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Kant and the Idea ofTranscendental Philosophy*

EDMUND HUSSERL

The expanded version of the thoughts of a lecture for theKant Celebration at the University of Freiburg on May 1, 1924.

Foreword

The two-hundredth anniversary of Immanuel Kant's birth must not gouncelebrated even in our phenomenological yearbook.! For in thefundamental development which phenomenology has undergone inmy life's work, in its course of development from a method, novel inform, for the analysis of origins (as in its first breakthrough in theLogical Investigations) to a new and, in the strictest sense, independentscience (the pure or transcendental phenomenology of my Ideas),there has emerged an obvious essential relationship between thisphenomenology and the transcendental philosophy of Kant. In fact,my adoption of the Kantian word "transcendental," despite all remote­ness from the basic presuppositions, guiding problems, and methods ofKant, was based from the beginning on the well-founded convictionthat all senseful problems which Kant and his successors had treatedtheoretically 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 firstEnglish translation. We have attempted to leave unaltered as far as possible thepeculiar characteristics of the German text and yet to achieve a readable Englishtext.

Our gratitude is offered here to James Street Fulton, Professor Emeritus of RiceUniversity, for his encouragement and valuable assistance with this project. We arealso grateful to Dr. H. J. H. Hartgerink of Martinus Nijhoff for granting us per­mission on behalf of the publisher and the Hussed Archives to publish thistranslation.

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.)

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least in their finally clarified formulation, be redirected to this newbasic science. When the new phenomenology introduced itself at oneand the same time as a beginning and as a universal methodology for aphenomenological philosophy, that amounted to saying that anyphilosophy whatsoever, taken as a systematic whole, can assume theform of an ultimately rigorous science only as a universal transcendentalphilosophy, but also only on the basis of phenomenology and in thespecifically 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 methodof purely intuitive description, distinguished above all by the radicalismwith which it sought to satisfy the requirement of taking every "phe­nomenon" (every "datum," everything immediately found), i.e., eachand every one that might enter the attentive gaze of consciousness,exactly as it presented itself in the latter, and of fixing systematic con­cepts that could describe each datum as such, in the "how" of itsgivenness: in strictly "descriptive" concepts, as concepts derived from"pure intuition" of these data themselves. As a matter of principle, allopinions and inquiries that go beyond the realms of pure givennesswere hereby excluded.

Every such datum is a datum for subjectivity, which directs its viewtoward it, has it in the presentive consciousness; this consciousness inits manifold formations is again itself a "phenomenon" in the reflectionwhich directs itself thereto. Objects are given, and they are given asemptily meant in expectation or as being there "in person," as sym­bolically 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 taketheir course and are viewable by consciousness in the unity of a look; asthe same object which at one time is indirectly indicated, the next timecopied, the third time directly intuitive; one time as subject of pre­dicative statements, another time as relational object, etc. The Ego'sturning of attention is also given, as well as its meaning with certainty,its supposing, its doubting, affirming and denying, and every supposedsense in the change of such modalities of the "thesis," etc.

Phenomenology began with indefatigable exhibitions of all suchsubjective "phenomena," to which, naturally, also belong all accep­tance-phenomena, the phenomena of evidence and verification andtheir correlates truth, true being, correctness, etc., of every kind andform. Nature as intuitable nature, exactly as it is perceived at any time,with all subjective characteristics with which it is given (and not onlyin those excluded methodically by the investigators of nature as being

10

"merely subjective"): this became immediately a great theme of phe­nomenological descriptions. The world took on an infinite widenessas soon as the actual life-world, the world in the "how" of the givennessof mental process, was observed. It took on the whole range of themanifold subjective appearances, modes of consciousness, modes ofpossible position-taking; for it was, for the subject, never given other­wise than in this subjective milieu, and in purely intuitive descriptionof the subjectively given there was no in-itself that is not given in sub­jective modes of the for-me or for-us, and the in-itself itself appears as acharacteristic in this context and has to undergo therein its clarificationof sense.

The principle, guiding from the start, of granting its due and itsprimary right of conceptual form to all that is given and to be given tothe Ego in immediate intuition also led, however, already in the LogicalJ nvestigations, to the recognition of the primary legitimacy of givennessof truly existing ideal objectivities of every kind, and in particular, ofthe eidetic objects, of the conceptual essentialities and of the eideticlaws. With all these, obviously, there was connected the knowl­edge of the universal possibility of sciences of essences for ob­jectivities of each and every objective category and the requirement ofthe systematic development of ontologies, formal and material. For thedescription of the infinity of immediate data in their subjective "how,"however, there came, once again in immediate sequence, the knowledgeof the possibility and necessity of a description of essence to be carriedout everywhere; of an eidetic description which did not remain de­pendent on the particular empirical data but rather searched after theireidetic types and the contexts of essence (as necessities, possibilities,regularities of essence) belonging thereto. The freedom with which thelook may turn from straight to reflective data and the knowledge of thecorrelations of essence that emerge hereby led to intentional analysis ofessence and to the basic elements of the intentional clarifying of theessence of reason, and first of all of the logically judging, predicatingreason and its preliminary stages.

Even though in the beginning of the spreading phenomenologicalmovement the analysis and description of essence (in the case of psy­chologically interested phenomenologists usually without any stressingof 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 animmanently pure and at best eidetic-psychological analysis or-to thosewhose interest was chiefly scientific-theoretical-a philosophical methodby which to accomplish for the various already existing sciences a clari-

11

11

fication of the origin of their foundations or a radical new derivation ofbasic concepts of their theory and method from the ultimate sources.Precisely the most profound and most difficult discussions of the LogicalInvestigations found little following. In them (above all in the 5th and6th Investigations of the second volume) the way to the phenomenol­ogy of logical reason (and therewith also the model of all reason ingeneral) was opened up, beginnings of an intentional constitution ofcategorial objectivities in the pure consciousness were laid bare, and themethod of a genuine intentional analysis was developed.

It was little understood how progressive this decisive step was Com­pared to the way my teacher Brentano-the brilliant discoverer of theintentionality of consciousness as a basic descriptive fact of psychology-remained caught up in the methodological attitudes of traditionalsensationalism in which he described the psychic acts by classifyingthem 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 scienceor, more precisely, as a universal eidetic transcendental philosophy, theIdeas at first caused great offen~e even among those who had emergedas distinguished fellow phenomenological investigators in the hithertoexisting sense.

A very large part of my research results-made public only in lectures-of those decades following the appearance of my first phenomenologi­cal attempt still awaits literary fixation and, with an immense amountof 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 ofimmediate intuition and of the most original description within themethod of phenomenological reduction-the most fundamental of allmethods. With the Ideas the deepest sense of the Cartesian turn ofmodern philosophy is, I dare to say, revealed, and the necessity of anabsolute self-contained eidetic science of pure consciousness in generalis cogently demonstrated-this, however, in relation to all correlationsgrounded in the essence of consciousness, to its possible really immanentmoments and to its noemata and objectivities intentionally-ideally de­termined therein. Systematic work on it is actively undertaken, method­ically as well as materially brought into the shape of a rigorous theorythat must continually be further developed. The determination of thiseidetic descriptive phenomenology is indicated beforehand (and notonly in the title) as in itself first philosophy and therewith as the be­ginning and basis of a universal philosophy, i.e., of a universal sciencegrounded in absolutely ultimate sources. The working out of descriptivephenomenology in going beyond mere description, while, however, re-

12

maining in the eidetic attitude, leads to the system of all a priorisciences-the transition from the transcendental a priori to the trans­cendental fact leads to the system of all empirical sciences on a trans­cendental foundation.H~we:e~ ess~ntiallY the ph~nomenological transcendental philoso­

?hy IS dlstmgmshed fro~ all h~storical philosophies, methodically andm the whole context of Its baSIC results and theories, it is nonethelessout of inexor.able inner necessity t~ansc~ndental philosophy. Eventhough the CIrcle of phenomenologIcal mvestigators may originallyhave f?lt itself to be in sharp op~osition t~ Kant's and the post-Kantianschool s methods; ev~n though It may. WIth good reaSOn have rejectedthe attempts to contmue and merely Improve Kant historically in themanner of a renascence (which presupposed a commonality ofmethod); even th~ugh, vis avis all Kantianism, it may with goodreason have champIOned the methodological principle that the uncon­ditional prius for any genuine scientific philosophy is the all-inclusivefounding through systematic descriptions of consciousness, throughmaking universally clear the essential layers of the cognizing as well asthe evaluating and practical subjectivity, according to all possible for­mations and correlations-nonetheless, now that we see ourselves inbroad lines at one with Kant in the essential results of our work, whichis systematically arising from the absolutely ultimate sources of allknowledge, we must honor him as the great pre-shaper of scientifictranscendental philosophy. That no one, and were he the most extremeanti-Kantian, can remove himself as a child of the times from the in­fluences of this mighty genius; that everyone experiences in some formor other the power of the motivations that moved Kant and wereawakened by him-this is an almost trivial truth. To see him (as do allgreat schools resting on Kant) with phenomenological eyes is also tounderstand him anew and to admire the greatness of his foresightedintuitions, phenomenological sources of which can now be found inalmost all his theories; but to do this is not, even now, to imitate himand to lend support to a mere renascence of Kantianism or of GermanIdealism. Naturally, we must from the outset go beyond all of the, inthe worst sense of the word, "metaphysical" stock elements of thecritique of reason (like the doctrine of the thing-in-itself, the doctrineof intellectus archetypus, the mythology of the transcendental apper­ception or of the "consciousness in general," etc.), that oppose thephenomenological transcendentalism and with it the deepest sense andlegitimacy of the Kantian position; and for his still half-mythical ~on­cept of the a priori we must substitute the phenomenologically clanfiedconcept of the general essence and law of essence (which Hume really

had in mind under the heading relation of idea, but which he had sensa­tionalistically and nominalistically reinterpreted and depreciated).

A transcendental subjectivism, carried out in the purity and necessityof essence, in which precisely the indefeasible essence of subjectivity ispredelineated as the primal locus and primal source of all sense-bestowaland truth achievements, and therewith, of all true objectivities and trueworlds (and no less, all fictitious ones); [such a transcendental sub­jectivism] leaves no room for "metaphysical" substructurings of a beingbehind the being intentionally constituting itself in actual and possibleachievements of consciousness, whether it be a matter of an in-itself ofnature or an in-itself of souls, in-itself of history, an in-itself of eideticobjectivities, 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 exub­erant of all scientific tasks for all mankind. It is the idea of a finalsystem of all sciences and, therefore, one carried out on the final, trans­cendental-subjective ground of science, carried out, that is to say, bymeans of a descriptive phenomenology as the primary science of allscientific method. The sphere of all possible sense and of all truth is,nevertheless, at the outset conceptually predelineated in it and by themethod of phenomenological reduction as the correct and intuitivelyshown sense of "consciousness in general," including inseparably all itspossible correlates. Metaphysics in the common sense of the word, re­ferring to transcendences in principle trans-subjective, is an infiniterealm, but a realm contrary to sense, as must be made evident. There­fore, only if we disregard such constituent elements, which for Kant'sphilosophy, of course, are not indifferent, will we transcendental phe­nomenologists be able to confirm Kant's genuine intuitions. Thorough­going studies, indeed, have taught me that, if one abstracts from suchKantian "metaphysics" (and that yields really a full context), Kant'sthinking and research moves de facto in the framework of the phe­nomenological attitude and that the force of these genuinely trans­cendental theories do in fact rest on pure intuitions which in theiressential lines are drawn from original sources. Of course, it makes adifference and, with regard to the level of scientific adequacy, an essen­tial difference: whether one theorizes naIvely in the phenomenologicalattitude or whether, in radical self-reflection one obtains fundamentalclarity about the essence of this attitude and the essence of the infinityof possible consciousness as such standing directly before one's eyesand whether one therefore produces a description that runs its coursein originally conceived concepts of essence and explains the sense andnecessity of an attitude and mode of knowledge that leads beyond all

the modes of knowledge of a natural attitude, that is to say, a com­pletely new one, the "transcendental."

