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Kant and the Idea of
Transcendental Philosophy*
EDMUND HUSSERL
The expanded version of the thoughts of a lecture for the
Kant Celebration at the University of Freiburg on May 1, 1924.
Foreword
The two-hundredth anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth must not go
uncelebrated even in our phenomenological yearbook.! For in the
fundamental development which phenomenology has undergone in
my life's work, in its course of development from a method, novel in
form, for the analysis of origins (as in its first breakthrough in the
Logical Investigations) to a new and, in the strictest sense, independent
science (the pure or transcendental phenomenology of my Ideas),
there has emerged an obvious essential relationship between this
phenomenology and the transcendental philosophy of Kant. In fact,
my adoption of the Kantian word "transcendental," despite all remote-
ness from the basic presuppositions, guiding problems, and methods of
Kant, was based from the beginning on the well-founded conviction
that all senseful problems which Kant and his successors had treated
theoretically under the heading of transcendental problems could, at
* Translators' Note: "Kant und die Idee der Transcendentalphilosophie" (1924)
was first published as a "Supplementary Text" to Erste Philosophie (1923124),
Volume I (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1956), pp. 230-87. Ours is the first
English translation. We have attempted to leave unaltered as far as possible the
peculiar characteristics of the German text and yet to achieve a readable English
text.
Our gratitude is offered here to James Street Fulton, Professor Emeritus of Rice
University, for his encouragement and valuable assistance with this project. We are
also grateful to Dr. H. J. H. Hartgerink of Martinus Nijhoff for granting us per-
mission on behalf of the publisher and the Hussed Archives to publish this
translation.
Copyright 1956 by Martinus Nijhoff.
Copyright 1974 by Ted E. Klein, Jr. and William E. Pohl, translators.
1. Hussed's intention (as can be seen from this sentence) of publishing this
treatise in the Jahrbuch fur Philosophie und Phiinomenologie was never realized.
The text appears here for the first time in print. (Note by editor of Hussedian VII.)
9
least in their finally clarified formulation, be redirected to this new
basic science. When the new phenomenology introduced itself at one
and the same time as a beginning and as a universal methodology for a
phenomenological philosophy, that amounted to saying that any
philosophy whatsoever, taken as a systematic whole, can assume the
form of an ultimately rigorous science only as a universal transcendental
philosophy, but also only on the basis of phenomenology and in the
specifically phenomenological method.
Some elucidations might be useful here.
In its first stage of development, at which, by the way, a number of
phenomenologists have stopped, phenomenology was a mere method
of purely intuitive description, distinguished above all by the radicalism
with which it sought to satisfy the requirement of taking every "phe-
nomenon" (every "datum," everything immediately found), i.e., each
and every one that might enter the attentive gaze of consciousness,
exactly as it presented itself in the latter, and of fixing systematic con-
cepts that could describe each datum as such, in the "how" of its
givenness: in strictly "descriptive" concepts, as concepts derived from
"pure intuition" of these data themselves. As a matter of principle, all
opinions and inquiries that go beyond the realms of pure givenness
were hereby excluded.
Every such datum is a datum for subjectivity, which directs its view
toward it, has it in the presentive consciousness; this consciousness in
its manifold formations is again itself a "phenomenon" in the reflection
which directs itself thereto. Objects are given, and they are given as
emptily meant in expectation or as being there "in person," as sym-
bolically indicated, as copied in the copy, etc. An object is given-e.g.,
a tree as one and the same-in several modes of givenness that take
their course and are viewable by consciousness in the unity of a look; as
the same object which at one time is indirectly indicated, the next time
copied, the third time directly intuitive; one time as subject of pre-
dicative statements, another time as relational object, etc. The Ego's
turning of attention is also given, as well as its meaning with certainty,
its supposing, its doubting, affirming and denying, and every supposed
sense in the change of such modalities of the "thesis," etc.
Phenomenology began with indefatigable exhibitions of all such
subjective "phenomena," to which, naturally, also belong all accep-
tance-phenomena, the phenomena of evidence and verification and
their correlates truth, true being, correctness, etc., of every kind and
form. Nature as intuitable nature, exactly as it is perceived at any time,
with all subjective characteristics with which it is given (and not only
in those excluded methodically by the investigators of nature as being
10
"merely subjective"): this became immediately a great theme of phe-
nomenological descriptions. The world took on an infinite wideness
as soon as the actual life-world, the world in the "how" of the givenness
of mental process, was observed. It took on the whole range of the
manifold subjective appearances, modes of consciousness, modes of
possible position-taking; for it was, for the subject, never given other-
wise than in this subjective milieu, and in purely intuitive description
of the subjectively given there was no in-itself that is not given in sub-
jective modes of the for-me or for-us, and the in-itself itself appears as a
characteristic in this context and has to undergo therein its clarification
of sense.
The principle, guiding from the start, of granting its due and its
primary right of conceptual form to all that is given and to be given to
the Ego in immediate intuition also led, however, already in the Logical
J nvestigations, to the recognition of the primary legitimacy of givenness
of truly existing ideal objectivities of every kind, and in particular, of
the eidetic objects, of the conceptual essentialities and of the eidetic
laws. With all these, obviously, there was connected the knowl-
edge of the universal possibility of sciences of essences for ob-
jectivities of each and every objective category and the requirement of
the systematic development of ontologies, formal and material. For the
description of the infinity of immediate data in their subjective "how,"
however, there came, once again in immediate sequence, the knowledge
of the possibility and necessity of a description of essence to be carried
out everywhere; of an eidetic description which did not remain de-
pendent on the particular empirical data but rather searched after their
eidetic types and the contexts of essence (as necessities, possibilities,
regularities of essence) belonging thereto. The freedom with which the
look may turn from straight to reflective data and the knowledge of the
correlations of essence that emerge hereby led to intentional analysis of
essence and to the basic elements of the intentional clarifying of the
essence of reason, and first of all of the logically judging, predicating
reason and its preliminary stages.
Even though in the beginning of the spreading phenomenological
movement the analysis and description of essence (in the case of psy-
chologically interested phenomenologists usually without any stressing
of its basic character as being of the "essence," of the genuine a priori,
which must be intuitively grasped) was carried out in various fields,
phenomenology seemed to most either a fundamental method of an
immanently pure and at best eidetic-psychological analysis or-to those
whose interest was chiefly scientific-theoretical-a philosophical method
by which to accomplish for the various already existing sciences a clari-
11
1
1
fication of the origin of their foundations or a radical new derivation of
basic concepts of their theory and method from the ultimate sources.
Precisely the most profound and most difficult discussions of the Logical
Investigations found little following. In them (above all in the 5th and
6th Investigations of the second volume) the way to the phenomenol-
ogy of logical reason (and therewith also the model of all reason in
general) was opened up, beginnings of an intentional constitution of
categorial objectivities in the pure consciousness were laid bare, and the
method of a genuine intentional analysis was developed.
It was little understood how progressive this decisive step was Com-
pared to the way my teacher Brentano-the brilliant discoverer of the
intentionality of consciousness as a basic descriptive fact of psychology
-remained caught up in the methodological attitudes of traditional
sensationalism in which he described the psychic acts by classifying
them without exception as sensuous data in order to base a naturalistic,
inductive causal investigation upon them. Thus, with its establishment,
after long years of study of phenomenology as an independent science
or, more precisely, as a universal eidetic transcendental philosophy, the
Ideas at first caused great even among those who had emerged
as distinguished fellow phenomenological investigators in the hitherto
existing sense.
A very large part of my research results-made public only in lectures
-of those decades following the appearance of my first phenomenologi-
cal attempt still awaits literary fixation and, with an immense amount
of work yet to be done, is still in the process of further development;
still, there is put forth in the Ideas the universal unity of the realm of
immediate intuition and of the most original description within the
method of phenomenological reduction-the most fundamental of all
methods. With the Ideas the deepest sense of the Cartesian turn of
modern philosophy is, I dare to say, revealed, and the necessity of an
absolute self-contained eidetic science of pure consciousness in general
is cogently demonstrated-this, however, in relation to all correlations
grounded in the essence of consciousness, to its possible really immanent
moments and to its noemata and objectivities intentionally-ideally de-
termined therein. Systematic work on it is actively undertaken, method-
ically as well as materially brought into the shape of a rigorous theory
that must continually be further developed. The determination of this
eidetic descriptive phenomenology is indicated beforehand (and not
only in the title) as in itself first philosophy and therewith as the be-
ginning and basis of a universal philosophy, i.e., of a universal science
grounded in absolutely ultimate sources. The working out of descriptive
phenomenology in going beyond mere description, while, however, re-
12
maining in the eidetic attitude, leads to the system of all a priori
sciences-the transition from the transcendental a priori to the trans-
cendental fact leads to the system of all empirical sciences on a trans-
cendental foundation.
the transcendental philoso-
?hy IS dlstmgmshed all philosophies, methodically and
m the whole context of Its baSIC results and theories, it is nonetheless
out of inexor.able inner necessity philosophy. Even
though the CIrcle of phenomenologIcal mvestigators may originally
have f?lt itself to be in sharp Kant's and the post-Kantian
school s methods; though It may. WIth good reaSOn have rejected
the attempts to contmue and merely Improve Kant historically in the
manner of a renascence (which presupposed a commonality of
method); even vis avis all Kantianism, it may with good
reason have champIOned the methodological principle that the uncon-
ditional prius for any genuine scientific philosophy is the all-inclusive
founding through systematic descriptions of consciousness, through
making universally clear the essential layers of the cognizing as well as
the evaluating and practical subjectivity, according to all possible for-
mations and correlations-nonetheless, now that we see ourselves in
broad lines at one with Kant in the essential results of our work, which
is systematically arising from the absolutely ultimate sources of all
knowledge, we must honor him as the great pre-shaper of scientific
transcendental philosophy. That no one, and were he the most extreme
anti-Kantian, can remove himself as a child of the times from the in-
fluences of this mighty genius; that everyone experiences in some form
or other the power of the motivations that moved Kant and were
awakened by him-this is an almost trivial truth. To see him (as do all
great schools resting on Kant) with phenomenological eyes is also to
understand him anew and to admire the greatness of his foresighted
intuitions, phenomenological sources of which can now be found in
almost all his theories; but to do this is not, even now, to imitate him
and to lend support to a mere renascence of Kantianism or of German
Idealism. Naturally, we must from the outset go beyond all of the, in
the worst sense of the word, "metaphysical" stock elements of the
critique of reason (like the doctrine of the thing-in-itself, the doctrine
of intellectus archetypus, the mythology of the transcendental apper-
ception or of the "consciousness in general," etc.), that oppose the
phenomenological transcendentalism and with it the deepest sense and
legitimacy of the Kantian position; and for his still half-mythical
cept of the a priori we must substitute the phenomenologically clanfied
concept of the general essence and law of essence (which Hume really
had in mind under the heading relation of idea, but which he had sensa-
tionalistically and nominalistically reinterpreted and depreciated).
A transcendental subjectivism, carried out in the purity and necessity
of essence, in which precisely the indefeasible essence of subjectivity is
predelineated as the primal locus and primal source of all sense-bestowal
and truth achievements, and therewith, of all true objectivities and true
worlds (and no less, all fictitious ones); [such a transcendental sub-
jectivism] leaves no room for "metaphysical" substructurings of a being
behind the being intentionally constituting itself in actual and possible
achievements of consciousness, whether it be a matter of an in-itself of
nature or an in-itself of souls, in-itself of history, an in-itself of eidetic
objectivities, and of ideal ones of whatever type.
The execution of a genuine and pure transcendentalism is, of course,
not the task of one man and one "system," but rather the most exub-
erant of all scientific tasks for all mankind. It is the idea of a final
system of all sciences and, therefore, one carried out on the final, trans-
cendental-subjective ground of science, carried out, that is to say, by
means of a descriptive phenomenology as the primary science of all
scientific method. The sphere of all possible sense and of all truth is,
nevertheless, at the outset conceptually predelineated in it and by the
method of phenomenological reduction as the correct and intuitively
shown sense of "consciousness in general," including inseparably all its
possible correlates. Metaphysics in the common sense of the word, re-
ferring to transcendences in principle trans-subjective, is an infinite
realm, but a realm contrary to sense, as must be made evident. There-
fore, only if we disregard such constituent elements, which for Kant's
philosophy, of course, are not indifferent, will we transcendental phe-
nomenologists be able to confirm Kant's genuine intuitions. Thorough-
going studies, indeed, have taught me that, if one abstracts from such
Kantian "metaphysics" (and that yields really a full context), Kant's
thinking and research moves de facto in the framework of the phe-
nomenological attitude and that the force of these genuinely trans-
cendental theories do in fact rest on pure intuitions which in their
essential lines are drawn from original sources. Of course, it makes a
difference and, with regard to the level of scientific adequacy, an essen-
tial difference: whether one theorizes naIvely in the phenomenological
attitude or whether, in radical self-reflection one obtains fundamental
clarity about the essence of this attitude and the essence of the infinity
of possible consciousness as such standing directly before one's eyes
and whether one therefore produces a description that runs its course
in originally conceived concepts of essence and explains the sense and
necessity of an attitude and mode of knowledge that leads beyond all
the modes of knowledge of a natural attitude, that is to say, a com-
pletely new one, the "transcendental."
