EDMUND HUSSERL

AN INTRODUCTION TO
PHENOMENOLOGY

Translated by
DORION CAIRNS

MARTI N US NIJH OFF PUBLISHERS

CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

EDMUND HUSSERL

CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

AN INTRODUCTION TO PHENOMENOLOGY

Translated by
DORION CAIRNS

Seventh impression

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First published in i960
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NOTE

This translation is based primarily on the printed text,
edited by Professor S. Strasser and published in the first volume
of Husserliana (Haag, Martinus Nijhoff, 1950). Most of Husserl's
emendations, as given in the Appendix to that volume, have
been treated as if they were part of the text. The others have
been translated in footnotes.

Secondary consideration has been given to a typescript (cited
as "Typescript C") on which Husserl wrote in 1933: "Cartes.
Meditationen / Originaltext 1929 / E. Husserl / fur Dorion
Cairns". Its use of emphasis and quotation marks conforms
more closely to Husserl's practice, as exemplified In works
published during his lifetime. In this respect the translation
usually follows Typescript C. Moreover, some of the variant
readings in this typescript are preferable and have been used
as the basis for the translation. Where that is the case, the
published text is given or translated in a foornote.

The published text and Typescript C have been compared
with the French translation by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel
Levinas (Paris, Armand Collin, 1931). The use of emphasis and
quotation marks in the French translation corresponds more
closely to that in Typescript C than to that in the published
text. Often, where the wording of the published text and that
of Typescript C differ, the French translation indicates that it
was based on a text that corresponded more closely to one or
the other — usually to Typescript C. In such cases the French
translation has been quoted or cited in a foornote.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

§ 1 . Descartes' Meditations as the prototype of philosophi-
cal reflection 1

§ 2. The necessity of a radical new beginning of philosophy 4

FIRST MEDITATION. THE WAY TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

§ 3. The Cartesian overthrow and the guiding final idea

of an absolute grounding of science 7

§ 4. Uncovering the final sense of science by becoming

immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon ... 9

§ 5. Evidence and the idea of genuine science 11

§ 6. Differentiations of evidence. The philosophical de-
mand for an evidence that is apodictic and first in

itself 14

§ 7. The evidence for the factual existence of the world

not apodictic ; its inclusion in the Cartesian overthrow 1 7
§ 8. The ego ^cogito as transcendental subjectivity . ... 18
§ 9. The range covered by apodictic evidence of the' Tarn" 22
§ 10. Digression: Descartes' failure to make the transcen-
dental turn 23

§11. The psychological and the transcendental Ego. The

transcendency of the world 25

SECOND MEDITATION. THE FIELD OF TRANSCENDENTAL EX-
PERIENCE LAID OPEN IN RESPECT OF ITS UNIVERSAL

STRUCTURES

§ 12. The idea of a transcendental grounding of knowledge 27
§ 13. Necessity of at first excluding problems relating to

the range covered by transcendental knowledge ... 29
§ 14. The stream of cogitationes. Cogito and cogiiatum ... 31

§15. Natural and transcendental reflection 33

§ 16. Digression: Necessary beginning of both transcen-
dental " purely psychological" reflection with the
ego cogito 37

VIII CONTENTS

§ 17. The two-sidedness of inquiry into consciousness as
an investigation of correlatives. Lines of description.
Synthesis as the primal form belonging to conscious-
ness 39

§ 18. Identification as the fundamental form of synthesis.

The all-embracing synthesis of transcendental time 41
§ 19. Actuality and potentiality of intentional life . ... 44

§ 20. The peculiar nature of intentional analysis 46

§ 21 . The intentional object as " transcendental clue" ... 50
§ 22. The idea of the universal unity comprising all

objects, and the task of clarifying it constitutionally 53

THIRD MEDITATION. CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS. TRUTH

AND ACTUALITY

§ 23. A more pregnant concept of constitution, under the

titles "reason" and '"unreason" 56

§ 24. Evidence as itself-givenness and the modifications of

evidence 57

§ 25. Actuality and quasi-actuality 58

§ 26. Actuality as the correlate of evident varification . . 59

§ 27. Habitual and potential evidence as functioning consti-

tutively for the sense "existing object" 60

§ 28. Presumptive evidence of world-experience. World
as an idea correlative to a perfect experiential evi-
dence 61

§ 29. Material and formal ontological regions as indexes

pointing to transcendental systems of evidence ... 62

FOURTH MEDITATION. DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSTITUTION-
AL PROBLEMS PERTAINING TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

HIMSELF

§ 30. The transcendental ego inseparable from the processes

making up his life 65

§ 31. The Ego as identical pole of the subjective processes 66

§ 32. The Ego as substrate of habitualities 66

§ 33. The full concretion of the Ego as monad and the

problem of his self-constitution 67

§ 34. A fundamental development of phenomenological

method. Transcendental analysis as eidetic 69

CONTENTS IX

§ 35. Excursus into eidetic Internal psychology 72

§ 36. The transcendental ego as the universe of possible
forms of subjective process. The composslbillty of
subjective processes In coexistence or succession as

subject to eidetic laws 73

§ 37. lime as the universal form of all egological genesis 75

§ 38. Active and passive genesis 77

§ 39. Association as a principle of passive genesis .... 80
§ 40. Transition to the question of transcendental Idealism 81
§41. Genuine phenomenological explication of one's own

"ego coglto" as transcendantal idealism 83

FIFTH MEDITATION. UNCOVERING OF THE SPHERE OF
TRANSCENDENTAL BEING AS MONADOLOGICAL INTER-
SUBJECTIVITY

§ 42. Exposition of the problem of experiencing someone
else, in rejoinder to the objection that phenomenology
entails solipsism 89

§ 43. The noematic-ontic mode of givenness of the Other,
as transcendental clue for the constitutional theory
of the experience of someone else 90

§ 44. Reduction of transcendental experience to the sphere

of ownness 92

§ 45. The transcendental ego, and self-apperception as a
psychophysical man reduced to what is included in
my ownness 99

§ 46. Ownness as the sphere of the actualities and potenti-
alities of the stream of subjective processes 100

§ 47. The intentional object also belongs to the full
monadic concretion of ownness. Immanent transcen-
dence and primordial world 103

§48. The transcendency of the Objective world as be-
longing to a level higher than that of primordial
transcendency 105

§ 49. Predelineation of the course to be followed by in-
tentional explication of experiencing what is other 106

§ 50. The mediate intentionality of experiencing someone

else, as '^presentation" (analogical apperception) . 108

X CONTENTS

§ 51 . "Pairing" as an associatively constitutive component

of my experience of someone else 112

§ 52. Appresentation as a kind of experience with its own

style of verification 113

§ 53. Potentialities of the primordial sphere and their
constitutive function in the apperception of the
Other 116

§ 54. Explicating the sense of the appresentation wherein

I experience someone else 117

§ 55. Establishment of the community of monads. The

first form of Objectivity: intersubjective Nature . . 120

§ 56. Constitution of higher levels of intermonadic com-
munity 128

§ 57. Clarification of the parallel between explication of
what is internal to the psyche and egological transcen-
dental explication 131

§ 58. Differentiation of problems in the intentional analysis
of higher intersubjective communities. I and my sur-
rounding world 131

§ 59. Ontological explication and its place within consti-
tutional transcendental phenomenology as a whole . 136

§ 60. Metaphysical results of our explication of experi-
encing someone else 139

§61. The traditional problems of "psychological origins"

and their phenomenological clarification 141

§ 62. Survey of our intentional explication of experiencing

someone else 148

CONCLUSION

§ 63. The task of criticizing transcendental experience and

knowledge 151

§64. Concluding word 152

INTRODUCTION <43>

§ 1. Descartes" Meditations as the prototype

of philosophical reflection.

I have particular reason for being glad that I may talk about
transcendental phenomenology in this, the most venerable abode
of French science. 1 France's greatest thinker, Ren£ Descartes,
gave transcendental phenomenology new impulses through his
Meditations; their study acted quite directly on the transfor-
mation of an already developing phenomenology into a new
kind of transcendental philosophy. Accordingly one might almost
call transcendental phenomenology a neo-Cartesianism, even
though it is obliged — and precisely by its radical development
of Cartesian motifs — to reject nearly all the well-known doc-
trinal content of the Cartesian philosophy.

That being the situation, I can already be assured of your
interest If I start with those motifs In the Meditationes de prima
philosophia that have, so I believe, an eternal significance and
go on to characterize the transformations, and the novel for-
mations, in which the method and problems of transcendental
phenomenology originate.

Every beginner in philosophy knows the remarkable train of
thoughts contained in the Meditations. Let us recall its guiding
idea. The aim of the Meditations is a complete reforming of
philosophy into a science grounded on an absolute foundation.
That implies for Descartes a corresponding reformation of all
the sciences, because in his opinion they are only non-selfsuf-
ficient members of the one all-inclusive science, and this is phi-
losophy. Only within the systematic unity of philosophy can
they develop Into genuine sciences. As they have developed

1 Translator's note: The Meditations are an elaboration of two lectures, entitled
"EinMtung in die transsmdentale PMnomenologie" (Introduction to Transcendental
Phenomenology), that Husserl delivered at the Sorbonne on the twenty- third and
twenty-fifth of February, 1929. See Strasser*s introduction, Husserliana, Vol. I,
p. XXIII.

2 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

<44> historically, on the other hand, / they lack that scientific genu-
ineness which would consist in their complete and ultimate
grounding on the basis of absolute insights, insights behind
which one cannot go back any further. Hence the need for a
radical rebuilding that satisfies the idea of philosophy as the
all-inclusive unity of the sciences, within the unity of such an
absolutely 2 rational grounding. With Descartes this demand
gives rise to a philosophy turned toward the subject himself.
The turn to the subject is made at two significant levels.

First, anyone who seriously intends to become a philosopher
must "once in his life" withdraw into himself and attempt,
within himself, to overthrow and build anew all the sciences
that, up to then, he has been accepting. Philosophy — wisdom
(sagesse) — is the philosophized quite personal affair. It must
arise as his wisdom, as his self-acquired knowledge tending
toward universality, a knowledge for which he can answer from
the beginning, and at each step, by virtue of his own absolute
insights. If I have decided to live with this as my aim — the
decision that alone can start me on the course of a philosophical
development — I have thereby chosen to begin in absolute
poverty, with an absolute lack of knowledge. Beginning thus,
obviously one of the first things I ought to do is reflect on how
I might find a method for going on, a method that promises to
lead to genuine knowing. Accordingly the Cartesian Meditations
are not intended to be a merely private concern of the philoso-
pher Descartes, to say nothing of their being merely an im-
pressive literary form in which to present the foundations of his
philosophy. Rather they draw the prototype for any beginning
philosopher's necessary meditations, the meditations out of
which alone a philosophy can grow originally. 2

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C Cf. the French: "sur un fondement d'un
caractire absolu".

2 Author's note: For confirmation of this interpretation see Lettre de Vauteur to the
translator of the Principia (Descartes, Oeuvres, Adam and Tannery edition, Vol. IX,
1904, Part 2, pp. 1-20).

Appended later: If someone were to object that, on the contrary, science, phi-
losophy, takes its rise in the cooperative labor oi the scientific community of philoso-
phers and, at each level, acquires its perfection only therein, Descartes' answer
might well be: I, the solitary individual philosophizer, owe much to others; but what
they accept as true, what they offer me as allegedly established by their insight, is
for me at first only something they claim. If I am to accept it, I must justify it by a
perfect insight on my own part. Therein consists my autonomy — mine and that of
every genuine scientist.

INTRODUCTION 3

When we turn to the content of the Meditations, so strange
to us men of today, we find a regress to / the philosophizing <45>
ego x in a second and deeper sense: the ego as subject of his pure
cogitationes. The meditator executes this regress by the famous
and very remarkable method of doubt. Aiming with radical
consistency at absolute knowledge, he refuses to let himself
accept anything as existent unless it is secured against every
conceivable possibility of becoming doubtful. Everything that
is certain, in his natural experiencing and thinking life, he there-
fore subjects to methodical criticism with respect to the con-
ceivability of a doubt about it; and, by excluding everything
that leaves open any possibility of doubt, he seeks to obtain a
stock of things that are absolutely evident. When this method
is followed, the certainty of sensuous experience, the certainty
with which the world is given in natural living, does not with-
stand criticism; accordingly the being of the world must remain
unaccepted at this initial stage. The meditator keeps only
himself, qua pure ego of his cogitationes, as having an absolutely
indubitable existence, as something that cannot be done away
with, something that would exist even though this world were
non-existent. Thus reduced, the ego carries on a kind of solips-
istic philosophizing. He seeks apodictically certain ways by
which, within his own pure inwardness, an Objective 2 outward-
ness can be deduced. The course of the argument is well known :
First God's existence and veracity are deduced and then, by
means of them, Objective Nature, the duality of finite substances
— in short, the Objective field of metaphysics and the positive
sciences, and these disciplines themselves. All the various infer-
ences proceed, as they must, according to guiding principles
that are immanent, or "innate", in the pure ego.

1 Translator's note: Sometimes Husserl uses Ego and Ich to express different
senses. Since the homophony of I and eye makes the English noun I intolerable, Ich
has been translated as Ego (spelled with a capital) and Ego has been translated as
ego (spelled with a small letter).

2 Translator's note: Husserl frequently uses the words Gegenstand and Objekt to
express importantly different senses. Having found no acceptable alternative to
translating them both as object, I differentiate by spelling this word with a small
letter when it represents Gegenstand and with a capital when it represents Objekt.
All this applies, mutatis mutandis, in the case of any word derived from Gegenstand
or Objekt. If the English word object, or a word derived from it, stands first in a
sentence, the German word is given in brackets.

4 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

§ 2. The necessity of a radical new beginning
of philosophy.

Thus far, Descartes. We ask now: It is really worth while to
hunt for an eternal significance belonging to these thoughts or
to some clarifiable core that may be contained in them? Are
they still such thoughts as might infuse our times with living
forces ?

Doubt is raised at least by the fact that the positive sciences,
which were to experience an absolutely rational grounding by
these meditations, have paid so little attention to them. To be
sure, the positive sciences, after three centuries of brilliant devel-
opment, are now feeling themselves greatly hampered by ob-
scurities in their foundations, in their fundamental concepts and
methods. But, when they attempt to give those foundations a
<46> new form, they do not think / of turning back to resume Carte-
sian meditations. On the other hand, great weight must be given
to the consideration that, in philosophy, the Meditations were
epoch-making in a quite unique sense, and precisely because of
their going back to the pure ego cogito. Descartes, in fact, in-
augurates an entirely new kind of philosophy. Changing its total
style, philosophy takes a radical turn: from naive Objectivism
to transcendental subjectivism — which, with its ever new but
always inadequate attempts, seems to be striving toward some
necessary final form, wherein its true sense and that of the
radical transmutation itself might become disclosed. Should not
this continuing tendency imply an eternal significance and, for
us, a task imposed by history itself, a great task in which we
are all summoned to collaborate?

The splintering of present-day philosophy, with its perplexed
activity, sets us thinking. When we attempt to view western
philosophy as a unitary science, its decline since the middle of
the nineteenth century is unmistakable. The comparative unity
that it had in previous ages, in its aims, its problems and methods,
has been lost. When, with the beginning of modern times, re-
ligious belief was becoming more and more externalized as a
lifeless convention, men of intellect were lifted by a new belief,
their great belief in an autonomous philosophy and science. The
whole of human culture was to be guided and illuminated by

INTRODUCTION 5

scientific insights and thus reformed, as new and autonomous.

But meanwhile this belief too has begun to languish. Not
without reason. Instead of a unitary living philosophy, we have
a philosophical literature growing beyond all bounds and almost
without coherence l . Instead of a serious discussion among
conflicting theories that, in their very conflict, demonstrate the
intimacy with which they belong together, the commonness of
their underlying convictions, and an unswerving belief in a true
philosophy, we have a pseudo-reporting and a pseudo-criticizing,
a mere semblance of philosophizing seriously with and for one
another. This hardly attests a mutual study carried on with a
consciousness of responsibility, in the spirit that caracterizes
serious / collaboration and an intention to produce Objectively <47>
valid results. "Objectively [objektiv] valid results" — the phrase,
after all, signifies nothing but results that have been refined by
mutual criticism and that now withstand every criticism. But
how could actual study and actual collaboration be possible,
where there are so many philosophers and almost equally many
philosophies? To be sure, we still have philosophical congresses.
The philosophers meet but, unfortunately, not the philosophies.
The philosophies lack the unity of a mental space in which they
might exist for and act on one another. 2 It may be that, within
each of the many different "schools" or "lines of thought", the
situation is somewhat better. Still, with the existence of these
in isolation, the total philosophical present is essentially as we
have described it.

In this unhappy present, is not our situation similar to the
one encountered by Descartes in his youth? If so, then is not
this a fitting time to renew his radicalness, the radicalness of the
beginning philosopher: to subject to a Cartesian overthrow the
immense philosophical literature with its medley of great tra-
ditions, of comparatively serious new beginnings, of stylish
literary activity (which counts on "making an effect" but not
on being studied), and to begin with new meditationes de prima
philosophial Cannot the disconsolateness of our philosophical
position be traced back ultimately to the fact that the driving

1 Later modified to read: we have an indeed literary, but not seriously scientific,
philosophical literature — growing beyond all bounds and without coherence.

2 The passage beginning "To be sure . . ." marked for deletion.

CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

forces emanating from the Meditations of Descartes have lost
their original vitality — lost it because the spirit that character-
izes radicalness of philosophical self-responsibility has been lost ?
Must not the demand for a philosophy aiming at the ultimate
conceivable freedom from prejudice, shaping itself with actual
autonomy according to ultimate evidences it has itself produced,
and therefore absolutely self-responsible — must not this de-
mand, instead of being excessive, be part of the fundamental
sense of genuine philosophy? In recent times the longing for a
fully alive philosophy has led to many a renaissance. Must not
the only fruitful renaissance be the one that reawakens the
impulse of the Cartesian Meditations: not to adopt their content
but, in not doing so, to renew with greater intensity the radi-
calness of their spirit, the radicalness of self-responsibility, to
make that radicalness true for the first time by enhancing it to
<48 > the last degree, / to uncover thereby for the first time the genuine
sense of the necessary regress to the ego, and consequently to
overcome the hidden but already felt naivete* of earlier phi-
losophizing ?

In any case, the question indicates one of the ways that has
led to transcendental phenomenology.

Along that way we now intend to walk together. In a quasi-
Cartesian fashion we intend, as radically beginning philosophers,
to carry out meditations with the utmost critical precaution and
a readiness for any — even the most far-reaching — transfor-
mation of the old-Cartesian meditations. Seductive aberrations,
into which Descartes and later thinkers strayed, will have to be
clarified and avoided as we pursue our course.

FIRST MEDITATION

THE WAY TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

§ 3. The Cartesian overthrow and the guiding final idea
of an absolute 1 grounding of science

And so we make a new beginning, each for himself and in
himself, with the decision of philosophers who begin radically:
that at first we shall put out of action all the convictions we
have been accepting up to now, including all our sciences. Let
the idea guiding our meditations be at first the Cartesian idea
of a science that shall be established as radically genuine, ulti-
mately an all-embracing science.

But, now t hat we no long erJhjLye at our disposal any already -
given science as anjsxa mple o f radically ge nuine science (after
all, we are n otjiccgEtiagjany.glY.en scie nce), whaJ LabimUJ^in-
dubitability of that ideajtself^theidea namely of _a jci^nce t that
shall be grounded absolutely? Is it a legitimate final idea, the
possible aim of some possible practice? Obviously that t oo i s
something we mus t not j>resuggose ?i to say nothing jpi .taking
any norms as already established for testing such possibilities —
or perchance a whole system of norms in which the style proper
to genuine science is allegedly prescribed. That would mean
presup posing a whole logic a sja..theory of science ; whereas jogic
must be included among the sciences overthrown in overthrowing
all science. Descartes himself presupposed .,an.,ijd£al.,pL.^ience J
the ideal approximated by geometry and mathematical natural
science. As a fateful / prejudice this ideal determines^ <*9>

phies for centu ries and hiddenlv determines the Meditations
tStsnaaslXfiS- Obviously it was, for Descartes, a truism from the
start that the all-embracing science must have the form of a
deductive system, in which the whole structure rests, ordine
geometrico, on an axiomatic foundation that grounds the de-
duction absolutely. For him a role similar to that of geometri-
cal axioms in geometry is played in the all-embracing science

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

8 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

by the axiom of the ego's absolute certainty of himself, along
with the axiomatic principles innate in the ego — only this
axiomatic foundation lies even deeper than that of geometry
and is called on to participate in the ultimate grounding even of
geometrical knowledge. 1

None of that shall determine our thinking. As beginning phi-
losophers we do not as yet accept any normative ideal of science;
and only so far as we produce one newly for ourselves can we
ever have such an ideal.

But this does not imply that we renounce the general aim of
grounding science absolutely. That aim shall indeed continually
motivate the course of our meditations, as it motivated the
course of the Cartesian meditations ; and gradually, in our medi-
tations, it shall become determined concretely. Only ^v^jmust
be careful about howjve makj_an

2HLJ^^ .even , its possibility

How then are we to find the legitimate manner in which to make
it our aim ? How are we to make our aim perfectly assured, and
thus assured as a practical possibility? How are we then to
differentiate the possibility, into which at first we have a general
insight, and thereby mark out the determinate methodical
course of a genuine philosophy, a radical philosophy that begins
with what is intrinsically first ?

Naturally we get the general idea of science from the sciences
that are factually given. If they have become for us, in our radical
critical attitude, merely alleged sciences, then, according to
what has already been said, their general final idea has become,
in a like sense, a mere supposition. Thus we do not yet know
whether that idea is at all capable of becoming actualized. 2
Nevertheless we do have it in this form, and in a state of inde-
terminate fluid generality; accordingly we have also the idea of
philosophy: as an idea about which we do not know whether or
how it can be actualized. 3 We take the general idea of .science
therefore, as a prec ursory presum^ we allow ourse lves

1 The passage beginning "Obviously it was ..." marked for deletion.

a This sentence marked for deletion.

* Reading, with Typescript C, "als unbekannt ob und wie zu verwirklichende**
instead of "als einer unbekannt ob und wie zu verwirklichenden" . Thus the published
text (unlike either Typescript C or the French translation) relates the phrase to
philosophy rather than to idea.

FIRST MEDITATION 9

taiy^ydy^by which we tentatively allow ourselves to be^gujded
in pur meditations. WSLSQnsidejLk^

a possibil ity an d then consider^b^th^^d.. ho^^Lmight be

gjy^n^temiinate actualization. To be sure, we get into what
are, at first, rather strange circumstantialities — but how can /
they be avoided, if our radicalness is not to remain an empty <50>
gesture but is to become an actual deed ? Let us go on then with
patience.

§ 4. Uncovering the final sense of science
by becoming immersed in science qua noematic phenomenon.

Obviously one of the first things we must do now is make
distinct the guiding idea that, at the beginning, floats before us
as a vague generality. The genuine concept of science, naturally ,
ijLnolLtjiJa^^ of abstraction based on mm-

paring the de facto sciences, i.e. the Objectively documented

theoretical structures (propositions, theories) that are in fact
generally accepted as sciences. The sense of our whole meditation
implies that sciences, as these facts of Objective culture, and
sciences "in the true and genuine sense" need not be identical
and that the former, over and above being cultural facts, involve
a claim, which ought to be established as one they already
satisfy. Science as an idea — as the idea, genuine science — "lies' 1 ,
still undisclosed, precisely in this claim.

How can this idea be uncovered and apprehended? Even
though we must not take any position with respect to the va-
lidity of the de facto sciences (the ones * 'claiming' ' validity) —
i.e. with respect to the genuineness of their theories and, cor-
rectively, the competence of their methods of theorizing —
there is nothing to kee p us from ' 'immersing ourselves^jnjthg
scientific striving and doing that pertain to them, in order to see
clearly and distinctly what _ is really being aimed at. If we do so , 1
if we immerse ourselves progressively in the characteristic in -
tention of scientific endeavor, th exonsiitiient partsj j the general
final idea, genuine science ..J aecmifiJBaadicatedJ ^ us, though at
first the differentiation is It selLgenexaL

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "Tun wit so" , instead of "T?eten wxr so". Cf. the
French: "St, agissant de la sortt".

10 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

Here belongs, first of all, an initial clarification of "judicative"
doing and the "judgment" itself, along with the discrimination
of immediate and mediate judgments: mediate judgments have
such a sense-relatedness to other judgments that judicatively
believing them "presupposes" believing these others — in the
manner characteristic of a believing on account of something
believed already. Also clarification of the striving for grounded
judgments, clarification of the grounding doing, in which the
"correctness" , the "truth" ', of the judgment should be shown —
<5i> or, in case of a failure, the / incorrectness, the falsity, of the
judgment. Where mediate judgments are concerned, this showing
is itself mediate; it rests on the showing that pertains to the
immediate judgments involved in the judgment-sense and, as
concrete, includes their grounding too. To a grounding already
executed, or to the truth shown therein, one can ' 'return' ' at
will. By virtue of this freedom to reactualize such a truth, with
awareness of it as one and the same, it is an abiding acquisition
or possession and, as such, is called a cognition.

If we go further in this manner (here, naturally, we are only
indicating the procedure), then, in explicating more precisely
the sense of a grounding or that of a cognition, we come forthwith
to the idea of evidence. In a genuine grounding, judgments show
themselves as "correct", as "agreeing"; that is to say, the
grounding is an agreement of the judgment with the judged state
of affairs [Urteilsverhalt] (the affair or affair-complex [Sack-
verhalf]) "itself". More precisely stated: Judging is meaning —
and, as a rule, merely supposing — that such and such exists and
has such and such determinations; the judgment (what is judged)
is then a merely supposed affair or complex of affairs : an affair,
or state-of-affairs, as what is meant. But, contrasted with that,
there is sometimes a pre-eminent judicative meaning [Meineri],
a judicative having of such and such itself. This having is called
evidence. In it the affair, the complex (or state) of affairs, instead
of being merely meant "from afar", is present as the affair
"itself", the affair-complex or state-of-affairs "itself") the judger
accordingly possesses it itself. A merely supposing judging be-
comes adjusted to the affairs, the affair-complexes, themselves
by conscious conversion into the corresponding evidence. This
conversion is inherently characterized as the fulfilling of what

FIRST MEDITATION 1 1

was merely meant, a synthesis in which what was meant coin-
cides and agrees with what is itself given ; it is an evident pos-
sessing of the correctness of what previously was meant at a
distance from affairs.

When we proceed thus, fundamental components of the final
idea governing all scientific doing come immediately to the fore.
For example, the scientist intends, not merely to judge, but to
ground his judgments. Stated more precisely: He intends to let
no judgment be accepted by himself or others as "scientific
knowledge", unless he has grounded it perfectly and can therefore
justify it completely at any time by a freely actualizable return
to his repeatable act of grounding. De facto that may never go
beyond being a mere claim; at all events, the claim involves an
ideal goal. /

Yet there is one more thing that should be brought out, to <52>
supplement what we have said. We must distinguish the
judgment in the broadest sense (something meant as being) and
evidence in the broadest sense from pre-predicative judgment
and from pre-predicative evidence respectively. Predicative in-
cludes pre-predicative evidence. That which is meant or,
perchance, evidently viewed receives predicative expression;
and science always intends to judge expressly and keep the
judgment 01 the truth fixed, as an express judgment or as an
express truth. But the expression as such has its own compara-
tively good or bad way of fitting what is meant or itself given ;
and therefore it has its own evidence or non-evidence, which also
goes into the predicating. Consequently evidence of the ex-
pression is also a determining part of the idea of scientific truth,
as predicative complexes that are, or can be, grounded absolutely.

§ 5. Evidence and the idea of genuine science.

As we go on meditating in this manner and along this line, we
beginning philosophers recognize that the Cartesian idea of a
science (ultimately an all-embracing science) grounded on an
absolute foundation, and absolutely justified, is none other than
the idea that constantly furnishes guidance in all sciences and
in their striving toward universality — whatever may be the
situation with respect to a de facto actualization of that idea.

12 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

Evidence is, in an extremely broad sense, an "experiencing" of
something that is, and is thus ; it is precisely a mental seeing of
something itself. Conflict with what evidence shows, with what
"experience" shows, yields the negative of evidence (or negative
evidence) — put in the form of a judgment: positive evidence
of the affair's non-being. In other words, negative evidence has
as its content evident falsity. Evidence, which in fact includes
all experiencing in the usual and narrower sense, can be more or
less perfect. Perfect evidence and its correlate, pure and genuine
truth, are given as ideas lodged in the striving for knowledge, for
fulfilment of one's meaning intention. By immersing ourselves
in such a striving, we can extract those ideas from it. Truth and
falsity, criticism and critical comparison with evident data,
are an everyday theme, playing their incessant part even in pre-
scientific life. For this everyday life, with its changing and rela-
tive purposes, relative evidences x and truths suffice. But science
<53> / looks for truths that are valid, and remain so, once for all and
for everyone; accordingly it seeks verifications of a new kind,
verifications carried through to the end. Though de facto, as
science itself must ultimately see, it does not attain actualization
of a system of absolute truths, but rather is obliged to modify
its "truths" again and again, it nevertheless follows the idea of
absolute or scientifically genuine truth; and accordingly it recon-
ciles itself to an infinite horizon of approximations, tending
toward that idea. By them, science believes, it can surpass in in-
finitum not only everyday knowing but also itself; likewise
however by its aim at systematic universality of knowledge,
whether that aim concern a particular closed scientific province
or a presupposed all-embracing unity of whatever exists — as it
does if a "philosophy" is possible and in question. According to
intention, therefore, the idea of science and philosophy involves
an order of cognition, proceeding from intrinsically earlier to in-
trinsically later cognitions) ultimately, then, a beginning and a
line of advance that are not to be chosen arbitrarily but have
their basis "in the nature of things themselves".
Thus, by immersing ourselves meditatively in the general in-

1 Author's marginal note: They are relative, inasmuch as the sense of the everyday
judgment, made at a particular time, relates that judgment to the judger's circum-
stances on that occasion.

FIRST MEDITATION 13

tentions of scientific endeavor, we discover fundamental parts
of the final idea, genuine science, which, though vague at first,
governs that striving. Meanwhile we have made no advance
judgment in favor of the possibility of those components or in
favor of a supposedly unquestionable scientific ideal.

We must not say at this point : "Why bother with such investi-
gations and ascertainments? They obviously belong to the
general theory of science, to logic, which must of course be
applied both now and later." On the contrary, we must guard
ourselves against just this matter-of-course opinion. Let us
emphasize what we said against Descartes: Like every other
already-given science, logic is deprived of acceptance by the
universal overthrow. Everything that makes a philosophical
beginning possible we must first acquire by ourselves. 1 Whether,
later on, a genuine science similar to traditional logic will accrue
to us is an eventuality about which we can at present know
nothing.

By this / preliminary work, here roughly indicated rather than <54>
done explicitly, we have gained a measure of clarity sufficient
to let us fix, for our whole further procedure, a first methodo-
logical principle. It is plain that I, as someone beginning philo-
sophically, since I am striving toward the presumptive end,
genuine science, must neither make nor go on accepting any
judgment as scientific that I have not derived from evidence , from
"experiences" in which the affairs and affair-complexes in
question are present to me as "they themselves". Indeed, even
then I must at all times reflect on the pertinent evidence ; I must
examine its "range" and make evident to myself how far that
evidence, how far its "perfection", the actual giving of the affairs
themselves, extends. Where this is still wanting, I must not claim
any final validity, but must account my judgment as, at best, a
possible intermediate stage on the way to final validity.

Because the sciences aim at predications that express com-
pletely and with evident fitness what is beheld pre-predica-
tively, it is obvious that I must be careful also about this aspect
of scientific evidence. Owing to the instability and ambiguity

1 Reading with Typescript C and the French translation. The published text may
be rendered: "All that has been developed as beginnings of philosophy we must first
acquire by ourselves."

14 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

of common language and its much too great complacency about
completeness of expression, we require, even where we use its
means of expression, a new legitimation of significations by
orienting them according to accrued insights, and a fixing of
words as expressing the significations thus legitimated. That
too we account as part of our normative principle of evidence,
which we shall apply consistently from now on.