To give such a description for the new attitude in which the Kantianthinking and research indeed moves is eo ipso to go beyond him. It is todevelop in ultimate philosophical self-consciousness the method ofphenomenological reduction, through which the concrete thematichorizon of transcendental philosophy-transcendental subjectivity in itstrue sense-is founded, and simultaneously with it the mode of workappropriate only to it, the ordering of the problematics arising fromthe 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 utmostin methodological self-examinations; it must not do anything where ithas not itself grasped what is methodological in this activity and madeit clear according to its necessities of essence. Kant was able to go be­yond the realm of pure consciousness only because he neglected towrench from the source-point of all modern philosophy-the Cartesianego cogito-its ultimate sense, that of the absolute, concretely intuitingsubjectivity. Also, through this lack of ultimate sense-investigations, hedoes not get so far as to bring the manner and method of an analysis ofconsciousness-as an unraveling of intentional implications and essence­correlations-to an actual development, although in his profound doc­trine of the synthesis he already discovered, basically, the peculiarity ofintentional contexts and already practiced, in his own naIvete, genuineintentional analyses. Had Kant realized the necessity of such ultimatesense-investigations and essence-descriptions, realized their uncondi­tional necessity for making possible a rigorously scientific philosophy,then his whole critique of reason and his philosophy would also havebecome something different. It would then of necessity have had to gothe ways that we phenomenologists go on the basis of arduous indi­vidual work on the consciousness itself and the essence-typology of itsphenomena.

The following expositions of the phenomenological sense of theKantian revolution in the natural way of thinking-with the appro­priate simplification, which consideration of the audience demanded,of course-formed the essential thought-content of a talk on ~ant thatI delivered at the Kant Celebration at the University of Frelburg onMay 1 of this year. For the present readership I have not only .a~dedsignificant depth to the presentation but have added some addItionalpieces after it which can clear up the misunderstandings of ph~nomen­ological transcendentalism that are circulating. These latter pIeces, bythe 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 theIdeas, the publication of Part II, which had been planned at the sametime as the latter, was postponed and has not yet come about. Whatwas 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 thestill all too primitive thinking and the phenomenological infantilism ofthe critics where they tried to refute me with a show of what theythought was phenomenology.

Phenomenology is not "literature" by means of which one goes ridingfor pleasure, as it were, while reading. As in any serious science, onemust of course work in order to acquire a methodically schooled eyeand 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 theliving generation of scientists who are bound to him by the unity of ahistorical tradition, a challenge to responsible self-examination. Withthis, the worthiest theme for commemorative celebrations in science isprescribed in the most general sense. And so the Kant Jubilee arouses inus the question: after one and a half centuries of an influence that hashelped to determine our whole philosophy in all its directions, whatmust we today regard as the lasting significance of Kant's monumentalcritiques of reason and therefore as that of which the pure working outis entrusted to us and to the entire future? However, to evaluate Kant'swhole life's work sub specie aeterni and thereby, at one and the sametime, 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 thislimited framework. Let us try to limit ourselves. Let us keep Kant at acertain distance, as if we were surveying from a distant point a mightymountain range that we had often wandered through with an in­defatigable interest in getting to know it, and now only the generalformation, the total type, emerges for us.

The completely dominant total form of the Kantian philosophy inits distant aspect is the idea of transcendental philosophy. This desig­nates a radically novel form of philosophical theory. Our question isthis: can we not delineate the idea of a general problematic and science,which is understandable in itself as its sense and eternal legitimacy andwhich must be regarded as the essence of his transcendental philosophy,purified of the conditions of Kant's time, as the idea of method thatimparted to him his most fundamental motivation-an idea which,

although limited and obscured by his historical motivations, found itsfirst concrete realization in his systematic theories?

I. The Revolution in the Natural Manner of Thinking

Kant's transcendental philosophy, as already intimated, is not anachievement significant merely for its time or only for one line of de­velopment, on which we can with all due admiration look back as onelong since fully exploited and in the meantime outmoded. Rather, therevolution in the total manner of philosophical thinking which Kantdemanded and in which he brought forth the powerful and perhapseven 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-sur­rendered task for all the future.

The foregoing designates that wherein Kant's indeed quite uniquesignificance in the whole history of philosophy is to be seen: in nothingother than that in which he himself saw it and to which he also re­peatedly gave emphatic expression. His significance for all time, there­fore, lies in the much discussed but little understood "Copernican" turnto an interpretation of the world that was new in principle and therebyrigorously scientific, but at the same time his significance lies in thefirst grounding of the "completely new" science belonging thereto­i.e., the transcendental, which, as Kant himself stresses, "is the only oneof its kind" and of which, as he even says, "no one has previously had asmuch as a thought, even the mere idea of it was unknown."

Surely Kant would have considerably limited this pronouncement inhis last work, if he had done some research in historical studies of thedevelopment of the transcendental idea. It was partly that the maindocuments of this development were unknown to him, partly that hewas no longer able, after the breakthrough of his final philosophy, towork through and interpret anew those works that came into con­sideration. In the history of modern philosophy, to speak only of that,Descartes must be seen as a precursor of transcendental philosophy. Itwas he who through his Meditations founded this modern period, im­parted to it its characteristic developmental tendency toward a trans­cendental philosophy. The ego cogito, understood in its profound sense,can surely be regarded as the first form of the discovery of transcen­dental subjectivity. We also know now that Leibniz was by no meansthe dogmatic metaphysician that Kant conceived him to be. It mightfurther be shown that the Essay [sic] of David Hume, by which Kantwas "awakened from his dogmatic slumber," stands far behind thesystematic Treatise-which Kant obviously did not know, or not from

his own thorough study-and that in this brilliant work of Hume'syouth a whole system of transcendental problematics is already out­lined and thought through in a transcendental spirit-even thoughdone in the negativistic form of a sensationalistic skepticism that nulli­fies itself in its pervasive absurdity.

But, as always, Kant's originality is not thereby diminished. Not onlydid he discover anew, impressed with his peculiar stamp, the transcen­dental idea which, since Descartes, had again and again cropped up anddisappeared; to him also belongs the praise for progressing with Un­paralleled energy of thought from the idea to the theoretical deed andfor causing the transcendental philosophy itself to arise with the wholeof his three inexhaustible major works-this, however, in the way inwhich a new science generally and in the most serious sense arises;namely, in the form of a systematically guiding problematic and asystematic unity of rational theories that provide positive solutions.Therefore, he did not, like Leibniz, remain mired in a general aper~u,

and it goes without saying that he did not, like Hume-to use a Kantianmetaphor-"let his ship go aground and decay on the beach of scepti­cism" instead of seeing the dangerous journey through to a good end.

One may justifiably complain about the obscurities of the Kantiancritique of reason, about the puzzling profundity of his basic conceptsand deductions; one may come to be persuaded that the gigantic Kan­tian structure of transcendental science is still far from having thatperfection of compelling rigor which its creator himself believed hecould attribute to it-indeed even that Kant did not penetrate at all tothe true foundations, to the most basic problematics, and to the ulti­mately valid method of a transcendental philosophy. One thing, how­ever, must in the end become evident to any unprejudiced person whothinks for himself and seriously takes upon himself the self­denying efforts at penetrating into these mysterious depths: that theproblematics and the science that make their appearance at this pointare not contrived in abstruse speculation but, however strange it mayseem, are necessary ones, which will be forever inescapable, if not intheir original form, then in a refined and enriched form. A sciencewhich satisfies the intellectual needs awakened by Kant and makesunderstandable theoretically the whole realm of transcendentalachievements of pure subjectivity, must be designated as the greatestof all the theoretical tasks that could be given to modern humanity.Indeed, the "sense and cognitive value of all genuine sciences," as Kanthimself-and quite justifiably-teaches, depend on the success of atranscendental philosophy. Therefore, not until-nothing less is beingasserted-a transcendental philosophy is established and put on its

course as rigorous science, can all other sciences attain the highest andfinal level of theoretical rationality, which they must, after all, neces­sarily demand of themselves.

Anyone who has been brought up in the beliefs still prevailing in ourtime will hear such claims with indignation. According to these con­victions, the positive sciences are autonomous vis avis philosophy. Todevise methods and theories, to interpret some, even the ultimate, senseof the truths they have gained are merely a matter for specialized scien­tific work. Does not the demand for an inversion of the entire mannerof thinking practiced in them-even if with the intention not of com­promising their method but rather of furnishing them with a novelperfection of cognition out of hitherto undisclosed sources beyond thespecialized sciences-does not that demand sound like one of thosephilosophical "extravagances" that have so seriously damaged the repu­tation of philosophy in recent times?

How unsuitable such a verdict would be-this I hope is something ofwhich the following considerations will be able to convince us.

II. Matters of the World That Are Taken for Grantedand the Life of Consciousness

As already indicated, I want to try, while disregarding the historicallyconditioned peculiarities of the Kantian points of departure, formationsof concepts and formulations of problems, to clear up, first of all, thebasic sense of that complete inversion of the natural manner of think­ing with which are revealed for the first time the previously completelyhidden realm of "pure" subjectivity and the infinity of "transcendental"formulations of questions. Although relating itself to all the world, toall sciences, to all kinds of human life, activity, and creation, it never­theless takes up none of the questions which the nature-orientedsciences have to direct to the world and to life in the world.

If we begin with human life and its natural conscious course, then itis a communalized life of human persons who immerse themselves inan endless world, i.e., viewing it, sometimes in isolation and sometimestogether with one another, imagining it variously, forming judgmentsabout it, evaluating it, actively shaping it to suit our purposes. Thisworld is for these persons, is for us humans, continually and quite ob­viously there as a common world surrounding us all; obviously there­it is the directly tangible and visible world in entirely immediate andfreely expandable experience. It embraces not merely things ~~d livingbeings, among them animals and humans, but also commumbes, com­munal institutions, works of art, cultural establishments of every kind.

Whatever in our individual and communal activities has achieved senseand form belongs forthwith to the world too; it is, or in principle maypossibly be, a constituent of existence accessible to everyone and there­fore to be included by us in a possible new opcration. We humans our­selves are subjects who experience, know, evaluate, and deal with theworld; and we are at the same time objects in the world and as suchprecisely objects of our experiencing, valuing, and acting. Especially asscientific subjects, given to theoretical interests and encompassing there­in each and every real and possible world, we create the sciences in in­dividual and communalized work. As theories, the sciences comprehendall the world; as human constructions, they themselves belong to theworld.

This all takes place and is understood in the natural attitude. Thenatural attitude is the form in which the total life of humanity isrealized in running its natural, practical course. It was the only formfrom millennium to millennium, until out of science and philosophythere developed unique motivations for a revolution. What is charac­teristic of this naturalness appears in a presupposition which remainsbeyond every mode of inquiry and which, in all naturally active living,provides part of its foundation everywhere as belonging essentially tolife's intrinsic sense. It is a matter here of something that is taken abso­lutely for granted precisely by virtue of this naturalness, and is thereforealso hidden from anyone in the natural attitude. It can be formulatedthus:

Our waking life is, as it also was and will be, always experiencing andalways able to experience "the" world, the totality of realities. Ofcourse, our experience is and always remains incomplete. In it, wegrasp 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 canproceed in experience actively to penetrate into the unknown reachesof the world or to bring things already experienced ever more com­pletely into experience. But an actually complete experience is impos­sible; for in principle there is no limit set to a progression. No thing, noside of a thing, no real property-nothing belonging to the world is, asit is experienced, an ultimately valid given; the most we can say is thatit is sufficient for us for the practical life-goal at any given'time. Thiswell-known and unquestionable incompleteness does not, however, dis­turb our conviction that we can through experience become acquaintedwith the world itself and that experience is what originally certifies realexistence to us.

