Phenomenological Reduction

In ordinary waking experience we take it for granted that the world around us exists independently of both us and our consciousness of it. This might be put by saying that we share an implicit belief in the independent existence of the world, and that this belief permeates and informs our everyday experience.
Husserl refers to this positing of the world and entities within it as things which transcend our experience of them as "the natural attitude" .
In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl introduces what he there refers to as "the epistemological reduction," according to which we are asked to supply this positing of a transcendent world with "an index of indifference" .
In Ideas I, this becomes the "phenomenological epoché," according to which, "We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being".
This means that all judgements that posit the independent existence of the world or worldly entities, and all judgements that presuppose such judgements, are to be bracketed and no use is to be made of them in the course of engaging in phenomenological analysis.
Importantly, Husserl claims that all of the empirical sciences posit the independent existence of the world, and so the claims of the sciences must be "put out of play" with no use being made of them by the phenomenologist.

        [Note: The Delphic motto, “Know thyself!” has gained a new signification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must lose the world by epoché, in order to regain it by a universal self-examination. (Husserl: Méditations cartésiennes, 157/183).
        Epoché: Suspension of the natural attitudes that phenomena (the world) exists independently of our consciousness.
        Phenomenon: Manifestation of the World.]

This epoché opens us up to the world of phenomena, how it is that the world and the entities within it are given. The reduction, then, is that which reveals to us the primary subject matter of phenomenology - the world as given and the givenness of the world; both objects and acts of consciousness.

There are a number of motivations for the view that phenomenology must operate within the confines of the phenomenological reduction. One is epistemological modesty. The subject matter of phenomenology is not held hostage to skepticism about the reality of the "external" world. Another is that the reduction allows the phenomenologist to offer a phenomenological analysis of the natural attitude itself. This is especially important if, as Husserl claims, the natural attitude is one of the presuppositions of scientific enquiry. Finally, there is the question of the purity of phenomenological description. It is possible that the implicit belief in the independent existence of the world will affect what we are likely to accept as an accurate description of the ways in which worldly things are given in experience. We may find ourselves describing things as "we know they must be" rather than how they are actually given.

The reduction, in part, enables the phenomenologist to go "back to the things themselves", meaning back to the ways that things are actually given in experience. Indeed, it is precisely here, in the realm of phenomena, that Husserl believes we will find that indubitable evidence that will ultimately serve as the foundation for every scientific discipline. As such, it is vital that we are able to look beyond the prejudices of common sense realism, and accept things as actually given. It is in this context that Husserl presents his Principle of All Principles which states that, "every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originally (so to speak, in its 'personal' actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there".

Eidetic Reduction

The results of phenomenology are not intended to be a collection of particular facts about consciousness, but are rather supposed to be facts about the essential natures of phenomena and their modes of givenness.
Phenomenologists do not merely aspire to offer accounts of what their own experiences of, say, material objects are like, but rather accounts of the essential features of material object perception as such. But how is this aspiration to be realized given that the method of phenomenology is descriptive, consisting in the careful description of experience? Doesn't this, necessarily, limit phenomenological results to facts about particular indviduals' experience, excluding the possibility of phenomenologically grounded general facts about experience as such?

The Husserlian answer to this difficulty is that the phenomenologist must perform a second reduction called "eidetic" reduction (because it involves a kind of vivid, imagistic intuition). The purpose of the eidetic reduction in Husserl's writings is to bracket any considerations concerning the contingent and accidental, and concentrate on (intuit) the essential natures or essences of the objects and acts of consciousness. This intuition of essences proceeds via what Husserl calls "free variation in imagination." We imagine variations on an object and ask, "What holds up amid such free variations of an original […] as the invariant, the necessary, universal form, the essential form, without which something of that kind […] would be altogether inconceivable?". We will eventually come up against something that cannot be varied without destroying that object as an instance of its kind. The implicit claim here is that if it is inconceivable that an object of kind K might lack feature F, then F is a part of the essence of K.

Eidetic intuition is, in short, an a priori method of gaining knowledge of necessities. However, the result of the eidetic reduction is not just that we come to knowledge of essences, but that we come to intuitive knowledge of essences. Essences show themselves to us (Wesensschau), although not to sensory intuition, but to categorial or eidetic intuition. It might be argued that Husserl's methods here are not so different from the standard methods of conceptual analysis: imaginative thought experiments.

2.2 Transcendence, “Natural Attitude,” and the Phenomenological Stance
The traditional dipole “internal-external” was recognizing the “external” world as transcendent, in comparison to the immanence of the knowing subjectivity.
The world of objects is thus confronted as a universe of self-existing beings that transcends the enclosedness of the bearer of the experiences and of knowledge.
Two independent spheres of reality are thus acknowledged, which enter into contact only from time to time, and wholly accidentally.
On the one side, we supposedly have the “external” reality and, on the other, the “internal” reality.
What is considered as experience and knowledge is the successful incoming and recognition of sensory contents to some suitable sentient ‘chamber’: psyche, nous, soul, mind, intellect, cogito, tabula rasa, consciousness, etc.
In some way, the problem of knowledge must find its solution on the basis of a kind of awareness regarding the contents in the soul, mind, consciousness, etc., which should correspond to, refer to, represent, etc., the external source.

Brentano, Husserl’s teacher, had also accepted this basic epistemological idea, and used it in his analyses under the title of intentionality (“Intentionalität”).
Brentano reformulated the epistemological problem in a form which is nowadays known as “Brentano’s problem”: how does the possession of some content, immanent in our soul, guarantee our cognitive relation to outer reality, which itself transcends our immanence and is totally different from this content?

Husserl was aware of his teacher’s efforts to solve this particular problem. In his 5th Logical Investigations, he moreover argued extensively in order to show the failure of the enterprise to bridge the immanent psychic with some transcending and self-existent real realm.
The Brentanian intentional contents that reside in an immanent psychic sphere should be “related” to the “external” things themselves. Nevertheless, what exactly could the texture of this “relation” be? In the end, Brentano couldn’t find either an adequate analysis for the ontology of the necessary correspondence or reference, or a satisfactory answer to the possibility of misrepresentation.

In the Logical Investigations Husserl offered his own path-breaking understanding of the notion of intentionality. In experience and knowledge we do not just possess some mere contents within the immanent stream of our consciousness’ living experiences (Erlebnisse). ………… …………….. ……………
I experience or I have knowledge of a thing when there is an appearance (Erscheinung) or a manifestation of it as a phenomenon in—or, better, to—my consciousness. But this appearing of phenomena is not identical to the having of contents recorded in the stream of living experiences. ….. ….. . Instead of the mere possession of immanent contents that ‘correspond’ to otherwise untraceable external objects, Husserl now talks about an intentional interpretation or intentional apprehension of the immanently lived-through contents that leads to the conscious appearance of the very things in their evident manifestation for me, firstly as whole perceptual beings that are simply sensorially experienced.
(Note: “Experience is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a room of consciousness; it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness into consciousness.” (FTL, 132/239). Also, “Neither the world nor any other existent of any conceivable sort comes ‘from outdoors’ into my ego, my life of consciousness” (FTL, 250/257).)

