It is well known that Husserl first makes the “transcendental” (as opposed to merely “empirical”) character of his proposed new science of phenomenology completely clear and explicit in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” published in 1910–11. In particular, although “phenomenology and psychology must stand in close relationship to each other, since both are concerned with consciousness,” they nevertheless are concerned with consciousness in two very different ways and from two very different points of view: “Psychology is concerned with ‘empirical consciousness,’ with consciousness from the empirical point of view, as empirical being in the ensemble of nature, whereas phenomenology is concerned with ‘pure’ consciousness, i.e., consciousness from the phenomenological point of view” (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 91). Husserl proceeds to illustrate this contrast, as is also well known, via a comparison with Galileo’s mathematization of physical nature in creating an exact natural science. Just as, in physics, properly empirical investigation, on the Galilean model, must be preceded by an a priori mathematical delineation of the essential structure of the domain of inquiry (mathematical essential analysis of the concepts of velocity, acceleration, and so on), so in psychology all properly empirical investigation must be preceded by an a priori phenomenological delineation of the essential structure of the domain of consciousness (phenomenological essential analysis of the structure of perception, recollection, and so on). All merely naturalistic psychology (and thus all psychophysics) is therefore, according to Husserl, in the same insecure position as pre-Galilean science of nature. Only when psychology (like physics) becomes grounded and established on the basis of a preceding a priori—and to this extent transcendental—delineation of its subject matter, can psychology (like physics) become a science, strictly speaking.
These ideas represent the core of Husserl’s critique of what he calls naturalistic philosophy—the attempt, characteristic of the late nineteenth century (in such thinkers as Helmholtz, Mach, Wundt, and James, for example), to set philosophy on the secure path of a science by closely associating it with recent empirical advances in psychology and psychophysics. Husserl’s argument, in opposition to such naturalistic tendencies, is that empirical advances alone can never amount to a truly rigorous science and, in particular, that psychology can become a genuine science only on the basis of phenomenological transcendental philosophy—an investigation “directed towards a scientific essential knowledge of consciousness, towards that which consciousness itself ‘is’ according to its essence in all its distinguishable forms,” an investigation that is analogous to Galileo’s mathematical essential analysis of physical nature but that, unlike Galileo’s, is also “purely descriptive” and “direct” rather than “exact” and “indirect” (“Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” p. 89). Nevertheless, and this is the core of Husserl’s critique of what he calls “historicism and Weltanschauung or worldview philosophy” (as represented, above all, by Dilthey), phenomenological philosophy is just as much a rigorous science as Galilean mathematical science of nature, insofar as “science is a title standing for absolute, timeless values,” and “the ‘idea’ of science ... is a supratemporal one, [where] here that means limited by no relatedness to the spirit of one’s time” (ibid., p. 136). In particular, the direct or descriptive methods of the new phenomenology, involving an immediate intuitive grasp of essences (Wesenserfassung), yield truths that are just as “supratemporal” as the indirect or exact methods of mathematics: “Thus the greatest step our age has to make is to recognize that with philosophical intuition in the correct sense, the phenomenological grasp of essences, a limitless field of work opens out, a science that without all indirectly symbolical and mathematical methods, without the apparatus of premises and conclusions, still attains a plenitude of the most rigorous cognitions, which are decisive for all further philosophy” (ibid., p. 147).