But how would this principle, or all our meditation up to now,
help us, if it gave us no hold for making an actual beginning,
that is, for starting to actualize the idea of genuine science ? Since
the form belonging to a systematic order of cognitions — genuine
cognitions — is part of this idea, there emerges, as the question
of the beginning, the inquiry for those cognitions that are first
in themselves and can support the whole storied edifice of uni-
versal knowledge. Consequently, if our presumptive aim is to
be capable of becoming a practically possible one, we meditators,
while completely destitute of all scientific knowledge, must have
<55> access to evidences that already / bear the stamp of fitness for
such a function, in that they are recognizable as preceding all
other imaginable evidences. 1 Moreover, in respect of this evi-
dence of preceding, they must have a certain perfection, they
must carry with them an absolute certainty, if advancing from
them and constructing on their basis a science governed by the
idea of a definitive system of knowledge — considering the in-
finity presumed to be part of this idea — is to be capable of
having any sense.

§ 6. Differentiations of evidence. The philosophical demand for an
evidence that is apodictic and first in itself.

But here, at this decisive point in the process of beginning,
we must penetrate deeper with our meditations. The phrase
absolute certainty and the equivalent phrase absolute indubita-
bility need clarifying. They call our attention to the fact that,
on more precise explication, the ideally demanded perfection of
evidence becomes differentiated. At the present introductory stage
of philosophical meditation we have the boundless infinity of
prescientific experiences, evidences: more or less perfect. With

1 Author's marginal note: As founding evidences! And absolutely certain.

FIRST MEDITATION 15

reference to them imperfection, as a rule, signifies incompleteness,
a one-sidedness and at the same time a relative obscurity and
indistinctness that qualify the givenness of the affairs themselves
or the affair-complexes themselves: i.e., an infectedness of the
^experience" with unfulfilled components, with expectant and
attendant meanings. 1 Perfecting then takes place as a synthetic
course of further harmonious experiences in which these at-
tendant meanings become fulfilled in actual experience. The
corresponding idea of perfection would be that of '* adequate
evidence" — and the question whether adequate evidence does
not necessarily lie at infinity may be left open. 2

Though this idea continuously guides the scientist's intent,
a different perfection of evidence has for him (as we see by the
aforesaid process of "immersing ourselves" in his intent) a
higher dignity. This perfection is "apodicticity"*, and it can occur
even in evidences that are inadequate. It is absolute indubita-
bility in a quite definite and peculiar sense, the absolute indubi-
ability that the scientist demands of all "principles"; and its
superior value is evinced in his endeavor, / where groundings < 56 >
already evident in and by themselves are concerned, to ground
them further and at a higher level by going back to principles,
and thereby to obtain for them the highest dignity, that of
apodicticity. The fundamental nature of apodicticity can be
characterized in the following manner:

Any evidence is a grasping of something itself that is, or is
thus, a grasping in the mode "it itself", with full certainty of its
being, a certainty that accordingly excludes every doubt. But
it does not follow that full certainty excludes the conceivability
that what is evident could subsequently become doubtful, or the
conceivability that being could prove to be illusion — indeed,
sensuous experience furnishes us with cases where that happens.
Moreover, this open possibility of becoming doubtful, or of non-
being, in spite of evidence, can always be recognized in advance
by critical reflection on what the evidence in question does. An
c upodictic evidence, however, is not merely cert ainlY^o£lh^,.ai£aiis

or affair-complexes (states-of-af faksLjevident, in it: ratfejsst.it

discloses itself, to a critical^ reflection, as having the jsignal jge-

1 Author's marginal note on this sentence: But that must be shown.

2 This sentence marked as unsatisfactory.

16 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

culiarity of hein^lJ^^sameJin^he absolute unimaginaMm^s^

(inconce iv ability) of their non-being^_%xi(L thus^^xduding jn

a^ancejv^ empty. Furthermore the

evidence of that critical reflection likewise has the dignity of
being apodictic, as does therefore the evidence of the unimagi-
nableness of what is presented with <apodictically > evident
certainty. And the same is true of every critical reflection at a
higher level. 1

We remember now the Cartesian principle for building genuine
science: the principle of absolute indubitability, by which every
imaginable doubt (even though it were in fact groundless) was
to be excluded. If, by our meditations, we have acquired that
principle in a clarified form, there arises the question whether
and how it might help us make an actual beginning. In ac-
cordance with what has already been said, we now formulate,
as an initial definite question of beginning philosophy, the
question whether it is possible for us to bring out evidences that,
on the one hand, carry with them - as we now must say: apo-
dictically — the insight that, as ''first in themselves", they
precede all other imaginable evidences and, on the other hand,
can be seen to be themselves apodictic. If they should turn out
to be inadequate, they would have to possess at least a recog-
nizable apodictic content, they would have to give us some
being that is firmly secured "once for all", or absolutely, by
<57> virtue of their apodicticity. How, / and even whether, it would be
possible to go on from there and build an apodictically secured
philosophy must, of course, remain for later consideration. 2

1 Strasser reports that the passage rendered by the sentences beginning with "An
apodictic evidence ..." includes emendations made by Fink. The earlier wording
given by Strasser may be rendered as follows: "An apodictic evidence, however, has
the signal peculiarity that the certainty of the being of what is beheld in it discloses
itself, to a critical reflection, as an absolute unimaginableness (inconceivability) of
the seen object's non-being and therefore of that object's being dubitable. [Blank
space for a word] the evidence of that critical reflection likewise has this dignity of
being apodictic. And the same is true at every level of critical reflection and also
with respect to always possible apodictic reflections." (Translator's note: The
thought underlying the phrase, "with respect to always possible apodictic re-
flections", may be that one can see apodictically that apodictic reflective insight into
the apodicticity of any apodictic reflective evidence is always possible.)

2 Author's marginal note: From here Fink. (Translator's note: Strasser comments:
"Yet § 6 already shows numerous improvements by Eugen Fink's hand." The im-
provements to which Strasser refers were made before the French translation (1931).
Husserl's marginal note probably refers to suggestions for revision submitted by
Fink in 1932. See Strasser's introduction to Husserliana, Vol. 1, p. XXVIIL

FIRST MEDITATION 17

§ 7. The evidence for the factual existence of the world not apodietic;
its inclusion in the Cartesian overthrow.

The question of evidences that are first in themselves can
apparently be answered without any trouble. Does not the
existence of the world present itself forthwith as such an evidence?
The life of everyday action relates to the world. All the sciences
relate to it: the sciences of matters of fact relate to it immedi-
ately; the apriori sciences, mediately, as instruments of scien-
tific method. More than anything else the being of the world is
obvious. It is so very obvious that no one would think of as-
serting it expressly in a proposition. After all, we have our
continuous experience in which this world incessantly stands
before our eyes, as existing without question. But, however
much this evidence is prior in itself to all the < other > evidences
of life (as turned toward the world) and to all the evidences of
all the world sciences (since it is the basis that continually
supports them), we soon become doubtful about the extent to
which, in this capacity, it can lay claim to being apodictic. And,
if we follow up this doubt, it becomes manifest that our ex-
periential evidence of the world lacks also the superiority of
being the absolutely primary evidence. Concerning the first
point, we note that the universal sensuous experience in whose
evidence the world is continuously given to us beforehand is
obviously not to be taken forthwith as an apodictic evidence,
which, as such, would absolutely exclude both the possibility of
eventual doubt whether the world is actual and the possibility
of its non-being. Not only can a particular experienced thing
suffer devaluation as an illusion of the senses; the whole uni-
tarily surveyable nexus, experienced throughout a period of
time, can prove to be an illusion, a coherent dream. We need not
take the indicating of these possible and sometimes actual re-
versals of evidence as a sufficient criticism of the evidence in
question and see in it a full proof that, in spite of the continual
experiencedness of the world, a non-being of the world is con-
ceivable. We shall retain only this much: that the evidence of
world-experience would, at all events, need to be criticized with
regard to its validity and range, before it could be used for the
purposes of a radical grounding of science, and that therefore

18 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

<58> we / must not take that evidence to be, without question, im-
mediately apodictic. It follows that denying acceptance to all
the sciences given us beforehand, treating them as, for us, inad-
missible prejudices 1 1 is not enough. Their universal basis, the
experienced world, must also be deprived of its naive acceptance.
The being of the world, by reason of the evidence of natural
experience, must no longer be for us an obvious matter of fact ;
it too must be for us, henceforth, only an acceptance-phe-
nomenon.

If we maintain this attitude, is any being whatever left us as
a basis for judgments, let alone for evidences on which we could
establish an all-embracing philosophy and, furthermore, do so
apodictically ? Is not "the world" the name for the universe of
whatever exists? If so, how can we avoid starting in extenso, and
as our first task, that criticism of world-experience which, a
moment ago, we merely indicated? Then, if criticism were to
yield the result considered likely in advance, would not our
whole philosophical aim 2 be frustrated ? But what if the world
were, in the end, not at all the absolutely first basis for judgments
and a being that is intrinsically prior to the world were the
already presupposed basis for the existence of the world ?

§ 8. The ego cogito as transcendental subjectivity.

At this point, following Descartes, we make the great reversal
that, if made in the right manner, leads to transcendental sub-
jectivity: the turn to the ego cogito as the ultimate and apodictil
cally certain basis for judgments, the basis on which any radica-
philosophy must be grounded. 3

Let us consider. As radically meditating philosophers, we now
have neither a science that we accept nor a world that exists for
us. Instead of simply existing for us — that is, being accepted
naturally by us in our experiential believing in its existence —
the world is for us only something that claims being. Moreover,

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

2 Reading, with Typescript C, "Absehen" instead of "Ergebnis" (result). Cf. the
French translation: "entreprise".

8 Author's marginal note: It is necessary to say that the reduction has apodictic
significance, since it shows apodictically that the being of the transcendental Ego is
antecedent to the being of the world.

FIRST MEDITATION 19

that affects the intramundane existence of all other Egos, 1 so
that rightly we should no longer speak communicatively, in the
plural. Other men than I, and brute animals, are data of experi-
ence for me only by virtue of my sensuous experience of their
bodily organisms ; and, since the validity of this experience too
is called in question, I must not use it. Along with other Egos, /
naturally, I lose all the formations pertaining to sociality and <59>
culture. In short, not just corporeal Nature but the whole
concrete surrounding life-world is for me, from now on, only a
phenomenon of being, instead of something that is.

But, no matter what the status of this phenomenon's claim
to actuality and no matter whether, at some future time, I de-
cide critically that the world exists or that it is an illusion, still
this phenomenon itself, as mine, is not nothing but is precisely
what makes such critical decisions at all possible and accordingly
makes possible whatever has for me sense and validity as "true"
being — definitively decided or definitively decideable being.
And besides : If I abstained — as I was free to do and as I did —
and still abstain from every believing involved in or founded on
sensuous experiencing, 2 so that the being of the experienced
world remains unaccepted by me, still this abstaining is what it
is; and it exists, together with the whole stream of my experi-
encing life. Moreover, this life is continually there for me. Con-
tinually, in respect of a field of the present, it is given to
consciousness perceptually, with the most originary originality,
as it itself; memorially, now these and now those pasts thereof
are "again" given to consciousness, and that implies: as the
"pasts themselves". Reflecting, I can at any time look at this
original living and note particulars ; I can grasp what is present
as present, what is past as past, each as itself. I do so now, as the
Ego who philosophizes and exercises the aforesaid abstention.

Meanwhile the world experienced in this reflectively grasped
life goes on being for me (in a certain manner) "experienced" as
before, and with just the content it has at any particular time.
It goes on appearing, as it appeared before ; the only difference
is that I, as reflecting philosophically, no longer keep in effect

1 Author's marginal note: Likewise the intramundane existence of my own Ego
as human!

2 Reading with Typescript C According to the published text and the French
translation: "every experiential believing".

20 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

(no longer accept) the natural believing in existence involved
in experiencing the world 1 — though that believing too is still
there and grasped by my noticing regard. 2 The same is true of
all the processes of meaning that, in addition to the world-
experiencing 3 ones, belong to my lif estream : the non-intuitive
processes of meaning objects, the judgings, valuings, and de-
cidings, the processess of setting ends and willing means, and
all the rest, in particular the position-takings necessarily involved
in them all when I am in the natural and non-reflective attitude

— since precisely these position-takings always presuppose the
<60> world, i.e., involve believing in its existence. Here too / the phi-
losophically reflective Ego's absention from position-takings,
his depriving them of acceptance, does not signify their disap-
pearance from his field of experience. The concrete subjective
processes, let us repeat, are indeed the things to which his
attentive regard is directed: but the attentive Ego, qua phi-
losophizing 4 Ego, practices abstention with respect to what he
intuits. Likewise everything meant in such accepting or positing
processes of consciousness (the meant judgment, theory, value,
end, or whatever it is) is still retained completely — but with
the acceptance-modification, "mere phenomenon".

This- universal depriving of acceptance, this ' 'inhibiting' ' or
"putting out of play" of all positions taken toward the already-
given Objective world and, in the first place, all existential
positions (those concerning being, illusion, possible being, being
likely, probable, etc.), — or, as it is also called, this "phenome-
nological epoch£" and "parenthesizing" of the Objective world

— therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contra-
ry we gain possession of something by it; and what we (or, to
speak more precisely, what I, the one who is meditating) acquire
by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes
making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant
in them: the universe of "phenomena" in the (particular and

1 The phrase "the world" supplied in accordance with Typescript C.

2 Author's marginal note: Background, habitual accepting, etc.. do not seem to
be taken into consideration.

3 Reading with Typescript C According to the published text and the French
translation, simply "experiencing".

4 Reading, with Typescript C, " philosophic endes" instead of " philosophisches"
(philosophical).

FIRST MEDITATION 21

also the wider) 1 phenomenological sense. The epoche can also
be said to be the radical and universal method by which I appre-
hend myself purely: as Ego, and with my own pure conscious
life, in and by which the entire Objective world exists for me
and is precisely as it is for me. Anything belonging to the world,
any spatiotemporal being, exists for me — that is to say, is
accepted by me — in that i experience it, perceive it, remember
it, think of it somehow, judge about it, value it, desire it, or the
like. Descartes, as we know, indicated all that by the name
cogito. The world is for me absolutely nothing else but the world
existing for and accepted by me in such a conscious cogito. It
gets its whole sense, universal and specific, and its acceptance
as existing, exclusively from such cogiiationes. 2 In these my
whole world-life goes on, including my scientifically inquiring
and grounding life. By my living, by my experiencing, thinking,
valuing, and acting, I can enter no world other than the one
that gets its sense and acceptance or status [Sinn und Geltung]
in and from me, myself. If I put myself above all this life and /
refrain from doing any believing that takes "the" world <6i>
straightforwardly as existing — if I direct my regard exclusively
to this life itself, as consciousness of "the" world — I thereby
acquire myself as the pure 3 ego, with the pure stream of my
cogiiationes.

Thus the being of the pure ego and his cogiiationes, as a being
that is prior in itself, is antecedent to the natural being of the
world — the world of which I always speak, the one of which I
can speak. Natural being is a realm whose existential status
[Seinsgeltung] is secondary; it continually presupposes the
realm of transcendental being. The fundamental phenome-
nological method of transcendental epochs, because it leads
back to this realm, is called transcendental-phenomenological
reduction. 4

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

2 Authors marginal note : But if something becomes for me an illusion.

8 Author's marginal note : Pure in the transcendental sense. This purity I shall
call transcendental purity.

4 Author's marginal note : There seems to be lacking the apodicticitv of the prece-
Jence belonging to transcendental subjectivity.

22 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

§ 9. The range covered by apodictic evidence of the" I am".

The next question is whether this reduction makes possible an
apodictic evidence of the being of transcendental subjectivity.
Only if my experiencing of my transcendental self is apodictic
can it serve as ground and basis for apodictic judgments; only
then is there accordingly the prospect of a philosophy, a system-
atic structure made up of apodictic cognitions, starting with the
intrinsically first field of experience and judgment. That ego sum
or sum cogitans must be pronounced apodictic, and that ac-
cordingly we get a first apodictically existing basis to stand on,
was already seen by Descartes. As we all know, he emphasizes
the indubitability of that proposition and stresses the fact that
"I doubt" would itself presuppose "I am". For Descartes too
it is a matter of that Ego who grasps himself after he has de-
prived the experienced world of acceptance, because it might
be doubtful. After our differentiations, it is clear that the sense
of the indubitability with which the ego becomes given by
transcendental reduction actually conforms to the concept of
apodicticity we explicated earlier. To be sure, the problem of
apodicticity — and consequently the problem of the primary
basis on which to ground a philosophy — is not thereby removed.
In fact, doubt arises immediately. For example: Does not
transcendental subjectivity at any given moment include its
past as an inseparable part, which is accessible only by way of
<62> memory? But can / apodictic evidence be claimed for memory?
Assuredly it would be wrong to deny the apodicticity of "I am",
on the ground that the evidence of memory is not apodictic;
such a denial is possible only if one confines oneself to arguing
about that apodicticity — that is to say, if one shuts one's eyes
to it. Nevertheless, in view of such questions, the problem of the
range covered by our apodictic evidence becomes urgent.

We remember in this connexion an earlier remark: that ade-
quacy and apodicticity of evidence need not go hand in hand. Perhaps
this remark was made precisely with the case of transcendental
self-experience in mind. In such experience the ego is accessible
to himself originaliter. But at any particular time this experience
offers only a core that is experienced "with strict adequacy",
namely the ego's living present (which the grammatical sense of

FIRST MEDITATION 23

the sentence, ego cogito, expresses) ; while, beyond that, only an
indeterminately general presumptive horizon extends, com-
prising what is strictly non-experienced but necessarily also-
meant. To it belongs not only the ego's past, most of which is
completely obscure, but also his transcendental abilities and his
habitual peculiarities at the time. External perception too
(though not apodictic) is an experiencing of something itself, the
physical thing itself: "it itself is there". But, in being there itself,
the physical thing has for the experiencer an open, infinite, inde-
terminately general horizon, comprising what is itself not strictly
perceived — a horizon (this is implicit as a presumption) that
can be opened up by possible experiences. Something similar is
true about the apodictic certainty characterizing transcendental
experience of my transcendental I-am, with the indeterminate
generality of the latter as having an open horizon. Accordingly
the actual being of the intrinsically first field of knowledge is
indeed assured absolutely, though not as yet what determines
its being more particularly and is still not itself given, but only
presumed, during the living evidence of the I-am. This pre-
sumption implicit in the apodictic evidence is subject therefore
to criticism, regarding the possibilities of its fulfilment and their
range (which may be apodictically determinable). How far can
the transcendental ego be deceived about himself? And how far
do those components extend that are absolutely indubitable,
in spite of such possible deception ?

When making certain of the transcendental ego, we are
standing at / an altogether dangerous point, even if at first we <63>
leave out of consideration the difficult question of apodicticity.

§ 10. Digression; Descartes* failure to make
the transcendental turn.

It seems so easy, following Descartes, to lay hold of the pure
Ego and his cogitationes. And yet it is as though we were on the
brink of a precipice, where advancing calmly and surely is a
matter of philosophical life and death. Descartes had the serious
will to free himself radically from prejudice. But we know from
recent inquiries, in particular the fine and profound researches

24 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

of Mr. Gilson and Mr. Koyr^, 1 how much scholasticism lies
hidden, as unclarified prejudice, in Descartes' Meditations. Not
only that. In the first place we must stay clear of the previously
mentioned prejudice, arising from admiration of mathematical
natural science and, as an old heritage, exercising a determining
influence even on us: the prejudice that, under the name ego
cogito, one is dealing with an apodictic "axiom", which, in con-
junction with other axioms and, perhaps, inductively grounded
hypotheses, is to serve as the foundation for a deductively ' 'ex-
planatory' ' world-science, a "nomological" science, a science
ordine geometrico, similar indeed to mathematical natural science.
In this connexion, furthermore, it must by no means be accepted
as a matter of course that, with our apodictic pure ego, we have
rescued a little tag-end of the world, as the sole unquestionable
part of it for the philosophizing Ego, and that now the problem
is to infer the rest of the world by rightly conducted arguments,
according to principles innate in the ego.

Unfortunately these prejudices were at work when Descartes
introduced the apparently insignificant but actually fateful
change whereby the ego becomes a substantia cogitans, a separate
human ''mens sive animus", 2 and the point of departure for
inferences according to the principle of causality — in short, the
change by virtue of which Descartes became the father of
transcendental realism, an absurd position, though its absurdity
cannot be made apparent at this point. We remain aloof from
all that, if we remain true to the radicalness of our meditative
self-examination and therefore to the principle of pure "intu-
ition" or evidence — that is to say, if we accept nothing here but
<64> what we / find actually given (and, at first, quite immediately 3)
in the field of the ego cogito, which has been opened up to us by
epochs, and if accordingly we assert nothing we ourselves do
not "see". Descartes erred in this respect. Consequently he stands
on the threshold of the greatest of all discoveries — in a certain
manner, has already made it — yet he does not grasp its proper

1 Translator's note: Etienne Gilson, £tudes sur la rdle de la pensee midUvale dans
la formation du sysUme cartesien (Paris, 1930), and Alexandre Koyre, Essai sur
Vidie de dieu et sur les preuves de son existence chez Descartes (Paris, 1 922).

2 Author's marginal note: And, in his opinion, even a pure intellectus, allegedly
thinkable as an intellectus without any imagination.

3 Author's marginal note: And then mediately; but mediate givenness is not
always deduction.

FIRST MEDITATION 25

sense, the sense namely of transcendental subjectivity, and so
he does not pass through the gateway that leads into genuine

transcendental philosophy.

§11. The psychological and the transcendental Ego.
The transcendency of the world.

If I keep purely what comes into view — for me, the one who
is meditating — by virtue of my free epoche with respect to the
being of the experienced world, the momentous fact is that I,
with my life, remain untouched 1 in my existential status, re-
gardless of whether or not the world exists and regardless of what
my eventual decision concerning its being or non-being might be.
This Ego, with his Ego-life, who necessarily remains 2 for me,
by virtue of such epochs, is not a piece of the world ; and if he
says, "I exist, ego cogito," that no longer signifies, "I, this man,
exist/' 3 No longer am I the man who, in natural self-experience,
finds himself as a man and who, with the abstractive restriction
to the pure contents of "internal" or purely psychological self-
experience, finds his own pure "mens sive animus sive intel-
lects' ' ; nor am I the separately considered psyche itself. Apper-
ceived in this "natural" manner, I and all other men are themes
of sciences that are Objective, or positive, in the usual sense:
biology, anthropology, and also (as included in these) psychology.
The psychic life that psychology talks about has in fact always
been, and still is, meant as psychic life in the world. Obviously
the same is true also of one's own psychic life, which is grasped and
considered in purely internal experience. But phenomenological
epochs (which the course of our purified Cartesian meditations
demands of him who is philosophizing) inhibits acceptance of the
Objective world as existent, and thereby excludes this world
completely from the field of judgment. In so doing, it likewise
inhibits acceptance of any Objectively apperceived facts, in-
cluding those of internal experience. Consequently for me, the
meditating Ego who, standing / and remaining in the attitude <65>

1 The word unberiihrt (untouched) crossed out, but nothing put in its place.

2 The word verbleibende (remaining) crossed out, but nothing put in its place.

3 Author's marginal note: Kant and all his convictions relating to Ego- tran-
scendent apperceptions, and likewise the convictions of all others, are parenthesized.

26 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

of epoche, posits exclusively himself as the acceptance-basis of
all Objective acceptances and bases [als Geltungsgrund alter
objektiven Geltungen und Grilnde], there is no psychological Ego
and there are no psychic phenomena in the sense proper to
psychology, i.e., as components of psychophysical men.

By phenomenological epoche I reduce my natural human
Ego and my psychic life — the realm of my psychological self-
experience — to my transcendent al-phenomenological Ego, the
realm of transcendental-phenomenological self-experience. The
Objective world, the world that exists for me, that always has
and always will exist for me, the only world that ever can exist
for me — this world, with all its Objects, I said, derives its whole
sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from me
myself, from me as the transcendental Ego, the Ego who comes to
the fore only with transcendental-phenomenological epoche.

This concept of the transcendental and its correlate, the
concept of the transcendent, must be derived exclusively from
our philosophically meditative situation. The following should
be noted in this connexion: Just as the reduced Ego is not a
piece of the world, so, conversely, neither the world nor any
worldly Object is a piece of my Ego, to be found in my conscious
life as a really inherent part of it, as a complex of data of sensation
or a complex of acts. This "transcendence" is part of the intrinsic
sense of anything worldly, despite the fact that anything worldly
necessarily acquires all the sense determining it, along with its
existential status, exclusively from my experiencing, my ob-
jectivating, thinking, valuing, or doing, at particular times —
notably the status of an evidently valid being is one it can
acquire only from my own evidences, my grounding acts. If
this "transcendence", which consists in being non-really in-
cluded, is part of the intrinsic sense of the world, then, by way
of contrast, the Ego himself, who bears within him the world as
an accepted sense and who, in turn, is necessarily presupposed
by this sense, is legitimately called transcendental, in the phe-
nomenological sense. Accordingly the philosophical problems
arising from this correlation are called transcendental-philo-
sophical.

SECOND MEDITATION <66>

THE FIELD OF TRANSCENDENTAL EXPERIENCE LAID OPEN
IN RESPECT OF ITS UNIVERSAL STRUCTURES

§ 12. The idea of a transcendental grounding of knowledge.

Our meditations now require a further development, without
which what has already been discovered cannot yield the right
profit. As one who is meditating in the Cartesian manner, what
can I do with the transcendental ego philosophically ? Certainly
his being is, for me, prior in the order of knowledge to all Ob-
jective being: In a certain sense he is the underlying basis on
which all Objective cognition takes place. But can this priority
rightly signify that the transcendental ego is, in the usual sense,
the knowledge-basis on which all Objective knowledge is
grounded? Not that we intend to abandon the great Cartesian
thought of attempting to find in transcendental subjectivity the
deepest grounding of all sciences and even of the being of an
Objective world. If we were to abandon that thought, we should
not be following Cartesian paths of meditation at all; our di-
vergencies would be more than modifications prompted by
criticism. But perhaps, with the Cartesian discovery of the
transcendental ego, a new idea of the grounding of knowledge also
becomes disclosed: the idea of it as a transcendental grounding.
And indeed, instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apo-
dictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying
a transcendent subjectivity, we shall direct our attention to the
fact that phenomenological epochs lays open (to me, the medi-
tating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the
sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience. 1
When we take it into consideration that, for each kind of actual
experience and for each of its universal variant modes (per-
ception, retention, recollection, etc.), there is a corresponding
pure phantasy, an "as-if experience" with parallel modes (as-if

1 Author's marginal note; And where there is a new experience, a new science
must arise.

28 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

perception, as-if retention, as-if recollection, etc.;, we surmise
that there Is also an apriori science, which confines itself to the
realm of pure possibility (pure imaginableness) and, instead of
judging about actualities of transcendental being, judges about
<its > apriori possibilities and thus at the same time prescribes
rules a priori for actualities. 1 /
<67> But admittedly, when we let our thoughts hasten on in this
manner, to the conception of a phenomenological science destined
to become philosophy, we immediately run into the already-
mentioned difficulties raised by the fundamental methodological
demand for an apodictic evidence of the ego. For, as we have
already seen, 2 no matter how absolute the apodictic evidence
of the ego's existence may be for him, still it is not necessarily
evidence for the existence of the manifold data of transcendental
experience. On the other hand, though the cogitationes given to
me, in the attitude that effects transcendental reduction, —
given as perceived, recollected, or otherwise experience cogita-
tiones — must not yet be declared absolutely indubitable with
respect to their present or past existence, still it may be possible
to show that the absolute evidence of the ego sum does, after all,
necessarily extend into those manifolds of self-experience in
which the ego's transcendental life and habitual properties are
given, even if there are limits that define the range of these
evidences (the evidences of recollection, retention, etc.). More
precisely stated: The bare identity of the "I am" is not the only
thing given as indubitable in transcendental self-experience.
Rather there extends through all the particular data of actual
and possible self-experience — even though they are not abso-
lutely indubitable in respect of single details — a universal
apoiiciically experienceahle structure of the Ego (for example, the
immanent temporal form belonging to the stream of subjective
processes). Perhaps it can also be shown, as something dependent
on that structure, and indeed as part of it, that the Ego is

1 Author's later note ; Ego [Ick] and habitual! ties are introduced for the first time
in the Fourth Meditation [§§31 f.]. Consideration must be given to whether that is
not too late. "Monad" [§33]. The concept of transcendental genesis [§34]? Intro-
duction of the eidetic mode of observation [§ 34]. Why not before, at the very be-
ginning of the Fourth Meditation or even earlier?

2 The phrase, "as we have already seen," supplied in accordance with Typescript
C and the French translation.

apodictically predelineated, for himself, as a concrete Ego existing

with an individual content made up of subjective processes,
abilities, and dispositions — horizonally predelineated as an
experienceable object, accessible to a possible self -experience
that can be perfected, and perhaps enriched, without limit.

§ 13. Necessity of at first excluding problems relating to the range
covered by transcendental knowledge.

Actual demonstration that such is the case would be a great
task, the task of a criticism of transcendental self-experience with
respect to its / particular interwoven forms and the total effect <68>
produced by the universal tissue of such forms. Obviously that
task would belong to a higher stage, since it would presuppose
that, first of all, we had followed the harmonious course of
transcendental experiencing as it functions in a certain naive
manner, that we had made inquiries about its data and described
them in respect of their universal properties.

The broadening of the Cartesian meditations, which was just
now effected, will motivate our further procedure, as we aim at
a philosophy in the Cartesian sense already described. We see
in advance that the scientific efforts for which we found the
collective name, transcendental phenomenology, must proceed in
two stages.

In the first stage the realm accessible to transcendental self-
experience (a tremendous realm, as we soon discover) must be
explored — and, at first, with simple devotion to the evidence in-
herent in the harmonious flow of such experience, while questions
pertaining to an ultimate criticism, intent on apodictic principles
governing the range of evidence, are set aside. In this stage
accordingly — a stage that is not yet philosophical in the full sense
— we proceed like the natural scientist in his devotion to the
evidence in which Nature is experienced, while for him, as an
investigator of Nature, questions pertaining to a radical criticism
of experience remain altogether outside the field of inquiry.

The second stage of phenomenological research would be
precisely the criticism of transcendental experience and then the
criticism of all transcendental cognition.

A science whose peculiar nature is unprecedented comes into our

30 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

field of vision: a science of concrete transcendental subjectivity,
as given in actual and possible transcendental experience, a
science that forms the extremes! contrast to sciences in ike hitherto
accepted sense, positive, "Objective** sciences. Also among the
Objective sciences there is Indeed a science of subjectivity;
but it is precisely the science of Objective subjectivity, the
subjectivity of men and other animals, a subjectivity that Is
<69> part of the world. / Now, however, we are envisaging a science
that Is, so to speak, absolutely subjective, whose thematic
object exists whether or not the world exists. But more than
this. Apparently my (the philosophizer's) transcendental ego Is,
and must be, not only Its Initial but Its sole theme. Without
doubt the sense of the transcendental reduction implies that, at
the beginning, this science can posit nothing but the ego and
what is Included In the ego himself, with a horizon of unde-
termined determlnabllity *. Without doubt [it must at first
parenthesize the distinction (evinced within the ego) between
"me myself" with my life, my appearances, my acquired certain-
ties of being, my abiding interests, etc., and others with their
lives, their appearances, etc. ; and thus, In a certain sense,] 2 it
begins accordingly as a pure egoiogy and as a science that ap-
parently condemns us to a solipsism, albeit a transcendental
solipsism. As yet it is quite Impossible to foresee how, for me in
the attitude of reduction, other egos • — not as mere wordly phe-
nomena but as other transcendental egos — can become
positable as existing and thus become equally legitimate themes
of a phenomenological egoiogy.

As beginning philosophers we must not let ourselves be
frightened by such considerations. Perhaps reduction to the
transcendental ego only seems to entail a permanently solipsistic
science; whereas the consequential elaboration of this science,
in accordance with its own sense, leads over to a phenomenology
of transcendental intersubjectivity and, by means of this, to a
universal transcendental philosophy. As a matter of fact, we
shall see that, in a certain manner, a transcendental solipsism is
only a subordinate stage philosophically; though, as such, it

1 Reading with Typescript C and the French translation. According to the publish-
ed text: "with the noetic-noematic content".

a Inserted later.