In the Husserlian account of intentionality, consciousness manages, thus, to ‘extend’ itself beyond the Heracletian flux of living experiences and to reach the beings themselves as in-person appearing in the world. With this move, Husserl solves—by actually cutting it like a Gordian knot—what is known as the “problem of epistemological transcendence.” What consciousness experiences or knows has now been put beyond consciousness’ immanence. Consciousness experiences and knows the transcendently appearing beings in the world; not its immanent ideas, representations, or contents of whatever sort.

In the LI, Husserl did indeed basically restrict himself to the examination of the appearance and structure of the phenomena. He felt content enough with the examination of intentional acts and their transcendently appearing intentional contents (objects). There, instead of engaging in an effort to solve the problem regarding the relation between the phenomena and the supposedly independent, realistic things ‘in-themselves,’ he circumvented the problem of the latter’s existence and meaning of Being. In this way, however, the problem we may call the “problem of ontological transcendence” remained unsolved.

In the LI, Phenomenology had not yet substantially freed itself from the traditional dualism between the psychical and the physically real, and was not suggesting any solution to the problem of ontological transcendence (traditionally understood). For this reason, the analyses there are restricted to the sphere of the intentional psychic and its intentional, transcendently—with regard to the stream of living experiences - appearing phenomena.

As Husserl admitted in 1906, what he had achieved was only a Eidetic-Descriptive Psychology of perceptual and categorial acts together with their phenomena in the corresponding intuitions. In order to fulfill the remaining work, Husserl needed to find a successful solution to the problem of ontological transcendence. And for this, he had to find a way to expand Phenomenology beyond the intentional and transcendent, to be sure, but also merely appearing objects. In other words, what Husserl needed to do was to find a new way to solve the problem of the supposed chasm between the psychical (together with the appearing phenomena) and the realistically understood being(s).

This problem kept Husserl busy during a course of five lectures, which are well known from their publication in volume II of the Husserliana series, under the title The Idea of Phenomenology. There, we have a first exposition of basic ideas connected with his transcendental turn; ideas that were going to take a more systematically elaborated form in the Ideas I (1913). In the Idea, Husserl remarks that we live our everyday lives with the background supposition that, out there, there is an ontologically independent, realistic world. Husserl now calls the stance from which we live such a transcendentally naïve life the “natural attitude” (natürliche Einstellung).

            “[Natural attitude is that] in which everyday life as a whole as well as the positive sciences operate. In it the world is for us the self-evidently existing universe of realities which are continuously before us in unquestioned givenness [Vorhandenheit]. So this is the general field of our practical and theoretical activities.” (PTP, 168/288)

The natural attitude appears as the legitimacy-source of common-sense ontology, as the sum of beliefs that justified dualism and created the unbridgeable gap between consciousness and reality in itself. An autonomously or absolutely self-existing “outer” world is supposed to affect (immediately or mediately) our perception and to become represented in our mind, to be given to the subject, to be contained in our consciousness, etc., in the maximum possible fidelity and referentiality. For the psychological and the empirical ego, which are definable within the context of the natural attitude, the world is already there as absolutely self-existent. From the natural attitude, the world with its beings as a reality in itself, as ‘something’ realistically standing “out there,” is independent of the subjectivity to which it just becomes manifest, to which it just becomes known as a phenomenon (itself, however, remaining always something ‘more substantial’ than its phenomenal appearance).

This fundamental but also generally implicit universal presupposition of the ontological independence is thematized in §30 of the Ideas I, and is called “the general thesis” or “the general positing” (Generalthesis). Husserl makes clear, the general positing, which defines the essence of the natural attitude, is not a propositionally articulated belief, but a universal form of sense-giving (Sinngebung) in our intentional relatedness with the world.
The general positing is the self-evident filter, as it were, through which we run our everyday lives and grasp the various epistemological and ontological problems regarding our relatedness to the world. In the end, the fact that the world appears to our consciousness is taken, by our natural attitude, as an additional and secondary event, which has no ontological but only epistemological significance.

2.3 Psychological-Phenomenological and Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction
In the Logical Investigations Husserl merely circumvented the problem of the relation between the phenomena manifesting themselves in the psychic sphere with that which—from the natural attitude—is understood as self-subsistent reality. This move was made possible by means of a methodological move that Husserl himself subsequently called “psychological phenomenological reduction.”
This methodological move was presumed as realistic within or behind the appearing phenomena. It puts into brackets the very (realistically understood) actuality—as it is made intelligible from the point of view of the natural attitude and its general positing—without touching upon it. This reduction offers us the possibility of abstaining from the issue regarding the realistic existence or not of the appearing thing and of restraining ourselves methodologically to whatever appears as a phenomenon.
The happening of the appearing, i.e., the ‘shining forth’ of that which appears in what it is, the intentional recognition of a thing in consciousness, can thus be treated within the limits of the psychological sphere as the sphere of intentional acts and their transcendently appearing intentional objects (as appearances). In this—still epistemologically— orientated Phenomenology, the legitimate propositions are articulated only with reference to whatever is intentionally (i.e., in the manner of intentionally appearing) ‘included’ in this sphere.

The psychological-phenomenological reduction methodologically transfers the realistically understood intentionally appearing, transcendent thing to intentionally appearing phenomenon. This move opens up the region of the intentional-psychologically pure consciousness and of the ‘therein’ appearing transcendent phenomena. It discloses the purely intentional-psychological field of (intentional) experiences and their transcendent intentional phenomena (purely and simply). Put otherwise, it highlights the field of the intentional, psychologically pure acts and their intentionally appearing intentional objectities. The mathesis that is thereby inaugurated is called “Phenomenological Psychology”(in the LI: Eidetic-Descriptive Phenomenological Psychology).

However, Phenomenological Psychology remained transcendentally naïve. Its interests are restricted to the unity of the intentional acts, to the unity of the appearing objectities and of their parts, and to their intentional relatedness (later: “correlation”). The transcendental naiveté of Phenomenological Psychology consists in this: whereas it focuses on the intentionally appearing and its constitution, it essentially keeps silently presupposing other realities, e.g., the supposed self-subsistent reality behind the perceptually appearing objects. Whatever appears in the sphere of the psychologically pure experiences was still considered simply as phenomenon of another realistic being, with reference to which the phenomenological psychologist merely suppresses his thoughts and their possible expression. This methodological self-restriction to the phenomena in the sphere of the (intentionally) purely psychic does not solve the problem of the transcendence to the very realistic—whatever this might be—but only demands that the phenomenologist remains mute with regard to it. The latter places the supposed independent reality in brackets, in the sense that it does away with the obligation to form and to express any thought or judgment about it. From this point of view, then, Phenomenological Psychology still moves within the bounds of the positivity that characterizes the natural attitude.