But now, with regard to another and, we are convinced, insuperable

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incompleteness, we must say more precisely: not just any experiencebut rather harmonious experience certifies [existence]. Experience canindeed also become discordant, can make us succumb to doubt anddeception. In any case, however, the production of harmony, and ulti­mately of the enduring harmony of the totality of experience, is pos­sible; and only in it-as is unquestionable-is there completed a thor­oughgoing and enduringly indubitable cognizance of the existing worlditself.

This world, already given perpetually by our continual experience, isthcn further to be judged and cognized in its objcctive theoretical truthin corresponding methods of the theoretical-insightful mode of judg­ment, as, on the other hand, it can be formed in practical reason bypurposeful action. We fashion the methods in our scientific thinkingabout the conditions of insightful theorizing; the a priori principles ofthe method, the essential conditions of rational method, in general, weseek and find under the heading of logic. On the other hand, the seek­ing subjectivity forms its particular expcricntial-Iogical methods foritself 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 normof our world-cognitions-as the norm of truth for the world itself, as itis in and for itself, whether we live or die, whether we cognize it or not.

There is, therefore, and without question, a harmony between theworld itself, or thc truths that are valid for it itself, and the acts andstructures of cognition. Or otherwise expressed: without question ourcognition "directs itself" toward the world itself. That our theoreticalcognition does this presupposes that our experience does it in its man­ner; that this experience as harmoniously formed has objective legiti­macy is taken for granted without question.

What has just been delimited as a never-formulated "presupposi­tion" 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 possibleas "positive," this presupposition cannot appear in thcm at all as thetheme of any positive questions whatever. Their very formulation mustappear strange if not perverse to onc in the "natural" or "positive"attitude. All positive questions move within the framework of theworld's unquestionable pre-givenness in living experience and of thefurther unquestioned matters built upon it. They always aim, therefor~,only at how this experienced and progressively experienceab~e. world I.Sto be determined in truth as regards the individual reahtI~s, theIrproperties, relationships, laws-and especially how the world IS to be

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determined in "objective" truth, which makes our cognition inde­pendent of the relativity of "merely subjective" modes of appearance.Likewise all practical questions of the outwardly working life have todo with how the given world is to be formed according to purposes inpractical reason.2

If the thought is here suggested that this "presupposition," which isincluded in the essential form of natural life and, especially, in that ofthe 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 properlegitimacy of this life. Nothing lies further from our intention than toplay skeptical paradoxes off against the natural rational activity of life­or against natural experience and its self-confirmation in its harmoniouscontinuation, or against natural thinking (and also valuing, active striv­ing) in its natural methods of reasoning (and, therefore, also againstnatural science), and it is not intended that any of these be deprecated.The genuine transcendental philosophy-let it be emphatically stressedat the outset-is not like the Humean and neither openly nor covertlya skeptical decomposition of the world-cognition and the world itselfinto 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 ap­pearances," which in some still senseful sense would have somethingto do with illusion. It does not occur to transcendental philosophy todispute the world of experience in the least, to take from it the least bitof the sense which it really has in the actuality of the experience andwhich in its harmonious course certifies itself in its indubitable legiti­macy. And again, it does not occur to it to deprive the objective truthof positive science of the least bit of the meaning that it really createsin the actual employment of its naturally evident methods and bearswithin itself as legitimately valid.

But, of course, transcendental philosophy is of the opinion that thissense of legitimacy, as it matures in such actuality, is in no way under­stood thereby. The "uuquestionableness" of what goes without ques-

2. Presupposition does not mean premise. "Presupposition" (not without reasondo we put the word in quotes) is of course an improper expression; for what we sodesignate is the general conception of that which lies in concrete particularity inevery act of natural living itself. In every act of experience there lies: "This or thatreal thing is there"; and in every connecting of new experiences to the same, therelies: "The same thing is there," which was experienced before, only now grasped ina later phase of its being; and in the interim, while I was meanwhile experiencingsomething else entirely, it was unexperienced; and similarly, for acts founded onexperience. Therefore, we described under the heading "presupposition" the generalsense of natural living, which, as such, it continually carries in itself-as a form ofall its convictions without its ever being brought out.

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tion in the natural cognition, of what is valid in its naive evidence, is,says transcendental philosophy, not the understandableness of the in­sight developed through the most radical lines of inquiry and clarifica­tion, is not that highest and ultimately necessary indubitability whichleaves remaining no unasked and therefore unsettled questions of thatfundamental sort which belong inseparably, because esssentially, toevery theme of cognition whatsoever.

The whole aim of transcendental philosophy goes back ultimately tothose fundamental matters that are unquestioned (and all others essen­tially akin to them), of which we spoke earlier. In them it sees the mostprofound and most difficult problems of the world and world-cognition(or, in its necessary expansion: problems of all objectivities in general­also of the nonreal-in relationship to their cognition as existing "inthemselves," 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-foundedstatement, or, more precisely put: content of our statement, based onthat which is experienced in our actual and possible experience, thatwhich is thought and seen in our experiential-logical thinking; so it ishere, it is wherever we maintain something, establish it as legitimate, astheme of "truths in themselves." Does not that which is expressed, es­tablished, seen-in short, cognized-and does not the essentially cog­nizable draw its sense from the cognition, from its own essence, whichcognition is, after all, in all its levels in consciousness, subjective mentalliving? Whatever it may "relate" itself to as "content" and whateversignification this word "content" may thereby assume-is not this re­lating accomplished in consciousness itself, and does not the contenttherefore lie enclosed in consciousness itself? But how is the "being-in­itself 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 orintersubjectively in our own cognitive achievement-naturally includ­ing the character "true being," which is conceivable only of senses?

And finally: if the substratum of these questions is understood, canthere still be any kind of philosophical consideration of the world thatproceeds as though talk of a "world existing in itself" could have alegitimate sense that would still be completely different from the sense­formations in cognition, from the sense concretely taking shape bysynthesis in the multiplicity of acts of insightfully cognitive conscious­ness-as though it could mean "metaphysical transcendence," whichthrough the "transcendent" regulation by a "metaphysical" causalitycould be connected with the "merely subjective" cognition formationas if with a "picture of cognition" effected inside subjectivity? Would

that not be a sense which, having been torn from the primal place of allsense in the sense-bestowal of consciousness, is precisely nonsense?

But questions must not preconceive answers. One thing is clear fromthe outset: there can be only one method of really answering all suchquestions and of obtaining a real understanding of the relationships be­tween cognized being and cognizing consciousness. One must studythe cognizing life itself in its own achievements of essence (and that,naturally, in the wider framework of the concretely full life of COn­sciousness in general) and observe how consciousness in itself andaccording to its essential type constitutes and bears in itself objectivesense and how it constitutes in itself "true" sense, in order then to findin itself the thus constituted sense as existing "in itself," as true beingand 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 ofa reversal of the total natural manner of thinking. Let us prepare adeeper understanding for ourselves in several steps.

I am what I am, and we are what we are, as subjects of a multi-formlife of consciousness, of a private and an intersubjectively communal­ized one. Sum cogitans-I am, in that I see and hear and otherwise per­ceive "externally" or am reflectively related to myself, remember, await,in that I presentiate something to myself in an image or likeness orthrough signs, let something hover before me in inventive fantasy; inthat I combine and separate, compare and generalize, declarativelyjudge and theorize, or also, in that, in the modes of affectivity, I havepleasure or displeasure, I am happy or sad, I am driven by wishes orfears, decide practically, behave effectively. Those all are typical exam­ples of special forms of the "consciousness," streaming in a continuallyflowing unity, in which, communalized through intersubjective acts ofconsciousness, we "live and move, and have our being." Obviously, themost general characteristic belonging indefeasibly to the proper essenceof all consciousness is that it is consciousness of something, of something"objective" of which, as we will soon understand more precisely, one isconscious in varying modes according to the particular form of con­sciousness. Therefore, consciousness and that of which there is con­sciousness-in an appropriate "how"-are inseparable.

Also inseparably involved in this is the fact that I, who live in this orthat consciousness, am necessarily also conscious of myself and amconscious of this being conscious itself. But from the outset it must be

noted that to be conscious (to have consciousness of) does not simplymean: to grasp that of which one is conscious, to have directed one'sattention to it. But what is not already in my "field of view," what Iam not already aware of in the wider sense, cannot "affect" me, cannotdraw my attention to itself. I am always free to turn my attention fromwhat at any given time has just been grasped to something of whichthere is co-awareness, and also to my processes of consciousness, to its"real" and "ideal" components, among them the manifold modes ofgivenness with which the "something objective" standing in a particu­lar field of attention enters my consciousness.

What is here called "something objective" is to be taken as what isobjective for a particular consciousness, and purely as such. It is ob­viously a nonself-sufficient moment. Anything whatever which entersinto consciousness necessarily does so with some determining contentwith which this consciousness "means" it. This "something objective"grasped in this manner-for the sake of clarity we shall call it the "ob­jective sense"-is nonself-sufficient, already insofar as it occurs neces­sarily in some characteristics of validity; we are conscious of it purelyand simply as an existent or as something doubtful, presumable, merelypossible, as something not existent, as impossible, etc.; also as beautiful,good, and the like. Altogether, they are characteristics which can besplit along the line of the opposition between actuality (positionality)and fiction (quasi-positionality) . We should also point to the change oflogical forms to which something objective is attached in any given case,forms which, by the way, already occur in a primitive shape before thestage of the properly comprehending-judging and predicating con­sciousness is reached. Everything of which one is conscious (every"objective sense") in the "how" of its modes, of the mentioned modesas well as others quite different and yet to be demonstrated that belongto it in the particular concrete process of consciousness, is again at oneand the same time to be grasped as an object. Then again we have-but,of course, on the basis of acts of consciousness attaching themselvessynthetically to the preceding consciousness-objective sense as thenucleus of changing modes. For example: When one is conscious ofsomething in the mode of "not existing," then there COmes out of thatan existing nonbeing or, with a change of conviction, a presumable orprobable nonbeing or nonexisting nonbeing, etc.

We further note that "object pure and simple," in the sense in whichit is used in normal judging discourse that does not make what one isconscious of as such the theme, means actually existing object, namelyas "object" that for the judger has the status of existing reality. Ob­viously 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 ex­pressing it in print: "object" (in quotes) and object (without quot~s).-According to the prevailing trend of judgment, by the way, objectmeans something real, object of the world, which our distinction itselfwould make equivocal if we were not careful to keep pure the indis­pensable, most general, concept of object, that is, to speak expressly ofsomething real where we mean it.

In order to learn to see that of which one is conscious as that of whichone is conscious, to learn to see objective sense in its "how" accordingto important new dimensions of this "how," let us turn our attention tosome basic types of processes of consciousness, of concrete particularsin the-only now properly concrete in the full sense-stream of the lifeof consciousness. They shall be considered purely according to what wefind 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 completelygeneral sense but, of course, not the usual one, then perception is thekind 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 ~hegaze of consciousness; where the perceiving has the mode of attention(attentive awareness, grasping), the "object" is grasped in this cha~acterof the so-called "being there in person" and has the character obVIOuslyfrom the perceiving itself.-If we take perception in the more res~rictedand more obvious sense, in the ordinary sense of the perceptIOn ofreality, then it is what originally makes us conscious of the realities exist­ing for us and "the" world as actually .existing. To ca~cel out all ~uchperception, actual and possible, means, for our total lIfe of conSCIOUS­ness, to cancel out the world as objective sense and as reality accepted byus; it means to remove from all thought about the world (in every signi­fication of this word) the original basis of sense and legitimacy. Anindividual perception, considered itself, is consciousness of some phy­sicalities and, taken quite concretely, is perception of the world byvirtue of the horizon of perception belonging to it. Let us attend strictlyto the fact that the particular perception in itself makes us conscious ofthe world with these or those intuitive traits and, in fact, as being therein personal presence. To make thus conscious is, so to speak, the achieve­ment 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 properessence (aspects, etc.) .A~other of ~he typical ~orms of the life of consciousness is memory.