To give such a description for the new attitude in which the Kantian
thinking and research indeed moves is eo ipso to go beyond him. It is to
develop in ultimate philosophical self-consciousness the method of
phenomenological reduction, through which the concrete thematic
horizon of transcendental philosophy-transcendental subjectivity in its
true sense-is founded, and simultaneously with it the mode of work
appropriate only to it, the ordering of the problematics arising from
the intuitive origins is discovered. A philosophy, and above all the
"first" of all philosophies, which is supposed to enable us to do the
"critique" of any achievements of reason whatever, must do its utmost
in methodological self-examinations; it must not do anything where it
has not itself grasped what is methodological in this activity and made
it clear according to its necessities of essence. Kant was able to go be-
yond the realm of pure consciousness only because he neglected to
wrench from the source-point of all modern philosophy-the Cartesian
ego cogito-its ultimate sense, that of the absolute, concretely intuiting
subjectivity. Also, through this lack of ultimate sense-investigations, he
does not get so far as to bring the manner and method of an analysis of
consciousness-as an unraveling of intentional implications and essence-
correlations-to an actual development, although in his profound doc-
trine of the synthesis he already discovered, basically, the peculiarity of
intentional contexts and already practiced, in his own naIvete, genuine
intentional analyses. Had Kant realized the necessity of such ultimate
sense-investigations and essence-descriptions, realized their uncondi-
tional necessity for making possible a rigorously scientific philosophy,
then his whole critique of reason and his philosophy would also have
become something different. It would then of necessity have had to go
the ways that we phenomenologists go on the basis of arduous indi-
vidual work on the consciousness itself and the essence-typology of its
phenomena.
The following expositions of the phenomenological sense of the
Kantian revolution in the natural way of thinking-with the appro-
priate simplification, which consideration of the audience demanded,
of course-formed the essential thought-content of a talk on that
I delivered at the Kant Celebration at the University of Frelburg on
May 1 of this year. For the present readership I have not only
significant depth to the presentation but have added some addItional
pieces after it which can clear up the misunderstandings of
ological transcendentalism that are circulating. These latter pIeces, by
the way, derive in large part from the fact that as a consequence of the
war that broke out shortly after the appearance of Volume I of the
Ideas, the publication of Part II, which had been planned at the same
time as the latter, was postponed and has not yet come about. What
was lacking in the published part was all too naively called an oversight,
and where it could not be seen how the continuation was possible,
absurd consequences were imputed to me, as might be expected of the
still all too primitive thinking and the phenomenological infantilism of
the critics where they tried to refute me with a show of what they
thought was phenomenology.
Phenomenology is not "literature" by means of which one goes riding
for pleasure, as it were, while reading. As in any serious science, one
must of course work in order to acquire a methodically schooled eye
and only thereby the capability of making one's own judgment.
Kant and the Idea of Transcendental Philosophy
The time for commemorating a great scientific genius is, for the
living generation of scientists who are bound to him by the unity of a
historical tradition, a challenge to responsible self-examination. With
this, the worthiest theme for commemorative celebrations in science is
prescribed in the most general sense. And so the Kant Jubilee arouses in
us the question: after one and a half centuries of an influence that has
helped to determine our whole philosophy in all its directions, what
must we today regard as the lasting significance of Kant's monumental
critiques of reason and therefore as that of which the pure working out
is entrusted to us and to the entire future? However, to evaluate Kant's
whole life's work sub specie aeterni and thereby, at one and the same
time, to assess and be responsible for the sense of our own present work
-that would be all too great a task for us to do it justice here in this
limited framework. Let us try to limit ourselves. Let us keep Kant at a
certain distance, as if we were surveying from a distant point a mighty
mountain range that we had often wandered through with an in-
defatigable interest in getting to know it, and now only the general
formation, the total type, emerges for us.
The completely dominant total form of the Kantian philosophy in
its distant aspect is the idea of transcendental philosophy. This desig-
nates a radically novel form of philosophical theory. Our question is
this: can we not delineate the idea of a general problematic and science,
which is understandable in itself as its sense and eternal legitimacy and
which must be regarded as the essence of his transcendental philosophy,
purified of the conditions of Kant's time, as the idea of method that
imparted to him his most fundamental motivation-an idea which,
although limited and obscured by his historical motivations, found its
first concrete realization in his systematic theories?
I. The Revolution in the Natural Manner of Thinking
Kant's transcendental philosophy, as already intimated, is not an
achievement significant merely for its time or only for one line of de-
velopment, on which we can with all due admiration look back as one
long since fully exploited and in the meantime outmoded. Rather, the
revolution in the total manner of philosophical thinking which Kant
demanded and in which he brought forth the powerful and perhaps
even violent design of a new science, is still the demand of the present;
and this new body of knowledge is our task and a never-to-be-sur-
rendered task for all the future.
The foregoing designates that wherein Kant's indeed quite unique
significance in the whole history of philosophy is to be seen: in nothing
other than that in which he himself saw it and to which he also re-
peatedly gave emphatic expression. His significance for all time, there-
fore, lies in the much discussed but little understood "Copernican" turn
to an interpretation of the world that was new in principle and thereby
rigorously scientific, but at the same time his significance lies in the
first grounding of the "completely new" science belonging thereto-
i.e., the transcendental, which, as Kant himself stresses, "is the only one
of its kind" and of which, as he even says, "no one has previously had as
much as a thought, even the mere idea of it was unknown."
Surely Kant would have considerably limited this pronouncement in
his last work, if he had done some research in historical studies of the
development of the transcendental idea. It was partly that the main
documents of this development were unknown to him, partly that he
was no longer able, after the breakthrough of his final philosophy, to
work through and interpret anew those works that came into con-
sideration. In the history of modern philosophy, to speak only of that,
Descartes must be seen as a precursor of transcendental philosophy. It
was he who through his Meditations founded this modern period, im-
parted to it its characteristic developmental tendency toward a trans-
cendental philosophy. The ego cogito, understood in its profound sense,
can surely be regarded as the first form of the discovery of transcen-
dental subjectivity. We also know now that Leibniz was by no means
the dogmatic metaphysician that Kant conceived him to be. It might
further be shown that the Essay [sic] of David Hume, by which Kant
was "awakened from his dogmatic slumber," stands far behind the
systematic Treatise-which Kant obviously did not know, or not from
his own thorough study-and that in this brilliant work of Hume's
youth a whole system of transcendental problematics is already out-
lined and thought through in a transcendental spirit-even though
done in the negativistic form of a sensationalistic skepticism that nulli-
fies itself in its pervasive absurdity.
But, as always, Kant's originality is not thereby diminished. Not only
did he discover anew, impressed with his peculiar stamp, the transcen-
dental idea which, since Descartes, had again and again cropped up and
disappeared; to him also belongs the praise for progressing with Un-
paralleled energy of thought from the idea to the theoretical deed and
for causing the transcendental philosophy itself to arise with the whole
of his three inexhaustible major works-this, however, in the way in
which a new science generally and in the most serious sense arises;
namely, in the form of a systematically guiding problematic and a
systematic unity of rational theories that provide positive solutions.
Therefore, he did not, like Leibniz, remain mired in a general a p e r ~ u ,
and it goes without saying that he did not, like Hume-to use a Kantian
metaphor-"let his ship go aground and decay on the beach of scepti-
cism" instead of seeing the dangerous journey through to a good end.
One may justifiably complain about the obscurities of the Kantian
critique of reason, about the puzzling profundity of his basic concepts
and deductions; one may come to be persuaded that the gigantic Kan-
tian structure of transcendental science is still far from having that
perfection of compelling rigor which its creator himself believed he
could attribute to it-indeed even that Kant did not penetrate at all to
the true foundations, to the most basic problematics, and to the ulti-
mately valid method of a transcendental philosophy. One thing, how-
ever, must in the end become evident to any unprejudiced person who
thinks for himself and seriously takes upon himself the self-
denying efforts at penetrating into these mysterious depths: that the
problematics and the science that make their appearance at this point
are not contrived in abstruse speculation but, however strange it may
seem, are necessary ones, which will be forever inescapable, if not in
their original form, then in a refined and enriched form. A science
which satisfies the intellectual needs awakened by Kant and makes
understandable theoretically the whole realm of transcendental
achievements of pure subjectivity, must be designated as the greatest
of all the theoretical tasks that could be given to modern humanity.
Indeed, the "sense and cognitive value of all genuine sciences," as Kant
himself-and quite justifiably-teaches, depend on the success of a
transcendental philosophy. Therefore, not until-nothing less is being
asserted-a transcendental philosophy is established and put on its
course as rigorous science, can all other sciences attain the highest and
final level of theoretical rationality, which they must, after all, neces-
sarily demand of themselves.
Anyone who has been brought up in the beliefs still prevailing in our
time will hear such claims with indignation. According to these con-
victions, the positive sciences are autonomous vis avis philosophy. To
devise methods and theories, to interpret some, even the ultimate, sense
of the truths they have gained are merely a matter for specialized scien-
tific work. Does not the demand for an inversion of the entire manner
of thinking practiced in them-even if with the intention not of com-
promising their method but rather of furnishing them with a novel
perfection of cognition out of hitherto undisclosed sources beyond the
specialized sciences-does not that demand sound like one of those
philosophical "extravagances" that have so seriously damaged the repu-
tation of philosophy in recent times?
How unsuitable such a verdict would be-this I hope is something of
which the following considerations will be able to convince us.
II. Matters of the World That Are Taken for Granted
and the Life of Consciousness
As already indicated, I want to try, while disregarding the historically
conditioned peculiarities of the Kantian points of departure, formations
of concepts and formulations of problems, to clear up, first of all, the
basic sense of that complete inversion of the natural manner of think-
ing with which are revealed for the first time the previously completely
hidden realm of "pure" subjectivity and the infinity of "transcendental"
formulations of questions. Although relating itself to all the world, to
all sciences, to all kinds of human life, activity, and creation, it never-
theless takes up none of the questions which the nature-oriented
sciences have to direct to the world and to life in the world.
If we begin with human life and its natural conscious course, then it
is a communalized life of human persons who immerse themselves in
an endless world, i.e., viewing it, sometimes in isolation and sometimes
together with one another, imagining it variously, forming judgments
about it, evaluating it, actively shaping it to suit our purposes. This
world is for these persons, is for us humans, continually and quite ob-
viously there as a common world surrounding us all; obviously there-
it is the directly tangible and visible world in entirely immediate and
freely expandable experience. It embraces not merely things ~ ~ d living
beings, among them animals and humans, but also commumbes, com-
munal institutions, works of art, cultural establishments of every kind.
Whatever in our individual and communal activities has achieved sense
and form belongs forthwith to the world too; it is, or in principle may
possibly be, a constituent of existence accessible to everyone and there-
fore to be included by us in a possible new opcration. We humans our-
selves are subjects who experience, know, evaluate, and deal with the
world; and we are at the same time objects in the world and as such
precisely objects of our experiencing, valuing, and acting. Especially as
scientific subjects, given to theoretical interests and encompassing there-
in each and every real and possible world, we create the sciences in in-
dividual and communalized work. As theories, the sciences comprehend
all the world; as human constructions, they themselves belong to the
world.
This all takes place and is understood in the natural attitude. The
natural attitude is the form in which the total life of humanity is
realized in running its natural, practical course. It was the only form
from millennium to millennium, until out of science and philosophy
there developed unique motivations for a revolution. What is charac-
teristic of this naturalness appears in a presupposition which remains
beyond every mode of inquiry and which, in all naturally active living,
provides part of its foundation everywhere as belonging essentially to
life's intrinsic sense. It is a matter here of something that is taken abso-
lutely for granted precisely by virtue of this naturalness, and is therefore
also hidden from anyone in the natural attitude. It can be formulated
thus:
Our waking life is, as it also was and will be, always experiencing and
always able to experience "the" world, the totality of realities. Of
course, our experience is and always remains incomplete. In it, we
grasp only fragments of the world and even these only one side at a time,
and the sides, again, never in ultimately valid adequacy. To be sure,
instead of passively allowing an experience to run its course, we can
proceed in experience actively to penetrate into the unknown reaches
of the world or to bring things already experienced ever more com-
pletely into experience. But an actually complete experience is impos-
sible; for in principle there is no limit set to a progression. No thing, no
side of a thing, no real property-nothing belonging to the world is, as
it is experienced, an ultimately valid given; the most we can say is that
it is sufficient for us for the practical life-goal at any given'time. This
well-known and unquestionable incompleteness does not, however, dis-
turb our conviction that we can through experience become acquainted
with the world itself and that experience is what originally certifies real
existence to us.