Phenomenological Psychology, to be sure, abolishes the analysis of the cognitive states (broadly speaking) in terms of a mere having of sensory contents. It confronts all intentional acts in terms of interpretation and evident appearing.
However, despite the fact that it transforms traditional epistemology, Phenomenological or Pure Psychology cannot express itself substantially on the issue of the relation between the appearing and the (supposed) realistic reality somehow ‘supporting’ or ‘underpinning’ this appearing of the phenomena. ….. From the psychological-phenomenological point of view, the appearance of the beings as phenomena happens, of course, above and beyond the stream of living experiences.

            Even Pure Psychology in the phenomenological sense, thematically delimited by the psychological-phenomenological reduction, still is and always will be a positive science: it has the world as its pre-given ground**. The pure psyches and communities of psyches [that it treats] are psyches that belong to bodies-in-nature that are presupposed but also simply left out of consideration. Like every positive science, this Pure [Phenomenological-] Psychology is itself transcendentally problematic. (PTP, 96/248–9)

**Phenomenological Psychology, however, is a science, and since like all the other sciences, it is built and developed on the basis of the ontological prejudices of the natural attitude, it is a positive mathesis that remains in need of transcendental clarification and grounding, as regards the meaning and the truth of its propositions.

In sum, even though the traditional problem regarding the relation between the intentionally psychic is set aside and left unthematized, the physical-realistic still retains a latent overall legitimacy.

What Husserl realizes in The Idea (1907) and systematizes in the Ideas I (1913) is that there might be also an ‘ontological’ dependence of the world on the consciousness that experiences it. Furthermore, this dependence is now recognized as a problem falling within the jurisdiction of general phenomenological problematics. It is recognized that the world does not only appear to consciousness, but it also is, what it fully is, for a consciousness and thanks to a consciousness. This time, moreover, talk of consciousness changes, and Husserl begins to refer to a transcendental consciousness**. These latter transcendental phenomenological findings are made possible in the attitude that is opened up by the transcendental phenomenological reduction.

           ** With the move of the transcendental reduction, a doublication of the ego seems to arise. On the one side, we speak about a psychological ego. On the other side, a transcendental ego is now introduced. Husserl, however, immediately remarks that this is only a seeming doublication. Without entering here into the specific issues of the Husserlian egology (in the original eidetic phenomenological-psychological LI, Husserl does not even acknowledge something like an ego), it suffices at present to say that the psychological ego is the ego as seen from the point of view of the psychological reduction, whereas the transcendental ego is the ego as seen from the point of view of the transcendental reduction.

In Phenomenological Psychology, whatever concerned the realistically existent within or behind the phenomenon*** was—at least at first—naively relegated to the natural sciences and, especially, to Physics. Now, however, it becomes clear that these sciences too want to control a truth that is possible only on the basis of a very specific cognitive attitude, the natural-scientific one, the meaning and the Presuppositions of which have not yet been clarified. This means that these sciences themselves, instead of being allowed to unquestionably raise the pretension to found all other knowledge, appear to be critically exposed to the need for a clarification of the conditions for their own possibility. On pain of transcendental circularity, as Husserl claims, the natural sciences can no longer be blindly and uninterpellatedly trusted to offer the ultimate foundation for what is, and for what we know.

           ***In Husserl’s descriptions of the natural attitude, there is no clear distinction between a general thesis positing the known empirical reality as independently existing (self-subsisting) and another positing some unknown metaphysical reality as existing in itself. Both may be meant in Husserl’s treatment of the ontology of the natural attitude. It seems, though, that the second alternative makes better sense and is better justified as a problem.

Husserl suggests that this problem applies only to the context of a very specific stance, i.e., to the natural attitude, and its general thesis or positing. Thus, in order to look at the problem anew, we have to convert our attitude into something new, in order to lift the impasses and paradoxes to which the general positing regulating the natural attitude leads us.

            The whole pre-discovered world posited in the natural attitude, actually found in experience and taken with perfect “freedom from theories” as it is actually experienced, as it clearly shows itself in the concatenations of experience, is now without validity for us; without being tested and also without being contested, it shall be parenthesized. In like manner all theories and sciences which relate to this world, no matter how well they may be grounded positivistically or otherwise, shall meet the same fate. (Ideas I, 62/66)

Now, in the Ideas I, it is realized that the idea about self-subsistent reality, an actuality that is understood realistically, is a radically unprovable prejudice of the natural attitude. Phenomenology’s motto “zu den Sachen selbst!” ought to be re-adjusted to the new findings, to become more radical. Phenomenology must continue to remain focused on whatever is intuitionally given beyond any speculation, without, however, limiting itself to just the structure of the phenomena and without accepting phenomenologically unfounded prejudices.

The discovery of the general positing that accompanies the natural attitude and its annihilation by the transcendental-phenomenological reduction allows exactly for the meeting of all these requirements.

No longer is only the dependence of the appearance of the world on an internally coherent context of conscious living experiences considered unquestionable. Its ontological dependence on the structure of intentional living experiences is now proved equally unquestionable. Every phenomenological unity, which from the point of view of the psychological ego just appears, is now also actually discovered as being (in this or that way) due to the immanent syntheses or intentionally constituting acts of a transcendental ego. Whatever was previously reluctantly recognized as just a phenomenon of some realistically posited dimension now gets upgraded into the full-fledged—and only thusly being—being: it is self-given in its entire actuality, though disentangled this time from any additional positing (as subsisting in itself). From Transcendental Phenomenology’s point of view, no other reality in itself can be legitimately posited beyond this transcendentally constituted being.

The chasm between psychologically meant phenomenon and realistically interpreted being is no longer just overlooked or methodologically circumvented; it is directly abolished—without losing anything crucial at all.

            From that epistemological point of view, then,] nothing is lost when [realistic] existence is put between brackets. But from an ontological standpoint, there is indeed a loss of extra-mental reality. [:::] [With the transcendental reduction, however,] only a certain interpretation is disconnected [i.e., the one owed to the general positing and dictated by the natural attitude]. Nothing is really lost. Insight into the relative mode of being of the thing eo ipso means an awareness of the absoluteness of [transcendental] consciousness. (De Boer 1978, 430)

Note: See Fink’s equally clear statement that “the transcendental ‘noema’ is the world itself [:::]this being itself” (1970, 124), i.e., the actual world with its beings in their actuality understood as intentional correlate of transcendental consciousness.

After the transcendental reduction, every intentional objectity appears in what it is as a noema, i.e., as a transcendent intentional correlate constituted in a corresponding noesis of transcendental consciousness. If the totality of scientific knowledge that is produced in the positivity of the natural attitude is put between brackets, and if the same is done with the general positing that regulates the natural attitude as a whole, then nothing in itself can be sought, behind or within**** the supposedly ‘mere’ phenomena.
Whatever is given in the one or the other degree of evidence and with the intuitionality appertaining to this or that intentional comportment or act, i.e., whatever is given in a noesis-noema intentional correlation, is fully actual.