Agam we see: m memory Itself there lies, as a new kind of consciousness?f and mak.in~ c~nscious,.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 totake as an example a significative or a pictorial representing, a con­sciousness of universals, apredicative judgment and inference, a hypo­thetical positing, holding as possible and probable, a doubting, affirm­ing, or denying, or whatever else-every new mode of consciousnessbears within itself as an objective sense inseparable from it its "objectof consciousness," according to the kind and particularization of con­sciousness, its changing modes of sense; for example, as signs for some­thing, as a copy, as universal of particulars, as reason or consequence, ashypothesis, etc.; also, however, as purely and simply existing or as pos­sible, presumable, doubtful, null, etc.

Let us have another look at the realm of the connections of con­sciousness. In the transition from consciousness to consciousness­from one perception to further perceptions, to memories, expectations,acts of thinking, to valuing and other consciousness-the individualacts of consciousness do not remain isolated and a mere succession.They come into connection, and every such connection is itself againone consciousness, which effects its new "synthetic" production ofsense; above all, when we are continually conscious of "one and thesame thing" in transitions of consciousness, even when they connectvery diverse acts. Then this self-same thing, which little by little makesitself definite just as it does, is nothing other than the unity of a struc­ture of sense that builds itself up in the unity of the train of conscious­ness connecting itself together in its continuation. By virtue of theidentifying connection of the individual acts that follow upon oneanother and perhaps continually pass over into one another, each ofwhich is conscious of its object in its "what" and "how," its aspects andtraits presented therein, its empty horizons or other subjective modes-by virtue of such identifying connection, the senses individually in­cluded in the acts constitute a single sense always changing itselfmodally in its continuation, namely, the one "object" which, as thesame object determining itself step by step more richly, "unifies" thesense achievements of all these acts. And out of that, obviously, all talkof the unity of an object, of its identity in the change of its modes ofappearance and its traits that appear, gets its significance. Further: if, in

all this, the experiencing consciousness goes on throughout in con­tinuous harmony, then the "that's right," "it is actual," is again a for­mation of sense making itself conscious, and, to be sure, in this mode ofconcordant consciousness, and likewise if the harmony is broken, in thenew synthetic type of consciousness of the inner strife, the "it does notaccord," "it is doubtful," or "null."

[It is] not otherwise in conceptual thinking and in the ever so highlydeveloped syntheses of "theoretical" action. In that action itself theconcepts and concept forms, judgments and judgment forms take shape.If the theoretical train of thought progresses with perfect insight asgenuine grounding and terminates in evident truth, then there lies. inthe unity of this synthetic activity of consciousness itself, as a formationproduced by the mind that has developed in the immanence of thisactivity, the grounding theory, and its thesis bears the characteristicof consciousness that in turn has developed purely immanently:"grounded truth." But true being, for example, physical being to whichthis truth "refers," naturally lies in the nexus of consciousness which atfirst had already constituted it in itself by objectifying it in pre­theoretical objectivations as something existing in certainty, then set itas a target of cognition in theoretical thinking, and, proceeding method­ically in the unified flow of insightfully predicating cognition, deter­mines it in theoretical truth.

In the synthetic connection of "repeated" arguments-whether one'sown or another's arguments-truth and true being are constituted as thesame in the manner peculiar to consciousness: the practical freedom of"being able" in the wider context of one consciousness to repeat theargument and to restore originaliter the same truth in insight, theontological character of truth as something existing in itself in therealm of cognition. Likewise, in the conscious insight into the possi­bility of being able to think of the argument as carried out ~y anybodyat any time who can intuitively be conceived as in commumty wIth us,there emerges the character of truth as something supertemporal andexalted above any cognizing subject-and therefore always as truth"in itself."

If we remain consistent in this sort of meditation, with a radical con­sistency that quite exclusively goes after subjective and intersubjectiveconsciousness in all its actual and possible forms, particular and syn­thetic forms, and quite exclusively directs its gaze upon what belongsto consciousness in and for itself-then we are already in the transcen­dental attitude. The conversion of the natural manner of thinking thenis complete. What is basically essential to it is the radicalism and theuniversality of a pure meditation on consciousness, a meditation that is

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fully conscious of this peculiarity, and is willed and carried out withunbroken consistency. For only thereby does pure consciousness as theabsolutely self-contained realm of purely subjective being becomeknown and, with its purely immanent interconnections, abilities, sense­structures, form the realm of a unique science in contrast to all "posi­tive" 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 the­oretical cognition, and thereby consciousness in its full concretion, in:vhich it is sU?jectivity existing purely. for itsel~ a~d contained purely in~tself, accordmg,to ea~h and every thmg that IS mcluded in it in reallyImmanent and mtentIOnal moments, syntheses, centerings, that is ex­hibitable in and of it as intuitively and theoretically inseparable from itsown essence; this radicalism obviously demands, then, the resolve to seeto it that we radically exclude every accompanying meaning of what isnot consciousness and of what is assigned to consciousness so as to beinterwoven with it by natural or even scientific-psychological orphilosophical, legitimate or perverse-convictions.

Of course that is more easily said and desired than actually done­and done in the understanding of its whole range, indeed, of its truesense.

At the outset, the idea of a subjectivity purely closed off in itself andtaking charge of itself intuitively in its own pure life of consciousnessthrough the self-reflection of the ego cogito is nothing especiallyastounding, but on the contrary-since Descartes' time-is somethingquite familiar; and accordingly also, the idea of an analysis and de­scription of cognition geared to theory, first of all in immediate psy­chological self-experience and then (by way of empathy) in theexperience of someone else. Perhaps it is the case that the struggleagainst transcendental-philosophical psychologism and against the sub­stitution of psychology for the science of transcendental consciousnesshas the fundamental root of its legitimacy in the fact that conscious­ness in the sense of psychological apperception is not pure in the sensein question here. We foresee, therefore, that the transcendental atti­tude, even if it is in itself a successful attitude toward consciousness inits own essentials and leads to theoretical results that are in our plainsense transcendental-purely according to the theory of consciousness­cannot yet be accepted as transcendental-scientinc and transcendental­philosophical, so long, that is, as a special methodological sense-investi­gation has not clarified more deeply the sense and the legitimacy of the

demand of the purity in question and a method that scientifically justi­fies itself has not secured in general the effecting of a transcendentalexperience, of an evident grasping of self by the "pure" consciousness,and therewith opened the way for the original grounding of a trans­cendental philosophy as a rigorous science.

The demand that is hereby being made has already been satisfied bythe new phenomenology under the title "phenomenological reduction."Since the development of this method makes indispensable a few con­siderations that are not easy and are understandable only with someelaboration, we shall deal with them in a section of their own.

(b) Transcendental essence-research and transcendental science ofmatters of fact.

At the outset-assuming the full success of the following clarifica­tions and therewith of the distinction between psychological and trans­cendentally pure consciousness-the definite sense of a science of thetranscendental in its universal range is firmly established in forma, soto speak. We at once call it transcendental philosophy-anticipating, a9cannot until later be established, that it embraces all "philosophical'jtasks of the entire tradition. In any case, it is not supposed to be any~

thing other than that science which in the transcendental attitude, andmethodologically secured attitude, theoretically investigates pure sub­jectivity in general and, concerning all formations possible in it, con­tinuously asks only about that which belongs to it according to itsproper essential sort and its own laws of essence and about that whichsubjectivity brings about in the way of possible achievements of senseand reason-achievements under manifold titles of the true, the gen­uine, the correct. This obviously amounts to saying that all possibleexperiences and sciences as well as all formations of consciousness thatare at all possible must belong to the area of research of this science.They are for it themes of investigation, in no way, however, logicallybasic cognitions the determinations of which could serve in it as pre­mises. Transcendental philosophy, therefore, also refers correlativelyto the world and to all possible worlds-and, again, not as given alreadyand plainly and simply existing in reality or possibility, but rather asforms of harmony and truth that display themselves immanently in thelife and work of rational philosophy.

Along with this, the universe of pure possibilities and the fact arenaturally separated in view of the transcendental investigations to becarried out. The factual life of consciousness, the universal life of con-

sciousness, in its transcendental intersubjective immanence, bears initself as "phenomenon" the correlative fact of the world constituted init in the form of representation. Taken concretely, then, it is the uni­verse of all transcendental facticity. As such, it is the universe of possible"transcendental experience" and presents the task of a correspondinglyuniversal theory of experience. This factual correlation is to be regardedas one possibility that leaves open an infinity of other possibilities-asmerely imaginable, as "a priori" or essential possibilities. Transcen­dental essence-research (the "eidetic") is investigation of the essentialpossibilities of transcendental consciousness in general, with the a prioripossible world to be constituted therein pre-theoretically or theoreti­cally. Indeed, we must make the framework even wider. In our pre­dominating interest in the naturally pre-given world, which at firstrepresents for us the totality of the existent, we limit our transcendentalinterest to it as well without taking notice. But, already, in order tosatisfy a transcendental contemplation of the world, we soon see our­selves forced to free ourselves from all limitations and to investigatetranscendentally the universe of consciousness in general that is possibler1 priori, as well as the universe of objectivities in general that are to be:onstituted therein-whereby our broadest concept of object must bebrought 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 andmakes possible for the first time the theoretically highest formation ofthe latter in "rational" theories, thus, of course, in natural science. Theeidetic transcendental science that is indeed to be grounded purely byitself, the universal science of essence of a transcendental subjectivity ingeneral, has priority, with all transcendental phenomena that area priori possible in it.

Finally, one must pay careful attention to the fact that a possibletranscendental subjectivity in general is not merely to be understoodas a possible singular but rather also as a possible communicative sub­jectivity, and primarily as one such that purely according to COn­sciousness, that is to say, through possible intersubjective acts ofconsciousness, it encloses together into a possible allness a multiplicityof individual transcendental subjects. To what extent a "solipsistic"subjectivity is at all possible in thought, outside of all community, isitself one of the transcendental problems.

We, standing as actual subjects of reason in the actuality of fatefullife, 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 phenome­nology, as we also say) is the instrument or method for the transcen­dental science of matters of fact.

If we look back from here at natural living and knowing, to which theradicalism 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 naturalattitude toward pure possibilities, it has eidetic sciences (such as themathematical sciences), functioning as instruments of the positivemethod of the sciences of matters of fact. Whatever the extent towhich it penetrates the infinities of natural horizons, it never happensupon-even if in principle it can in its attitude happen upon thetranscendental data and theories-the actual and possible transcenden­tal consciousness, the "world," "possible worlds," as its intentionalconstruction, nor upon the above designated transcendental sciences.

How, then, the one might stand in relation to the other, in whatsense one can speak at all of another, in what sense the universal scienceof the transcendental-and, above all, the transcendental eidetic phe­nomenology with its immediate essential descriptions of the possibili­ties of pure achievements of consciousness of transcendental subjects­is called upon to interpret the ultimately true sense of the naturallygiven and cognized world, is similarly called upon to exercise criticismof all positive sciences and of all in the same sense positive ("dogmatic")philosophies, indeed, with regard to these, even called upon to producein its own framework all science in ultimately scientific form and torealize in itself every possible sense of philosophy in ultimate form­these 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 neces­sary to assure ourselves still further of the previous separation of thetwo kinds of thinking, that is to say, above all, to illuminate moredeeply that remarkable radicalism of an exclusive letting-be-acceptedand seeking of the "purely" subjective, in the concretely self-containedwhole of a "pure subjectivity." We have already said that it shall belongto the essential sense of this pure subjectivity not to presuppose ortolerate in principle any co-positing of naturally objective being (de­cided in the universe of positive fact) .