Famously, in his last great work, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, written in the years 1934–37, Husserl returns to the theme of the relationship between phenomenological philosophy and Galilean mathematical science, and to the relationship between transcendental phenomenology and history. Husserl is explicitly responding, in particular, to the circumstance (the present “crisis”) that the very idea of science or reason as it has been passed down to us from the Renaissance, through Galileo, and then the Enlightenment—where “reason is a title for ‘absolute,’ ‘eternal,’ ‘supratemporal,’ ‘unconditionally’ valid ideas and ideals”—has now become profoundly questionable (Crisis , § 3). Husserl responds to this crisis of his own time by an essentially historical investigation—a self-consciously idealized, reconstructive, or “teleological” historical investigation—into how the original idea of science that inspired the Renaissance was subsequently obscured or covered over. Specifically, the original ideal of a new “ ‘philosophical’ form of [human] existence: Freely giving oneself, one’s whole life, its rule through pure reason or philosophy,” resulting in “universal knowledge, absolutely free from prejudice, of the world and man” was subsequently replaced by the ideal of “positive” or “objective science” (as exemplified, above all, by the mathematical and physical sciences); and, most importantly, the reasons for this transformation have themselves remained hidden from us (ibid.). Through an idealized historical reconstruction of this process, Husserl aims to show that transcendental phenomenology is precisely its immanent end, or telos, and that this philosophy alone offers us a satisfactory resolution of our current crisis.
The key figure in the fateful transformation of the idea of science was of course Galileo. For Galileo first realized the Renaissance ideal of “universal [rational] knowledge, absolutely free from prejudice” by creating the mathematically exact science of nature. Here, using reason’s own products, the tools and methods of “pure geometry,” one was able to secure a science of nature entirely free from all superstition, theology, and metaphysics; and one was then able, accordingly, to implement an ideal of “objective science” or “objective truth” as an infinite, never to be completed task of systematic inquiry into this rationally constituted domain—the domain of mathematically described physical nature. At the same time, however, one thereby lost sight of the fact that mathematics itself (here the domain of pure geometry) is essentially a schematization or idealization of something more fundamental, namely, “the only real world, the one that is actually given through perception, that is ever experienced and experienceable—our everyday life-world [Lebenswelt]” (Crisis, § 9h). In particular, the actual intuitively given shapes and figures that we can perceive in ordinary life are not perfectly precise or exact but essentially rough and approximate; and their perfectly precise and exact geometrical counterparts arise only on the basis of a further constituent of real or ordinary experience—the “practical art of surveying” or “measurement”—as we imagine purely in thought an idealized indefinite extension of the continual increase in precision actually available empirically (straighter and straighter lines, flatter and flatter planes, and so on). When Galileo and modern mathematical science then turn around and declare that only mathematically described nature is objectively real, and that the “subjective-relative” domain of our actual experience or perception is a misleading appearance of this absolute and objective realm, they forget that our new mathematical description of nature only has sense and meaning on the basis of its necessary origin in the ordinary world of perception and experience—otherwise it is a mere empty formalism. The actual intentional meaning and origin of geometry becomes hidden from us by a historical process of “sedimentation” and “technization,” and this leads to the most profound philosophical misunderstandings.
The most fundamental of these misunderstandings is the creation of mind-body dualism by Descartes. Nature as a whole divides into two separate parts: external or extended nature, described solely by pure geometry, and internal or thinking nature, characterized by the essentially nonspatial predicates of thought or consciousness. These two separate parts of nature as a whole are in causal interaction, however, and the merely subjective appearance of external nature that we are actually conscious of in perception is nothing but the effect of purely geometrical matter as it impinges upon our sensory organs. From the Galilean-Cartesian starting point, we thus obtain a naturalized conception of consciousness or the mind as the complement, as it were, of the de-perceptualized, idealized, and mathematized conception of physical nature characteristic of modern science. And the only way to combat such a hopelessly misleading conception of consciousness, according to Husserl, is to recognize that Galilean-Cartesian “physicalist objectivism” itself has a counterpart in modern “transcendental subjectivism.” This latter tendency, too, has its origin in Descartes, but it reaches its culmination, in the modern period, in the explicitly transcendental philosophy of Kant—where consciousness or the mind is no longer seen as a complementary part of nature at all, but rather as the transcendental or constitutive ground of all of nature, including, especially, our new mathematical representation of physical or external nature. Nevertheless, Kant’s version of transcendental philosophy, for Husserl, was also ultimately a failure; for Kant grounded it on a “transcendental logic” derived from the Leibnizean tradition and thereby misunderstood its essentially intuitive or perceptual dimension. The inevitable result was a “merely regressive” method of transcendental inquiry, whereby we start with the “fact” of mathematical natural science and then develop hypothetical or “mythical” constructions (within Kantian “transcendental psychology”) to explain the conditions of possibility of this fact. Just as, in the case of Galileo, the life-world is “the forgotten meaning-fundament of natural science” (Crisis, § 9h), “Kant’s unexpressed ‘presupposition’,” according to Husserl, is precisely “the surrounding world of life, taken for granted as valid” (Crisis, § 28). It is the task of transcendental phenomenology systematically to “inquireback [rückfragen]” into this “pre-given life-world” so as finally to articulate a fully coherent—and fully scientific—version of transcendental philosophy.
