grasp the self as more than a mere bundle of sense impressions. Admit-
ting that we do not know the world as it is “in itself,” the defenders of
the transcendental turn argue that such naive belief is unnecessary to
justify our everyday experiences, much less to account for our scientific
knowledge of the world. In fact, such an uncritical stance, they argue,
leaves us vulnerable to the skeptical objections of Hume and others. For
Husserl, this transcendental turn becomes synonymous with doing phil-
osophy itself. And this, we shall see, generated considerable ambiguity
both on his part and especially on that of Sartre and Maurice Merleau-
Ponty with regard to the so-called transcendental “reduction.”
Though Husserl accepts the transcendental turn precisely for its
presumed ability to warrant our scientific knowledge,paceKant, he does
not confine us to a world that only allows sense perception (even when
enlightened by our mental categories) to increase our knowledge.^37 In
other words, Husserl admits our capacity to achieve intellectual intu-
itions; that is, the kind of “aha” experiences or insights that scientists
and others look for but which, for Kant, only a Divine mind enjoys.
Recall that it was Levinas’s book on the concept of intuition in Husserl’s
philosophy that reportedly drew Sartre into phenomenology. As he
defines it inTranscendence of the Ego, “intuition, according to Husserl,
puts us in the presence ofthe thing”(TE 95 ). Indeed, Husserl’s motto
was “to the things themselves” (zu den Sachen selbst). The immediate
(that is, intuitive) grasp of the object as it presents itself is the terminus
of a phenomenological description. So phenomenology is a kind of
empiricism, one that accepts and seeks intuitive knowledge.^38
(^37) This is a reference to Kant’s famous claim that “thoughts without content are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind” (ibid.,A 51 /B 75 .).
(^38) Sartre wants to stress this point by claiming that phenomenology is concerned with facts,
though he admits in a note that Husserl calls it a “science of essences.” Sartre rather boldly
asserts that “from the viewpoint that we are now assuming, that comes down to the same
thing” (TE 95 , n. b). That is a curious equivalency in view of Husserl’s unqualified
commitment to the distinction between essence and fact (the a priori and the empirical).
On the other hand, it does resonate with Sartre’s “nominalism” for which he was noted at
the E ́cole and which slips into his understanding of “essence” as “the principle of the series
of manifestations of an object” (BNxlvi;EN 12 ) and “the synthetic connection of the
appearances” (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self,” trans. Mary
Ellen and Nathaniel Lawrence, inReadings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. Nathaniel
Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967 ], 120 ; hereafter
CSKS;TE 245 ). But even granting Sartre’s stipulation in the present essay and respecting
the strategic function of this remark, one must point out that Husserl insists inIdeasthat
68 Teaching in the lyce ́e, 1931–1939