(c ) Natural and transcendental reflection and the underlying basis ofintentionality.

Let us go back again to something already considered. In the courseof our natural living we human subjects at every moment have the

existent already given, the existent in the abundant sense, coming inmanifold ways within the grasp of consciousness and disappearingagain, but even then still existing for us. All things thus given before­hand are in a certain sense unified; they form a universe of thingsalready there for us. A nature is continually there for us-"the" totalityof 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. Tothe real mundane universe, the totality of the "really" existent, is thenreferred everything which otherwise offers itself as existing, such asideals, ideas of every sort, mathematical objectivities (numbers, multi­plicities ), theories, and the like; it is in a certain way a mere annex ofthe real world, according to the sense that natural living gives it. Ourtotal natural praxis (our praxis in the usual narrower sense of real in­dustry and also our cognitive praxis) is related to the current universeof things given to us beforehand. Through praxis of both kinds wereshape the universe of that which is "existent" for us at any given time,as validities existing for us-and only produce for ourselves thereby newthings given beforehand; we expand the old universe, simultaneouslynarrowing it by striking out of it many things as being henceforth nolonger accepted by us.3

Throughout this total life, which is continuously active individuallyand communally in the performance of acceptances, there run effortsdirected toward the attainment of "truths" (in the widest sense). Outof subjective and changing acceptances we toil to shape legitimatelyverified truths and truths that are to be verified at any time subjectivelyas well as intersubjectively, and finally-under the title of science­"ultimately valid" truths, the existent in the "true," in the ultimatelyvalid sense.

Now everything, so we tell ourselves, that is accepted by us as anexistent in such natural living-and perhaps in the form "groundedwith final validity"-is something being accepted and perhaps acceptedwith finality, as synthetic unity in multiform consciousness, as some­thing one and the same in manifold subjective modes of givenness, inthe subjective synthesis of which it constitutes itself precisely as a unityand 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-as­being in the form of rejection and that any possibly occurring "modalization" of thisacceptance whatsoever establishes again and again a sort of positive acceptance andtherefore an existent for us again, even though in a changed attitude (possible atany time). Under the objectively existent, then, we have: existing objective pos­sibilities, probabilities, nullities, impossibilities, questionabilities.

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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 myand our total experience, related and to be related to this same thing­a title for exceedingly multiform lived experiences and modes of given­ness as lived experiences, without which the latter cannot be conscious­ness of the thing, and any things in general, as this one and same exis­tent. But while perception gives us the thing as existing "in person," weknow nothing of the exceedingly manifold modes of consciousness,sense-contents, modes of positing, etc., which make up the experiencingas that of this thing. The grasping view rests exclusively on the consti­tuted synthetic unity and its elements of unity, the physical properties.In the natural attitude, and to be sure, in the basic attitude of straight­forwardly, unreflectively living along, we see the thing and not thesubjective manifold in which it is constituted as unity. If somethingpre-given becomes the theme of an action of consciousnesss founded ata 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 theorizingwe have exclusively in the thematic view the consequences of thetheorems given as existing; of the modes of consciousness constructed inan entangled and very much changing manner, with their sense­contents, modes of positing, syntheses, etc., as whose structure of unityeach component of the theory and, in the successive building up, thewhole of the theory comes into view-of these we know nothing in theperformance; they remain extra-thematic. In general, actually given ob­jects are themes; themes are unities of act manifolds remainingunthematic.

What has been said about the objectivities given in the mode of theactual present, with the subjective features belonging to them, is trans­ferable to the objectivities in some way "presentiated" with the cor­respondingly presentiated subjectivity (remembering, depictive repre­sentation, and the like); likewise, it is transferable from the objectivitiesof which there is consciousness and which are accepted as actual withthe acts actually positing them in acceptance to the objects representedin the mode of "mere phantasying" and to the correlative acts of an ac­ceptance which one merely thinks or phantasies instead of "actually,""seriously," performing them. For example: as one is conscious of anactually experienced existing house in many subjective modes, in chang­ing orientation and perspective, in changing differences of clarity anddistinctness, of the mode of attentiveness, etc., so also a phantasied­existent 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 radicallydeviant 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 astruggle between giants hover before me is, to be sure, a present livedexperience, but this struggle hovers before me only in a correlativelyhovering perception of this struggle, a perception "as if" and not anactual perception, and similarly so in every intuitive presentation,

We can therefore interrogate anything and everything that we acceptas existing and that is ever objectivated to us or can be phantasied by usas being acceptable in the mode of possibility, according to the hiddenmanifolds of consciousness that remain or have remained unthematiC'and we can direct our aim to their disclosure. The life of consciousnes~that is unthematic, to a certain extent anonymous, but of which there isalso 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 funda­mental difference between natural and transcendental reflection.

All reflection in the general sense here at first meant-whether it istranscendental or not-has in common that it is a bending of conscious­ness back upon itself, a transition from somehow having consciousnessof some objectivities or other to becoming conscious of precisely thisconsciousness and its Ego. Since Locke, as a rule, one understands byreflection: self-experiencing in turning consciousness toward oneselfand one's conscious life, that is to say, self-perceptions (related to one'sown present conscious lived experience), also, of course, self-recollec­tions (related to one's own past consciousness). But we will forthwithbecome acquainted with reflections of still other sorts, among themalso 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 cor­responding modifications (and then more difficult to underst~nd)

transfers to all other reflections. I mean the phenomenon of ego­splitting."

With the act of self-reflection I lift myself above myself, separatemyself into the upper ego of the acts of reflection and t~e lo:ver ego, o?which I reflect (the "me"). The former and its reflectIve lIved expen­ence 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 dtion, has now come to cognition and perhaps to expression ~s reflecte fupon, "uncovered": this, however, in the familiar conscIOusnes~ °identity in duplication, which, thematically uncovered i? fuhrt ler,

. . ,"m t e ex-higher-level reflection, creates for Itself the expreSSIOn. . d'. ' I unexpenenceperiencing 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

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longs to the essence of every reflection that it in turn admits a higherreflection, that the Ego-splitting, in other words, can always be executedanew. Every reflection has in view something reflected, and the reflect­ing Ego and its reflecting activity is therein "anonymous" and comes tolight in a bending back of the gaze upon itself, that is to say, through anew Ego-splitting, whereby once again the new reflecting activity andits Ego is in concealment, but again also able to be uncovered.

But let us now consider reflections of other sorts, which already occurin numerous forms in everyone's natural living. They have very variedstructure, always an intentionally complicated one, and at variouslevels of complication. If we follow these up, unfolding only the inten­tional implications included in their own essence, then we can recog­nize each reflection as a now more immediate, now more mediate modi­fication of a single primitive form, and that is the form of reflection ofsimple self-perception. Let us undertake the following meditations inorder to use this so-called structural derivation of all other reflections atonce 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 insome mode or other. Here, the Ego lives in complete anonymity, so tospeak; it has only [objective] things but nothing subjective. Onlythrough reflection and, in the most original form, through simple self­perception, does it gain "self-consciousness," cognizance, and perhapsrecognition of its self; it is now capable of valuing itself, of dealing withitself. But perception becomes fertile only through recollection, and soalso self-perception through self-recollecting. Perception is character­ized with regard to its own essence (through the proper sense-content ofits intentionality itself) as modification of self-perception. And if thisbending back comes from a ground of straightforward perceptions, thenthe self-remembering is a bending back from such a straightforwardremembering. This latter "presentiates" what is present as if it wereappearing "in person" itself, and in a manner that it posits as existent,as something existent in the time-mode "past." Therein memory dis­tinguishes 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 positedby 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 itwere." The self-remembering which branches off from the straight­forward remembering of, say, a house, does not uncover the presentEgo, that of the actual perceptions (among them the present recollec­tion 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 thosemodes of consciousness.

Remembering is, according to its essence, not only the having in forceof something past, but rather of this something past as something thathas been perceived by me and as something of which there has beenconsciousness in some other way: and precisely this past Ego and con­sciousness that is anonymous in straightforward recollection gets un­covered in a reflection (reflection not on the present recollecting butrather "in" it). We see immediately that in the same manner a reflec­tion "in" every phantasy is also possible. If I phantasy a thing (or someother 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 amphantasied along with it as subject of the perceiving have uncovered thisperceiving "as if" through reflection not on but "in" the phantasy, anduncovered it precisely as something subjective that is co-phantasied.

In a similar manner, there arise now, in general, various intentionalvariants of the most original self-reflection, self-perception, which is inthis sense the original form of all reflection. All reflections differentfrom it are (according to their own intentionality) "variants" of thesame, although perhaps very indirect. It is to be noted in this connec­tion 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 followany self-perception of any higher level than that of its variant; as anyremembering, so also can any self-remembering be recollected, andtherefore this latter one, and so on. Precisely the same thing holds forphantasies, and especially the self-phantasies in their iterable higherlevels, and so on in general.

Of special importance are the reflections through which I attainknowledge of "others," of alien subjectivity, its lived experiences, itsways of appearing, its intentional objects as such, etc. Intentional de­rivation ultimately from self-perceptions, as must be repeatedly stressed,holds good even for these reflections. \\1e call them reflections and saythereby that in the essence of every original experience of others("empathy") and-in the further sequence of variants--:-of ever~ c~n­sciousness through which the ego is conscious of the alIen subJectIve(therefore not only according to perception as present bu~ also accord­ing to memory and according to phantasy, in pre-ex~ectatlOns," throughdepictions, through thinking, etc.), there is somethlI1? reflectIve, e~enif in the form of perhaps very complicated implicatIOns. Alon~ WIthh " 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 '

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emptily, and so, too, all otherwise possible inflected reflections and, noless, every kind of prior relation to something existent, can be includedin such acts of an undeveloped sort, which uncover their reflective senseonly in the "clarifying," the making intuited. In the most original andrelatively simplest form (the primitive form for all more complicatedalien experiences and their variants in phantasy), I gain "immediate"experience of the other by way of implicit reflection which has itsstarting ground in the perceptual "existence" of my [animate] organ­ism and my subjectivity originarily functioning in it. From here, amotivation radiates in which alien [animate] organism as such be­comes understandable and therefore understandable as functionalorgan of the other. This understanding, in this foundation of myoriginary self-experience, arises as a peculiar form of variation of myself-perception, as a sort of presentiation analogous to memory but ob­viously different from it. In it, I can attain an Ego and a consciousness,not, however, as the one announcing itself in my rememberings (andanticipations), that is, in my originary self-experience, the one repro­ductively given as presentiated present, but rather as a life running inthe same course with mine, and, to be sure, one such that it indicatesitself in the originary data of my life in an original manner as co-existing.

And similarly, variously inflected reflections, and always includingreflections such as those through which there comes about for us con­sciousness of the alien-subjective, alien ego and Ego-life, modes of ap­prehension belonging to the alien subject, subjective phenomena ofevery sort, in the manner of factual existence that is valid for us.