The concept of the pregiven life-world is thus the fundamental concept in Husserl’s late reformulation of the task of transcendental phenomenology. But what exactly is this life-world? It is just the world as it is ordinarily experienced or lived by each of us from our own subjective-relative points of view. It is the world now spread out around me in space and time, for example, containing physical bodies simply as they are perceived by me. It is a world in which I myself am embodied and may move, accordingly, among the physical bodies spread out around me in space so as successively to experience various sides or aspects of these bodies from different points of view at different times. In so doing, moreover, I undertake various intentional activities and practical projects, each associated with various ends or values, including such projects as the arts, crafts, and sciences—all with their various “techniques,” both practical and theoretical. Finally, it is a world containing other human beings like myself, among whom and with whom I undertake such activities collectively. It is an essentially intersubjective world, in other words, of collective human activity, collective human culture, and collective human history. All of this, as Husserl says, is perfectly obvious to all of us; and the concept of the life-world, so understood, was already present in Husserl’s very first articulations of transcendental phenomenology. Thus, in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” Husserl emphasizes that “experience in the pre-scientific sense ... plays an important role within the technique proper to natural science” and then states that “the natural sciences have not in a single instance unraveled for us actual reality, the reality in which we live, move, and are” (Crisis, § 36). Similarly, in § 47 of Ideas I, Husserl contrasts the world of modern mathematical physics with the realm of “experiencing consciousness” or “confirmatory experience [ausweisende Ehrfahrung]” on which it is based, and in the following § 48, he emphasizes that this realm of actual experience is intersubjective. It is so far entirely unclear, therefore, what the new systematic status of the life-world within transcendental philosophy is supposed to be. It is similarly unclear what this new status—if indeed it is new—has to do with the new emphasis on philosophical and scientific history also characteristic of the Crisis.
The systematic status of the life-world begins to be clarified in the immediately following sections of the Crisis, where Husserl discusses “the problem of a science of the life-world” and then uses this discussion to motivate a reconceived version of the “transcendental epoché” or “transcendental reduction” (§§ 37ff.). The problem of a science of the life-world, it turns out, is precisely to distinguish this kind of science from all objective or positive science. The latter arises, as we have suggested, on the basis of the life-world, as we attempt systematically to sort out exactly which entities intuitively appearing in the life-world are “actual,” exactly which statements we might make about the life-world are “true.” For, in going about our practical affairs within the life-world, it may happen that an entity that originally appeared to be actual (a statement that originally appeared to be true) may turn out not to be what it originally appeared: In walking up to or around an apparent physical object, for example, it may turn out to be a hallucination or a dream. Within the life-world itself, we have inductive regularities and causal relations that guide us in this process of continual correction (real or actual physical objects are perceived to have a backside when we walk around them, for example); and objective or positive science naturally arises from this process as we then attempt, in turn, continually to correct and improve such inductive regularities by reference to more accurate and comprehensive scientific laws. The outcome is an infinite, never-to-be-completed project of systematic inquiry and continual refinement, which is analogous, in this respect, to the indefinite process of continual idealization that first gave rise to the objective science of pure geometry. By contrast, the task of a science of the life-world itself is oriented in precisely the opposite direction. Rather than leaving the immediately intuitive realm of the life-world behind in an infinite process of continual idealization and abstraction, as all properly objective or positive sciences essentially and legitimately do, the point of a science of the life-world is self-consciously to remain entirely within the immediately intuitive realm so as to become fully clear and explicit about the fact that the original intentional meaning of all the properly objective sciences derives solely from their relationship to the life-world.
