“ It is said that our age is of decay. I cannot consider this reproach justified. It is difficult to find in history a time when such a sum of energies has been put in motion and that these energies have acted so successfully. (...) I think our time is great because of its vocation. He suffers only from the skepticism that destroyed the old, debated ideals. And that is why he suffers from the lack of development and lack of strength of a philosophy that is not advanced and insufficiently scientific to be able to overcome skeptical negativism - which calls himself 'positivism' - by means of truthful positivism. Our age only wants to believe in 'realities'. Its strongest task is science; therefore, philosophical science is what our time needs most. Husserl, Philosophy as a Strict Science
Under the influence of Stuart Mill, for whom logic is but a branch of psychology, the piscologist current had acquired a relevant importance. The most important consequence of the psychologization of logic is the relativism, not only of logic but of all science, while logic is the one that provides the essential foundations of all science.
Husserl reacts against all forms of naturalism and psychologism, even more so against all forms of reductionism, that is, assimilating something into a sphere that does not belong to him. To assimilate logic with psychology, for example, would be nothing but to confuse the fields. While the laws of logic refer to validations, the psychological ones to concrete facts, not knowing this implies relativizing science, that is, moving away from authentic knowledge.
Husserl will call the individual psychic act of thinking noesis and noema the objective content of thought. This distinction will be based on the fact that the content is independent of the act of thought: The example of a calculating machine completely clarifies the difference (...) No one will use arithmetic, rather than mechanical, laws to physically explain the gait of a machine. Husserl
For Husserl this means the proposition of a 'pure logic', that is, a logic independent of all experience and even psychology. In short, this' pure logic 'will be nothing but the intellection of the' essences' and the 'connections' between essences. In this way, it places science in the field of essences.
Hurssel makes a distinction between 'facts' and 'essences' which, together with the classification of 'empirical sciences' and 'eidetic sciences', forms the foundation of science according to its theoretical perspective.
The facts
These can be known through experience and make up the real world which is the total set of objects of experience, that is, possible empirical knowledge.
The facts are studied by the empirical sciences (world sciences), the natural and scientific sciences of the spirit (humanities)
The Essences
Husserl calls' essence 'to what is found in the autarchic being of an individual constituting what he is. They are known by essential intuition (ideation) but not by sensitive intuition (experience). Essences are studied by the sciences of essences, the formal eidetics (logic), which are 'empty' essences and the material eidetics which, having content, deal with the true essences.
In this way, all empirical science (of facts) must have a corresponding eidetic science (ontology). Indeed, Hurssel pointed to a meta-empirical foundation of the science of nautraleza as he tries to save the crisis generated by positivism by denying all metaphysics.
Intentionality is not so much a property of psychic acts but the very structure of consciousness.
For Western philosophy, from Descartes philosophy becomes a philosophy of consciousness. In fact, the Cogito (I think) becomes the starting point of all philosophizing from which one tries to reach the real world. The philosophy of Hurssel is therefore also a philosophy of consciousness, but of intentional consciousness. This means that consciousness, far from being a thing or an empty scope, is a relationship to an object. It is a set of experiences in which a bipolar structure is distinguished:
Intentional act (noesis)
The intenicional object (noema)
In short, he will understand consciousness as' pure consciousness' when it is reduced by phenomenological reduction and will then call 'transcendental' all that refers to the realm of pure consciousness as opposed to the realm of the empirical world.
“Phenomenology” means “science of phenomena”, but unlike other knowledge it deals with modifying them reducing them in such a way that only as reduced phenomena they become part of the phenomenological sphere.
It is remarkable that those phenomena which the raicionalists considered suspicious are Hursserl's starting point, but it should be pointed out that what he considers to be a phenomenon is simply “what appears” or manifests itself in consciousness. Then the phenomenon ceases to be a deceptive appearance to be a manifestation as long as it contains an essence.
Phenomena need to be purified, that is the sense of reduction, which is nothing other than a methodological procedure that allows access to essences and place them in the realm of transcendental consciousness.
There are three types of reduction:
Philosophical reduction: It refers to an abstention, this is not to discuss theories but to stick exclusively to what is given to consciousness, that is, the phenomenon.
Eidetic reduction: Everything that could be individual and contingent in the phenomenon shown either by empirical intuition or by images of fantasy is suspended to remain solely with the essence of the phenomenon. In this way, the phenomenon is purified so that the essence can be intuited.
Transcendental reduction: The natural attitude formed by a set of beliefs necessary for everyday life is put in suspense. This means discarding:
The existence of the world around me and the objects that mate me
The existence of the empirical self itself, its psychic acts and interests.
In this way, as a phenomenological residue, it will remain to pure consciousness, its pure experiences and the contents of these.
The phenomenological reduction is considered by Hursserl the method of access to the work of the new science, because if one wants to philosophize it turns out to abandon the sphere in which the natural attitude places us and to place ourselves in another sphere, that of “pure consciousness”. It is in this transcendental realm that the philosopher stands as a selfless spectator of the life of consciousness.