But now, with regard to another and, we are convinced, insuperable
20
incompleteness, we must say more precisely: not just any experience
but rather harmonious experience certifies [existence]. Experience can
indeed also become discordant, can make us succumb to doubt and
deception. In any case, however, the production of harmony, and ulti-
mately of the enduring harmony of the totality of experience, is pos-
sible; and only in it-as is unquestionable-is there completed a thor-
oughgoing and enduringly indubitable cognizance of the existing world
itself.
This world, already given perpetually by our continual experience, is
thcn further to be judged and cognized in its objcctive theoretical truth
in corresponding methods of the theoretical-insightful mode of judg-
ment, as, on the other hand, it can be formed in practical reason by
purposeful action. We fashion the methods in our scientific thinking
about the conditions of insightful theorizing; the a priori principles of
the method, the essential conditions of rational method, in general, we
seek and find under the heading of logic. On the other hand, the seek-
ing subjectivity forms its particular expcricntial-Iogical methods for
itself in every particular science of reality. What we in this manner,
purely subjectively, produce in ourselves and our "insightful" thinking,
on the ground of actual and possible experience, serves us as the norm
of our world-cognitions-as the norm of truth for the world itself, as it
is in and for itself, whether we live or die, whether we cognize it or not.
There is, therefore, and without question, a harmony between the
world itself, or thc truths that are valid for it itself, and the acts and
structures of cognition. Or otherwise expressed: without question our
cognition "directs itself" toward the world itself. That our theoretical
cognition does this presupposes that our experience does it in its man-
ner; that this experience as harmoniously formed has objective legiti-
macy is taken for granted without question.
What has just been delimited as a never-formulated "presupposi-
tion" is the basis of all "pOSitive" sciences and correspondingly limited,
all other natural living and working. As a fundamental "presupposition"
on the basis of which they unfold their uniqueness and become possible
as "positive," this presupposition cannot appear in thcm at all as the
theme of any positive questions whatever. Their very formulation must
appear strange if not perverse to onc in the "natural" or "positive"
attitude. All positive questions move within the framework of the
world's unquestionable pre-givenness in living experience and of the
further unquestioned matters built upon it. They always aim,
only at how this experienced and progressively world I.S
to be determined in truth as regards the individual theIr
properties, relationships, laws-and especially how the world IS to be
21
determined in "objective" truth, which makes our cognition inde-
pendent of the relativity of "merely subjective" modes of appearance.
Likewise all practical questions of the outwardly working life have to
do with how the given world is to be formed according to purposes in
practical reason.
2
If the thought is here suggested that this "presupposition," which is
included in the essential form of natural life and, especially, in that of
the scientific cognition of nature, could and must be "put in question,"
then no damage of any kind is to be supposed done by that to the proper
legitimacy of this life. Nothing lies further from our intention than to
play skeptical paradoxes off against the natural rational activity of life-
or against natural experience and its self-confirmation in its harmonious
continuation, or against natural thinking (and also valuing, active striv-
ing) in its natural methods of reasoning (and, therefore, also against
natural science), and it is not intended that any of these be deprecated.
The genuine transcendental philosophy-let it be emphatically stressed
at the outset-is not like the Humean and neither openly nor covertly
a skeptical decomposition of the world-cognition and the world itself
into fictions, that is to say, in modern terms, a "philosophy of As-If."
Least of all is it a "dissolution" of the world into "mere subjective ap-
pearances," which in some still senseful sense would have something
to do with illusion. It does not occur to transcendental philosophy to
dispute the world of experience in the least, to take from it the least bit
of the sense which it really has in the actuality of the experience and
which in its harmonious course certifies itself in its indubitable legiti-
macy. And again, it does not occur to it to deprive the objective truth
of positive science of the least bit of the meaning that it really creates
in the actual employment of its naturally evident methods and bears
within itself as legitimately valid.
But, of course, transcendental philosophy is of the opinion that this
sense of legitimacy, as it matures in such actuality, is in no way under-
stood thereby. The "uuquestionableness" of what goes without ques-
2. Presupposition does not mean premise. "Presupposition" (not without reason
do we put the word in quotes) is of course an improper expression; for what we so
designate is the general conception of that which lies in concrete particularity in
every act of natural living itself. In every act of experience there lies: "This or that
real thing is there"; and in every connecting of new experiences to the same, there
lies: "The same thing is there," which was experienced before, only now grasped in
a later phase of its being; and in the interim, while I was meanwhile experiencing
something else entirely, it was unexperienced; and similarly, for acts founded on
experience. Therefore, we described under the heading "presupposition" the general
sense of natural living, which, as such, it continually carries in itself-as a form of
all its convictions without its ever being brought out.
22
tion in the natural cognition, of what is valid in its naive evidence, is,
says transcendental philosophy, not the understandableness of the in-
sight developed through the most radical lines of inquiry and clarifica-
tion, is not that highest and ultimately necessary indubitability which
leaves remaining no unasked and therefore unsettled questions of that
fundamental sort which belong inseparably, because esssentially, to
every theme of cognition whatsoever.
The whole aim of transcendental philosophy goes back ultimately to
those fundamental matters that are unquestioned (and all others essen-
tially akin to them), of which we spoke earlier. In them it sees the most
profound and most difficult problems of the world and world-cognition
(or, in its necessary expansion: problems of all objectivities in general-
also of the nonreal-in relationship to their cognition as existing "in
themselves," as substrata for "truths in themselves"). It says:
Certainly, the being-in-itself of the world is an indubitable fact; but
"indubitable fact" is nothing other than our naturally well-founded
statement, or, more precisely put: content of our statement, based on
that which is experienced in our actual and possible experience, that
which is thought and seen in our experiential-logical thinking; so it is
here, it is wherever we maintain something, establish it as legitimate, as
theme of "truths in themselves." Does not that which is expressed, es-
tablished, seen-in short, cognized-and does not the essentially cog-
nizable draw its sense from the cognition, from its own essence, which
cognition is, after all, in all its levels in consciousness, subjective mental
living? Whatever it may "relate" itself to as "content" and whatever
signification this word "content" may thereby assume-is not this re-
lating accomplished in consciousness itself, and does not the content
therefore lie enclosed in consciousness itself? But how is the "being-in-
itself of the world" to be understood now, if it is for us nothing other,
and can be nothing other, than a sense taking shape subjectively or
intersubjectively in our own cognitive achievement-naturally includ-
ing the character "true being," which is conceivable only of senses?
And finally: if the substratum of these questions is understood, can
there still be any kind of philosophical consideration of the world that
proceeds as though talk of a "world existing in itself" could have a
legitimate sense that would still be completely different from the sense-
formations in cognition, from the sense concretely taking shape by
synthesis in the multiplicity of acts of insightfully cognitive conscious-
ness-as though it could mean "metaphysical transcendence," which
through the "transcendent" regulation by a "metaphysical" causality
could be connected with the "merely subjective" cognition formation
as if with a "picture of cognition" effected inside subjectivity? Would
that not be a sense which, having been torn from the primal place of all
sense in the sense-bestowal of consciousness, is precisely nonsense?
But questions must not preconceive answers. One thing is clear from
the outset: there can be only one method of really answering all such
questions and of obtaining a real understanding of the relationships be-
tween cognized being and cognizing consciousness. One must study
the cognizing life itself in its own achievements of essence (and that,
naturally, in the wider framework of the concretely full life of COn-
sciousness in general) and observe how consciousness in itself and
according to its essential type constitutes and bears in itself objective
sense and how it constitutes in itself "true" sense, in order then to find
in itself the thus constituted sense as existing "in itself," as true being
and truth "in itself."
III. Discovery of the Realm of Transcendental Experience
(a) Pure subfective and intersubfective consciousiness.
With that we stand before the decisive point: before the necessity of
a reversal of the total natural manner of thinking. Let us prepare a
deeper understanding for ourselves in several steps.
I am what I am, and we are what we are, as subjects of a multi-form
life of consciousness, of a private and an intersubjectively communal-
ized one. Sum cogitans-I am, in that I see and hear and otherwise per-
ceive "externally" or am reflectively related to myself, remember, await,
in that I presentiate something to myself in an image or likeness or
through signs, let something hover before me in inventive fantasy; in
that I combine and separate, compare and generalize, declaratively
judge and theorize, or also, in that, in the modes of affectivity, I have
pleasure or displeasure, I am happy or sad, I am driven by wishes or
fears, decide practically, behave effectively. Those all are typical exam-
ples of special forms of the "consciousness," streaming in a continually
flowing unity, in which, communalized through intersubjective acts of
consciousness, we "live and move, and have our being." Obviously, the
most general characteristic belonging indefeasibly to the proper essence
of all consciousness is that it is consciousness of something, of something
"objective" of which, as we will soon understand more precisely, one is
conscious in varying modes according to the particular form of con-
sciousness. Therefore, consciousness and that of which there is con-
sciousness-in an appropriate "how"-are inseparable.
Also inseparably involved in this is the fact that I, who live in this or
that consciousness, am necessarily also conscious of myself and am
conscious of this being conscious itself. But from the outset it must be
noted that to be conscious (to have consciousness of) does not simply
mean: to grasp that of which one is conscious, to have directed one's
attention to it. But what is not already in my "field of view," what I
am not already aware of in the wider sense, cannot "affect" me, cannot
draw my attention to itself. I am always free to turn my attention from
what at any given time has just been grasped to something of which
there is co-awareness, and also to my processes of consciousness, to its
"real" and "ideal" components, among them the manifold modes of
givenness with which the "something objective" standing in a particu-
lar field of attention enters my consciousness.
What is here called "something objective" is to be taken as what is
objective for a particular consciousness, and purely as such. It is ob-
viously a nonself-sufficient moment. Anything whatever which enters
into consciousness necessarily does so with some determining content
with which this consciousness "means" it. This "something objective"
grasped in this manner-for the sake of clarity we shall call it the "ob-
jective sense"-is nonself-sufficient, already insofar as it occurs neces-
sarily in some characteristics of validity; we are conscious of it purely
and simply as an existent or as something doubtful, presumable, merely
possible, as something not existent, as impossible, etc.; also as beautiful,
good, and the like. Altogether, they are characteristics which can be
split along the line of the opposition between actuality (positionality)
and fiction (quasi-positionality) . We should also point to the change of
logical forms to which something objective is attached in any given case,
forms which, by the way, already occur in a primitive shape before the
stage of the properly comprehending-judging and predicating con-
sciousness is reached. Everything of which one is conscious (every
"objective sense") in the "how" of its modes, of the mentioned modes
as well as others quite different and yet to be demonstrated that belong
to it in the particular concrete process of consciousness, is again at one
and the same time to be grasped as an object. Then again we have-but,
of course, on the basis of acts of consciousness attaching themselves
synthetically to the preceding consciousness-objective sense as the
nucleus of changing modes. For example: When one is conscious of
something in the mode of "not existing," then there COmes out of that
an existing nonbeing or, with a change of conviction, a presumable or
probable nonbeing or nonexisting nonbeing, etc.
We further note that "object pure and simple," in the sense in which
it is used in normal judging discourse that does not make what one is
conscious of as such the theme, means actually existing object, namely
as "object" that for the judger has the status of existing reality. Ob-
viously the word "object" has become ambiguous in this sentence, pre-
cisely because in its last part that of which one is conscious was meant.
The distinction between "objective sense" and "object pure and simple"
does away with the equivocation; likewise the simpler manner of ex-
pressing it in print: "object" (in quotes) and object (without
-According to the prevailing trend of judgment, by the way, object
means something real, object of the world, which our distinction itself
would make equivocal if we were not careful to keep pure the indis-
pensable, most general, concept of object, that is, to speak expressly of
something real where we mean it.
In order to learn to see that of which one is conscious as that of which
one is conscious, to learn to see objective sense in its "how" according
to important new dimensions of this "how," let us turn our attention to
some basic types of processes of consciousness, of concrete particulars
in the-only now properly concrete in the full sense-stream of the life
of consciousness. They shall be considered purely according to what we
find in or on them, in or according to their proper essence, which is,
therefore, inseparable from them.
Let us consider perception. If we take the word in a completely
general sense but, of course, not the usual one, then perception is the
kind of consciousness that makes us conscious of an existent as existent,
completely originally, as it itself. The "object" stands in the mode
"peculiar own being and being-thus," "it itself in the original" in
gaze of consciousness; where the perceiving has the mode of attention
(attentive awareness, grasping), the "object" is grasped in this
of the so-called "being there in person" and has the character obVIOusly
from the perceiving itself.-If we take perception in the more
and more obvious sense, in the ordinary sense of the perceptIOn of
reality, then it is what originally makes us conscious of the realities exist-
ing for us and "the" world as actually .existing. To out all
perception, actual and possible, means, for our total lIfe of conSCIOUS-
ness, to cancel out the world as objective sense and as reality accepted by
us; it means to remove from all thought about the world (in every signi-
fication of this word) the original basis of sense and legitimacy. An
individual perception, considered itself, is consciousness of some phy-
sicalities and, taken quite concretely, is perception of the world by
virtue of the horizon of perception belonging to it. Let us attend strictly
to the fact that the particular perception in itself makes us conscious of
the world with these or those intuitive traits and, in fact, as being there
in personal presence. To make thus conscious is, so to speak, the achieve-
ment of consciousness essentially peculiar to perception as perception.-
Were we more closely to consider perception and what it has perceived,
there would still be here much to be found pertaining to its proper
essence (aspects, etc.) .
of typical of the life of consciousness is memory.