Thus, whereas all possible objective sciences—mathematics, physics, history, psychology, and so on—must have their own forms of “evidence” or “insight” (their own forms of “essential intuition” and “essential analysis”), these forms of evidence are by no means ultimately or originally intuitive in the sense of the life-world:
All conceivable verification leads back to these modes of evidence [the “immediate presence” of things as experienced in the life-world] because the “thing itself” (in the particular mode) lies in these intuitions themselves as that which is actually, intersubjectively experienceable and verifiable and is not a substruction of thought; whereas such substruction, insofar as it makes a claim to truth, can have actual truth only by being related back to such evidences.... One must fully clarify, i.e., bring to ultimate evidence [letzten Evidenz], how all the evidence of objective-logical accomplishments, through which objective theory (thus mathematical and natural-scientific theory) is grounded in respect of form and content, has its hidden sources of grounding in the ultimately accomplishing life, the life in which the evident givenness of the life-world forever has, has attained, and attains anew its prescientific ontic meaning. From objective-logical evidence (mathematical “insight,” natural-scientific positive-scientific “insight,” as it is being accomplished by the inquiring and grounding mathematician, etc.), the path leads back, here, to the primal evidence [Urevidenz] in which the life-world is ever pre-given. (Crisis, § 34d)
And it follows, therefore, that “the objective is precisely never experienceable as itself; ... the experienceability of something objective is no different from that of infinitely distant geometrical structures and, in general, from that of all infinite ‘ideas,’ including, for example, the infinity of the number series” (ibid.).
This fundamental distinction between a science of the life-world as such and all objective sciences that then may be erected on the basis of the life-world—a distinction that itself arises, as we have seen, from a historical reconstruction of the origin and significance of Galilean natural science for the modern period—is now used to motivate and inform Husserl’s reconceived version of the transcendental epoché. Indeed, the very first step on the road to this epoché is what Husserl calls “the epoché of objective science,” whereby we turn away from the project of objective science and orient ourselves instead toward the originally intuitive basis, which can alone provide a transcendental or constitutive grounding of these sciences. Yet this first step or epoché is by no means sufficient to define the characteristic attitude or point of view of transcendental phenomenology, for there are two very different ways of making the life-world into the subject matter of an essential or eidetic science: Either we can remain within the life-world itself, in our natural and naive everyday attitude and then attempt, from this point of view, to describe the essential or a priori formal structure of this world (this, in effect, is what we have already done above, when we first introduced the structure of the life-world in terms that are obvious to everyone). Or we can take up “a consistently reflective attitude towards the ‘how’ of the subjective manner of givenness of the life-world and life-world objects” (Crisis, § 38). It is only in this second step that we obtain “the genuine transcendental epoché,” and thus the “transcendental reduction,” that is, “the discovery and investigation of the transcendental correlation between world and world-consciousness” (Crisis, § 41). In this way, in particular, the life-world becomes a “subject matter for a theoretical interest determined by a universal epoché with respect to the actuality of the things in the life-world” (Crisis, § 44).