SECOND MEDITATION 31

must first be delimited for purposes of method, in order that the
problems of transcendental intersubjectivity, as problems be-
longing to a higher level, may be correctly stated and attacked. 1
But, at this point in our meditations, we can make no definite
decision about this matter; nor can the advance indications
given here reveal their full significance before we have carried
our meditations further.

At all events, a fundamentally essential deviation from the
Cartesian course has been definitely indicated and will henceforth
be decisive for all our meditating. Unlike Descartes, we shall
plunge into the task of laying open the infinite field of transcendental
experience. The Cartesian evidence — the evidence of the propo-
sition, ego cogito, ego sum — remained barren because Descartes
neglected, / not only to clarify the pure sense of the method of <70>
transcendental epochs, but also to direct his attention to the
fact that the ego can explicate himself ad infinitum and system-
atically, by means of transcendental experience, and therefore
lies ready as a possible field of work. This field is completely
unique and separate, since it indeed relates likewise to all the
world and all the Objective sciences, yet does not presuppose
acceptance of their existence, and since thereby it is separated
from all these sciences, yet does not in any manner adjoin them.

§ 14. The stream of cogitationes. Cogito and cogitatum.

We now shift the weight of transcendental evidence of the
ego cogito (this word taken in the broadest Cartesian sense) from
the identical ego to the manifold cogitationes, the flowing
conscious life in which the identical Ego (mine, the meditator's)
lives — no matter what may define these expressions more
particularly. (Meanwhile we understand questions about the
range of the apodicticity of this evidence to be set aside.) To his
conscious life — for example, his sensuously perceiving and
imagining life, or his asserting, valuing, or willing life — the
Ego can at any time direct his reflective regard ; he can contem-
plate it and, in respect of its contents, explicate and describe it.

It would be much too great a mistake, if one said that to

1 The last sentence of the preceding paragraph and this paragraph, as far as here,
marked emphatically for deletion.

32 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

follow this line of research is nothing else than to make psycho-
logical descriptions based on purely internal experience, experi-
ence of one's own conscious life, and that naturally, to keep such
descriptions pure, one must disregard everything psychophysical.
A great mistake, because a purely descriptive psychology of
consciousness (though its true method has become understandable
and available only by virtue of the new phenomenology) is not
itself transcendental phenomenology as we have defined the latter,
in terms of the transcendental phenomenological reduction. To
be sure, pure psychology of consciousness is a precise parallel to
transcendental phenomenology of consciousness. Nevertheless
the two must at first be kept strictly separate, since failure to
distinguish them, which is characteristic of transcendental psy-
chologism, makes a genuine philosophy impossible. We have
71 > here one of those seemingly trivial nuances / that make a de-
cisive difference between right and wrong paths of philosophy.
It must be continually borne in mind that all transcendental-
phenomenological research is inseparable from undeviating ob-
servance of the transcendental reduction, which must not be
confounded with the abstractive restricting of anthropological
research to purely psychic life. Accordingly the difference be-
tween the sense of a psychological, and that of a transcendental-
phenomenological, exploration of consciousness is immeasurably
profound, though the contents to be described on the one hand
and on the other can correspond. In the one case we have data
belonging to the world, which is presupposed as existing — that
is to say, data taken as psychic components of a man. In the
other case the parallel data, with their like contents, are not
taken in this manner, because the whole world, when one is in
the phenomenological attitude, is not accepted as actuality, but
only as an actuality-phenomenon.

If this psychologistic confusion is avoided, there remains
another point of decisive importance (which moreover, with a
corresponding change of attitude, is decisive also, in the realm
of natural experience, for a genuine psychology of consciousness).
It must not be overlooked that epochs with respect to all worldly
being does not at all change the fact that the manifold cogi-
tationes relating to what is worldly bear this relation within
themselves, that, e.g., the perception of this table still is, as it

SECOND MEDITATION 33

was before, precisely a perception of this table. In this manner,
without exception, every conscious process is, in itself, conscious-
ness of such and such, regardless of what the rightful actuality-
status of this objective such-and-such may be, and regardless
of the circumstance that I, as standing in the transcendental
attitude, abstain from acceptance of this object as well as from
all my other natural acceptances. The transcendental heading,
ego cogito, must therefore be broadened by adding one more
member. Each cogito, each conscious process, we may also say,
"means" something or other and bears in itself, in this manner
peculiar to the meant, its particular cogitatum. Each does this,
moreover, in its own fashion. The house-perception means a
house — more precisely, as this individual house — and means
it in the fashion peculiar to perception ; a house-memory means
a house in the fashion peculiar to memory; a house-phantasy,
in the fashion peculiar to phantasy. A predicative judging about
a house, which perhaps is "there' 1 perceptually, means it in just
the fashion peculiar to judging; a / valuing that supervenes <72>
means it in yet another fashion; and so forth. Conscious processes
are also called intentional) but then the word intentionality
signifies nothing else than this universal fundamental property
of consciousness: to be consciousness of something; as a cogito,
to bear within itself its cogitatum. 1

§ 15. Natural and transcendental reflection.

For the sake of further clarification, however, it should be
added that we must distinguish "straightforwardly" executed
grasping perceiving, remembering, predicating, valuing,
purposing, etc., from the reflections by means of which alone, as
grasping acts belonging to a new level, the straightforward acts
become accessible to us. Perceiving straightforwardly, we grasp,
for example, the house and not the perceiving. Only in re-
flection do we "direct" ourselves to the perceiving itself and to
its perceptual direct edness to the house. In the "natural re-
flection" of everyday life, also however in that of psychological
science (that is, in psychological experience of our own psychic

1 Author's marginal note: This needs supplementations. Start with intentionality
in the pregnant sense, that of directing oneself to something; and so forth.

34 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

processes), we stand on the footing of the world already given as
existing — as when, in everyday life, we assert: "I see a house
there" or "I remember having heard this melody". In transcen-
dental-phenomenological reflection we deliver ourselves from this
footing, by universal epochs with respect to the being or non-
being of the world. The experience as thus modified, the transcen-
dental experience, consists then, we can say, in our looking at and
describing the particular transcendentally reduced cogito, but
without participating, as reflective subjects, in the natural
existence-positing that the originally straightforward perception
(or other cogito) contains or that the Ego, as immersing himself
straightforwardly in the world, actually executed. Therewith,
to be sure, an essentially changed subjective process takes the
place of the original one; accordingly it must be said that this
reflection alters the original subjective process. But that is true
of every reflection, including natural reflection. Natural re-
flection alters the previously naive subjective process quite
essentially; this process loses its original mode, "straightforward",
by the very fact that reflection makes an object out of what was
previously a subjective process but not objective. The proper
task of reflection, however, is not to repeat the original process,
<73> / but to consider it and explicate what can be found in it. Natu-
rally the transition to this considering yields a new intentional
process, which, with its peculiarity of "relating back to the
earlier process", is awareness, and perhaps evident awareness,
of just that earlier process itself, and not some other. Precisely
thereby an experiential knowing (which at first is descriptive)
becomes possible, that experiential knowing [Erfahrungswissen]
to which we owe all conceivable cognizance [Kenntnis] and
cognition [Erkenntnis] of our intentional living. This continues
to hold, then, for transcendental-phenomenological reflection.
The reflecting Ego's non-participation in the "positing" (be-
lieving, taking a position as to being) that is part of the
straightforward house-perception in no wise alters the fact that
his reflecting experiencing is precisely an experiencing experi-
encing of the house-perception with all its moments, which be-
longed to it before and are continuing to take shape. And among
these, in our example, are the moments of the perceiving itself,
as the flowing subjective process, and the moments of the per-

SECOND MEDITATION 35

ceived "house", purely as perceived. There is lacking neither,
on the one side, the existence-positing (perceptual belief) in the
mode of certainty, which is part of — normal — perceiving, nor,
on the other side (that of the appearing house) , the character of
simple "factual existence". The non-participating, the ab-
staining, of the Ego who has the phenomenological attitude is
his affair, not that of the perceiving he considers reflectively,
nor that of the naturally perceiving Ego. We may add that it is
itself accessible to an appropriate reflection ; and only by means
of this do we know anything about it.

We can describe the situation also on the following manner.
If the Ego, as naturally immersed in the world, experiencingly
and otherwise, is called "interested" in the world, then the phe-
nomenologically altered — and, as so altered, continually main-
tained — attitude consists in a splitting of the Ego: in that the
phenomenological Ego establishes himself as "disinterested on-
looker", above the naively interested Ego. That this takes place
is then itself accessible by means of a new reflection, which,
as transcendental, likewise demands the very same attitude of
looking on "disinterestedly" — the Ego's sole remaining interest
being to see and to describe adequately what he sees, purely as
seen, as what is seen and seen in such and such a manner.

Thus all occurences of the life turned toward the world, with
all their simple and founded positings of being and with the
correlative modes of being (such as certainly existing, / being <74>
possible, being probable, also being beautiful and being good,
being useful, etc.), pure of all accompanying and expectant
meanings on the observer's part, become accessible to description.
Only in this purity, indeed, can they become themes of a uni-
versal criticism of consciousness, such as our aiming at a philoso-
phy necessarily demands. We recall the radicalness of the
Cartesian idea of philosophy, as the idea of the all-embracing
science, grounded to the utmost and apodictically. This idea
demands an absolute universal criticism, which, for its part, by
abstention from all positions that already give anything existent,
must first create for itself a universe of absolute freedom from
prejudice. The universality of transcendental experience and
description does this by inhibiting the universal "prejudice" of
world-experience, which hiddenly pervades all naturalness (the

36 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

belief in the world, which pervades naturalness thoroughly and
continuously), and then — within the sphere that remains unaf-
fected, the absolute sphere of egological being, as the sphere of
meanings reduced to an unalloyed freedom from prejudice —
striving for a universal description. This description is then
called on to be the foundation for a radical and universal criti-
cism. Naturally everything depends on strictly preserving the
absolute "unprejudicedness" of the description and thereby
satisfying the principle of pure evidence, which we laid down
in advance. That signifies restriction to the pure data of transcen-
dental reflection, which therefore must be taken precisely as
they are given in simple evidence, purely "intuitively", and
always kept free from all interpretations that read into them
more than is genuinely seen.

If we follow this methodological principle in the case of the
dual topic, cogito — cogitatum (qua cogitatum), there become
opened to us, first of all, the general descriptions to be made,
always on the basis of particular cogitationes, with regard to
each of the two correlative sides. Accordingly, on the one hand,
descriptions of the intentional object as such, with regard to the
determinations attributed to it in the modes of consciousness
concerned, attributed furthermore with corresponding modal-
ities, which stand out when attention is directed to them 1 .
(For example: the "modalities of being", like certainly being,
possibly or presumably being, etc.; or the "subjective"- tempo-
ral modes, being present, past, or future.) This line of description
is called noematic. Its counterpart is noetic description, which
<75> concerns the modes of the cogito / itself, the modes of conscious-
ness (for example: perception, recollection, retention), with the
modal differences inherent in them (for example: differences in
clarity and distinctness).

We now understand that, by our universal epoche with respect
to the being or non-being of the world, we have not simply lost
the world for phenomenology; we retain it, after all, qua cogi-
tatum. And not only with respect to the particular realities that
are meant (and as they are meant) in some set or other of sepa-
rate acts of consciousness — or, stated more distinctly: that are
meant selectively. For indeed their particularity is particularity

1 Translator's note: In the text the pronoun is ambiguous.

SECOND MEDITATION 37

within a unitary universe, which, even when we are directed to
and grasping the particular, goes on "appearing" unitarily. In
other words, there is always co-awareness of it, in the unity of a
consciousness that can itself become a grasping consciousness,
and often enough does. This consciousness is awareness of the
world-whole in its own peculiar form, that of spatio temporal
endlessness. Throughout every change in consciousness the uni-
verse — changeable in its experienced (and otherwise selectively
meant) particulars, but still the one and only universe — remains
as the existing background of our whole natural life. Thus, when
phenomenological reduction is consistently executed, there is
left us, on the noetic side, the openly endless life of pure conscious-
ness and, as its correlate on the noematic side, the meant world,
purely as meant. Accordingly, not only in respect of particulars
but also universally, the phenomenologically meditating Ego can
become the "non-participant onlooker" at himself — including
furthermore every Objectivity that "is" for him, and as it is for
him. Obviously it can be said that, as an Ego in the natural
attitude, I am likewise and at all times a transcendental Ego,
but that I know about this only by executing phenomenological
reduction. Only by virtue of this new attitude do I see that all
the world, and therefore whatever exists naturally, exists for
me only as accepted by me, with the sense it has for me at the
time — that it exists for me only as oogitatum of my changing
and, while changing, interconnected cogitationes ; and I now
accept it solely as that. Consequently I, the transcendental phe-
nomenologist, have objects (singly or in universal complexes) as
a theme for my universal descriptions: solely as the intentional
correlates of modes of consciousness of them. /

§ 16. Digression: Necessary beginning of both transcendental and <76>
"purely psychological" reflection with the ego cogito.

According to this account, the ego cogito of the transcendental
ego, in the universality of his life, indicates an openly infinite
multiplicity of particular concrete subjective processes, the un-
covering and descriptive apprehension of which indicates, in
turn, a first great domain of problems. Those processes are to
be uncovered and described in respect of their varying (noetic
and noematic) structures ; likewise, on the other hand, in respect

38 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

of their modes of "combination" — at the highest level, in the
unity of the concrete ego himself. The ego, naturally, is concrete
only in the openly endless universality of his connectedly unitary
intentional life and of the correlates involved in it as cogitata —
correlates that, for their part, are united into integral uni-
versalities and include, in their number, the appearing world as
appearing. The concrete ego himself is the universal theme of
the description. Or, stated more distinctly: I, the meditating
phenomenologist, set myself the all-embracing task of uncovering
myself, in my full concreteness — that is, with all the intentional
correlates that are included therein. As already mentioned, the
parallel to this transcendental uncovering is the psychological
uncovering of myself, i.e., my purely psychic being and, first of
all, my psychic life, apperceived in the natural manner, namely
as a component of my psychophysical (animal) reality and thus
as a component of the world I naturally accept.

Manifestly a transcendental-descriptive egology, and likewise
a descriptive lt purely inner psychology" actually derived quite
exclusively from internal experience (a psychology that, as the
fundamental psychological discipline, must be developed), can
start with nothing other than the ego cogito. What with the
failure of all modern attempts to distinguish between a psycho-
logical and a philosophical theory of consciousness, this remark
is of the greatest importance. Access to both theories is barred,
if one is misled by the still all-prevailing tradition of sensualism
and starts with a theory of sensation. To do so involves the
following: In advance, as though this were obviously correct,
one misinterprets conscious life as a complex of data of "ex-
ternal" and (at best) "internal sensuousness" ; then one lets /
<77> form-qualities take care of combining such data into wholes. To
get rid of "atomism", one adds the theory that the forms or
configurations are founded on these data necessarily and the
wholes are therefore prior in themselves to the parts. But, when
descriptive theory of consciousness begins radically, it has before
it no such data and wholes, except perhaps as prejudices. Its
beginning is the pure — and, so to speak, still dumb — psycho-
logical l experience, which now must be made to utter its own

1 Reading "psychologische" instead of "psychtsche" (psychic), as in both the
published text and typescript C.

SECOND MEDITATION 39

sense with no adulteration. The truly first utterance, however,
is the Cartesian utterance of the ego cogito — for example: "I
perceive — this house* ' or "I remember — a certain commotion
in the street". And the first descriptive generality is the sepa-
ration of cogito and cogitatum qua cogitatum. In what cases, and
in what different significations of the phrase, data of sensation
can then perhaps be tendered legitimately as components : that
is <a problem whose solution is > a special result, to be produced
by a work of uncovering and describing — from which the tra-
ditional theory of consciousness has completely exempted itself,
to its own detriment. Since it was not clear about the funda-
mental essentials of method, it entirely missed not only the
tremendous theme of describing cogitata qua cogitata but also the
proper sense and particular tasks belonging to a description of
cogitationes themselves, as modes of consciousness.

§ 17. The two-sidedness of inquiry into consciousness as an investi-
gation of correlatives. Lines of description. Synthesis as the primal
form belonging to consciousness.

On the other hand, if the beginning and the direction in which
our tasks lie are clear from the first, they provide us, in our
transcendental attitude, with important thoughts to guide the
attack on further problems. Inquiry into consciousness concerns
two sides (for the present we are leaving out of consideration the
question of the identical Ego) ; they can be characterized de-
scriptively as belonging together inseparably. The sort of combi-
nation uniting consciousness with consciousness can be charac-
terized as synthesis, a mode of combination exclusively peculiar
to consciousness. For example, if I take the perceiving of this
die as the theme for my description, I see in pure reflection that
"this" die is given continuously as an objective unity in a multi-
form and changeable multiplicity of manners of appearing, which
belong determinately to it. These, in their temporal flow, are
not an incoherent sequence of / subjective processes. Rather <78>
they flow away in the unity of a synthesis, such that in them
"one and the same" is intended as appearing. The one identical
die appears, now in "near appearances", now in "far ap-
pearances": in the changing modes of the Here and There, over

40 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

against an always co-intended, though perhaps unheeded, abso-
lute Here (in my co-appearing organism). Furthermore, each
continued manner of appearance in such a mode (for example:
"the die here, in the near sphere") shows itself to be, in turn, the
synthetic unity pertaining to a multiplicity of manners of ap-
pearance belonging to that mode. Thus the near-thing, as "the
same", appears now from this "side", now from that; and the
"visual perspectives" change — also, however, the other manners
of appearance (tactual, acoustic, and so forth), as we can observe
by turning our attention in the right direction. Then, if we pay
particular heed to any of the die's features that shows itself in
the die-perception (for example : the die's shape or color, or one
of its faces in particular, or the square shape or particular color
of that face), the same is again the case. Always we find the
feature in question as a unity belonging to a passing flow of
"multiplicities". Looking straightforwardly, we have perhaps
the one unchanging shape or color; in the reflective attitude, we
have its manners of appearance (orientational, perspectival, and
so forth), following one another in continuous sequence. Further-
more, each of these manners of appearance (for example: the
shadowing forth [Abschattung] of the shape or color) is itself an
exhibition of [Darstellung von] the shape, the color, or whatever
the feature is that appears in it. Thus each passing cogito intends
its cogitatum, not with an undifferentiated blankness, but as a
cogito with a describable structure of multiplicities, a structure
having a quite definite noetic-noematic composition, which, by
virtue of its essential nature, pertains to just this identical
cogitatum.

Parallel and (as becomes apparent in making them) extremely
far-reaching descriptions can be developed in the case of any
intuition — that is, not only in the case of sensuous perception,
but also in the case of other modes of intuition (recollection,
which makes intuited afterwards; expectation, which makes
intuited beforehand). For example: the remembered physical
thing also appears "in" changing sides, perspectives, and so
forth. But, in order to do justice to the differences among modes
of intuition (for example: to what differentiates givenness in
<79> memory / from givenness in perception), other dimensions would
have to be described. One most general trait, however, is always

SECOND MEDITATION 41

present in any consciousness of any sort, as consciousness of
something: This something, the particular "intentional object
qua intentional" in any consciousness, is there [bewusst] as an
identical unity belonging to noetically-noematically changing
modes of consciousness, whether intuitive or non-intuitive.

Once we have laid hold of the phenomenological task of de-
scribing consciousness concretely, veritable infinities of facts —
never explored prior to phenomenology — become disclosed.
They can all be characterized as facts of synthetic structure, which
give noetic-noematic unity to single cogitationes, in themselves
(as concrete synthetic wholes) and in relation to one another.
Only elucidation of the peculiarity we call synthesis makes
fruitful the exhibition of the cogito (the intentional subjective
process) as consciousness-of — that is to say, Franz Brentano's
significant discovery that "intentionality" is the fundamental
characteristic of "psychic phenomena" — and actually lays
open the method for a descriptive transcendental-philosophical
theory of consciousness (and naturally also for a corresponding
psychological theory).

§ 18. Identification as the fundamental form of synthesis. The all-
embracing synthesis of transcendental time.

If we consider the fundamental form of synthesis, namely identi-
fication, we encounter it first of all as an all-ruling, passively
flowing synthesis, in the form of the continuous consciousness of
internal time. Every subjective process has its internal tempo-
rality. If it is a conscious process in which (as in the perception
of the die) a worldly Object appears as cogitatum, then we have
to distinguish the Objective temporality that appears (for example:
the temporality of this die) from the "internal" temporality of
the appearing (for example: that of the die-perceiving). This
appearing "flows away" with its temporal extents and phases,
which, for their part, are continually changing appearances of
the one identical die. Their unity is a unity of synthesis: not
merely a continuous connectedness of cogitationes (as it were,
a being stuck to one another externally), but a connectedness
that makes the unity of one consciousness, in which the unity of
an intentional objectivity, as "the same" objectivity / belonging <80>

42 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

to multiple modes of appearance, becomes "constituted" '. The
existence of a world and, accordingly, the existence of this die
are "parenthesized" in consequence of my epochs ; but the one
identical, appearing die (as appearing) 1 is continuously
"immanent" in the flowing consciousness, descriptively "in" it;
as is likewise the attribute "one identical". This being-in-
consciousness is a being-in of a completely unique kind: not a
being-in-consciousness as a really intrinsic component part, but
rather a being-in-it "ideally" as something intentional, something
appearing — or, equivalantly stated, a being-in-it as its immanent
"objective sense". The "object" of consciousness, the object as
having identity "with itself" during the flowing subjective
process, does not come into the process from outside; on the
contrary, it is included as a sense in the subjective process itself
— and thus as an "intentional effect" produced by the synthesis
of consciousness.

Now the same die (the same for consciousness) can be intended
in highly diverse modes of , consciousness — simultaneously, or
else successively in separated modes of consciousness — for ex-
ample : in separate perceptions, recollections, expectations, valu-
ations, and so forth. Again it is a synthesis that, as a unitary
consciousness embracing these separated processes, gives rise to
the consciousness of identity and thereby makes any knowing
of identity possible.

But likewise every consciousness in which the non-identical is
intended unitarily (every consciousness of a plurality, a relational
complex, or the like) is ultimately a synthesis in this sense, consti-
tuting its peculiar cogitatum (the plurality, the relational
complex, or whatever it is) synthetically or, as is also said here,
syntactically — regardless, moreover, of whether this synthesis
should be characterized as a pure passivity on the Ego's part or
as his activity. Even contradictions, incompatibilities, are
products of "syntheses" (to be sure, syntheses of another kind).
Synthesis, however, does not occur just in every particular
conscious process, nor does it connect one particular conscious
process with another only occasionally. On the contrary, as we
said beforehand, the whole of conscious life is unified synthetic-
ally. Conscious life is therefore an all-embracing "cogito", syn-

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C.

SECOND MEDITATION 43

thetically comprising all particular conscious processes that ever
become prominent, and having its all-embracing cogitatum,
founded at different levels on the manifold particular cogitata.
But this founding does not signify a building up in the temporal
/ sequence of a genesis, since indeed any imaginable particular <8! >
subjective process is only a prominence within a total conscious-
ness always presupposed as unitary. 1 The all-embracing cogita-
tum <of reflection > is the all-embracing life itself, with its
openly endless unity and wholeness. Only because it already
appears as a total unity can it also be "contemplated", in the
pre-eminent manner characterizing acts of paying attention and
grasping, and be made the theme for an all-embracing cognition.
The fundamental form of this universal synthesis, the form that
makes all other syntheses of consciousness possible, is the all-
embracing consciousness of internal time. The correlate of this
consciousness is immanent temporality itself, in conformity
with which all the life-processes belonging to the ego that can
ever be found reflectively must present themselves as temporally
ordered, temporally beginning and ending, simultaneous or
successive, within the constant infinite horizon : immanent time.
The distinction between <internal > time itself and the conscious-
ness of <internal > time can be expressed also as that between
the subjective process in internal time, or the temporal form of
this process, and the modes of its temporal appearance, as the
corresponding "multiplicities". As these modes of appearance,
which make up the consciousness of internal time, are themselves
"intentive components of conscious life" [ (< intentionale Erleb-
nisse"] and must in turn be given in reflection as temporalities,
we encounter here a paradoxical fundamental property of
conscious life, which seems thus to be infected with an infinite
regress. The task of clarifying this fact and making it under-
standable presents extraordinary difficulties. Be that as it may,
the fact is evident, even apodictically evident, and indicates one
aspect of the ego's marvellous being-f or-himself : here, in the
first place, the being of his conscious life in the form of reflexive
intentional relatedness to itself.

1 Author's marginal note: All this requires turther supplementation, relating to
the consciousness (within the ego) of intersubjective time.

44 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

§ 19. Actuality and potentiality of intentional life.

The multiplicity of the intentionality belonging to any cogito
— to any that relates to the world, by the very fact that such a
cogito not only intends something wordly but is itself intended
in the consciousness of internal time — is a theme not exhausted
with the consideration of cogitationes 1 as actual subjective
processes. On the contrary, every actuality involves its potenti-
alities, which are not empty possibilities, but rather possibilities
<82> / intentionally predelineated in respect of content — namely,
in the actual subjective process itself — and, in addition, having
the character of possibilities actualizable by the Ego.

With that, another fundamental trait of intentionality is indi-
cated. Every subjective process has a process 2 "horizon", which
changes with the alteration of the nexus of consciousness to
which the process belongs and with the alteration of the process
itself from phase to phase of its flow — an intentional horizon of
reference to potentialities of consciousness that belong to the
process itself. For example, there belongs to every external per-
ception its reference from the "genuinely perceived" sides of the
object of perception to the sides "also meant" — not yet per-
ceived, but only anticipated and, at first, with a non-intuitional
emptiness (as the sides that are "coming" now perceptually):
a continuous protention, which, with each phase of the per-
ception, has a new sense. Furthermore, the perception has
horizons made up of other possibilities of perception, as per-
ceptions that we could have, if we actively directed the course of
perception otherwise: if, for example, we turned our eyes that
way instead of this, or if we were to step forward or to one side,
and so forth. In the corresponding memory this recurs in modified
form, perhaps in the consciousness that, instead of the sides then
visible in fact, I could have seen others — naturally, if I had
directed my perceptual activity in a suitably different manner.
Moreover, as might have been said earlier, to every perception
there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentiality of
awakenable recollections; and to every recollection there belongs,
as a horizon, the continuous intervening intentionality of possible

1 In the published text, Typescript C, and the French translation: cogitata.
a Inserted later.

SECOND MEDITATION 45

recollections (to be actualized on my initiative, actively), up
to the actual Now of perception. Everywhere in this connexion
an "I can and do, but I can also do otherwise than I am doing' '
plays its part — without detriment to the fact that this
"freedom", like every other, is always open to possible hindrances.

The horizons are "predelineated" potentialities. We say also:
We can ask any horizon what "lies in it", we can explicate or
unfold it, and "uncover" the potentialities of conscious life at a
particular time. Precisely thereby we uncover the objective sense
meant implicitly in the actual cogito, though never with more
than a certain degree of foreshadowing. This sense, the cogitatum
qua cogitatum, is never present to actual consciousness \yor-
stellig] as a finished datum; it becomes "clarified" only through
explication of the given horizon and the new / horizons continu- <83 >
ously awakened [der stetig neu geweckten Horizonte], The prede-
lineation itself, to be sure, is at all times imperfect ; yet, with its
indeterminateness, it has a determinate structure. For example:
the die leaves open a great variety of things pertaining to the
unseen faces; yet it is already "construed" in advance as a die,
in particular as colored, rough, and the like, though each of these
determinations always leaves further particulars open. This
leaving open, prior to further determinings (which perhaps
never take place), is a moment included in the given conscious-
ness itself; it is precisely what makes up the "horizon". As
contrasted with mere l clarification by means of anticipative
"imaginings", there takes place, by means of an actually con-
tinuing perception, a fulfilling further determination (and per-
haps determination as otherwise) — but with new horizons of
openness.

Thus, as consciousness of something, every consciousness has
the essential property, not just of being somehow able to change
into continually new modes of consciousness of the same object
(which, throughout the unity of synthesis, is inherent in them
as an identical objective sense), but of being able to do so ac-
cording to — indeed, only according to those horizon intentional-
ities 2 . The object is, so to speak, a pole of identity, always meant

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "blossen" instead of ,{ grossen". Cf. the French:
"simple".

2 Reading, with Typescript C, ,t -intentionalitdten'\ instead of "-itdentionaUtat",

46 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

expectantly as having a sense yet to be actualized; in every
moment of consciousness it is an index, pointing to a noetic
intentionality that pertains to it according to its sense, an in-
tentionally that can be asked for and explicated. All this is
concretely accessible to investigation.

§ 20. The peculiar nature of intentional analysis.

It becomes evident that, as intentional, the analysis of
consciousness is totally different from analysis in the usual and
natural sense. Conscious life, as we said once before, is not just
a whole made up of "data" of consciousness and therefore
"analyzable" (in an extremely broad sense, divisible) merely
into its selfsufficient and non-selfsufficient elements — the forms
of unity (the "form-qualities") being included then among the
non-selfsufficient elements. To be sure, when regard is directed
to certain themes, intentional "analysis" does lead also to such
divisions, and to that extent the word can still serve in the origi-
nal sense; but everywhere its peculiar attainment (as "in-
tentional") is an uncovering of the potentialities " implicit* ' in
actualities of consciousness — an uncovering that brings about,
<84> on the noematic side, an / "explication" or "unfolding", a "be-
coming distinct" and perhaps a "clearing" of what is consciously
meant (the objective sense) and, correlatively, an explication of
the potential intentional processes themselves. Intentional analy-
sis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a conscious-
ness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of
its meant [Meinung seines Gemeinten], but that, at any moment,
this something meant [dieses Vermeinte] is more — something
meant with something more — than what is meant at that
moment "explicitly". In our example, each phase of perception
was a mere side of "the" object, as what was perceptually meant.
This intending-beyond-itself, which is implicit in any conscious-
ness, must be considered an essential moment of it. That, on the
other hand, this intending is, and must be, a "meaning more"
of the Same becomes shown only by the evidence of a possible
making distinct and, ultimately, of an intuitive uncovering, in
the form of actual and possible continued perceiving or of possi-
ble recollecting, as something to be done on my initiative.

SECOND MEDITATION 47

The phenomenologist, however, does not inquire with merely
a naive devotedness to the intentional object purely as such; he
does not consider the intentional object only straightforwardly
and explicate its meant features, its meant parts and properties.
If that were all he did, the intentionality, which makes up the
intuitive or non-intuitive consciousness itself and the explicative
considering, would remain "anonymous". In other words: There
would remain hidden the noetic multiplicities of consciousness
and their synthetic unity, by virtue of which alone, and as their
essentially necessary unitary doing [ihre wesensmdssige Binheits-
leistung], we have one intentional object, and always this defi-
nite one, continuously meant — have it, so to speak, before us
as meant thus and so; likewise the hidden constitutive per-
formances by virtue of which (if consideration then continues
as explication) we find straightforwardly, as explicata of what
is meant, such things as a "feature'', a "property" * a "part",
or mean these implicitly and can then discover them intuitively.
When the phenomenologist explores everything objective, and
whatever can be found in it, exclusively as a "correlate of
consciousness", he does not consider and describe it only
straightforwardly and only as somehow related back to the
corresponding Ego and the ego cogito of which it is the cogitatum.
Rather, with his reflective regard, he penetrates the anonymous
"cogitative" life, he uncovers the definite synthetic courses of
the manifold modes of consciousness and, / further back, the <85>
modes of Ego-comportment, which make understandable the
objective affair's simple meantness for the Ego, its intuitive or
non-intuitive meantness. Or, stated more precisely, they make
it understandable how, in itself and by virtue of its current
intentional structure, consciousness makes possible and necessary
the fact that such an "existing" and "thus determined" Object
is intended in it, occurs in it as such a sense. Thus, in the case
of perception of a spatial thing, the phenomenologist (abstracting
at first from all "significance" predicates and restricting himself
purely to the "res extensa") explores the manner in which the
changing "sight things", and "things" of the other senses, have
in themselves the character of appearances of this same res

Author's marginal note: substratum.