Agam we see: m memory Itself there lies, as a new kind of consciousness
?f and .the kind in the time mode of being-past and,
mcluded withm It, of havmg-been-perceived by me.
And so it is now quite generally obvious, whether we now want to
take as an example a significative or a pictorial representing, a con-
sciousness of universals, apredicative judgment and inference, a hypo-
thetical positing, holding as possible and probable, a doubting, affirm-
ing, or denying, or whatever else-every new mode of consciousness
bears within itself as an objective sense inseparable from it its "object
of consciousness," according to the kind and particularization of con-
sciousness, its changing modes of sense; for example, as signs for some-
thing, as a copy, as universal of particulars, as reason or consequence, as
hypothesis, etc.; also, however, as purely and simply existing or as pos-
sible, presumable, doubtful, null, etc.
Let us have another look at the realm of the connections of con-
sciousness. In the transition from consciousness to consciousness-
from one perception to further perceptions, to memories, expectations,
acts of thinking, to valuing and other consciousness-the individual
acts of consciousness do not remain isolated and a mere succession.
They come into connection, and every such connection is itself again
one consciousness, which effects its new "synthetic" production of
sense; above all, when we are continually conscious of "one and the
same thing" in transitions of consciousness, even when they connect
very diverse acts. Then this self-same thing, which little by little makes
itself definite just as it does, is nothing other than the unity of a struc-
ture of sense that builds itself up in the unity of the train of conscious-
ness connecting itself together in its continuation. By virtue of the
identifying connection of the individual acts that follow upon one
another and perhaps continually pass over into one another, each of
which is conscious of its object in its "what" and "how," its aspects and
traits presented therein, its empty horizons or other subjective modes
-by virtue of such identifying connection, the senses individually in-
cluded in the acts constitute a single sense always changing itself
modally in its continuation, namely, the one "object" which, as the
same object determining itself step by step more richly, "unifies" the
sense achievements of all these acts. And out of that, obviously, all talk
of the unity of an object, of its identity in the change of its modes of
appearance and its traits that appear, gets its significance. Further: if, in
all this, the experiencing consciousness goes on throughout in con-
tinuous harmony, then the "that's right," "it is actual," is again a for-
mation of sense making itself conscious, and, to be sure, in this mode of
concordant consciousness, and likewise if the harmony is broken, in the
new synthetic type of consciousness of the inner strife, the "it does not
accord," "it is doubtful," or "null."
[It is] not otherwise in conceptual thinking and in the ever so highly
developed syntheses of "theoretical" action. In that action itself the
concepts and concept forms, judgments and judgment forms take shape.
If the theoretical train of thought progresses with perfect insight as
genuine grounding and terminates in evident truth, then there lies. in
the unity of this synthetic activity of consciousness itself, as a formation
produced by the mind that has developed in the immanence of this
activity, the grounding theory, and its thesis bears the characteristic
of consciousness that in turn has developed purely immanently:
"grounded truth." But true being, for example, physical being to which
this truth "refers," naturally lies in the nexus of consciousness which at
first had already constituted it in itself by objectifying it in pre-
theoretical objectivations as something existing in certainty, then set it
as a target of cognition in theoretical thinking, and, proceeding method-
ically in the unified flow of insightfully predicating cognition, deter-
mines it in theoretical truth.
In the synthetic connection of "repeated" arguments-whether one's
own or another's arguments-truth and true being are constituted as the
same in the manner peculiar to consciousness: the practical freedom of
"being able" in the wider context of one consciousness to repeat the
argument and to restore originaliter the same truth in insight, the
ontological character of truth as something existing in itself in the
realm of cognition. Likewise, in the conscious insight into the possi-
bility of being able to think of the argument as carried out anybody
at any time who can intuitively be conceived as in commumty wIth us,
there emerges the character of truth as something supertemporal and
exalted above any cognizing subject-and therefore always as truth
"in itself."
If we remain consistent in this sort of meditation, with a radical con-
sistency that quite exclusively goes after subjective and intersubjective
consciousness in all its actual and possible forms, particular and syn-
thetic forms, and quite exclusively directs its gaze upon what belongs
to consciousness in and for itself-then we are already in the transcen-
dental attitude. The conversion of the natural manner of thinking then
is complete. What is basically essential to it is the radicalism and the
universality of a pure meditation on consciousness, a meditation that is
28
fully conscious of this peculiarity, and is willed and carried out with
unbroken consistency. For only thereby does pure consciousness as the
absolutely self-contained realm of purely subjective being become
known and, with its purely immanent interconnections, abilities, sense-
structures, form the realm of a unique science in contrast to all "posi-
tive" sciences, independent in principle of all their statements: namely,
transcendental philosophy.
The "radicalism" of the transcendental attitude demands therefore
, ,
the firm resolve to bring consciousness, consciousness in its pure own-
essentialness, exclusively to intuitive self-comprehension and to the-
oretical cognition, and thereby consciousness in its full concretion, in
:v
hich
it is sU?jectivity existing purely. for contained purely in
accordmg,to and every thmg that IS mcluded in it in really
Immanent and mtentIOnal moments, syntheses, centerings, that is ex-
hibitable in and of it as intuitively and theoretically inseparable from its
own essence; this radicalism obviously demands, then, the resolve to see
to it that we radically exclude every accompanying meaning of what is
not consciousness and of what is assigned to consciousness so as to be
interwoven with it by natural or even scientific-psychological or
philosophical, legitimate or perverse-convictions.
Of course that is more easily said and desired than actually done-
and done in the understanding of its whole range, indeed, of its true
sense.
At the outset, the idea of a subjectivity purely closed off in itself and
taking charge of itself intuitively in its own pure life of consciousness
through the self-reflection of the ego cogito is nothing especially
astounding, but on the contrary-since Descartes' time-is something
quite familiar; and accordingly also, the idea of an analysis and de-
scription of cognition geared to theory, first of all in immediate psy-
chological self-experience and then (by way of empathy) in the
experience of someone else. Perhaps it is the case that the struggle
against transcendental-philosophical psychologism and against the sub-
stitution of psychology for the science of transcendental consciousness
has the fundamental root of its legitimacy in the fact that conscious-
ness in the sense of psychological apperception is not pure in the sense
in question here. We foresee, therefore, that the transcendental atti-
tude, even if it is in itself a successful attitude toward consciousness in
its own essentials and leads to theoretical results that are in our plain
sense transcendental-purely according to the theory of consciousness-
cannot yet be accepted as transcendental-scientinc and transcendental-
philosophical, so long, that is, as a special methodological sense-investi-
gation has not clarified more deeply the sense and the legitimacy of the
demand of the purity in question and a method that scientifically justi-
fies itself has not secured in general the effecting of a transcendental
experience, of an evident grasping of self by the "pure" consciousness,
and therewith opened the way for the original grounding of a trans-
cendental philosophy as a rigorous science.
The demand that is hereby being made has already been satisfied by
the new phenomenology under the title "phenomenological reduction."
Since the development of this method makes indispensable a few con-
siderations that are not easy and are understandable only with some
elaboration, we shall deal with them in a section of their own.
(b) Transcendental essence-research and transcendental science of
matters of fact.
At the outset-assuming the full success of the following clarifica-
tions and therewith of the distinction between psychological and trans-
cendentally pure consciousness-the definite sense of a science of the
transcendental in its universal range is firmly established in forma, so
to speak. We at once call it transcendental philosophy-anticipating, a9
cannot until later be established, that it embraces all "philosophical'j
tasks of the entire tradition. In any case, it is not supposed to be a n y ~
thing other than that science which in the transcendental attitude, and
methodologically secured attitude, theoretically investigates pure sub-
jectivity in general and, concerning all formations possible in it, con-
tinuously asks only about that which belongs to it according to its
proper essential sort and its own laws of essence and about that which
subjectivity brings about in the way of possible achievements of sense
and reason-achievements under manifold titles of the true, the gen-
uine, the correct. This obviously amounts to saying that all possible
experiences and sciences as well as all formations of consciousness that
are at all possible must belong to the area of research of this science.
They are for it themes of investigation, in no way, however, logically
basic cognitions the determinations of which could serve in it as pre-
mises. Transcendental philosophy, therefore, also refers correlatively
to the world and to all possible worlds-and, again, not as given already
and plainly and simply existing in reality or possibility, but rather as
forms of harmony and truth that display themselves immanently in the
life and work of rational philosophy.
Along with this, the universe of pure possibilities and the fact are
naturally separated in view of the transcendental investigations to be
carried out. The factual life of consciousness, the universal life of con-
sciousness, in its transcendental intersubjective immanence, bears in
itself as "phenomenon" the correlative fact of the world constituted in
it in the form of representation. Taken concretely, then, it is the uni-
verse of all transcendental facticity. As such, it is the universe of possible
"transcendental experience" and presents the task of a correspondingly
universal theory of experience. This factual correlation is to be regarded
as one possibility that leaves open an infinity of other possibilities-as
merely imaginable, as "a priori" or essential possibilities. Transcen-
dental essence-research (the "eidetic") is investigation of the essential
possibilities of transcendental consciousness in general, with the a priori
possible world to be constituted therein pre-theoretically or theoreti-
cally. Indeed, we must make the framework even wider. In our pre-
dominating interest in the naturally pre-given world, which at first
represents for us the totality of the existent, we limit our transcendental
interest to it as well without taking notice. But, already, in order to
satisfy a transcendental contemplation of the world, we soon see our-
selves forced to free ourselves from all limitations and to investigate
transcendentally the universe of consciousness in general that is possible
r1 priori, as well as the universe of objectivities in general that are to be
:onstituted therein-whereby our broadest concept of object must be
brought into play, into which, indeed, many kinds of ideal objectivities,
such as pure numbers, ideals, and the like, are integrated.
In itself, eidetic science everywhere precedes science of facts and
makes possible for the first time the theoretically highest formation of
the latter in "rational" theories, thus, of course, in natural science. The
eidetic transcendental science that is indeed to be grounded purely by
itself, the universal science of essence of a transcendental subjectivity in
general, has priority, with all transcendental phenomena that are
a priori possible in it.
Finally, one must pay careful attention to the fact that a possible
transcendental subjectivity in general is not merely to be understood
as a possible singular but rather also as a possible communicative sub-
jectivity, and primarily as one such that purely according to COn-
sciousness, that is to say, through possible intersubjective acts of
consciousness, it encloses together into a possible allness a multiplicity
of individual transcendental subjects. To what extent a "solipsistic"
subjectivity is at all possible in thought, outside of all community, is
itself one of the transcendental problems.
We, standing as actual subjects of reason in the actuality of fateful
life, engage in science as function and method of precisely this life.
Our interest lies, accordingly, in the factual. In further consequence,
therefore, eidetic transcendental philosophy (transcendental phenome-
nology, as we also say) is the instrument or method for the transcen-
dental science of matters of fact.
If we look back from here at natural living and knowing, to which the
radicalism of transcendental consideration remains foreign, then it has,
on the ground of natural experience, the world, and related to it, the
"positive" sciences of matters of fact; on the ground of the natural
attitude toward pure possibilities, it has eidetic sciences (such as the
mathematical sciences), functioning as instruments of the positive
method of the sciences of matters of fact. Whatever the extent to
which it penetrates the infinities of natural horizons, it never happens
upon-even if in principle it can in its attitude happen upon the
transcendental data and theories-the actual and possible transcenden-
tal consciousness, the "world," "possible worlds," as its intentional
construction, nor upon the above designated transcendental sciences.
How, then, the one might stand in relation to the other, in what
sense one can speak at all of another, in what sense the universal science
of the transcendental-and, above all, the transcendental eidetic phe-
nomenology with its immediate essential descriptions of the possibili-
ties of pure achievements of consciousness of transcendental subjects-
is called upon to interpret the ultimately true sense of the naturally
given and cognized world, is similarly called upon to exercise criticism
of all positive sciences and of all in the same sense positive ("dogmatic")
philosophies, indeed, with regard to these, even called upon to produce
in its own framework all science in ultimately scientific form and to
realize in itself every possible sense of philosophy in ultimate form-
these are the questions that are now pressing upon us or opening up.
But, before we take a further step in this direction, it will be neces-
sary to assure ourselves still further of the previous separation of the
two kinds of thinking, that is to say, above all, to illuminate more
deeply that remarkable radicalism of an exclusive letting-be-accepted
and seeking of the "purely" subjective, in the concretely self-contained
whole of a "pure subjectivity." We have already said that it shall belong
to the essential sense of this pure subjectivity not to presuppose or
tolerate in principle any co-positing of naturally objective being (de-
cided in the universe of positive fact) .
(c) Natural and transcendental reflection and the underlying basis of
intentionality.
