailed discussion to point out a further distinction. The subsumption of something individual, of a this-here in general, under an essence is likewise not to be confused with the subordination of an essence to its higher species or to a genus. (Subsumption has a different character depending on whether a lowest difference or a genus is in question.)

Likewise we shall merely indicate the shifting talk of extensions, which relates in particular to the function of essences in universal judgments; this talk obviously has to be differentiated along with the differences we have discussed. Every essence that is not a lowest difference has an eidetic extension, an extension of specificities and ultimately, in any case, of eidetic singularities. Every formal essence, on the other hand, has its formal or “mathematical” extension. Further, every essence in general has its extension of individual singular instances, an ideal totality of possible thisnesses to which it can be related in eidetically universal thinking. Talk of empirical extension says more. It means the restriction to a sphere of existence by virtue of an interwoven positing of existence, which cancels pure universality. All this of course carries over from essences to concepts as meanings.

We further note the distinction between “full,” “materially filled” substrates, together with the correspondingly “full,” “materially filled” syntactic objectivities, and the empty substrates, together with the syntactic objectivities formed from them, the modifications of the empty something. This latter class is by no means itself empty or meager. It is determined as the totality of states of affairs belonging to the content of pure logic as mathesis universalis, with all the categorial objectivities out of which these are built. Thus the following all belong here: every state of affairs expressed by any syllogistic or arithmetical axiom or theorem, every form of inference, every numerical number, every formation of numbers, every function of pure analysis, every Euclidean or non-Euclidean manifold well defined within it.

If we now give preference to the class of materially filled objectivities, we arrive at ultimate materially filled substrates as the cores of all syntactic formations. To these cores belong the substrate categories. They fall under two disjoint main headings: “materially filled ultimate essence” and “this-here,” or pure, syntactically formless individual particular. The term “individual,” which suggests itself here, is unsuitable. The word also expresses indivisibility, however that is to be determined, and precisely this must not be taken into the concept; it must rather remain reserved for the special and wholly indispensable concept individual. We therefore adopt the Aristotelian expression τόδε τι [“this-here”], which, at least in its literal wording, does not include this sense.note

We have contrasted the formless ultimate essence and the this-here. We must now establish the essential connection that holds between them. It consists in the fact that every this-here has its materially filled essential content, which has the character of a substrate-essence that is formless in the sense indicated.

We need yet another fundamental distinction, that between independent and dependent objects. A categorial form, for example, is dependent insofar as it necessarily points back to a substrate whose form it is. Substrate and form depend on each other; they are essences that cannot 29 be thought “without each other.” In this broadest sense, then, the purely logical form is dependent. So, for example, is the categorial form object in relation to all object-matters, the category essence in relation to all determinate essences, and the like. Let us disregard these kinds of dependence. Let us instead relate a strict concept of dependence, or independence, to properly contentual connections, to relations of “being contained,” being one, and possibly being connected, in a more proper sense.

What especially interests us here is the situation with ultimate substrates and, more narrowly still, with materially filled substrate-essences. For them there are two possibilities: either such an essence founds, together with another, the unity of one essence, or it does not. In the former case there result relations of possibly one-sided or mutual dependence, which are to be described more closely. With regard to the eidetic and individual singular items falling under the unified essences, an apodictically necessary consequence follows. Singular items of the one essence cannot exist except as determined by essences that have at least a community of genus with the other essence.¹ For example, sensuous quality necessarily points to some difference or other of extendedness. Extendedness in turn is necessarily the extendedness of some quality that is one with it and “covers” it.

From this there now result important determinations of the formal-categorial concepts individual, concretum and abstractum. A dependent essence is called an abstractum, an absolutely independent one a concretum. A this-here whose materially filled essence is a concretum is called an individual.

If we bring the “operation” of generalization under the now extended concept of logical “modification,” we can say: the individual is the primal object required by pure logic, the logical absolute to which all logical modifications point back.

A concretum is, of course, an eidetic singularity, since species and genera are dependent in principle. (These expressions usually exclude the lowest differences.) Eidetic singularities accordingly divide into abstract and concrete ones.

Eidetic singularities contained disjointly in a concretum are necessarily heterogeneous. This follows from the formal-ontological law that two eidetic singularities of one and the same genus cannot be combined in the unity of one essence. As it is also put: lowest differences of one genus are incompatible with one another. Accordingly, every singularity included in a concretum, considered as a difference, leads to a separate system of species and genera, and hence also to separate highest genera. For example, in the unity of a phenomenal thing the determinate shape leads to the highest genus spatial shape in general, and the determinate color to visual quality in general. However, lowest differences in the concretum can also overlap instead of being disjoint. Physical properties, for example, presuppose spatial determinations and include them within themselves. In that case the highest genera are not disjoint either.

As a further consequence, the genera divide, in a characteristic and fundamental way, into those that have concreta under them and those that have abstracta under them. For convenience we speak of concrete and abstract genera, despite the double meaning that the adjectives now take on. For no one could hit on the idea of taking concrete genera themselves for concreta in the original sense. Where precision demands it, however, the cumbersome expressions genera of concreta and genera of abstracta must be used. Examples of concrete genera are real thing, visual phantom (visual shape appearing as sensuously filled), lived experience and the like. By contrast, spatial shape, visual quality and the like are examples of abstract genera.

With the concepts individual and concretum, the region, the fundamental concept of the theory of science, is also defined strictly “analytically.” A region is nothing other than the total highest generic unity belonging to a concretum. It is thus the essentially unified connection of the highest 31 genera belonging to the lowest differences within the concretum. The eidetic extension of the region comprises the ideal totality of concretely unified complexes of differences of these genera. The individual extension comprises the ideal totality of possible individuals of such concrete essences.

Every regional essence determines “synthetic” essential truths, i.e., truths that are grounded in it as this generic essence and are not mere particularizations of formal-ontological truths. In these synthetic truths, therefore, the regional concept and its regional subspecies are not freely variable. Replacing the relevant determinate terms by indeterminate ones yields no formal-logical law, as characteristically happens with all “analytic” necessities. The sum of the synthetic truths grounded in the regional essence makes up the content of the regional ontology. The total sum of the basic truths among them, the regional axioms, delimits and defines for us the sum of the regional categories.

One may wish to preserve the echoes of Kant’s critique of reason (despite considerable differences in basic conceptions, which, however, do not rule out an inner kinship). In that case one would have to understand by synthetic cognitions a priori the regional axioms, and we would have as many irreducible classes of such cognitions as there are regions. The “synthetic basic concepts” or categories would be the regional basic concepts (essentially related to the determinate region and its synthetic principles). We would then have as many distinct groups of categories as there are regions to be distinguished.note

In this scheme formal ontology stands outwardly in line with the regional (the genuinely material, “synthetic”) ontologies. Its regional concept “object” 32 determines (cf. above § 10) the formal system of axioms and thereby the sum of formal (“analytic”) categories. Herein there lies, in fact, a justification for treating them in parallel, despite all the essential differences we have stressed.

Our whole reflection has been purely logical. It moved in no “material” sphere, or, as we equivalently say, in no determinate region. It spoke universally of regions and categories, and in keeping with the sense of the definitions built one upon another, this universality was a purely logical one. The point was precisely to sketch a schema on the basis of pure logic. It forms part of the fundamental structure of all possible cognition, or of all objectivities of cognition, that issues from pure logic. According to this schema, individuals must be determinable under “synthetic principles a priori,” in accordance with concepts and laws. Equivalently, all empirical sciences must be grounded in regional ontologies belonging to them, and not merely in the pure logic common to all sciences.

At the same time, the idea of a task arises from here. Within the sphere of our individual intuitions, it is to determine the highest genera of concretions, and in this way to carry out a division of all intuitable individual being according to regions of being. Each of these regions designates an eidetic and empirical science (or group of sciences) that is distinct in principle, because distinct on the most radical grounds of essence. The radical distinction, moreover, by no means excludes interweaving and partial overlapping. Thus, for example, “material thing” and “soul” are different regions of being, and yet the latter is founded in the former. From this arises the founding of the science of the soul in the science of the living body.

The problem of a radical “classification” of the sciences is in the main the problem of separating the regions. This in turn requires, beforehand, purely logical investigations of the kind conducted here along a few lines. On the other hand, it of course also requires phenomenology, of which we so far know nothing.

At the outset we set out general discussions of essence and science of essences, as opposed to fact and science of facts. They dealt with essential foundations for our construction of the idea of a pure phenomenology (which, after all, according to the Introduction, is to become a science of essences). They also dealt with foundations for understanding its position relative to all empirical sciences, and hence also to psychology. But all determinations of principle must be understood in the right sense, and much depends on this. Let it be sharply emphasized: in them we have not lectured from a pregiven philosophical standpoint. We have not used traditional philosophical doctrines, not even universally recognized ones. Instead we have carried out some demonstrations of principle in the strictest sense, i.e., we have merely given faithful expression to differences that are given to us directly in intuition.

It is precisely in this respect that we must engage in a dispute with empiricism. We can quite well fight out this dispute within our epoché, since the points at issue here can be settled by immediate establishment. Suppose philosophy has any stock at all of foundations that are “of principle” in the genuine sense, foundations that by their essence can be grounded only through immediately giving intuition. Then the decision of a dispute concerning them is independent of all philosophical science, of possessing its idea and its supposedly grounded doctrinal content. The situation that forces this dispute upon us is that empiricism denies “ideas,” “essences,” “cognitions of essences.”

Empiricist naturalism springs, as we must acknowledge, from highly estimable motives. It is a radicalism of cognitive practice. Against all “idols,” against the powers of tradition and superstition, against crude and refined prejudices of every kind, it seeks to 35 assert the right of autonomous reason as the sole authority in questions of truth. To judge rationally or scientifically about things, however, means to be guided by the things themselves. It means going back from talk and opinions to the things themselves, questioning them in their self-givenness and setting aside all prejudices alien to them. It is only another way of expressing the very same thing, so the empiricist thinks, to say that all science must start from experience and must ground its mediate cognition in immediate experience. Thus for the empiricist genuine science and experiential science are one and the same.note

Yet everything the empiricist says here rests on misunderstandings and prejudices, however well-meant and good the motive that originally guides him. The fundamental error of the empiricist argument lies in identifying, or confusing, two demands. One is the basic demand for a return to the “things themselves.” The other is the demand that all cognition be grounded through experience. Given his understandable naturalistic restriction of the range of knowable things, the empiricist simply takes experience to be the only act that gives things themselves. But things are not simply natural things, and actuality in the ordinary sense is not simply actuality in general. And it is only to natural actuality that the originarily giving act we call experience relates. To make identifications here and treat them as supposed matters of course means to push unexamined 36 aside differences that can be given with the clearest insight.

Immediate “seeing” is the ultimate source of legitimacy for all rational assertions. This means not merely sensuous, experiential seeing, but seeing in general as originarily giving consciousness of whatever kind. It has this legitimizing function only because, and insofar as, it is originarily giving. Suppose we see an object in full clarity. Suppose that, purely on the basis of the seeing and within the limits of what is actually grasped in seeing, we have carried out explication and conceptual grasping. Suppose we then see (as a new mode of “seeing”) what the object is like. Then the faithful expressive statement has its legitimacy. When the question is why it has this legitimacy, to attach no value to “I see it” would be absurd, as we again see with insight.

So for experience we substitute the more universal “intuition,” and in doing so we reject the identification of science in general with experiential science. It is easy to see, moreover, that arguing for this identification and contesting the validity of purely eidetic thinking leads to a skepticism which, as genuine skepticism, cancels itself through absurdity.¹ One need only ask the empiricist about the source of the validity of his universal theses (e.g., “all valid thinking is grounded in experience as the only giving intuition”), and he becomes entangled in demonstrable absurdity. Direct experience, after all, gives only singular particulars and no universalities, so it does not suffice.

We shall not enter here into lengthy discussions, which would only repeat what has been said elsewhere. But at least this much should have become evident: the basic theses of empiricism would first of all require a more precise exposition, clarification and grounding, and this grounding would itself have to conform to the norms that the theses express. At the same time, however, it is also obvious that there is at least a serious suspicion here that absurdity lies hidden in this reflexive relation. And yet in the empiricist literature hardly a beginning can be found of any seriously executed attempt to create genuine clarity and scientific grounding in these respects. Here as elsewhere, scientific empirical grounding would demand the following: starting from individual cases that are theoretically strictly fixed, and proceeding to universal theses according to strict methods illuminated by insight of principle.

They start, as genuine philosophers of a standpoint and in obvious contradiction to their own principle of freedom from prejudice, from unclarified and ungrounded preconceptions. We, by contrast, take our start from what lies before all standpoints. This is the total domain of what is itself given intuitively, prior even to all theorizing thought: everything that one can immediately see and grasp. It is open to anyone who does not let prejudices blind him and keep him from taking whole classes of genuine data into consideration. If “positivism” means the absolutely prejudice-free grounding of all sciences on the “positive,” i.e., on what can be grasped originarily, then we are the genuine positivists.

Admittedly, unclarity prevails on the opposing side as well. People there do accept a pure thinking, an “a priori” thinking, and so reject the empiricist thesis. But they do not bring themselves, by reflection, to a clear consciousness that there is such a thing as pure intuiting, as a mode of givenness in which essences are originarily given as objects, just as individual realities are given in experiencing intuition. They do not recognize that every judging insight as well—in particular the insight into unconditionally universal truths—falls under the concept of giving intuition, which indeed has manifold differentiations, above all differentiations running parallel to the logical categories.¹ They do speak of evidence. But instead of bringing it, as insight, into essential relations with ordinary seeing, they speak of a “feeling of evidence,” which, as a mystical index veri [mark of truth], is supposed to lend the judgment an emotional coloring.

Particular offense has been taken, again and again, at the fact that we, as “Platonizing realists,” set up ideas or essences as objects and ascribe to them, as to other objects, actual (true) being, and also, correlatively, graspability through intuition—no differently than in the case of realities. We shall disregard here that sort of hasty reader, unfortunately very common, who foists onto the author their own concepts, quite foreign to him, and then finds it none too hard to read absurdities out of his expositions.¹ If object and the real, actuality and real actuality mean one and the same, then the conception of ideas as objects and as actualities is indeed a perverse “Platonic hypostatization.” But if, as was done in the Logical Investigations, the two are sharply separated, if object is defined as anything whatever—thus, for example,

Prejudices make one remarkably easily satisfied in theoretical matters. There can be no essences, and therefore no seeing of essence (ideation) either; so where ordinary talk contradicts this, it must be a matter of “grammatical hypostatizations,” by which one must certainly not let oneself be driven on to “metaphysical” ones. What is actually present can only be real psychic occurrences of “abstraction,” attached to real experiences or representations. Accordingly, “theories of abstraction” are now zealously constructed, and psychology, so proud of its experience, is here—as in all intentional spheres (which surely make up the principal themes of psychology)—enriched with invented phenomena, with psychological analyses that are no analyses. Ideas or essences, then, so it is said, are “concepts,” and concepts are “psychic formations,” “products of abstraction,” and as such they certainly play a large role in our thinking.

We answer: Certainly essences are “concepts”—if by concepts one understands, as the ambiguous word permits, precisely essences. Only let it be clear that talk of psychic products is then nonsense, and likewise talk of concept formation, insofar as it is meant to be understood strictly and properly. Occasionally one reads in a treatise that the series of cardinal numbers is a series of concepts, and then, a little further on: 42 concepts are formations of thought. First, then, the numbers themselves, the essences, were designated as concepts. But, we ask, are not the numbers what they are, whether we “form” them or do not form them? Certainly, I perform my counting; I form my number representations in “one and one.”

But, it will be objected, is it not true and evident after all that concepts—or, if you like, essences—such as red, house, etc., arise through abstraction from individual intuitions? And do we not construct concepts arbitrarily out of concepts already formed? So it is a matter of psychological products after all. It is, one may perhaps add, similar to the case of arbitrary fictions: the flute-playing centaur that we freely imagine is simply a formation of our representing.—We answer: Certainly “concept formation,” and likewise free fiction, takes place spontaneously, and what is spontaneously produced is, of course, a product of the mind.

Still, placing essence beside fictive consciousness might give rise to misgivings, namely with regard to the “existence” of essences. Is the essence not a fiction, as the skeptics indeed would have it? However, just as placing fiction and perception side by side under the more general concept “intuiting consciousness” does not impair the existence of objects given in perception, so the juxtaposition carried out above does not impair the “existence” of essences. Things can be perceived, remembered, and thereby be given to consciousness as “actual”; or, in modified acts, they can be given to consciousness as doubtful, as null (illusory); finally, in a quite different modification, they can be given to consciousness as “merely hovering before us,” and as hovering before us as if actual, null, and so on. The situation is quite similar with essences, and connected with this is the fact that they too, like other objects, can be meant sometimes correctly, sometimes falsely—as, for example,

In this sense the natural scientist is perfectly right to follow the “principle” that, for every assertion concerning facts of nature, one must ask for the experiences that ground it. For that is a principle; it is an assertion drawn immediately from general insight, as we can convince ourselves at any time by bringing the sense of the expressions used in the principle to perfect clarity, and the essences belonging to them to pure givenness.

De facto, the positivist rejects cognitions of essence only when he reflects “philosophically” and lets himself be deceived by the sophisms of empiricist philosophers, but not when, as a natural scientist, he thinks and grounds his claims in the normal attitude of natural science. For there he evidently lets himself be guided to a very large extent by insights into essence. As is well known, the purely mathematical disciplines—the material ones such as geometry or phoronomy, the formal (purely logical) ones such as arithmetic, analysis, etc.—are the basic means of theorizing in natural science. That these disciplines do not proceed empirically, that they are not grounded through observations and experiments on experienced figures, motions, etc., is obvious.note

Empiricism, to be sure, does not want to see this. But should one take its argument seriously—that there is so 45 little lack of grounding experiences that, on the contrary, infinities of experiences are at our disposal? In the whole experience of all generations of humankind, indeed even of preceding generations of animals, an enormous treasure of geometrical and arithmetical impressions has supposedly accumulated and been integrated in the form of habits of apprehension, and our geometrical insights now draw on this fund.—But how, then, does one know about these allegedly accumulated treasures, if no one has observed them scientifically and faithfully documented them? Since when have long-forgotten and entirely hypothetical experiences—instead of actual ones whose genuinely experiencing function and scope have been examined with the utmost care—been the grounds of a science, and of the most exact science at that?

Or should one say, as has in fact been said from other quarters, that we owe our geometrical insights to “phantasy experience,” that we carry them out as inductions from phantasy experiments? But why, runs our counter-question, does the physicist make no use of such wonderful phantasy experience? Surely because experiments in imagination would be imagined experiments, just as figures, motions, sets in phantasy are precisely not actual but imagined ones.