****Note: In the psychological reduction, metaphysical reality can just stay in suspension, waiting, as it were, for the possibility of a kind of scientific-realist theoretical insight or theoretical-hypothetical interpretation of its constitution. In the transcendental reduction, metaphysical reality as well as empirical reality is definitely deprived of the meaning “existing in itself;” an ontological meaning like this is no longer legitimate. There is no sense of speaking about a metaphysical reality in itself, and an empirical reality is intentionally constituted in its complete being. There could, however, be some kind of higher-order theoretical hypothesis positing some ‘metaphysically real’ dimension in order to explain the appearances (phenomena). To the extent that such an explanation is successful, it might be said that there is also a higher-order experience with some kind and degree of evidence (even a mediate one) that this is how things ‘at bottom’ are. This theoretically posited and theoretically experienced reality, however, should now also be understood as being transcendentally constituted as an interpretation of what appears as experiential being.

Actuality is a ‘category’ appertaining to the in-person or ‘bodily’ (leibhaftig) givenness of a transcendent correlate—with the pre-predicative givenness of the things in simple sensory experience being most primordial.
Realistic actuality or simply reality, on the other hand, is a ‘category’ owed to the general positing of the natural attitude, and is a side-effect of the way in which natural- or nature-things are given.
What is apprehended as phenomenologically transcendent is also considered as ontologically independent.

            [I]t would not be acceptable for someone to say “there is only absolute [i.e., transcendental] consciousness” as if he or she wanted to say “every other being [Sein] is just something that merely appears [nur ein scheinbares], an unreal semblance [unwirklicher Schein], a fiction.” This would, of course, have been fundamentally false. The nature-objects [in simple perception] are self-evidently true objects; their Being [Sein] is true Being; nature is actuality in the genuine and full sense [of the term]. It is fundamentally false to ascribe to this Being a measure different than that which this category demands and, thus, to somehow discredit it [i.e., nature], because it is “constituted” within [transcendental] consciousness; because it has its roots in [transcendental] consciousness. (Hua XXXVI, 70-1)

The ontological Transcendental Phenomenology thus came to decisively complement the epistemologically oriented LI (and especially the 6th LI). Psychological phenomenological epoché from the judgments regarding the existence or nonexistence of the “external” world, under which the analyses of the LI are conducted, had to be abandoned, in order for Phenomenology to attain the undertaking of its responsibilities vis-à-vis all kinds of Being and all kinds of beings. Hence, what one reads in the Ideas I is a reply with regard to the transcendental conditions that make possible, for the first time, something (this or that) to be, i.e., the conditions securing that there is something (rather than nothing). Only at this point does Phenomenology become the universal Ontology that Husserl explicitly required it to be.

Phenomenological researchers generally agree that our central concern is to return to embodied, experiential meanings aiming for a fresh, complex, rich description of a phenomenon as it is concretely lived. Yet debates abound when it comes to deciding how best to carry out this phenomenological research in practice. Confusion about how to conduct appropriate phenomenological research makes our field difficult for novices to access. Six particular questions are contested: (1) How tightly or loosely should we define what counts as “phenomenology”? (2) Should we always aim to produce a general (normative) description of the phenomenon, or is idiographic analysis a legitimate aim? (3) To what extent should interpretation be involved in our descriptions? (4) Should we set aside or bring to the foreground researcher subjectivity? (5) Should phenomenology be more science than art? (6) Is phenomenology a modernist or postmodernist project, or neither?

Phenomenology is a meditative philosophy that describes the concreteness of personal lived experience and person-world relations. Phenomenological research methods are responsive to both the phenomenon and the subjective interconnection between the perceiver and the perceived.

What Counts as “Phenomenology”?

Many different research methods and techniques are practiced under the banner of phenomenological research. What are the boundaries, the defining characteristics, of phenomenology? What distinguishes our work from other variants of qualitative research that focus on subjective meanings?

Focusing specifically on psychological phenomenological approaches1, Giorgi (1989) has stated that four core characteristics hold across all variations: The research is rigorously descriptive, uses the phenomenological reductions, explores the intentional relationship between persons and situations, and discloses the essences, or structures, of meaning immanent in human experiences through the use of imaginative variation. Elsewhere Giorgi (1997), more straightforwardly, argues that the phenomenological method encompasses three interlocking steps: (1) phenomenological reduction, (2) description, and (3) search for essences.

There are variations in phenomenological methodology. Some adhere reasonably closely to Giorgi’s framework based on the reduction and imaginative variation while, at the same time, offering their own emphases (e.g., the open lifeworld approach of Dahlberg et al. 2008; van Manen’s, lived experience human science inquiry based on University of Utrecht tradition, 1990; the dialogal approach, Halling et al., 2006; the Dallas approach, Garza 2007; Todres’ embodied lifeworld approach, 2005, 2007; and Ashworth’s, lifeworld approach, 2003, 2006).

There also exist a number of phenomenological methods which focus on rich descriptions of lived experience and meanings, but which do not explicitly use Husserlian techniques such as eidetic variation. Smith’s Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), which has gained considerable purchase in the qualitative psychology field in the United Kingdom, is one such example. Smith argues that his idiographic and inductive method, which seeks to explore participants’ personal lived experiences, is phenomenological in its concern for individuals’ perceptions. He also, however, identifies more strongly with hermeneutic traditions which recognize the central role played by the researcher, and does not advocate the use of bracketing (Smith, 2004).

Linda Finlay: “My own position on this question is that phenomenological research is phenomenological when it involves both rich description of the lifeworld or lived experience, and where the researcher has adopted a special, open phenomenological attitude which, at least initially, refrains from importing external frameworks and sets aside judgements about the realness of the phenomenon. Put another way, I support Husserl’s idea that varying modes of “givenness” can only be unfurled through the reduction and, as Marion (2002) puts it, with more reduction we get more givenness.”

Any research which does not have at its core the description of “the things in their appearing,” focusing on experience as lived, cannot be considered phenomenological.

General Description or Idiographic (‘Individual’) Analysis?

Phenomenologists contest what should be the focus of their research. Many, like Giorgi (following Husserl), seek to throw light on the essential and general structures of a phenomenon.
One version of this approach is to explicitly focus on the lifeworld, which is seen to be a human universal consisting of essential features
A variant of lifeworld research is a reflective and practical focus on lived experience adopted by many in the pedagogic and health care field. Other phenomenologists concentrate on the narratives emerging from data.

With these different approaches, the phenomenon in question varies subtly. For instance, in researching the topic of anxiety, one could explore the lifeworld of a person who is anxious; another could aim to explore the general structure (or essence) of the lived experience of “being anxious”; yet another could explore the stories people tell of their experience of feeling anxious. Underlying these different approaches, with their varying points of focus, are questions that ask to what extent the phenomenology practiced aims to describe the experience in general (i.e., as one shared by many), or is it instead focused on explicating individual experience?

Giorgi (2008) is clear that the purpose of the method he has developed is to clarify the nature of the phenomenon being studied in a more traditional, normative, and scientific sense.
In Giorgi’s method, idiographic analysis may form part of the process of analysis but the eventual aim is to explicate—eidetically—the phenomenon as a whole regardless of the individuals concerned. Idiographic details are thus discarded or typified and generalized.
In contrast, other phenomenologists explicitly seek out idiographic meanings in an attempt to understand the individual which may or may not offer general insights.