Let us go back again to something already considered. In the course
of our natural living we human subjects at every moment have the
existent already given, the existent in the abundant sense, coming in
manifold ways within the grasp of consciousness and disappearing
again, but even then still existing for us. All things thus given before-
hand are in a certain sense unified; they form a universe of things
already there for us. A nature is continually there for us-"the" totality
of nature, uniting in itself all material objectivities existing for us. It is,
however, merely a dependent structure of the concretely full world,
with its human beings, states, churches, works of art, sciences, etc. To
the real mundane universe, the totality of the "really" existent, is then
referred everything which otherwise offers itself as existing, such as
ideals, ideas of every sort, mathematical objectivities (numbers, multi-
plicities ), theories, and the like; it is in a certain way a mere annex of
the real world, according to the sense that natural living gives it. Our
total natural praxis (our praxis in the usual narrower sense of real in-
dustry and also our cognitive praxis) is related to the current universe
of things given to us beforehand. Through praxis of both kinds we
reshape the universe of that which is "existent" for us at any given time,
as validities existing for us-and only produce for ourselves thereby new
things given beforehand; we expand the old universe, simultaneously
narrowing it by striking out of it many things as being henceforth no
longer accepted by us.
3
Throughout this total life, which is continuously active individually
and communally in the performance of acceptances, there run efforts
directed toward the attainment of "truths" (in the widest sense). Out
of subjective and changing acceptances we toil to shape legitimately
verified truths and truths that are to be verified at any time subjectively
as well as intersubjectively, and finally-under the title of science-
"ultimately valid" truths, the existent in the "true," in the ultimately
valid sense.
Now everything, so we tell ourselves, that is accepted by us as an
existent in such natural living-and perhaps in the form "grounded
with final validity"-is something being accepted and perhaps accepted
with finality, as synthetic unity in multiform consciousness, as some-
thing one and the same in manifold subjective modes of givenness, in
the subjective synthesis of which it constitutes itself precisely as a unity
and in the character of the unity of that which is accepted, or perhaps
3. But it must not be overlooked that the modification of the acceptance-as-
being in the form of rejection and that any possibly occurring "modalization" of this
acceptance whatsoever establishes again and again a sort of positive acceptance and
therefore an existent for us again, even though in a changed attitude (possible at
any time). Under the objectively existent, then, we have: existing objective pos-
sibilities, probabilities, nullities, impossibilities, questionabilities.
33
of the verified, the true, etc. So even the simple title "perception"
of some thing or other, and experience of this thing in general, is-as my
and our total experience, related and to be related to this same thing-
a title for exceedingly multiform lived experiences and modes of given-
ness as lived experiences, without which the latter cannot be conscious-
ness of the thing, and any things in general, as this one and same exis-
tent. But while perception gives us the thing as existing "in person," we
know nothing of the exceedingly manifold modes of consciousness,
sense-contents, modes of positing, etc., which make up the experiencing
as that of this thing. The grasping view rests exclusively on the consti-
tuted synthetic unity and its elements of unity, the physical properties.
In the natural attitude, and to be sure, in the basic attitude of straight-
forwardly, unreflectively living along, we see the thing and not the
subjective manifold in which it is constituted as unity. If something
pre-given becomes the theme of an action of consciousnesss founded at
a higher level, e.g., of a theorizing and perhaps of an evident theorizing,
then nothing other than this is the case: in the process of this theorizing
we have exclusively in the thematic view the consequences of the
theorems given as existing; of the modes of consciousness constructed in
an entangled and very much changing manner, with their sense-
contents, modes of positing, syntheses, etc., as whose structure of unity
each component of the theory and, in the successive building up, the
whole of the theory comes into view-of these we know nothing in the
performance; they remain extra-thematic. In general, actually given ob-
jects are themes; themes are unities of act manifolds remaining
unthematic.
What has been said about the objectivities given in the mode of the
actual present, with the subjective features belonging to them, is trans-
ferable to the objectivities in some way "presentiated" with the cor-
respondingly presentiated subjectivity (remembering, depictive repre-
sentation, and the like); likewise, it is transferable from the objectivities
of which there is consciousness and which are accepted as actual with
the acts actually positing them in acceptance to the objects represented
in the mode of "mere phantasying" and to the correlative acts of an ac-
ceptance which one merely thinks or phantasies instead of "actually,"
"seriously," performing them. For example: as one is conscious of an
actually experienced existing house in many subjective modes, in chang-
ing orientation and perspective, in changing differences of clarity and
distinctness, of the mode of attentiveness, etc., so also a phantasied-
existent house has its modes, and it has in an exact parallel "the same"
typical set of subjective modes, and yet all of them in the radically
deviant character of the not actually subjective but rather of an "as if I
34
were undergoing that mentally." The phantasying in which I now let a
struggle between giants hover before me is, to be sure, a present lived
experience, but this struggle hovers before me only in a correlatively
hovering perception of this struggle, a perception "as if" and not an
actual perception, and similarly so in every intuitive presentation,
We can therefore interrogate anything and everything that we accept
as existing and that is ever objectivated to us or can be phantasied by us
as being acceptable in the mode of possibility, according to the hidden
manifolds of consciousness that remain or have remained unthematiC'
and we can direct our aim to their disclosure. The life of
that is unthematic, to a certain extent anonymous, but of which there is
also a co-consciousness, is accessible at any time in the form of reflection.
It is of decisive importance to bring to clarity step by step the funda-
mental difference between natural and transcendental reflection.
All reflection in the general sense here at first meant-whether it is
transcendental or not-has in common that it is a bending of conscious-
ness back upon itself, a transition from somehow having consciousness
of some objectivities or other to becoming conscious of precisely this
consciousness and its Ego. Since Locke, as a rule, one understands by
reflection: self-experiencing in turning consciousness toward oneself
and one's conscious life, that is to say, self-perceptions (related to one's
own present conscious lived experience), also, of course, self-recollec-
tions (related to one's own past consciousness). But we will forthwith
become acquainted with reflections of still other sorts, among them
also such as are not the reflector's reflections upon himself.
If we keep at first to reflections in the narrower sense of self-reflection,
then a remarkable essential peculiarity can be exhibited which in cor-
responding modifications (and then more difficult to
transfers to all other reflections. I mean the phenomenon of ego-
splitting."
With the act of self-reflection I lift myself above myself, separate
myself into the upper ego of the acts of reflection and lo:ver ego, o?
which I reflect (the "me"). The former and its reflectIve lIved expen-
ence is then, for its part, "unconscious" of itself, anonymous, while the
h 1
" 1 before reflec-
previously anonymous Ego, namely t e one lVlng a ong d
tion, has now come to cognition and perhaps to expression reflecte f
upon, "uncovered": this, however, in the familiar
identity in duplication, which, thematically uncovered i? fuhrt ler,
. . ,"m t e ex-
higher-level reflection, creates for Itself the expreSSIOn. . d
'. ' I unexpenence
periencing of self I expenence my self, my prevIOUS y
seeing, hearing, thinking, etc." . I 't be-
We here come across a reflection of a higher level. ObVIOUS y, I
35
longs to the essence of every reflection that it in turn admits a higher
reflection, that the Ego-splitting, in other words, can always be executed
anew. Every reflection has in view something reflected, and the reflect-
ing Ego and its reflecting activity is therein "anonymous" and comes to
light in a bending back of the gaze upon itself, that is to say, through a
new Ego-splitting, whereby once again the new reflecting activity and
its Ego is in concealment, but again also able to be uncovered.
But let us now consider reflections of other sorts, which already occur
in numerous forms in everyone's natural living. They have very varied
structure, always an intentionally complicated one, and at various
levels of complication. If we follow these up, unfolding only the inten-
tional implications included in their own essence, then we can recog-
nize each reflection as a now more immediate, now more mediate modi-
fication of a single primitive form, and that is the form of reflection of
simple self-perception. Let us undertake the following meditations in
order to use this so-called structural derivation of all other reflections at
once for the purpose of learning to understand it itself in its structure.
Prior to all self-reflection there lies straightforward consciousness,
related without reflection to objects that are therein accepted by it in
some mode or other. Here, the Ego lives in complete anonymity, so to
speak; it has only [objective] things but nothing subjective. Only
through reflection and, in the most original form, through simple self-
perception, does it gain "self-consciousness," cognizance, and perhaps
recognition of its self; it is now capable of valuing itself, of dealing with
itself. But perception becomes fertile only through recollection, and so
also self-perception through self-recollecting. Perception is character-
ized with regard to its own essence (through the proper sense-content of
its intentionality itself) as modification of self-perception. And if this
bending back comes from a ground of straightforward perceptions, then
the self-remembering is a bending back from such a straightforward
remembering. This latter "presentiates" what is present as if it were
appearing "in person" itself, and in a manner that it posits as existent,
as something existent in the time-mode "past." Therein memory dis-
tinguishes itself from mere phantasy, of whose object there is, to be sure,
also consciousness in an "as if it were there" but is not actually posited
by the phantasying Ego. In memory, the "as if" is also related to being;
it is not accepted in its phantasy-contents as actual, but only "as if it
were." The self-remembering which branches off from the straight-
forward remembering of, say, a house, does not uncover the present
Ego, that of the actual perceptions (among them the present recollec-
tion itself as mental process of the present), but rather the past Ego,
which belongs to the proper intentional essence of the remembered
house, as that for which it was there, and was there in these or those
modes of consciousness.
Remembering is, according to its essence, not only the having in force
of something past, but rather of this something past as something that
has been perceived by me and as something of which there has been
consciousness in some other way: and precisely this past Ego and con-
sciousness that is anonymous in straightforward recollection gets un-
covered in a reflection (reflection not on the present recollecting but
rather "in" it). We see immediately that in the same manner a reflec-
tion "in" every phantasy is also possible. If I phantasy a thing (or some
other object), there lies in it the fact that it appears to me as phantasy,
that I have the consciousness "as if I were perceiving it," and I who am
phantasied along with it as subject of the perceiving have uncovered this
perceiving "as if" through reflection not on but "in" the phantasy, and
uncovered it precisely as something subjective that is co-phantasied.
In a similar manner, there arise now, in general, various intentional
variants of the most original self-reflection, self-perception, which is in
this sense the original form of all reflection. All reflections different
from it are (according to their own intentionality) "variants" of the
same, although perhaps very indirect. It is to be noted in this connec-
tion that, just as perception is in the first instance an iterable operation,
so to speak, the same also holds for self-recollection, as the primary
(positional) variant of self-perception. It is not only that it can follow
any self-perception of any higher level than that of its variant; as any
remembering, so also can any self-remembering be recollected, and
therefore this latter one, and so on. Precisely the same thing holds for
phantasies, and especially the self-phantasies in their iterable higher
levels, and so on in general.
Of special importance are the reflections through which I attain
knowledge of "others," of alien subjectivity, its lived experiences, its
ways of appearing, its intentional objects as such, etc. Intentional de-
rivation ultimately from self-perceptions, as must be repeatedly stressed,
holds good even for these reflections. \\1e call them reflections and say
thereby that in the essence of every original experience of others
("empathy") and-in the further sequence of variants--:-of
sciousness through which the ego is conscious of the alIen subJectIve
(therefore not only according to perception as present also accord-
ing to memory and according to phantasy, in through
depictions, through thinking, etc.), there is somethlI1? reflectIve,
if in the form of perhaps very complicated implicatIOns. WIth
h
" f h t h as evervwhere the lI1ten-
t IS one must take note of the act t a ere, ) , "
" '1' 1"" b d ut unl"ntuitively symbolIcally,
tIona Imp Icabons can e rawn 0 '
37
emptily, and so, too, all otherwise possible inflected reflections and, no
less, every kind of prior relation to something existent, can be included
in such acts of an undeveloped sort, which uncover their reflective sense
only in the "clarifying," the making intuited. In the most original and
relatively simplest form (the primitive form for all more complicated
alien experiences and their variants in phantasy), I gain "immediate"
experience of the other by way of implicit reflection which has its
starting ground in the perceptual "existence" of my [animate] organ-
ism and my subjectivity originarily functioning in it. From here, a
motivation radiates in which alien [animate] organism as such be-
comes understandable and therefore understandable as functional
organ of the other. This understanding, in this foundation of my
originary self-experience, arises as a peculiar form of variation of my
self-perception, as a sort of presentiation analogous to memory but ob-
viously different from it. In it, I can attain an Ego and a consciousness,
not, however, as the one announcing itself in my rememberings (and
anticipations), that is, in my originary self-experience, the one repro-
ductively given as presentiated present, but rather as a life running in
the same course with mine, and, to be sure, one such that it indicates
itself in the originary data of my life in an original manner as co-existing.
And similarly, variously inflected reflections, and always including
reflections such as those through which there comes about for us con-
sciousness of the alien-subjective, alien ego and Ego-life, modes of ap-
prehension belonging to the alien subject, subjective phenomena of
every sort, in the manner of factual existence that is valid for us.