But the most correct course, in the face of all such interpretations, is not to argue on their ground but to point to the proper sense of mathematical assertions. To know, and to know beyond doubt, what a mathematical axiom states, we must turn not to the empiricist philosopher but to the consciousness in which, doing mathematics, we grasp the axiomatic states of affairs with full insight. If we keep purely to this intuition, there is no doubt whatever that the axioms express pure essential connections, without the slightest co-positing of facts of experience. One must not philosophize and psychologize about geometrical thinking and intuiting from outside, instead of vitally performing it and determining its immanent sense on the basis of direct analysis.

Natural scientists, then, speak skeptically about mathematics and everything eidetic, but proceed dogmatically in their eidetic methods. Fortunately for them. Natural science became great by summarily pushing aside the luxuriantly proliferating skepticism of antiquity and renouncing any attempt to overcome it. Instead of toiling over the odd puzzle questions of how knowledge of an “external” nature is possible at all, and how all the difficulties that the ancients already found in this possibility might be resolved, it preferred to toil over the question of the right method for a knowledge of nature that could actually be carried out and made as perfect as possible—knowledge in the form of exact natural science.

An unavoidable and important division must indeed be made in the realm of scientific research. On one side stand the sciences of the dogmatic attitude, turned toward the matters, unconcerned about all epistemological 47 or skeptical problems. They start from the originary givenness of their matters (and in testing their cognitions they return to it again and again), and they ask as what the matters immediately give themselves, and what can be mediately inferred on that basis for these matters and for the matters of the domain in general.

This at the same time marks the peculiar situation on account of which the theory of knowledge becomes necessary as a science of a dimension of its own. However satisfied knowledge may be that is directed purely at the matters and borne by insight, as soon as knowledge turns back reflectively upon itself, the possibility of the validity of all kinds of knowledge—including even intuitions and insights—appears beset with bewildering unclarities, with almost insoluble difficulties; and this especially in view of the transcendence that objects of knowledge claim over against knowledge. For precisely this reason there are skepticisms that assert themselves in defiance of all intuition, all experience and insight, and that, as a further consequence, can also have their effect as inhibitions in the practical conduct of science.

THE FUNDAMENTAL PHENOMENOLOGICAL CONSIDERATION.

I am conscious of a world, endlessly spread out in space, endlessly becoming and having become in time. I am conscious of it: this means, above all, that I find it immediately and intuitively before me; I experience it. Through seeing, touching, hearing, etc., in the various modes of sensuous perception, physical things in some spatial distribution or other are simply there for me, “on hand” in the literal or the figurative sense, whether or not I pay particular attention to them and occupy myself with them in contemplating, thinking, feeling, willing.

But neither is the world that is on hand for me in consciousness at every waking moment exhausted by the domain of what is intuitively co-present, clearly or obscurely, distinctly or indistinctly—the domain that forms a constant ring around the actual field of perception. Rather, it reaches, in a fixed order of being, into the unlimited. What is actually perceived, and what is more or less clearly co-present and determinate (or at least determinate to some extent), is partly pervaded, partly surrounded, by an obscurely conscious horizon of indeterminate actuality. I can send rays of the illuminating regard of attention into it, with varying success. Determining presentifications, obscure at first and then coming to life, fetch something out for me; a chain of such memories links together; the circle of determinacy widens further and further, and possibly

As it is with the world in its order of being of spatial presence, which I have been following so far, so it is with the world in its order of being in the succession of time. This world, on hand for me now and evidently in every waking now, has its temporal horizon, infinite in both directions: its known and unknown, immediately living and not living past and future. In the free activity of experiencing, which brings what is on hand to my intuition, I can pursue these connections of the actuality immediately surrounding me.

In this way I find myself in waking consciousness at all times, and without ever being able to change it, related to the one and same world, though a world that changes in its content. It is continually “on hand” for me, and I myself am a member of it. Moreover, this world is there for me not as a mere world of things, but, with the same immediacy, as a world of values, a world of goods, a practical world. Without further ado I find the things before me furnished with value-characteristics as well as with material properties: as beautiful and ugly, as pleasing and displeasing, as agreeable and disagreeable, and the like. Things stand there immediately as objects of use: the “table” with its “books,” the “drinking glass,” the “vase,” the “piano,” etc.

It is to this world, the world in which I find myself and which is at the same time my surrounding world, that the complexes of my manifoldly changing spontaneities of consciousness relate: of investigating contemplation, of explicating and bringing to concepts in description, of comparing and distinguishing, of collecting and counting, of presupposing and inferring—in short, of theorizing consciousness in its various forms and levels. Likewise the manifold acts and states of feeling and willing: liking and disliking, rejoicing and being sad, desiring and shunning, hoping and fearing, deciding and acting. All of these, together with the simple acts of the Ego in which I am conscious of the world as immediately on hand in spontaneously turning toward it and grasping it, are encompassed by the single Cartesian expression cogito [“I think”].

I continually find myself as someone who perceives, represents, thinks, feels, desires, etc.; and in doing so I find myself for the most part actually related to the actuality constantly surrounding me. For I am not always so related: not every cogito in which I live has things, people, or any objects or states of affairs of my surrounding world as its cogitatum [what is thought]. Suppose I am occupied with pure numbers and their laws: nothing of the kind is on hand in the surrounding world, this world of real actuality. The world of numbers is likewise there for me, precisely as the field of objects of arithmetical occupation; during such occupation, individual numbers or numerical formations will be at the focus of my regard, surrounded by a partly determinate, partly indeterminate arithmetical horizon. But evidently this being-there-for-me, like what is there itself, is of a different kind.

All that holds of me myself also holds, as I know, for all other human beings whom I find on hand in my surrounding world. 52 Experiencing them as human beings, I understand and accept them as Ego-subjects, as I myself am one, and as related to their natural surrounding world. But this in such a way that I apprehend their surrounding world and mine objectively as one and the same world, which merely comes to consciousness in different ways for all of us. Each has his place from which he sees the things on hand, and accordingly each has different appearances of things. Also, the actual fields of perception, of memory, etc., are different for each, quite apart from the fact that even what is intersubjectively conscious in common within them is conscious in different ways, in different modes of apprehension, degrees of clarity, and so on.

What we have presented to characterize the givenness of the natural attitude, and thereby to characterize the attitude itself, was a piece of pure description prior to all “theory.” In these investigations we keep theories—which here means preconceptions of every kind—strictly at arm’s length. Theories belong within our sphere only as facts of our surrounding world, not as actual or supposed unities of validity. But we do not now set ourselves the task of continuing the pure description and raising it to a systematically comprehensive characterization, exhausting its breadths and depths, of what is to be found in the natural attitude (let alone in all the attitudes that can be harmoniously interwoven with it). Such a task can and must be fixed—as a scientific one—and it is an extraordinarily important task, although hitherto hardly seen. Here it is not ours.

Let us bring out once more something of the greatest importance, in the following sentences: I continually find on hand, as what stands over against me, the one spatiotemporal actuality to which I myself belong, as do all other human beings found in it and related to it in the same way. Actuality—the word itself already says so—I find 53 as existing, and I accept it, as it gives itself to me, also as existing. No doubting or rejecting of data of the natural world changes anything in the general thesis of the natural attitude. “The” world is always there as actuality; at most it is, here or there, “other” than I supposed; this or that is, under the titles “illusion,” “hallucination,” and the like,

Instead of remaining in this attitude, we now propose to alter it radically. What matters now is to convince ourselves of the possibility in principle of this alteration.

The general thesis, by virtue of which the real surrounding world is continually given to consciousness not merely by way of apprehension in general but as existing “actuality,” does not of course consist in a separate act, in an articulated judgment about existence. It is, after all, something that persists throughout the whole duration of the attitude, i.e., throughout natural waking life. Whatever is perceived at any time, whatever is presentified clearly or obscurely—in short, everything of the natural world that is given to consciousness through experience and prior to all thinking—bears, in its total unity and in all its articulated salient features, the character “there,” “on hand”: a character on which an explicit (predicative) judgment of existence, in unison with it, can by essential necessity be founded.

Now we can proceed with the potential, non-explicit thesis exactly as with the explicit thesis of judgment. One such procedure, possible at any time, is, for example, the attempt at universal doubt that Descartes undertook to carry out for a quite different purpose, with the aim of bringing to light an absolutely indubitable sphere of being. We take this as our starting point here, but emphasize 54 at once that the universal attempt at doubt is to serve us only as a methodological expedient, in order to bring out certain points that can be evidently brought to light through it, as enclosed in its essence.note

The universal attempt at doubt belongs to the realm of our perfect freedom: we can attempt to doubt anything and everything, however firmly we may be convinced of it, indeed even if we are assured of it in adequate evidence.

Let us consider what lies in the essence of such an act. Whoever attempts to doubt attempts to doubt some “being,” explicated predicatively as a “That is!” “It is so!” and the like. The kind of being does not matter here. Whoever, for example, doubts whether an object whose being he does not doubt is constituted thus and so, doubts precisely its being-so-constituted. This evidently carries over from doubting to the attempt to doubt. It is further clear that we cannot doubt a being and, in the same consciousness (in the unitary form of simultaneity), confer the thesis on the substrate of this being, that is, be conscious of it with the character of the “on hand.” Expressed equivalently: we cannot doubt and hold as certain the same matter of being at the same time.

In the attempt at doubt, which attaches to a thesis—and, as we presuppose, to a certain and sustained one—the “exclusion” is carried out in and with a modification of the antithesis, namely with the “supposition” of non-being, which thus forms part of the basis of the attempt at doubt. In Descartes this predominates so much that one can say his universal attempt at doubt is really an attempt at universal negation. We disregard this here; we are not interested in every analytical component of the attempt at doubt, and therefore not in its exact and fully sufficient analysis either. We pick out only the phenomenon of “bracketing” or “exclusion,” which is evidently not bound to the phenomenon of the attempt at doubt, although it is especially easy to detach from it, but can also occur in other interweavings and no less on its own.

Naturally, one must not simply identify this consciousness with that of “merely thinking to oneself,” for example, that water nymphs are dancing a round dance; for there no exclusion of a living conviction that remains living takes place—although, on the other hand, the close kinship between the one consciousness and the other is obvious. Still less is it a matter of thinking to oneself in the sense of “assuming” or presupposing, which in the usual equivocal talk can likewise be expressed in the words: “I think to myself (I make the assumption) that it is thus and so.”

It should further be noted that nothing prevents us from speaking of bracketing also correlatively, with regard to an objectivity to be posited, of whatever region and category. In this case what is meant is that every thesis related to this objectivity is to be excluded and changed into its bracketing modification. Looked at closely, moreover, the image of bracketing fits the sphere of the object better from the outset, just as talk of putting out of action fits the sphere of the act, or of consciousness, better.

The restriction can be designated in a word.

We put out of action the general thesis belonging to the essence of the natural attitude; we put in brackets whatever it includes in the ontic respect, each and every thing: thus this whole natural world, which is continually “there for us,” “on hand,” and which will always remain there as an “actuality” for consciousness, even if it pleases us to bracket it.

If I do this, as is fully within my freedom, then I do not negate this “world,” as though I were a sophist; I do not doubt its existence, as though I were a skeptic; but I practice the “phenomenological” epoché, which completely shuts me off from any judgment about spatiotemporal existence.

Thus all the sciences related to this natural world, however firmly they stand for me, however much I admire them, however little I think of raising the slightest objection to them—these I exclude; of their validities I make 57 absolutely no use. Not a single one of the propositions belonging to them, even if they are perfectly evident, do I make my own; none is accepted by me, none gives me a foundation—so long, mark you, as it is understood in the way it presents itself in these sciences, as a truth about actualities of this world. I may accept it only after I have put it in brackets.

The epoché in question here is not to be confused with the one that positivism demands, and which, as we had to convince ourselves, positivism itself violates. It is not now a matter of excluding all the prejudices that cloud the pure impartiality of research. Nor is it a matter of constituting a “theory-free,” “metaphysics-free” science by tracing all grounding back to what is immediately found, nor of means for reaching such goals, whose value is not in question. What we demand lies along a different line. The whole world, posited in the natural attitude and actually found in experience, taken completely “free of theory,” as the world actually experienced and clearly attesting itself in the nexus of experiences, now counts for nothing with us. It is to be bracketed, unexamined but also uncontested.

We have learned to understand the sense of the phenomenological epoché, but by no means what it can accomplish. Above all, it is not clear to what extent the delimitation of the total sphere of the epoché given in the foregoing really involves a restriction of its universality. What, then, can remain, if the whole world, ourselves included, with all our cogitare, is excluded?

Since the reader already knows that the interest governing these meditations is directed toward a new eidetics, he will at first expect that the world as fact does indeed fall under the exclusion, but not the world as eidos, nor any other sphere of essence. After all, the exclusion of the world really does not mean the exclusion of, for example, the number series and the arithmetic relating to it.

However, we are not taking this path, and our goal does not lie along its line either. We can also describe that goal as gaining a new region of being, one not hitherto delimited in its own distinctive character, which, like every genuine region, is a region of individual being. What this means more precisely will be shown by the findings that follow.

We proceed at first by direct exhibition. The being to be exhibited is nothing other than what, for essential reasons, we shall designate as “pure lived experiences,” “pure consciousness” with its pure “correlates of consciousness” and, on the other hand, its “pure Ego.” We therefore start our consideration from the Ego, from consciousness, from the lived experiences that are given to us in the natural attitude.

I am—I, the actual human being, a real object like others in the natural world. I perform cogitationes, “acts of consciousness” in the broader and narrower sense, and these acts, as belonging to this human subject, are occurrences within the same natural actuality. So too are all my other lived experiences, out of whose changing stream the specific Ego-acts light up in so distinctive a way, pass over into one another, link up into syntheses, and are incessantly modified. In the widest sense, the expression consciousness (then, admittedly, less aptly) embraces all lived experiences as well. We are “in the natural attitude” even in scientific thinking, by habits that are the firmest because they have never been thrown off course; and so we take all these findings of psychological reflection as real occurrences in the world, precisely as lived experiences of animate beings.

We therefore keep our regard firmly fixed on the sphere of consciousness and study what we find immanently in it. First, still without performing the phenomenological exclusions of judgment, we subject this sphere to a systematic essential analysis, though by no means an exhaustive one. What we absolutely need is a certain general insight into the essence of consciousness in general, and quite particularly also of consciousness insofar as in it, by its very essence, “natural” actuality becomes conscious. We carry these studies as far as is necessary to achieve the insight we are aiming at, namely the insight that consciousness has in itself a being of its own which, in its absolute own essence, is not affected by the phenomenological exclusion.

Only through this insight will the “phenomenological” epoché earn its name. Its fully conscious performance will prove to be the necessary operation that makes “pure” consciousness, and subsequently the whole phenomenological region, accessible to us. Precisely by this it will become understandable why this region and the new science correlated with it had to remain unknown. In the natural attitude nothing other than the natural world can be seen. So long as the possibility of the phenomenological attitude had not been recognized, and the method for bringing the objectivities that arise with it to originary grasp had not been developed, the phenomenological world had to remain unknown, indeed scarcely suspected.

To our terminology the following should be added. Important motives grounded in the problems of the theory of knowledge justify our also designating the “pure” consciousness, of which so much will be said, as transcendental consciousness, and likewise the operation by which it is gained as the transcendental epoché. Methodically, this operation will break down into different steps of “exclusion” and “bracketing,” and so our method will take on the character of a step-by-step reduction. For this reason we shall speak, and indeed predominantly, of phenomenological reductions (or also, in unified fashion with respect to their total unity, of 60 the phenomenological reduction), and hence, from the epistemological point of view, also of transcendental reductions.

We begin with a series of considerations within which we do not trouble ourselves with any phenomenological epoché. We are directed in the natural way toward the “external world” and, without leaving the natural attitude, we perform a psychological reflection on our Ego and its lived experiencing. We immerse ourselves—just as we would if we had heard nothing of the new kind of attitude—in the essence of “consciousness of something,” in which, for example, we are conscious of the existence of material things, living bodies, human beings, of the existence of technical and literary works, and so on. We follow our general principle that every individual occurrence has its essence, which can be grasped in eidetic purity and in this purity must belong to a field of possible eidetic research.

We delimit our theme further. Its title was: consciousness, or more distinctly, lived experience of consciousness in general, in an extraordinarily broad sense whose exact delimitation, fortunately, does not matter. Something of that kind does not stand at the beginning of analyses of the sort we are carrying out here; it is a late result of great efforts. As our point of departure we take consciousness 61 in a pregnant sense that offers itself first, and which we can most simply designate by the Cartesian cogito, the “I think.” As is well known, Descartes understood it so broadly that it also embraces every “I perceive, I remember, I phantasy, I judge, feel, desire, will,” and thus all Ego-experiences that are in any way similar, in their countless flowing particular formations.

We consider the lived experiences of consciousness in the whole fullness of their concreteness, in which they appear in their concrete nexus—the stream of lived experience—and into which they close together by virtue of their own essence. It then becomes evident that every lived experience in the stream that the reflective regard is able to reach has an essence of its own that can be grasped intuitively, a “content” that can be considered in its own distinctiveness, for itself. What matters to us is to grasp this proper content of the cogitatio in its pure distinctiveness and to characterize it in general terms, thus excluding everything that does not lie in the cogitatio according to what it is in itself.

Let us start from examples. In front of me, in the half-light, lies this white paper. I see it, I touch it. This perceptual seeing and touching of the paper, as the full concrete lived experience of the paper lying here—and indeed of the paper given in precisely these qualities, appearing in precisely this relative unclarity, in this imperfect determinacy, in this orientation toward me—is a cogitatio, a lived experience of consciousness. The paper itself, with its objective properties, its extension in space, its objective position in relation to the spatial thing called my 62 living body, is not cogitatio but cogitatum, not a lived experience of perception but something perceived. Now something perceived can itself very well be a lived experience of consciousness; but it is evident that something like a material thing, for examplenote

Before we pursue this further, let us multiply the examples. In perceiving proper, as a noticing, I am turned toward the object, for example the paper; I grasp it as this being here and now. The grasping is a singling out; everything perceived has an experiential background. Around the paper lie books, pencils, an inkwell and so on, in a certain way also “perceived,” perceptually there, in the “field of intuition.” But while I was turned toward the paper, they lacked any turning toward and grasping, even a merely secondary one. They appeared and yet were not picked out, not posited for themselves.

Things are conscious not only in perception but also in memories and in presentifications resembling memory, and also in free phantasies. All this happens sometimes in “clear intuition,” sometimes without noticeable intuitiveness, in the manner of “obscure” representations; and in this they hover before us in different “characterizations,” 63 as actual, possible, fictive and so on. Of these essentially different lived experiences, evidently everything holds that we have set out about lived experiences of perception. We shall not dream of confusing the objects conscious in these kinds of consciousness (for example, the phantasied water nymphs) with the lived experiences of consciousness themselves, which are consciousness of them.