48 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

extensa. In the case of any spatial thing, he explores its 1 (po-
tential and perhaps actual) changing perspectives ; furthermore,
with regard to its temporal modes of givenness, the modifications
of its being still intended while it sinks retentionally into the
past and, with respect to the Ego, the modes of his specifically
own still-having and holding, the modes of attention, and so
forth. It is to be noted in this connexion that phenomenological
explication of the perceived as such is not restricted to that
perceptual explication of it, in respect of its features, which
comes about as perception continues. On the contrary, phenome-
nological explication makes clear what is included and only non-
intuitively co-intended in the sense of the cogitatum (for ex-
ample, the "other side"), by making present in phantasy the
potential perceptions that would make the invisible visible. That
is true of any intentional analysis. As intentional it reaches out
beyond the isolated subjective processes that are to be analyzed.
By explicating their correlative horizons, it brings the highly
diverse anonymous processes into the field comprising those that
function "constitutively" in relation to the objective sense of
the cogitatum in question — that is to say: not only the actual
but also the potential subjective processes, which, as such, are
"implicit" and "predelineated" in the sense-producing in-
tentionally of the actual ones and which, when discovered,
have the evident character of processes that explicate the im-
plicit sense. Thus alone can the phenomenologist make under-
standable to himself how, within the immanency of conscious
life and in thus and so determined modes of consciousness be-
longing to this incessant flux, anything like fixed and abiding
objective unities can become intended and, in particular, how this
marvellous work of "constituting" identical objects is done in
<86> the case of each category of objects j — that is to say: how, in the
case of each category, the constitutive conscious life looks, and
must look, in respect of the correlative noetic and noematic
variants pertaining to the same object. The horizon structure
belonging to every intentionality thus prescribes for phenome-
nological analysis and description methods of a totally new kind,
which come into action wherever consciousness and object,
wherever intending and sense, real and ideal actuality, possi-

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "ihre" instead of "ihrer".

SECOND MEDITATION 49

bility, necessity, illusion, truth, and, on the other hand, experi-
ence, judgment, evidence, and so forth, present themselves as
names for transcendental problems, to be taken in hand as
genuine problems concerning "subjective origins".

Mutatis mutandis the same is manifestly true in the case of a
pure 1 "internal psychology" or a "purely intentional" psy-
chology (within the realm of natural posit ivity) 2 , which we have
alluded to as the parallel to constitutional transcendental phe-
nomenology. The only radical reform of psychology consists in
the pure development of an intentional psychology. Brentano
demanded it ; but unfortunately he failed to recognize the funda-
mental sense of an intentional analysis and therefore failed to
recognize the method that alone makes such a psychology
pcssible, as the latter can gain access to its genuine and truly
infinite field of problems only by that method.

At first, to be sure, the possibility of a pure phenomenology
of consciousness seems highly questionable, since the realm of
phenomena of consciousness is so truly the realm of a Hera-
clitean flux. It would in fact be hopeless to attempt to proceed
here with such methods of concept and judgment formation as
are standard in the Objective sciences. The attempt to determine
a process of consciousness as an identical object, on the basis of
experience, in the same fashion as a natural Object — ultimately
then with the ideal presumption of a possible explication into
identical elements, which might be apprehended by means of
fixed concepts — would indeed be folly. Processes of conscious-
ness — not merely owing to our imperfect ability to know objects
of that kind, but a priori — have no ultimate elements and
relationships, fit for subsumption under the idea of objects de-
terminable by fixed concepts and therefore such that, in their
case, it would be rational to set ourselves the task of an approxi-
mative determination guided by fixed concepts. In spite of that,
however, the idea of an intentional analysis is legitimate, since,
in the flux of intentional synthesis (which creates unity in all
consciousness and which, noetically and noematically, consti-
tutes unity of objective sense), an essentially necessary con-
formity to type prevails and can be apprehended in strict concepts, j <87>

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.
J Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

50 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

§ 21. The intentional object as "transcendental clue".

1 The most universal type — within which, as a form, every-
thing particular is included — is indicated by our first universal
scheme: ego — cogito — cogitaium. The most universal de-
scriptions (made with the most extreme, with — so to speak —
formal, universality), which we have attempted in a rough
fashion concerning intentionality, concerning its peculiar synthe-
sis, and so forth, relate to that type. In the particularization of
that type, and of its description, the intentional object (on the
side belonging to the cogitatum) plays, for easily understood
reasons, the role of "transcendental clue" to the typical infinite
multiplicities of possible cogitationes that, in a possible synthesis,
bear the intentional object within them (in the manner peculiar
to consciousness) as the same meant object. Necessarily the point
of departure is the object given "straightforwardly" at the par-
ticular time. From it reflection goes back to the mode of
consciousness at that time and to the potential modes of
consciousness included horizonally in that mode, then to those
in which the object might be otherwise intended as the same,
within the unity (ultimately) of a possible conscious life, all the
possibilities of which are included in the "ego". If we continue
to limit ourselves to the most extreme universality, to formal
universality, if we think of just any object (with an unrestrictedly
optional content) as cogitatum, and take it in this universality as
our clue, we find that the multiplicity of possible modes of
consciousness of the Same — the formal type that all these ex-
emplify — is subdivided into a number of sharply differentiated
particular types. For example, possible perception, retention,
recollection, expectation, intending as something symbolized,
intuitive representation by analogy, are such types of in-
tentionality, which pertain to any conceivable object, as do their
types of synthetic combination. All these types become further
particularized in their whole noetic-noematic composition as
soon as we particularize the empty universality of the intentional
object. The particularization may at first be formal-logical
(formal-ontological) — that is to say: modes of the Anything

1 Author's note opposite first line of text: Intentional modifications of the cogito
— memories and empathies.

SECOND MEDITATION 53

Whatever, such as single object, and ultimately individual
object, universal, plurality, whole, predicatively formed state
(or complex) of affairs, relational complex, and so forth. Here
the radical difference between objectivities that are real (in a broad
sense) and categorial objectivities also presents itself. The latter
point back to an origin from "operations", from a step-by-step
generative-constructive / activity of the ego: the former, to an <88>
origin as effects of a merely passive (in any case, not an < active-
ly > generative) synthesis. On the other hand, we have the ma-
terial-ontological particularizations, starting from the concept of
the real concrete individual, which is differentiated into its real
regions — for example : (mere) spatial thing, animate being, and
so forth — and entails corresponding particularizations of the
relevant formal-logical modifications (real property, real plu-
rality, real relational complex, and the rest).

Each type brought out by these clues is to be asked about its
noetic-noematic structure, is to be systematically explicated and
established in respect of those modes of intentional flux that
pertain to it, and in respect of their horizons and the intentional
processes implicit in their horizons, and so forth. If one keeps
no matter what object fixed in its form or category and main-
tains continuous evidence of its identity throughout the change
in modes of consciousness of it, one sees that, no matter how
fluid these may be, and no matter how inapprehensible as having
ultimate elements, still they are by no means variable without
restriction. They are always restricted to a set of structural tyj>es,
which is "invariable", inviolably the same: as long as the objec-
tivity remains intended as this one and as of this kind, and as
long as, throughout the change in modes of consciousness, evi-
dence of objective identity can persist.

To explicate systematically just this set of structural types is
the task of transcendental theory, which, if it restricts itself to an
objective universality as its clue, is called theory of the transcen-
dental constitution of any object whatever, as an object of the
form or category (highest of all, the region) in question. Thus
arise — first of all, as separate — many different transcendental
theories: a theory of perception and the other types of intuition,
a theory of intending objects as symbolized, a theory of judgment,
a theory of volition, and so forth. They become united, however,

52 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

in view of the more comprehensive synthetic complexes; they
belong together functionally, and thus make up the formally
universal constitutional theory of any object whatever or of an
open horizon of possible objects of any sort, as objects of possible
consciousness.
<89> Furthermore, transcendental / theories of constitution arise
that, as non-formal, relate to any spatial things whatever (singly
and in the all-embracing nexus of a Nature), to any psycho-
physical beings, to human beings as such, to their self-com-
portment toward their natural and otherwise determined sur-
rounding world, to any social communities, any cultural objects,
and ultimately to any Objective world whatever — purely as a
world intended in possible consciousness and, transcendentally,
as a world constituted (in the manner peculiar to consciousness)
purely within the transcendental ego. All of that, naturally, with
consistently exercised transcendental epoch6, from which all
these theories derive a transcendental sense. 1

Yet it must not be overlooked that types of real and ideal
objects intended as "Objective'' are not the only clues for consti-

1 At about this point Husserl inserted a page of text, which may be translated
as follows.

<238> Yet I. had to begin with myself, the Ego given in experience of myself as a man.
After all, I could exercise reduction only by starting out from myself; and therefore
I arrived only at the ego who has, as his worldly counterpart, his own psyche. My
own human psyche, therefore, I can make evident as a manifestation of the absolute:
What are others, what is the world, for me? — Constituted phenomena, merely
something produced within me. Never can I reach the point of ascribing being in the
absolute sense to others, any more than to the physical things of Nature, which exist
only as transcendentally produced affairs. Meditations I-IV concern a first path,
along which it becomes visible in a very general manner that, for the ego of the tran-
scendental reduction, all that exists is and must be a constituted product. But must
it not be said likewise that all that exists for me as a man must be constituted within
me, in the manner peculiar to consciousness — including my own humanness ? How
is the latter proposition related to the former? Conscious life is likewise constituted
necessarily as human in the constituted world, and as a human conscious life in
which the world is intended, psychically constituted, and so forth.
The all-embracing constitution of the world within the ego is outlined as a problem

-: 239 > only / as far as the theory of clues — as far as the consideration of the world (that is
to say: the ontological consideration thereof, as transformed into a constitutional-
ontological consideration). Somewhere in that context, naturally, the problem man
must present itself? But what is the proper order?

The first procedure in Meditations I-IV is to awaken the guiding thought: The
world is a meaning, an accepted sense. When we go back to the ego, we can explicate
the founding and founded strata with which that sense is built op [den Fundierungs-
aufbau], we can reach the absolute being and process in which the being of the world
shows its ultimate truth and in which the ultimate problems of being reveal them-
selves — bringing into the thematic field all the disguises that unphilosophical
naivete cannot penetrate [alle Verhullungen der unphilosophischen Naivitat].

SECOND MEDITATION 53

tutional investigations — that is, when we inquire into the uni-
versal types of possible modes of consciousness of objects. The
types of merely subjective objects, such as all immanent subjective
processes themselves, are likewise clues, since, as objects of the
consciousness of internal time, they have (singly and universally)
their "constitution".

Everywhere problems of particular, separately considered kinds
of objects and problems of universality become distinguishable.
The latter concern the ego in the universality of his being and
living and in his relation to the corresponding universality of his
objective correlates. If we take the unitary Objective world as a
transcendental clue, it leads back to the synthesis of Objective
perceptions and other Objective intuitions, which extends
throughout the unity of life as a whole, and is such that the world
is at all times intended — and can become thematic — as a unit.
Consequently the world is a universal problem of egology, as is
likewise the whole of conscious life, in its immanent temporality,
when we direct our regard to the purely immanent.

§ 22. The idea of the universal unity comprising all objects, and
the task of clarifying it constitutionally.

Types of objects — viewed with the attitude established by
phenomenological reduction, purely as cogitata, and not con-
strued with the "prejudices" involved in a set of scientific
concepts accepted in advance — were found to be clues for
transcendental investigations, which belong together on account
of their themes. The fact is that the constituting multiplicities
of consciousness — those actually or possibly combined to make
the unity of an identifying synthesis — are not accidental but,
as regards the possibility / of such a synthesis, belong together for <90>
essential reasons. Accordingly they are governed by principles,
thanks to which our phenomenological investigations do not
get lost in disconnected descriptions but are essentially organ-
ized. Any "Objective" object, any object whatever (even an
immanent one), points to a structure, within the transcendental
ego, that is governed by a rule. As something the ego objectivates,
something of which he is conscious in any manner, the object
indicates forthwith a universal rule governing possible other

54 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

consciousnesses of it as identical — possible, as exemplifying
essentially predelineated types. And naturally the same is true
of any "imaginable" object, anything conceivable as something
intended. Transcendental subjectivity is not a chaos of in-
tentional processes. Moreover, it is not a chaos of types of consti-
tution, each organized in itself by its relation to a kind or a form
of intentional objects. In other words: The allness of objects and
types of objects conceivable for me — transcendent ally speaking:
for me as transcendental ego — is no chaos; and correlatively
the allness of the types of the infinite multiplicities, the types
corresponding to types of objects, is not a chaos either: noetically
and noematically those multiplicities always belong together,
in respect of their possible synthesis.

That indicates in advance a universal constitutive synthesis,
in which all syntheses function together in a definitely ordered
manner and in which therefore all actual and possible objec-
tivities (as actual and possible for the transcendental ego), and
correlatively all actual and possible modes of consciousness of
them, are embraced. Furthermore we can say that an enormous
task is foreshadowed, which is that of transcendental phenome-
nology as a whole : the task of carrying out all phenomenological
investigations within the unity of a systematic and all-embracing
order by following, as our mobile clue, a system to be found out
level by level, the system namely of all objects of possible
consciousness, including the system of their formal and material
categories — the task, I say, of carrying out such investigations
as corresponding constitutional investigations, one based upon
another, and all of them interconnected, in a strictly systematic
fashion.

But we speak more correctly if we say that here it is a matter
of an infinite regulative idea, that the evidently presupposable
<9i> system of possible objects of possible / consciousness is itself an
anticipative idea (not however an invention, an "as if"), and
that, as regards practice, it equips us with the principle for
combining any relatively closed constitutional theory with any
other : by an incessant uncovering of horizons — not"only those
belonging to objects of consciousness internally, but also those
having an external reference, namely to essential forms of inter-
connexions. To be sure, even the tasks that present themselves

SECOND MEDITATION 55

when we take single types of objects as restricted clues prove
to be extremely complicated and always lead to extensive disci-
plines when we penetrate more deeply. That is the case, for
example, with a transcendental theory of the constitution of a
spatial object (to say nothing of a Nature) as such, of psycho-
physical being and humanity as such, culture as such.

THIRD MEDITATION

CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS. TRUTH AND ACTUALITY

§ 23. A more -pregnant concept of constitution, under the titles
"reason" and "unreason".

Phenomenological constitution has been for us, up to now,
constitution of any intentional object whatever. It has embraced
the full breadth of the topic, cogito — cogitatum. We shall now
proceed to differentiate this breadth structurally, and to prepare
for a more pregnant concept of constitution. It has not mattered
up to now, whether the objects in question were truly existent
or non-existent, or whether they were possible or impossible.
These differences are not perchance excluded from the field of
inquiry by abstaining from decision about the being or non-
being of the world (and, consequently, of other already-given
objectivities). On the contrary, under the broadly understood
titles, reason and unreason, as correlative titles for being and
non-being, they are an all-embracing theme for phenomenology.
By epochs we effect a reduction to our pure meaning (cogito)
and to the meant, purely as meant. The predicates being and
non-being, and their modal variants, relate to the latter — ac-
cordingly, not to objects simpliciter but to the objective sense, j
<92> The predicates truth {correctness) and falsity, albeit in a most
extremely broad sense, relate to the former, to the particular
meaning or intending. These predicates are not given ipso facto
as phenomenological data, when the subjective meaning
processes, or correlatively the meant objects as meant, are
given; yet they have their "phenomenological origin". As we
have said, the multiplicities of modes of consciousness that
belong together synthetically and pertain to any meant object,
of no matter what category, can be explored as to their phe-
nomenological types. Among such multiplicities are included
those syntheses that, with regard to the initial intending, have
the typical style of verifying and, in particular, evidently veri-
fying syntheses — or else, on the contrary, that of nullifying

THIRD MEDITATION 57

and evidently nullifying syntheses. When such a synthesis takes
place, the meant object has, correlatively, the evident charac-
teristic existing, or else the evident characteristic non-existing
(the characteristic of annulled, of "cancelled" being). These
synthetic occurences are intentionalities of a higher level, which,
as acts and correlates of "reason'', essentially producible by
the transcendental ego, pertain (in exclusive disjunction) to all
objective senses. Reason is not an accidental de facto ability, not
a title for possible accidental matters of fact, but rather a title
for an all-embracing essentially necessary structural form belonging
to all transcendental subjectivity.

Reason refers to possibilites of verification; and verification
refers ultimately to making evident and having as evident. About
evidence we had to speak even at the beginning of our medi-
tations — when, with our initial naivete, we were still seeking
the guiding lines for a method and had not yet set foot within
the realm of phenomenology. It now becomes our phenome-
nological theme.

§ 24. Evidence as itself -givenness and the modifications of

evidence.

In the broadest sense, evidence denotes a universal primal
phenomenon of intentional life, namely — as contrasted with
other consciousness-of, which is capable a priori of being
"empty", expectant, indirect, non-presentive — the quite pre-
eminent mode of consciousness that consists in the self-ap-
pearance, the self -exhibiting, the self-giving, of an affair, an affair-
complex (or state of affairs), a universality, a value, or other
objectivity, in the final mode: "itself there", "immediately intu-
ited", / "given originaliter". For the Ego that signifies: not <93>
aiming confusedly at something, with an empty expectant in-
tention, but being with it itself, viewing, seeing, having insight
into 3 it itself. Experience in the ordinary sense is a particular
evidence. All evidence, we may say, is experience in a maximally
broad, and yet essentially unitary, sense. In the case of most
objects, to be sure, evidence is only an occasional occurrence in
conscious life; yet it is a possibility — and, more particularly,
one that can be the aim of a striving and actualizing intention

58 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

— in the case of anything meant already or meanable. Thus it
points to an essential fundamental trait of all intentional life. Any
consciousness, without exception, either is itself already charac-
terized as evidence (that is, as giving its object originaliter) 01
else has an essential tendency toward conversion into givings of
its object originaliter — accordingly, toward syntheses of veri-
fication, which belong essentially in the domain of the "I can".
In the attitude established by transcendental reduction, we can
ask any vague consciousness whether, and to what extent, while
the identity of the meant object is preserved, the meant object
in the mode "it itself" corresponds (or can correspond) to that
consciousness; or, equivalently, how the presupposed object would
have to look as "it itself" — that which, as yet, is indetermi-
nately anticipated becoming, at the same time, more particu-
lary determined. During the process of verification, verification
can turn into its negative; instead of the meant itself, a "differ-
ent" can come to the fore, and do so in the mode "it itself" —
a different that wrecks the positing of what was meant, so that
the previously meant, for its part, assumes the character: nullity.
Non-being is only a modality of simple being, of certain being
(which is the primal mode) — a modality that, for certain
reasons, has a pre-eminent place in logic. But evidence, in a
maximally broad sense, is a concept that is correlated not only
with the concepts being and non-being. It becomes modalized
also in correlation with the other modal variants of simple being,
such as being possible, probable, or doubtful — likewise, how-
ever, in correlation with variants that do not belong in this series
but have their origin in the spheres of emotion and volition,
such as being valuable and being morally good.

§ 25. Actuality and quasi-actuality.

<94> AH these differences moreover are bifurcated, / on account
of a difference that extends throughout the whole sphere of
consciousness and, correlatively, throughout all modalities of
being: the difference, namely, between actuality and phantasy
(as-if actuality). On this side a new universal concept of possi-
bility arises, which, as mere "imaginableness" (in a phantasying,
as if something were), repeats in modified form all the modes of

THIRD MEDITATION 59

being, starting with simple certainty of being. It repeats them
as modes belonging to purely phantasied "non-actualities", in
contrast to the modes belonging to "actuality" (actual being,
actual being probable or doubtful, actual being not). Corr da-
tively, modes of consciousness are likewise divided into those of
tt posiiionality 3> and those of " quasi- ftositionality" (of the as-if,
of "phantasying" — admittedly too ambiguous an expression);
and to each of these modes there correspond both a particular
mode of evidence of its meant objects — in the appropriate
mode of being — and potentialities of making objects evident.
Here belongs what we often call clarification. Making clear is
always a mode of making evident, of laying a synthetic course
from an unclear intending to a corresponding "firefigurative"
intuition, namely one that implicitly contains the sense: if this
took place as a direct intuition, giving the object itself, it would
fulfil and verify the existential sense of this intending. The
prefigurative intuition of this verifying fulfilment furnishes
actualizing evidence — not indeed of the being, but of the
possible being of the content in question.

§ 26. Actuality as the correlate of evident verification.

In the first place, formally universal problems of intentional
analysis and pertinent investigations (already very compre-
hensive and difficult) concerning the phenomenological origin of
the principles and fundamental concepts of formal logic are indi-
cated by these brief observations. But not only that. They advise
us of the significant fact that those concepts, with their formal-
ontological universality, point to a universal conformity to laws
of structure on the part of conscious life, a regularity by virtue of
which alone truth and actuality have, and / are able to have, <95>
sense for us. To be sure, that objects in the broadest sense (real
physical things, subjective processes, numbers, states of affairs,
laws, theories, and the rest) exist for me is a statement that says
nothing immediately about evidence; it says only that objects
are accepted by me — are, in other words, there for me as cogi-
tata intended in the positional mode: certain believing. But we
do know also that we should have to abandon such acceptance
forthwith, if a course of evident identifying synthesis were to

60 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

lead to conflict with an evident datum, and that we can be sure
something is actual only by virtue of a synthesis of evident veri-
fication, which presents rightful or true actuality itself. It is
clear that truth or the true actuality of objects is to be obtained
only from evidence, and that it is evidence alone by virtue of
which an "actually" existing, true, rightly accepted object of
whatever form or kind has sense for us — and with all the de-
terminations that for us belong to it under the title of its true
nature. Every Tightness comes from evidence, therefore 1 from
our transcendental subjectivity itself; every imaginable ade-
quation originates as our verification, is our synthesis, has in us
its ultimate transcendental basis.

§ 27. Habitual and potential evidence as functioning constitutively
for the sense "existing object ".

To be sure, like the identity of any meant object as meant,
neither the identity of the truly existing object nor the identity
constituted in the adequation of the meant as such and the truly
existent is a really intrinsic moment of the transient conscious
process of evidence and verification. But we have here an ideal
immanence, which refers us to further complexes of possible
syntheses, as complexes that play an essential role in this con-
nexion. Every evidence "sets up" or "institutes" for me an
abiding possession. I can "always return" to the itself -beheld
actuality, in a series of new evidences as restitutions of the first
evidence. Thus, in the case of evidence of immanent data, I can
return to them in a series of intuitive recollections that has the
open endlessness which the "I can always do so again" (as a
<96> horizon of potentiality) 2 creates. / Without such "possibilities"
there would be for us no fixed and abiding being, no real and no
ideal world. Both of these exist for us thanks to evidence or the
presumption of being able to make evident and to repeat ac-
quired evidence.

Hence it follows without more ado that the particular evidence

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

a Reading, with Typescript C, "als potentieller Horizon?' instead of "als poten-
Hellen Horizont". According to the published text, the sense would be: ". . . the open
endlessness which creates, as a horizon of potentiality, the "I can always do so
again"."

THIRD MEDITATION 61

does not as yet produce for us any abiding being. Everything that
exists is "in itself", in a maximally broad sense, and stands in
contrast to the accidental being "for me" of the particular acts;
likewise every truth is, in this broadest sense, a "truth in itself".
This broadest sense of the In-Itself refers us to evidence, not
however to a particular evidence as a de facto experience, but
rather to certain potentialities, which are grounded in the
transcendental Ego and his life: first of all, to the potentiality
of the 1 infinity of intendings of every kind that relate to some-
thing as identical, but then also to the potentiality of verifying
these intendings, consequently to potential evidences which, as
de facto experiences, are repeatable in infinitum.

§ 28. Presumptive evidence of world-experience.

World as an idea

correlative to a perfect experiential evidence.

In yet another and a much more complicated manner evi-
dences refer us to infinities of evidences relating to the same
object, wherever they make their object itself -given with an
essentially necessary one-sidedness. That is the case with nothing
less than the totality of evidences by virtue of which a real
Objective world, as a whole and in respect of any particular
Objects, is immediately there for us intuitionally. The evidence
pertaining to particular Objects in a real Objective world is
"external experience"; and we can see that, as a matter of
essential necessity, no other mode of self-presentation is con-
ceivable in the case of such objects. But we can also see that, on
the other hand, this kind of evidence has an essential "one-
sidedness" — stated more precisely: a multiform horizon of
unfulfilled anticipations (which, however, are in need of ful-
filment) and, accordingly, contents of a mere meaning, which
refer us to corresponding potential evidences. This imperfect
evidence becomes more nearly perfect in the actualizing syn-
thetic transitions from evidence to evidence, but necessarily in
such a manner that no imaginable synthesis of this kind is

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "diejenige der" instead of "die" (the published text
as amended) or "diejenige" (the original typescript as given in the appendix the
published text).

62 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

completed as an adequate evidence: any such synthesis must
always involve unfulfilled, expectant and accompanying
<97> meanings. / At the same time there always remains the open
possibility that the belief in being, which extends into the antici-
pation, will not be fulfilled, that what is appearing in the mode
"it itself" nevertheless does not exist or is different. Yet, as a
matter of essential necessity, external experience alone can
verify objects of external experience x , though, to be sure, it
does so only as long as the (passively or actively) continuing
experience has the form of a harmonious synthesis. That the
being of the world "transcends" consciousness in this fashion
(even with respect to the evidence in which the world presents
itself), and that it necessarily remains transcendent, in no wise
alters the fact that it is conscious life alone, wherein everything
transcendent becomes constituted, as something inseparable
from consciousness, and which specifically, as world-conscious-
ness, bears within itself inseparably the sense: world — and
indeed: "this actually existing" world.

Only an uncovering of the horizon of experience ultimately
clarifies the "actuality" and the "transcendency" of the world,
at the same time showing the world to be inseparable from
transcendental subjectivity, which constitutes actuality of being
and sense. The reference to harmonious infinities of further
possible experience, starting from each world-experience —
where "actually existing Object" can have sense only as a unity
meant and meanable in the nexus of consciousness, a unity that
would be given as itself in a perfect experiential evidence —
manifestly signifies that an actual Object belonging to a world
or, all the more so, a world itself, is an infinite idea, related to
infinities of harmoniously combinable experiences — an idea that
is the correlate of the idea of a perfect experiential evidence, a com-
plete synthesis of possible experiences.

§ 29. Material and formal ontological regions as indexes pointing
to transcendental systems of evidence.

We now understand the great tasks of the ego's self-expli-
cation, or his explication of his conscious life, which arise con-

1 The phrase, "objects of external experience", supplied in accordance with
Typescript.C and the French translation.

THIRD MEDITATION 63

cerning objectivities posited or positable in that life. The heading,
true being and truth (in all modalities), indicates, in the case of
any objects meant or ever meanable for me as transcendental
ego, a structural differentiation among the infinite multiplicities
of actual and possible cogitationes / that relate to the object in <98>
question and thus can somehow go together to make up the
unity of an identifying synthesis. Actually existing object indi-
cates a particular system within this multiplicity, the system of
evidences relating to the object and belonging together in such
a manner that they combine to make up one (though perhaps
an infinite) total evidence. This would be an absolutely perfect
evidence, which would finally present the object itself in respect
of all it is — an evidence in whose synthesis everything that is
still unfulfilled expectant intention, in the particular evidences
founding the synthesis, would attain adequate fulfilment. Not
actually to produce this evidence — that would be a nonsensical
aim in the case of any Objectively real object, since (as already
observed) an absolute evidence is, in the case of such objects, an
idea — but to clear up its essential structure, or to clear up, in
respect of all internal structures, the essential structure of the
dimensions of infinity that make up systematically the ideal
infinite synthesis of this evidence, is a quite definite and tre-
mendous task. It is the problem of the transcendental constitution
of existing objectivity (in a pregnant sense of the word < consti-
tution >). Besides formally universal investigations — that is to
say, investigations that confine themselves to the formal-logical
(formal-ontological) concept of any object as such (and thus
are indifferent to the peculiarities of the various particular cate-
gories of objects) — we have then what prove to be the tre-
mendous problems of that constitution which occurs with respect
to each ot the highest and no longer formal-logical categories
(the ''regions") of objects, such as the regions subsumed under
the heading: Objective world. There is need of a constitutional
theory of physical Nature (which is "given" as always existing
and, in being so given, is likewise always presupposed), a consti-
tutional theory of man, of human community, of culture, and
so forth. Each title of this kind points to a vast discipline with
different lines of investigation, corresponding to the naive onto-
logical component concepts (such as real space, real time, real

64 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

causality, real physical thing, real property, and so forth).
Naturally it is everywhere a matter of uncovering the in-
tentionality implicit in the experience itself as a transcendental
process, a matter of explicating systematically the prede-
lineative horizons by a conversion into possible fulfilling evi-
<99> dence, and then incessantly / explicating in like manner the new
horizons that indeed incessantly arise within the old, according
to a definite style. These explications, moreover, involve con-
tinual study of intentional correlations. As we pursue this course,
an extremely complicated intentional composition of the consti-
tuting evidences, in their synthetic unity, becomes apparent as
regards Objects — for example: a founding by levels of non-
Objective ("merely subjective") objects, ascending from the
lowest objective basis. To be this lowest basis is the continual
function of immanent temporality, the flowing life that consti-
tutes itself in and for itself. Its constitutional clarification is
undertaken by the theory of original time-consciousness, wherein
temporal data are constituted. 1

1 A page of stenographic text was inserted at this point in the typescript on which
the published text is based. Strasser's transliteration may be xendered as follows.
<239> Time-constitution, immanency and transcendency. Single subjectivity — inter-
subjectivity. I. Single subjectivity: primordial immanency, the primordial stream
of consciousness, primordial facultative modification of the stream of consciousness
— the course of actual experience with its de facto "I move" and with the facul-
tative possibilities of the Ego's moving — primordial, with the sense of an abstraction
from acceptances of being that involve empathy. 2. The empathies lie within the
immannency that belongs to me as "ego" of the reduction. These non-originary
presentations function together with all the others in the constitution of the
" world". Therefore what is set forth in Meditations I-III must have made
implicit use also of empathy — only it was not mentioned. The difference between
other persons and me as a person among persons is itself a constituted differ-
ence — constituted within the ego. Within the ego: the transcendental differenti-
ation between transcendental I (ego in the second sense) and transcendental others ;
and the transcendental intersubjective constitution of the world, as a world for all
and a world that contains the transcendental subjects, mundanized as men. In the
absolute and original ego of the reduction the world is constituted, as a world that
is constituted as transcendentally intersubjective in every transcendental Ego. My
full primordial immanency (empathy included), my concrete primordial being,
constitutes as unities of being: "repetitions", "other" Egos, other total primordi-
alities. (It already includes an abiding acceptance of them; meanwhile constitutive
acceptances are continually being added.) And these transcendental others, as consti-
tuted in me, are fundamental to further constitutive functions. Their acceptedness
by me, their showing themselves to me, subject to correction, is in continual synthetic
connexus with everything else constituted, or in the course of being constituted, in
me — but the nexus is such that the intentional repetition as others repeats this
functioning too.

FOURTH MEDITATION

DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL PROBLEMS PERTAINING
TO THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO HIMSELF

§ 30. The transcendental ego inseparable from the processes making

up his life.

Objects exist for me, and are for me what they are, only as
objects of actual and possible consciousness. If this is not to be
an empty statement and a theme for empty speculations, it must
be shown what makes up concretely this existence and being-
thus for me, or what sort of actual and possible consciousness is
concerned, what the structure of this consciousness is, what
"possibility" signifies here, and so forth. This can be done solely
by constitutional investigation — first, in the broader sense
introduced initially, and then in the narrower sense just now
described. Moreover there is but one possible method, the one
demanded by the essence of intentionality and of its horizons.
Even from the preparatory analyses leading us upward to the
sense of the problem, it becomes clear that the transcendental
ego (in the psychological parallel, the psyche) is what it is solely
in relation to intentional objectivities. 1 Among these, however,
are necessarily included for the ego existing objects and, for him
as related to a world, not only objects within his (adequately
verifiable) 2 sphere of immanent time but also world Objects,
which are shown to be existent only in his inadequate, merely
presumptive, external experience — in the harmoniousness of
its course. / It is thus an essential property of the ego, constantly <ioo>
to have systems of intentionality — among them, harmonious
ones — partly as going on within him < actually >, partly as fixed
potentialities, which, thanks to predelineating horizons, are
available for uncovering. Each object that the ego ever means,
thinks of, values, deals with, likewise each that he ever phanta-
sies or can phantasy, indicates its correlative system and exists
only as itself the correlate of its system.