Through the meditations just carried out we have gained some in-
sight into the reflections through which subjective things of every sort,
we ourselves, and the manifold subjective contents of our living, but
also others and their living, come into givenness. And at the same time,
we have become attentive to the underlying basis of intentionality
which all reflections ultimately presuppose. Reflectionless acts of con-
sciousness, the most general types of consciousness, such as actual acts
and quasi-acts in the manner of phantasy, including especially percep-
tions, recollections, expectations, symbolic indications, pictorially rep-
resenting acts, empty consciousness, consciousness of generality, etc.,
designate forms in which unreflective living runs its course, as does all
conscious life. But the unreflective living designates a substratum in
which "mere things" exist for us, the realm of the "Ego-alien" objec-
tivities, which are, according to their sense, free of all subjectivity, to the
extent that this subject, so long as it does not perform any acts of re-
flection, is not conscious even of its very subjectivity (of the originally
first one which can become thematic for it), that is to say, is also not
capable of including it within any objective sense, as this latter is con-
stituted by a mere consciousness of things. So it is with the things
by title "mere nature," originally given in pure expe-
I.e., expen.ence forgetful of self, which attends ex-
the thmg as it appears in this mode and is so constituted; but
also for the ideal realms, such as pure numbers,
the like. So long as the subject re-
mams unreflected and directly dismembers the materially given 't
d
. . ,i can
not fin and ubhze for thematic sense-formation anything subjective.
So, then, the universe of my data given beforehand, outside the un-
reflectively given world of mere things, encompasses myself and an
open .of alien All this is intertwined through ac-
cepted relationships, clothed With relational characters in which 't
. i
constitutes my surrounding world intuitively known and articulated
with categorial definiteness and, at the same time, the surrounding
world common to all of us bound through possible mutual under-
standing, the one which, as inclusive of ourselves, is therefore "the"
world, pure and simple.
It belongs essentially to all natural reflection that it does and always
can find consciousness at hand, but only "real," "mundane" con-
sciousness that is intertwined with nature. On the other hand, pure
reflection-practiced, in a certain purifying method, on the data of
natural reflection-seeks and finds pure or transcendental conscious-
ness. In contrast to the natural self-experience, the natural experience of
someone else, and the experience of community, there comes the trans-
cendental experience; likewise for all variants of the experience and all
higher consciousness that builds itself upon it, especially the theoreti-
cally cognizing, the factual-scientific, and the eidetic consciousness.
(d ) Natural reflection and the inadequacy of psychological reduction.
Let us first of all bring into greater clarity for ourselves the peculiar
essence of natural reflection.
The Ego that lives in natural living has continually, as we said, a
universe of data given beforehand. What it had earlier gained in new
experiences, from new judging activities, valuings, etc. (from "primally
instituting" acts, as we say)-all that remained and remains for it in
continuing acceptance, unless it be that this acceptance loses its force,
is compromised, or the like, for special reasons, e.g., through acts. of
modalization. Thus, natural living has a universal base upon which
from the outset it finds itself and moves about, as it were-that base,
precisely, of a pre-given, even if changeable, horizon of real and ob-
39
jective-ideal being. Above all, it "has" the real mundane universe, as
a pervasively connected universe of real acceptance, taking up every new
real object at any given time in the determination-content with which
this new object is accepted in its occurrence and continues to be ac-
cepted. If, now, the Ego has an object given as its actual theme, then
the rest of its world-and everything else that is existent for it-is, to be
sure, not actually present but nevertheless is in a certain manner still a
co-theme, but just not an actual one; as co-accepted it determines every
actual apprehension and belongs to its intentional horizon. The
thing, therefore, continues to be the case when the Ego reflects on Its
consciousness of an object that has been thematic at any given time, on
its subjective modes, and the like; then the consciousness is, to be sure,
its special theme, but within the co-accepted universe.
In particular, the object in question to whose modes of
a natural reflection is directed, as it previously was more acceptable III
these, is thereby more acceptable, even for the reflecting Ego. But if we
want to posit the consciousness purely as such, if, proceeding further,
we want to investigate whether and how we could establish conscious-
ness at all as a proper universe of accepted being, purely self-contained,
then we must obviously carry out a purifying "disconnection" of all
accepted being that is not consciousness. Such a "disconnection" is
necessary; for consciousness, actual and possible, is given to us first of
all in natural reflections, and these, as has already become noticeable
and will soon become even more perfectly apparent, never posit mere
consciousness, but with it also, at one and the same time, something
other.
If the sought-for universe of pure consciousness is to become a sure
base upon which scientific knowledge could be grounded, then it must
come originally to be given in universal, univocal experience; and if it is
first of all, as is methodologically obvious, a matter of the production
of the universe of my pure subjectivity, which lives itself out in a closed,
pure life, then what is in question is this: pure experience in relation to
myself, that is to say pure self-perception, self-remembering, and a uni-
versal continuity of actual and possible pure self-experience.
At first glance it seems as if the right way to attain it would be as
follows:
We carry out a reflective survey of all our whole life and, passing
from individual reflection to individual reflection, reduce it to pure
life, in such a manner, that is to say, that we purify one by one every
natural reflection-i.e., every natural self-experience-of all that is non-
subjective and thereby gain its content of the purely subjective.
Such a purification is required in all circumstances, which fact one
can make clear to oneself at once with "positional" acts (therefore for
the time being ignoring all of the merely phantasying oneself in the per-
formance of acts, "as if" one believed, valued, etc.). If I proceed in this
way, the relevant cogito which I have in my experiential grasp, is con-
sciousness of a cogitatum, of an existent in some mode or other. But this
cogitatum, be it accepted by me on ever so good a ground, be it, as is so
often the case in natural living, even something subjective ("psychic")
-this cogitatum is not only not the consciousness of it, but does not in
any case even belong to it as a really immanent part. What is accepted
by me at any given time in consciousness purely and simply as object-
of that there can, of course, be consciousness; it can be given as the
same existent in ideally innumerable new acts of consciousness-and
that is the case with all naturally pre-given ideal objectivities as realities
which are repeatedly perceptible as the same by me and others, and no
less the case with pre-given ideal objectivities that can be grasped re-
peatedly as the same by me and others in separate acts of original in-
sight. Therefore, in order to preserve in its purity the purely subjective,
the individual lived experience of consciousness, we must put out of
operation all of the objectivities posited therein, i.e., while we posit
consciousness as existing purely as it itself, we must deny to ourselves
the co-positing of that in it of which there is consciousness and which is
posited.
However, this method, continually practiced in the individual con-
sciousness, if practiced with universally extended methodological intent
On all our lived experiences that we could reflectively catch sight of in
our living, would by no means get at the-in the transcendental sense-
pure, the radically pure, life of consciousness. In fact, psychology, to
the extent that it takes account of the basic essence of the subjective
life as intentional, requires this sort of purification in order to attain the
purely psychic in the psychological sense. Its theme, human and animal
"psychic life," to be sure, comprehends consciousness with all real and
ideal contents belonging inseparably to it, but consciousness as a real
event in the nexus of the pre-given world, continuously pre-given thanks
to our continually univocal experience. Psychic self-perception, self-
experience is, as regards its sense-achievement, just as much "objective"
experience as the experience of spatial things that is related to m.erely
material being. Such self-perception is essentially founded in .ex-
perience, and in such a manner that its own sense-bestowal and pOSIting
of existence inseparably perform a co-positing of physical being and
finally of a whole space-time world-inseparably, so long as this sort of
sense-bestowal and sense remains preserved: consciousness in the
naturally real sense; psychic life in the real, space-time nexus.
IV. The Sense of "Calling-in-Question" the World
If one has viewed, in overcoming the deeply and firmly rooted natural
manner of thinking, the realm of transcendental subjectivity in its
peculiar ownness and complete self-containedness, and if one has, by
considerations such as those just indicated, arrived at the first presenti-
ment of the uniqueness and range of a transcendental philosophy, then
one falls into astonishment and soon also into an increasing inner
uneasiness.
The world and science of the natural manner of thinking seemed, as
long as one was not aware of the possibility of a transcendental world
and science, to contain in itself all experienceable being in general and
all imaginable sciences in general. Now, however, a new sphere of being
discloses itself, which to separate and keep separate from the natural
sphere at once causes severe difficulties; and a new science discloses
itself, which thematically encompasses all positive science and yet is
itself not to be positive and is not to include a single one of its proposi-
tions as premise or as constituent of its own theories. Out of the ob-
scurity arises a painful conflict between the cognitive values of the
natural manner of thinking, which one still cannot compromise, and
the cognitive requirements of the new manner, whose own legitimacy
has become indubitable. If one proceeds in this new manner, then
everything which one formerly had possessed in the unquestioned
obviousness of a naturally grounded legitimacy appears to be called into
question-and that, in both senses of this equivocal expression. For,
since pure consciousness in general and, within it, legitimizing con-
sciousness, have become a universal problem and since, therefore, legiti-
macy itself (as a title for intentional correlates) must become the theme
of the question; then any legitimacy, in the condition of obscurity in
which we at first stand, seems to become questionable in the other
sense too-namely, doubtful.
The transcendental question about the essence, the sense, of all
legitimacy-in other words, the question of how it is to be made in-
telligible in terms of the original sense-bestowal of consciousness as the
original establishment of legitimacy, so to speak-that question changes
into the question, whether and to what extent legitimacy of positive
knowledge of the world and with that, really, of all positive sciences
(namely also all a priori ones as well as those which are from the outset
sciences of possible realities, such as pure geometry and mechanics as
well as the disciplines of the Mathesis universalis, which always func-
tion as its instruments for the cognition of nature) . At issue here, how-
ever, is not a shifting of the question of legitimacy on account of an
equivocation, which can be due only to confusion and thoughtlessness
remote from the facts. But so peculiar is the relationship of the two
ways of thinking that precisely a serious and profound penetration into
the transcendental sphere of cognition seems to require a sense of the
world which must appear quite unacceptable, at least at first, to natural
thought-especially upon any return from the transcendental attitude
to that of natural thinking.
To show this, we must explicate somewhat more precisely the char-
acter and achievement of transcendental cognition in contrast to the
natural sort, and carry it on far enough for us to see what kind of general
predelineation of the sense of the world seems to result of necessity in
the somersault of the transcendental problematics.
Let us consider the following. As naturally thinking subjects we had
the world; it was given as indubitable actuality. We experienced it, took
it into consideration, formed theories about it in terms of natural evi-
dence and achieved sciences admirable in methods and results. Now,
however, in the inversion of the natural manner of thought, we have,
instead of the world pure and simple, only the consciousness of "the
world." More distinctly stated: we have only our transcendental-pure
subjectivity which is knowable with absolutely self-sufficient evidence,
and which carries in itself all its cognitive sense in its flowing conscious-
ness, and therefore carries in itself also "the world," which "exists in
sense" for us and just in the way that it does. It is the always presumed
world, as and how it is presumed, the always known and knowable
world, precisely as it is known and knowable. Only thus does it here
become the theme of research.
And, in fact, this is an extensive theme: to make clear on every side
how purely subjective living, considered in isolation or as communal
life, running its course in the universal essential form of the intentio, of
the "consciollsness," is enabled, thanks to the modes and syntheses of
consciollsness proper to it, and purely as its performance-results accord-
ing to its sense-to make clear how it is enabled to make one conscious
of "factually existing world." What hierarchy of structures of con-
sciousness, of syntheses of consciousness founded on one another or
intertwined with one another, may be demonstrable here in reflection
and description of essence? And, correlatively, what hierarchical con-
struction of sense-formations constituting themselves therein, and
highest of all, the one delimiting it, that of spatio-temporal "realities,"
constituting itself as "always" and for "everyone" verifiable, as "objec-
tively true being"? How, in terms of eidetic laws, may the necessity
of such a structure be made conceivable for the universal achievement
of a continuous intuition of a world, and further, for the achievement
43
of a science of this world? How are these great tasks initially to be ful-
filled under the methodologically primary limitation to the sense-
bestowals of the individual-ego which functions as subject of the trans-
cendental inquiry, and then fulfilled again at a higher level in the widest
framework of the universal community of subjects standing in pos-
sible communication with it and with one another, that is to say, in
relation to "everybody whatsoever" and transcendental intersub-
jectivity?
In such transcendental inquiry, there is given, therefore, under the
title "the world" only what always in the manifoldly changing and
synthetically connected intentionality of the consciousness cognizing
the world, only what constitutes itself as a cognitive unity, that is to
say, can constitute itself in practical freedom in freely inferable hori-
zons of consciousness-as one and the same in the flux of manifold
modes of consciousness and of individual objects always "coming forth"
anew therein. All this, however, must be taken exclusively as it is found
at hand in the consistent and purely reflective manner of observation,
which we call the transcendental, in actual or-in the case of the eidetic
attitude-in essentially possible consciousness.
Let us now in this regard take the following into consideration:
cognition in the active sense is striving, and as action is a striving to
pass from merely aiming at meaning to the goal of seeing for oneself
and now having for oneself of that which is meant. In the aiming mode
of consciousness that of which there is consciousness is sense in the
mode of "mere meaning" ("intentive sense"4); in the mode of the
achieving consciousness that of which there is consciousness is sense in
the mode "actuality in person," actuality "itself" ("fulfilling sense"5) .