We establish something similar for any cogitationes whatever in the sense of the Cartesian sphere of examples, for all lived experiences of thinking, feeling and willing. The only difference is that, as will emerge (in the next section), the “being directed toward,” the “being turned toward,” which distinguishes actuality, does not coincide—as it does in the privileged, because simplest, examples of sensuous representations—with the singling-out attention to the objects of consciousness. Of all such lived experiences, too, it evidently holds that the actual ones are surrounded by a “halo” of non-actual ones; the stream of lived experience can never consist of sheer actualities. It is precisely the actualities which—in the widest generalization, one that must be carried beyond the circle of our examples, and in the contrast drawn with the non-actualities—determine the pregnant sense of the expression “cogito,” “I have consciousness of something,” “I perform an act of consciousness.”

A “waking Ego” we can define as one that, within its stream of lived experience, continuously performs consciousness in the specific form of the cogito. This of course does not mean that it constantly, or at all, brings these lived experiences to predicative expression, or is able to do so. There are, after all, animal Ego-subjects 64 too. But according to what was said above, it belongs to the essence of the stream of lived experience of a waking Ego that the continuously progressing chain of cogitationes is constantly surrounded by a medium of non-actuality, which is always ready to pass over into the mode of actuality, just as, conversely, actuality passes into non-actuality.

However thoroughgoing the change that the lived experiences of actual consciousness undergo through the transition into non-actuality, the modified lived experiences still have a significant community of essence with the original ones. In general, it belongs to the essence of every actual cogito to be consciousness of something. But in its own way, according to what was set out a moment ago, the modified cogitatio is likewise consciousness, and of the same thing as the corresponding unmodified one. The general essential property of consciousness is thus preserved in the modification. All lived experiences that have these essential properties in common are also called “intentional lived experiences” (acts in the widest sense of the Logical Investigations); insofar as they are consciousness of something, they are said to be “intentionally related” to this something.

It should be carefully noted that we are not speaking here of a relation between some psychological occurrence—called a lived experience—and another real existent—called an object—or of a psychological connection that would take place in objective actuality between the one and the other. Rather, we are speaking of lived experiences purely according to their essence, or of pure essences, and of what is “a priori” included, with unconditional necessity, in the essences.

That a lived experience is consciousness of something—for example, that a fiction is the fiction of a particular centaur, but also that a perception is the perception of its actual object, a judgment the judgment of its state of affairs, and so on—concerns not the fact of the lived experience in the world, specifically in its factual psychological nexus, but the pure essence grasped in ideation as pure idea. It lies in the essence of the lived experience itself not only that it is consciousness, but also what it is consciousness of, and in what determinate or indeterminate sense it is so. Accordingly, it is also included in the essence of non-actual consciousness into what kinds of actual cogitationes it can be converted through 65 the modification discussed above, which we designate as “the turning of the attending regard toward what was previously unattended.”

By lived experiences in the widest sense we understand anything and everything to be found in the stream of lived experience: thus not only the intentional lived experiences, the actual and potential cogitationes, taken in their full concreteness, but whatever really inherent moments are to be found in this stream and its concrete parts.note

For it is easy to see that not every really inherent moment in the concrete unity of an intentional lived experience itself has the fundamental character of intentionality, that is, the property of being “consciousness of something.” This applies, for example, to all sensation data, which play so great a role in perceptual intuitions of things. In the lived experience of perceiving this white paper, more precisely in the component of that perception related to the quality whiteness of the paper, we find, by a suitable turning of the regard, the sensation datum white. This white is something that belongs inseparably to the essence of the concrete perception, and belongs to it as a really inherent concrete constituent part. As presenting content for the appearing white of the paper, it is the bearer of an intentionality, but not itself a consciousness of something. Exactly the same holds of other data of lived experience, for example the so-called sensuous feelings.

Without being able here to go more deeply into a descriptive essential analysis of intentional lived experiences, we single out some moments that must be borne in mind for what follows. If an intentional lived experience is actual, that is, performed in the manner of the cogito, then in it the subject “directs” itself toward the intentional object. To the cogito itself there belongs a “regard-toward” the object, immanent to the cogito, which on the other hand springs forth from the “Ego,” and the Ego therefore can never be absent. This Ego-regard toward something is, according to the act, a perceiving regard in perception, a fictioning regard in fiction, a liking regard in liking, a willing regard in willing, and so on.

In acts of the kind that valuing acts are, we thus have an intentional object in a twofold sense: we must distinguish between the mere thing and the full intentional object, and correspondingly a twofold intentio, a double being-turned-toward. If, in 67 an act of valuing, we are directed toward a thing, the direction toward the thing is an attending to it, a grasping of it; but we are also “directed” toward the value—only not in the grasping manner. Not only the representing of the thing but also the valuing of the thing, which encompasses that representing, has the mode of actuality.

But we must add at once that matters are this simple only in the simple acts of valuing. In general, acts of feeling and will are founded at a higher level, and accordingly the intentional objectivity is multiplied too, as are the ways in which the objects included in the unified total objectivity are turned toward. In any case, however, what the following main proposition states holds good:

In every act a mode of attentiveness holds sway. But wherever it is not a simple consciousness of a thing, wherever a further consciousness, one that “takes a position” toward the thing, is founded on such a consciousness, there thing and full intentional object (for example, thing and “value”), and likewise attending and having-in-the-mental-regard, come apart. At the same time, however, it belongs to the essence of these founded acts that a modification is possible through which their full intentional objects become attended objects and, in this sense, “represented” objects; and these are then in their turn capable of serving as substrates for explications, relations, conceptual framings and predications.

We add further: living in the cogito, we are not conscious of the cogitatio itself as an intentional object; but it can become one at any time. To its essence belongs the in-principle possibility of a “reflective” turning of the regard, naturally in the form of a new cogitatio, which directs itself toward it in the manner of a simply grasping cogitatio. In other words, every cogitatio can become the object of a so-called “inner perception,” and subsequently the object of a reflective valuation, of an approval or disapproval, and so on. The same holds, in a correspondingly modified way, not only of acts that actually occur, in the sense of act-impressions, 68 but also of acts of which we are conscious “in” phantasy, “in” memory, or “in” empathy, when we understand and live through the acts of others after them. We can reflect “in” memory, empathy and so on

Here we attach the distinction between transcendent and immanent perceptions, or acts in general. We shall avoid talk of outer and inner perception, which faces serious objections. We give the following explanations.

By immanently directed acts, or, more generally, by immanently related intentional lived experiences, we understand those to whose essence it belongs that their intentional objects, if they exist at all, belong to the same stream of lived experience as they themselves. This applies, for example, wherever an act is related to an act (a cogitatio to a cogitatio) of the same Ego, or likewise an act to a sensuous feeling-datum of the same Ego, and so on. Consciousness and its object form an individual unity produced purely through lived experiences.

Transcendently directed are those intentional lived experiences for which this does not hold: for example, all acts directed toward essences, or toward intentional lived experiences of other Egos with other streams of lived experience; likewise all acts directed toward things, toward realities in general, as will yet become apparent.

In the case of an immanently directed perception, or, briefly put, an immanent perception (the so-called “inner” perception), perception and perceived essentially form an unmediated unity, that of a single concrete cogitatio. Here the perceiving harbors its object within itself in such a way that it can be separated from that object only abstractively, only as something essentially non-independent. If the perceived is an intentional lived experience, as when we reflect on a conviction that is alive at this very moment (saying, perhaps: I am convinced that —), then we have an interlocking of two intentional lived experiences, of which at least the higher is non-independent and, moreover, not merely founded in the lower but at the same time intentionally turned toward it.

This kind of really inherent “inclusion” (which is, strictly speaking, only a metaphor) is a distinguishing characteristic of immanent perception and of the position-takings founded in it; it is lacking in most other cases of the immanent relation of intentional lived experiences. This is so, for example, already with memories of memories. The remembered memory of yesterday does not belong to the present memory as a really inherent component of its concrete unity. According to its own full essence, the present memory could exist even if yesterday’s had not in truth been. The latter, however, if it really has been, necessarily belongs, together with the present memory, to the one and the same never-interrupted stream of lived experience, which continuously mediates between the two through manifold concretions of lived experience.

All the essential characterizations of lived experience and consciousness that we have gained are, for us, necessary preliminary stages for reaching the goal that constantly guides us, namely, gaining the essence of that “pure” consciousness by which the phenomenological field is to be determined. Our considerations were eidetic; but the singular instances of the essences lived experience, stream of lived experience, and so of “consciousness” in every sense, belonged to the natural world as real occurrences. For we have not, after all, abandoned the ground of the natural attitude. Individual consciousness is interwoven with the natural world in a twofold way: it is the consciousness of some human being or animal, and it is, at least in a great number 70 of its particularizations, consciousness of this world.

To gain clarity, let us seek out the ultimate source from which the general thesis of the world, which I perform in the natural attitude, draws its nourishment: the source that makes it possible for me to find, in the manner of consciousness, an existing world of things over against me, to ascribe to myself a living body in this world, and so to be able to fit myself into it. Evidently this ultimate source is sensuous experience. For our purposes, however, it suffices to consider sensuous perception, which among experiencing acts plays, in a certain good sense, the role of a primal experience, from which all other experiencing acts draw a chief part of their grounding force.

Our natural waking Ego-life is a constant perceiving, actual or non-actual. The world of things, and in it our living body, is perceptually there at all times. How, then, are consciousness itself, as a concrete being in itself, and what is conscious in it, the perceived being, as something “over against” consciousness and “in and for itself,” set apart from each other—and how can they be?

I meditate first as a naive human being. I see and grasp the thing itself in its “in-person” character. Admittedly, I am sometimes deceived, and not only regarding the perceived properties but also regarding existence itself. I fall prey to an illusion or a hallucination. The perception is then not “genuine” perception. But if it is genuine—and that means: if it can be “confirmed” in the actual nexus of experience, possibly with the help of correct empirical thinking—then the perceived thing is actual, and actually given itself in the perception, and indeed given in person. Considered merely as consciousness, and apart from the living body and the bodily organs, the perceiving then appears as something without any essence of its own, an empty looking of an empty “Ego” at the object itself, which in some remarkable way comes into contact with that Ego.

If, as a “naive human being,” deceived by sensibility, I have given in to the inclination to spin out such reflections, I now, as a “scientific human being,” recall the familiar distinction between secondary and primary qualities, according to which the specific sense qualities are supposed to be “merely subjective” and only the geometrical-physical qualities “objective.” The color of the thing, the sound of the thing, the smell and taste of the thing, and the like—however much they appear “in person” on the thing, as belonging 72 to its essence—are said not to be actual themselves, and not actual as what they appear as there, but mere signs for certain primary qualities.

The “true being” would thus be something determined throughout, and in principle, otherwise than what is given in perception as in-person actuality—which is given exclusively with sensuous determinations, among them the determinations of sense-space. The thing properly experienced gives the mere “this,” an empty x, which becomes the bearer of mathematical determinations and the associated mathematical formulas. And this x exists not in perceptual space but in an “objective” space, of which perceptual space is the mere “sign”: a Euclidean manifold of three dimensions that can be represented only symbolically.

Let us, then, accept this. Let it be, as is taught here, that what is given in person in all perception is “mere appearance,” in principle “merely subjective,” and yet no empty semblance. For what is given in perception serves, in the rigorous method of natural 73 science, for the valid determination—one that anyone can carry out and check with insight—of that transcendent being whose sign it is. The sensuous content of what is given in perception is indeed always taken to be something other than the true thing as it is in itself; but the substrate, the bearer (the empty x) of the perceived determinations, is always taken to be what is determined by the exact method in physical predicates.

What, then, with all this presupposed, belongs to the concrete really inherent composition of perception itself, as cogitatio? Not the physical thing, as goes without saying—this thoroughly transcendent thing, transcendent in relation to the whole “world of appearances.” But however much this world of appearances is called “merely subjective,” it too, with all its individual things and occurrences, does not belong to the really inherent composition of perception; it is “transcendent” in relation to perception. Let us consider this more closely. We have just now spoken of the transcendence of the thing, but only in passing. What matters now is to gain deeper insight into the way the transcendent stands in relation to the consciousness that is conscious of it, and into how this mutual relatedness, which has its riddles, is to be understood.

So let us exclude the whole of physics and the whole domain of theoretical thinking. Let us keep within the framework of simple intuition and the syntheses belonging to it, to which perception belongs. It is then evident that intuition and what is intuited, perception and perceived thing, though related to each other in their essence, are, with necessity in principle, not one and combined in a really inherent way and by essence.

Let us start from an example. Constantly seeing this table, walking around it as I do so, changing my position in space in whatever way, I continuously have consciousness of the in-person existence of this one and the same table, and indeed of the 74 same table, which in itself remains wholly unchanged. The perception of the table, however, is a constantly changing one; it is a continuity of changing perceptions. I close my eyes. My other senses are out of relation to the table. Now I have no perception of it. I open my eyes, and I have the perception again. The perception? Let us be more exact. When it returns, it is under no circumstances individually the same. Only the table is the same, conscious as identical in the synthetic consciousness that connects the new perception with the memory.

With essential necessity, to an “all-sided” consciousness of experience of the same thing, one that continuously and in unified fashion confirms itself within itself, there belongs a multiple system of continuous manifolds of appearances and adumbrations, in which all the objective moments that fall within perception with the 75 character of in-person self-givenness adumbrate themselves in determinate continuities. Every determination has its system of adumbrations; and for each of them, as for the whole thing, it holds that, for the grasping consciousness that synthetically unites memory and new perception, it stands there as the same despite an interruption in the course of the continuity of actual perception.

At the same time we now see what actually and indubitably belongs to the really inherent composition of the concrete intentional lived experiences called perceptions of things. The thing is the intentional unity, what is conscious as identical and unitary in the continuously regulated flow of the manifolds of perception passing into one another. These manifolds themselves, meanwhile, always have their determinate descriptive composition, which is essentially correlated with that unity. To every phase of perception there necessarily belongs, for example, a determinate content of color adumbrations, shape adumbrations and so on. They count among the “sensation data,” data of a region of their own with determinate genera, which within each such genus join together into concrete unities of lived experience sui generis [of their own kind] (the sensation fields). Further, in a way not to be described in more detail here, these data are animated by “apprehensions” in the concrete unity of perception, and in this animation they exercise the “presenting function,” or

It must be kept sharply in view that the sensation data which exercise the function of adumbrating color, smoothness, shape, and so on (the function of “exhibition”) are, as a matter of principle, entirely distinct from color simpliciter, smoothness simpliciter, shape simpliciter, in short from all kinds of thingly moments. The adumbration, though it bears the same name, is in principle not of the same genus as what is adumbrated. An adumbration is a lived experience. But a lived experience is possible only as a lived experience, and not as something spatial. What is adumbrated, however, is in principle possible only as something spatial (it is spatial precisely in its essence), 76 but not possible as a lived experience. In particular, it is also an absurdity to take the shape-adumbration (for instance, that of a triangle) for something spatial and possible in space. Whoever does so confuses it with the adumbrated shape, i.e. the appearing shape.

The considerations we have carried out yielded the transcendence of the thing over against its perception and, as a further consequence, over against every consciousness whatever that relates to it. This holds not merely in the sense that the thing is in fact not to be found as a really inherent component of consciousness. Rather, the whole situation is one of eidetic insight: with absolutely unconditioned universality, or necessity, a thing cannot be given as really immanent in any possible perception, in any possible consciousness whatever. A fundamentally essential difference thus emerges between being as lived experience and being as thing. As a matter of principle, it belongs to the regional essence lived experience (specifically to the regional particularization cogitatio) that it is perceivable in immanent perception. To the essence of a spatial thing, however, it belongs that it is not.

Before we pursue this contrast of immanence and transcendence somewhat further, let the following remark be inserted. If we disregard perception, we find many kinds of intentional lived experiences which by their essence exclude the really inherent immanence of their intentional objects, whatever kind of objects these may otherwise be. This holds, for example, of every presentification: of every memory, of the empathic grasping of another’s consciousness, and so on. We must not, of course, confuse this transcendence 77 with the one that occupies us here. To the thing as such, to every reality in the genuine sense that we have yet to clarify and fix, there belongs essentially and quite “in principle”¹ the incapacity to be immanently perceivable, and hence to be found at all within the nexus of lived experience. It is in this sense that the thing itself is called transcendent simpliciter.

To this contrast between immanence and transcendence there belongs, as has further emerged in our account, a difference in principle in the mode of givenness. Immanent and transcendent perception do not differ only, in general terms, in that the intentional object, which stands there with the character of the self in person, is in the one case really immanent in the perceiving and in the other not. They differ rather by a mode of givenness which, in its essential distinctness, carries over mutatis mutandis [with the necessary changes] into all the presentifying modifications of perception, into the parallel intuitions of memory and of phantasy. We perceive the thing through its adumbrating itself with respect to all the determinations that, in a given case, actually and properly fall within the perception. A lived experience does not adumbrate itself.

It is thus an error in principle to believe that perception (and, in its own way, every other kind of intuition of things) does not reach the thing itself. On this view, the thing is not given to us in itself and in its being-in-itself. To every existent, it is said, there belongs the possibility in principle of intuiting it simply, as what it is, and specifically of perceiving it in an adequate perception, one that gives the self in person without any mediation by “appearances”. God, the subject of absolutely perfect knowledge and hence also of every possible adequate perception, would naturally possess that perception of the thing in itself which is denied to us finite beings.

This view, however, is absurd. For it implies that there is no essential difference between the transcendent and the immanent; that in the postulated divine intuition a spatial thing would be a really inherent constituent, and so itself a lived experience, belonging along with the rest to the divine stream of consciousness and lived experience. People let themselves be misled by the thought that the transcendence of the thing is that of an image or a sign. The image theory is often zealously 79 combated and a sign theory substituted for it. But the one, like the other, is not only incorrect but absurd. The spatial thing that we see is, for all its transcendence, something perceived, something given to consciousness in its “in-person” character. It is not that an image or a sign is given in its stead. One must not substitute a consciousness of signs or of images for perceiving.

Between perception, on the one hand, and pictorial-symbolic or signitive-symbolic representation, on the other, there is an unbridgeable essential difference. In these kinds of representation we intuit something in the consciousness that it depicts something else or signitively indicates it. Having the one in our field of intuition, we are directed not to it but, through the medium of a founded apprehending, to the other, to what is depicted or designated. In perception there is no question of anything of the kind, any more than in simple memory or simple phantasy.