Through the meditations just carried out we have gained some in­sight into the reflections through which subjective things of every sort,we ourselves, and the manifold subjective contents of our living, butalso others and their living, come into givenness. And at the same time,we have become attentive to the underlying basis of intentionalitywhich all reflections ultimately presuppose. Reflectionless acts of con­sciousness, the most general types of consciousness, such as actual actsand quasi-acts in the manner of phantasy, including especially percep­tions, recollections, expectations, symbolic indications, pictorially rep­resenting acts, empty consciousness, consciousness of generality, etc.,designate forms in which unreflective living runs its course, as does allconscious life. But the unreflective living designates a substratum inwhich "mere things" exist for us, the realm of the "Ego-alien" objec­tivities, which are, according to their sense, free of all subjectivity, to theextent that this subject, so long as it does not perform any acts of re­flection, is not conscious even of its very subjectivity (of the originallyfirst 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 con­stituted by a mere consciousness of things. So it is with the things~esigna~ed by th~ title "mere nature," originally given in pure expe­nen~e, I.e., expen.ence ~ompletely forgetful of self, which attends ex­cluslV~ly t~ the thmg as it appears in this mode and is so constituted; butalso hkew~se for th.in~s. ~f the ideal realms, such as pure numbers,ma~hemabcal mulbphc~bes, an~ the like. So long as the subject re­mams 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 anopen mu1tip~icity .of alien subjec~s. All this is intertwined through ac­cepted relationships, clothed With relational characters in which 't

. iconstitutes my surrounding world intuitively known and articulatedwith categorial definiteness and, at the same time, the surroundingworld common to all of us bound through possible mutual under­standing, 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 alwayscan find consciousness at hand, but only "real," "mundane" con­sciousness that is intertwined with nature. On the other hand, purereflection-practiced, in a certain purifying method, on the data ofnatural reflection-seeks and finds pure or transcendental conscious­ness. In contrast to the natural self-experience, the natural experience ofsomeone else, and the experience of community, there comes the trans­cendental experience; likewise for all variants of the experience and allhigher consciousness that builds itself upon it, especially the theoreti­cally 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 peculiaressence of natural reflection.

The Ego that lives in natural living has continually, as we said, auniverse of data given beforehand. What it had earlier gained in newexperiences, from new judging activities, valuings, etc. (from "primallyinstituting" acts, as we say)-all that remained and remains for it incontinuing acceptance, unless it be that this acceptance loses its force,is compromised, or the like, for special reasons, e.g., through acts. ofmodalization. Thus, natural living has a universal base upon whichfrom 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-

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jective-ideal being. Above all, it "has" the real mundane universe, asa pervasively connected universe of real acceptance, taking up every newreal object at any given time in the determination-content with whichthis new object is accepted in its occurrence and continues to be ac­cepted. If, now, the Ego has an object given as its actual theme, thenthe rest of its world-and everything else that is existent for it-is, to besure, not actually present but nevertheless is in a certain manner still aco-theme, but just not an actual one; as co-accepted it determines everyactual apprehension and belongs to its intentional horizon. The sa~e

thing, therefore, continues to be the case when the Ego reflects on Itsconsciousness of an object that has been thematic at any given time, onits 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 consciousne~s

a natural reflection is directed, as it previously was more acceptable III

these, is thereby more acceptable, even for the reflecting Ego. But if wewant to posit the consciousness purely as such, if, proceeding further,we want to investigate whether and how we could establish conscious­ness at all as a proper universe of accepted being, purely self-contained,then we must obviously carry out a purifying "disconnection" of allaccepted being that is not consciousness. Such a "disconnection" isnecessary; for consciousness, actual and possible, is given to us first ofall in natural reflections, and these, as has already become noticeableand will soon become even more perfectly apparent, never posit mereconsciousness, but with it also, at one and the same time, somethingother.

If the sought-for universe of pure consciousness is to become a surebase upon which scientific knowledge could be grounded, then it mustcome originally to be given in universal, univocal experience; and if it isfirst of all, as is methodologically obvious, a matter of the productionof 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 tomyself, that is to say pure self-perception, self-remembering, and a uni­versal continuity of actual and possible pure self-experience.

At first glance it seems as if the right way to attain it would be asfollows:

We carry out a reflective survey of all our whole life and, passingfrom individual reflection to individual reflection, reduce it to purelife, in such a manner, that is to say, that we purify one by one everynatural reflection-i.e., every natural self-experience-of all that is non­subjective 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 forthe time being ignoring all of the merely phantasying oneself in the per­formance of acts, "as if" one believed, valued, etc.). If I proceed in thisway, the relevant cogito which I have in my experiential grasp, is con­sciousness of a cogitatum, of an existent in some mode or other. But thiscogitatum, be it accepted by me on ever so good a ground, be it, as is sooften the case in natural living, even something subjective ("psychic")-this cogitatum is not only not the consciousness of it, but does not inany case even belong to it as a really immanent part. What is acceptedby me at any given time in consciousness purely and simply as object­of that there can, of course, be consciousness; it can be given as thesame existent in ideally innumerable new acts of consciousness-andthat is the case with all naturally pre-given ideal objectivities as realitieswhich are repeatedly perceptible as the same by me and others, and noless the case with pre-given ideal objectivities that can be grasped re­peatedly as the same by me and others in separate acts of original in­sight. Therefore, in order to preserve in its purity the purely subjective,the individual lived experience of consciousness, we must put out ofoperation all of the objectivities posited therein, i.e., while we positconsciousness as existing purely as it itself, we must deny to ourselvesthe co-positing of that in it of which there is consciousness and which isposited.

However, this method, continually practiced in the individual con­sciousness, if practiced with universally extended methodological intentOn all our lived experiences that we could reflectively catch sight of inour living, would by no means get at the-in the transcendental sense­pure, the radically pure, life of consciousness. In fact, psychology, tothe extent that it takes account of the basic essence of the subjectivelife as intentional, requires this sort of purification in order to attain thepurely psychic in the psychological sense. Its theme, human and animal"psychic life," to be sure, comprehends consciousness with all real andideal contents belonging inseparably to it, but consciousness as a realevent in the nexus of the pre-given world, continuously pre-given thanksto our continually univocal experience. Psychic self-perception, self­experience is, as regards its sense-achievement, just as much "objective"experience as the experience of spatial things that is related to m.erelymaterial being. Such self-perception is essentially founded in thI~ .ex­perience, and in such a manner that its own sense-bestowal and pOSItingof existence inseparably perform a co-positing of physical being andfinally of a whole space-time world-inseparably, so long as this sort ofsense-bestowal and sense remains preserved: consciousness in thenaturally real sense; psychic life in the real, space-time nexus.

IV. The Sense of "Calling-in-Question" the World

Ifone has viewed, in overcoming the deeply and firmly rooted naturalmanner of thinking, the realm of transcendental subjectivity in itspeculiar ownness and complete self-containedness, and if one has, byconsiderations such as those just indicated, arrived at the first presenti­ment of the uniqueness and range of a transcendental philosophy, thenone falls into astonishment and soon also into an increasing inneruneasiness.

The world and science of the natural manner of thinking seemed, aslong as one was not aware of the possibility of a transcendental worldand science, to contain in itself all experienceable being in general andall imaginable sciences in general. Now, however, a new sphere of beingdiscloses itself, which to separate and keep separate from the naturalsphere at once causes severe difficulties; and a new science disclosesitself, which thematically encompasses all positive science and yet isitself not to be positive and is not to include a single one of its proposi­tions as premise or as constituent of its own theories. Out of the ob­scurity arises a painful conflict between the cognitive values of thenatural manner of thinking, which one still cannot compromise, andthe cognitive requirements of the new manner, whose own legitimacyhas become indubitable. If one proceeds in this new manner, theneverything which one formerly had possessed in the unquestionedobviousness of a naturally grounded legitimacy appears to be called intoquestion-and that, in both senses of this equivocal expression. For,since pure consciousness in general and, within it, legitimizing con­sciousness, have become a universal problem and since, therefore, legiti­macy itself (as a title for intentional correlates) must become the themeof the question; then any legitimacy, in the condition of obscurity inwhich we at first stand, seems to become questionable in the othersense too-namely, doubtful.

The transcendental question about the essence, the sense, of alllegitimacy-in other words, the question of how it is to be made in­telligible in terms of the original sense-bestowal of consciousness as theoriginal establishment of legitimacy, so to speak-that question changesinto the question, whether and to what extent legitimacy of positiveknowledge 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 outsetsciences of possible realities, such as pure geometry and mechanics aswell as the disciplines of the Mathesis universalis, which always func­tion as its instruments for the cognition of nature) . At issue here, how­ever, is not a shifting of the question of legitimacy on account of an

equivocation, which can be due only to confusion and thoughtlessnessremote from the facts. But so peculiar is the relationship of the twoways of thinking that precisely a serious and profound penetration intothe transcendental sphere of cognition seems to require a sense of theworld which must appear quite unacceptable, at least at first, to naturalthought-especially upon any return from the transcendental attitudeto that of natural thinking.

To show this, we must explicate somewhat more precisely the char­acter and achievement of transcendental cognition in contrast to thenatural sort, and carry it on far enough for us to see what kind of generalpredelineation of the sense of the world seems to result of necessity inthe somersault of the transcendental problematics.

Let us consider the following. As naturally thinking subjects we hadthe world; it was given as indubitable actuality. We experienced it, tookit into consideration, formed theories about it in terms of natural evi­dence 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 "theworld." More distinctly stated: we have only our transcendental-puresubjectivity which is knowable with absolutely self-sufficient evidence,and which carries in itself all its cognitive sense in its flowing conscious­ness, and therefore carries in itself also "the world," which "exists insense" for us and just in the way that it does. It is the always presumedworld, as and how it is presumed, the always known and knowableworld, precisely as it is known and knowable. Only thus does it herebecome the theme of research.

And, in fact, this is an extensive theme: to make clear on every sidehow purely subjective living, considered in isolation or as communallife, running its course in the universal essential form of the intentio, ofthe "consciollsness," is enabled, thanks to the modes and syntheses ofconsciollsness proper to it, and purely as its performance-results accord­ing to its sense-to make clear how it is enabled to make one consciousof "factually existing world." What hierarchy of structures of con­sciousness, of syntheses of consciousness founded on one another orintertwined with one another, may be demonstrable here in reflectionand description of essence? And, correlatively, what hierarchical con­struction of sense-formations constituting themselves therein, andhighest of all, the one delimiting it, that of spatio-temporal "realities,"constituting itself as "always" and for "everyone" verifiable, as "objec­tively true being"? How, in terms of eidetic laws, may the necessityof such a structure be made conceivable for the universal achievementof a continuous intuition of a world, and further, for the achievement

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of a science of this world? How are these great tasks initially to be ful­filled under the methodologically primary limitation to the sense­bestowals of the individual-ego which functions as subject of the trans­cendental inquiry, and then fulfilled again at a higher level in the widestframework of the universal community of subjects standing in pos­sible communication with it and with one another, that is to say, inrelation to "everybody whatsoever" and transcendental intersub­jectivity?

In such transcendental inquiry, there is given, therefore, under thetitle "the world" only what always in the manifoldly changing andsynthetically connected intentionality of the consciousness cognizingthe world, only what constitutes itself as a cognitive unity, that is tosay, can constitute itself in practical freedom in freely inferable hori­zons of consciousness-as one and the same in the flux of manifoldmodes of consciousness and of individual objects always "coming forth"anew therein. All this, however, must be taken exclusively as it is foundat hand in the consistent and purely reflective manner of observation,which we call the transcendental, in actual or-in the case of the eideticattitude-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 topass from merely aiming at meaning to the goal of seeing for oneselfand now having for oneself of that which is meant. In the aiming modeof consciousness that of which there is consciousness is sense in themode of "mere meaning" ("intentive sense"4); in the mode of theachieving consciousness that of which there is consciousness is sense inthe 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 withhorizons of unfulfilled meaning. That of which there is already con­sciousness in the mode of the object "itself" apprehended "in person"(as what is perceived in the external perception) has, of course, alwaysco-intented, but not themselves grasped, "sides." And thus it remains,however far fulfilling experience may follow them out. There alwaysremains something new to be experienced, since new horizons of antici­patory intention always open up. The new, however, concerns notmerely the "objects" which, as steady targets of experience, are pre­served throughout a uniformly connected effort of experience. Rather,?ew objects, too, enter into their open horizons of experience, affectl11terest, and perhaps become new targets of experience, appropriating

4· Thus in the manner of speaking of the Log. Unters. II.5. Ibid.

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to themselves in new sequences of experience the fulfilling sense belong­ing to them. In addition, the old and new unities organize themselvesinto combinations, which are objectivities of a higher level.