But never, in the total realm of reality, is the fulfillment a complete one.
In each instance, the fulfilling sense is burdened at the same time with
horizons of unfulfilled meaning. That of which there is already con-
sciousness in the mode of the object "itself" apprehended "in person"
(as what is perceived in the external perception) has, of course, always
co-intented, but not themselves grasped, "sides." And thus it remains,
however far fulfilling experience may follow them out. There always
remains something new to be experienced, since new horizons of antici-
patory intention always open up. The new, however, concerns not
merely the "objects" which, as steady targets of experience, are pre-
served throughout a uniformly connected effort of experience. Rather,
?ew objects, too, enter into their open horizons of experience, affect
l11terest, and perhaps become new targets of experience, appropriating
4 Thus in the manner of speaking of the Log. Unters. II.
5. Ibid.
44
to themselves in new sequences of experience the fulfilling sense belong-
ing to them. In addition, the old and new unities organize themselves
into combinations, which are objectivities of a higher level.
Naturally, something similar holds for conceptual judgment and, at
the highest level, for scientifically evident cognition. No knowledge is
the ultimate one, every successful insight is at once end and beginning;
with each one new horizons of problems open up, which, in their turn,
again require fulfilling insight. The realm of knowledge is infinite, as is
correlatively the province of knowledge that is knowledge determined
according to its true being. The complete province of objective-real
factual knowledge, however, is the world, the universe of possible uni-
vocal experience, the province of all real provinces, whose science there-
fore enCOII).paSses synthetically all objective factual sciences.
6
Accordingly we can say: in purely transcendental consideration the
world is, as it is in itself and in logical truth, ultimately only an idea
lying at infinity, which draws its target-sense from the actuality of con-
scious life.
Let us make this important proposition completely evident.
Each and every sense arises in the characteristic sense-bestowal by
pure subjectivity and its conscious life and remains therein, henceforth,
even if in the mutation into a knowing that is habitual but always
capable of being reawakened. Likewise also, that universal objective
truth-sense "world," which has its origin in the actuality of the trans-
cendental cognitional life of objective experience and theoretical in-
sight that organizes itself subjectively and intersubjectively into a
universal coherence of harmony. This sense of unity is, to be sure, con-
tinually involved in change, but only in the way that, in keeping with
its sense, one and the same thing offers itself in various determinate
formations. The same objective universe appears continually, but in
ever new modes of givenness, with ever new objects, properties, relations
coming thereby into "authentic" experience and cognition. This sense
of unity continually has at one and the same time the form of an in-
tended and that of a fulfilling sense. The continual process of cognition
is, as for the individual objects so also for the universe, a total process of
fulfillment, running its course in multiple particular processes, a total
process which, with increasing perfection, brings to self-presentation
6. Correlative, of course, is the complete province of eidetic knowledge for the
real in general, or the universe of possible realities and worlds in general; the uni-
versal science of the essence of the real in general encompasses all a priori sciences
that have been developed or still could be developed for special regions or formal
structures of possible reality (e.g., "pure" natural science, pure geometry, pure
doctrine of time, pure mechanics) .
45
and eventually to self-grasping cognizance that horizon of the un-
experienced, of undetermined and determinable co-meaning, which of
essential necessity accompanies all real experience. The total fulfillment
is a fulfillment which, in an inclusive harmony and with the total force
of progressive, experiential verification, resolves all the occasional dis-
appointments into a higher harmony. Exposed illusion signifies at the
same time and always restoration of a true being which finds itself a
place in the general harmony in place of the illusion.
Experience and processes of experience, however, are essentially
characterized as processes within the framework of the practical "I can"
(and, in further sequence, "everyone can"), i.e., as processes that some
"I" does or can direct. The empty horizons belonging to the general
mode of real givenness are practical horizons, to be fulfilled systemati-
cally in the co-constituted and therefore continually familiar system of
the possibilities of practical intervention. The possibility of fulfillment,
in the sense of the practical possibility of converting the perception in
question as experientially taking cognizance into the form of fulfill-
ment, of more exact determination of that which is still unknown about
the already perceived reality-which, however, essentially is never any-
thing absolutely unknown, but rather, is something predelineated in its
formal type, e.g., as a thing in space-this fulfillability constantly car-
ries with itself empirical-practical evidence: I can, however I may prac-
tically engage in the system of my possible ways of performance (e.g.,
in the perceptual "I approach, I see, I feel"), continue my perceiving as
perceiving the same thing, in taking cognizance, which harmoniously
proceeds and at the same time confirms it. Again and again this thing
will come to light as existent and as it itself is; and likewise in the
possible freely active transition to the other things that lie in the so-to-
speak indefinite-definite open horizon, that is to say, within the region
of the world constantly co-posited and known in the all-inclusive
horizon-consciousness.
Inseparable from it, as can easily be seen, is the evidence belonging
to every past phase of my life into which I am able freely to put myself
back: acting freely, I could have modified my past experience in free
realization of my practical possibilities at that time, could have become
acquainted on all sides with the past world as it was, the world which,
in the empirical evidentness of the process of harmony that continually
runs up to the present experience, was the same one that still is, except
that it has been altered in the objective-temporal change of its real
states.
In the continually successful total process of fulfilling realization of
the ever still intended world-sense-and not only in the subjectively but
also in the intersubjectivelY communalized process-the future and in-
finitely continuable realization of the process is always confirming it-
self, and, to be sure, in the form of cognitive processes of increasing
perfection. But precisely thereby the actual being of the world itself is
confirmed as a telos-lying at infinity-of this process of ever more
perfect realization, which can at all times be freely continued (in the
consciousness of the "I could," "anyone could," or "could have"). In
the purely transcendental meditation, then, "the world itself" offers
itself only as a peculiar truth-sense of a higher level coming to light in
actual subjectivity or intersubjectivity, namely, as an idea constituting
itself in the immanent form of grounded acceptance. Its equivalent is
the idea of the conceived totality of truths cognizable ad infinitum,
truths related to all objects of actual and possible experience. It pre-
delineates for all cognizing subjects a universal law for these with regard
to the totality of the experiences and experiential theoretizings possible
in them.
The foregoing discussion will, in its rough outlines of arguments to
be carried out, suffice to give clarity to the opening proposition and, at
the same time, [suffice] to give evidence of a powerfully motivated an-
ticipation. In any case, what has been said can serve to give bolder relief
to the motivation, which was awakened already in the first, highly un-
refined, and unclear attempts at transcendental world interpretation.
It will also make it understandable why great philosophers whose
genius announced itself in the very fact that their anticipatory evidence
reached so much further than they could make clear to themselves in
explicative particular intuitions or could make precise to themselves in
originally created concepts, even as first theoretical approximations-
why they saw themselves forced to a transcendental-subjective con-
sideration of the world, where, of course, they encountered ready ob-
jections from the natural manner of thought, which they passed over
without really being able to dispose of them.
But here a more detailed discussion is needed.
V. The Justification of Transcendental "Idealism": Its
Systematic Scientific Execution
Even though we have made clear to ourselves in a rough general way
the fact that, and the way in which "the world" constitutes itself as
accepted sense in transcendental context, that is to say, purely in the
sense-bestowal of possible external experience and experiential science;
nevertheless, this novel cognition of the world by no means satisfies us;
for it seems to force upon us consequences that come into sharp con-
47
tradietion to unassailable truths of the natural, positive cognition of the
world.
The world of which we speak and always can speak, of which we know
and always can know, is after all none other than that very one which
we constitute in the immanence of our own, individual, and com-
munalized conscious life in the indicated multiplicities of self-unifying
cognitive formations. That world is the one which we as cognizing per-
sons continually "have" and continually strive after as a cognitive
goal, and, finally, it is our mere "idea." Is it not precisely the necessary
function of the transcendental attitude to make visible and completely
evident through the consistency of the purely subjective sort of medita-
tion that in the total province of possible cognition nothing can occur
other than the cognitive formation constituting itself therein by its
own performance? This is to say, nowhere else can the world, or any
possible world, have "existence" but "in" the cognizing subjects, "in"
the fact-so evident to them-of their conscious life and in their essen-
tial "capacities."
Against this very claim the naturally thinking person will raise his
decisive objection. Quite obviously, he will say, one must distinguish
between the world itself, which exists in and for itself, and the subjective
cognitive formations by means of which subjects relate themselves to
the world. It is patent nonsense, he will say, to assume that the world
is in us as mere sense-formation, as an idea, when we ourselves are, after
all-as no reasonable person can ever doubt-mere components of the
world.
The transcendental philosopher, of course, would not be embarrassed
for an answer here. He would, first of all, point out that, just as is the
case with any senseful difference, so also that all-familiar one between
objects in their being in and for themselves and cognized objects
creates its original and legitimate sense out of the cognizing conscious-
ness. In accordance with this latter, however, the cognitionally realized
real object is, as is evident, none other than the still uncognized one,
indeed, the one as yet not even thought of-but which, of course, from
the outset is thought of as belonging to the open horizon of our possible
cognition. Only the tension between imperfect cognition, with its
many modes of empty intention and fulfilling intuition, and ideally
perfect cognition remains. Is an idea lying at infinity less a cognitive
formation by virtue of its ideality, less situated in the horizon of con-
sciousness of each subjectivity itself, which approaches the idea as its
cognitive goal and in all its genuine cognitions realizes a small part or
an immature stage of its infinite sense?
-Furthermore, as for that countersense that is drawn from the
double position of cognizing persons as subjects for the world and as
objects in the world, it is indeed resolvable. Not the pure subjects in
whose conscious life all objects are cognitive goals of intersubjective
experience and cognition through the logic of experience-not these
are objects in the world and as such themselves again "phenomena,"
but rather, the psychophysical subjects are, the human beings and their
human "psychic life." Even the ego, which for Descartes, in the stage
of approach to the possible nonexistence of the objective world, was left
over as indubitable subject of indubitably streaming cogitationes, was
not the psychophysical real Ego of these human beings.
Such answers surely have their value. But for the actual resolution of
the great difficulties in which the change of attitudes and evidences, the
natural and the transcendental, entangles one, they do not suffice. An
understanding clarification of the sense of a world, the one existing and
so existing for the cognizing subjectivity only out of its own perform-
ance of consciousness, can never arise out of merely argumentative de-
liberations that move in generalities remote from things instead of
producing the actual insight required here through the concrete and
systematic study of transcendental subjectivity grasped in purity and
first of all concretely seen, and of the extremely numerous sorts of con-
sciousness and performances of consciousness. In fact, one must strive
for actual insight into how objective sense of every sort and how objec-
tive truth arise in pure consciousness; how the sense-constituting con-
sciousness looks, so to speak, according to its essential sort and essential
structures; and correlatively, how the sense actually arising therein itself
looks in such originary genuineness. The solution of this problem
which, at bottom, already is a moving force in Locke's doctrine of
origin-but through fateful implications works itself out in a sense-
perverted form there, the solution may for its part entangle us in ex-
tremely difficult investigations. Difficulties, however, are there in order
to be overcome. But they are not overcome if one shies away from the
toil of making oneself familiar with the peculiarity of the transcendental
mode of consideration through actual practice and therefore never
comes to the point of even understanding the enormous tasks that have
arisen for philosophy with the discovery of the transcendental sphere
as one that is absolutely independent of all objective presuppositions.
Even the first philosophers who, following Descartes but with radical
consistency, practiced the transcendental sort of consideration and
(although still imperfectly and in all-too-great generality) reflected on
the immanent cognitive-formations-Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume-
even they recognized that herewith novel insights of unheard-of range
opened up, indeed, that a reshaping of the total world-view established
49
by the philosophers of the past seemed to be required. Thus idealism
made its appearance in history in very different, and very differently to
be evaluated, forms, and raised an unremitting demand for a scientific
execution. However, from the universal anticipations of a transcen-
dental world-view as a novel form of metaphysical world-interpretation,
it was a very long way to a science with concretely formed work-prob-
lems and effective, systematically connected theories. One first of all
had to learn to see in the new attitude, to grasp the peculiar essence of
intentionality and its achievement, to distinguish the many special
forms of pure consciousness and its sense-formations. Only then could
vague problems be made exact by means of originally created transcen-
dental concepts, and only then could transcendental method as well as
theory become possible.
VI. Kant's Sketch of aFirst System of Scientific Transcendental
Philosophy
Here, now, lies the firmest ground for the fame of Immanuel Kant:
full of the will to rigorous science, he made his life's work the guiding
problem, once he saw it-the problem of the transcendental sense of a
cognizable objectivity and of a science claiming cognitive acceptance in
subjective insights-and that in the decades of the most devoted re-
search he sketched a first system of a scientific transcendental philoso-
phy. From the beginning certain individual problems guided him as a
genuine scientist, those which had grown out of his philosophical con-
sideration of mathematics and mathematical natural science and out
of the critical awareness of the inadequacy of contemporary ontology;
problems which revealed themselves in their transcendental sense with
a deeper penetration and led him to the independent discovery of a
novel "metaphysics," the transcendental or "critical" over against the
"dogmatic."