1 This sentence marked as unsatisfactory.

2 This phrase marked as unsatisfactory.

66 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

§ 31 . The Ego as identical pole of the subjective processes.

Now, however, we must call attention to a great gap in our
exposition. 1 The ego is himself existent for himself in continuous
evidence ; thus, in himself, he is continuously constituting himself
as existing. 2 Heretofore we have touched on only one side of this
self-constitution, we have looked at only the flowing cogito. The
ego grasps himself not only as a flowing life but also as /, who
live this and that subjective process, who live through this and
that cogito, as the same I. Since we were busied up to now with
the intentional relation of consciousness to object, cogito to
cogitatum, only that synthesis stood out for us which "polarizes"
the multiplicities of actual and possible consciousness toward
identical objects, accordingly in relation to objects as poles,
synthetic unities. Now we encounter a second polarization, 3 a
second kind of synthesis, which embraces all the particular multi-
plicities of cogitationes collectively and in its own manner,
namely as belonging to the identical Ego, who, as the active and
affected subject of consciousness, lives in all processes of conscious-
ness and is related, through them, to all object-poles.

§ 32. The Ego as substrate of habitualities.

But it is to be noted that this centering Ego is not an empty
pole of identity, any more than any object is such. Rather, ac-
cording to a law of "transcendental generation", with every
act emanating from him and having a new objective sense, he
acquires a new abiding property. For example: If, in an act of
judgment, I decide for the first time in favor of a being and a
being-thus, the fleeting act passes; but from now on / am
<101 > abidingly the Ego who is thus and so decided, / "I am of this con-
viction". That, however, does not signify merely that I remember
the act or can remember it later. This I can do, even if meanwhile
I have "given up" my conviction. After cancellation it is no
longer my conviction; but it has remained abidingly my con-
viction up to then. As long as it is accepted by me, I can "return"

1 Author's later note : Does this not come too late ?

2 Marginal note: Transcendental Self -Constitution.

8 Marginal note: itself a form (?) of unity-production.

FOURTH MEDITATION 67

to it repeatedly, and repeatedly find it as mine, habitually my
own opinion or, correlatively, find myself as the Ego who is
convinced, who, as the persisting Ego, is determined by this
abiding habitus or state. Likewise in the case of decisions of
every other kind, value-decisions, volitional decisions. I decide;
the act-process vanishes but the decision persists; whether I
become passive and sink into heavy sleep or live in other acts,
the decision continues to be accepted and, correlatively, I am
so decided from then on, as long as I do not give the decision up.
If it aims at a terminating deed, it is not "revoked" by the deed
that fulfils it ; in the mode characteristic of fulfilled decision it
continues to be accepted: "I continue to stand by my deed".
J myself, who am persisting in my abiding volition, becomed
changed if I "cancel" my decisions or repudiate my deeds. The
persisting, the temporal enduring, of such determining properties
of the Ego, or the peculiar change that the Ego undergoes in
respect of them, manifestly is not a continuous filling of
immanent time with subjective processes — just as the abiding
Ego himself, as the pole of abiding Ego-properties, is not a
process or a continuity of processes, even though, with such
habitual determining properties, he is indeed related back to
the stream of subjective processes. Since, by his own active gener-
ating, the Ego constitues himself as identical substrate of Ego-
properties, he constitutes himself also as a "fixed and abiding"
personal Ego — in a maximally broad sense, which permits us
to speak of sub-human "persons". Though convictions are, in
general, only relatively abiding and have their modes of alter-
ation (through modalization of the active positings — for ex-
ample, "cancellation" or negation, undoing of their acceptance),
the Ego shows, in such alterations, an abiding style with a unity
of identity throughout all of them: a "personal character". /

§ 33. The full concretion of the Ego as monad and the problem of <102>
his self -constitution.

From the Ego as identical pole, and as substrate of habitu-
alities, we distinguish the ego taken in full concreteness — in that
we take, in addition, that without which the Ego cannot after
all be concrete. (The ego, taken in full concreteness, we propose

68 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

to call by the Leibnizian name: monad.) The Ego can be concrete
only in the flowing multiformity of his intentional life, along with
the objects meant — and in some cases constituted as existent
for him — in that life. Manifestly, in the case of an object so
constituted, its abiding existence and being-thus are a correlate
of the habituality constituted in the Ego-pole himself by virtue
of his position-taking.

That is to be understood in the following manner. As ego, I
have a surrounding world, which is continually ''existing for
me"; and, in it, objects as "existing for me" — already with the
abiding distinction between those with which I am acquainted
and those only anticipated as objects with which I may become
acquainted. The former, the ones that are, in the first sense,
existent for me, are such by original acquisition — that is: by
my original taking cognizance of what I had never beheld previ-
ously, and my explication of it in particular intuitions of its
features. Thereby, in my synthetic activity, the object becomes
constituted originally, perceptively, in the explicit sense-form:
"something identical having its manifold properties", or "object
as identical with itself and undergoing determination in respect
of its manifold properties". This, my activity of positing and
explicating being, sets up a habituality of my Ego, by virtue of
which the object, as having its manifold determinations, is mine
abidingly. Such abiding acquisitions make up my surrounding
world, so far as I am acquainted with it at the time, with its
horizons of objects with which I am unacquainted — that is:
objects yet to be acquired but already anticipated with this
formal object-structure.

I exist for myself and am continually given to myself, 1 by
experiential evidence, as "I myself \ This is true of the transcen-
dental ego and, correspondingly, of the psychologically pure
ego; it is true, moreover, with respect to any sense of the word
ego. Since the monadically concrete ego includes also the whole
of actual and potential conscious life, it is clear that the problem
of explicating this monadic ego phenomenologically (the problem
<i03>of his constitution for himself) must / include all constitutional
problems without exception. Consequently the phenomenology of
this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology as a whole.

1 Reading : Ich bin fttr mich selbst und (bin > mir . . . gegeben.

FOURTH MEDITATION 69

§ 34. A fundamental development of phenomenological method.
Transcendental analysis as eidetic.

With the doctrine of the Ego as pole of his acts and substrate
of habitualities, we have already touched on the problems of
phenomenological genesis and done so at a significant point. Thus
we have touched the level of genetic phenomenology. Before we
clarify the more precise sense of genetic phenomenology, a
renewed meditation concerning phenomenological method is needed.
At last we must bring to b^ar a fundamental methodological
insight, which, once it is grasped, pervades the whole phenome-
nological method (and likewise, in the natural realm, the method
of a genuine and pure internal psychology). We have delayed
mentioning it, only to facilitate entrance into phenomenology.
The excessively great multiplicity of novel discoveries and
problems was meant to act at first in the simpler attire of a
merely empirical description (though conducted purely within
the sphere of transcendental experience). The method of eidetic
description, however, signifies a transfer of all empirical de-
scriptions into a new and fundamental dimension, which at the
beginning would have increased the difficulties of understanding;
on the other hand, it is easy to grasp after a considerable number
of empirical l descriptions.

By the method of transcendental reduction each of us, as
Cartesian 2 meditator, was led back to his transcendental ego —
naturally with its concrete-monadic contents as this de facto
ego, the one and only absolute ego. When I keep on meditating,
I, as this ego, find descriptively formulable, intentionally expli-
catable types; and I was able to progress step by step in the
intentional uncovering of my ' 'monad* ' along the fundamental
lines that offer themselves. For good reasons, in the course of
our descriptions such expressions as ''essential necessity" and
"essentially determined ,, forced themselves upon us — phrases
in which a definite concept of the Apriori, first clarified and
delimited by phenomenology, receives expression. /

What is involved here will become clear directly in particular <104>
examples. Let us pick out no matter what type of intentional

1 Crossed out.

2 Replaced by "transcendental".

70 CAR1TSIAN MEDITATIONS

processes (of perception, retention, recollection, declaration,
liking something, striving for it, and so forth) and think of it as
explicated and described in respect of its sort of intentional
performance — accordingly: in respect of noesis and noema.
This can signify (and so we have understood it up to now) that
types of de facto occurences in the de facto transcendental ego
are in question and that the transcendental descriptions are
therefore meant to have an "empirical" significance. But in-
voluntarily we confined our description to such a universality
that its results remain unaffected, regardless of what the situation
may be with respect to the empirical factualness of the transcen-
dental ego.

Let us make this clear to ourselves, and then fruitful for our
method. Starting from this table-perception as an example, we
vary the perceptual object, table, with a completely free option-
alness, yet in such a manner that we keep perception fixed as
perception of something, no matter what. Perhaps we begin by
Actively changing the shape or the color of the object quite arbi-
trarily, keeping identical only its perceptual appearing. In other
words : Abstaining from acceptance of its being, we change the
fact of this perception into a pure possibility, one among other
quite ' 'optional' ' pure possibilities — but possibilities that are
possible perceptions. We, so to speak, shift the actual perception
into the realm of non-actualities, the realm of the as-if , which
supplies us with "pure" possibilities, pure of everything that
restricts to this fact or to any fact whatever. As regards the
latter point, we keep the aforesaid possibilities, not as restricted
even to the co-posited de facto ego, but just as a completely free
"imaginableness" of phantasy. Accordingly from the very start
we might have taken as our initial example a phantasying our-
selves into a perceiving, with no relation to the rest of our de
facto life. Perception, the universal type thus acquired, floats
in the air, so to speak — in the atmosphere of pure phanta-
siableness 1 . Thus removed from all factualness, it has become
the pure "eidos" perception, whose "ideal" extension is made up
of all ideally possible perceptions, as purely phantsiable processes.
<105> / Analyses of perception are then "essential" or "eidetic" analyses.
All that we have set forth concerning syntheses belonging to the

1 Reading, with Typescript C, the singular.

FOURTH MEDITATION 71

type, perception, concerning horizons of potentiality, and so
forth, holds good, as can easily be seen, "essentially" for every-
thing formable in this free variation, accordingly for all imagi-
nable perceptions without exception — in other words: with
absolute "essential universality" , and with "essential necessity"
for every particular case selected, hence for every de facto per-
ception, since every fact can be thought of merely as exemplifying
a pure possibility.

The variation being meant as an evident one, accordingly as
presenting in pure intuition the possibilites themselves as possi-
bilities, its correlate is an intuitive and apodictic consciousness of
something universal. The eidos itself is a beheld or beholdable
universal, one that is pure, ' 'unconditioned" — that is to say:
according to its own intuitional sense, a universal not con-
ditioned by any fact. It is prior to all "concepts" , in the sense of
verbal significations; indeed, as pure concepts, these must be
made to fit the eidos.

Though each singly selected type is thus elevated from its
milieu within the empirically factual transcendental ego into the
pure eidetic sphere, the intentional outer horizons pointing to
its uncoverable connexus within the ego do not vanish; only
this nexus-horizon itself becomes eidetic. In other words: With
each eidetically pure type we find ourselves, not indeed inside
the de facto ego, but inside an eidos ego ; and constitution of one
actually pure possibility among others carries with it implicitly,
as its outer horizon, a purely possible ego, a pure possibility-
variant of my de facto ego. We could have started out by im-
agining this ego to be freely varied, and could set the problem
of exploring eidetically the explicit constitution of any transcen-
dental ego whatever. The new phenomenology did so from the
beginning; and accordingly all the descriptions and all the
problem-delimitations treated by us up to now have in fact been
translations from the original eidetic form back into that of an
empirical description of types. Therefore, if we think of a phe-
nomenology developed as an intuitively apriori science purely
according to the eidetic method, all its eidetic researches are nothing
else but uncoverings of the / all-embracing eidos , transcendental <106>
ego as such, which comprises all pure possibility-variants of my
de facto ego and this ego itself qua possibility. Eidetic phenome-

72 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

nology, accordingly, explores the universal Apriori without
which neither I nor x any transcendental Ego whatever is ' 'im-
aginable"; or, since every eidetic universality has the value of
an unbreakable law, eidetic phenomenology explores the all-
embracing laws that prescribe for every factual statement about
something transcendental the possible sense (as opposed to the
absurdity or inconsistency) of that statement.

2 To me as the meditating ego 3 , guided by the idea of a
philosophy as the all-embracing science, grounded with absolute
strictness, a science whose possibility I took as a tentative basis,
it becomes evident after these last considerations that, first of all,
I must develop a purely eidetic phenomenology and that in the
latter alone the first actualization of a philosophical science —
the actualization of a "first philosophy" — takes place or can
take place. After transcendental reduction, my true interest is
directed to my pure ego, to the uncovering of this de facto ego.
But the uncovering can become genuinely scientific, only if I go
back to the apodictic principles that pertain to this ego as
exemplifying the eidos ego: the essential universalities and
necessities by means of which the fact is to be related to its
rational grounds (those of its pure possibility) and thus made
scientific (logical). It should be noted that, in the transition
from my ego to an ego as such, neither the actuality nor the
possibility of other egos is presupposed. I phantasy only myself
as if I were otherwise; I do not phantasy others. "In itself",
then, the science of pure possibilites precedes the science of
actualities and alone makes it possible, as a science. With this
we attain the methodological insight that, along with phenome-
nological reduction, eidetic intuition is the fundamental form of all
particular transcendental methods (that both of them determine,
through and through, the legitimate sense of a transcendental
phenomenology). /

<107> § 35. Excursus into eidetic internal psychology.

We go outside the closed sphere of our meditations, which
restricts us to transcendental phenomenology, if we cannot

1 Inserted (substituted?) here: any possibility-variant.

2 A new section indicated marginally.

8 Originally: the ego meditating in a Cartesian fashion.

FOURTH MEDITATION 73

repress the remark that, with only slight modifications (which,
to be sure, abolish its transcendental sense), the whole content
of the fundamental methodological observation that has just
been made remains ours when, on the basis of the natural world
view, we strive for a psychology as a positive science and, in
that connexion, strive primarily for the psychology that is first
in itself and necessary to any psychology: purely intentional
psychology. To the concrete transcendental ego there corre-
sponds then the human Ego, concretely as the psyche taken
purely in itself and <as it is > for itself, with the psychic polar-
ization: I as pole of my habitualities, the properties comprised
in my character. Instead of eidetic transcendental phenome-
nology we then have an eidetic pure psychology, relating to the
eidos psyche, whose eidetic horizon, to be sure, remains unex-
amined. If, however, it did become examined, the way to over-
come this positivity would become open — that is, the way
leading over into absolute phenomenology, the phenomenology
of the transcendental ego, who indeed no longer has a horizon
that could lead beyond the sphere of his transcendental being
and thus relativize him.

§ 36. The transcendental ego as the universe of possible forms of

subjective process. The compos sibility of subjective processes in

coexistence or succession as subject to eidetic laws.

After the significant new formulation of the idea of a transcen-
dental phenomenology according to the eidetic method, when we
return to the task of discovering the problems of phenome-
nology, we naturally confine ourselves thenceforth within the
limits of a purely eidetic phenomenology, in which the de facto
transcendental ego and particular data given in transcendental
experience of the ego have the significance merely of examples of
pure possibilities. Likewise we understand the already discovered
problems as eidetic, in that we think of the possibility of making
them eidetically pure (a possibility shown in our example) as actu-
alized. / Satisfying the ideal problem of an actually systematic <108)
discovery of the essential components belonging to a concrete
ego as such, or initiating an actually systematic sequence of
problems and investigations, involves extraordinary difficulties.

74 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

Only in the last decade has this system begun to make itself
clear, above all because we have gained l new ways of access to
the specifically universal problems of the transcendental ego's
constitution. The universal Apriori pertaining to a transcen-
dental ego as such is an eidetic form, which contains an infinity
of forms, an infinity of apriori types of actualities and potenti-
alities of life, along with the objects constitutable in a life as objects
actually existing. But in a unitarily possible ego 2 not all singly
possible types are compossible, and not all compossible ones are
compossible in just any order, at no matter what loci in that
ego's own temporality. If I form some scientific theory or other,
my complex rational activity, with its rationally constituted
existent, belongs to an essential type that is possible, not in
every possible ego, 3 but only in one that is "rational" in a par-
ticular sense, the same that, with the mundanization of the ego,
presents itself in the essential form: man 4 ("rational" animal).
When I reduce my de facto theorizing to its eidetic type, I have
varied myself too (regardless of whether I am aware of it) — not
however in a wholly optional manner, but within the frame of
the corresponding essential type, "rational" being. Manifestly
I cannot imagine the theorizing I do or can do now as shifted
arbitrarily within the unity of my life ; and this too carries over
into the eidetic. Eidetic apprehension of my (transcendentally
reduced) childhood life and its possibilities of constitution
produces a type, such that in its further development, but not
in its own nexus, the type "scientific theorizing" can occur.
Restriction of this kind has its grounds in an apriori universal
structure, in a conformity to universal eidetic laws of coexistence
and succession in egological time. For indeed whatever occurs
in my ego, 6 and eidetically in an ego as such — in the way of
intentional processes, constituted unities, Ego habitualities —
has its temporality and, in this respect, participates in the
system of forms that belongs to the all-inclusive temporality

* Typescript C and the French translation. The published text: "difficulties, above
all because we must gain'*.

2 Later: in any unitarily possible ego that is a possibility-variant of my de facto
ego.

* Later : not in every possibility- variant of my ego.
4 Later: I, the man.

* Later: occurs as related to me.

FOURTH MEDITATION 75

with which every imaginable ego, every possibility- variant of
my ego, 1 constitutes himself for himself. /

§ 37. Time as the universal form of all egological genesis. <109>

The eidetic laws of compossibility (rules that govern simul-
taneous or successive existence and possible existence together,
in the fact) are laws of causality in a maximally broad sense —
laws for an If and Then. Yet it is better to avoid here the ex-
pression causality, which is laden with prejudices (deriving
from naturalism) 2 , and to speak of motivation in the transcen-
dental sphere (and in the sphere of "pure" psychology). The
universe of subjective processes, which are the "really inherent 1 '
consciousness-constituents of the transcendental ego, is a uni-
verse of compossibilities only in the universal unity-form of the
flux, in which all particulars have their respective places as
processes that flow within it. Accordingly even this most uni-
versal form, which belongs to all particular forms of concrete
subjective processes (with the products that are flowingly consti-
tuted in the flux of such processes) is the form of a motivation,
connecting all and governing within each single process in par-
ticular. We can call it furthermore a formal regularity pertaining
to a universal genesis, which is such that past, present, and
future, become unitarily constituted over and over again, in a
certain noetic-noematic formal structure of flowing modes of
givenness.

But, within this form, life goes on as a motivated course of
particular constitutive performances with a multiplicity of
particular motivations and motivational systems, which, ac-
cording to universal laws of genesis, produce a unity of universal
genesis of the ego. The ego constitutes himself for himself in, so
to speak, the unity of a "history". We said that the constitution
of the ego contains all the constitutions of all the objectivities
existing for him, whether these be immanent or transcendent,
ideal or real. It should now be added that the constitutive systems
(systems actualizable by the Ego) 3 , by virtue of which such and

1 This phrase inserted later.

2 Added later.

3 Inserted later.

76 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

such objects and categories of objects exist 1 for him, are
themselves possible only within the frame of a genesis in con-
formity with laws. At the same time they are bound, in their
constituting, by the universal genetic form that makes the
concrete ego (the monad) possible as a unity, as having par-
ticular constituents of his being that are compossible. That a
Nature, a cultural world, a world of men with their social forms,
and so forth, exist for me signifies that possibilities of corre-
sponding experiences exist for me, as experiences I can at any
<no>time / bring into play and continue in a certain synthetic style,
whether or not I am at present actually experiencing objects
belonging to the realm in question. It signifies furthermore that
other modes of consciousness corresponding to them — vague
intendings and the like — exist as possibilities for me, and also
that these other modes of consciousness have possibilities of
becoming fulfilled or disappointed by experiences of prede-
lineated types. This involves a firmly developed habituality,
acquired by a certain genesis in conformity with eidetic laws.

We are reminded here of the long-familiar problems con-
cerning the psychological origin of the "idea of space", the "idea
of time", the "idea of a physical thing", and so forth. In phe-
nomenology such problems present themselves as transcendental
and, naturally, as problems of intentionality , which have their
particular places among the problems of a universal genesis.

Access to the ultimate universalities involved in problems of
eidetic phenomenology is, however, very difficult. This is par-
ticularly true with respect to an ultimate genesis. The beginning
phenomenologist is bound involuntarily by the circumstance
that he takes himself as his initial example. Transcendentally
he finds himself as the ego, then as generically an ego, who
already has (in conscious fashion) a world — a world of our
universally familiar ontological type, with Nature, with culture
(sciences, fine art, mechanical art, and so forth), with person-
alities of a higher order (state, church), and the rest. The phe-
nomenology developed at first is merely "static" ; its descriptions
are analogous to those of natural history, which concern par-
ticular types and, at best, arrange them in their systematic
order. Questions of universal genesis and the genetic structure

1 Changed to: are accepted unities.

FOURTH MEDITATION 77

of the ego in his universality, so far as that structure is more
than temporal x formation, are still far away; and, indeed, they
belong to a higher level. 2 But even when they are raised, it is
with a restriction. At first, even eidetic observation will consider
an ego as such with the restriction that a constituted world
already exists for him. This, moreover, is a necessary level; only
by laying open the law-forms of the genesis pertaining to this
level can one see the possibilities of a maximally universal eidetic
phenomenology. In the latter the ego varies himself so freely
that he does not keep even the ideal restrictive presupposition
that a world / having the ontological structure accepted by us <in>
as obvious is essentially constituted for him.

§ 38. Active and passive genesis.

If we inquire first about principles of constitutive genesis that
have universal significance for us, as possible subjects related
to a world, we find them to be divided according to two funda-
mental forms, into principles of active and principles of passive
genesis. In active genesis the Ego functions as productively
constitutive, by means of subjective processes that are specifi-
cally acts of the Ego. Here belong all the works of practical
reason, in a maximally broad sense. In this sense even logical
reason is practical. The characteristic feature (in the case of the
realm of logos) 3 is that Ego-acts, pooled in a sociality — whose
transcendental sense, to be sure, we have not yet brought to
light — , become combined in a manifold, specifically active
synthesis and, on the basis of objects already given (in modes of
consciousness that give beforehand), constitute new objects origi-
nally. These then present themselves for consciousness as products.
Thus, in collecting, the collection <is constituted > ; in counting,
the number; in dividing, the part; in predicating, the predicate
and the predicational complex of affairs ; in inferring, the infer-
ence; and so forth. Original universality-consciousness is likewise
an activity, one in which the universal becomes constituted
objectively. On the Ego side there becomes constituted a conse-

1 Marginal note; immanent?

2 The rest of this paragraph is marked as unsatisfactory.

3 Inserted later.

78 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

quent habituality of continuing acceptance, which thereupon is
part of the constitution of the object as simply existing for the
Ego : an object that can always be seized again, be it in reiterated
producings, with synthetic consciousness of the same objectivity
as given again in "categorial intuition" ', or be it in a synthetically
appertinent vague consciousness. The transcendental consti-
tution of such objects (cultural objects, for example), in relation
to inter subjective activities, presupposes the antecedent consti-
tution of a transcendental intersubjectivity — about which we
shall not speak until later. 1 /
<H2> As already mentioned, the higher forms of such activities of
"reason" in a specific sense and, correlatively, the higher forms
of products of reason, all of which have the character of irreality
(that of "ideal" objects), cannot be regarded forthwith as be-
longing to every concrete ego as such. This is already shown by
memory of our childhood. However, as regards the lowest levels,
such as experiential grasping, explicating the experienced 2
in respect of its parts, taking together, relating, and the like,
the situation may well turn out to be different. In any case,
anything built by activity necessarily presupposes, as the
lowest level, a passivity that gives something beforehand; and,
when we trace anything built actively, we run into constitution
by passive generation. The "ready-made 1 ' object that confronts
us in life as an existent mere physical thing (when we disregard
all the "spiritual" or "cultural" characteristics that make it
knowable as, for example, a hammer, a table, an aesthetic
creation) is given, with the originality of the "it itself", in the
synthesis of a passive experience. As such a thing, it is given
beforehand to "spiritual" activities, which begin with active
grasping.

While these are making their synthetic products, the passive
synthesis that supplies all their "material" still goes on. The
physical thing given beforehand in passive intuition continues
to appear in a unitary intuition ; and, no matter how much the
thing may be modified therein by the activity of explication, of
grasping parts and features, it continues to be given beforehand

1 This sentence marked as unsatisfactory.

2 Reading "das Erfahrene" instead of u das Erfahren" (experiencing), as in both
the published text and Typescript C

FOURTH MEDITATION 79

during and in this activity: The manifold modes of appearance,
the unitary visual or tactual "perceptual images" continue their
flow; and, in their manifestly passive synthesis, the one physical
thing, with its one shape and other unitary features, appears.
Yet precisely this synthesis, as a synthesis having this form, has
its "history", evinced in the synthesis itself. It is owing to an
essentially necessary genesis that I, the ego, can experience a
physical thing and do so even at first glance. This is true, more-
over, not only as regards phenomenological genesis but also as
regards genesis in the usual sense, psychological genesis. With
good reason it is said that in infancy we had to learn to see
physical things, and that such modes of consciousness of them
had to precede all others genetically. In "early infancy", then,
the field of perception that gives beforehand does not as yet
contain anything that, in a mere look, might be explicated as a
physical thing. Yet, without putting ourselves back into the
realm of passivity, to say nothing of using the external psycho-
physical point of view of psychology, / we can, the meditating <m>
ego can, penetrate into the intentional constituents of experi-
ential phenomena themselves — thing-experiencing phenomena
and all others — and thus find intentional references leading
back to a "history" and accordingly making these phenomena
knowable as formations subsequent to other, essentially ante-
cedent formations (even if the latter cannot be related to
precisely the same constituted object). There, however, we soon
encounter eidetic laws governing a passive forming of per-
petually new syntheses (a forming that, in part, lies prior to all
activity and, in part, takes in all activity itself) ; we encounter a
passive genesis of the manifold apperceptions, as products that
persist in a habituality relating specifically to them. When these
habitual apperceptions become actually operative, the already
given objects formed for the central Ego appear 1 , affect him,
and motivate activities. Thanks to the aforesaid passive synthe-
sis (into which the performances of active synthesis also enter),
the Ego always has an environment of "objects". Even the
circumstance that everything affecting me, as a "developed"
ego, is apperceived as an "object", a substrate of predicates with
which I may become acquainted, belongs here, since this is an

1 Crossed out.

80 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

already familiar goal-form for possible explications as ac-
quaintive explications — explications that would constitute an
object as an abiding possession, as something accessible again
and again; and this goal-form is understandable in advance as
having arisen from a genesis. It itself points back to a "primal
instituting" of this form. Everything known to us points to an
original becoming acquainted; what we call unknown has, never-
theless, a known structural form: the form "object" and, more
particularly, the form "spatial thing", "cultural Object", "tool",
and so forth.

§ 39. Association as a principle of passive genesis.

The universal principle of passive genesis, for the constitution
of all objectivities given completely prior to the products of
activity x } bears the title association. Association, it should be
clearly noted, is a matter of intentionality , descriptively de-
monstrable as that, in respect of its primal forms, and standing,
in respect of its intentional performances, under eidetic laws.
Owing to these, each and every passive constitution is to be
made understandable — both the constitution of subjective
processes, as objects in immanent time, and the constitution of
all real natural objects belonging to the Objective spatio-tempo-
<H4>ral world. Association is a / fundamental concept belonging to
transcendental phenomenology (and, in the psychological parallel,
a fundamental concept belonging to a purely intentional psy-
chology). The old concepts of association and of laws of associ-
ation, though they too have usually been related to the coheren-
cies of pure psychic life by Hume and later thinkers, are only
naturalistic distortions of the corresponding genuine, intentional
concepts. From phenomenology, which was very late in finding
avenues to the exploration of association, this concept receives
a completely new aspect, an essentially new delimination, with
new fundamental forms. Here belongs, for example, sensuous
configuration in coexistence and in succession. It is phenome-
nologically evident, but strange to the tradition-bound, that

1 Reading (somewhat freely) with the published text, "den aktiven Gebilden leizt*
lich vorgegebenen" , instead of with the same as amended, "im aktiven Gebilden letzt-
lich vorgegebenen" .

FOURTH MEDITATION 81

association is not a title merely for a conformity to empirical
laws on the part of complexes of data comprised in a "psyche" —
according to the old figure, something like an intrapsychic gravi-
tation — but a title (moreover an extremely comprehensive one)
for a conformity to eidetic laws on the part of the constitution
of the pure ego. It designates a realm of the "innate" A priori,
without which an ego as such is unthinkable. Only through the
phenomenology of genesis does the ego become understandable :
as a nexus, connected in the unity of an all-embracing genesis,
an infinite nexus of synthetically congruous performances — at
levels, all of which fit the universal persisting form, temporality,
because the latter itself is built up in a continual, passive and
completely universal genesis, which, as a matter of essential
necessity, embraces everything new. In the developed ego, this
many-leveled structure is conserved as a persistent form-system
of apperception and consequently of constituted objectivities —
among them, the ones belonging to an Objective universe having
a fixed ontological structure; and this conserving is itself only
a form of genesis. In all of that, the particular fact is irrational;
but it is possible only in the apriori form-system pertaining to
it as an egological fact. Nor should it be overlooked here that
"fact", with its "irrationality", is itself a structural concept within
the system of the concrete Apriori.

§ 40. Transition to the question of transcendental idealism.

Now that the problems of phenomenology have been reduced
to the unitary comprehensive title, "the (static and genetic)
constitution of objectivities of possible consciousness", / phe-<H5>
nomenology seems to be rightly characterized also as transcen-
dental theory of knowledge. Let us contrast theory of knowledge,
as transcendental in our sense, with traditional theory of
knowledge.

The latter's problem is transcendence. Even when the tra-
ditional theory, as empiristic, bases itself on the usual psy-
chology, it intends, not to be merely psychology of knowledge,
but to clear up the essential possibility of knowledge. The
problem arises for it, and is dealt with, in the natural attitude.
I find myself here as a man in the world; likewise as experiencing

82 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

and scientifically knowing the world, myself included. And now
I say to myself: Whatever exists for me, exists for me thanks to
my knowing consciousness; it is for me the experienced of my
experiencing, the thought of my thinking, the theorized of my
theorizing, the intellectually seen of my insight. If, following
Brentano, 1 1 recognize intentionality, I shall say: Intentionality,
as a fundamental property of my psychic life, is a real 2 property
belonging to me, as a man, and to every other man in respect
of his purely psychic inner being. (Indeed, Brentano had already
made intentionality central for empirical human psychology.) 3
The first person singular of this beginning is, and remains, the
natural first person singular; it confines itself, and likewise the
whole further treatment of the problem, within the realm of the
given world. Accordingly I go on to say, and quite under-
standably: Whatever exists for a man like me and is accepted
by him, exists for him and is accepted in his own conscious life,
which, in all consciousness of a world and in all scientific doing,
keeps to itself. All my distinguishing between genuine and
deceptive experience and between being and illusion in experi-
ence goes on within the sphere itself of my consciousness; the
like is true when I distinguish, at a higher level, between thinking
with and without insight, or between what is necessary a priori
and what is inconsistent, or, again, between the empirically
correct and the empirically false. Evidently actual, intellectually
necessary, inconsistent, thinkable, probable, and the like — all
these are characteristics that occur within the realm itself of my
consciousness, as characteristics of the intentional object in
question. Every grounding, every showing of truth and being,
goes on wholly within myself; and its result is a characteristic
in the cogitatum of my cogito. /
<i 16 > Therein lies the great problem, according to the traditional
view. That I attain certainties, even compelling evidences, in
my own domain of consciousness, in the nexus of motivation
determining me, is understandable. But how can this business,
going on wholly within the immanency of conscious life, acquire
Objective significance? How can evidence {data et distincta

1 This phrase crossed out.

a Crossed out. Exclamation point in the margin.

8 The original of these last two sentences marked as unsatisfactory

FOURTH MEDITATION 83

perceptio) claim to be more than a characteristic of consciousness
within me? Aside from the (perhaps not so unimportant) ex-
clusion of acceptance of the world as being, it is the Cartesian
problem, which was supposed to be solved by divine veracitas.

§41. Genuine phenomenological explication of one's own "ego
cogito" as transcendental idealism.