Naturally, something similar holds for conceptual judgment and, atthe highest level, for scientifically evident cognition. No knowledge isthe 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 iscorrelatively the province of knowledge that is knowledge determinedaccording to its true being. The complete province of objective-realfactual knowledge, however, is the world, the universe of possible uni­vocal experience, the province of all real provinces, whose science there­fore enCOII).paSses synthetically all objective factual sciences.6

Accordingly we can say: in purely transcendental consideration theworld is, as it is in itself and in logical truth, ultimately only an idealying at infinity, which draws its target-sense from the actuality of con­scious 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 alwayscapable of being reawakened. Likewise also, that universal objectivetruth-sense "world," which has its origin in the actuality of the trans­cendental cognitional life of objective experience and theoretical in­sight that organizes itself subjectively and intersubjectively into auniversal coherence of harmony. This sense of unity is, to be sure, con­tinually involved in change, but only in the way that, in keeping withits sense, one and the same thing offers itself in various determinateformations. The same objective universe appears continually, but inever new modes of givenness, with ever new objects, properties, relationscoming thereby into "authentic" experience and cognition. This senseof unity continually has at one and the same time the form of an in­tended and that of a fulfilling sense. The continual process of cognitionis, as for the individual objects so also for the universe, a total process offulfillment, running its course in multiple particular processes, a totalprocess which, with increasing perfection, brings to self-presentation

6. Correlative, of course, is the complete province of eidetic knowledge for thereal in general, or the universe of possible realities and worlds in general; the uni­versal science of the essence of the real in general encompasses all a priori sciencesthat have been developed or still could be developed for special regions or formalstructures of possible reality (e.g., "pure" natural science, pure geometry, puredoctrine of time, pure mechanics) .

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and eventually to self-grasping cognizance that horizon of the un­experienced, of undetermined and determinable co-meaning, which ofessential necessity accompanies all real experience. The total fulfillmentis a fulfillment which, in an inclusive harmony and with the total forceof progressive, experiential verification, resolves all the occasional dis­appointments into a higher harmony. Exposed illusion signifies at thesame time and always restoration of a true being which finds itself aplace in the general harmony in place of the illusion.

Experience and processes of experience, however, are essentiallycharacterized 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 generalmode of real givenness are practical horizons, to be fulfilled systemati­cally in the co-constituted and therefore continually familiar system ofthe possibilities of practical intervention. The possibility of fulfillment,in the sense of the practical possibility of converting the perception inquestion as experientially taking cognizance into the form of fulfill­ment, of more exact determination of that which is still unknown aboutthe already perceived reality-which, however, essentially is never any­thing absolutely unknown, but rather, is something predelineated in itsformal type, e.g., as a thing in space-this fulfillability constantly car­ries with itself empirical-practical evidence: I can, however I may prac­tically engage in the system of my possible ways of performance (e.g.,in the perceptual "I approach, I see, I feel"), continue my perceiving asperceiving the same thing, in taking cognizance, which harmoniouslyproceeds and at the same time confirms it. Again and again this thingwill come to light as existent and as it itself is; and likewise in thepossible freely active transition to the other things that lie in the so-to­speak indefinite-definite open horizon, that is to say, within the regionof the world constantly co-posited and known in the all-inclusivehorizon-consciousness.

Inseparable from it, as can easily be seen, is the evidence belongingto every past phase of my life into which I am able freely to put myselfback: acting freely, I could have modified my past experience in freerealization of my practical possibilities at that time, could have becomeacquainted on all sides with the past world as it was, the world which,in the empirical evidentness of the process of harmony that continuallyruns up to the present experience, was the same one that still is, exceptthat it has been altered in the objective-temporal change of its realstates.

In the continually successful total process of fulfilling realization ofthe ever still intended world-sense-and not only in the subjectively but

also in the intersubjectivelY communalized process-the future and in­finitely continuable realization of the process is always confirming it­self, and, to be sure, in the form of cognitive processes of increasingperfection. But precisely thereby the actual being of the world itself isconfirmed as a telos-lying at infinity-of this process of ever moreperfect realization, which can at all times be freely continued (in theconsciousness of the "I could," "anyone could," or "could have"). Inthe purely transcendental meditation, then, "the world itself" offersitself only as a peculiar truth-sense of a higher level coming to light inactual subjectivity or intersubjectivity, namely, as an idea constitutingitself in the immanent form of grounded acceptance. Its equivalent isthe idea of the conceived totality of truths cognizable ad infinitum,truths related to all objects of actual and possible experience. It pre­delineates for all cognizing subjects a universal law for these with regardto the totality of the experiences and experiential theoretizings possiblein them.

The foregoing discussion will, in its rough outlines of arguments tobe carried out, suffice to give clarity to the opening proposition and, atthe same time, [suffice] to give evidence of a powerfully motivated an­ticipation. In any case, what has been said can serve to give bolder reliefto the motivation, which was awakened already in the first, highly un­refined, and unclear attempts at transcendental world interpretation.It will also make it understandable why great philosophers whosegenius announced itself in the very fact that their anticipatory evidencereached so much further than they could make clear to themselves inexplicative particular intuitions or could make precise to themselves inoriginally created concepts, even as first theoretical approximations­why they saw themselves forced to a transcendental-subjective con­sideration of the world, where, of course, they encountered ready ob­jections from the natural manner of thought, which they passed overwithout really being able to dispose of them.

But here a more detailed discussion is needed.

V. The Justification of Transcendental "Idealism": ItsSystematic Scientific Execution

Even though we have made clear to ourselves in a rough general waythe fact that, and the way in which "the world" constitutes itself asaccepted sense in transcendental context, that is to say, purely in thesense-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-

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tradietion to unassailable truths of the natural, positive cognition of theworld.

The world of which we speak and always can speak, of which we knowand always can know, is after all none other than that very one whichwe constitute in the immanence of our own, individual, and com­munalized conscious life in the indicated multiplicities of self-unifyingcognitive formations. That world is the one which we as cognizing per­sons continually "have" and continually strive after as a cognitivegoal, and, finally, it is our mere "idea." Is it not precisely the necessaryfunction of the transcendental attitude to make visible and completelyevident through the consistency of the purely subjective sort of medita­tion that in the total province of possible cognition nothing can occurother than the cognitive formation constituting itself therein by itsown performance? This is to say, nowhere else can the world, or anypossible world, have "existence" but "in" the cognizing subjects, "in"the fact-so evident to them-of their conscious life and in their essen­tial "capacities."

Against this very claim the naturally thinking person will raise hisdecisive objection. Quite obviously, he will say, one must distinguishbetween the world itself, which exists in and for itself, and the subjectivecognitive formations by means of which subjects relate themselves tothe world. It is patent nonsense, he will say, to assume that the worldis in us as mere sense-formation, as an idea, when we ourselves are, afterall-as no reasonable person can ever doubt-mere components of theworld.

The transcendental philosopher, of course, would not be embarrassedfor an answer here. He would, first of all, point out that, just as is thecase with any senseful difference, so also that all-familiar one betweenobjects in their being in and for themselves and cognized objectscreates its original and legitimate sense out of the cognizing conscious­ness. In accordance with this latter, however, the cognitionally realizedreal 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, fromthe outset is thought of as belonging to the open horizon of our possiblecognition. Only the tension between imperfect cognition, with itsmany modes of empty intention and fulfilling intuition, and ideallyperfect cognition remains. Is an idea lying at infinity less a cognitiveformation by virtue of its ideality, less situated in the horizon of con­sciousness of each subjectivity itself, which approaches the idea as itscognitive goal and in all its genuine cognitions realizes a small part oran 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 asobjects in the world, it is indeed resolvable. Not the pure subjects inwhose conscious life all objects are cognitive goals of intersubjectiveexperience and cognition through the logic of experience-not theseare objects in the world and as such themselves again "phenomena,"but rather, the psychophysical subjects are, the human beings and theirhuman "psychic life." Even the ego, which for Descartes, in the stageof approach to the possible nonexistence of the objective world, was leftover as indubitable subject of indubitably streaming cogitationes, wasnot the psychophysical real Ego of these human beings.

Such answers surely have their value. But for the actual resolution ofthe great difficulties in which the change of attitudes and evidences, thenatural and the transcendental, entangles one, they do not suffice. Anunderstanding clarification of the sense of a world, the one existing andso existing for the cognizing subjectivity only out of its own perform­ance of consciousness, can never arise out of merely argumentative de­liberations that move in generalities remote from things instead ofproducing the actual insight required here through the concrete andsystematic study of transcendental subjectivity grasped in purity andfirst of all concretely seen, and of the extremely numerous sorts of con­sciousness and performances of consciousness. In fact, one must strivefor actual insight into how objective sense of every sort and how objec­tive truth arise in pure consciousness; how the sense-constituting con­sciousness looks, so to speak, according to its essential sort and essentialstructures; and correlatively, how the sense actually arising therein itselflooks in such originary genuineness. The solution of this problemwhich, at bottom, already is a moving force in Locke's doctrine oforigin-but through fateful implications works itself out in a sense­perverted form there, the solution may for its part entangle us in ex­tremely difficult investigations. Difficulties, however, are there in orderto be overcome. But they are not overcome if one shies away from thetoil of making oneself familiar with the peculiarity of the transcendentalmode of consideration through actual practice and therefore nevercomes to the point of even understanding the enormous tasks that havearisen for philosophy with the discovery of the transcendental sphereas one that is absolutely independent of all objective presuppositions.

Even the first philosophers who, following Descartes but with radicalconsistency, practiced the transcendental sort of consideration and(although still imperfectly and in all-too-great generality) reflected onthe immanent cognitive-formations-Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume­even they recognized that herewith novel insights of unheard-of rangeopened up, indeed, that a reshaping of the total world-view established

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by the philosophers of the past seemed to be required. Thus idealismmade its appearance in history in very different, and very differently tobe evaluated, forms, and raised an unremitting demand for a scientificexecution. However, from the universal anticipations of a transcen­dental world-view as a novel form of metaphysical world-interpretation,it was a very long way to a science with concretely formed work-prob­lems and effective, systematically connected theories. One first of allhad to learn to see in the new attitude, to grasp the peculiar essence ofintentionality and its achievement, to distinguish the many specialforms of pure consciousness and its sense-formations. Only then couldvague problems be made exact by means of originally created transcen­dental concepts, and only then could transcendental method as well astheory become possible.

VI. Kant's Sketch of a First System of Scientific TranscendentalPhilosophy

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 guidingproblem, once he saw it-the problem of the transcendental sense of acognizable objectivity and of a science claiming cognitive acceptance insubjective insights-and that in the decades of the most devoted re­search he sketched a first system of a scientific transcendental philoso­phy. From the beginning certain individual problems guided him as agenuine scientist, those which had grown out of his philosophical con­sideration of mathematics and mathematical natural science and outof the critical awareness of the inadequacy of contemporary ontology;problems which revealed themselves in their transcendental sense witha deeper penetration and led him to the independent discovery of anovel "metaphysics," the transcendental or "critical" over against the"dogmatic."

Transcendental philosophy in the process of development assumes aspecial theoretical stamp, by virtue of the fact that its primary attentionremains directed toward the sciences and the problems of transcen­dental "possibility" that arrange themselves according to their prin­cipal types. He was the first to come to consider science not merelyobjectively as theories of objective actualities and possibilities, butrather, under a consistent transcendental aspect, as subjective cognitiveperformances in the consciousness generally. Completely new is themanner 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. Thishappens in the sense of the original regressive way of putting the ques­tion: under which forms of concept and law must an objective world(a nature) stand in general, which is supposed to be experienceable asone and the same world for all cognizers in the synthesis of possibleexperience and then further is supposed to be cognizable in subsequenttheoretical cognitions; and to be sure in truths and sciences which canbe attained by anyone with the necessary validity, therefore accordingto methods which, running their course in subjective cognitive pro­cesses, must attain and vouch for something necessarily acceptable ingeneral-?