In immediately intuiting acts we intuit a “self.” No apprehensions of a higher level are built on their apprehensions; so nothing is conscious for which what is intuited could function as a “sign” or “image.” And precisely for that reason it is said to be immediately intuited as “itself.” In perception, this same self is further characterized in a peculiar way as “in person,” as against the modified character “hovering before us,” “presentified,” in memory or free phantasy.¹ One falls into absurdity if one lumps together, as is usually done, these essentially differently structured modes of representation and, correlatively, the givens that correspond to them: that is, if one confuses simple presentification with symbolization (whether pictorial or significative), and all the more simple perception with both of them.

To the perception of a thing there further belongs a certain inadequacy, and this too is an essential necessity. A thing can in principle be given only “one-sidedly.” This means not only incompletely, not only imperfectly in some arbitrary sense, but precisely what exhibition through adumbration prescribes. A thing is necessarily given in mere “modes of appearance.” In this, necessarily, a core of what is “actually exhibited” is surrounded, as far as apprehension is concerned, by a horizon of improper “co-givenness” and of more or less vague indeterminacy. And the sense of this indeterminacy is in turn prefigured by the general sense of what is perceived as a thing, in general and as such, or by the universal essence of the type of perception that we call perception of things. Indeterminacy, after all, necessarily means determinability of a firmly prescribed style.

81 of possible perceptions which, starting from any one that has been carried out, extend in infinitely many directions in a systematically, firmly regulated manner, and in each direction endlessly, always governed throughout by a unity of sense. In principle there always remains a horizon of determinable indeterminacy, however far we may advance in experience, however great the continua of actual perceptions of the same thing that we may have run through. No God can change anything about that, any more than about the fact that 1 + 2 = 3, or that any other essential truth holds.

It can already be seen, in general, that transcendent being of whatever genus, understood as being for an Ego, can come to givenness only in a manner analogous to a thing, that is, only through appearances. Otherwise it would be precisely a being that could also become immanent; but what is immanently perceivable is only immanently perceivable. Only if one commits the confusions indicated above and now cleared up can one consider it possible that one and the same thing could be given at one time through appearance, in the form of transcendent perception, and at another time through immanent perception.

But let us first carry the contrast, specifically that between thing and lived experience, through on the other side as well. The lived experience, we said, does not exhibit itself. This implies that the perception of a lived experience is a simple seeing of something that is given (or can be given) in perception as something “absolute”, and not as what is identical across modes of appearance through adumbration. Everything we have set out about the givenness of things loses its sense here, and one must bring this to complete clarity in detail. A lived experience of feeling does not adumbrate itself. If I look at it, I have something absolute; it has no sides that could exhibit themselves now in one way, now in another.

We therefore hold fast to this: while it belongs to the essence of givenness through appearances that no appearance gives the matter as something “absolute” instead of in one-sided exhibition, it belongs to the essence of immanent givenness to give precisely something absolute, which cannot exhibit and adumbrate itself in sides at all. It is also evident, after all, that the adumbrating sensation contents themselves, which belong really inherently to the lived experience of perceiving a thing, do indeed function as adumbrations of something else, but are not themselves given, in their turn, through adumbration.

Note also the following difference. A lived experience, too, is not completely perceived, and never is; in its full unity it cannot be adequately grasped. By its essence it is a flow, which we can swim after, directing our reflective regard to it, starting from the now-point, while the stretches lying behind are lost to perception. Only in the form of retention, or in the form of retrospective recollection, do we have a consciousness of what has just flowed past. And finally, my whole stream of lived experience is a unity of lived experience of which a perceptual grasp that fully “swims along” with it is in principle impossible. But this incompleteness, or “imperfection,” which belongs to the essence of the perception of lived experience, is different in principle from the one that lies in the essence of “transcendent” perception, perception by adumbrating exhibition, by something like appearance.

All the modes of givenness, and the differences between them, that we find in the sphere of perception enter into the reproductive modifications, but in a modified way. Presentifications of things presentify through exhibitions, 83 in which the adumbrations themselves, the apprehensions, and so the whole phenomena, are thoroughly reproductively modified. Of lived experiences, too, we have reproductions and acts of reproductive intuition, in the manner of presentification and of reflection within presentification. Naturally we find nothing here of reproductive adumbrations.

We now add the following contrast. To the essence of presentifications there belong gradual differences of relative clarity or obscurity. Evidently this difference in perfection, too, has nothing to do with the one relating to givenness through adumbrating appearances. A more or less clear representation does not adumbrate itself through its degree of clarity, not, that is, in the sense decisive for our terminology, according to which a spatial shape, every quality covering it, and so the whole “appearing thing as such” adumbrates itself in manifold ways, whether the representation is clear or obscure. A reproductive representation of a thing has its various possible degrees of clarity, and does so for each mode of adumbration. One sees that we are dealing with differences that lie in different dimensions.

If one immerses oneself in these situations, one also understands the following essential difference in the way lived experiences and things stand to one another with regard to their perceivability.

It belongs to the mode of being of lived experience that a regard of seeing perception can be directed quite immediately onto every actual lived experience that is alive as an originary present. This happens in the form of reflection. Reflection has the remarkable peculiarity that what it grasps perceptually is characterized in principle as something that not only is and endures within the perceiving regard, but already was before this regard turned toward it. “All lived experiences are conscious”: with regard specifically to intentional lived experiences, this means that they are not only consciousness 84 of something, and are present as such not only when they themselves are objects of a reflecting consciousness. Rather, they are already there, unreflected, as “background,” and are thus in principle ready to be perceived, in a sense at first analogous to that in which unnoticed things in our outer visual field are.

Let us carry the contrast further. We see: it is the mode of being of lived experience to be perceivable in principle in the manner of reflection. The thing, too, is perceivable in principle, and in perception it is grasped as a thing of my surrounding world. It belongs to this world even without being perceived, and so even then it is there for the Ego. But in general not in such a way that a regard of simple noticing could be directed onto it. The background field, understood as a field of what can simply be looked at, comprises, after all, only a small piece of my surrounding world.

Important consequences follow from all this. Every immanent perception necessarily guarantees the existence of its object. If reflective grasping is directed at my lived experience, then I have grasped an absolute self whose existence cannot in principle be negated; that is, the insight that it does not exist is in principle impossible. It would be an absurdity to consider it possible that a lived experience given in this way does not in truth exist.

To every stream of lived experience and every Ego as such there belongs the possibility in principle of attaining this evidence; each bears within itself the guarantee of its absolute existence as a possibility in principle. But is it not conceivable, one might ask, that an Ego had only phantasies in its stream of lived experience, that this stream consisted of nothing but fictive intuitions? Such an Ego would then find only fictions of cogitationes; given the nature of this medium of lived experience, its reflections would be exclusively reflections in imagination.—But that is an obvious absurdity. What hovers before one may be a mere figment; the hovering-before itself, the fictive consciousness, is not itself something fictive. And to its essence, as to that of every lived experience, belongs the possibility of a reflection that perceives and grasps its absolute existence.

By contrast, as we know, it belongs to the essence of the world of things that no perception in its domain, however perfect, gives something absolute. Essentially connected with this is the fact that every experience, however far-reaching, leaves open the possibility that what is given does not exist, in spite of the constant consciousness of its presence in person. It holds as an essential law that the existence of a thing is never one required as necessary by its givenness, but is always in a certain way contingent. This means: it can always happen that the further course of experience compels us to give up what had been posited with experiential right. It was, we say afterward, mere illusion, hallucination, merely a coherent dream, and the like.

So it is clear in every respect that everything that is there for me in the world of things is in principle only presumptive actuality; whereas I myself, for whom it is there (excluding whatever of “me” is to be counted as part of the world of things)—or, more precisely, my actuality of lived experience—am absolute actuality, given through an unconditioned, simply irrevocable positing.

The thesis of the world, which is a contingent one, thus stands over against the thesis of my pure Ego and Ego-life, which is a “necessary,” absolutely indubitable one. Anything thingly that is given in person can also not exist; no lived experience given in person can also not exist: that is the essential law that defines this necessity and that contingency.

Evidently, however, the necessity of being of the current actual lived experience is not for that reason a pure essential necessity, i.e. not a purely eidetic particularization of an essential law. It is the necessity of a fact, so called because an essential law is involved in the fact, and here indeed in its existence as such. 87 In the essence of a pure Ego in general and of a lived experience in general there is grounded the ideal possibility of a reflection that has the essential character of an evidently irrevocable thesis of existence.

The reflection just carried out also makes it clear that no proofs drawn from the experiential consideration of the world are conceivable that could assure us of the world’s existence with absolute certainty. The world is not doubtful in the sense that there were rational motives to be weighed against the tremendous force of concordant experiences. It is doubtful in the sense that a doubt is conceivable; and a doubt is conceivable because the possibility of non-being, as a possibility in principle, is never excluded. Any force of experience, however great, can gradually be counterbalanced and outweighed. The absolute being of lived experiences is in no way altered by this; indeed, they always remain presupposed by all of it.

With this our consideration has reached a high point. We have gained the insights we need. In the essential connections that have been disclosed to us, the most important premises are already contained for the conclusions we wish to draw concerning the detachability in principle of the entire natural world from the domain of consciousness, the sphere of being of lived experiences. In these conclusions, as we shall be able to convince ourselves, a core of Descartes’s Meditations (which were aimed at quite different goals), a core that simply never came to work itself out purely, finally comes into its own. Admittedly, some supplements, easily supplied as it happens, will still be needed afterward to reach our ultimate goals. For the time being, we draw our consequences within a framework of limited validity.

Connecting with the results of the last chapter, we undertake the following reflection. The factual course of our human experiences is such that it compels our reason to go beyond the intuitively given things (those of the Cartesian imaginatio [imagination]) 88 and to underlay them with a “physical truth.” But it could also be otherwise. Not merely in the way it would be if human development had never led, and were never to lead, beyond the prescientific stage, so that the physical world would indeed have its truth but we would know nothing of it. Nor in the sense that the physical world would be a different one, with orders of laws other than those that in fact hold. Rather, it is also conceivable that our intuitive world was the last one, behind which there was no physical world at all; that is,

But we can also go further in this direction: in the destruction, in thought, of the objectivity of things, as the correlate of the consciousness of experience, no limits hold us back. Here it must always be borne in mind that what things are (the things about which alone we make statements, about whose being or non-being, being-thus or being-otherwise alone we can dispute and rationally decide), they are as things of experience. It is experience alone that prescribes their sense to them; and indeed, since we are dealing with factual things, it is actual experience in its determinately ordered nexuses of experience.

This holds for every conceivable kind of transcendence that is to be treatable as actuality or as possibility. An object existing in itself is never one with which consciousness and the Ego of consciousness have nothing to do. The thing is a thing of the surrounding world, even the thing not seen, even the really possible thing, not experienced but experienceable, or perhaps experienceable. Experienceability never means an empty logical possibility, but a possibility motivated in the nexus of experience. This nexus itself is through and through a nexus of “motivation”¹, constantly taking in new motivations and reshaping those already formed. The motivations differ in their content of apprehension or determination: they are richer or less rich, more or less delimited or vague in content, according to whether we are dealing with things already “known” or “completely unknown,” still “undiscovered,” or,

Every hypothetical assumption of practical life and of empirical science relates to this changeable but always co-posited horizon, through which the thesis of the world receives its essential sense.

The hypothetical assumption of something real outside this world is, to be sure, “logically” possible; there is evidently no formal contradiction in it. But suppose we ask about the essential conditions of its validity, about the kind of verification required by its sense; suppose we ask about the kind of verification in general that is determined in principle by the thesis of something transcendent, however we may legitimately generalize its essence. Then we recognize that this transcendent would necessarily have to be experienceable, and not merely for an Ego conjured up as an empty logical possibility, but for some actual Ego, as a verifiable unity of its nexuses of experience.

Let us now add the results we arrived at at the end of the last chapter; let us think, that is, of the possibility of non-being that lies in the essence of every thingly transcendence. Then it becomes evident that the being of consciousness, of every stream of lived experience whatever, would indeed necessarily be modified by an annihilation of the world of things, but would not be touched in its own existence. Modified, 92 to be sure. For the annihilation of the world means, correlatively, nothing other than that in every stream of lived experience (the whole stream of an Ego’s lived experiences, taken fully, and so as endless in both directions) certain ordered nexuses of experience would be excluded, and accordingly also the nexuses of theorizing reason that orient themselves by them. But this does not imply that other lived experiences and nexuses of lived experience would be excluded.

Immanent being is therefore indubitably absolute being in the sense that in principle it nulla “re” indiget ad existendum [needs no “thing” in order to exist].note

On the other hand, the world of transcendent “res” [things] is entirely dependent on consciousness, and not on a consciousness logically conjured up, but on actual consciousness.

This has already become clear, in its most general features, from the discussion above (in the preceding section). Something transcendent is given through certain nexuses of experience. It is given directly and with increasing perfection in continua of perception that prove themselves concordant, and in certain methodical forms of thinking grounded on experience. In this way it comes, more or less mediately, to insightful and ever further progressing theoretical determination.

We see, then, that consciousness (lived experience) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, dwelling peaceably side by side and occasionally “relating” to one another or “connecting” with one another. Only what is essentially akin, what, the one 93 like the other, has an essence of its own in the same sense, can connect in the true sense and form a whole. Immanent or absolute being and transcendent being are, to be sure, both called “existent” and “object,” and each has its objective content of determination. But it is evident that what is called object and objective determination on either side bears the same name only according to the empty logical categories. Between consciousness and reality there yawns a veritable abyss of sense.

Thus it becomes clear that, in spite of all the talk, certainly well founded in its own sense, of a real being of the human Ego and its lived experiences of consciousness in the world, and of everything that in any way belongs to it with respect to “psychophysical” connections—that in spite of all this, consciousness, considered in its purity, must count as a self-contained nexus of being, as a nexus of absolute being, into which nothing can penetrate and out of which nothing can slip. It has no spatiotemporal outside and cannot be inside any spatiotemporal nexus; it can undergo causality from no thing and exercise causality on no thing—provided that causality has the normal sense of natural causality, as a relation of dependence between realities.

On the other hand, the whole spatiotemporal world, to which human beings and the human Ego count themselves as subordinate individual realities, is, according to its sense, mere intentional being. It is therefore a being that has the merely secondary, relative sense of a being for a consciousness. It is a being which consciousness posits in its experiences, which in principle is intuitable and determinable only as something identical in motivated manifolds of appearances—but which beyond that is a nothing.

Thus the ordinary sense of talk about being is reversed. The being that is first for us is in itself second; that is, it is what it is only in relation to the first. This is not as though a blind order of laws had brought it about that the ordo et connexio rerum [order and connection of things] must conform to the ordo et connexio idearum [order and connection of ideas]. Reality, both the reality of the single thing taken by itself and the reality of the whole world, essentially (in our strict sense) lacks 94 self-sufficiency. It is not something absolute in itself that then binds itself secondarily to something else. Rather, in the absolute sense it is nothing at all; it has no “absolute essence” whatsoever. It has the essentiality of something that in principle is only intentional, only something one is conscious of, something presented in the manner of consciousness, something appearing.note

Let us now turn our thoughts back to the first chapter, to our reflections on the phenomenological reduction. It is now clear that, in contrast to the natural theoretical attitude, whose correlate is the world, a new attitude must indeed be possible. Despite the exclusion of this psychophysical all-embracing nature, that attitude retains something—the whole field of absolute consciousness. Instead, then, of living naively in experience and theoretically investigating what is experienced, transcendent nature, we carry out the “phenomenological reduction.”

Let us make this clear in detail. In the natural attitude we simply carry out all the acts through which the world is there for us. We live naively in perceiving and experiencing, in these thetic acts in which unities of things appear to us—and not only appear, but are given in the character of the “on hand,” the “actual.” When we pursue natural science, we carry out acts of thinking ordered according to the logic of experience. In them these actualities, accepted just as they are given, are determined in thought, and in them, on the basis of such directly experienced and determined transcendences, inferences are also drawn to new ones. In the phenomenological attitude we inhibit, with universality in principle, the carrying out of all such cogitative theses; that is,

Anyone, of course, can carry out reflection and bring consciousness within their grasping regard; but that does not yet amount to phenomenological reflection, and the consciousness grasped is not yet pure consciousness. Radical considerations of the kind we have carried out are therefore necessary in order to break through to the knowledge that there is, indeed can be, anything like the field of pure consciousness at all—a field that is not a component of nature, and is so far from being one that nature is possible only as an intentional unity motivated in it by immanent connections.

We note the following here in passing, and let it be said so as not to allow misunderstandings to arise. Suppose the facticity in the given order of the course of consciousness, in its separation into individuals, and the teleology immanent in them give well-founded occasion to ask for the ground of precisely this order. Then the theological principle that might rationally be supposed cannot, for essential reasons, be assumed as a transcendence in the sense of the world; for that, as follows in advance with evidence from what we have established, would be an absurd circle. The ordering principle of the absolute must be found in the absolute itself and in purely absolute consideration.

But none of this concerns us further here. Our immediate aim is not theology but phenomenology, however much the latter may indirectly mean for the former. The fundamental considerations we have carried out served phenomenology, however, insofar as they were indispensable for opening up the absolute sphere as the field of research proper to it.

But now to the necessary supplements. We carried out the last series of our reflections chiefly with reference to the thing of sensuous imaginatio, and paid no proper attention to the physical thing, for which the sensuously appearing thing (the thing given in perception) is supposed to function as “mere appearance,” perhaps even as something “merely subjective.” However, it already lies in the sense of our earlier discussions that this mere subjectivity must not (as so often happens) be confused with a subjectivity of lived experience—as if the perceived things in their perceptual qualities, and as if these qualities themselves, were lived experiences.

May we now even say, in the sense of the so widespread “realism”: what is actually perceived (and what appears in the first sense) is in its turn to be regarded as the appearance, or the instinctive substruction, of something else, something inwardly foreign to it and separate from it? And that, considered theoretically, this latter would have to count as a reality to be assumed hypothetically for the purpose of explaining the course of the lived experiences of appearance—a completely 98 unknown reality, a hidden cause of these appearances, to be characterized only indirectly and by analogy through mathematical concepts?

Already on the basis of our general expositions (which will be greatly deepened by our further analyses and will receive constant confirmation), it is clear that theories of this sort are possible only as long as one avoids seriously considering and scientifically fathoming the sense of what is given as a thing, and hence of “thing in general,” that lies in the very essence of experience—the sense that constitutes the absolute norm of all rational talk about things. Whatever violates this sense is precisely absurd in the strictest meaning of the word,¹ and that undoubtedly holds of all epistemological doctrines of the type described.

It could easily be shown, after all, that if the unknown alleged cause exists at all, it would in principle have to be perceivable and experienceable—if not for us, then for other Egos who see better and farther. This is not a matter of an empty, merely logical possibility, but of an essential possibility that is rich in content and valid with this content. It would further have to be shown that the possible perception itself would in turn, and with essential necessity, have to be a perception through appearances, and that we would thus fall into an unavoidable regressus in infinitum [infinite regress]. It would also have to be pointed out that an explanation of the processes given in perception by hypothetically assumed causal realities, by unknown thingly entities (as, for example,

We cannot enter here into a systematically exhaustive discussion of all such relations. For our purposes it suffices to bring a few main points into clear relief.