What does phenomenology's transcendental self-investigation
have to say about this ? Nothing less than that the whole problem
is inconsistent. It involves an inconsistency into which Descartes
necessarily fell, because he missed the genuine sense of his re-
duction to the indubitable — we were about to say : his transcen-
dental epochs and reduction to the pure ego. But, precisely
because of its complete disregard of the Cartesian epochs, the
usual post-Cartesian way of thinking is much cruder. We ask:
Who then is the Ego who can rightly ask such " transcendent al"
questions? As a natural man, can I rightly ask them? As a
natural man, can I ask seriously and transcendentally how I get
outside my island of consciousness and how what presents itself
in my consciousness as a subjective evidence-process can acquire
Objective significance? When I apperceive myself as a natural
man, I have already apperceived the spatial world and construed
myself as in space, where I already have an Outside Me. There-
fore the validity of world-apperception has already been presup-
posed, has already entered into the sense assumed in asking the
question — whereas the answer alone ought to show the
Tightness of accepting anything as Objectively valid. Manifestly
the conscious execution of phenomenological reduction is needed,
in order to attain that Ego and conscious life by which transcen-
dental questions, as questions about the possibility of transcen-
dent knowledge, can be asked. But as soon as — instead of
transiently exercising a phenomenological epochs — one sets
to work, attempting in a systematic self-investigation and as the
pure ego to uncover this ego's whole field of consciousness, one
recognizes that all that / exists for the pure ego becomes consti- <H7>
tuted in him himself; furthermore, that every kind of being —
including every kind characterized as, in any sense, "tran-
scendent' ' — has its own particular constitution. Transcendency

84 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

in every form is an immanent existential characteristic, consti-
tuted within the ego. Every imaginable sense, every imaginable
being, whether the latter is called immanent or transcendent,
falls within the domain of transcendental subjectivity, as the
subjectivity that constitutes sense and being. The attempt to
conceive the universe of true being as something lying outside
the universe of possible consciousness, possible knowledge, possi-
ble evidence, the two being related to one another merely ex-
ternally by a rigid law, is nonsensical. They belong together
essentially; and, as belonging together essentially, they are also
concretely one, one in the only absolute concretion: transcen-
dental subjectivity. If transcendental subjectivity is the uni-
verse of possible sense, then an outside is precisely — nonsense.
But even nonsense is always a mode of sense and has its non-
sensicalness within the sphere of possible insight. That is true,
however, not alone in the case of the merely de facto ego and
what is in fact (thanks to his own constituting) x accessible to
him as existing for him — including an open plurality of other
egos who, along with their constitutive performances, exist for
him. 2 Stated more precisely: If (as is in fact the case) there are
transcendentally constituted in me, the transcendental ego, not
only other egos but also (as constituted in turn by the transcen-
dental intersubjectivity accruing to me thanks to the consti-
tution in me of others) an Objective world common to us all,
then everything said up to now is true, not alone in the case of
my de facto ego and in the case of this de facto intersubjectivity
and world, which receive sense and existence-status in my
subjectivity 3 . The "phenomenological self-explication" that
went on in my ego, this explication of all my ego's constitutings
and all the objectivities existing for him, necessarily assumed
the methodic form of an apriori self-explication, one that gives
the facts their place in the corresponding universe of pure (or
eidetic) possibilities. This explication therefore concerns my de
facto ego, only 4 so far as the latter is one of the pure possibilities
to be acquired by his free phantasy-variation (fictive changing)

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

2 The last two sentences marked particularly as unsatisfactory. The latter part
of the second, beginning with "and what is in fact", crossed out.

3 Reading, with Typescript C, "in der meinen" instead of "*n dem meine".

4 Crossed out.

FOURTH MEDITATION 85

of himself. 1 Therefore, as eidetic, the explication is valid for the
universe of these, my possibilities as essentially an ego, my
possibilities namely of being otherwise; accordingly then it is
valid also for every possible / intersubjectivity related (with a <118>
corresponding modification) to these possibilities, and valid
likewise for every world imaginable as constituted in such an
intersubjectivity. Genuine theory of knowledge is accordingly
possible [sinnvoll] only as a transcendental-phenomenological
theory, which, instead of operating with inconsistent inferences
leading from a supposed immanency to a supposed transcendency
(that of no matter what "thing in itself', which is alleged to be
essentially unknowable), has to do exclusively with systematic
clarification of the knowledge performance, a clarification in
which this must become thoroughly understandable as an in-
tentional performance 2 . Precisely thereby every sort of existent
itself, real or ideal, becomes understandables as a " product' ' of
transcendental subjectivity, a product constituted in just that
performance. This kind of understandablenes is the highest
imaginable form of rationality. All wrong interpretations of
being come from naive blindness to the horizons that join in
determining the sense of being, and to the corresponding tasks
of uncovering implicit intentionality. If these are seen and
undertaken, there results a universal phenomenology, as a self-
explication of the ego, carried out with continuous evidence and
at the same time with concreteness. Stated more precisely: First,
a self-explication in the pregnant sense, showing systematically
how the ego constitutes himself, in respect of his own proper
essence, as existent in himself and for himself; then, secondly, a
self-explication in the broadened sense, which goes on from there
to show how, by virtue of this proper essence, the ego likewise
constitutes in himself something "other", something "Ob-
jective", and thus constitutes everything without exception that
ever has for him, in the Ego, existential status as non-Ego. 3

1 The whole passage beginning approximately with "That is true, however ..."
marked as unsatisfactory. A few lines beyond here, the comment: "That will have
to be treated differently."

2 The phrase rendered as "understandable as an intentional performance" marked
as unsatisfactory.

3 Exclamation point in margin opposite the last clause. Three exclamation points
opposite the passage beginning with "Stated more precisely . . .". The whole passage
from there, presumably to the end of the paragraph, marked as unsatisfactory.

86 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

Carried out with this systematic concreteness, phenomenology
is eo ipso "transcendental idealism,", though in a fundamentally
and essentially new sense. It is not a psychological idealism, and
most certainly not such an idealism as sensualistic psychologism
proposes, an idealism that would derive a senseful world from
senseless sensuous data. Nor is it a Kantian idealism, which
believes it can keep open, at least as a limiting concept, the
possibility of a world of things in themselves x . On the contrary,
we have here a transcendental idealism that is nothing more
than a consequentially executed self-explication in the form of a
systematic egological science, an explication of my ego as subject
of every possible cognition, and indeed with respect to every
sense of what exists, wherewith the latter might be able to have
a sense for me, the ego. This idealism is not a product of sportive
< 119 > argumentations, a prize / to be won in the dialectical contest
with "realisms". It is sense-explication achieved by actual work,
an explication carried out as regards every type of existent ever
conceivable by me, the ego, and specifically as regards the
transcendency actually given to me beforehand through experi-
ence: Nature, culture, the world as a whole. But that signifies:
systematic uncovering of the constituting intentionality itself.
The proof of this idealism is therefore phenomenology itself. Only
someone who misunderstands either the deepest sense of in-
tentional method, or that of transcendental reduction, or perhaps
both, can attempt to separate phenomenology from transcen-
dental idealism. Whoever labors under the first misunderstanding
has not advanced even so far as to grasp the peculiar essence of
a genuine intentional psychology (including that of an in-
tentional-psychological theory of knowledge) or the requirement
that intentional psychology become the fundamental and central
part of a truly scientific psychology. On the other hand, anyone
who misconstrues the sense and performance of transcendental-
phenomenological reduction is still entangled in psychologism;
he confounds intentional psychology and transcendental phe-
nomenology, a parallel that arises by virtue of the essential
possibility of a change in attitude ; he falls a victim to the incon-

1 Added later : which would signify for the Ego a realm in itself, belonging to him
mythically. And Kantian transcendentalism would by no means turn into the
phenomenological transcendentalism treated here, even if such doctrines were
eliminated.

FOURTH MEDITATION 87

sistency of a transcendental philosophy that stays within the
natural realm.

Our meditations have prospered to the extent that already
they have made evident the necessary style of a philosophy,
namely its style as transcendental-phenomenological philosophy,
and correlatively, for the universe of what exists for us actually
or possibly, the style of its only possible sense-interpretation:
the style of the latter as transcendental-phenomenological
idealism. Included in this evidence is the insight that the infinity
of tasks disclosed by our extremely general preliminary sketch
— the self-explications of my (the meditator's) ego in respect
of constituting and constituted — are a chain of particular
meditations fitting into the universal frame of one unitary
meditation, which can always be carried further synthetically.

Are we allowed to break off with this and leave all the rest to
an exposition of particulars ? Is the acquired evidence, with its
predelineative goal-sense, already sufficient ? Has the predeline-
ation already been carried far enough to fill us with that great
belief in a / philosophy arising from this meditative method of <120>
self-explication — so that we can accept such a philosophy as
an aim of our life- will and go to work with happy assurance?
Even in our fleeting glance at what is constituted in us — in me
always, in the meditating ego — as a world, a whole universe
of being, we naturally could not avoid being mindful of "others' '
and their constitutings. By means of the alien constitutings
constituted in my own self, there becomes constituted for me
(as has already been mentioned) the common world for "all of
us". Here belongs also, of course, the constituting of a philosophy
as common to "all of us" who meditate together — ideally, a
single philosophia perennis. But wiU our evidence stand firm, the
evidence of a phenomenological philosophy and a phenome-
nological idealism as the only possibilities — this evidence, which
was completely clear and certain to us as long as we devoted
ourselves to the course of our meditative intuitions and stated
the essential necessities that came to light in them ? Will it not
become unstable, since we have not carried our methodic prede-
lineations through to the point where the possibility of the being
for me of others (as we all feel, a very puzzling possibility) and
the more precise nature of their being for me are understandable

88 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

and since the complex problem of their being for me has not
been explicated? If our "Cartesian meditations'* are to be, for
us nascent philosophers, the genuine "introduction" into a phi-
losophy and the beginning that establishes the actuality of a
philosophy as a necessarily practical idea (a beginning to which
belongs therefore the evidence of a course — constitutable 1 as
an ideal necessity — for an infinity of executing work), then our
meditations themselves must carry us so far that, in this respect,
they leave no puzzles as to the course and the goal. In full
accordance with the aspiration of the old Cartesian meditations,
ours must have uncovered and made understandable without
residue the universal problems relating to the final idea of phi-
losophy (for us, therefore, the universal problems of consti-
tution) ; and that implies that they must have already exposed
with the greatest, yet with a strictly comprehended, universality
the true universal sense of "the existent as such" and of its uni-
versal structures — with a universality that makes possible, for
the first time, executive ontological work, in the form of a
concretely connected phenomenological philosophy, and then
<i2i>in consequence a philosophical / science of matters of fact. For
philosophy, and accordingly for the correlational research of
phenomenology, "the existent" is a practical idea, that of the
infinity of theoretically determining work.

1 Reading "zu konstituierenden** instead of simply "konstituierenden" (consti-
tuting), as in both the published text and Typescript C

FIFTH MEDITATION

UNCOVERING OF THE SPHERE OF TRANSCENDENTAL BEING AS
MONADOLOGICAL INTERSUBJECTIVITY

§ 42. Exposition of the problem of experiencing someone else, in
rejoinder to the objection that phenomenology entails solipsism.

As the point of departure for our new meditations, let us take
what may seem to be a grave objection. The objection concerns
nothing less than the claim of transcendental phenomenology
to be itself transcendental philosophy and therefore its claim
that, in the form of a constitutional problematic and theory
moving within the limits of the transcendentally reduced ego,
it can solve the transcendental problems pertaining to the
Objective world. When I, the meditating I, reduce myself to my
absolute transcendental ego by phenomenological epochs do I
not become solus ipse; and do I not remain that, as long as I
carry on a consistent self-explication under the name phenome-
nology? Should not a phenomenology that proposed to solve
the problems of Objective being, and to present itself actually
as philosophy, be branded therefore as transcendental solipsism?

Let us consider the matter more closely. Transcendental
reduction restricts me to the stream of my pure conscious
processes and the unities constituted by their actualities and
potentialities. And indeed it seems x obvious that such unities
are inseparable from my ego and therefore belong to his
concreteness itself.

But what about other egos, who surely are not a mere in-
tending and intended in me, merely synthetic unities of possible
verification in me, but, according to their sense, precisely
others'? Have we not therefore done transcendental realism an
injustice? The doctrine may lack a phenomenological foun-
dation; but essentially it is right in the end, since it / looks for <122>
a path from the immanency of the ego to the transcendency of
the Other. Can we, as phenomenologists, do anything but agree
with this and say: "The Nature and the whole world that are

1 Marginal note: Seems? Is.

90 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

constituted 'immanently' in the ego are only my 'ideas' and
have behind them the world that exists in itself. The way to this
world must still be sought/'? Accordingly can we avoid saying
likewise: 'The very question of the possibility of actually tran-
scendent knowledge — above all, that of the possibility of my
going outside my ego and reaching other egos (who, after all, as
others, are not actually in me but only consciously intended in
me) — this question cannot be asked purely phenomenologic-
ally"? Is it not self-understood from the very beginning that my
field of transcendental knowledge does not reach beyond my
sphere of transcendental experience and what is synthetically
comprised therein? Is it not self-understood that all of that is
included without residue in my own transcendental ego ?

But perhaps there is some mistake in thoughts like these.
Before one decides in favor of them and the " self -understood"
propositions they exploit, and then perchance embarks on dia-
lectical argumentations and self-styled "metaphysical" hypothe-
ses (whose supposed possibility may turn out to be complete
absurdity), it might indeed be more fitting to undertake the task
of phenomenological explication indicated in this connexion by
the "alter ego" and carry it through in concrete work. We must,
after all, obtain for ourselves insight into the explicit and im-
plicit intentionality wherein the alter ego becomes evinced and
verified in the realm of our transcendental ego ; we must discover
in what intentionalities, syntheses, motivations, the sense
"other ego" becomes fashioned in me x and, under the title,
harmonious experience of someone else, becomes verified as
existing and even as itself there in its own manner. These ex-
periences and their works are facts belonging to my 2 phenome-
nological sphere. How else than by examining them can I ex-
plicate the sense, existing others, in all its aspects ?

§ 43. The noematic-ontic mode of givenness of the Other,

as transcendental clue for the constitutional theory

of the experience of someone else.

<123> First of all, / my "transcendental clue" is the experienced

Other, given to me in straightforward consciousness and as I

1 The phrase rendered by "in me" crossed out.

2 The word rendered as "belonging to my" crossed out. Marginal comment: "The
dangerous first person singular I This should be expanded terminologieaUy."

FIFTH MEDITATION 91

immerse myself in examining the noematic-ontic content be-
longing to him (purely as correlate of my cogito, the particular
structure of which is yet to be uncovered). By its remarkableness
and multiplicity, that content already indicates the many-
sidedness and difficulty of the phenomenological task. For ex-
ample: In changeable harmonious multiplicities of experience I
experience others as actually existing and, on the one hand, as
world Objects — not as mere physical things belonging to
Nature, though indeed as such things in respect of one side of
them. They are in fact experienced also as governing psychically
in their respective natural organisms 1 . Thus peculiarly involved
with animate organisms, as "psychophysical" Objects, they are
"in" the world. On the other hand, I experience them at the same
time as subjects for this world, as experiencing it (this same world
that I experience) and, in so doing, experiencing me too, even as
I experience the world and others in it. Continuing along this
line, I can explicate a variety of other moments noematically.

In any case then, within myself, within the limits of my
transcendentally reduced pure conscious life, I experience the
world (including others) — and, according to its experiential
sense, not as (so to speak) my private synthetic formation but as
other than mine alone [mir fremde], as an inter subjective world,
actually there for everyone, accessible in respect of its Objects
to everyone. And yet each has his experiences, his appearances
and appearance-unities, his world-phenomenon; whereas the
experienced world exists in itself, over against all experiencing
subjects and their world-phenomena.

What is the explanation of this ? Imperturbably I must hold
fast to the insight that every sense that any existent whatever
has or can have for me — in respect of its "what" and its "it
exists and actually is" — is a sense in and arising from my in-
tentional life, becoming clarified and uncovered for me in conse-
quence of my life's constitutive syntheses, in systems of har-
monious verification. Therefore, in order to provide the basis for
answering all imaginable questions that can have any sense
<here> — nay, in order that, step by step, these questions
themselves may be propounded and solved — it is necessary to
begin with a systematic explication of the overt and implicit

This sentence crossed out. Three exclamation points in the margin.

92 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

intentionality in which the being of others for me becomes
"made" and explicated in respect of its rightful content — that
is, its fulfilment-content.

Thus the problem is stated at first as a special one, namely /
<i24>that of the "thereness-for-me" of others, and accordingly as the
theme of a transcendental theory of experiencing someone else, a
transcendental theory of so-called "empathy". But it soon be-
comes evident that the range of such a theory is much greater
than at first it seems, that it contributes to the founding of a
transcendental theory of the Objective world and, indeed, to the
founding of such a theory in every respect, notably as regards
Objective Nature. The existence-sense [Seinssinn] of the world
and of Nature in particular, as Objective Nature, includes after
all, as we have already mentioned, thereness-for-everyone. This
is always coint ended whereever we speak of Objective actuality.
In addition, Objects with "spiritual" predicates belong to the
experienced world. These Objects, in respect of their origin and
sense, refer us to subjects, usually other subjects, and their
actively constituting intentionality. Thus it is in the case of all
cultural Objects (books, tools, works of any kind, and so forth),
which moreover carry with them at the same time the experi-
ential sense of thereness-for-everyone (that is, everyone belonging
to the corresponding cultural community, such as the European
or perhaps, more narrowly, the French cultural community,
and so forth).

§ 44. Reduction of transcendental experience to the sphere
of ownness.

If the transcendental constitution of other subjects and
accordingly the transcendental sense, "other subjects", are in
question, and consequently a universal sense-stratum 1 that
emanates from others 2 and is indispensible to the possibility of
an Objective world for me is also in question, then the sense,
"other subjects", that is in question here cannot as yet be the

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "Sinnesschichte" instead of "Sinngeschichte" (sense
history).

2 Reading "ihnen" (them) instead of "innfin" (within), as in both the published
text and Typescript C

FIFTH MEDITATION 93

sense: "Objective subjects, subjects existing in the world". As
regards method, a prime requirement for proceeding correctly
here is that first of all we carry out, inside the universal transcen-
dental sphere, a peculiar kind of epoche with respect to our theme.
For the present we exclude from the thematic field everything
now in question: we disregard all constitutional effects of in-
tentionality relating immediately or mediately to other subjectivity
and delimit first of all the total nexus of that actual and potential
intentionality in which the ego constitutes within himself a
peculiar owness 1 . /

This reduction to my transcendental sphero of peculiar ownness <125>
or to my transcendental concrete I-myself, by abstraction from
everything that transcendental constitution gives me as Other,
has an unusual sense. In the natural, the world-accepting atti-
tude, I find differentiated and contrasted: myself and others.
If I "abstract" (in the usual sense) from others, / "alone" remain.
But such abstraction is not radical; such aloneness in no respect
alters the natural world-sense, "experienceable by everyone",
which attaches to the naturally understood Ego and would not
be lost, even if a universal plague had left only me. Taken how-
ever in the transcendental attitude and at the same time with
the constitutional abstraction that we have just characterized,
my (the meditator's) ego in his transcendental ownness is not
the usual I, this man, reduced to a mere correlate phenomenon
and having his status within the total world-phenomenon. What
concerns us is, on the contrary, an essential structure, which is part
of the all-embracing constitution in which the transcendental
ego, as constituting an Objective world, lives his life. 2

1 Originally: constitutes himself in his peculiar ownness and synthetic unities
inseparable from his peculiar ownness, which are therefore to be accounted as part
of it.

The following comment was appended later :

§ 44. "inside the universal transcendental sphere" — "peculiar epoche". But it is
misleading when the text goes on to say: "in that we exclude from the theoretical
{sic") field everything now in question, in that we <disregard> all constitutional
effects that relate immediately or mediately to other subjectivity," etc.

The question after all concerns, not other men, but the manner in which the ego
(as the transcendental onlooker experiences him transcendent ally) constitutes within
himself the distinction between Ego and Other Ego — a difference, however, that
presents itself first of all in the phenomenon, "world" : as the difference between my
human Ego (my Ego in the usual sense) and the other human Ego (the other Ego
<likewise in the usual sense) ).

2 Strasser attaches here the following note, which Husserl wrote on a separate
sheet :

94 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

What is specifically peculiar to me as ego, my concrete being as
a monad, purely in myself and for myself with an exclusive
ownness, includes <my> every intentionality and therefore,
in particular, the intentionality directed to what is other 1 ; but,
for reasons of method, the synthetic effect of such intentionality
(the actuality for me of what is other) shall at first remain ex-
cluded from the theme. In this pre-eminent intentionality there
becomes constituted for me the new existence-sense that goes
beyond my monadic very-ownness ; there becomes constituted
an ego, not as "X myself", but as mirrored in my own Ego, in
my monad. The second ego, however, is not simply there, and 2
strictly presented; rather is he constituted as "alter ego" — the
ego indicated as one moment by this expression being I myself
in my ownness. The "Other", according to his own constituted
sense, points to me myself; the other is a "mirroring" of my own
self and yet not a mirroring proper, an analogue of my own self
and yet again not an analogue in the usual sense. Accordingly
<!26>if, as / a first step, the ego in his peculiar ownness has been
delimited, has been surveyed and articulated in respect of his
constituents — not only in the way of life-processes but also in
the way of accepted unities concretely inseparable from him — ,
the question must then be asked: How can my ego, within his
peculiar ownness, constitute under the name, "experience of
something other", precisely something other — something, that
is, with a sense that excludes the constituted from the concrete
make-up of the sense-constituting I-myself, as somehow the
latter's analogue? In the first place the question concerns no
matter what alter egos; then however it concerns everything
that acquires sense-determinations from them — in short, an
Objective world in the proper and full signification of the
phrase.

The total appearance of the world — the world always intended in the flux.

The total appearance of Nature.

The total intending of the world, the particular intending — the particular ap-
pearance of the particular wordly object. But the intending has strata ; I can abstract.
Physical-thing appearance, stratum of culture or stratum of human existence as
<blank-space > in the flowing present. The stream of world-' 'appearances", of "per-
ceptual appearances"; what is intended ontologically. Cogito-strata, such that each
stratum has a stratum of the cogitatum. The ego directed to what is intended.

1 Marginal comment: ?! To men and to myself as a man.

a Reading, with Typescript C, "mid" instead of "uns" (to us).

FIFTH MEDITATION 95

These problems will become more understandable if we pro-
ceed to characterize the ego's sphere of owness or, correlatively,
to carry out explicitly the abstractive epochs that yields it.
Thematic exclusion of the constitutional effects produced by
experience of something other, together with the effects of
all the further modes of consciousness relating to something
other, does not signify merely phenomenological epochs with
respect to naive acceptance of the being of the other, as in the
case of everything Objective existing for us in straightforward
consciousness. After all, the transcendental attitude is and
remains presupposed, the attitude according to which every-
thing previously existing for us in straightforward consciousness
is taken exclusively as -"phenomenon", as a sense meant and
undergoing verification, purely in the manner in which, as corre-
late of uncoverable constitutive systems, it has gained and is
gaining existential sense. We are now preparing for just this
uncovering and sense-clarification by the novel epochs, more
particularly in the following manner.

As Ego in the transcendental attitude I attempt first of all to
delimit, within my horizon of transcendental experience, what
is peculiarly my own. First I say that it is non-alien [Nicht-
Fremdes]. I begin by freeing that horizon abstractively from
everything that is at all alien. A property of the transcendental
phenomenon "world" is that of being given in harmonious
straightforward experience; accordingly it is necessary to survey
this world and pay attention to how something alien makes its
appearance as jointly determining the sense of the world and,
so far as it does so, to exclude it abstractively. Thus we abstract
first of all from what gives men and brutes their specific sense
as, so to speak, Ego-like living beings and / consequently from <127>
all determinations of the phenomenal world that refer by their
sense to "others" as Ego-subjects and, accordingly, presuppose
these. For example, all cultural predicates. We can say also that
we abstract from everything "other-spiritual", as that which
makes possible, in the "alien" or "other" that is in question
here, its specific sense. Furthermore the characteristic of belonging
to the surrounding world, not merely for others who are also
given at the particular time in actual experience, but also for
everyone, the characteristic of being there for and accessible to

96 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

everyone, of being capable of mattering or not mattering to
each in his living and striving, — a characteristic of all Objects
belonging to the phenomenal world and the characteristic
wherein their otherness consists — should not be overlooked,
but rather excluded abstractively.

In this connexion we note something important. When we
thus abstract, we retain a unitarily coherent stratum of the phe-
nomenon world, a stratum of the phenomenon that is the corre-
late of continuously harmonious, continuing world-experience.
Despite our abstraction, we can go on continuously in our experi-
encing intuition, while remaining exclusively in the aforesaid
stratum. This unitary stratum, furthermore, is distinguished
by being essentially the founding stratum — that is to say: I
obviously cannot have the "alien" or "other" as experience, and
therefore cannot have the sense "Objective world" as an ex-
periential sense, without having this stratum in actual experi-
ence; whereas the reverse is not the case.

Let us observe more closely the result of our abstraction and,
accordingly, what it leaves us. From the phenomenon world,
from the world appearing with an Objective sense, a substratum
becomes separated, as the "Nature" included in my ownness, a
Nature that must always be carefully distinguished from
Nature, pure and simple — that is to say: from the Nature that
becomes the theme of the natural scientist. This Nature, to be
sure, is likewise a result of abstraction, namely abstraction from
everything psychic and from those predicates of the Objective
world that have arisen from persons. But what is acquired by
this abstraction on the part of the natural scientist is a stratum
that belongs to the Objective world itseli (viewed in the transcen-
dental attitude, a stratum that belongs to the objective sense:
"Objective world") and is therefore itself Objective — just as,
on the other hand, what is abstracted from is Objective (the
Objective psychic, Objective cultural predicates, and so forth).
But in the case of our abstraction the sense "Objective", which
belongs to everything worldly — as constituted intersubjectively,
<i28>as / experienceable by everyone, and so forth — vanishes com-
pletely. Thus there is included in my ownness, as purified from
every sense pertaining to other subjectivity, a sense, "mere
Nature", that has lost precisely that "by everyone" and therefore

FIFTH MEDITATION 97

must not by any means be taken for an abstract stratum of the
world or of the world's sense. Among the bodies belonging to
this ' 'Nature' ' and included in my peculiar ownness, I then find
my animate organism as uniquely singled out — namely as the
only one of them that is not just a body but precisely an animate
organism: the sole Object within my abstract world-stratum to
which, in accordance with experience, I ascribe fields of sensation
(belonging to it, however, in different manners — a field of
tactual sensations, a field of warmth and coldness, and so forth),
the only Object "in" which I "rule and govern" immediately,
governing particularly in each of its "organs". Touching kind-
est hetically, I perceive "with" my hands; seeing kinesthetically,
I perceive also "with" my eyes; and so forth; moreover I can
perceive thus at any time. Meanwhile the kinesthesias pertaining
to the organs flow in the mode "I am doing", and are subject to
my "I can" ; furthermore, by calling these kinesthesias into play,
I can push, thrust, and so forth, and can thereby "act" somatic-
ally — immediately, and then mediately. As perceptively active,
I experience (or can experience) all of Nature, including my own
animate organism, which therefore in the process is reflexively
related to itself. That becomes possible because I "can" perceive
one hand "by means of" the other, an eye by means of a hand,
and so forth — a procedure in which the functioning organ must
become an Object and the Object a functioning organ. And it is the
same in the case of my generally possible original dealing with
Nature and with my animate organism itself, by means of this
organism — which therefore is reflexively related to itself also
in practice.

Bringing to light my animate organism, reduced to what is
included in my ownness, is itself part of bringing to light the
ownness-essence of the Objective phenoemnon: "I, as this man".
If I reduce other men to what is included in my ownness, I get
bodies included therein; if I reduce myself as a man, I get "my
animate organism" and "my psyche", or myself as a psycho-
physical unity — in the latter, my personal Ego, who operates in
tihs animate organism and, "by means of" it, in the "external
world", who is affected by this world, and who thus in all respects,
by virtue of the continual experience of such unique modes of
Ego- and life-relatedness, is constituted as psychophy sic ally

98 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

united with the animate corporeal organism. If ownness-purie
< 129 > fication of the external world, the animate organism, j and th-
psychophysical whole, has been effected, I have lost my natural
sense as Ego, since every sense-relation to a possible Us or We
remains excluded, and have lost likewise all my worldliness, in
the natural sense. But, in my spiritual ownness, I am never-
theless the identical Ego-pole of my manifold "pure" subjective
processes, those of my passive and active intentionality, and the
pole of all the habitualities instituted or to be instituted by those
processes.

Accordingly this peculiar abstractive sense-exclusion of what
is alien leaves us a kind of "world" still, a Nature reduced to
what is included in our ownness and, as having its place in this
Nature thanks to the bodily organism, the psychophysical Ego,
with "body and soul" and personal Ego — utterly unique
members of this reduced "world". Manifestly predicates that
get significance from this Ego also occur in the reduced world —
for example: "value" predicates and predicates of "works" as
such. None of this is worldly in the natural sense (therefore all
the quotation-marks) ; it is all exclusively what is mine in my
world-experience, pervading my world-experience through and
through and likewise cohering unitarily in my intuition. Ac-
cordingly the members we distinguish in this, my peculiarly
own world-phenomenon, are concretely united, as is further
shown by the fact that the spatiotemporal form — as reduced,
however, to the form included in my ownness — also goes into
this reduced world-phenomenon. Hence the reduced "Objects"
— the "physical things", the "psychophysical Ego" — are
likewise outside one another.

But here something remarkable strikes us : a sequence of evi-
dences that yet, in their sequence, seem paradoxical. The
psychic life of my Ego (this "psychophysical" Ego), including
my whole world-experiencing life and therefore including my
actual and possible experience of what is other, is wholly unaf-
fected by screening off what is other. Consequently there belongs
within my psychic being the whole constitution of the world
existing for me and, in further consequence, the differentiation
of that constitution into the systems that constitute what is
included in my peculiar ownness and the systems that constitute

FIFTH MEDITATION 99

what is other. I, the ieduced "human Ego" ("psychophysical"
Ego), am constituted, accordingly, as a member of the "world"
with a multiplicity of "objects outside me". But I myself consti-
tute all this in my "psyche" and bear it intentionally within me.
If perchance it could be shown that everything constituted as
part of my peculiar ownness, including then the reduced "world",
/ belonged to the concrete essence of the constituting subject as <130>
an inseparable internal determination, then, in the Ego's self-
explication, his peculiarly own world would be found as "inside"
and, on the other hand, when running through that world
straightforwardly, the Ego would find himself as a member
among its "externalities" and would distinguish between himself
and "the external world".

§ 45. The transcendental ego, and self-apperception as a psycho-
physical man reduced to what is included in my ownness.

These last meditations, like all the others, have been carried
on by us in the attitude that effects transcendental reduction —
carried on, that is to say, by me (the meditator) as transcendental
ego. We now ask how I, the human Ego reduced to what is
purely my own and, as thus reduced, included in the similarly
reduced world-phenomenon and, on the other hand, I as transcen-
dental ego are related to one another. The transcendental ego
emerged by virtue of my "parenthesizing" of the entire Objective
world and all other (including all ideal) Objectivities. In conse-
quence of this parenthesizing, I have become aware of myself
as the transcendental ego, who constitutes in his constitutive
life everything that is ever Objective for me — the ego of all
constitutions, who exists in his actual and potential life-processes
and Ego-habitualities and who constitutes in them not only
everything Objective but also himself as identical ego. We can
say now: In that I, as this ego, have constituted and am con-
tinually further constituting as a phenomenon x (as a correlate)
the world that exists for me, I have carried out a mundanizing
self-apperception — under the title "Ego in the usual sense" —
in corresponding constitutive syntheses and am maintaining a

1 The phrase "as a phenomenon" supplied in accordance with Typescript C and
the French translation.

100 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

continuing acceptance and further development of it. By virtue
of this mundanization everything included in the ownness be-
longing to me transcendent ally (as this ultimate ego) enters, as
something psychic, into "my psyche". I find the mundanizing
apperception; and now, from the psyche as phenomenon and
part of the phenomenon man, I can go back to the all-inclusive
absolute ego, the transcendental ego. Therefore if I, as this ego,
reduce my phenomenon, "the Objective world", to what is
included in my peculiar ownness and take in addition whatever
else I find as peculiarly my own (which can no longer contain
anything "alien" or "other", after that reduction), then all this
ownness of my ego is to be found again, in the reduced world-
< 131 > phenomenon, as the ownness / of "my psyche". Here, however,
as a component pertaining to my world-apperception, it is
something transcendentally secondary. Restricting ourselves to
the ultimate transcendental ego and the universe of what is
constituted in him, we can say that a division of his whole
transcendental field of experience belongs to him immediately,
namely the division into the sphere of his ownness — with the
coherent stratum consisting in his experience of a world reduced
to what is included in his ownness x (an experience in which
everything "other" is "screened off") — and the sphere of what
is "other". Yet every consciousness of what is other, every mode
of appearance of it, belongs in the former sphere. Whatever the
transcendental ego constitutes in that first stratum, whatever he
constitutes as non-other, as his "peculiarly own" — that indeed
belongs to him as a component of his own concrete essence (as we
shall show); it is inseparable from his concrete being. Within
and by means of this ownness the transcendental ego constitutes,
however, the "Objective" world, as a universe of being that is
other than himself — and constitutes, at the first level, the
other in the mode : alter ego.