The life-world, to begin with, has a subjective-relative mode of existence. It is given to a particular person from a particular point of view—for example, it is my perceptual world as it is directly given spread out around me now in space and time. In my natural attitude within this world, I have perceptual and theoretical interests in its “truth” or “actuality,” and these interests, in turn, are inextricably connected with my practical interests in negotiating my way within this world in pursuit of my various ends and projects. I need to know, for example, whether when I walk up to the wall, I can continue right on through it, and thus my natural attitude within the life-world is essentially bound up with an interest in truth. Indeed, it is for precisely this reason, as we have seen, that the life-world itself necessarily and inevitably leads to the further project of objective science. In order to take up an attitude toward the life-world that decisively and definitively precludes all objective science, so as then to enable a distinctively transcendental science of the life-world qua transcendental ground of objective science, I need to redirect my orientation within the life-world away from all questions of truth or actuality with respect to its objects. I no longer care, for example, whether when I walk up to the wall, I can continue right on through it. Rather, I am concerned solely with those manners of “subjective givenness” of walls (and of all life-world objects more generally) on the basis of which, in the natural attitude, it is then possible to say whether something is one kind of life-world object rather than another (a physical object, say, instead of a hallucination or a dream). For example, the subjective mode of givenness of an actual physical wall, within my experience of the life-world in general, is such that certain visual experiences (of the wall) are correlated with certain kinesthetic experiences (of moving my body up to the wall) and certain further tactual and kinesthetic experiences (of touching the wall, feeling its pressure, and finding the motion of my body inhibited). The transcendental meaning of any object within the life-world (actual physical wall, hallucinated wall, and so on) is thus an intentional correlate, as it were, of some such system of subjective correlations. The life-world itself, as lived in the natural attitude, is a constitutional achievement of transcendental subjectivity; it itself has a transcendental ground—which, since the life-world is always “my” world as it is given to me here and now, is finally “the absolutely unique, ultimately functioning ego” (Crisis, § 55).
In the midst of arriving at this new understanding of the transcendental reduction, Husserl inserts an intriguing remark. Immediately after commenting that the reduction “has [now] attained a self-understanding in principle which procures for these insights and for the epoché itself their ultimate meaning and value,” Husserl writes:
I note in passing that the much shorter way to the transcendental epoché in my Ideas toward a Pure Phenomenolog y and Phenomenological Philosophy, which I call the “Cartesian way” (since it is thought of as being attained merely by reflectively engrossing oneself in the Cartesian epoché of the Meditations while critically purifying it of Descartes’s prejudices and confusions), has a great disadvantage: while it leads to the transcendental ego in one leap, as it were, it brings this ego into view as apparently empty of content, since there can be no preparatory explication; so one is at a loss, at first, to know what has been gained by it, much less how, starting with this, a completely new sort of fundamental science, decisive for philosophy, has been attained. Hence also, as the reception of my Ideas showed, it is all too easy right at the very beginning to fall back into the naïve-natural attitude—something that is very tempting in any case. (Crisis, § 43)
This remark therefore invites us to consider whether there are any fundamental differences between the transcendental (or phenomenological) reduction as it is described in the Ideas and as it is now being described in the Crisis.
The phenomenological reduction, in the Ideas, takes its starting point by “bracketing” or “disconnecting” the entire world experienced in the natural attitude. We do this, of course, by employing (in a modified form) the method of Cartesian “universal doubt,” with the following result:
The entire world, posited [gesetzte] in the natural attitude, actually prefound in experience, taken completely “free of theory,” as it is actually experienced and clearly exhibited in the interconnections of experiences, now counts as nothing for us—it is to be bracketed, untested but also uncontested. In the same way all positivistic or otherwise grounded theories and sciences that relate to this world, no matter how good, succumb to the same fate. (Ideas I, § 32, my translation)
Thus, the Ideas begins by simultaneously bracketing, via the method of Cartesian doubt, both what Husserl later calls the life-world and all objective sciences that emerge from it, whereas the Crisis begins by contrasting the life-world with the objective sciences that emerge from it and then bracketing the latter on behalf of the former.
Of course, as we have seen, this epoché of the objective sciences on behalf of the life-world is only the first step toward the full transcendental epoché developed in the Crisis, and Husserl then goes on to take the more radical step of leaving the natural attitude for the sake of “a consistently reflective attitude towards the ‘how’ of the subjective manner of givenness of the life-world and life-world objects” involving “a universal epoché with respect to the actuality of the things in the life-world.” And there is no doubt, in particular, that this second, more radical step bears a close similarity to the phenomenological epoché of the Ideas, resulting in the new phenomenological “region of pure consciousness.” Nevertheless, there is also a fundamental dissimilarity. The Ideas arrives at the realm of pure consciousness by a principled distinction between “immanent” and “transcendent perceptions” (or “acts”), where the former are such “that their intentional objects, when these exist at all, belong to the same stream of experience as they do,” and the latter are not. Thus my awareness of my own conscious states counts as an immanent perception, and my awareness of things in the world around me is transcendent (Ideas I, § 38). The crucial point, as Husserl then explains, is that transcendent perceptions are always dubitable, whereas immanent perceptions are indubitable. The phenomenological region of pure or “absolute” consciousness thereby emerges as the “residuum after the nullifying of the [transcendent] world”—it emerges as that which is absolutely secure from all doubt (Ideas I, § 49).