Linda Finlay: “For my part, I have also favored an approach with a strong idiographic, narrative element when exploring how particular health conditions may be experienced by individuals. For example, I was interested in explicating how one woman experienced her particular variant of multiple sclerosis (Finlay, 2003), and how another coped with her particular journey related to receiving a cochlear implant.” (Finlay and Molano-Fisher, 2008)

There is also a middle position. Halling (2008) accepts both the particular and general by arguing that idiographic research can also be general in that it may well identify general structures of experience. He suggests that phenomenologists engage three levels of analysis: firstly, they look at particular experience, such as one person’s story of being disillusioned; secondly, they concern themselves with themes common to the phenomenon (for instance, the nature of disillusionment in general); thirdly, they probe philosophical and universal aspects of being human, by asking what is it about our nature and relationships that creates disillusionment. Halling counsels researchers to move back and forth between experience and abstraction—between experience and reflection—at these different levels.

Building on Halling’s formulation, we could say that single cases may offer insight into individual essences (as opposed to typical or universal essences). Husserl (1913/1983) lends support to this position when he says, “Eidetic singularities are essences which necessarily have over them ‘more universal’ essences as their genre, but do not have under them any particularization in relation to which they would themselves be species” (p. 25). Thus, the choice of a single case may provide sufficient access to a phenomenon depending on the epistemological goals of the project, and the rigor of the eidetic approach adopted. If the research aims for generality across the field, then a wider sample representing different aspects is required. Todres and Galvin (2005) provide an example of research which examines the phenomenon of the “caring narrative” both generically (thematically) and idiographically.

Description or Interpretation?

Phenomenological research characteristically starts with concrete descriptions of lived situations, often first-person accounts, set down in everyday language and avoiding abstract intellectual generalizations. The researcher proceeds by reflectively analyzing these descriptions, perhaps idiographically first, then by offering a synthesized account, for example, identifying general themes about the essence of the phenomenon. Importantly, the phenomenological researcher aims to go beyond surface expressions or explicit meanings to read between the lines so as to access implicit dimensions and intuitions. It is this process of “reading between the lines” which has generated uncertainty. To what extent does this approach involve going beyond what the person has said and enter the realm of interpretation?

While all phenomenology is descriptive in the sense of aiming to describe rather than explain, a number of scholars and researchers distinguish between descriptive phenomenology versus interpretive, or hermeneutic, phenomenology.
With descriptive (i.e., Husserl-inspired) phenomenology, researchers aim to reveal essential general meaning structures of a phenomenon. They stay close to what is given to them in all its richness and complexity, and restrict themselves to “making assertions which are supported by appropriate intuitive validations”

Interpretive phenomenology, in contrast, has emerged from the work of hermeneutic philosophers, including Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, who argue for our embeddedness in the world of language and social relationships, and the inescapable historicity of all understanding. “The meaning of phenomenological description as a method lies in interpretation,” says Heidegger. Interpretation is not an additional procedure: It constitutes an inevitable and basic structure of our “being-in-the- world”. We experience a thing as something that has already been interpreted.

The division between these descriptive and interpretive variants of phenomenology finds reflection in research. Giorgi, a proponent of a thorough, descriptive Husserlian method, provided the impetus for what became known as the Duquesne approach or tradition.
Others have embraced more explicitly hermeneutic versions, including the existential, hermeneutic approaches of the Dallas School; the open lifeworld approach of Dahlberg et al.; the dialogal approach of Halling and his colleagues; the embodied enquiry approach of Todres; and the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis in use by Smith and his colleagues.

Some scholars prefer to see description and interpretation as a continuum where specific work may be more or less interpretive. Langdridge notes that in practice there are no hard and fast boundaries between description and interpretation, as “such boundaries would be antithetical to the spirit of the phenomenological tradition that prizes individuality and creativity” (Langdridge, 2008, p. 1131).

Researcher Subjectivity

Phenomenologists all accept that researcher subjectivity is inevitably implicated in research—indeed, some would say it is precisely the realization of the intersubjective interconnectedness between researcher and researched that characterizes phenomenology. The question at stake is to what extent, and how, researcher subjectivity should be marshalled in phenomenological research. As Giorgi (1994) has firmly stated, “nothing can be accomplished without subjectivity, so its elimination is not the solution. Rather how the subject is present is what matters, and objectivity itself is an achievement of subjectivity” . Phenomenologists also concur about the need for researchers to engage a “phenomenological attitude.” Using this attitude, the researcher strives to be open to the “other” and to attempt to see the world freshly, in a different way. The process has been described variously as disciplined naïveté, bridled dwelling, disinterested attentiveness, and/or the process of retaining an empathic wonderment in the face of the world (Finlay, 2008).

While phenomenologists agree about the need for an open attitude, there remains debate as to whether or not it is necessary to engage the reduction and, if so, what it involves.

Some phenomenologists emphasize the reduction as a process of rendering oneself as noninfluential and neutral as possible. Here researchers aim to “bracket” their previous understandings, past knowledge, and assumptions about the phenomenon so as to focus on the phenomenon in its appearing. ……. In fact, bracketing involves a process whereby “one simply refrains from positing altogether; one looks at the data with the attitude of relative openness” (Giorgi, 1994, p. 212).
More specifically, Ashworth (1996) suggests that at least three particular areas of presupposition need to be set aside: (1) scientific theories, knowledge and explanation; (2) truth or falsity of claims being made by the participant; and (3) personal views and experiences of the researcher which would cloud descriptions of the phenomenon itself. Importantly, this “setting aside” is carried out throughout the research process and is not just a first step.

Other researchers—particularly those of hermeneutic sensibility—would deny it is possible, or even desirable, to set aside or bracket researchers’ experience and understandings. They argue instead that researchers need to come to an awareness of their preexisting beliefs, which then makes it possible to examine and question them in light of new evidence (Halling et al., 2006). Researchers need to bring a “critical self-awareness of their own subjectivity, vested interests, predilections and assumptions and to be conscious of how these might impact on the research process and findings” (Finlay, 2008, p. 17). Researchers’ subjectivity should, therefore, be placed in the foreground so as to begin the process of separating out what belongs to the researcher rather than the researched. Colaizzi (1973), for example, argues that researcher self-reflection constitutes an important step of the research process, and that preconceived biases and presuppositions need to be brought into awareness to separate them out from participants’ descriptions. Gadamer (1975) describes this process in terms of being open to the other while recognizing biases. According to him, knowledge in the human sciences always involves some self-knowledge.

Science or Art?

All phenomenologists agree on the need to study human beings in human terms. They therefore reject positivist, natural science methods in favor of a qualitative human science approach. As a human science, phenomenology aims to be systematic, methodical, general, and critical (Giorgi, 1997). At the same time, phenomenology also pursues the intertwining of science with art, the imparting of a “poetic sensibility” to the scientific enterprise. In this sense, science blends with the stylistic realms of the humanities. Where phenomenologists disagree, is about how much weight should be accorded to scientific versus artistic elements.