As our point of departure we take the easily verified finding that, in the method of physics, the perceived thing itself is, always and in principle, precisely the thing that the physicist investigates and scientifically determines.

This statement seems to contradict the statements made earlier,¹ in which we tried to determine more closely the sense of the physicists’ customary ways of speaking, or the sense of the traditional distinction between primary and secondary qualities. After eliminating obvious misinterpretations, we said that the “thing properly experienced” gives us the “mere this,” an “empty x,” which becomes the bearer of the exact physical determinations, which themselves do not fall within experience proper. The “physically true” being, then, is “determined in a way different in principle” from the being given “in person” in perception itself. The latter stands there with purely sensuous determinations, which are precisely not physical ones.

Nonetheless the two accounts are quite compatible, and we need not seriously dispute that interpretation of the physical conception. We need only understand it correctly. By no means may we fall into the image and sign theories, wrong in principle, which we considered earlier without special regard to the physical thing and refuted at once in radical generality.¹ An image or sign points to something lying outside it, which could be grasped “itself” by passing over into another mode of representation, that of giving intuition. A sign or image does not, in its own self, “make known” the self that is signified (or depicted). The physical thing, however, is nothing foreign to what appears sensuously and in person; it is something that makes itself known originarily in that, and indeed a priori (for essential reasons that cannot be annulled) only in that.

Only this much can be said. The thing appearing with such and such sensuous qualities under the given phenomenal circumstances is, for the physicist who has already carried out the physical determination, in general terms, for such things as a whole in connections of appearance of the relevant kind, an indication of a wealth of causal properties of this same thing. These properties, as such, make themselves known precisely in dependencies of appearance whose types are well known. What makes itself known there is obviously—precisely as making itself known in intentional unities of lived experiences of consciousness—transcendent in principle.

After all this it is clear that even the higher transcendence of the physical thing does not signify any reaching out beyond the world for consciousness, or beyond the world for every Ego functioning as a subject of knowledge (singly or in the nexus of empathy).

Indicated in general terms, the situation is this. On the ground of natural experiencing (or of the natural theses it carries out), physical thinking establishes itself. Following the motives of reason that the connections of experience offer it, this thinking is compelled to carry out certain modes of apprehension, certain intentional constructions, as rationally required, and to carry them out for the theoretical determination of the sensuously experienced things. Precisely in this way the contrast arises between the thing of simple sensuous imaginatio and the thing of physical intellectio [understanding]. And on the side of the latter arise all the ideal ontological formations of thought that 101 are expressed in the concepts of physics and draw their sense exclusively—and may draw it only—from the method of natural science.

If, then, experiential-logical reason, under the title of physics, works out an intentional correlate of a higher level—physical nature out of simply appearing nature—it is engaging in mythology to set up this insightful datum of reason as an unknown world of thing-realities in themselves, supposedly substructed hypothetically for the purpose of the causal explanation of appearances. For this datum is after all nothing but the experiential-logical determination of the nature that is given in simple intuition.

Absurdly, then, one links sensuous things and physical things by causality. In doing so, however, ordinary realism confuses the sensuous appearances—that is, the appearing objects as such (which are themselves already transcendences)—on account of their “mere subjectivity,” with the absolute lived experiences of appearing that constitute them, the lived experiences of experiencing consciousness in general. At least in this form the confusion is committed everywhere: one speaks as though objective physics were occupied with explaining the “appearances of things” not in the sense of the appearing things, but in the sense of the constituting lived experiences of experiencing consciousness.

No small influence on these misinterpretations is certainly exerted by the following circumstance. All categorial unities of thought possess a sensuous non-intuitiveness—naturally to a particularly striking degree those formed very mediately—and there is a tendency, useful in the practice of knowledge, to underlay these unities of thought with sensuous images, “models.” One gives a false interpretation both to that non-intuitiveness and to this tendency: namely, that what is sensuously non-intuitive is a symbolic representative of something hidden, which with a better intellectual organization could be brought to simple sensuous intuition; and that the models serve as intuitive schematic images of this hidden something, so that they would have a function similar to the hypothetical drawings that the paleontologist sketches of vanished worlds of living things on the basis of meager data.

However much these discussions need deepening, however keenly they may make us feel the need for a full clarification of all the relations involved, what we need for our purposes has become evident to us. In terms of principle, the transcendence of the physical thing is the transcendence of a being that constitutes itself in consciousness and is bound to consciousness; and taking mathematical natural science into account (however many particular enigmas may lie in its knowledge) changes nothing in our results.

It needs no special discussion that everything we have made clear to ourselves regarding natural objectivities as “mere things” must hold for all the axiological and practical objectivities founded in them—aesthetic objects, cultural formations, and so on. And likewise, finally, for all transcendences whatsoever that constitute themselves in consciousness.

Another extension of the bounds of our considerations is very important. We have drawn the whole of material nature into the scope of our findings: both nature as it appears sensuously and physical nature, founded in it as a higher level of knowledge. But what about the animal realities, human beings and animals? What about them with respect to their souls and psychic lived experiences? After all, the full world is not merely physical but psychophysical. To it—who can deny this?—all the streams of consciousness bound up with animate living bodies are supposed to belong. Thus, on the one hand, consciousness is supposed to be the absolute in which everything transcendent, and therefore ultimately the whole psychophysical world, constitutes itself; and, on the other hand, consciousness is supposed to be a subordinate real event within this world. How do these fit together?

Let us make clear to ourselves how consciousness can, so to speak, enter into the real world—how what is in itself absolute can give up its immanence and take on the character of transcendence. We see at once that it can do this only through a certain participation in transcendence in the first, originary sense, and that is obviously the transcendence of material nature. Only through its experiential relation to the living body does consciousness become real human and animal consciousness, and only thereby does it gain a place in the space of nature and in the time of nature—the time that is measured physically.

A peculiar kind of apprehension or experience, a peculiar kind of “apperception,” accomplishes the work of this so-called “attachment,” this realization of consciousness. Whatever this apperception may consist in, whatever particular kind of verification it may require, this much is quite obvious: consciousness itself, in these apperceptive interweavings, or in this psychophysical relation to what is bodily, loses nothing of its own essence and can take into itself nothing 104 foreign to its essence—which would indeed be absurd. Bodily being is in principle something appearing, something presenting itself through sensuous adumbrations. Consciousness apperceived as natural—the stream of lived experiences that is given as human and animal, and thus experienced in connection with bodiliness—does not, of course, through this apperception itself become something that appears through adumbration.

And yet it has become something other, a component of nature. In itself it is what it is, of absolute essence. But it is not grasped in this essence, in its flowing thisness; rather, it is “apprehended as something.” And in this peculiar apprehension a peculiar transcendence constitutes itself. There now appears a state of consciousness of an identical real Ego-subject, which makes known in it its individual real properties and which is now—as this unity of properties making themselves known in states—given to consciousness as one with the appearing living body. In the manner of appearance, the psychophysical natural unity, human being or animal, thus constitutes itself as a unity founded in the living body, corresponding to the founding of the apperception.

As with every transcending apperception, here too a twofold attitude can, as a matter of essence, be carried out. In the one, the grasping regard goes to the apperceived object, as it were through the transcending apprehension; in the other, it goes reflectively to the pure apprehending consciousness. Accordingly, in our case we have, on the one hand, the psychological attitude, in which the naturally focused regard goes to the lived experiences—for example, to a lived experience of joy—as a state of lived experience of the human being or animal.

Let us imagine that we carried out natural apperceptions, but constantly invalid ones, which allowed no concordant connections in which unities of experience could constitute themselves for us. In other words, let us imagine, in the sense of the discussions above,¹ that the whole of nature, first of all physical nature, has been “annihilated.” Then there would no longer be living bodies, and hence no human beings. I as a human being would no longer be, and still less would there be fellow human beings for me. But my consciousness, however much its stock of lived experiences might be altered, would remain an absolute stream of lived experience with its own essence. If something still remained that allowed the lived experiences to be taken as “states” of a personal Ego, in whose changes identical personal properties made themselves known, then we could dissolve these apprehensions too, discard the intentional forms that constitute them, and reduce to the pure lived experiences.

Certainly a consciousness without a living body is conceivable, and, paradoxical as it sounds, perhaps also a consciousness without a soul, a non-personal consciousness. That is, a stream of lived experience is conceivable in which the intentional unities of experience “living body,” “soul,” “empirical Ego-subject” did not constitute themselves, and in which all these concepts of experience—and thus also that of lived experience in the psychological sense (as the lived experience of a person, of an animal Ego)—would have no foothold and in any case no validity. All empirical unities, and so also psychological lived experiences, are indices of absolute connections of lived experience of a distinctive essential formation, besides which still other formations are conceivable. All are, in the same sense, transcendent, merely relative, contingent.

In a certain way, and with some caution in the use of words, one can also say: “All real unities are ‘unities of sense.’” Unities of sense presuppose (I stress again: not because we deduce this from some metaphysical postulates or other, but because we can exhibit it by an intuitive, completely indubitable procedure) sense-giving consciousness, which for its part is absolute and does not itself exist in turn through sense-giving. If one draws the concept of reality from natural realities, from the unities of possible experience, then “universe,” “all-embracing nature,” amounts indeed to the totality of realities. But to identify it with the totality of being, and thereby to absolutize it, is absurd. An absolute reality is worth exactly as much as a round square.

Anyone who objects, in the face of our discussions, that this amounts to turning the whole world into subjective illusion and throwing oneself into the arms of a “Berkeleyan idealism”—to them we can only 107 reply that they have not grasped the sense of these discussions. Nothing is taken away from the fully valid being of the world, as the totality of realities, any more than anything is taken away from the fully valid geometrical being of the square when one denies (which in this case is admittedly a plain matter of course) that it is round. Real actuality is not “reinterpreted,” let alone denied; rather, an absurd interpretation of it—one that therefore contradicts its own sense, clarified by insight—is removed. That interpretation stems from a philosophical absolutizing of the world which is utterly foreign to the natural way of regarding the world.

Finally, it should be noted that the generality with which the constitution of the natural world in absolute consciousness has been spoken of in the considerations just carried out must not give offense. The scientifically experienced reader will be able to gather from the conceptual precision of the exposition that we have not ventured philosophical notions from on high, but have concentrated, into descriptions phrased in general terms, cognitions carefully obtained on the basis of systematic fundamental work in this field. The need for more detailed discussion and for filling in the gaps left open may be keenly felt, and it ought to be. The further expositions will make considerable contributions to working out the outlines drawn so far in more concrete form.

The exclusion of nature was for us the methodological means of making it possible to turn our regard to transcendentally pure consciousness in general. Now that we have it within our seeing regard, it is still useful to consider, conversely, what in general must remain excluded for the purpose of a pure investigation of consciousness, and whether the necessary exclusion concerns only the sphere of nature. For the phenomenological science that is to be founded, this also means asking from which sciences it may draw without violating its pure sense, which sciences it may use as pregiven and which not—which, therefore, require “bracketing.” It lies in the peculiar essence of phenomenology as a science of “origins” that methodological questions of this sort, which are remote from every naive (“dogmatic”) science, must be carefully considered by it.

It is obvious, to begin with, that with the exclusion of the natural world, physical and psychophysical, all individual objectivities that constitute themselves through valuing and practical functions of consciousness are also excluded: all kinds of cultural formations, works of the technical and fine arts, of the sciences (insofar as they come into question not as unities of validity but precisely as cultural facts), aesthetic and practical values of every form. Likewise, of course, actualities of such kinds as state, custom, law, religion. With this, all natural and human sciences fall under the exclusion, with their entire stock of knowledge, precisely as sciences that require the natural attitude.

Difficulties arise at one boundary point. The human being as a natural being and as a person in a personal association, in that of “society,” is excluded; likewise every animal being. But what about the pure Ego? Has the phenomenological Ego, the Ego that finds things before it, also become a transcendental nothing through the phenomenological reduction? Let us reduce to the stream of pure consciousness. In reflection, every cogitatio that is carried out takes on the explicit form cogito. Does it lose this form when we practice transcendental reduction?

This much is clear from the outset: after carrying out this reduction, we shall nowhere come upon the pure Ego in the flow of manifold lived experiences that remains as transcendental residue—neither as one lived experience among others, nor as a genuine piece of a lived experience, arising and disappearing again with the lived experience of which it would be a piece. The Ego seems to be there constantly, indeed necessarily, and this constancy is obviously not that of a stupidly persisting lived experience, a fixed idea. Rather, it belongs to every lived experience that comes and flows away; its “regard” goes through every actual cogito to what is objective. This ray of regard changes with every cogito, shooting forth anew with each new one and disappearing with it. The Ego, however, is something identical.

In every actual cogito it lives itself out in a special sense; but all background lived experiences also belong to it, and it to them. All of them, as belonging to the one stream of lived experience that is mine, must be capable of being converted into actual cogitationes or of being immanently drawn into such. In Kant’s language: “The ‘I think’ must be able to accompany all my representations.”note

If a pure Ego remains to us as a residue of the phenomenological exclusion of the world and of the empirical subjectivity belonging to it (and then, for each stream of lived experience, one that is in principle 110 different), then with it there presents itself a peculiar—not constituted—transcendence, a transcendence in immanence. Given the immediately essential role that this transcendence plays in every cogitatio, we shall not be permitted to subject it to exclusion, even though for many investigations the questions of the pure Ego can remain in suspenso [undecided]. But we mean to count the pure Ego as a phenomenological datum only as far as its essential peculiarity, immediately and evidently ascertainable, and its being given together with pure consciousness extend. All doctrines about it that go beyond this framework, on the other hand, are to fall under the exclusion.

Once the natural world has been given up, we come upon yet another transcendence. Unlike the pure Ego, it is not given immediately at one with reduced consciousness, but comes to be known only very mediately, standing, as it were, at the opposite pole from the transcendence of the world. We mean the transcendence of God. The reduction of the natural world to the absolute of consciousness yields factual connections of lived experiences of consciousness of certain kinds, with distinctive orders of regularity. In them, as intentional correlate, a world morphologically ordered in the sphere of empirical intuition constitutes itself—that is, a world for which there can be classifying and describing sciences. This very world can at the same time, as far as its material lower level is concerned, be determined in the theoretical thinking of the mathematical natural sciences as the “appearance” of a physical nature standing under exact laws of nature.

Further: the systematic investigation of all the teleologies to be found in the empirical world itself—for example, the factual development of the series of organisms up to the human being, the growth of culture with its treasures of spirit in the development of humanity, and so on—is not settled by the natural-scientific explanations of all such formations from the given factual circumstances and according to the laws of nature. Rather, the passage into pure consciousness by the method of transcendental reduction leads necessarily to the question of the ground for the facticity, which now emerges, of the corresponding constituting consciousness.

We naturally extend the phenomenological reduction to this Absolute and “transcendent” as well. It is to remain excluded from the new field of research that is to be created, insofar as this is to be a field of pure consciousness itself.

Just as we have tried to exclude individual realities in every sense, so we now try to exclude all other kinds of “transcendences” as well. This concerns the series of “universal” objects, of essences. They too are, after all, in a certain way “transcendent” to pure consciousness: they are not to be found in it as really inherent. However, we cannot exclude transcendences without limit. Transcendental purification cannot mean the exclusion of all transcendences, since otherwise a pure consciousness would indeed remain, but no possibility of a science of pure consciousness.

Let us make this clear to ourselves. Let us try excluding the eidetic as far as possible, and hence excluding all eidetic sciences. To every regionally delimitable sphere of individual being, in the widest logical sense, there belongs an ontology: to physical nature, for example, an ontology of nature; to animality an ontology of animality. All these disciplines, whether already developed or as yet merely postulated, fall to the reduction. Over against the material ontologies stands “formal” ontology (together with the formal logic of the meanings of thought), and to it belongs the quasi-region “object in general.” If we try to exclude it too, misgivings arise that will at the same time concern the possibility of excluding the eidetic without limit.

The following train of thought forces itself upon us. To every domain of being we must, for the purposes of science, adjoin certain eidetic spheres—not exactly as fields of research, but as repositories of knowledge of essences. The researcher in the domain in question must be permitted to reach into them at any time, wherever the theoretical motives connected with the essential peculiarity of this domain suggest it to him. Above all, every researcher must surely be able to appeal freely to formal logic (or formal ontology). For whatever he investigates, it is always objects; and what holds formaliter for objects in general (for properties, states of affairs in general, and the like) is his own concern as well.

But if we consider the matter more closely, there emerges, under certain presuppositions, a possibility of putting formal logic, and with it all the disciplines of formal mathesis (algebra, number theory, the theory of manifolds, and so on), in “brackets.” The presupposition is this: that phenomenology’s research into pure consciousness sets itself, and has to set itself, no other tasks than those of descriptive analysis, 113 which are to be solved in pure intuition. In that case the theory-forms of the mathematical disciplines and all their mediate theorems can be of no use to it. Where the formation of concepts and judgments does not proceed constructively, where no systems of mediate deduction are built, the theory of the forms of deductive systems in general, as we find it in mathematics, cannot function as an instrument of material research.

Now phenomenology is in fact a purely descriptive discipline, one that explores the field of transcendentally pure consciousness in pure intuition. The logical propositions to which it might ever find occasion to appeal would therefore be nothing but logical axioms, such as the principle of contradiction—and their universal and absolute validity it could make insightful by way of examples in its own data. We can therefore include formal logic and all of mathesis in general in the expressly excluding epoché, and in this respect be certain of the legitimacy of the norm that we as phenomenologists mean to follow: to lay claim to nothing but what we can make essentially insightful to ourselves in consciousness itself, in pure immanence.

In doing so we also bring ourselves to the explicit recognition that a descriptive phenomenology is in principle independent of all those disciplines. With regard to the philosophical use to be made of phenomenology, this finding is not without importance, and it is therefore useful to note it at once on this occasion.

As for the material eidetic spheres, one of them is distinguished for us in such a way that its exclusion obviously cannot be contemplated: the essential sphere of phenomenologically purified consciousness itself. Even if we set ourselves the goal of studying pure consciousness in its singular particularizations—that is, in the manner of a science of facts, yet not empirical-psychologically (for we move within the charmed circle of the phenomenological exclusion of the world)—we could not do without the a priori of consciousness. A science of facts cannot divest itself of the right to make use of the essential truths that relate to the individual objectivities of its own domain.

