In a programmatic essay from 1911, outlining his idea of philosophy, Husserl asks:

How can experience as consciousness give or make contact with an object? How can experiences be mutually legitimated or corrected by means of each other, and not merely replace each other or confirm each other subjectively? How can the play of a consciousness whose logic is empirical make objectively valid statements, valid for things that are in and for themselves? Why are the playing rules, so to speak, of consciousness not irrelevant for things? How is natural science to be comprehensible in absolutely every case, to the extent that it pretends at every step to posit and to know a nature that is in itself- in itself in opposition to the subjective flow of consciousness? (Husserl, 1965: 87–88).12

Husserl’s earlier “analytic” phenomenology (in the Investigations) also tried to answer the above questions but was unable to adequately clarify the ambivalence of the subjective activity making objective knowledge possible. Using descriptive and psychological categories in the Investigations, Husserl effectively bypassed any account of non-empirical factors, for example, the “ego-pole” as center of all experience, and ignored the more basic constitutive sources of meaning and knowledge. In other words, Husserl’s original studies of consciousness took cognitive acts to be intentionally directed but also viewed them as methodologically divorced from any deeper analysis of the internally apprehended noetic sources of those same acts. Later, after the Ideas I, Husserl comes to publically maintain that the “ego cogito”, now understood as an “ego-pole” of pure experiences, indicates an “openly infinite” multiplicity of particular concrete subjective processes centered within a “transcendental ego”.

Embracing a transcendental approach leads Husserl to transform phenomenology into a much more ambitious undertaking, one seeking a broader account of experience than was found in his initial descriptive studies. The turn to the subject in the later Husserl is also accompanied by a subsequent method for obtaining adequate knowledge of the proper foundations for a transcendental project, that is, the transcendental phenomenological reduction. The term reduction (from the Latin re-ducere: to lead back) suggests the radical movement towards interiority that characterizes this direct and immediate contact with the world of experience. Pure phenomenology, according to Husserl, will explore experience before we apply our conceptual categories and scientific theories to its lived meanings.Footnote 7 Since Husserl’s later approach is “transcendental” we might here question the validity of calling the insights he is seeking “internal”. This assumption, however, fails to take into account the epistemological aims involved in the use of the method of reduction, as well as Husserl’s simultaneous commitment to a non-deflationary yet also anti-representationalist view of consciousness. Briefly, if the reduction is a way of relating to the already existing world, and if the world reveals itself to us directly in what Husserl calls “positing acts”, then the immanently present psychological mental acts in their intentional world-directed nature must be the access point to initiating the reduction. In fact they form the only possible access point. To think otherwise is to fall prey to the objectivist bias of the natural attitude. In this respect, the factors that led Husserl to radicalize his earlier phenomenological approach can here be noted. Where the earlier descriptive studies posited a separation between internal and psychological, that is, concrete but subjective, acts of consciousness as distinct from the ideal species and adequately grasped meanings, a significant change about the sense of the terms “factual” and “essential” takes place in his thinking between 1900 and 1912 (culminating in the publication of Ideas I in 1913).

In the Logical Investigations Husserl opposes the “real” to both the “ideal” and the “universal” (cf. Husserl, 2001, vol. 1, Inv. I, §3; 8/Husserl, 1984, vol. 2, p. 101; 123). By the time of the Ideas I, however, (and continuing into later writings) what is “real” comes to signify what Husserl calls the “transcendent” (of the ego-pole) content with “irreal being” now equated to the immanent being of pure consciousness. What this amounts to, beyond the introduction of a “transcendental ego” delimiting a new conception of the unity of subjective life, is a reinterpretation of the fact/essence distinction. Husserl reinterprets the categories of “fact” and “essence” against a new distinction between what he calls “immanence” and “transcendence” now explored in light of sustained attempts to highlight the most basic foundations of knowledge as constituted by conscious acts.