In the Crisis, by contrast, there is no use whatsoever of the method of Cartesian doubt. In particular, transcendental subjectivity and the transcendental ego are not arrived at by “nullifying” the life-world to which they are attached. Rather, transcendental subjectivity and the transcendental ego are arrived at by changing our orientation within the life-world itself so that its own transcendental structure—its own intentional constitution—is clearly and explicitly revealed. To be sure, in the course of this process of reorientation, we must indeed bracket all questions of actuality or truth pertaining to the things of the life-world. But the transcendental epoché now involves no properly skeptical questions at all, and there is absolutely no discussion, in particular, about the dubitability of “outer,” or transcendent, experience as opposed to the indubitability of “inner,” or immanent, experience. As we have seen, all questions of actuality and truth are bracketed here simply to preclude, at the outset, any move away from the life-world toward objective science, and to focus our attention instead on the ultimate transcendental conditions that make possible both the life-world itself, as it is taken in the natural attitude, and the objective sciences that necessarily and inevitably arise from it.
In the final section of Part III A of the Crisis, Husserl sums up his new understanding of the transcendental epoché and the corresponding type of “apodicticity” appropriate to transcendental phenomenology in an especially striking way:
From this one also understands the sense of the demand for apodicticity in regard to the ego and all transcendental knowledge gained upon this transcendental basis. Having arrived at the ego, one becomes aware of standing within a sphere of evidence of such a nature that any attempt to inquireback behind it would be absurd. By contrast, every ordinary appeal to evidence, insofar as it was supposed to cut off further inquiry-back, was theoretically no better than an appeal to an oracle through which a god reveals himself. All natural evidences, those of all objective sciences (not excluding those of formal logic and mathematics), belong to the realm of what is “obvious,” what in truth has a background of incomprehensibility. Every evidence is the title of a problem, with the sole exception of phenomenological evidence, after it has reflectively clarified itself and shown itself to be ultimate evidence. It is naturally a ludicrous, although unfortunately common misunderstanding, to seek to attack transcendental phenomenology as “Cartesianism,” as if its ego cogito were a premise or set of premises from which the rest of knowledge (whereby one naively speaks only of objective knowledge) was to be deduced, absolutely “secured.” The point is not to secure objectivity but to understand it. One must finally achieve the insight that no objective science, no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain anything in a serious sense .... The only true way to explain is to make transcendentally understandable. (Crisis, § 55)
Thus, whereas the exposition of the transcendental epoché in the Ideas could (and did) easily lead to the prevalent misunderstanding of transcendental phenomenology as a form of epistemological foundationalism, aimed at finally securing our objective knowledge in a basis of absolute certainty, the exposition in the Crisis is self-consciously intended to remove this misunderstanding once and for all.