If we do that, it encompasses as its own all “immanent essences,” i.e., those that are individuated exclusively in the individual occurrences of a stream of consciousness, in any singular lived experiences flowing past. Now it is of fundamental importance to see that by no means all essences belong to this sphere. Rather, just as the distinction between immanent and transcendent objectivities holds for individual objectivities, so it holds for the corresponding essences. Thus “thing,” “spatial shape,” “motion,” “color of a thing,” and the like, but also “human being,” “human sensation,” “soul” and “psychic lived experience” (lived experience in the psychological sense), “person,” “trait of character,” and the like, are transcendent essences.

In its immanence, therefore, phenomenology has to make no positings of the being of such essences whatever, no statements about their validity or non-validity, or about the ideal possibility of objectivities corresponding to them; and it has to establish no laws of essence relating to them.

Transcendent-eidetic regions and disciplines can in principle contribute no premises to a phenomenology that really means to confine itself to the pure region of lived experience. Now it is our aim to ground phenomenology in precisely this purity (in accordance with the norm stated a moment ago), and the greatest philosophical interests also hinge on carrying it through, fully consciously, in this purity. We therefore expressly extend the original reduction to all transcendent-eidetic domains and the ontologies belonging to them.

Thus: just as we exclude actual physical nature and the empirical natural sciences, so too we exclude the eidetic ones, i.e., the sciences that investigate what belongs essentially to the objectivity of physical nature as such. Geometry, phoronomy, 115 the pure physics of matter receive their brackets. Likewise, we have excluded all the empirical sciences of animal beings in nature and all the empirical human sciences dealing with personal beings in personal associations, with human beings as subjects of history, as bearers of culture, but also with cultural formations themselves, and so on; so now we also exclude the eidetic sciences corresponding to these objectivities. We do so in advance and in idea; for so far, as everyone knows, these eidetic sciences (e.g., rational psychology, sociology) have arrived at no grounding at all, or at no pure and unobjectionable one.

In view of the philosophical functions that phenomenology is called upon to take over, it is good here again to state expressly that the preceding discussions have at the same time established the absolute independence of phenomenology from the material-eidetic sciences, as from all others.

The extensions of the phenomenological reduction just given obviously do not have the fundamental significance of the original, simple exclusion of the natural world and of the sciences relating to it. For it is this first reduction that makes it possible at all to turn our regard toward the phenomenological field and to grasp its data. The other reductions, since they presuppose the first, are therefore secondary—but by no means of lesser importance on that account.

For the phenomenological method (and, further, for the method of transcendental-philosophical research in general), a systematic theory of all the phenomenological reductions, such as we have tried to sketch here, is of great importance. Their explicit “bracketings” have the methodological function of constantly reminding us of two things: that the spheres of being and knowledge in question lie in principle outside those which are to be investigated as transcendental-phenomenological spheres; and that every intrusion of premises belonging to those bracketed domains is a sign of an absurd confusion, of a genuine μετάβασις [metabasis, a shift into another genus]. If the phenomenological domain presented itself as immediately and self-evidently as the domains of the natural attitude of experience,note

116 or if it resulted from a mere transition from this attitude to the eidetic attitude—as, say, the geometrical domain results when we start from what is empirically spatial—then there would be no need of laborious reductions with the difficult considerations that go with them. Nor would there be any need of care in separating the individual steps, were it not for constant temptations to faulty metabasis, especially in interpreting the objectivities of the eidetic disciplines. These temptations are so strong that they threaten even someone who, in particular domains, has freed himself from the general misinterpretations.

First in line here is the extraordinarily widespread tendency of our time to psychologize the eidetic. Many who call themselves idealists succumb to it too—as indeed the influence of empiricist views on the idealist side is a strong one in general. Someone may take ideas, essences, to be “psychic formations.” Or, considering the operations of consciousness in which the concepts of color and shape are acquired on the basis of exemplary intuitions of things with thingly colors, shapes, and so on, he may confuse the consciousness of these essences, color and shape, that results in each case with these essences themselves. Such a person ascribes to the flow of consciousness, as a really inherent component, what is in principle transcendent to it. But this is on the one hand a corruption of psychology, since it already affects empirical consciousness, and on the other hand (and this is what concerns us here) a corruption of phenomenology.

Now, admittedly, this exclusion had to be restricted to the eidetics of transcendent individual objectivities in every sense. Here a new fundamental moment comes into consideration. Even once we have freed ourselves from the tendency to psychologize essence and essential states of affairs, it is a new, great step—one that by no means follows so readily along with the first—to recognize the momentous distinction that we have briefly designated as that between immanent and transcendent essences, and to take it consistently into account everywhere. On the one side stand essences of formations of consciousness itself; on the other, 117 essences of individual occurrences transcendent to consciousness, that is, essences of what merely announces itself in formations of consciousness—what, for example, is “constituted” in consciousness through sensory appearances.

For me at least, the second step remained quite difficult even after the first. An attentive reader of the Logical Investigations cannot now fail to notice this. There the first step is taken with complete decisiveness: the proper right of the eidetic against its psychologization is justified at length—very much against the spirit of the time, which reacted so vigorously against “Platonism” and “logicism.” As for the second step, however, it is decisively taken in some theories, such as those concerning logical-categorial objectivities and the consciousness that gives them. In other discussions in the same volume, by contrast, the wavering is evident—namely, insofar as the concept of the logical proposition is related now to logical-categorial objectivity and now to the corresponding essence immanent in judging thought.

I have just used the word “dogmatist.” It will become apparent that this is not a merely analogical use of it, but that the echo of epistemology springs from the very essence of the matters themselves. There is good reason to recall here the epistemological opposition between dogmatism and criticism, and to designate all the sciences that fall to the reduction as dogmatic.note

However, in saying this we are anticipating later expositions (those of the third book of this work). Let what has been said here by way of anticipation serve to justify why we designate the complex of sciences that fall to the reduction as dogmatic and set it over against phenomenology, as a science of a completely different dimension. At the same time, and in parallel with this, we contrast the dogmatic and the phenomenological attitude; the natural attitude is obviously subordinate to the dogmatic attitude as a special case of it.

Remark.

The specifically phenomenological exclusions we have taught are independent of the eidetic exclusion of individual existence. This circumstance suggests the question whether, within the framework of those exclusions, a science of facts about the transcendentally reduced lived experiences might not be possible after all. This question, like every question of possibility in principle, can be decided only on the ground of eidetic phenomenology. It is answered in such a way that it becomes intelligible why any attempt to begin naively with a phenomenological science of facts, before the phenomenological theory of essence has been carried out, would be nonsense.

Suppose we observe the norms that the phenomenological reductions prescribe for us: we exclude all transcendences exactly as they demand, and so take lived experiences purely according to their own essence. Then, after everything set out so far, a field of eidetic cognitions opens up to us. Once one has overcome the difficulties of the beginning, it presents itself as infinite in all directions. The manifold of kinds and forms of lived experience, with their really inherent and intentional essential components, is simply inexhaustible; and so accordingly is the manifold of essential connections and apodictically necessary truths founded in them. This infinite field of the a priori of consciousness, then—which has never come into its own in its peculiarity, indeed has never really been seen—is what we must bring under cultivation, drawing from it fruits of full value. But how are we to find the right beginning?

It is not as it is with the data of the natural attitude, in particular with the objects of nature. Through constant experience and through thousands of years of practice in thinking, these are familiar to us in their manifold peculiarities, elements and laws when, investigating on our own initiative, we try to advance knowledge of them further. There, everything unknown is the horizon of something known. All methodical effort links up with something given, all further development of method with method already on hand. In general it is a matter merely of developing special methods, which fit into the pregiven and fixed style of a proven scientific methodology in general and in their invention take their guidance from this style.

How different it is in phenomenology. Not only is a method needed before any method that determines subject matter—namely, a method for bringing the field of subject matter of transcendentally pure consciousness into our grasping view at all. Not only does this require a laborious turning of regard away from the natural data, which are continually conscious and hence, as it were, interwoven with the newly intended data, so that the danger of confusing the one with the other is always looming. We also lack everything that stands us in good stead in the natural sphere of objects: familiarity through practiced intuition, the benefit of inherited theorizing and of methods proper to the discipline. Naturally, even the methodology that has already been worked out lacks the willing trust that could draw nourishment from manifold successful and proven applications in the recognized sciences and in the practice of life.

Phenomenology, as it newly emerges, must therefore reckon with a basic mood of skepticism. It has not only to develop the method for wresting new kinds of knowledge from new kinds of subject matter; it has to create the most complete clarity about the sense and validity of that method—a clarity in which it can withstand all serious objections.

In addition—and this is much more important, because it concerns matters of principle—phenomenology must by its essence claim to be “first” philosophy and to provide the means for every critique of reason that is to be carried out. It therefore demands the most complete freedom from presuppositions and, with respect to itself, absolute reflective insight. It is its very essence to realize the most complete clarity about its own essence, and hence also about the principles of its method.note

For these reasons, the careful efforts to gain insight into the fundamentals of the method—that is, into what is methodically determinative for the new science right from the beginning and constantly as it proceeds—have a quite different significance for phenomenology than analogous efforts could ever have for other sciences.

First, let us mention a methodological misgiving that might hamper the very first steps.

We exclude the whole natural world and all transcendent-eidetic spheres, and are supposed thereby to gain a pure consciousness. 122 But did we not just say “we” exclude? Can we phenomenologists, who are after all members of the natural world ourselves, put ourselves out of play?

One soon becomes convinced that this presents no difficulty at all, provided only that we have not shifted the sense of “excluding.” We can even calmly go on speaking as we have to speak as natural human beings; for as phenomenologists we are not supposed to stop being natural human beings, or to stop positing ourselves as such, in our speech as well. But as part of the method, for the findings to be entered in the new register of phenomenology that is now to be laid down, we give ourselves the norm of phenomenological reduction. This norm extends to our empirical existence as well, and forbids us to enter any proposition that contains, explicitly or implicitly, natural positings of this kind. As far as individual existence is concerned, the phenomenologist proceeds no differently from any eidetic scientist—the geometer, for example.

Again, one might take offense at the following: in the phenomenological attitude we direct our regard to any pure lived experiences whatever in order to investigate them; yet the lived experiences of this research itself, of this attitude and direction of regard, taken in phenomenological purity, are at the same time supposed to belong to the domain of what is to be investigated.

This too is no difficulty. It is exactly the same, after all, in psychology, and likewise in logical noetics. The psychologist’s thinking is itself something psychological, the logician’s thinking something logical—that is, it itself falls within the scope of logical norms. This relatedness back to itself would be worrying only if knowledge of all other matters in the relevant fields of research depended on phenomenological, psychological and logical knowledge of the particular thinking of the particular thinker—which is a manifestly absurd presupposition.

A certain difficulty does, admittedly, lie in all disciplines that relate back to themselves: the first introduction to them, as 123 well as the first investigative penetration into them, must operate with methodological aids that these disciplines only afterward have to shape definitively in scientific form. Without provisional and preparatory consideration of subject matter and method, no project of a new science comes about. But the concepts and other methodological elements with which a beginning psychology, phenomenology, etc., operates in such preparatory work are themselves psychological, phenomenological, etc., and they gain their scientific stamp only in the system of the science once it has been grounded.

In this direction there are evidently no serious misgivings that could hinder the actual carrying out of such sciences, and of phenomenology in particular. And if phenomenology means to be a science within the framework of mere immediate intuition, a purely “descriptive” science of essence, then the general character of its procedure is pregiven as something entirely self-evident. It has to place occurrences of pure consciousness before its eyes as examples; to bring them to complete clarity; within this clarity, to practice analysis and the grasping of essence on them; to pursue the essential connections that can be seen with insight; to capture what is seen in each case in faithful conceptual expressions, which let their sense be prescribed purely by what is seen, or by what is discerned in general; and so on.

What has been said obviously holds for all methodological investigations relating to phenomenology, however widely we may extend their scope; and so it is understandable that this entire work, which aims to prepare the way for phenomenology, is itself, in its content, phenomenology through and through.

Let us at once pursue a little further the most general of the methodological thoughts that emerged in the preceding section. In phenomenology, which aims to be nothing other than a theory of essence within pure intuition, we thus carry out immediate seeings of essence on exemplary data of transcendentally pure consciousness and fix them conceptually, or terminologically. The words used may stem from common language; they may be ambiguous, vague in their shifting sense. As soon as they “coincide,” in the manner of actual expression, with what is intuitively given, they take on a definite sense as their actual and clear sense hic et nunc [here and now]; and from here they can be fixed scientifically.

Merely carrying out the application of the word in faithful adaptation to the intuitively grasped essence does not, after all, accomplish everything—even if what is needed has been fully accomplished on the side of this intuitive grasping. Science is possible only where the results of thinking can be preserved in the form of knowledge and used for further thinking in the form of a system of statements. These statements are distinct in their logical sense, but can be understood, or actualized in judgment, without clarity of the underlying representations, and thus without insight. Admittedly, science at the same time requires subjective and objective provisions for producing at will (and indeed intersubjectively) the corresponding groundings and actual insights.

To all this there also belongs the requirement that the same words and sentences be unambiguously correlated with certain intuitively graspable essences that make up their fulfilling sense. On the basis of intuition and of well-practiced exemplary individual intuitions, they are 125 thus furnished with distinct and unique meanings (as it were, by crossing out the other meanings that may, under certain circumstances, habitually force themselves upon us). This is done in such a way that in all possible contexts of actual thinking they hold fast to their concepts of thought and lose their capacity to fit other intuitive data with other fulfilling essences. For good reasons, technical terms foreign to the generally current languages are avoided as far as possible. Hence, in the face of the existing ambiguities of ordinary usage, there is a constant need for caution and for frequent re-examination of whether what was fixed in an earlier context is really being applied in the same sense in the new one.

Of greater interest to us are methodological considerations that relate not to expression but to the essences and essential connections that are to be expressed by it and grasped beforehand. If the investigating regard is directed toward lived experiences, they will in general present themselves in an emptiness and vague distance that make them unusable for either a singular or an eidetic determination. It would be otherwise if, interested not in the lived experiences themselves but rather in their mode of givenness, we wanted to investigate the essence of emptiness and vagueness itself; these, for their part, come to givenness here not vaguely but in the fullest clarity. But if what is vaguely conscious itself—say, what hovers unclearly before us in memory or phantasy—is to yield its own essences, then what it yields can only be something imperfect; that is,

The task, then, is to bring what hovers before us in each case in flowing unclarity, at a greater or lesser distance from intuition, to normal nearness—to bring it up to complete clarity—in order to practice on it correspondingly valuable intuitions of essence, in which the intended essences and essential relations come to complete givenness.

The grasping of essence accordingly has its own levels of clarity, just as the individual that hovers before us does. But for every essence, as for the moment corresponding to it in the individual, there is, so to speak, an absolute nearness, in which its givenness is absolute with respect to this series of levels, i.e., pure self-givenness. What is objective is conscious not merely in general as standing “itself” before our regard and as “given,” but as a purely given self, wholly and entirely as it is in itself. To the extent that a remnant of unclarity still remains, it overshadows moments in what is given “itself”—moments that therefore do not reach into the circle of light of what is purely given.

Giving consciousness in the pregnant sense and intuitive consciousness, as against non-intuitive, clear consciousness as against obscure: these coincide. Likewise: levels of givenness, of intuitiveness, of clarity. The limit at zero is obscurity; the limit at one is full clarity, intuitiveness, givenness.

Here, however, givenness is not to be understood as originary givenness, and hence not as givenness in perception. We do not identify the “self-given” with the “originarily given,” with what is given “in person.” In the sense specifically designated here, “given” and “self-given” are one and the same; the use of the pleonastic expression is only meant to serve us in ruling out givenness in the wider sense, in which it is ultimately said of everything represented that it is given in the representation (but, say, “in an empty way”).

Our determinations furthermore hold, as is readily apparent, for any intuitions whatever, or empty representations, and thus also without restriction as regards objectivities, although here we are interested only in modes of 127 givenness of lived experiences and their phenomenological (really inherent and intentional) components.

With regard to future analyses, however, it should also be noted that what is most essential in the situation is preserved whether or not the regard of the pure Ego passes through the conscious lived experience in question—to put it more plainly, whether or not the pure Ego turns toward a “given” and possibly “grasps” it. Thus, for example, “given in perception”—instead of meaning as much as perceived, in the proper and normal sense of grasping the being of this given—can also mean merely “ready for perception.” Likewise, “given in phantasy” need not yet mean “grasped in phantasizing”; and so on generally, including with respect to all levels of clarity or obscurity.

But our descriptions still need to be carried further. When we speak of levels of givenness or clarity, we must distinguish between genuine graded levels of clarity, to which one may also add graded levels within obscurity, and spurious levels of clarity, namely extensive enlargements of the range of clarity, possibly accompanied by a simultaneous intensive increase in clarity.

A moment that is already given, already actually intuited, can be given in greater or lesser clarity—a tone, for example, or a color. Let us exclude all apprehensions that reach beyond what is intuitively given. Then we are dealing with graded differences that move within the framework in which what is intuitive is really intuitive. Intuitiveness as such admits, under the heading of clarity, of continuous intensity-like differences, which, like intensities, start from zero but close off at the top with a fixed limit. To this limit, one would like to say, the lower levels in a certain way point: intuiting a color in a mode of incomplete clarity, we “mean” the color as it is “in itself,” and that is precisely the color given in complete clarity.

Matters are quite different where an apprehension reaching beyond what is intuitively given interweaves empty apprehensions with the actually intuitive apprehension. Here, quasi-gradually, more and more of what is emptily represented can become intuitive, or more of what is already intuitive can become emptily represented. Making clear to oneself thus consists here in two kinds of processes that combine with each other: processes of making intuitive, and processes of heightening the clarity of what is already intuitive.

With this, however, the essence of normal clarification has been described. For the rule is that no pure intuitions are present, and that pure empty representations do not pass over into pure intuitions. Rather, a principal role is played—possibly as intermediate stages—by impure intuitions, which bring their objective to intuition in certain sides or moments while merely representing it emptily in others.

Completely clear grasping has the advantage that by its essence it permits absolutely indubitable identification and distinction, explication, relating, and so on—hence the “insightful” performance of all “logical” acts. To these also belong the acts of grasping essence. As was already said above, the differences of clarity now more closely clarified carry over to the objective correlates of these acts; and, on the other hand, the methodological knowledge we have just gained carries over to the achievement of complete givenness of essence.

In general, then, the method, which is a basic component of the method of eidetic science in general, requires a step-by-step procedure. The individual intuitions serving the grasping of essence may already be clear enough to yield an essential universal with complete clarity—one that, however, does not 129 reach as far as the guiding intention. Clarity is lacking with regard to the more precise determinations of the essences interwoven with it. What is needed, then, is a bringing-nearer of the exemplary particulars, or a fresh procurement of better-suited ones, in which the individual features intended in confusion and obscurity can stand out and then be brought to the clearest givenness.¹

A bringing-nearer takes place everywhere here even in the sphere of obscurity. What is obscurely represented comes nearer to us in its own peculiar way; it finally knocks at the gate of intuition, but it need not on that account pass through it (and perhaps cannot, “by virtue of psychological inhibitions”).