Around 1907, Husserl clarifies that the distinction between fact and essence can actually be found within the realm of “pure consciousness” conceived as an interior sphere of egoic-life.14 Factual and “absolute phenomena” (now called, in allusion to Descartes, cogitationes) are held to be immanent in the sense relevant to the phenomenologist. Yet, what Husserl calls “logical modifications” of cogitationes, including their singular, specific and generic essences, are now described as immanent in a new sense. Since an essence does not possess its being as a “reell” part of the stream of consciousness, what is essential cannot be immanent in the stronger “phenomenological” sense of that term. Therefore interiority, transcendentally apprehended and revealed in phenomenologically reduced consciousness, has (for Husserl) a different mode of being than subjective and real mental processes. In this way, a new understanding of transcendence (called “transcendence in immanence”) is stressed by Husserl. Transcendence in immanence can be distinguished from the transcendence manifested by transcendent objects and ideal essences, even if both of the latter are now revealed only in the former. So the focus on interiority comes to have a more central and elaborate role in Husserl’s phenomenology even as he radicalizes and expands the meaning of intentionality by applying the reduction. For this reason, Husserl’s “ontologically motivated” distinction of interiority from external being through use of the reduction, once again, requires qualification.

While true that, in the first part of the Ideas I, Husserl introduces his transcendental phenomenology by focusing on formal and material ontologies (as “regions”, cf. Husserl, 1980, §§ 9–17, 18–32), this focus on existence now becomes a transcendental exercise. Husserl’s “regions of being” are not meant to designate transcendent being (the natural world-horizon). Making use of the phenomenological reduction, Husserl is concerned with how objectivity is “constituted” (made sense of) by examining purely immanent possibility conditions. In the Ideas I, for example, consciousness is ultimately conceived of as a region unto itself.Footnote 8 Here, and elsewhere, consciousness is equated to a primal region (Urregion) grounding all others (Husserl, 1980, § 33, 65–66). This is not because, as immanent being, consciousness is opposed to or metaphysically removed from worldly existence by Husserl; rather he came to believe that consciousness is what establishes access to the world for us in its “factical” (faktisch) sense. In the Ideas I, Husserl both introduces a preliminary version of the paradox of subjectivity (it would more prominently resurface and also be officially named in the Crisis manuscript) and gives unquestionable support to an internalist account of justifying beliefs. In Ideas I paragraph 53, he writes:

…on the one hand consciousness is said to be the absolute in which everything transcendent and, therefore, ultimately the whole psychophysical world, becomes constituted; and, on the other hand, consciousness is said to be a subordinate real event within that world. How can these statements be reconciled? (Husserl, 1980: 124)

And in paragraph 54 we find the following:

All empirical unities, and, therefore, also psychological mental processes, are indices pointing to concatenations of absolute mental processes having a distinctive essential formation, along with which other formations are imaginable; all are, in the same sense, transcendent, merely relative, accidental. One must convince oneself that the obviousness with which every mental process in one’s own life or in another’s is accepted, and quite legitimately, as a psychological and psychophysical sequence of states of an animate subject, has its limit in the aforementioned consideration: that in contrast to the empirical mental process there stands, as a presupposition for the sense of that process, the absolute mental process; that the latter is not a metaphysical construction but rather something which, in its absoluteness, can become indubitably demonstrated, given in direct intuition by a corresponding change in one’s attitude. One must convince oneself that anything psychical, in the sense relevant to psychology, psychical personality, psychical properties, mental processes or states, are empirical unities and are, therefore, like other realities of every kind and level, merely unities of intentional “constitution” in its sense, truly existing: intuitable, experienceable, scientifically determinable on the basis of experience, but still “merely intentional” and hence merely “relative.” To take them as existing in the absolute sense is consequently a countersense (Husserl, 1980: 128).

Husserl is, therefore, obviously interested in interiority as a possibility condition of “sense-making” activities for all living rational beings. He is also now quite adamant that no logical-abstract or empirical (including psychological) approach to conceptualizing interiority is sufficient for fully grasping its depths. This means that the immanent actuality of transcendentally apprehended consciousness, in its full significance, cannot be captured in any “eidetic” reduction and instead requires the more radical transcendental phenomenological reduction.16 It does not mean that the space of interiority is understood negatively or viewed as what constitutes a hidden realm derived from external transcendent structures or spatio-temporal and causally conditioned external events and relations. Husserl’s position, however, is problematic due to its failure to fully engage with, and outline a metaphysical account of, what can be called the “noematic correlates” of noetic activity. Here, some comments on how Husserl’s static-phenomenological understanding of interiority connects to the immanence of the phenomenological ground uncovered in the reduction will prove useful.