Perhaps the future will agree in this: the profound obscurities ofKant's theories, which can after all be accepted as signs of a not ulti­mately scientific foundation, have their definite ground in the fact thatKant, having come from the W olffian ontology, remains, even in thetranscendental attitude, ontologically interested. That is to say, hisstudy, like his peculiar problematics, was almost exclusively concernedwith the forms of sense and truth and the sense-moments necessarilybelonging to them with objective force. On the other hand, he con­siders as dispensable for settling his problematics the systematic execu­tion of a correlative, concretely intuitive study of subjectivity in itsperformance and conscious functions, its passive and active conscioussyntheses, in which all kinds of objective sense and objective right takeshape. However great his first profound insights were into the a prioriof the sense-bestowal by the conscious life and the connections ofsense-bestowal and sense itself-especially under the title "subjectivededuction" (in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason)­nevertheless, he did not recognize that a transcendental philosophycannot be narrowed down in the way in which he believed he could doit and a radically clear, that is to say, radical scientific working out ofsuch a philosophy is possible only if the concretely full conscious lifeand conscious performance is subjected to study on all its correla­tive sides, and with all its differentiations-and that all done withinthe framework of the unified, concretely intuitive, transcendentalsubjectivity.

A transcendental logic is possible only in a transcendental noetics;transcendental theories of objective sense-formations are, if fully ade­quate and therefore absolute cognition is to be acquired, inseparablefrom the transcendental essence-investigation of the life shaping theobjective sense. These theories ultimately lead back to a most universalstudy of the essence of consciousness in general-to a "transcendental

phenomenology." That is precisely what forces one to widen Kant'speculiar concept "transcendental," on which our presentation has beenbased from the outset.

But whatever stance one might take on Kant's own delimitation oftranscendental philosophy, he was, as I already said, the first to bring itinto the form of theory actually being worked out. In particular, he wasthe first who, in gigantic sketches, embarked on the attempt, whichmust be made again and again until there is full success, of makingnature, first of all the nature of intuition and that of mathematicalnatural science, theoretically understandable, as a formation consti­tuting itself in the internality of transcendental subjectivity. The samemust be carried out for all realms of the naturally-naIvely experiencedworld and therefore also for all sciences. Here-in our time a keenly feltdesideratum-the manifold human socialities and the cultural forma­tions arising in their communal life, therefore also the cultural sciencesrelated to them, must be brought into the transcendental considerationas "objects of possible experience," and Kant's "prejudice for naturalscience" must be overcome.

VII. Historical Development of the Transcendental Philosophyand its Practical Significance

If I were permitted to reach farther out beyond the universal idea oftranscendental philosophy and enter into the special contents of Kant'stheories, there would, of course, still be much to say that would redoundto his fame. One would have to point to the many great particular dis­coveries which Kant came upon almost everywhere in his theoretizing;discoveries, of course, each of which bears the inscription: "Earn me inorder to possess me." Things went with transcendental philosophymuch the same as, e.g., with the infinitesimal calculus: although it wasoriginally created through theory, a work of centuries was required toproduce the true theory in which it could itself for the first time attaingenuine form and unassailable existence. In our case, where a radicalrevolution in the entire natural manner of thinking was required and acompletely novel, absolutely self-enclosed realm of cognition was un­covered, in which what had never been seen could be seen and whathad never been thought could be thought, the imperfections of thefirst scientific appropriation had to be much greater still. To a particu­larly high degree, therefore, the problems, methods, theories that firstoffered themselves were encumbered with unclarified presuppositionswhich did not allow them to become evident in a completely satis­factory way. Accordingly, the task given to the future had to be much

more difficult: to penetrate to presuppositionless and self-evident be­ginnings; to develop the appropriate method; to outline the actuallyradical problematics, and finally to build up a theory systematicallythat could be justified with finality.

And so we now may be able to understand why in transcendentalphilosophy we have until now missed a continual ascent of the sortthat modern mathematics has shown from the beginning; indeed, whylong and not yet concluded struggles were required for it to make goodits peculiar right and privilege as opposed to the positive sciences-butalso first and foremost to work out in these struggles the ultimatelyjustifiable pure sense of a transcendental philosophy and transcendentalmethod. It is not only that the most deeply ingrained habits of thenatural manner of cognition had to be broken; here there was lackingalso the never-failing propaganda power of the other side's technicalsuccesses. Transcendental philosophy, a very useless art, does not aidthe lords and masters of this world, the politicians, engineers, indus­trialists. But perhaps it is no reproach that on the theoretical level itdelivers us from absolutizing this world and opens to us the only pos­sible scientific gate leading to the-in the higher sense-only true world,the world of absolute mind. And perhaps it is also the theoretical func­tion of a praxis, and of precisely that one in which the supreme andultimate interests of humanity must of necessity become effective.

VIII. The Sense of a Succession to Kant

In this manner, therefore, we understand the imperishable signifi­cance of Kant's scientific life's work, and therewith is revealed to us themagnitude of the task in its entirety to which we and all future genera­tions are called. Above all, and at first without raising any questionsabout Kant's special theses and theories which so impressively deter­mine the character of his specific philosophical apprehension of theworld, we must recognize the idea of a transcendental philosophy(which came into its first but only preliminary existence as theory inhis philosophy) as the eternal sense which was, as it were, innate in thehistorical development of philosophy, and which remains forever in­separable from its further development. In any case, it had its firstactual existence, as idea in germinal form, in Descartes' Meditationsand thus it forthwith became the moving developmental sense of spe­cifically modern philosophy, its intention, spiritedly driving it andworking itself out in it. Once the ego cogito was seen as the pure, self­contained cognizing subjectivity, seen, that is, as the universal ground ofcognition for everything that can ever be cognized, and once it was

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accordingly recognized as the primal source of philosophical methodand made current in literature, there was opened up, for philosophicalthinkers of later time, an intentional horizon which unconditionallyhad to be explored; there was awakened the idea of a philosophy whichunconditionally had to be brought to fulfilling clarity and actualization.

Although it may at first still have appeared that everything hereamounted to a philosophy new only in method and one that neededonly to be equipped with more profoundly secure theoretical contents,a philosophy which, obviously, would retain the only general metaphy­sical style hitherto conceivable, nevertheless, as the transcendentalmotive of the method became effective, its genuine, revolutionary sensehad to reveal itself. Finally, an actual transcendental philosophy had toattain to active scientific realization, which made evident the basicessential novelty of the philosophy demanded by this development. Ithad to become evident that what had achieved actuality in it, becausederived from the absolutely ultimate source of all method, could claimwith a previously unheard-of force to present, at least in its completelynovel essential type, the only possible philosophy, or, better, to bring acompletely novel philosophy to its first institution.

In this manner Kant's critique of reason has the significance that init, at last, the philosophical revolution incipient in the historicallyemerging philosophy of the modern age became fact. With its appear­ance there was revealed to philosophy itself the methodological formessentially necessary to it as scientifically true philosophy, that is to say,the genuine teleological idea which all further developments muststrive 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 clarityand purity through a radical exploration of transcendental subjectivityas the field in which all method originates. To this purely shaped sensethe significance of a legitimately and consciously guiding teleologicalidea then had to be given, which, as a disclosed entelechy, made possiblethe most rational and incomparably the most fruitful form of philoso­phical development: the idea of a most genuine self-vindicating sciencein the ultimate and most rigorous sense.

It is essential to philosophy, ideally speaking, that it first attain trueand genuine existence in the highest and most conscious clarity aboutthe universal methodological, systematic form which it must satisfy asits guiding formal final idea and must fulfill by actual theories. In otherwords, it exists in the true sense only insofar as it has, in active reflectionand insight, incorporated in itself this its rational teleological idea and,in continually and consciously determining itself according to this idea,

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has prescribed for its coming-into-being the form of a rational develop­ment, one vigorously directed toward its genuine teleological sense.

According to all this, Kant's revolutionizing in philosophy is for usnot a merely historical fact, but historically the first (and still imperfect)actualization of a turn predelineated in the essential sense of philosophyitself in its development from the natural to the transcendental methodof cognition, from the positive or dogmatic to the transcendental cog­nition and science of the world; the turn, we can also say, from the naIvepositive stage of world-cognition to a world-cognition through ultimateself-consciousness of cognition-but not in emptying generalities-con­cerning its active accomplishments, under the titles of reason, truth,science.

At the same time, there arises for us, out of the insights attained, theright sense in which we must understand and challenge Kant's follow­ing: to take over his system as it is or to improve its details, this is notwhat is necessary above all else, but rather to understand the ultimatesense of his revolution-and to understand him better than he himself,the trailblazer, but not the perfecter, was capable of doing. This under­standing, however, must be expressed in a scientifically basic way; aphilosophy that is scientific in the most rigorous sense, that accordingto its essence is beginning without presuppositions, needs first of all toderive its ABC's, so to speak, from original consciousness, and by meansof this, it must attain its ultimately valid theoretical form of develop­ment that lifts it out above the play of philosophical systems. Thelegacy of Kant, therefore, will be not abandoned but rather perpetuated,by clarifying and making full use of its absolute contents. Whether hissystematic world-view would thereby be retained, even in its generalstyle, is, on the other hand, a completely secondary question.

There has been no lack of serious efforts in such a spirit, especiallyin the last decades. These efforts have in any case seen to it that thedanger of having the transcendental idea completely submerged-as aresult of the sense-perverting misunderstandings of the innermostmotives of Kant, as well as those of his predecessors in transcendentalphilosophy-can be considered as overcome, even though the philoso­phical world-literature of our time, seen as a mass phenomenon, stillyields a different total picture.

For decades our Freiburg in particular has been a place where theKantian intentions seek their philosophical effects, even if in quitevaried forms. However much the phenomenological direction that is atpresent represented here goes its own way in the range of its prob­lematics and its formulation, and even in the principles of its method,and however little it was directly determined by Kant and Kantian

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William E. PohlInstructor in GermanTexas Christian University

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schools-it must also, in all reactivation of older and oldest motives ofthinking and in the shaping of completely new ones-recognize that itis an attempt to lend truth to the deepest sense of Kantian philoso­phizing; at least, if the interpretation that we have thought throughtogether at this hour has its legitimacy.

In any case, we see ourselves completely at one with Kant in thatendeavoring to actualize transcendental philosophy not in the spirit ofa world-view that accommodates itself to the needs of the time, butrather in the spirit of a rigorous science striving toward the idea ofultimate validity.

And so we may dare to hope that Kant's spirit will affably accept ourmodest thank-offering.

Translated by:Ted E. Klein, Jr.Associate Professor of PhilosophyTexas Christian University

..The Method of Clarificatl

EDMUND HUSSERL

The investigation just carried out Sl

between phenomenology and ontolo.its significance for the clarification ofpsychological) method in a definite <:

problems are cleared up-problems 0

dardizations of the connected phendescriptions. It lies in the nature ofachievements which the whole of OUI

continually applied to itself reflectivesources it must bring to fullest claritytices. There is no science behind it, C

Any obscurity which remains for it preof confusions and the like to creep ingical results, and also for misinterpremethod and the abuses bound up witthe most radical rigor, which for its 1illumination in the method of clarificdropped the word which is to form tlgations. For what has been presentedmentioned in the theory of the redl

* Translators' Note: The text publishedlation is Chapter IV of Ideen zu einer rein<gischen Philosophie, Drittes Buch: Die PhilWissenschaften, edited by Marly Biemel asMartinus Nijhoff, 1952), pp. 93-105. Tlldeen III.

We are grateful to Dr. H. J. H. Hartgeripermission on behalf of the publisher and th,lation. General information about this thiJfound in the editor's introduction to Husserwork owe their gratitude to James Street Fuat Rice University.

Copyright © 1952 by Martinus Nijhoff.Copyright © 1974 by Ted E. Klein, Jr. an

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