It should further be mentioned that what is given in each case is for the most part surrounded by a halo of indeterminate determinability. This halo has its own manner of “unfolding” bringing-nearer, as it spreads out into series of representations—at first, say, once again in obscurity, then anew in the sphere of givenness—until what is intended enters the sharply illuminated circle of complete givenness.

Attention should also be drawn to the fact that it would surely be saying too much to claim that all evidence of grasping essence requires full clarity of the underlying particulars in their concreteness. To grasp the most general differences of essence, such as those between color and tone, between perception and will, it probably suffices to have the examples given at a low level of clarity. It is as though the most general element, the genus (color in general, tone in general), were already fully given in them, but not yet the difference. That is an objectionable way of speaking, but I would not know how to avoid it. Let the reader make the situation present to himself in living intuition.

Let us bring out a few more especially important features of the method of grasping essence.

It belongs to the general essence of immediately intuitive grasping of essence that it can be carried out (we have already laid stress on this!) on the basis of mere presentification of exemplary particulars. But presentification—phantasy, for example—can, as we have just shown, be so 130 completely clear that it makes possible complete graspings of essence and insights into essence. In general, originarily giving perception has its advantages over all kinds of presentification; external perception in particular, of course. This, however, not merely as an experiencing act for establishing existence—which is not in question here—but as a basis for phenomenological findings about essence. External perception has its complete clarity for all objective moments that have really come to givenness in it in the mode of originarity. But it also offers, possibly

If the advantages of originarity were methodically very important, we would now have to consider where, how and to what extent originarity can be realized in the various kinds of lived experience. We would also have to ask which kinds of lived experience come especially close in this respect to the so highly privileged domain of sensuous perception, and more of the same. But we can disregard all this. There are reasons why, in phenomenology as in all eidetic sciences, presentifications and, more precisely, free phantasies gain a privileged position over perceptions. This holds even in the phenomenology of perception 131 itself, though admittedly not in that of sensation data.

In his investigative thinking the geometer operates incomparably more in phantasy than in perception of the figure or the model. This holds even of the pure geometer, that is, the one who renounces algebraic methods. In phantasy, to be sure, he must strive for clear intuitions, an effort from which the drawing and the model relieve him. But in actual drawing and modeling he is bound. In phantasy he has incomparable freedom in the arbitrary reshaping of the fictive figures, in running through continuously modified possible shapes, and thus in producing countless new formations. It is this freedom that first opens up for him access to the vast expanses of essential possibilities, with their infinite horizons of cognitions of essence.

For the phenomenologist, who deals with reduced lived experiences and the correlates essentially belonging to them, matters are no different in the most general respects. Phenomenological essential formations, too, are infinitely many. He too can make only limited use of the aid of originary givenness. It is true that all the main types of perceptions and presentifications are freely at his disposal in originary givenness, namely as perceptual exemplifications for a phenomenology of perception, of phantasy, of memory, and so on. Likewise, in the sphere of originarity, he has examples at his command for what is most general in judgments, surmises, feelings and volitions. But of course he does not have them for all possible particular formations, any more than the geometer has drawings and models at his disposal for the infinitely many kinds of solids.

On the other hand, of course, it is important (and here again as in geometry, which lately has attached great value, not for nothing, to collections of models and the like 132 ) to exercise phantasy abundantly in the perfect clarification required here and in the free reshaping of the givens of phantasy. Before that, however, it is also important to fertilize phantasy through observations in originary intuition that are as rich and as good as possible. This fertilization naturally does not mean that experience as such has a function of grounding validity.

So one can really say, if one loves paradoxical talk, and can say in strict truth, if one understands the ambiguous sense properly, that “fiction” is the vital element of phenomenology, as of all eidetic science. Fiction is the source from which the cognition of “eternal truths” draws its nourishment.¹

Repeatedly in what has gone before we have called phenomenology outright a descriptive science. Here again a fundamental methodical question arises, together with a misgiving that holds us back in our eagerness to penetrate the new domain. Is it right to set phenomenology the goals of mere description? A descriptive eidetics: is that not something altogether wrong-headed?

The motives for such questions lie close enough to all of us. Anyone who, in our manner, gropes his way, so to speak, into a new eidetics, asking what investigations are possible here, what starting points to take and what methods to follow, involuntarily looks to the old, highly developed eidetic disciplines. That is, he looks to the mathematical ones, above all geometry and arithmetic. But we notice at once that these disciplines cannot be called on to guide us in our case, and that in them the situation

¹ A sentence that should be particularly well suited to be quoted by naturalists in ridicule of the eidetic mode of cognition. 133 must be essentially different. For anyone who has not yet become acquainted with any piece of genuine phenomenological analysis of essence, there is some danger here of losing faith in the possibility of a phenomenology. The mathematical disciplines are the only ones that can at present effectively represent the idea of a scientific eidetics. So at first the thought remains remote that there could be eidetic disciplines of yet another kind: non-mathematical ones, fundamentally different in their whole theoretical type from the familiar ones.

Let us make clear to ourselves, in the most general terms, what is peculiar to mathematical disciplines in contrast to what is peculiar to a doctrine of the essence of lived experiences. We thereby make clear what goals and methods they really are that are supposed to be, in principle, inappropriate in the sphere of lived experience.

We start from the division of essences and sciences of essence into material and formal ones. We can set aside the formal ones, and with them the whole aggregate of formal mathematical disciplines, since phenomenology evidently belongs among the material eidetic sciences. If the analogy can be methodically guiding at all, it will be most effective if we restrict ourselves to material mathematical disciplines such as geometry. We therefore ask, more specifically, whether a phenomenology must, or rather can, be constituted as a geometry of lived experiences.

To gain the desired insight here, we must keep in view some important determinations from the general theory of science.¹

Every theoretical science binds together an ideally closed totality through relation to a domain of knowledge, which is in turn determined by a highest genus. A radical unity

¹ For the further discussion, cf. Chapter 1 of Part I, especially §§ 12, 15 and 16. 134 we attain only by going back to the absolutely highest genus. That is, we must go back to the region in question and the regional generic components, i.e. to the highest genera that unite in the regional genus and may be founded on one another. The highest concrete genus (the region) is built out of highest genera that are partly disjunct and partly founded in one another (and in this way include one another). This structure corresponds to the way the corresponding concreta are built out of lowest differences that are partly disjunct and partly founded in one another: in the case of the thing, for example, temporal, spatial and material determinateness. To each region there corresponds a regional ontology with a series of regional sciences, each closed in itself and independent, and possibly

Depending on whether highest genera are regional (concrete) or merely components of such genera, the sciences are concrete or abstract. The division evidently corresponds to that between concrete and abstract genera in general.¹ Accordingly, the domain comprises concrete objects in one case, as in the eidetics of nature, and abstract ones in the other, such as spatial shapes, temporal shapes and shapes of motion. All abstract genera are essentially related to concrete genera and ultimately to regional ones. This gives all abstract disciplines and full sciences an essential relation to concrete sciences, the regional ones.

The division of the eidetic sciences, moreover, is paralleled exactly by a division of the empirical sciences. These too are divided according to regions. We have, for example, a physical science of nature, and all the individual natural sciences are really mere disciplines. What gives them unity is the mighty stock not only of eidetic but also of empirical laws that belong to physical nature in general, prior to any division into spheres of nature. For the rest, different regions can also prove to be linked by empirical regularities, as for instance the region of the physical and that of the psychic.

If we now look at the familiar eidetic sciences, we are struck by the fact that they do not proceed descriptively. Geometry, for example, does not grasp in individual intuitions the lowest eidetic differences, that is, the countless spatial shapes that can be drawn in space; nor does it describe and classify them, as the descriptive natural sciences do with the empirical formations of nature. Instead, geometry fixes a few kinds of basic formations: the ideas of solid, surface, point, angle and the like, the same ones that play the determining role in the “axioms.” With the help of the axioms, i.e. the primitive essential laws, it is then in a position to derive purely deductively all the spatial shapes that “exist” in space, i.e.

Such a manifold is characterized as follows. A finite number of concepts and propositions, drawn where necessary from the essence of the domain in question, completely and unambiguously determines the totality of all possible formations of the domain, in the manner of purely analytic necessity. So in principle nothing further remains open in the domain.

We can also put it this way: such a manifold has the distinctive property of being “mathematically exhaustively definable.” The “definition” lies in the system of axiomatic concepts and axioms. The “mathematically exhaustive” character lies in the fact that the defining assertions, in relation to the manifold, imply the greatest conceivable prejudgment: nothing remains undetermined.

An equivalent of the concept of a definite manifold also lies in the following propositions:

Every proposition that can be formed from the distinguished axiomatic concepts, in whatever logical forms, is either a 136 pure formal-logical consequence of the axioms or a formal-logical counter-consequence of the same kind, i.e. one that formally contradicts the axioms. In the latter case its contradictory opposite would be a formal-logical consequence of the axioms. In a mathematically definite manifold the concepts “true” and “formal-logical consequence of the axioms” are equivalent, and likewise the concepts “false” and “formal-logical counter-consequence of the axioms.”

An axiom system that, in a purely analytic way, “exhaustively defines” a manifold in the manner indicated I also call a definite axiom system. Every deductive discipline resting on such a system is a definite discipline, or a discipline that is mathematical in the pregnant sense.

The definitions all remain in force if we let the material particularization of the manifold become wholly indeterminate, that is, if we carry out formalizing generalization. The axiom system is then transformed into a system of axiom forms, the manifold into a manifold form, and the discipline relating to the manifold into a discipline form.¹

How do matters stand, then, with phenomenology in comparison with geometry, taken as the representative of a material mathematics in general? It is clear that phenomenology belongs among the concrete eidetic disciplines. Its extension is made up of essences of lived experiences, and these are not abstracta but concreta. As such they have manifold abstract moments. The question now is this: do the highest genera belonging to these abstract moments here too form domains for definite disciplines, for “mathematical” disciplines on the model of 137 geometry? Must we, then, here too look for a definite axiom system and build deductive theories on it? Or, correspondingly, must we here too look for “basic formations”? Must we derive from them all the other essential formations of the domain and their essential determinations constructively, i.e. deductively, by consistently applying the axioms?

It is a highly significant problem for the theory of science to become completely clear about all the fundamental questions pertinent here. That is, after fixing the concept of the definite manifold, one must consider the necessary conditions that a materially determined domain has to satisfy if it is to be able to correspond to this idea. One condition for this is the exactness of “concept formation.” This is by no means a matter of our free choice and logical art. As regards the putative axiomatic concepts, which must after all be demonstrable in immediate intuition, it presupposes exactness in the grasped essences themselves. But to what extent “exact” essences are to be found in a domain of essences depends entirely on the peculiar nature of the domain. So does the question whether exact essences can even be substructed beneath all essences graspable in actual intuition, and thus beneath all essential components as well.

The problem just touched on is intimately interwoven with fundamental problems that are still unsolved. One is the problem of clarifying in principle the relation between description, with its “descriptive concepts,” and unambiguous, exact determination, with its “ideal concepts.” In parallel with this, there is the problem of clarifying the still so little understood relation between “descriptive sciences” and explanatory sciences. An attempt in this direction will be presented in the continuation of these investigations. Here we must not hold up the main course of our reflections too long, and we are also not yet sufficiently prepared 138 to treat such questions exhaustively. In what follows, let it suffice to point to a few points that can be brought home in a general way.

Let us start our considerations from the contrast between geometry and descriptive natural science. The geometer is not interested in the factual shapes intuitable by the senses, as the descriptive naturalist is. Unlike the latter, he does not form morphological concepts of vague types of shape, which are grasped directly on the basis of sensuous intuition and fixed conceptually or terminologically, vague as they are. The vagueness of these concepts, the fact that they have fluid spheres of application, is not a defect to be charged against them. For the sphere of knowledge they serve, they are simply indispensable; or rather, in that sphere they are the only legitimate ones. Suppose the task is to bring the intuitable givens of things, with their intuitively given essential characters, to adequate conceptual expression. Then we must take them precisely as they give themselves.

Geometrical concepts are “ideal” concepts: they express something that one cannot “see.” Their “origin,” and with it their content, is essentially different from that of descriptive concepts, which express essences taken directly from simple intuition and not “ideals.” Exact concepts have their correlates in essences that have the character of “Ideas” in the Kantian sense. Over against these Ideas, or ideal essences, stand the morphological essences, as correlates of the descriptive concepts.

One kind of ideation yields ideal essences as ideal “limits.” These can in principle be found in no sensuous intuition, and morphological essences 139 “approach” them more or less, without ever reaching them. This ideation is something fundamentally different from grasping essence through simple “abstraction,” in which a “moment” that has been singled out is raised into the region of essences as something in principle vague, as something typical. The fixity and clean distinguishability of generic concepts, or generic essences, whose extension lies in the fluid, must not be confused with the exactness of Idea concepts, and of genera whose extension contains nothing but what is ideal.

As for phenomenology, it aims to be a descriptive doctrine of the essence of transcendentally pure lived experiences in the phenomenological attitude. Like every descriptive discipline that neither substructs nor idealizes, it has its justification in itself. Whatever in reduced lived experiences can be grasped eidetically in pure intuition, whether as a really inherent component or as an intentional correlate, belongs to phenomenology. For phenomenology this is a great source of absolute cognitions.

But let us look a little more closely at the extent to which genuinely scientific descriptions can be established in the phenomenological field, with its countless eidetic concreta, and at what they are able to achieve.

It lies in the peculiar nature of consciousness in general to be a fluctuation running on in various dimensions. So there can be no question of fixing in conceptually exact terms any eidetic concreta and all the moments that immediately constitute them. Take, for example, a lived experience of the genus “phantasy of a thing,” as it is given to us either in phenomenologically immanent perception or in some other (always reduced) intuition.

Although there is no question of an unambiguous determination of the eidetic singularities in our descriptive sphere, matters are quite different with essences at a higher level of specificity. These are accessible to firm distinction, to being held fast as identical and to strict conceptual grasp, and likewise to analysis into their component essences. Accordingly, the tasks of a comprehensive scientific description can meaningfully be set for them.

Thus we describe, and thereby determine in rigorous concepts, the generic essence of perception in general, or of subordinate species such as perception of physical thinghood, of animal beings and the like. Likewise we describe the generic essence of memory in general, empathy in general, willing in general, and so on. Before these, however, come the highest universalities: lived experience in general, cogitatio in general. These already make comprehensive descriptions of essence possible. It evidently lies in the nature of generic grasping, analysis and description of essences that achievements at higher levels do not depend on those at lower levels in such a way that, say, a systematic inductive procedure would be methodically required, a stepwise ascent up the ladder of generality.

Let one further consequence be added here. According to what has been set out, deductive theorizings are excluded from phenomenology. Mediate inferences are not flatly denied to it. But all its cognitions are meant to be descriptive ones, purely adapted to the immanent sphere. So inferences, and non-intuitive procedures of every kind, have only the methodical significance of leading us toward the matters that a subsequent direct seeing of essence has to bring to givenness. Analogies that force themselves upon us may, before actual intuition, suggest surmises about 141 essential connections, and further inferences may be drawn from these surmises. But in the end, actual seeing of the essential connections must make good on the surmises. As long as this has not happened, we have no phenomenological result.

Admittedly, this does not answer a question that forces itself upon us. In the eidetic domain of reduced phenomena (whether as a whole or in some subdomain), could there not also be an idealizing procedure alongside the descriptive one? Such a procedure would substitute pure and rigorous ideals for the intuitive givens. These ideals could then even serve as basic means for a mathesis of lived experiences, as a counterpart to descriptive phenomenology.

However much the investigations just carried out had to leave open, they have advanced us considerably, and not only by bringing a series of important problems into our field of vision. It is now completely clear to us that nothing is to be gained for the grounding of phenomenology by analogizing. It is merely a misleading prejudice to think that the methodology of the historically given a priori sciences, which are all exact ideal sciences, must as a matter of course serve as the model for every new science, and especially for our transcendental phenomenology. It is as if there could be eidetic sciences of only a single methodical type, that of “exactness.” But transcendental phenomenology, as a descriptive science of essence, belongs to a totally different basic class of eidetic sciences from the mathematical sciences.

Through the phenomenological reduction, the realm of transcendental consciousness had presented itself to us as the realm of being that is, in a definite sense, “absolute.” It is the primal category of being in general (or, in our terms, the primal region). All other regions of being are rooted in it and related to it by their essence, and they are therefore all essentially dependent on it. The doctrine of categories must take its start entirely from this most radical of all distinctions of being: being as consciousness, and being as “transcendent” being that “announces itself” in consciousness. As one comes to see, this distinction can be attained and appreciated in 142 its purity only through the method of phenomenological reduction.

It is absolutely necessary to understand this state of affairs thoroughly, from the various points of view proper to it. It includes, for example, the fact that physical nature is subject to exclusion. Nevertheless, there is a phenomenology of natural-scientific consciousness, on the side of natural-scientific experiencing and thinking, and there is also a phenomenology of nature itself as the correlate of natural-scientific consciousness. Likewise, although psychology and the human sciences are affected by the exclusion, there is a phenomenology of the human being, of his personality, his personal properties and his (human) course of consciousness. There is further a phenomenology of the social spirit, of social formations, of cultural formations, and so on. Everything transcendent, insofar as it comes to givenness in consciousness, is an object of phenomenological investigation not only on the side of consciousness of it, e.g.

In this way there are mighty domains of phenomenological research for which one is quite unprepared when starting from the idea of lived experience. This is especially so if, like all of us, one begins with the psychological attitude and has at first taken over the concept of lived experience from the psychology of our time. Under the influence of inner inhibitions, one will at first be little inclined 143 to recognize these domains as phenomenological at all. For psychology and the human sciences, this inclusion of the bracketed results in quite peculiar and at first confusing situations. To indicate this only in the case of psychology, we note the following. Consciousness, as something given in psychological experience, that is, as human or animal consciousness, is the object of psychology: of empirical psychology in empirical research, and of eidetic psychology in eidetic research.

The indications just given make us feel how far we still are from understanding phenomenology. We have learned to practice the phenomenological attitude. We have removed a series of confusing methodical misgivings. We have defended the right of pure description. The field of research lies open. But we do not yet know what the great themes in it are. More precisely, we do not know what basic directions of description are prefigured by the most general essential character of lived experiences. To bring clarity in these respects, we shall attempt in the 144 following chapters to characterize this most general essential character, at least in some especially important features.