In moving from bracketing the world (through the epoché), and after actualizing the transcendental phenomenological reduction to capture the true sense of the immediate internal acts of perception in reflection, nothing less than the neutralization of the “doxic-positing” (Setzen) of being is said to be achieved. Therefore, from an initial suspension of what Husserl calls “the natural attitude”, all connection to the worldly “being-sense” of objects can be said to be analogously suspended (Husserl, 1980, §§ 31–32, 57–62). The suspension of the “being sense” of natural worldly life is not, however, an abstract transformation of the data of empirical consciousness, or a reflection of the external world inside our minds. This turn inwards is instead viewed by Husserl as a deepening of the full sense of normal, worldly, object-taking conscious acts. Instead of taking consciousness for granted, however, we now grasp how positing acts work to give rise to the natural supposition (Vermutung) of an external world. Examining the implications of these experiential accomplishments reflectively is what allows the intentionality of consciousness to be viewed as a theme for exploration. Husserl then introduces new terminology (the noesis-noema correlation) for thematizing the fact that doxic acts are always object-taking (cf. Husserl, 2001b: 17–22; 267).Footnote 9 However, as mentioned, this initial static account of the transcendental reduction remains unsatisfactory since no ontological analysis accompanies Husserl’s descriptive phenomenological accounts of the structures of experience.18

After expanding his studies to include further analyses of temporality (mostly excluded from the Ideas I), and after stressing the intersubjective nature of transcendental experience, Husserl came to hold that an even deeper (but passive) level of constitution exists.Footnote 10 In his later writings, he attempts to more clearly formulate this distinction between a deeper sphere of interiority and related levels of immanence contributing to the constitution of meaning. The internal horizon (complementing the external horizon of the world) is thus equated to the realm of transcendental subjectivity. For the mature Husserl, furthermore, all doxic-positing in the transcendental attitude comes to be viewed as a modal modification of intentional horizontal consciousness (Längsintentionalität). As a consequence of transcendental intentional analysis what is “interior” now gains yet another perspective from which to be apprehended in relation to objective structures. The phenomenological reduction (later undergoing yet another critical modification into what can be called an “apodictic” reduction, cf. Husserl, 2002: 178) is now articulated by Husserl as incrementally allowing further and more radically dynamic perspectives on interiority.20 The later Husserl introduces the term “transcendental experience” in order to study what he calls these “essential structures” revealed by deeper insights into passive aspects of consciousness. In his exploration of internal time consciousness, for example, Husserl came to believe that the flow of time opens a new dimension of transcendence for the ego. Since time is the essential condition against which all conscious acts unfold, a pre-temporal vertical intentionality (Querintentionalität) must complement horizontal intentional acts with the two working in tandem to constitute the deepest level of experience: absolute consciousness (Husserl, 1990: 80–81).Footnote 11

In later studies, Husserl also describes both pure and empirical acts of consciousness as revealing essential data. Regarding the sense of internal factors relating to experience, Husserl gives detailed accounts of how consciousness manifest its very own “felt necessities” that are not to be confused with “causal” factors influencing knowledge and, therefore, should not be confused with objective forces outside of experience. “Motivations”, instead, are said to be expressions of internally formed habits, instinctually connecting together subjective life (cf. Husserl, 1989b, §§ 56, 63). However, no causal or genetic laws can be turned to for determining the unfolding of these intentional acts and, in the same way, no externalist account of knowledge attainment can fully explain how knowing subjects can grasp objective facts about the world that can be both intuitively and inter-subjectively confirmed.

By the early 1920’s, therefore, Husserl had come to maintain that no form of neutralization could characterize the absence of doxic positing in an act of pure free fantasy (freie Phantasie) (Husserl, 2001b, § 20). Fantasy or imagination, as internal thought, is, in this way, clearly separated from both acts of memory and other merely subjective forms of image consciousness. These later formulations have consequences for how the mature Husserl comes to clarify his method of eidetic variation which, in turn, influences his understanding of both adequate knowledge and apodictic or essential insights.22 Husserl’s studies of inter-subjectivity and the essentially embodied status of cognition also led him to eventually understand truth as fully and actually grasped by an embodied living ego-subject in the Life-world.