While Giorgi supports the need to have a “certain openness and flexibility” (2008a, p. 42) when it comes to applying his method, he insists that criteria associated with scientific rigor need to be completely respected. Any discerned meanings that come out of the research need to be seen as based on data and achieved through a systematic process of free imaginative variation which allows a kind of internal validity check10. A rigorous application of this eidetic variation involves freely changing aspects of the phenomenon in order to distinguish essential features from particular or incidental ones. Other phenomenologists recommend engaging modes beyond the scientific—art, literary prose, and poetry. They seek methods that retain their concrete, mooded, sensed, imaginative, and embodied nature. Todres, for example, recommends balancing textural and structural forms as part of communicating the aesthetic dimensions of human experience (Todres, 2000, 2007).

Embracing the Utrecht School tradition, van Manen (1990, 2007) advocates the writing up of phenomenological research as including, ideally, an artistic dimension to “stir our pedagogical, psychological or professional sensibilities”

Linda Finlay: “Sometimes, researcher arguments are best presented by emphasizing the systematic nature of research methods applied and the scientific credentials of the research. At other times, the research may be more memorable when creatively presented.” As Behar (1996 as cited in Bochner 2001) once said in reference to anthropology, research which “doesn’t break your heart just isn’t worth doing anymore” (p. 143). A phenomenological text is most successful when readers feel addressed by it (van Manen, 2007).

Modern or Postmodern Paradigms?

Phenomenology is sometimes linked to a modernist agenda (Moran, 2000). Some would argue that it offers an inductive methodology to explore human subjectivity systematically in terms of what individuals are really feeling and experiencing. “The main function of a phenomenological description is to serve as a reliable guide to the listener’s own actual or potential experience of the phenomena” (Spiegelberg, 1982, p. 694). Here, phenomena are seen to be made up of essences and essential structures which can be identified and described if studied carefully and rigorously enough. In such characterizations, phenomenology can be seen as tending towards being a realist, modernist project where there is a belief in a knowable world with universal properties (at least in some senses), and the aim is to examine the “real world out there.”

Others would deny such a simplistic and static view of the phenomenological project. For one thing, attributing fixed immutable properties to human phenomenon is antithetical to the phenomenological project. ….. Also, phenomenological philosophy originally arose, at least in part, in critique of the effects of modern natural human scientific outlook on human beings.11 If modernism is aligned to a worldview of an ordered universe ruled by mathematical laws which can eventually be uncovered by science (Polkinghorne, 1992), then phenomenology might be better described as postmodern. In this context, many phenomenologists favor an approach which forgoes any search of true fixed meanings, recognizing that truth is a matter of perspective. Instead, they embrace ambiguity, paradox, descriptive nuance, and a more relational unfolding of meanings (Merleau-Ponty, 1968). They recognize the relative, intersubjective, fluid nature of knowledge. They argue that researcher and participant cocreate the research; that subject-object/self-other are intertwined in intergivenness (Marion, 2002).12 In such a paradigm, also, the phenomenological researcher’s epistemological authority is disrupted.

The argument about whether phenomenology is a modernist or postmodernist project largely rests on how one defines these concepts (Kvale, 1992). If postmodernism is seen as a perspective that avoids privileging any one authority or method, and denies that any one approach has a clear window on subjectivity/human experience, then many phenomenologists would feel comfortable with this position. In fact, it could said that even Husserl’s early work laid the foundations of the postmodern movement by highlighting varying modes of givenness and relativity of appearances (Rodemeyer, 2008). Here, relativity of understanding is stressed instead of relativism as such (Churchill, 2002).

For some, however, postmodernism involves the dissolution of the autonomous, rational subject: the “self is anesthetized” (Mills, 2005, p. 166). Postmodernism is also associated largely with the poststructural, relativist, deconstructive turn where language is seen as an unstable system of referents, thus making it impossible to adequately capture meanings of social actions or texts leading to messy, critical, reflexive, intertextual representations.

Conclusion

Researchers entering the phenomenological field have to decide for themselves where they stand on questions concerning what paradigm phenomenologists embrace, what their research means, and to what extent interpretation can be involved in the basic descriptive project. They need to work out whether they are seeking normative or idiographic understandings, how to manage researcher subjectivity, and whether phenomenology should be treated as a science, an art, or both.

The term “Phenomenology”, as it is used by Husserl (1859-1938) and his disciples, designates first of all a principle of philosophical and scientific method. The usual method of natural science proceeds from a body of accepted truth and seeks to extend its conquest of the unknown by putting questions to nature and compelling it to answer.
The phenomenological method adopts a softer approach. Setting aside all presuppositions and suppressing hypotheses, it seeks to devise techniques of observation, description, classification which permit it to disclose structures and connections in nature which do not yield to experimental techniques. It has been widely fruitful in psychology and social sciences, as well as in epistemology and value-theory.

Husserl, in his (1900-1901), did much to advance general phenomenological studies. But he had in view a specifically philosophical application of the technique which many of his associates did not completely grasp, or failed to share. Ideas was written with a view to clearing up the distinction between phenomenological psychology, which he regarded as a legitimate, but secondary, science, and phenomenological philosophy, which, he was prepared to maintain, is the foundation of all science. When a sociologist or psychologist conducts a phenomenological investigation, he puts aside all the usual theories and assumptions which have governed research in that field: but he cannot rid himself of all presuppositions (such as, for example, the belief in the existence of the external world, the constancy of nature). As Plato saw, every science must proceed upon some assumptions – except philosophy. To fulfill its promise, the phenomenological approach must bring us at last to an absolutely presupposition-less science. Pure phenomenology, or phenomenological philosophy, is, in Husserl’s opinion, precisely that. (It has long been the aspiration of philosophers to make their science an absolute one, one that rids itself of all presuppositions and stands with open countenance before pure Being. Husserl stands in this tradition).

Phenomenology is not to be confused with “phenomenalism”, a name sometimes given to extreme forms of empiricism, such as that of Ernst Mach, which maintains that nothing is real except sense data. In fact, this is one of the misconceptions which phenomenology is designed to overcome.
If the empiricists are right, the unity and order which we are accustomed to find in the world are not given in experience but put there by the activity of the mind. ……. …….
Husserl argued, however, that the empiricists were wrong, that …… …they have misconceived the task of psychology in supposing that it can discover in the mind laws which give rise to the meaning of the world, and that it is incumbent upon us to set about developing new accounts of logic, knowledge-theory, aesthetics, and ethics which stand on their own evidence. In place of psychologism what is needed, if justice is to be done to experience, is phenomenology (science of phenomena, or appearance).

Husserl takes his place, then, in the forefront of those twentieth century philosophers who have sought to reaffirm the autonomy of various philosophical disciplines over against psychology. He was equally concerned to turn back the tide of the popular scientific view of the world which he called naturalism. The particular sciences, by nature, are dogmatic. That is to say, they proceed without examining the conditions under which knowledge is possible. This is not to be held against them. But when anyone attempts to build a natural philosophy on the findings of the sciences, his uncritical procedure opens the way to scepticism, because the categories in terms of which we grasp natural events are unsuited to take account of conscious events, including the pursuit of scientific truth. It seems innocent enough to establish consciousness in terms of natural causes until we recollect that matter and the laws which govern its behavior are themselves part of our experience. This, according to Husserl, is the point at which the philosopher must step in. His primary task, in fact, will be to distinguish within experience the part that experiences from the part that is experienced.

