1074 EDMUNDHUSSERL
psychologically purified to the transcendental, that most general, subjectivity, which
makes the world and its “souls,” and confirms them.
I no longer survey my perception experiences, imagination-experiences, the
psychological data which my psychological experience reveals: I learn to survey
transcendental experience. I am no longer interested in my own existence. I am inter-
ested in the pure intentional life, wherein my psychically real experiences have
occurred. This step raises the transcendental problem (the transcendental being defined
as the quality of that which is consciousness) to its true level. We have to recognize that
relativity to consciousness is not only an actual quality of our world, but, from eidetic
necessity, the quality of every conceivable world. We may, in a free fancy, vary our
actual world, and transmute it to any other which we can imagine, but we are obliged
with the world to vary ourselves also, and ourselves we cannot vary except within the
limits prescribed to us by the nature of subjectivity. Change worlds as we may, each
must ever be a world such as we could experience, prove upon the evidence of our
theories and inhabit with our practice. The transcendental problem is eidetic. My
psychological experiences, perceptions, imaginations and the like remain in form and
content what they were, but I see them as “structures” now, for I am face to face at last
with the ultimate structure of consciousness.
It is obvious that, like every other intelligible problem, the transcendental problem
derives the means of its solution from an existence-stratum, which it presupposes and sets
beyond the reach of its enquiry. This realm is no other than the bare subjectivity of
consciousness in general, while the realm of its investigation remains not less than every
sphere which can be called “objective,” which considered in its totality, and at its root, is the
conscious life. No one, then, can justly propose to solve the transcendental problem by psy-
chology either empirical or eidetic-phenomenological, without petitio principii[begging
the question], for psychology’s “subjectivity” and “consciousness” are not that subjectivity
and consciousness, which our philosophy will investigate. The transcendental reduction
has supplanted the psychological reduction. In the place of the psychological “I” and “we,”
the transcendental “I” and “we” are comprehended in the concreteness of transcendental
consciousness. But though the transcendental “I” is not my psychological “I,” it must not
be considered as if it were a second “I,” for it is no more separated from my psychological
“I” in the conventional sense of separation, than it is joined to it in the conventional sense
of being joined.
Transcendental self-experience may, at any moment, merely by a change of
attitude, be turned back into psychological self-experience. Passing, thus, from the one
to the other attitude, we notice a certain “identity” about the ego. What I saw under the
psychological reflection as “my” objectification, I see under the transcendental reflec-
tion as self-objectifying, or, as we may also say, as objectified by the transcendental “I.”
We have only to recognize that what makes the psychological and transcendental
spheres of experience parallel is an “identity” in their significance, and that what differ-
entiates them is merely a change of attitude, to realize that the psychological and tran-
scendental phenomenologies will also be parallel. Under the more stringent <epoche ̄>
the psychological subjectivity is transformed into the transcendental subjectivity, and
the psychological inter-subjectivity into the transcendental inter-subjectivity. It is this
last which is the concrete, ultimate ground, whence all that transcends consciousness,
including all that is real in the world, derives the sense of its existence. For all objective
existence is essentially “relative,” and owes its nature to a unity of intention, which
being established according to transcendental laws, produces consciousness with its
habit of belief and its conviction.