§ 46. Ownness as the sphere of the actualities and potentialities of
the stream of subjective processes.

Up to now we have characterized the fundamental concept of
"my own" only indirectly: as non-alien or non-other — a charac-

1 The phrase "reduced to what is included in his ownness" supplied in accordance
with Typescript C and the French translation.

FIFTH MEDITATION 101

terization that is based on, and thus presupposes, the concept of
another ego. In order to clarify the sense of this "my own" it is
important, however, to bring out its positive characteristic, or
the positive characteristic of "the ego in his x ownness". This
characteristic was merely indicated in the last sentences of the
preceding section.

As our point of departure let us take something more general.
If a concrete object stands out for us in experience as something
particular, and our attentively grasping regard then becomes
directed to it, it becomes appropriated in this simple grasping
merely as "an undetermined object of empirical intuition". It
becomes a determined object, and one undergoing further de-
termination, in a continuation of the experience in the form of
a determining experience, which at first unfolds only what is
included in the object itself: a pure explication. In its articulated
synthetic course, on the basis of the object given as self-identical
in a continuous intuitive synthesis of identification, this pure
explication unfolds, in a concatenation of particular intuitions
the object's very / own determinations, the "internal" determi- >132>
nations. These present themselves originaliter as determinations
in which it, the Identical itself, is 2 what it is and, moreover,
exists in itself, "in and of itself" — determinations wherein its
identical being becomes explicated as the particulars making
up its ownness: what it is, in particular. This own-essential
content is only generally and horizonally anticipated beforehand;
it then becomes constituted originaliter — with the sense: in-
ternal, own-essential feature (specifically, part or property) —
by explication.

Let us apply this. When I am effecting transcendental re-
duction and reflecting on myself, the transcendental ego, I am
given to myself perceptually as this ego — in a grasping per-
ception. Furthermore I become aware that, although not grasped
before this perception, I was "already given", already there for
myself continually as an object of original intuition (as perceived
in the broader sense). But I am given, in anjr case, with an open
infinite horizon of still undiscovered internal features of my own.

1 Reading "seiner" instead of "meiner" (my), as in both the published text and
Typescript C

2 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation

102 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

My own too is discovered by explication and gets its original
sense by virtue thereof. It becomes uncovered originaliter when
my experiencing-explicating regard is directed to myself, to my
perceptually and even apodictically given "I am" and its abiding
identity with itself 1 in the continuous unitary synthesis of origi-
nal self-experience. Whatever is included in this identical being's
own essence is characterized as its actual or possible explicatum,
as a respect in which I merely unfold my own identical being as
what it, as identical, is in particular: it in itself.

Now the following is to be noted here. Though I speak rightly
of self-perception, and indeed as regards my concrete ego, that
is not to say that, like explication of a perceptually given 'Visual
thing", self-explication always goes on in particular perceptions,
in the proper sense, and accordingly yields just perceptual
explicata and no others. After all, when explicating the horizon
of being that is included in my own essence, one of the first things
I run into is my immanent temporality and, with it, my existence
in the form of an open infiniteness, that of a stream of subjective
processes, and in the form of all those "ownnesses" of mine that
are somehow included in the stream — one of which is mv
explicating. Since it goes on in the living present, self-explication
c 133 > can / find, strictly perceptively, only what is going on in the living
present. In the most original manner conceivable it uncovers
my own past by means of recollections. Therefore, though I am
continually given to myself originaliter and can explicate pro-
gressively what is included in my own essence, this explication
is carried out largely in acts of consciousness that are not perceptions
of the own-essential moments it discovers. Thus alone can my
stream of subjective processes, the stream in which I live as the
identical Ego, become accessible to me: first of all, in respect of
its actualities, and then in respect of the potentialities that
manifestly are likewise moments of my own essence. All possi-
bilities of the kind subsumed under the I "can" or "could have"
set this or that series of subjective processes going (including in
particular: I can look ahead or look back, I can penetrate and
uncover the horizon of my temporal being) — all such possi-
bilities manifestly belong to me as moments of my own essence.
In every case, however, explication is original if, precisely on

1 According to Typescript C; "and my abiding identity with myself*.

FIFTH MEDITATION 103

the basis of original self-experience, it unfolds the experienced
itself and confers upon the experienced that self-giveness which
is, for it, the most original conceivable. The apodictic evidence of
transcendental self-perception (the apodictic evidence of the
"I am") extends into such explication, though with a previously
stated restriction. In unqualifiedly apodictic evidence self-expli-
cation brings out only the all-embracing structural forms in
which I exist as ego — that is to say : in which I exist with an
essentially necessary all-inclusiveness and without which I could
not exist. They include (among others) the mode of existence
in the form of a certain all-embracing life of some sort or other,
that of existence in the form of the continuous self-constitution
of that life's own processes, as temporal within an all-embracing
time, and so forth. In this all-embracing apodictic Apriori, with
its undetermined universality and, on the other hand, its de-
terminability, every explication of single egological data then
participates — for example: as a certain, albeit imperfect, evi-
dence contained in the recollection of my own past. The partici-
pation in apodicticity appears in the formal law (which is itself
apodictic): So much illusion, so much being — which is only
covered up and falsified thereby and which therefore can be
asked about, sought, and (by following a predelineated way)
found, even if only with approximation to its fully determined
content. This fully determined content itself, with the sense of
something firmly identifiable again and again, in respect of all
its parts and moments, is an "idea", valid a priori. /

§47. The intentional object also belongs to the full monadic <134>
concretion of ownness. Immanent transcendence and primordial

world.

Manifestly (and this is of particular importance) the own-essenti-
aaliy belonging to me as ego comprises more than merely the
pctualities and potentialities of the stream of subjective
rtocesses. Just as it comprises the constitutive systems, it com-
prises the constituted unities — but with a certain restriction. That
is to say: Where, and so far as, the constituted unity is inseparable
from the original constitution itself, with the inseparableness that

104 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

characterizes an immediate 1 concrete oneness, not only the
constitutive perceiving but also the perceived existent belongs
to my concrete very-ownness.

That is not only the case with sensuous data, which, taken as
mere data of sensation, become constituted as peculiarly my
own: as "immanent temporalities" within the limits of my ego.
It is also the case with all my habitualities, which are likewise
peculiarly my own : the habitualities that begin with institutive
acts of my own and become constituted as abiding convictions
in which / myself become abidingly convinced of such and such,
and by virtue of which I, as polar Ego (Ego in the particular
sense: mere Ego-pole), acquire determinations that are specifi-
cally Ego-determinations. But "transcendent objects" (for ex-
ample: the objects of "external" sensuousness, unities belonging
to multiplicites of sensuous modes of appearance) also belong
here: if I, as ego, take into account just what is constituted
actually originaliter as an appearing spatial object by my own
sensuousness, my own apperceptions, as itself concretely insepa-
rable from them. We see forthwith that the entire reduced "world" ,
which we previously obtained by excluding the sense-components
pertaining to what is other or alien, belongs in this sphere and
is rightly included in the positively defined concrete make-up
of the ego : as something peculiarly his own. As soon as we exclude
from consideration the intentional effects produced* by
"empathy", by our experience of others, we have a Nature
(including an animate organism) that is constituted, to be sure,
as a unity of spatial objects "transcending" the stream of sub-
jective processes, yet constituted as merely a multiplicity of
< 135 > objects / of possible experience — this experience being purely
my own life, and what is experienced in this experience being
nothing more than a synthetic unity inseparable from this life
and its potentialities.

In this manner it becomes clear that the ego, taken concretely,
has a universe of what is peculiarly his own, which can be un-
covered by an original explication of his apodictic "ego sum" —
an explication that is itself apodictic or at least predelineative
of an apodictic form. Within this "original sphere" (the sphere

1 Reading "unmittelbarer" instead of "unmittelbar" (immediately), as in both the
published text and Typescript 0. Cf. the French: "immidiate et concrete".

FIFTH MEDITATION 105

of original self-explication) we find also a "transcendent world",
which accrues on the basis of the intentional phenomenon,
"Objective world", by reduction to what is peculiarly the ego's
own (in the positive sense, which is now preferred). But, provided
only that they are subjected to our reduction to what is included
in the ego's ownness, all the corresponding illusions, phantasies,
"pure" possibilities, and eidetic objectivities, which offer
themselves as "transcendent", likewise belong in this domain —
the domain of my peculiarly own essentiality, of what I am in
myself, in my full concreteness or (as we may also say) what I
am in myself as this monad 1 .

§ 48. The transcendency of the Objective world as belonging to a
level higher than that of primordial transcendency.

That my own essence can be at all contrasted for rue with
something else, or that I (who am I) can become aware of
someone else (who is not I but someone other than I), presup-
poses that not all my own modes of consciousness are modes of my
self -consciousness. Since actual being is constituted originally by
harmoniousness of experience, my own self must contain, in
contrast to self-experience and the system of its harmoniousness
(the system, therefore, of self-explication into components of my
ownness), yet other experiences united in harmonious systems.
And now the problem is how we are to understand the fact that
the ego has, and can always go on forming, in himself such
intentionalities of a different kind, intentionalities with an ex-
istence-sense whereby he wholly transcends his own being. How
can something actually existent for me — and, as that, not just
somehow meant but undergoing harmonious verification in me
— be anything else than, so to speak, a point of intersection
belonging to my constitutive synthesis? As concretely insepa-
rable from my synthesis, is it peculiarly my own? But even the
/ possibility of a vaguest, emptiest intending of something alien <136>
is problematic, if it is true that, essentially, every such mode of
consciousness involves its possibilities of an uncovering of what
is intended, its possibilities of becoming converted into either

1 Reading with Typescript C and the French translation. According to the publish-
ed text: "or (as we may also say) in my monad".

106 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

fulfilling or disillusioning experiences of what is meant, and
moreover, (as regards the genesis of the consciousness) points back
to such experiences of the same intended object or a similar one.

The fact of experience of something alien (something that is
not I), is present as experience of an Objective world and others
in it (non-Ego in the form: other Ego) ; and an important result
of the ownness-reduction performed on these experiences was
that it brought out a substratum belonging to them, an in-
tentional substratum in which a reduced ' 'world' ' shows itself,
as an "immanent transcendency". In the order pertaining to
constitution of a world alien to my Ego — a world "external" to
my own concrete Ego (but not at all in the natural spatial sense)
— that reduced world is the intrinsically first, the "primordial"
transcendency (or "world"); and, regardless of its ideality as a
synthetic unity belonging to an infinite system of my potenti-
alities, it is still a determining part of my own concrete being, the
being that belongs to me as concrete ego.

It must now be made understandable how, at the founded
higher level, the sense-bestowal pertaining to transcendency
proper, to constitutionally secondary Objective transcendency,
comes about — and does so as an experience. Here it is not a
matter of uncovering a genesis going on in time, but a matter
of "static analysis' 1 . The Objective world is constantly there
before me as already finished, a datum of my livingly continuous
Objective experience and, even in respect of what is no longer
experienced, something I go on accepting habitually. It is a
matter of examining this experience itself and uncovering in-
tentionally the manner in which it bestows sense, the manner
in which it can occur as experience and become verified as evi-
dence relating to an actual existent with an explicatable essence
of its own, which is not my own essence and has no place as a
constituent part thereof, though it nevertheless can acquire sense
and verification only in my essence. /

<137>§49. Predelineation of the course to be followed by intentional
explication of experiencing what is other.

Constitution of the existence-sense, "Objective world", on
the basis of my primordial "world", involves a number of levels.

FIFTH MEDITATION 107

As the first of these, there is to be distinguished the constitutional
level pertaining to the "other ego" or to any "other egos"
whatever — that is: to egos excluded from my own concrete
being (from me as the "primordial ego"). In connexion with that
and, indeed, motivated by it, there occurs a universal super-
addition of sense to my primordial world, whereby the latter be-
comes the appearance "of" a determinate "Objective" world, as
the identical world for everyone, myself included. Accordingly
the intrinsically first other (the first "non-Ego") is the other Ego.
And the other Ego makes constitutionally possible a new infinite
domain of what is "other": an Objective Nature and a whole
Objective world, to which all other Egos and I myself belong.
This constitution, arising on the basis of the "pure" others (the
other Egos who as yet have no worldly sense), is essentially such
that the "others"-for-me do not remain isolated; on the contrary,
an Ego-community, which includes me, becomes constituted (in
my sphere of ownness, naturally) as a community of Egos
existing with each other and for each other — ultimately a com-
munity of monads, which, moreover, (in its communalized m-
tentionality) constitutes the one identical world. In this world all
Egos again present themselves, but in an Ohjectivating apper-
ception with the sense "men" or "psychophysical men as worldly
Objects".

By virtue of the mentioned communalization <of constitutive
intentionality >, the transcendental intersubjectivity has an
inter subjective sphere of ownness, in which it constitutes the
Objective world; and thus, as the transcendencental "We", it
is a subjectivity for this world and also for the world of men,
which is the form in which it has made itself Objectively actual.
If, however, intersubjective sphere of ownness and Objective
world are to be distinguished here, nevertheless, when I as ego
take my stand on the basis of the intersubjectivity constituted
from sources within my own essence, I can recognize that the
Objective world does not, in the proper sense, / transcend that <138>
sphere or that sphere's own intersubjective essence, but rather
inheres in it as an "immanent" transcendency. Stated more
precisely: The Objective world as an idea — the ideal correlate
of an intersubjective (intersubjectively communalized) experi-
ence, which ideally can be and is carried on as constantly har-

108 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

monious — is essentially related to intersubjectivity (itself
constituted as having the ideality of endless openness), whose
component particular subjects are equiped with mutually corre-
sponding and harmonious constitutive systems. Consequently
the constitution of the world essentially involves a "harmony" of the
monads: precisely this harmony among particular constitutions
in the particular monads; and accordingly it involves also a
harmonious generation that goes on in each particular monad.
That is not meant, however, as a "metaphysical" hypothesizing
of monadic harmony, any more than the monads themselves
are metaphysical inventions or hypotheses. On the contrary, it
is itself part of the explication of the intentional components
implicit in the fact of the experiential world that exists for us.
Here again it is to be noted that, as has been repeatedly empha-
sized, the ideas referred to are not phantasies or modes of the
"as if", but arise constitutionally in integral connexion with all
Objective experience and have their modes of legitimation and
their development by scientific activity.

What we have just presented is a preliminary view of the
course to be followed, level by level, in the intentional expli-
cation that we must carry out, if we are to solve the transcen-
dental problem in the only conceivable way and actually execute
the transcendental idealism of phenomenology.

§ 50. The mediate intentionality of experiencing someone else, as
"appresentation" {analogical apperception).

After we have dealt with the prior stage, which is very im-
portant transcendentally — namely, definition and articulation
of the primordial sphere — , the genuine difficulties (and in fact
they are not inconsiderable) are occasioned by the first of the
above-indicated steps toward constitution of an Objective world:
the step taking us to the "other" ego. They lie, accordingly, in the
transcendental clarification of experiencing "someone else" —
in the sense in which the other has not yet attained the sense
man . /
<139> Experience is original consciousness; and in fact we generally
say, in the case of experiencing a man; the other is himself there

FIFTH MEDITATION 109

before us "in person". On the other hand, this being there in
person does not keeps us from admitting forthwith that, properly
speaking, neither the other Ego himself, nor his subjective
processes or his appearances themselves, nor anything else be-
longing to his own essence, becomes given in our experience
originally. If it were, if what belongs to the other's own essence
were directly accessible, it would be merely a moment of my
own essence, and ultimately he himself and I myself would be
the same. The situation would be similar as regards his animate
organism, if the latter were nothing else but the "body" that is
a unity constituted purely in my actual and possible experi-
ences, a unity belonging — as a product of my "sensuousness"
exclusively — in my primordial sphere. A certain mediacy of
intentionality must be present here, going out from the sub-
stratum, "primordial world", (which in any case is the inces-
santly underlying basis) and making present to consciousness
a "there too", which nevertheless is not itself there and can
never become an "itself-there". We have here, accordingly, a
kind of making "co-present", a kind of "appresentation".

An appresentation occurs even in external experience, since
the strictly seen front of a physical thing always and necessarily
appresents a rear aspect and prescribes for it a more or less
determinate content. On the other hand, experiencing someone
else cannot be a matter of just this kind of appresentation, which
already plays a role in the constitution of primordial Nature:
Appresentation of this sort involves the possibility of verifi-
cation by a corresponding fulfilling presentation (the back
becomes the front) ; whereas, in the case of that appresentation
which would lead over into the other original sphere, such verifi-
cation must be excluded a priori. How can appresentation of
another original sphere, and thereby the sense "someone else",
be motivated in my original sphere and, in fact, motivated as
experience — as the word "appresentation" (making intended
as co-present) already indicates? Not every non-originary
making-present can do that. A non-originary making-present
can do it only in combination with an originary presentation, an
itself-giving proper; and only as demanded by the originary
presentation can it have the character of appresentation —
somewhat as, in the case of experiencing a physical thing, what

110 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

is there perceptually motivates <belief in > something else being
there too.

The perception proper that functions as the underlying basis is
<i 40 > offered us by our / perception of the primordially reduced world,
with its previously described articulation — a perception going
on continually within the general bounds of the ego's incessant
self-perception. The problem now is: In the perception of that
reduced world, what in particular must be of account here ? How
does the motivation run ? What becomes uncovered as involved
in the very complicated intentional performance of the appre-
sentation, which does in fact come about ?

Initial guidance can be furnished by the verbal sense, an Other:
an Other Ego. "Alter" signifies alter ego. And the ego involved
here is I myself, constituted within my primordial ownness, and
uniquely, as the psychophysical unity (the primordial man) : as
"personal" Ego, governing immediately in my animate organism
(the only animate organism) and producing effects mediately 1
in the primordial surrounding world; the subject, moreover, of
a concrete intentional life, <and (?) > of a psychic sphere relating
to himself and the "world". All of that — with the grouping
under types that arises in experiential life and the familiar forms
of flow and combination — is at our disposal. As for the in-
tentionalities by which it has become constituted (and they too
are highly complicated) — admittedly we have not investigated
them <in these meditations >. They belong to a distinct stratum
and are the theme of vast investigations into which we did not
and could not enter.

Let us assume that another man enters our perceptual sphere.
Primordially reduced, that signifies: In the perceptual sphere
pertaining to my primordial Nature, a body is presented, which,
as primordial, is of course only a determining part of myself: an
"immanent transcendency". Since, in this Nature and this
world, my animate organism is the only body that is or can be
constituted originally as an animate organism (a functioning
organ), the body over there, which is nevertheless apprehended
as an animate organism, must have derived this sense by an
apperceptive transfer from my animate organism, and done so in

1 According: to the published text, Typescript C and the French translaton:
"immediately".

FIFTH MEDITATION 1 1 1

a manner that excludes an actually direct, and hence primordial,
showing of the predicates belonging to an animate organism
specifically, a showing of them in perception proper. It is clear
from the very beginning that only a similarity connecting,
within my primordial sphere, that body over there with my body
can serve as the motivational basis for the "analogizing" appre-
hension of that body as another animate organism. /

There would be, accordingly, a certain assimilative apper-<ui>
ception; but it by no means follows that there would by an
inference from analogy. Apperception is not inference, not a
thinking act. Every apperception in which we apprehend at a
glance, and noticingly grasp, objects given beforehand — for
example, the already-given everyday world — every apper-
ception in which we understand their sense and its horizons
forthwith, points back to a "primal instituting", in which an
object with a similar sense became constituted for the first time.
Even the physical things of this world that are unknown to us
are, to speak generally, known in respect of their type. We have
already seen like things before, though not precisely this thing
here. Thus each everyday experience involves an analogizing
transfer of an originally instituted objective sense to a new case,
with its anticipative apprehension of the object as having a
similar sense. To the extent that there is givenness beforehand,
there is such a transfer. At the same time, that sense-component
in further experience which proves to be actually new may
function in turn as institutive and found a pregivenness that
has a richer sense. The child who already sees physical things
understands, let us say, for the first time the final sense of
scissors ; and from now on he sees scissors at the first glance as
scissors — but naturally not in an explicit reproducing, com-
paring, and inferring. Yet the manner in which apperceptions
arise — and consequently in themselves, by their sense and
sense-horizon, point back to their genesis — varies greatly. There
are different levels of apperception, corresponding to different
layers of objective sense. Ultimately we always get back to the
radical differentiation of apperceptions into those that, according
to their genesis, belong purely to the primordial sphere and those
that present themselves with the sense "alter ego" and, upon this
sense, have built a new one — thanks to a genesis at a higher level.

112 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

§51. "Pairing" as an associatively constitutive component of my
experience of someone else.

If we attempt to indicate the peculiar nature of that analo-
gizing apprehension whereby a body within my primordial
sphere, being similar to my own animate body, becomes appre-
hended as likewise an animate organism, we encounter: first, the
<i 42 > circumstance that here the primally institutive original j is always
livingly present, and the primal instituting itself is therefore
always going on in a livingly effective manner; secondly, the
peculiarity we already know to be necessary, namely that what
is appresented by virtue of the aforesaid analogizing can never
attain actual presence, never become an object of perception
proper. Closely connected with the first peculiarity is the circum-
stance that ego and alter ego are always and necessarily given in
an original "pairing 1 '.

Pairing, occurence in configuration as a pair and then as a
group, a plurality, is a universal phenomenon of the transcen-
dental sphere (and of the parallel sphere of intentional psy-
chology); and, we may add forthwith, as far as a pairing is
actually present, so far extends that remarkable kind of primal
instituting of an analogizing apprehension — its continuous
primal institution in living actuality — which we have already
stressed as the first peculiarity of experiencing someone else.
Hence it is not exclusively peculiar to this experience.

First of all, let us elucidate the essential nature of any "pairing' '
(or any forming of a plurality) . Pairing is a primal form of that
passive synthesis which we designate as "association" , in contrast
to passive synthesis of "identification' \ In a pairing association
the characteristic feature is that, in the most primitive case, two
data are given intuitionally, and with prominence, in the unity
of a consciousness and that, on this basis — essentially, already
in pure passivity (regardless therefore of whether they are noticed
or unnoticed) — , as data appearing with mutual distinctness,
they found phenomenologically a unity of similarity and thus are
always constituted precisely as a pair. If there are more than
twosuchdata, then a phenomenally unitary group, a plurality, be-
comes constituted. On more precise analysis we find essentially
present here an intentional overreaching, coming "about genet-

FIFTH MEDITATION 113

ically (and by essential necessity) as soon as the data that
undergo pairing have become prominent and simultaneously
intended; we find, more particularly, a living mutual awakening
and an overlaying of each with the objective sense of the other.
This overlaying can bring a total or a partial coincidence, which in
any particular instance has its degree, the limiting case being
that of complete 'likeness". As the result of this overlaying,
there takes place in the paired data a mutual transfer of sense —
that is to say : an apperception of each according to the sense of
the other, so far as / moments of sense actualized in what is <143>
experienced do not annul this transfer, with the consciousness
of "different '.

In that case of association and apperception which particu-
larly interests us — namely apperception of the alter ego by the
ego — pairing first comes about when the Other enters my field
of perception. I, as the primordial psychophysical Ego, am
always prominent in my primordial field of perception, regardless
of whether I pay attention to myself and turn toward myself
with some activity or other. In particular, my live body is always
there and sensuously prominent; but, in addition to that and
likewise with primordial originariness, it is equipped with the
specific sense of an animate organism. Now in case there presents
itself, as outstanding in my primordial sphere, a body "similar"
to mine — that is to say, a body with determinations such that
it must enter into a phenomenal pairing with mine — it seems
clear without more ado that, with the transfer of sense, this
body must forthwith appropriate from mine the sense : animate
organism. But is the apperception actually so transparent? Is
it a simple apperception by transfer, like any other ? What makes
this organism another's, rather than a second organism of my
own ? Obviously what we designated as the second fundamental
characteristic of the apperception in question plays a part here:
that none of the appropriated sense specific to an animate organ-
ism can become actualized originarily in my primordial sphere.

§ 52. Appresentation as a kind of experience with its own style of

verification.

But now there arises for us the difficult problem of making it
understandable that such an apperception is possible and need

114 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

not be annulled forthwith. How does it happen that, as the fact
tells us, the transferred sense is appropriated with existence-
status, as a set of "psychic" determinations existing in combi-
nation with that body over there, even though they can never
show themselves as themselves in the domain of originality, be-
longing to the primordial sphere (which alone is available) ?

Let us look at the intentional situation more closely. The
appresentation which gives that component of the Other which
is not accessible originaliter is combined with an original presen-
tation (of "his" body as part of the Nature given as included
in my ownness). In this combination, moreover, the Other's
< 144 > animate body and his governing Ego / are given in the manner
that characterizes a unitary transcending experience. Every
experience points to further experiences that would fulfil and
verify the appresented horizons, which include, in the form of
non-intuitive anticipations, potentially verifiable syntheses of
harmonious further experience. Regarding experience of someone
else, it is clear that its fulfillingly verifying continuation can
ensue only by means of new appresentations that proceed in a syn-
thetically harmonious fashion, and only by virtue of the manner
in which these appresentations owe their existence-value to their
motivational connexion with the changing presentations proper,
within my ownness, that continually appertain to them.

As a suggestive clue to the requisite clarification, this propo-
sition may suffice : The experienced animate organism of another
continues to prove itself as actually an animate organism, solely
in its changing but incessantly harmonious "behavior". Such
harmonious behavior (as having a physical side that indicates
something psychic appresentatively) must present itself ful-
fillingly in original experience, and do so throughout the con-
tinuous change in behavior from phase to phase. The organism
becomes experienced as a pseudo-organism, precisely if there is
something discordant about its behavior.

The character of the existent "other" has its basis in this kind
of verifiable accessibility of what is not originally accessible.
Whatever can become presented, and evidently verified, origi-
nally — is something J am ; or else it belongs to me as peculiarly
my own. Whatever, by virtue thereof, is experienced in that
founded manner which characterizes a primordially unfulfillable

FIFTH MEDITATION 115

experience — an experience that does not give something itself
originally but that consistently verifies something indicated —
is "other". It is therefore conceivable only as an analogue of
something included in my peculiar ownness. Because of its sense-
constitution it occurs necessarily as an "intentional modification 1 '
of that Ego of mine which is the first to be Objectivated, or as
an intentional modification of my primordial "world": the
Other as phenomenologically a "modification" of myself (which,
for its part, gets this character of being "my" self by virtue of
the contrastive pairing that necessarily takes place). It is clear
that, with the other Ego, there is appresented, in an analogizing
modification, everything that belongs to his concretion: first,
his primordial world, and then his fully concrete ego. In other
words, another monad becomes constituted appresentatively in
mine.

Similarly (to draw an instructive comparison), within my
ownness and moreover within / the sphere of its living present, <145>
my past is given only by memory and is characterized in memory
as my past, a past present — that is: an intentional modifi-
cation. The experiential verification of it, as a modification, then
goes on necessarily in harmonious syntheses of recollection ; only
thus does a past as such become verified. Somewhat as my
memorial past, as a modification of my living present, "tran-
scends" my present, the appresented other being "transcends"
my own being (in the pure and most fundamental sense: what
is included in my primordial ownness). In both cases the modifi-
cation is inherent as a sense-component in the sense itself; it is
a correlate of the intentionality constituting it. Just as, in my
living present, in the domain of "internal perception", my past
becomes constituted by virtue of the harmonious memories
occuring in this present, so in my primordial sphere, by means
of appresentations occuring in it and motivated by its contents,
an ego other than mine can become constituted — accordingly,
in non-originary presentations [in Vergegenwdrtigungen] of a
new type, which have a modificatum of a new kind as their
correlate. To be sure, as long as I consider non-originary presen-
tations <of something lying > within the sphere of my ownness,
the Ego in whom they center is the one identical I-myself. On
the other hand, to everything alien (as long as it remains whitin

116 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

the appresented horizon of concreteness that necessarily goes
with it) centers in an appresented Ego who is not I myself but,
relative to me, a modificatum: an other Ego.

An actually sufficient explication of the noematic complexes
involved in experience of what is alien — such an explanation
as is absolutely necessary to a complete clarification of what
this experience does constitutively, by constitutive association
— is not yet completed with what has been shown up to now.
There is need of a supplement, in order to reach the point where,
on the basis of cognitions already acquired, the possibility and
scope of a transcendental constitution of the Objective world
can become evident and transcendental-phenomenological ideal-
ism can thus become entirely manifest.

§ 53. Potentialities of the primordial sphere and their constitutive
function in the apperception of the Other.

As reflexively related to itself, my animate bodily organism
(in my primoidial sphere) 1 has the central "Here" as its mode
<H6>of givenness; every other body, / and accordingly the "other's"
body, has the mode "There". This orientation, "There", can be
freely changed by virtue of my kinesthesias. Thus, in my pri-
mordial sphere, the one spatial "Nature" is constituted through-
out the change in orientations, and constituted moreover with
an intentional relatedness to my animate organism as functioning
perceptually. Now the fact that my bodily organism can be
(and is) apprehended as a natural body existing and movable in
space like any other is manifestly connected with the possibility
expressed in the words : By free modification of my kinesthesias,
particularly those of locomotion, I can change my position in
such a manner that I convert any There into a Here — that is
to ssy, I could occupy any spatial locus with my organism. This
implies that, perceiving from there, I should see the same physi-
cal things, only in correspondingly different modes of appearance,
such as pertain to my being there. It implies, then, that not only
the systems of appearance that pertain to my current perceiving
"from here", but other quite determinate systems, corresponding

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

FIFTH MEDITATION 1 1 7

to the change of position that puts me "there", belong con-
stitutively to each physical thing. And the same in the case of
every other "There".

Should not these interconnexions, or rathe r these instances of
belonging together, which are involved in the primordial consti-
tution of "my" Nature and are themselves characterized as
associative — should not they be quite essential to clarification
of the associative performance, experiencing someone else?
After all, I do not apperceive the other ego simply as a dupli-
cate of myself and accordingly as having my original sphere or
one completely like mine. I do not apperceive him as having,
more particularly, the spatial modes of appearance that are mine
from here ; rather, as we find on closer examination, I apperceive
him as having spatial modes of appearance like those I should
have if I should go over there and be where he is. Furthermore
the Other is appresentatively apperceived as the "Ego" of a
primordial world, and of a monad, wherein his animate organism
is originally constituted and experienced in the mode of the
absolute Here, precisely as the functional center for his governing.
In this appresentation, therefore, the body in the mode There,
which presents itself in my monadic sphere and is apperceived
as another's live body (the animate organism of the alter ego) —
that body indicates "the same" body in the mode Here, as the
body experienced by the other ego in his monadic sphere.
Moreover it indicates the "same" body concretely, with all the
constitutive intentionality pertaining to this mode of givenness
in the other's experience. /

§ 54. Explicating the sense of the appresentation wherein I <147>
experience someone else.

Manifestly what has just now been brought to light points to
the course of the association constituting the mode "Other".
The body that is a member of my primordial world (the body
subsequently of the other ego) is for me a body in the mode
There. Its manner of appearance does not become paired in a
direct association with the manner of appearance actually be-
longing at the time to my animate organism (in the mode Here) ;

118 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

rather it awakens reproductively another, an immediately i
similar appearance included in the system constitutive of my
animate organism as a body in space. It brings to mind the way
my body would look "if I were there". In this case too, although
the awakening does not become a memory intuition, fairing
takes place. The first-awakened manner of appearance of my
body is not the only thing that enters into a pairing ; my body
itself does so likewise: as the synthetic unity pertaining to this
mode, and the many other familiar modes, of its appearance.
Thus the assimilative apperception becomes possible and es-
tablished, by which the external body over there receives ana-
logically from mine the sense, animate organism, and conse-
quently the sense, organism belonging to another " world",
analogous to my primordial world.