With these new considerations we do not really leave the problems of method behind. Even our methodical discussions so far were determined by the most general insights into the essence of the phenomenological sphere. It goes without saying that a more penetrating knowledge of this sphere, not in its details but in its pervasive universalities, must also furnish us with methodical norms of richer content. All special methods will have to conform to these norms. Method, after all, is nothing that is brought to a domain from outside, or that could be. Formal logic, or

Among the most general essential peculiarities of the pure sphere of lived experience, we treat reflection first. We do so because of its universal methodological function: the phenomenological method moves entirely in acts of reflection. But skeptical misgivings have been raised about what reflection can accomplish, and thus about the possibility of a phenomenology in general. We would like to dispose of these thoroughly first of all.

We already had to speak of reflection in the preliminary considerations. What we arrived at there, even before we had set foot on phenomenological ground, we can nevertheless take over now while strictly carrying out the phenomenological reduction. Those findings concerned only what belongs to the proper essence of lived experiences. That is, as we know, they concerned what remains to us as a secure possession, only transcendentally purified in the way it is apprehended. We shall first recapitulate what is already known, and at once try to penetrate more deeply into the matters themselves and into the kind of phenomenological studies that reflection makes possible and requires.¹

Every Ego lives through its lived experiences, and much is included in these, both really inherently and intentionally. That the Ego lives through them does not mean that it has them, and what is included in them, “in view,” grasping them in the manner of immanent experience or of some other immanent intuition and representation. Every lived experience that is not in view can, as an ideal possibility, become one that is “viewed.” A reflection of the Ego is directed to it, and it now becomes an object for the Ego. The same holds for the Ego’s possible regards directed to the components of the lived experience and to its intentionalities (to that of which they may be consciousness). Reflections are in turn lived experiences and can as such become substrates of new reflections, and so in infinitum, with the generality of principle.

The lived experience actually being lived through at a given moment, as it newly enters the reflecting regard, gives itself as actually lived through, as being “now.” But not only that: it also gives itself as having just been; and insofar as it was unregarded, it gives itself precisely as such, as having been unreflected. In the natural attitude we take it as a matter of course, without giving it any thought, that lived experiences exist not only when we are turned toward them and grasp them in immanent experience. We take it for granted, too, that they actually were, and were actually lived through by us, when in immanent reflection they are “still conscious” within retention (“primary” memory) as having “just” been.note

We are further convinced that reflection on the basis of, and “in,” recollection also informs us about our earlier lived experiences. These were “at that time” present and immanently perceivable, though not immanently perceived. According to the naive, natural view, precisely the same holds for fore-memory, for forward-looking expectation. What comes into question here first is immediate “protention” (as we might call it), the exact counterpart of immediate retention. Then there is fore-memory that presentifies in quite a different way, reproducing in a more proper sense, and this is the counterpart of recollection. Thanks to the reflection that is possible “in” fore-memory, what is intuitively expected, what is conscious in the forward look as “coming in the future,” has at the same time the meaning of something that will be perceived. In just the same way, what is remembered has the meaning of something that has been perceived.

All this we make clear to ourselves in the natural attitude, as psychologists, say, and we pursue it into its further connections.

If we now carry out phenomenological reduction, these findings (in their bracketing) are transformed into exemplary cases of essential universalities. We can make these universalities our own and study them systematically within the framework of pure intuition. For example, in living intuition (even if it be imagination) we put ourselves into the performance of some act: say, a joy over a theoretical train of thought that is running its course freely and fruitfully. We carry out all the reductions and see what lies in the pure essence of the phenomenological matters. First, then, there is a being-turned-toward the thoughts as they run their course. We develop the exemplary phenomenon further. While the joyful course goes on, let a reflecting regard turn to the joy. The joy becomes a regarded and immanently perceived lived experience, fluctuating and fading away in such and such a manner in the regard of reflection.

The first reflection on the joy finds it as actual and present, but not as only just beginning. It stands there as enduring, as already lived through before and simply not taken into view. That is, there is evidently the possibility of following up the past duration and mode of givenness of what gladdens us. We can attend to the earlier stretch of the theoretical train of thought, but also to the regard that was earlier turned toward it. On the other hand, we can attend to the joyful turning toward it and, by contrast, grasp the absence of any regard turned toward the joy in the phenomenon that has run its course.

All this we can consider in the phenomenological attitude and eidetically, whether in higher universality or according to what may turn out to hold essentially for particular kinds of lived experience. The entire stream of lived experience, with its lived experiences lived through in the mode of unreflected consciousness, can thus be subjected to one scientific study of essence that aims at systematic completeness. This also holds with regard to all possibilities of moments of lived experience intentionally included in them. So it holds specifically with regard to the lived experiences that may be conscious in them in modified form, and to their intentionalia. We have come to know examples of the latter in the form of the modifications of lived experience that are intentionally included in all presentifications and can be drawn out through reflections “in” them. Examples are the “having-been-perceived” that lies in every memory, and the “going-to-be-perceived” that lies in every expectation.

The study of the stream of lived experience is itself carried out in manifold reflective acts of peculiar structure. These in turn belong to the stream of lived experience and can, and must, be made objects of phenomenological analyses in corresponding reflections of a higher level. For such analyses are fundamental to a general phenomenology and to the methodological insight that is wholly indispensable to it. Something similar evidently holds for psychology. Vague talk of studying lived experiences in reflection, or in memory, which is what reflection is usually identified with, accomplishes nothing as yet. That is quite apart from many falsehoods that commonly get interwoven with such talk from the start (precisely because serious analysis of essence is lacking). One of these is the claim that there could be no such thing at all as immanent perception and observation.

Let us go into the matters somewhat more closely.

According to what has just been set out, reflection is a title for acts in which the stream of lived experience, with all its manifold occurrences (moments of lived experience, intentionalia), becomes graspable and analyzable with evidence. It is, as we can also put it, the title of consciousness’s method for the cognition of consciousness in general. But in this very method reflection itself becomes the object of possible studies. Reflection is also the title for kinds of lived experience that essentially belong together, and thus the theme of a main chapter 148 of phenomenology. The task there is to distinguish the various “reflections” and to analyze them completely, in systematic order.

Here we must first make clear to ourselves that every kind of “reflection” has the character of a modification of consciousness, and indeed of a modification that, in principle, every consciousness can undergo.

We speak of modification here insofar as every reflection essentially arises from changes of attitude. Through them a pregiven lived experience, or datum of lived experience (the unreflected one), undergoes a certain transformation: precisely into the mode of reflected consciousness (or of what is reflectively conscious). The pregiven lived experience may itself already have the character of a reflected consciousness of something, so that the modification is of a higher level. But ultimately we come back to absolutely unreflected lived experiences and their really inherent or intentional data. Now, by essential law, every lived experience can be converted into reflective modifications, and in various directions, which we shall come to know more precisely.

The eidetic study of reflections has a fundamental methodological significance for phenomenology, and no less for psychology. This is shown by the fact that all modes of immanent grasping of essence, and on the other hand of immanent experience, fall under the concept of reflection. Take, for example, immanent perception. It is in fact a reflection, insofar as it presupposes a turning of regard from something otherwise conscious to the consciousness of it. Likewise, as we touched on (in the preceding section) when discussing what the natural attitude takes for granted, every memory permits not only a reflective turning of regard to itself but also the peculiar reflection in memory. At first, say, the course of a piece of music is conscious in memory, unreflected, in the mode of the “past.”

The phenomenological task here is to investigate systematically all the modifications of lived experience that fall under the heading of reflection. They must be studied in connection with all the modifications with which they stand in essential relation and which they presuppose. These latter modifications comprise the totality of essential modifications that every lived experience must undergo in the course of its originary flow. They also comprise the various kinds of alteration that can be thought of as carried out ideally on every lived experience in the manner of “operations.”

Every lived experience is in itself a flow of becoming. It is what it is in an original generation of an unchangeable essential type: a constant flow of retentions and protentions, mediated by a phase of originarity that is itself flowing, in which the living now of the lived experience becomes conscious in contrast to its before and after. On the other hand, every lived experience has its parallels in various forms of reproduction, which can be regarded as ideal operative transformations of the original lived experience. Each has its “exactly corresponding” and yet thoroughly modified counterpart in a recollection. It likewise has such a counterpart in a possible fore-memory, in a possible mere phantasy, and again in the iterations of such alterations.

Naturally we think of all the lived experiences placed in parallel as having a common essential content. The parallel experiences are thus supposed to be conscious of the same intentional objectivities, and conscious of them in identical modes of givenness, drawn from the range of all those that can occur in other respects of possible variation.

The modifications under consideration belong to every lived experience as ideally possible alterations, and thus designate, as it were, ideal operations that can be thought of as carried out on every one. They can therefore be repeated in infinitum, and they can also be carried out on the modified experiences. Conversely, from every lived experience that is already characterized as such a modification, and is then always characterized as such in itself, we are led back to certain primal lived experiences, to “impressions,” which represent the absolutely originary lived experiences in the phenomenological sense. Thus perceptions of things are originary lived experiences in relation to all memories, presentifications of phantasy, and so on. They are as originary as concrete lived experiences can be at all.

We can relate these modifications primarily to the actual lived experiences that are conscious without reflection. For it can be seen at once that all lived experiences that are reflectively conscious must eo ipso share in these primary modifications. As reflections on lived experiences, and taken in full concreteness, they are themselves lived experiences conscious without reflection, and as such they take on all the modifications. Now reflection itself is certainly a new kind of universal modification. It is this directing of the Ego toward its lived experiences, and, at one with it, the performing of acts of the cogito (in particular acts of the lowest, fundamental stratum, that of simple representations), “in” which the Ego directs itself to its lived experiences. But precisely the interweaving of reflection with intuitive or empty apprehensions, or rather

Only through reflectively experiencing acts do we know anything of the stream of lived experience and of its necessary relatedness to the pure Ego. Only through them do we know that the stream is a field in which cogitationes of one and the same pure Ego are freely performed, and that all the lived experiences of the stream are the Ego’s own precisely insofar as the Ego can look at them or look “through them” at other things alien to the Ego. We convince ourselves that these experiences retain sense and legitimacy even as reduced experiences. In general essential universality we grasp the legitimacy of experiences of this kind in general, just as, in parallel with this, we grasp the legitimacy of seeings of essence related to lived experiences in general.

Thus we grasp, for example, the absolute legitimacy of immanently perceiving reflection, i.e., of immanent perception simpliciter, with respect to what it brings, as it flows along, to actually originary givenness. Likewise we grasp the absolute legitimacy of immanent retention with respect to what is conscious in it with the character of the “still” living and the “just” having-been—but, admittedly, only as far as the content of what is so characterized extends. For example, with respect to its having been the perceiving of a tone and not of a color. Likewise we grasp the relative legitimacy of immanent recollection. It extends as far as the content of this memory, considered item by item, shows the genuine character of recollection (which by no means every moment of what is remembered does in general). This is a legitimacy that holds in just the same way for every 151 recollection.

We thus see with the most perfect clarity, and in the consciousness of unconditional validity, several things. It would be absurd to hold that lived experiences are cognitively secured only insofar as they are given in the reflecting consciousness of immanent perception, or even that they are secured only in the actual now of the moment. It would be wrong to doubt the having-been of what is found as “still” conscious when the regard turns back (in immediate retention). And it would be wrong, again, to doubt whether in the end the lived experiences that come into view are not, precisely by that, transformed into something toto coelo [utterly] different, and so on.

From the preceding accounts one can see that phenomenology is not affected by the methodological skepticism that, in a parallel way, has so often led in empirical psychology to denying, or inappropriately restricting, the value of inner experience. Recently H. J. Watt¹ has nonetheless believed he could maintain this skepticism against phenomenology. He has, admittedly, not grasped the peculiar sense of pure phenomenology, which the Logical Investigations tried to introduce, and has not seen how the purely phenomenological situation differs from the empirical-psychological one.note

“One can hardly even venture conjectures about how one arrives at knowledge of immediate lived experiencing. For it is neither knowledge nor an object of knowledge, but something else. One cannot see how a report on the lived experiencing of lived experiencing, even if it is there, gets onto paper. Yet this is, after all, the ultimate question of the basic problem of self-observation. . . . Nowadays this absolute description is called phenomenology.”

Reporting on Th. Lipps’s¹ accounts, Watt then goes on: “The known reality of the objects of self-observation stands opposed to the reality of the present Ego and of the present lived experiences of consciousness. This reality is lived through [namely, merely lived through, not ‘known,’ i.e., reflectively grasped]. It is precisely thereby absolute reality. Now one may be of very different opinions,” he then adds on his own account, “about what one can do with this absolute reality. . . . It is probably, after all, only a matter of results of self-observation. But if this is always a retrospective consideration, always a knowing of lived experiences just had, taken as objects, how is one to posit states of which one can have no knowledge, which are only conscious?

A pious faith in the omnipotence of the inductive method speaks from these last lines, a faith Watt would hardly be able to hold to if he reflected on the conditions of the possibility of this method. Given that faith, one is admittedly surprised by his admission “that a functionally analyzing psychology will never be able to explain the fact of knowledge.”¹

Against these statements, which are characteristic of present-day psychology, we would first—precisely insofar as they are meant psychologically—have to bring to bear the above distinction between the psychological and the phenomenological question. In this regard we would have to stress the following. A phenomenological doctrine of essence has as little need to concern itself with the methods by which the phenomenologist might assure himself of the existence of the lived experiences that serve as a basis for his phenomenological findings as geometry has to concern itself with how the existence of the figures on the blackboard or of the models in the cabinet is to be methodically secured. Geometry and phenomenology, as sciences of pure essence, know no findings about real existence.

Now phenomenology has no findings about existence to make concerning lived experiences—and so no experiences and observations in the natural sense, the sense in which a science of facts must rely on such things. Even so, as a fundamental condition of its possibility, it does make findings of essence about unreflected lived experiences. But it owes these to reflection, more precisely to reflective intuition of essence. Consequently the skeptical 154 doubts regarding self-observation come into consideration for phenomenology as well. They do so insofar as these doubts can readily be extended from immanently experiencing reflection to every reflection whatever.¹

Indeed, what would become of phenomenology if “one could not see how a report on the lived experiencing of lived experiencing, even if it is there, gets onto paper”? What would become of it if it were permitted to make statements about the essences of “known,” reflected lived experiences, but not about the essences of lived experiences simpliciter? What would become of it if “one could hardly even venture conjectures about how one arrives at knowledge of immediate lived experiencing,” or rather at knowledge of its essence? It may be that the phenomenologist has no findings about existence to make regarding the lived experiences that hover before him as examples for his ideations. Yet, one might object, in these ideations he sees only ideas of whatever he happens to have before his eyes in the example.

This evidently concerns every kind of reflection, although in phenomenology each one claims to count as a source of absolute cognitions. In phantasy a thing hovers before me—say, even a centaur. I think I know that it presents itself in certain “modes of appearance,” in certain “sensation adumbrations,” apprehensions, and the like. I think I have the essential insight here that such an object can in general be intuited only in modes of appearance of this kind, only by means of such adumbrating functions and whatever else may play a role here. But while I have the centaur in view, I do not have its modes of appearance, its adumbrating data, its apprehensions in view; and in grasping its essence I do not grasp them and their essence.

The difficulty evidently also concerns the analyses of consciousness with respect to the “sense” of intentional lived experiences—with respect to everything that belongs to what is meant, to the intentionally objective as such, to the sense of a statement, and the like. For these too are analyses within reflections of a peculiar direction. Watt himself even goes so far as to say: “Psychology must make clear to itself that self-observation alters the relation to objects of the lived experiences to be described. Perhaps this alteration has a much greater significance than one is inclined to believe.”¹ If Watt is right, then in establishing through self-observation that we were just now attending to this book here and still are, we would be asserting too much. That held at most before the reflection.

All genuine skepticism, of whatever kind and direction, betrays itself by a fundamental absurdity: in its arguments it implicitly presupposes, as conditions of the possibility of their validity, precisely what it denies in its theses. One convinces oneself without difficulty that this mark also fits the arguments under discussion. Whoever so much as says, “I doubt the cognitive significance of reflection,” asserts an absurdity. For in making a statement about his doubting he reflects. And to put forward this statement as valid presupposes that reflection really and indubitably (scilicet [namely], in the cases at hand) has the cognitive value being doubted: that it does not alter the relation to objects, that the unreflected lived experience does not lose its essence in passing over into reflection.

Further: in the arguments there is constant talk of reflection as a fact, and of what it brings about or could bring about. With this there is naturally also talk of the “unknown,” unreflected lived experiences, again as facts, namely as those out of which the reflected ones arise. Thus a knowledge of unreflected lived experiences, among them of unreflected reflections, is constantly presupposed, while at the same time the possibility of such knowledge is called into question. That 156 happens insofar as it is doubted whether one can establish anything at all about the content of the unreflected lived experience and about what reflection accomplishes: how far it alters the original lived experience, and whether it does not, so to speak, falsify it into something totally different.

But it is clear that, if this doubt and the possibility posited in it were legitimate, not the slightest legitimate ground would remain for the certainty that there is and can be any unreflected lived experience and any reflection at all. It is further clear that the latter, which was after all the constant presupposition, can only be known through reflection. As immediate knowledge, it can only be grounded through reflective giving intuition. The same holds for the assertion of the actuality or possibility of the modifications that follow upon reflection. But if something of this kind is given through intuition, then it is given in an intuitional content. Hence it is absurd to assert that there is nothing knowable here at all—nothing concerning the content of the unreflected lived experience and the kind of modifications it undergoes.

That suffices to make the absurdity plain. Here as everywhere, skepticism loses its force once we go back from verbal arguments to the intuition of essence, to originarily giving intuition and its very own legitimacy. Admittedly, everything depends on actually performing this intuition and on being able to bring oneself to raise what is in question into the light of genuine essential clarity—or, as the case may be, to take up accounts such as those we attempted in the previous section as intuitively as they were carried out and offered.

The phenomena of reflection are in fact a sphere of pure and, in some cases, perfectly clear givens. It is an essential insight, attainable at any time because immediate, that from what is objectively given as such a reflection is possible on the giving consciousness and its subject. Such a reflection is possible from the perceived, what is “there” in person, to the perceiving; from the remembered, just as it “hovers before us” as such, as “having been,” to the remembering; from the statement, in its unfolding givenness, to the stating, and so on. In this, the perceiving comes to givenness as the perceiving of precisely this perceived, and each consciousness as consciousness of precisely what is in each case conscious.

This also implies that reflection cannot be entangled in any antinomical conflict with the ideal of perfect cognition. Every kind of being—we have already had to stress this several times—essentially has its modes of givenness, and thereby its modes of cognitive method. To treat essential peculiarities of these as defects, or even to charge them to “our human” cognition as contingent, factual defects, is an absurdity.

For the rest, it must be stressed that our repeated recourse to insight (evidence, or intuition) is, here as everywhere, not a mere phrase. In the sense of the introductory Part, it means going back to what is ultimate in all cognition—exactly as when one speaks of insight in the case of the most primitive logical and arithmetical axioms.