We can deepen our appreciation of this point, and we can connect it, in turn, with the problem of historicity, if we now take a brief look at Part III B of the Crisis. Here Husserl takes up the thread of the (reconstructive) historical narrative interrupted by Part III A, beginning with “Kant’s unexpressed ‘presupposition’: the surrounding world of life, taken for granted as valid,” and continues the story into the nineteenth century. His focus is on the profoundly problematic relationship between psychology and transcendental philosophy during this period, and thus on the very problematic (“naturalistic philosophy”) which first prompted Husserl to clarify the peculiarly transcendental (as opposed to merely empirical) character of the new science of phenomenology in “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” Now, in the Crisis, the main theme of “the philosophical development after Kant” is characterized as a “struggle between physicalistic objectivism and the constantly reemerging ‘transcendental motif’” (Crisis, § 56). Physicalistic objectivism, as we already know, obtains a naturalized conception of the mind, consciousness, or (as Husserl now puts it) the soul as the complement, within nature as a whole, of the de-perceptualized, idealized, and mathematized conception of physical nature characteristic of post-Galilean modern science. Nature as a whole is thus “seen ‘naturalistically’ as a world with two strata of real facts regulated by causal laws ... [and] souls [are] seen as real annexes of their physical living bodies (these being conceived in terms of exact natural science) ...” (Crisis, § 61). We obtain the familiar dualistic conception (which Husserl characterizes as “absurd”) according to which “body and soul thus signify two real strata in this experiential world [that is, the life-world] which are integrally and really connected similarly to, and in the same sense as, two pieces of a body. Thus, concretely, one is external to the other, is distinct from it, and is merely related to it in a regulated way” (Crisis, § 62). And this conception is absurd, for Husserl, because “it is contrary to what is essentially proper to bodies and souls as actually given in life-world experience, which is what determines the genuine sense of all scientific concepts” (Crisis, § 62). In particular, in the life-world itself, I am directly and immediately given both physical bodies spread out around me in space and my own physical body in which I “hold sway”—as essentially em-bodied—as I live and move among them.
Nevertheless, it then appears, at least at first, that in order to delimit the subject matter of a proposed new objective science—a new science of “descriptive psychology”—it is still possible to bracket all physical or bodily dimensions of the life-world by means of what Husserl calls “a fully consciously practiced method ... which I call the phenomenological-psychological reduction—taken in this context as a method for psychology” (Crisis, § 69). I arrive at this standpoint, namely, by an “epoché of validity” with respect to all beliefs concerning perceptual physical objects in the life-world around me, so that “purely descriptive psychology thematizes persons in the pure internal attitude of the epoché, and this gives it its subject matter, the soul” (ibid.). In other words: “For the psychologist, as long as he limits himself to pure description, the only simple objects are ego-subjects and what can be experienced ‘in’ these ego-subjects themselves (and then only through the epoché) as what is immanently their own, in order to make this the subject matter of further scientific work” (Crisis, § 70).
But precisely here Husserl now finds a fundamental problem. We have been attempting to find a foundation for “individual psychology”—by “performing the universal reduction in such a way that it is exercised individually upon all individual subjects accessible through experience and induction, and in each case” (Crisis, § 71). We have been assuming as “obvious” that “human beings are external to one another, they are separated realities, and so their psychic interiors are also separated. Internal psychology can thus be only individual psychology of individual souls, and everything else is a matter for psychophysical research” (ibid.). However, “the properly understood epoché, with its properly understood universality, totally changes all the notions that one could ever have of the task of psychology, and it reveals everything that was just put forward as obvious to be a naiveté which necessarily and forever becomes impossible as soon as the epoché and the reduction are actually, and in their full sense, understood and carried out” (ibid.).
The fundamental problem, it turns out, is that the present version of the epoché—the phenomenological-psychological reduction—entirely misconstrues the a priori constitutive force of intersubjectivity:
How, more precisely, does each [subject] have world-consciousness while it has self-apperception as this human being? Here we soon see, as another a priori, that self-consciousness and consciousness of others are inseparable; it is unthinkable, and not merely [contrary to] fact, that I be a human being in a world without being a human being. There need be no one in my perceptual field, but fellow humans are necessary as actual, as known, and as an open horizon of those I might possibly meet. Factually I am within an inter-human present and within an open horizon of humankind: I know myself to be factually within a generative framework, in the unitary flow of an historical development in which this present is humankind’s present, and the world of which it is conscious is an historical present with an historical past and an historical future. (Crisis, § 71)
After the properly understood universal epoché, then: “What remains, now, is not a multiplicity of separated souls, each reduced to its pure interiority, but rather, just as there is a single universal nature as a selfenclosed framework of unity, so there is a single psychic framework, a total framework of all souls, which are united not externally but internally, namely, through the intentional interpenetration which is the communalization of their lives” (ibid.).
