PHENOMENOLOGY 1071
self-experience and purely psychical data? This difficulty, even since Brentano’s dis-
covery of intentionality, as the fundamental character of the psychical, has blinded
psychologists to the possibilities of phenomenological psychology. The psychologist
finds his self-consciousness mixed everywhere with “external” experience, and non-
psychical realities. For what is experienced as external belongs not to the intentional
“internal,” though our experience of it belongs there as an experience of the external.
The phenomenologist, who will only notice phenomena, and know purely his own
“life,” must practice an <epoche ̄>. He must inhibit every ordinary objective “posi-
tion,” and partake in no judgement concerning the objective world. The experience
itself will remain what it was, an experience of this house, of this body, of this world
in general, in its particular mode. For one cannot describe any intentional experience,
even though it be “illusory,” a self-contradicting judgment and the like, without
describing what in the experience is, as such, the object of consciousness.
Our comprehensive <epoche ̄>puts, as we say, the world between brackets,
excludes the world which is simply there! from the subject’s field, presenting in its
stead the so-and-so-experienced-perceived-remembered-judged-thought-valued-etc.,
world, as such, the “bracketed” world. Not the world or any part of it appears, but the
“sense” of the world. To enjoy phenomenological experience we must retreat from
the objects posited in the natural attitude to the multiple modes of their “appearance,”
to the “bracketed” objects.
The phenomenological reduction to phenomena, to the purely psychical, advances
by two steps: (1) systematic and radical <epoche ̄>of every objectifying “position” in an
experience, practised both upon the regard of particular objects and upon the entire atti-
tude of mind, and (2) expert recognition, comprehension and description of the manifold
“appearances” of what are no longer “objects” but “unities” of “sense.” So that the phe-
nomenological description will comprise two parts, description of the “noetic” (
or “experiencing” and description of the “noematic” (
Phenomenological experience, is the only experience which may properly be called
“internal” and there is no limit to its practice. And as a similar “bracketing” of objective,
and description of what then “appears” (<“noema” in “noesis”>), can be performed upon
the “life” of another self which we represent to ourselves, the “reductive” method can be
extended from one’s own self-experience to one’s experience of other selves. And,
further, that society, which we experience in a common consciousness, may be reduced
not only to the intentional fields of the individual consciousness, but also by the means of
an inter-subjective reduction, to that which unites these, namely the phenomenological
unity of the social life. Thus enlarged, the psychological concept of internal experience
reaches its full extent.
But it takes more than the unity of a manifold “intentional life,” with its insepara-
ble complement of “sense-unities,” to make a “soul.” For from the individual life that
“ego-subject” cannot be disjoined, which persists as an identical ego or “pole,” to the
particular intentions, and the “habits” growing out of these. Thus the “inter-subjective,”
phenomenologically reduced and concretely apprehended, is seen to be a “society” of
“persons,” who share a conscious life.
Phenomenological psychology can be purged of every empirical and psycho-
physical element, but, being so purged, it cannot deal with “matters of fact.” Any closed
field may be considered as regards its “essence,” its
factual side of our phenomena, and use them as “examples” merely. We shall ignore
individual souls and societies, to learn their a priori,their “possible” forms. Our thesis
will be “theoretical,” observing the invariable through variation, disclosing a typical