There are many overtones of Descartes in Husserl’s writings. The former philosopher, in order to escape from the ambiguities and uncertainties of our ordinary, natural experience, developed a method of doubting. By bringing under question the whole phenomenal world, he laid bare a world of logical forms which he could not doubt. Husserl adopts a similar method. He talks of “suspending” our natural beliefs, including the fundamental conviction of every healthy mind that there is a world “out there”, that there are other selves, and so on. We are asked to “alter” this natural standpoint, to “disconnect” our beliefs about causation and motion, to “put them out of action”. This is, of course, only a methodological procedure, in order to help us overcome our animal bias and make it possible for us to take a coolly intellectual view of things. Greek philosophy used the term epochē to indicate the suspense of judgment. Husserl presses this term into his service.

To make his meaning clear, he uses the example of looking with pleasure into a garden where an apple tree is blossoming. From the natural standpoint, the tree is something that has transcendent reality in space and time, and the joy of perceiving it has reality in the psyche of a human being. But Descartes has reminded us that perceptions are sometimes hallucinations. We pass, therefore, from the natural to the phenomenological standpoint, bracketing the claims of both the knower and the known to natural being. This leaves us with “a nexus of exotic experiences of perception and pleasure valuation”. We can now speak of the content and structure of the situation without any reference to external existence. Nothing is really taken away from the experience, but it is all there in a new manner. In order to indicate this, the use of quotation marks is helpful. We can now speak of “tree”, “plant”, “material thing”, “blossoming”, “white”, “sweet”, and so forth, and be sure that we are talking only about things that belong to the essence of our experience. Similarly, at the opposites pole, we can distinguish “perceiving”, attending”, “enjoying”, and other ego-acts. These each have their special characters, and repay analysis.

Husserl was at one time a student of Franz Brentano (1838-1917), who had said that what distinguishes mental acts from non-mental acts is that the former invariably refer to something other than themselves. Drawing from the scholastics, he said that they are “intentional”. Husserl makes constant use of this discovery. To designate the ego-acts, which are not limited to cognition but include as well various attitudes such as doubting and supposing, as well as volitions and feelings, he uses the Greek word noesis (literally, a perceiving). To designate the corresponding objects, for instance, “tree”, “fruitful”, “charming”, he uses the corresponding word noema (literally, that which is perceived). An important part of the analysis of consciousness consists in tracing the relation between these. In each case, the noesis is real and fundamental, but noema is dependent and, strictly speaking, unreal.
In our example, “the perceiving of the tree” is actual and constitutive of “the tree perceived”. But conversely, though it does not have reality, noema has being, which is lacking to noesis: that is to say, it is composed entirely of essences, which are eternally what they are and stand in necessary or a priori relations with each other. The same thing is true of volition and other modes.
“The valuing of the tree” is a noesis. It has the same reality as “the perceiving of the tree”. Correspondingly, “the value of the tree” is a noema. It does not have reality, but it has the same kind of essential being as the structure and properties have which make up the object of cognition. The value-characters likewise take their place in an a priori system together with other values.

As long as our interest, as philosophers, is directed primarily toward the life of the mind, we shall be chiefly interested in exploring the various noeses.
Husserl’s delineation of these is subtle and perceptive, and goes a long way toward persuading the reader of the necessity of this descriptive groundwork, although as is sometimes true of the drawings of a microscopist we may have difficulty in recognizing in it the familiar features of the mind.
His account of “meaning”, for example, should be studied by those who are interested in semantics, and his analysis of “sentiment” and “volition” provides an instructive approach to the question of the relation between emotions and values.
One thing is common to all noeses, according to Husserl” all are at bottom thetic, or postulational; Husserl speaks of them as doxa (Plato’s word for “opinion”). This does not imply that some of our noeses are not characterized by “certainty”, just as others are characterized by a “sense of likelihood” or “doubt”. But in any case, it is what we commonly call a “moral certainty”. The conviction is a mode of the perceiving” rather than a function of anything lying in the “perceived”.

But in the present work Husserl does not consider mental acts per se.He studies them because they provide the key to the various grades and types of objects which make up the noemata; for, corresponding to “perception” there is the realm of “colors”, “shapes”, and “size”; and corresponding to “perceptual enjoyment” there are “dainty” ink and “gloriously” scented. These qualities owe their actuality in consciousness to the noeses; but they are part of an order of being which is absolute and independent.
Husserl calls all such absolute forms or essences Eideia, to avoid the ambiguities of such words as Idea and Essences. They are eternal possibilities, each perfectly definite and distinct from every other, but also linked with every other in a system of eternal relations. Thus, “pink”, “white”, “green” are species under the genus “color”; and “color” itself stands in a hierarchy of perceptual “qualities”. A similar hierarchical structure embraces the noema of value.

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In the present volume, as is proper in an introduction, Husserl is able only to indicate the direction which the investigation must take. And one must look to his other works, and those of his disciples, to see tha analyses carried out in detail. While Husserl worked chiefly in the field of epistemology, his disciples carried the method into axiology and philosophical anthropology (Max Scheler), aesthetics (Theodor Lipps), sociology (Karl Mannheim), and ethics (Nicolai Hartmann), not to mention the “existentialism” of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. For the ordinary reader, these developments are more interesting and fruitful than pure phenomenology. But that is because it is difficult for most people to exercise themselves about the sheer possibility of knowledge. Husserl’s significance, as a philosopher, is that, like Descartes and Kant, he appeared at a time when the foundations of science were themselves threatened, and irrationalism, skepticism, and nihilism threatened the very nerve of Western civilization. He sought to revive knowledge, to make possible once again a rational view of the world and of the human enterprise. He was conscious of being the continuer of a long tradition, and with some reluctance admitted to falling under the classification of idealist. He most resembles Kant, and his work can be summed up as the search for transcendental conditions which make “meaning” (scientific, ethical, aesthetic, religious) possible.

Husserl's Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (1913) is one of the key texts of twentieth century philosophy. It is the first of Husserl's published works to present his distinctive version of transcendental philosophy and to put forward the ambitious claim that phenomenology is the fundamental science of philosophy. In Ideas, Husserl introduces for the first time the conceptual arsenal of his mature phenomenology: the principle of all principles, the phenomenological epoché and reduction, pure consciousness, and the noema. All these difficult notions have been influential and controversial in subsequent philosophy, both analytic and Continental. In this commentary, thirteen leading scholars of Husserlian phenomenology set out to clarify and defend Husserl's views, connecting them to the vast corpus of his published and unpublished writings, and discussing the main available interpretations in the existing scholarship. The result is a detailed and comprehensive account of the most original form of transcendental philosophy since Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

PREFACE

PREFACE pp 3-4
Phenomenology may be characterized broadly as the descriptive science of consciously lived experiences and the objects of those experiences, described precisely in the manner in which they are experienced.

Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology evolved and changed over his life, and the Crisis represents the mature expression of his transcendental phenomenology. Initially, he focused on individual processes of consciousness—perception, imagination, memory, timeconsciousness, and so on—understood as ‘lived experiences’ (Erlebnisse), mental episodes.
But gradually he came to recognize the need to address the manner in which the flowing, connected stream of conscious experiences is unified into a life, centred around an ego but interconnected with other egos in a communal life of what Husserl calls broadly ‘intersubjectivity’, leading, finally, to the shared experience of a world as a whole (primarily experienced as the familiar ‘life-world’). This turn to the ego especially, led Husserl’s phenomenology in a transcendental direction (and Descartes is for Husserl the father of transcendental philosophy). The Crisis revolutionized phenomenology with its introduction of the life-world understood as the historical world.

Husserl had a deep fear that his phenomenology had been misunderstood. In his draft Introduction, Husserl fears that his labours in the development of phenomenology are in danger of being discarded as irrelevant and outmoded especially with the growing interest in life-philosophy, existentialism and what Husserl broadly characterizes as ‘irrationalism’ in philosophy. Husserl’s urgent tone reflects not just his own sense of impending mortality, his need to critically assess his own achievement, but also the need to confront the intellectual crisis shaking Europe at a time--the mid 1930s--when the Nazification process was in full swing in Germany. Husserl had the strong sense that the whole scientific culture of Europe was being threatened and undermined by a descent into irrationalism. Husserl outlines the dangers confronting European culture and the intellectual confusions lying at the very heart of the positive sciences that appear, on the surface, to be so successful. Indeed, the Crisis is-a decade before Heidegger’s famous critique of humanist ideals in ‘Letter on “Humanism”’ (1947)10--a profound critical interrogation and reflection on the meaning of humanity and on the humanist ideals of the Enlightenment.

PREFACE pp 5-8
Husserl begins the Crisisby announcing a ‘crisis’ not just in the extraordinarily successful natural sciences but in the ‘total meaningfulness’ of cultural life (C 12). …
The move towards naturalism in modern philosophy mirrors the scientific embrace of naturalism and objectivism, with a consequent loss of a way of understanding values and indeed a complete misunderstanding of the ‘enigma of subjectivity’. …

Husserl’s extended meditation on the development and current predicament of modern science and modern philosophy includes a critical evaluation of the circumstances that give birth to the (then relatively new) science of psychology. Husserl is concerned to show that empirical psychology is a failed science since it fundamentally misunderstands the true nature of subjectivity, due to its acceptance of the fundamental split between objectivity and subjectivity brought about by modern science and further installed into the heart of modern philosophy by Descartes and his successors. For Husserl, the crisis of psychology (with its retarded development and methodological difficulties, C 4; K 2), is emblematic of the crisis facing the cultural sciences as a whole; these sciences have a distorted conception of subjectivity which is threatening their very meaningfulness as sciences. He therefore embarks on an intensive investigation of the meaning of human cultural interpenetration with the world, the world of living experience, what he calls the ‘life-world’ (Lebenswelt),as a way of re-orienting and grounding both the natural and the human sciences. …..
The life-world, as Husserl characterizes it, is the world of the pre-given, familiar, present, available surrounding world, including both ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ (however they may be defined), that envelops us and is always there as taken for granted. The life-world also provides a set of horizons for all human activity. The life-world is, in Husserl’s terms, the ‘fundament’ for all human meaning and purposive activity.

Although he is fascinated by the idea of the evolving human historical and cultural world (which has been the object of the particular sciences for millennia), in fact, in the Crisis, he is not specifically interested in the life-world for its own sake (what he would regard as a ‘naïve’ science of the life-world) but rather to meditate on the life-world as both support and counterpoint to the world of science as a way to understanding transcendental phenomenology. Husserl wants to understand the life-world in terms of the manner it provides cooperating subjects with the background and horizons necessary for the whole accomplishment of the objective world.

In the Crisis, Husserl makes a number of bold and interrelated claims:
1. There is a crisis of foundations in exact sciences
2. there is a crisis brought on by the positivity of the sciences
3. there is a crisis in the human sciences since they model themselves on the exact sciences
4. there is an explicit crisis in psychology, the supposed science of human spirit
5. There is a crisis in contemporary culture (‘a radical life-crisis of European humanity’)
6. There is a crisis in philosophy (traditionally understood as the discipline which addressed the crisis in the sciences and in life)

All these crises are interlinked and they have, according to Husserl, a common solution: transcendental phenomenology with its secure and grounded clarification of the concept of subjectivity offers a way out of these crises. ….

The overall crisis, for Husserl, then, is the failure of European rationality, despite the enormous advances of the sciences in the technological domination of the world and in the technical organization of society, to have supplied a cure for social and psychic illness of the time, because of the crucial neglect of the subjective contribution to the experience of the world. Thus, in his 1935 ‘Vienna Lecture’, he … wonders why there has been no scientific medicine for cultural ailments. Phenomenology will provide that cultural medicine for our time.

PREFACE pp 15-16
According to Husserl in the Crisis, phenomenology is the final evolution of modern philosophy in its transcendental turn. It aims at a comprehensive account of what he calls the a priori correlation between objectivity and subjectivity.
As he recounts at several points in the Crisis (i.e. §41, §46 and §48), this a priori correlation presented itself to Husserl as a new insight around 1898:
            The correlation between world (the world of which we always speak) and its subjective manners of givenness never evoked philosophical wonder (that is, prior to the first breakthrough of “transcendental phenomenology” in the Logical Investigations), in spite of the fact that it had made itself felt even in pre-Socratic philosophy and among the Sophists—though here only as a motive for skeptical argument. This correlation never aroused a philosophical interest of its own which could have made it the object of an appropriate scientific attitude. (C 165; K 168)

According to this a priori correlation, the manner in which entities in the world present themselves is always related to the subjective way of apprehending these entities. Thus the properties of the seen object has to be understood as related to the subjective act of visual perception, and so on. As Husserl puts it in his 1917 Inaugural Address to Freiburg University:
            To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.

This correlation is uncovered through a specific kind of reflection. In his Amsterdam Lectures given in 1928, shortly before he delivered the Paris lectures of February 1929 that formed the basis of the Cartesian Meditations, Husserl gives an illuminating description of how he means to proceed in phenomenological reflection:

We will refrain from any traditional prejudgments, even the most universally obvious ones of traditional logic, which already have perhaps taken from Nature unnoticed elements of meaning. We will hold ourselves resolutely to what phenomenological reflection presents to us as consciousness and object of consciousness, and purely to what comes to actual, evident self-givenness. In other words, we will interrogate exclusively the phenomenological experience, clearly and quite concretely thinking into a reflective experience of consciousness, without interest in determining concretely occurring facts. Such [phenomenological] experience does not have the individual experience [in view], but the form most immediate to all as Self-Experience. …