The phenomenological-psychological epoché is thereby transformed, in particular, into the truly universal transcendental epoché:
This means at the same time that, within the vitally flowing intentionality in which the life of an ego-subject consists, every other ego is already intentionally implied in advance, by way of empathy and the empathy-horizon. Within the universal epoché which actually understands itself, it becomes evident that there is no separation of mutual externality at all for souls in their own essential nature. What is a mutual externality for the naturalmundane attitude of world-life prior to the epoché, because of the localization of souls in living bodies, is transformed in the epoché into a pure, intentional, mutual internality. With this the world—the straightforward existing world and, within it, existing nature—is transformed into the all-communal phenomenon “world,” “world for all actual and possible subjects,” none of which can escape the intentional implication according to which it belongs in advance within the horizon of every other subject.
Thus we see with surprise, I think, that in the pure development of the idea of a descriptive psychology, which seeks to bring to expression what is essentially proper to souls, there necessarily occurs a transformation of the phenomenological-psychological epoché and reduction into the transcendental ; and we see that we have done and could do nothing else here but repeat in basic outlines the considerations that we had to carry out earlier in quite another interest, i.e., in the interest not of a psychology as a positive science but of a universal and then transcendental philosophy. (Crisis, § 71)
In particular, if I undertake the transcendental epoché as it is articulated in the Crisis, I arrive at a position of necessary intersubjectivity or human community, according to which “all souls make up a single unity of intentionality within the reciprocal implication of the life-fluxes of the individual subjects, a unity that can be unfolded systematically by phenomenology” (ibid.).
We noted above that Husserl had already emphasized the importance of intersubjectivity in § 48 of the Ideas. In particular, he there suggests that “the factually separate worlds of experience [of different subjects] fit together through the interconnections of actual experience into a single intersubjective world, the correlate of the unitary spiritual world (the universal extension of the human community)” (Ideas I, § 48). But this theme, in the Ideas, is only thus briefly suggested; and, most importantly, there is no discussion at all of the necessary historicity of the community in question—of the circumstance that, as described in the Crisis, “factually I am within an inter-human present and within an open horizon of humankind: I know myself to be factually within a generative framework, in the unitary flow of an historical development in which this present is humankind’s present, and the world of which it is conscious is an historical present with an historical past and an historical future” (Crisis, § 71).
If we take this last idea seriously, however, it follows that the old dream of “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”—the idea of pure phenomenology as a fundamentally ahistorical discipline concerned only with “ ‘absolute,’ ‘eternal,’ ‘supratemporal,’ ‘unconditionally’ valid ideas and ideals”—must also be given up. The role of transcendental phenomenology, in this respect, is completely disanalogous to the role of Galilean pure geometry in grounding, for the first time, a mathematical science of nature. Rather, the role of transcendental phenomenology, as Husserl now understands it, is precisely to intervene in our historically present (circa 1935) “crisis of European sciences” so as to recapture the original idea of science as a new “ ‘philosophical’ form of [human] existence: freely giving oneself, one’s whole life, its rule through pure reason or philosophy,” resulting in “universal knowledge, absolutely free from prejudice, of the world and man” (Crisis, § 3). In particular, all objective or positive science is now seen to be an achievement of transcendental subjectivity, depending (among other things) on “the essential structures of absolute historicity, namely, those of a transcendental community of subjects as one which, living in community through intentionality in these most general and also in particularized a priori forms, has in itself and continues to create the world as intentional validity-correlate, in ever new forms and strata of a cultural world” (Crisis, § 72). Objective science is no mere “technique” for cognitively accessing (and controlling) an alien nonhuman reality; human subjectivity is no mere “residuum” of a de-perceptualized external nature. On the contrary, the world of objective science is a free, rational creation of historical human subjectivity, now seen as an equally free and rational historical transcendental community. Transcendental phenomenology thereby restores the intrinsic worth and dignity of both objective science and that human subjectivity—our human subjectivity—of which it is a necessary product.