Transcendental philosophy in the process of development assumes a
special theoretical stamp, by virtue of the fact that its primary attention
remains directed toward the sciences and the problems of transcen-
dental "possibility" that arrange themselves according to their prin-
cipal types. He was the first to come to consider science not merely
objectively as theories of objective actualities and possibilities, but
rather, under a consistent transcendental aspect, as subjective cognitive
performances in the consciousness generally. Completely new is the
manner in which he sketches the idea of a formal ontology of nature
(natura formaliter spectata) and undertakes uniformly to deduce its
basic concepts and principles transcendentally and systematically. This
happens in the sense of the original regressive way of putting the ques-
tion: under which forms of concept and law must an objective world
(a nature) stand in general, which is supposed to be experienceable as
one and the same world for all cognizers in the synthesis of possible
experience and then further is supposed to be cognizable in subsequent
theoretical cognitions; and to be sure in truths and sciences which can
be attained by anyone with the necessary validity, therefore according
to methods which, running their course in subjective cognitive pro-
cesses, must attain and vouch for something necessarily acceptable in
general-?
Perhaps the future will agree in this: the profound obscurities of
Kant's theories, which can after all be accepted as signs of a not ulti-
mately scientific foundation, have their definite ground in the fact that
Kant, having come from the W olffian ontology, remains, even in the
transcendental attitude, ontologically interested. That is to say, his
study, like his peculiar problematics, was almost exclusively concerned
with the forms of sense and truth and the sense-moments necessarily
belonging to them with objective force. On the other hand, he con-
siders as dispensable for settling his problematics the systematic execu-
tion of a correlative, concretely intuitive study of subjectivity in its
performance and conscious functions, its passive and active conscious
syntheses, in which all kinds of objective sense and objective right take
shape. However great his first profound insights were into the a priori
of the sense-bestowal by the conscious life and the connections of
sense-bestowal and sense itself-especially under the title "subjective
deduction" (in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason)-
nevertheless, he did not recognize that a transcendental philosophy
cannot be narrowed down in the way in which he believed he could do
it and a radically clear, that is to say, radical scientific working out of
such a philosophy is possible only if the concretely full conscious life
and conscious performance is subjected to study on all its correla-
tive sides, and with all its differentiations-and that all done within
the framework of the unified, concretely intuitive, transcendental
subjectivity.
A transcendental logic is possible only in a transcendental noetics;
transcendental theories of objective sense-formations are, if fully ade-
quate and therefore absolute cognition is to be acquired, inseparable
from the transcendental essence-investigation of the life shaping the
objective sense. These theories ultimately lead back to a most universal
study of the essence of consciousness in general-to a "transcendental
phenomenology." That is precisely what forces one to widen Kant's
peculiar concept "transcendental," on which our presentation has been
based from the outset.
But whatever stance one might take on Kant's own delimitation of
transcendental philosophy, he was, as I already said, the first to bring it
into the form of theory actually being worked out. In particular, he was
the first who, in gigantic sketches, embarked on the attempt, which
must be made again and again until there is full success, of making
nature, first of all the nature of intuition and that of mathematical
natural science, theoretically understandable, as a formation consti-
tuting itself in the internality of transcendental subjectivity. The same
must be carried out for all realms of the naturally-naIvely experienced
world and therefore also for all sciences. Here-in our time a keenly felt
desideratum-the manifold human socialities and the cultural forma-
tions arising in their communal life, therefore also the cultural sciences
related to them, must be brought into the transcendental consideration
as "objects of possible experience," and Kant's "prejudice for natural
science" must be overcome.
VII. Historical Development of the Transcendental Philosophy
and its Practical Significance
If I were permitted to reach farther out beyond the universal idea of
transcendental philosophy and enter into the special contents of Kant's
theories, there would, of course, still be much to say that would redound
to his fame. One would have to point to the many great particular dis-
coveries which Kant came upon almost everywhere in his theoretizing;
discoveries, of course, each of which bears the inscription: "Earn me in
order to possess me." Things went with transcendental philosophy
much the same as, e.g., with the infinitesimal calculus: although it was
originally created through theory, a work of centuries was required to
produce the true theory in which it could itself for the first time attain
genuine form and unassailable existence. In our case, where a radical
revolution in the entire natural manner of thinking was required and a
completely novel, absolutely self-enclosed realm of cognition was un-
covered, in which what had never been seen could be seen and what
had never been thought could be thought, the imperfections of the
first scientific appropriation had to be much greater still. To a particu-
larly high degree, therefore, the problems, methods, theories that first
offered themselves were encumbered with unclarified presuppositions
which did not allow them to become evident in a completely satis-
factory way. Accordingly, the task given to the future had to be much
more difficult: to penetrate to presuppositionless and self-evident be-
ginnings; to develop the appropriate method; to outline the actually
radical problematics, and finally to build up a theory systematically
that could be justified with finality.
And so we now may be able to understand why in transcendental
philosophy we have until now missed a continual ascent of the sort
that modern mathematics has shown from the beginning; indeed, why
long and not yet concluded struggles were required for it to make good
its peculiar right and privilege as opposed to the positive sciences-but
also first and foremost to work out in these struggles the ultimately
justifiable pure sense of a transcendental philosophy and transcendental
method. It is not only that the most deeply ingrained habits of the
natural manner of cognition had to be broken; here there was lacking
also the never-failing propaganda power of the other side's technical
successes. Transcendental philosophy, a very useless art, does not aid
the lords and masters of this world, the politicians, engineers, indus-
trialists. But perhaps it is no reproach that on the theoretical level it
delivers us from absolutizing this world and opens to us the only pos-
sible scientific gate leading to the-in the higher sense-only true world,
the world of absolute mind. And perhaps it is also the theoretical func-
tion of a praxis, and of precisely that one in which the supreme and
ultimate interests of humanity must of necessity become effective.
VIII. The Sense of a Succession to Kant
In this manner, therefore, we understand the imperishable signifi-
cance of Kant's scientific life's work, and therewith is revealed to us the
magnitude of the task in its entirety to which we and all future genera-
tions are called. Above all, and at first without raising any questions
about Kant's special theses and theories which so impressively deter-
mine the character of his specific philosophical apprehension of the
world, we must recognize the idea of a transcendental philosophy
(which came into its first but only preliminary existence as theory in
his philosophy) as the eternal sense which was, as it were, innate in the
historical development of philosophy, and which remains forever in-
separable from its further development. In any case, it had its first
actual existence, as idea in germinal form, in Descartes' Meditations
and thus it forthwith became the moving developmental sense of spe-
cifically modern philosophy, its intention, spiritedly driving it and
working itself out in it. Once the ego cogito was seen as the pure, self-
contained cognizing subjectivity, seen, that is, as the universal ground of
cognition for everything that can ever be cognized, and once it was
53
accordingly recognized as the primal source of philosophical method
and made current in literature, there was opened up, for philosophical
thinkers of later time, an intentional horizon which unconditionally
had to be explored; there was awakened the idea of a philosophy which
unconditionally had to be brought to fulfilling clarity and actualization.
Although it may at first still have appeared that everything here
amounted to a philosophy new only in method and one that needed
only to be equipped with more profoundly secure theoretical contents,
a philosophy which, obviously, would retain the only general metaphy-
sical style hitherto conceivable, nevertheless, as the transcendental
motive of the method became effective, its genuine, revolutionary sense
had to reveal itself. Finally, an actual transcendental philosophy had to
attain to active scientific realization, which made evident the basic
essential novelty of the philosophy demanded by this development. It
had to become evident that what had achieved actuality in it, because
derived from the absolutely ultimate source of all method, could claim
with a previously unheard-of force to present, at least in its completely
novel essential type, the only possible philosophy, or, better, to bring a
completely novel philosophy to its first institution.
In this manner Kant's critique of reason has the significance that in
it, at last, the philosophical revolution incipient in the historically
emerging philosophy of the modern age became fact. With its appear-
ance there was revealed to philosophy itself the methodological form
essentially necessary to it as scientifically true philosophy, that is to say,
the genuine teleological idea which all further developments must
strive to realize in consciously purposeful activity.
Here one task was set apart as the first and most important: namely,
to bring this new, transcendental sense of philosophy to perfect clarity
and purity through a radical exploration of transcendental subjectivity
as the field in which all method originates. To this purely shaped sense
the significance of a legitimately and consciously guiding teleological
idea then had to be given, which, as a disclosed entelechy, made possible
the most rational and incomparably the most fruitful form of philoso-
phical development: the idea of a most genuine self-vindicating science
in the ultimate and most rigorous sense.
It is essential to philosophy, ideally speaking, that it first attain true
and genuine existence in the highest and most conscious clarity about
the universal methodological, systematic form which it must satisfy as
its guiding formal final idea and must fulfill by actual theories. In other
words, it exists in the true sense only insofar as it has, in active reflection
and insight, incorporated in itself this its rational teleological idea and,
in continually and consciously determining itself according to this idea,
54
has prescribed for its coming-into-being the form of a rational develop-
ment, one vigorously directed toward its genuine teleological sense.
According to all this, Kant's revolutionizing in philosophy is for us
not a merely historical fact, but historically the first (and still imperfect)
actualization of a turn predelineated in the essential sense of philosophy
itself in its development from the natural to the transcendental method
of cognition, from the positive or dogmatic to the transcendental cog-
nition and science of the world; the turn, we can also say, from the naIve
positive stage of world-cognition to a world-cognition through ultimate
self-consciousness of cognition-but not in emptying generalities-con-
cerning its active accomplishments, under the titles of reason, truth,
science.
At the same time, there arises for us, out of the insights attained, the
right sense in which we must understand and challenge Kant's follow-
ing: to take over his system as it is or to improve its details, this is not
what is necessary above all else, but rather to understand the ultimate
sense of his revolution-and to understand him better than he himself,
the trailblazer, but not the perfecter, was capable of doing. This under-
standing, however, must be expressed in a scientifically basic way; a
philosophy that is scientific in the most rigorous sense, that according
to its essence is beginning without presuppositions, needs first of all to
derive its ABC's, so to speak, from original consciousness, and by means
of this, it must attain its ultimately valid theoretical form of develop-
ment that lifts it out above the play of philosophical systems. The
legacy of Kant, therefore, will be not abandoned but rather perpetuated,
by clarifying and making full use of its absolute contents. Whether his
systematic world-view would thereby be retained, even in its general
style, is, on the other hand, a completely secondary question.
There has been no lack of serious efforts in such a spirit, especially
in the last decades. These efforts have in any case seen to it that the
danger of having the transcendental idea completely submerged-as a
result of the sense-perverting misunderstandings of the innermost
motives of Kant, as well as those of his predecessors in transcendental
philosophy-can be considered as overcome, even though the philoso-
phical world-literature of our time, seen as a mass phenomenon, still
yields a different total picture.
For decades our Freiburg in particular has been a place where the
Kantian intentions seek their philosophical effects, even if in quite
varied forms. However much the phenomenological direction that is at
present represented here goes its own way in the range of its prob-
lematics and its formulation, and even in the principles of its method,
and however little it was directly determined by Kant and Kantian
55
William E. Pohl
Instructor in German
Texas Christian University
-
schools-it must also, in all reactivation of older and oldest motives of
thinking and in the shaping of completely new ones-recognize that it
is an attempt to lend truth to the deepest sense of Kantian philoso-
phizing; at least, if the interpretation that we have thought through
together at this hour has its legitimacy.
In any case, we see ourselves completely at one with Kant in that
endeavoring to actualize transcendental philosophy not in the spirit of
a world-view that accommodates itself to the needs of the time, but
rather in the spirit of a rigorous science striving toward the idea of
ultimate validity.
And so we may dare to hope that Kant's spirit will affably accept our
modest thank-offering.
Translated by:
Ted E. Klein, Jr.
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Texas Christian University
..
The Method of Clarificatl
EDMUND HUSSERL
The investigation just carried out Sl
between phenomenology and ontolo.
its significance for the clarification of
psychological) method in a definite <:
problems are cleared up-problems 0
dardizations of the connected phen
descriptions. It lies in the nature of
achievements which the whole of OUI
continually applied to itself reflective
sources it must bring to fullest clarity
tices. There is no science behind it, C
Any obscurity which remains for it pre
of confusions and the like to creep in
gical results, and also for misinterpre
method and the abuses bound up wit
the most radical rigor, which for its 1
illumination in the method of clarific
dropped the word which is to form tl
gations. For what has been presented
mentioned in the theory of the redl
* Translators' Note: The text published
lation is Chapter IV of Ideen zu einer rein<
gischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch: Die Phil
Wissenschaften, edited by Marly Biemel as
Martinus Nijhoff, 1952), pp. 93-105. Tl
ldeen III.
We are grateful to Dr. H. J. H. Hartgeri
permission on behalf of the publisher and th,
lation. General information about this thiJ
found in the editor's introduction to Husser
work owe their gratitude to James Street Fu
at Rice University.
Copyright 1952 by Martinus Nijhoff.
Copyright 1974 by Ted E. Klein, Jr. an
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