The general style of this and every other apperception that
arises associatively is therefore to be described as follows : With
the associative overlapping of the data founding the apper-
ception, there takes place an association at a higher level. If the
one datum is a particular mode of appearance of an intentional
object, which is itself an index pointing to an associatively
awakened system of manifold appearances wherein it would
show itself, then the other datum is "supplemented" to become
likewise an appearance of something, namely an analogous
object. But it is not as though the unity and multiplicity "thiust
upon" the latter datum merely supplemented it with modes of
appearance taken from these others. On the contrary, the ana-
logically apprehended object and its indicated system of ap-
pearances are indeed analogically adapted to the analogous ap-
pearance, which has awakened this whole system too. Every
overlapping-at-a-distance, which occurs by virtue of associative
pairing, is at the same time a fusion and 2 therein, so far as incom-
patibilities do not interfere, an assimilation, an accomodation
of the sense of the one member to that of the other. /
< 148 > If we return to our case, that of apperception of the alter ego,
it is now self-understood that what is appresented by the "body"
over there, in my primordial "surrounding world", is not

1 The words "another" and "immediately" supplied in accordance with Typescript
C and the French translation.

a Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

FIFTH MEDITATION 1 \ 9

something psychic of mine, nor anything else in my sphere of
ownness. I am here somatically, the center of a primordial
"world" oriented around me. Consequently my entire primordial
ownness, proper to me as a monad, has the content of the Here
— not the content varying with some "I can and do", which
might set in, and belonging to some There or other ; accordingly,
not the content belonging to that definite There. 1 Each of these
contents excludes the other; they cannot both exist <in my
sphere of ownness > at the same time. But, since the other body
there enters into a pairing association with my body here and,
being given perceptually, becomes the core of an appresentation,
the core of my experience of a coexisting ego, that ego, according
to the whole sense-giving course of the association, must be
appresented as an ego now coexisting in the mode There, "such as
I should be if I were there". My own ego however, the ego given
in constant self-perception, is actual now with the content be-
longing to his Here. Therefore an ego is appresented, as other than
mine. That which is primordially incompatible, in simultaneous
coexistence, becomes compatible: because my primordial ego
constitutes the ego who is other for him by an appresentative
apperception, which, according to its intrinsic nature, never
demands and never is open to fulfilment by presentation.

Likewise easy to understand is the manner in which, as the
effective association goes on continuously, such an appresentation
of someone else continually furnishes new appresentational con-
tents — that is to say, brings the changing contents of the other
ego to definite notice; and, on the other hand, the manner in
which, by virtue of the combination with a continual presentation
and the associational demands expectantly addressed to this
presentation, a consistent confirmation becomes possible. The
first determinate content obviously must be formed by the under-
standing of the other's organism and specifically organismal
conduct: the understanding of the members as hands groping
or functioning in pushing, as feet functioning in walking, as eyes
functioning in seeing, and so forth. With this the Ego at first is
determined only as governing thus somatically [so leiblich walten-
des] and, in a familiar manner, proves himself continually, so

1 Reading with the original typescript, as jiven in the appendix to the published

text.

120 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

far as the whole stylistic form of the sensible processes manifest
to me primordially must correspond to the form whose type is
familiar from my own organismal governing [leibliches W alien].
<H9>/ It is quite comprehensible that, as a further consequence, an
" empathizing" of definite contents belonging to the "higher
psychic sphere" arises. Such contents too are indicated somatic-
ally and in the conduct of the organism toward the outside world
— for example : as the outward conduct of someone who is angry
or cheerful, which I easily understand from my own conduct
under similar circumstances. Higher psychic occurrences, diverse
as they are and familiar as they have become, have furthermore
their style of synthetic interconnexions and take their course in
forms of their own, which I can understand associatively on the
basis of my empirical familiarity with the style of my own life,
as examplifying roughly differentiated typical forms. In this
sphere, moreover, every successful understanding of what occurs
in others has the effect of opening up new associations and new
possibilities of understanding; and conversely, since every pairing
association is reciprocal, every such understanding uncovers my
own psychic life in its similarity and difference and, by bringing
new features into prominence, makes it fruitful for new as-
sociations.

§ 55. Establishment of the community of monads.
The first form of Objectivity: intersuhjective Nature.

But it is more important to clarify the community, developing
at various levels, which is produced forthwith by virtue of ex-
periencing someone else; the community between me, the
primordial psychophysical Ego governing in and by means of
my primordial organism, and the appresentatively experienced
Other; then, considered more concretely and radically, between
my monadic ego and his.

The first thing constituted in the form of community, and the
foundation for all other inter subjectively common things, is the
commoness of Nature, along with that of the Other's organism
and his psychophysical Ego, as paired with my own psychophysical
Ego.

Since other subjectivity, by appresentation within the ex-
clusive own-essentialness of my subjectivity, arises with the

FIFTH MEDITATION 121

sense and status of a subjectivity that is other in its own essence 1 ,
it might at first seem to be a mystery how community — even
the first community, in the form of a common world — becomes
established. The other organism, as appearing in my primordial
sphere, is first of all a body in my / primordial Nature, which is <150>
a synthetic unity belonging to me and therefore, as a determining
part included in my own essence, inseparable from me myself.
If that body functions appresentatively, then, in union with it,
the other Ego becomes an object of my consciousness — and
primarily the other Ego with his organism, as given to him in
the manner of appearance pertaining to his "absolute Here".
How can I speak at all of the same body, as appearing within my
primordial sphere in the mode There and within his and to him
in the mode Here? These two primordial spheres, mine which is
for me as ego the original sphere, and his which is for me an
appresented sphere — are they not separated by an abyss I
cannot actually cross, since crossing it would mean, after all,
that I acquired an original (rather than an appresenting) ex-
perience of someone else ? If we stick to our de facto experience,
our experience of someone else as it comes to pass at any time,
we find that actually the sensuously seen body is experienced
forthwith as the body of someone else and not as merely an indi-
cation of someone else. Is not this fact an enigma ?

The body belonging to my original sphere and the body
constituted, after all, quite separately in the other ego become
identified and are called the identical body of someone else. How
does this identification come about? How can it come about?
But the enigma appears only if the two original spheres have
already been distinguished — a distinction that already presup-
poses that experience of someone else has done its work. Since
we are not dealing here with a temporal genesis of such experi-
ence, on the basis of a temporally antecedent self-experience,
manifestly only a precise explication of the intentionality
actually observable in our experience of someone, else and dis-
covery of the motivations essentially implicit in that intention-
ality can unlock the enigma.

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "einer eigenwesentUch-anderen" instead of "einer
eigenwesentlichen anderen" (another subjectivity having its own essence). Cf. the
French: "ay ant un etre essentiellement propre % \

122 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

As we said once before, appresentation as such presupposes a
core of presentation. It is a making present combined by associ-
ations with presentation, with perception proper, but a making
present that is fused with the latter in the particular function of
''co-perception". In other words, the two are so fused that they
stand within the functional community of one perception, which
simultaneously presents and appresents, and yet furnishes for
the total object a consciousness of its being itself there. Therefore,
<151> in the object of / such a present ive-appresentive perception (an
object making its appearance in the mode, itself-there), we must
distinguish noematically between that part which is genuinely
perceived and the rest, which is not strictly perceived and yet
is indeed there too. Thus every perception of this type is tran-
scending: it posits more as itself-there than it makes "actually"
present at any time. Every external perception belongs here —
for example, perception of a house (front — rear) ; but at bottom
absolutely every perception, indeed every evidence, is thus
described in respect of a most general feature, provided only
that we understand "presenting" in a broader sense.

Let us apply this general cognition to the case of experiencing
someone else. In this case too it should be noted that experience
can appresent only because it presents, that here too appresentation
can exist only in the aforesaid functional community with
presentation. That implies, however, that, from the very be-
ginning, what this experience presents must belong to the unity of
the very object appresented. In other words: It is not, and cannot
be, the case that the body belonging to my primordial sphere
and indicating to me the other Ego (and, with him, the whole
of the other primordial sphere or the other concrete ego) could
appresent his factual existence and being-there-too, unless this
primordial body acquired the sense, "a body belonging to the
other ego", and, according to the whole associative-apperceptive
performance, the sense: tl someone else's animate organism itself'.
Therefore it is not as though the body over there, in my pri-
mordial sphere, remained separate from the animate bodily
organism of the other Ego, as if that body were something like
a signal for its analogue (by virtue of an obviously inconceivable
motivation) ; it is not as though consequently, with the spreading
of the association and appresentation, my primordial Nature

FIFTH MEDITATION 123

and the other's appresented primordial Nature — therefore my
concrete ego and the other concrete ego — remained separate.
On the contrary, this natural body belonging to my sphere
appresents the other Ego, by virtue of the pairing association
with my bodily organism, and with my Ego governing in my
organism, within my primordially constituted Nature. In so
doing, it appresents first of all the other Ego's governing in this
body, the body over there, and mediately his governing in the
Nature that appears to him perceptually — identically the Nature
to which the body over there belongs, identically the Nature
that / is my primordial Nature. It is the same Nature, but in the <152>
mode of appearance: "as if I were standing over there, where
the Other's body is". The body is the same, given to me as the
body there, and to him as the body here, the central body.
Furthermore, "my" whole Nature is the same as the Other's.
In my primordial sphere it is constituted as an identical unity
of my manifold modes of givenness — an identical unity in
changing orientations around my animate organism (the zero
body, the body in the absolute Here), an identical unity of even
richer multiplicities that, as changing modes of appearance per-
taining to different "senses", or else as changeable "perspectives",
belong to each particular orientation as here or there and also,
in a quite particular manner, belong to my animate organism,
which is inseparable from the absolute Here. All of this has for
me the originality of something included in my particular
ownness, something directly accessible in original explication of
my own self. In the appresented other ego the synthetic systems
are the same, with all their modes of appearance, accordingly
with all the possible perceptions and the noematic contents of
these: except that the actual perceptions and the modes of
givenness actualized therein, and also in part the objects actually
perceived, are not the same; rather the objects perceived are
precisely those perceivable from there, and as they are perceivable
from there. Something similar is true of anything else of my own
and the corresponding alien thing, even where original expli-
cation does not go on in perceptions. I do not have an appresented
second original sphere with a second "Nature" and, in this Nature,
a second animate bodily organism (the one belonging to the
other ego himself), so that I must then ask how I can apprehend

124 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

my Nature and this other as modes of appearance of the same
Objective Nature. On the contrary, the identity-sense of "my"
primordial Nature and the presentiated other primordial Nature
is necessarily produced by the appresentation and the unity
that it, as appresentation, necessarily has with the presentation
co-functioning for it — this appresentation by virtue of which
an Other and, consequently, his concrete ego are there for me
in the first place. Quite rightly, therefore, we speak of perceiving
someone else and then of perceiving the Objective world, per-
ceiving that the other Ego and I are looking at the same world,
and so forth — though this perceiving goes on exclusively within
the sphere of my ownness. That does not at all contravene the
fact that the intentionality of this sphere transcends my owness,
<i53>or the fact that accordingly my ego / constitutes in himself
another ego — and constitutes this ego, moreover, as existent.
What I actually see is not a sign and not a mere analogue, a
depiction in any natural sense of the word ; on the contrary, it
is someone else. And what is grasped with actual origin ariness
in this seeing — namely that corporeality over there, or rather
only one aspect of its surface — is the Other's body itself, but
seen just from my position and in respect of this aspect: Ac-
cording to the sense-constitution involved in perceiving someone
else, what is grasped originaliter is the body of a psyche es-
sentially inaccessible to me originaliter, and the two are com-
prised in the unity of one psychophysical reality.

On the other hand, it is implicit in the intentional essence of
this perception of the Other — the Other who exists henceforth,
as I do myself, within what is henceforth the Objective world —
that I as perceiver can find the aforesaid distinction between my
primordial sphere and the merely presentiated primordial sphere
of the Other, and consequently can trace the peculiarities of the
division into two noetic strata and explicate the complexes of
associative intentionality. The experiential phenomenon, Ob-
jective Nature, has, besides the primordially constituted stratum,
a superimposed second, merely appresented stratum originating
from my experiencing of someone else; and this fact concerns,
first of all, the Other's animate bodily organism, which is, so to
speak, the intrinsically first Object, just as the other man is consti-
tutionally the intrinsically first <Objective> man. In the case of

FIFTH MEDITATION 125

this primal phenomenon of Objectivity, the situation is already
clear to us : If I screen off my experience of someone else, I have
the lowest constitution, the one-layered presentive constitution
of the other body within my primordial sphere; if I add that
experience, I have appresentationally, and as coinciding syn-
thetically with the presentational stratum, the same animate
organism as it is given to the other Ego himself, and I have the
further possible modes of givenness available to him.

From that, as is easily understandable, every natural Object
experienced or experienceable by me in the lower stratum
receives an appresentational stratum (though by no means one
that becomes explicitly intuited), a stratum united in an identi-
fying synthesis with the stratum given to me in the mode of
primordial originality: the same natural Object in its possible
modes of givenness to the other Ego. This is repeated, mutatis
mutandis, in the case of subsequently constituted mundanities
of the concrete Objective world as it always exists for us: namely
as a world of men and culture. /

The following should be noted in this connexion. It is implicit <154>
in the sense of my successful apperception of others that their
world, the world belonging to their appearance-systems, must
be experienced forthwith as the same as the world belonging to
my appearance-systems; and this involves an identity of our
appearance-systems. Now we know very well that there are
such things as "abnormalities" (for example: in the case of sub-
jects who are blind or deaf); we know that therefore the ap-
pearance-systems are by no means always absolutely identical
and that whole strata (though not all strata) can differ. But
abnormality must first be constituted as such; and the consti-
tuting of abnormality is possible only on the basis of an in-
trinsically antecedent normality. This points to new tasks, which
belong to a higher level of phenomenological analysis of the
constitutional origin of the Objective world — as the Objective
world existing for us and only by virtue of our own sense-
producing sources, a world that can have neither sense nor
existence for us otherwise. The Objective world has existence by
virtue of a harmonious confirmation of the apperceptive consti-
tution, once this has succeeded: a confirmation thereof by the
continuance of experiencing life with a consistent harmoni-

126 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

ousness, which always becomes re-established as extending
through any "corrections" that may be required to that end.
Now harmoniousness is preserved also by virtue of a recasting
of apperceptions through distinguishing between normality and
abnormalities (as modifications thereof), or by virtue of the
constitution of new unities throughout the changes involved in
abnormalities. Among the problems of abnormality the problem
of non-human animality and that of the levels of "higher and
lower" brutes are included. Relative to the brute, man is, consti-
tutionally speaking, the normal case — just as I myself am the
primal norm constitutionally for all other men. Brutes are es-
sentially constituted for me as abnormal "variants" of my
humanness, even though among them in turn normality and
abnormality may be differentiated. Always it is a matter of
intentional modifications in the sense-structure itself, as what
becomes evinced. All of that, to be sure, needs a more thorough
phenomenological explication. This general account, however,
is enough for our present purposes.

After these clarifications it is no longer an enigma how I can
constitute in myself another Ego or, more radically, how I can
constitute in my monad another monad, and can experience
what is constituted in me as nevertheless other than me. At the
same time, this being indeed inseparable from such constitution,
<155> it is no longer an enigma how I / can identify a Nature consti-
tuted in me with a Nature constituted by someone else (or,
stated with the necessary precision, how I can identify a Nature
constituted in me with one constituted in me as a Nature consti-
tuted by someone else) . This identification is no greater enigma
than any other synthetic identification. It is therefore no more
mysterious than any, by virtue of which, as an identification
confined to my own original sphere, no matter what objective
unity acquires sense and being for me through the medium of
fresentiations. Let us consider the following instructive example
and use it to bring out a thought that takes us further: the
notion of a connexion constituted through the medium of presen-
tation. How does one of my own subjective processes acquire
for me the sense and status of an existent process, something
existing with its identical temporal form and identical temporal
content? The original is gone; but, in repeated presentiations,

FIFTH MEDITATION 127

I go back to it and do so with the evidence: "I can always do so
again/' But these repeated presentations are evidently them-
selves a temporal sequence; and each is separate from the
others. In spite ot that, however, an identifying synthesis
connects them in the evident consciousness of "the Same" —
which implies the same, never repeated temporal form, filled
with the same content. Here, as everywhere else, "the Same"
signifies therefore an identical intentional object of separate
conscious processes, hence an object immanent in them only as
something non-really inherent. Another case, very important in
itself, is that of the constitution of objects that are ideal in the
pregnant sense — for example: all logically ideal objects. In a
living, many-membered thinking action I produce a structure:
a theorem or a numerical structure. Subsequently I repeat the
producing, while recollecting my earlier producing. At once, and
by essential necessity, an identifying synthesis takes place;
furthermore a new identifying synthesis occurs with each
additional repetition (a repetition performed with a conscious-
ness that the producing can be repeated again at will): It is
identically the same proposition, identically the same numerical
structure, but repeatedly produced or, this being equivalent,
repeatedly made evident. Therefore in this case, through the
medium of recollective presentiations, the synthesis extends —
within my stream of subjective processes (which always is
already constituted) — from my living present into my currently
relevant separate pasts and thus makes a connexion between my
present and these pasts. "With that, moreover, the supremely
significant transcendental problem of ideal objectivities ("ideal"
in the specific sense) is solved. Their supertemporality turns out
to be omnitemporality, as a correlate of free / produceability and <156>
reproduceability at all times. After constitution of the Objective
world with its Objective time and its Objective men as possible
thinking subjects, that obviously carries over to ideal structures,
as themselves Objectivated, and to their Objective omnitempo-
rality. Thus the contrast between them and Objective realities,
as spatiotemporally individuated structures, becomes under-
standable.

If we return now to our case, the experience of someone else,
we find that, with its complicated structure, it effects a similar

128 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

connexion mediated by presentiation; namely a connexion be-
tween, on the one hand, the uninterruptedly living self-experi-
ence (as purely passive original self-appearance) of the concrete
ego — accordingly, his primordial sphere — and, on the other
hand, the alien sphere presentiated therein. It effects this, first,
by its identifying synthesis of the primordially given animate
body of someone else and the same animate body, but ap-
presented in other modes of appearance, and secondly, spreading
out from there, by its identifying synthesis of the same Nature,
given and verified primordially (with pure sensuous originality)
and at the same time appresentationally. In that way the
coexistence of my <polar> Ego and the other Ego, of my whole
concrete ego and his, my intentional life and his, my "realities"
and his — in short, a common time- form — is primally instituted;
and thus every primordial temporality automatically acquires
the significance of being merely an original mode of appearance
of Objective temporality to a particular subject. In this con-
nexion we see that the temporal community of the consti-
tutively interrelated monads is indissoluble, because it is tied
up essentially with the constitution of a world and a world time.

§ 56. Constitution of higher levels of intermonadic community.

With these considerations we have clarified the first and lowest
level of communalization between me, the primordial monad for
myself, and the monad constituted in me, yet as other and
accordingly as existing for himself but only appresentationally
demonstrable to me. The only conceivable manner in which
others can have for me the sense and status of existent others,
thus and so determined, consists in their being constituted in me
as others. If they get that sense and status from sources that
yield a continual confirmation, then they do indeed exist (as I /
ci57>am compelled to say), but exclusively as having the sense with
which they are constituted : as monads, existing for themselves
precisely as I exist for myself, yet existing also in communion,
therefore (I emphasize the expression already used earlier) in
connexion with me qua concrete ego, qua monad. To be sure, they
are separate from my monad, so far as really inherent consti-
tuents are concerned, since no really inherent connexion leads

FIFTH MEDITATION 129

from their subjective processes to my subjective processes or
from anything included in their peculiar ownness to anything
included in mine. To that separation there corresponds, after all,
the "real", the mundane separation of my psychophysical ex-
istence from someone else's, a separation that shows itself as
spatial, owing to the spatial character of our Objective animate
organisms. On the other hand, this original communion is not
just nothing. Whereas, really inherently, each monad is an
absolutely separate unity, the "irreal" intentional reaching of
the other into my primordiality is not irreal in the sense of being
dreamt into it or being present to consciousness after the fashion
of a mere phantasy. Something that exists is in intentional com-
munion with something else that exists. It is an essentially unique
connectedness, an actual community and precisely the one that
makes transcendentally possible the being of a world, a world
of men and things.

After the first level of communalization and (this being almost
equivalent) the first constitution of an Objective world, starting
from the primordial world, have been sufficiently clarified, the
higher levels offer relatively minor difficulties. Though compre-
hensive investigations and a progressive differentiation of
problems relating to these levels are necessary for purposes of an
all-round explication, here we can be satisfied with rough general
indications, easily understandable on the basis already laid.
Starting from me, from the one who is constitutionally the primal
monad, I acquire what are for me other monads and, correc-
tively, others as psychophysical subjects. This implies that I do
not acquire the latter merely as over against me somatically and
— by virtue of associative pairing — as related back to my psycho-
physical existence (which indeed is universally "central", and
particularly the "central member" in the communalized world
of the present level because of the necessarily oriented manner
in which this world is given). On the contrary (and this carries
over to the sociality of brute animals), in the sense of a com-
munity of men and in that of man — who, even as solitary, has
the sense : member of a community — there is implicit a mutual
being for one another, which / entails an Objectivating equalization <158>
of my existence with that of all others — consequently: I or
anyone else, as a man among other men. If, with my under-

130 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

standing of someone else, I penetrate more deeply into him, into
his horizon of ownness, I shall soon run into the fact that, just
as his animate bodily organism lies in my field of perception, so
my animate organism lies in his field of perception and that, in
general, he experiences me forthwith as an Other for him, just
as I experience him as my Other. Likewise I shall find that, in
the case of a plurality of Others, they are experienced also by
one another as Others, and consequently that I can experience
any given Other not only as himself an Other but also as related
in turn to his Others and perhaps — with a mediatedness that
may be conceived as reiterable — related at the same time to
me. It is also clear that men become apperceivable only as finding
Others and still more Others, not just in the realm of actuality
but likewise in the realm of possibility, at their own pleasure.
Openly endless Nature itself then becomes a Nature that in-
cludes an open plurality of men (conceived more generally:
animalia), distributed one knows not how in infinite space, as
subjects of possible intercommunion. To this community there
naturally corresponds, in transcendental concreteness, a simi-
larly 1 open community of monads, which we designate as
transcendental inter subjectivity. We need hardly say that, as
existing for me, 2 it is constituted purely within me, the medi-
tating ego, purely by virtue of sources belonging to my in-
tentionally; nevertheless it is constituted thus as a community
constituted also in every other monad (who, in turn, is consti-
tuted with the modification: "other") as the same community
— only with a different subjective mode of appearance — and
as necessarily bearing within itself the same Objective world.
Manifestly it is essentially necessary to the world constituted
transcendentally in me (and similarly necessary to the world
constituted in any community of monads that is imaginable by
me) that it be a world of men and that, in each particular man, it
be more or less perfectly constituted intrapsychically — in
intentional processes and potential systems of intentionality,
which, as "psychic life", are themselves already constituted as
existing in the world. By "the psychic constitution of the

1 Reading " entsprechend" instead of "entsprechende" (similar), as in both the
published text and Typescript C

a Reading with Typescript C and the French version. According to the published
text: "that for me".

FIFTH MEDITATION 131

Objective world" we mean, for example, my actual and possible
experience of the world, as an experience belonging to me, the
Ego who experiences himself as a man. Such experience of the
world is more or less perfect ; it always has its x open unde-
termined horizon. For each man, every other is implicit in this
horizon — physically, / psychophysical^, in respect of what is <159>
internal to the other's psyche — and is thus in principle a realm
of endless accessibilities, though in fact most other men remain
horizon al.

§ 57. Clarification of the parallel between explication of what is
internal to the psyche and egological transcendental explication.

On this basis it is not hard to clear up the necessary parallel
between explications of what is internal to the psyche and egological
transcendental explications, or the fact that, as was already said
earlier, the pure psyche is a self-Objectivation of the monad,
accomplished in the latter — a self-Objectivation the different
levels of which are essential necessities, if Others are possibly to
exist for the monad.

Connected with this is the fact that, a priori, every analysis
or theory of transcendental phenomenology — including the
theory whose main features have just been indicated, the theory
of transcendental constitution of an Objective world — can be
produced in the natural realm, when we give up the transcen-
dental attitude. Thus transposed to the realm of transcendental
naivete, it becomes a theory pertaining to internal psychology.
Whether the two disciplines be eidetic or empirical , a "pure" psy-
chology — a psychology that merely explicates what belongs to
a psyche, to a concrete human Ego, as its own intentional essence
— corresponds to a transcendental phenomenology, and vice versa.
That, however, is something to be made evident transcen-
dentally.

§ 58. Differentiation of problems in the intentional analysis of
higher inter subjective communities. I and my surrounding world.

The constitution of humanity, or of that community which
belongs to the full essence of humanity, does not end with what

1 Reading with Typescript C, "sie hat stets ihren", instead of "abet dock mindtstens
als". Cf. the French: "elle a toujours ses".

132 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

has been considered up to now. On the basis, however, of com-
munity in the last sense acquired, it is easy to understand l the
possibility of acts of the Ego that reach into the other Ego through
the medium of appresentative experience of someone else and,
indeed, the possibility of specifically personal acts of the Ego
that have the character of acts of mine directed to you 2 , the
character of social acts, by means of which all human personal
communication is established. To study these acts carefully in
their different forms and, starting from there, to make the
essence of all sociality transcendentally understandable is an
< 1 60 > important task. With / communalization proper, social com-
rnunalization, there become constituted within the Objective
world, as spiritual Objectivities of a peculiar kind, the various
types of social communities with their possible hierarchical
order — , among them the pre-eminent types that have the
character of "personalities of a higher order" .

Consequently there would come into consideration, as insepa-
rable from and (in a certain sense) correlative to the set of
problems indicated, the problem of the constitution of the
specifically human surrounding world, a surrounding world of
culture for each man and each human community; likewise the
problem of the genuine, though restricted, kind of Objectivity
belonging to, such a world. Its Objectivity is restricted, though
concretely the world is given to me and to everyone only as a
cultural world and as having the sense: accessible to everyone.
But, as soon becomes apparent when its sense is explicated
precisely, there are essential constitutional reasons why this
accessibility is not unconditional. In this respect it is mani-
festly different from that absolutely unconditional accessi-
bility to everyone which belongs essentially to the constitutional
sense of Nature, of the animate organism, and therefore of the
psychophysical man (understood with a certain generality). To
be sure, the following is also included in the sphere of uncon-
ditional universality which is the correlate of the essential form

1 Reading with Typescript C: u Aber verstdndlich ist sehr leicht" , instead of "Aber
selbstverstdndlich ist es sehr leicht" (But of course it is very easy), which makes the
sentence incomplete. Cf. the French: u on comprend Incitement".

2 The phrase, "the character of acts of niinc directed to you", supplied in ac-
cordance with Typescript C, ''von Ich-Du-Akten", and the French, "d'actes allant
*de moi a toV ".

FIFTH MEDITATION 133

of world constitution : Everyone, as a matter of apriori necessity,
lives in the same Nature, a Nature moreover that, with the
necessary communalization of his life and the lives of others, he
has fashioned into a cultural world in his individual and com-
munalized living and doing — a world having human signifi-
cances, even if it belongs to an extremely low cultural level. But
this, after all, does not exclude, either a priori or de facto, the
truth that men belonging to one and the same world live in a
loose cultural community — or even none at all — and ac-
cordingly constitute different surrounding worlds of culture, as
concrete life-worlds in which the relatively or absolutely separate
communities live their passive and active lives. Each man
understands first of all, in respect of a core and as having its
unrevealed horizon, his concrete surrounding world or his
culture; and he does so precisely as a man who belongs to the
community fashioning it historically. A deeper understanding,
one that opens up the horizon of the past (which is co-determi-
nant for an understanding of the present itself), is essentially
possible to all members of that community, with a certain origi-
nality possible to them alone / and barred to anyone from<i6i>
another community who enters into relation with theirs. At first
such an individual necessarily understands men of the alien
world as generically men, and men of a "certain" cultural world.
Starting from there, he must first produce for himself, step by
step, the possibilities of further understanding. Starting from
what is most generally understandable, he must first open up
ways of access to a sympathetic understanding of broader and
broader strata of the present and then of the historical past,
which in turn helps him to gain broader access to the present.
Constitution of "worlds" of any kind whatever, beginning
with one's own stream of subjective processes, with its openly
endless multiplicities, and continuing up through the Objective
world with its various levels of Objectivation, is subject to the
law of "oriented" constitution, 1 a constitution that presupposes
at various levels, but within the extension of a sense conceived
with maximal breadth, something "primordially" and something

1 In accordance with Typescript C and the French translation, the passage of the
published text that follows here, p. 161, 11. 15-21, is assigned a later position. See
the next note.

134 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

"secondarily" constituted. At each of the levels in question, the
primordial enters, with a new stratum of sense, into the second-
arily constituted world; and this occurs in such a fashion that
the primordial becomes the central member, in accordance with
orientational modes of givenness. The secondarily constituted,
as a " world", is necessarily given as a horizon of being that is
accessible from the primordial and is discoverable in a particular
order. It is already thus in the case of the first, the "immanent"
world, which we call the stream of subjective processes. As a
system of mutual externalities, this stream is given in an orien-
tation around the primordially constituted living present, from
which everything else outside it (but belonging to immanent
temporality) is accessible. Again, within the sphere that is
primordial in our specific sense, my animate organism is the
central member of "Nature", the "world" that becomes consti-
tuted by means of governance of my organism. In like manner,
my psychophysical organism is primordial for the constitution
of the Objective world of mutual externalities, and, in accordance
with the oriented mode of givenness of this world, enters it as
the central member. If the "world" that is primordial in our

< 1 62 > distinctive sense / does not itself become the center of the Ob-
jective world, the reason is that this whole primordial "world"
becomes Objectivated in such a fashion that it produces no new
mutual externalities. On the other hand, the multiplicity of the
Other's world is given as oriented peripherally to mine, and is
thus a world, because it becomes constituted with a common
Objective world immanent in it, and the spatiotemporal form
of this Objective world functions at the same time as a form
that gives access to it.

If we return to our case, that of the cultural world, we find
that it too, as a world of cultures, is given orientedly on the
underlying basis of the Nature common to all and on the basis
of the spatiotemporal form that gives access to Nature and must
function also in making the multiplicity of cultural formations

<i6i > and cultures accessible. / We see that in this fashion the cultural
world too is given "orientedly", in relation to a zero member or
a <zero> "personality". Here I and my culture are primordial,
over against every alien culture. To me and to those who share
in my culture, an alien culture is accessible only by a kind of

FIFTH MEDITATION 135

"experience of someone else", a kind of "empathy", by which
we project ourselves into the alien cultural community and its
culture. This empathy also calls for intentional investi-
gations. 1 /

We must forgo a more precise exploration of the sense-stratum < 162>
that gives to the world of humanity and culture, as such, its
specific sense, thus making it a world endowed with specifically
"spiritual" predicates. Our constitutional explications have
shown the intentional motivational complexes wherein accrued
that coherent substratum of the full concrete world which is left
us if we abstract from all predicates belonging to "Objective
spirit". We retain the whole of Nature, already constituted as
a concrete unity in itself. We retain, as included in Nature, the
animate organisms of men and brutes ; but we no longer retain
psychic life as concretely complete, since human existence as
such is always related consciously to an existent practical world
as a surrounding world already endowed with humanly signifi-
cant predicates, and this relationship presupposes a psycho-
logical constitution of such predicates.

That every such predicate of the world accrues from a temporal
genesis and, indeed, one that is rooted in human undergoing and
doing, needs no proof. A presupposition for the origin of such
predicates in the particular subjects (and for the origin of their
intersubjective acceptance as abiding predicates of the common
life-world) is, consequently, that a community of men and each
particular man are vitally immersed in a concrete surrounding
world, are related to it in undergoing and doing — that all of
this is already constituted. With this continual change in the
human life-world, manifestly the men themselves also change as
persons, since correlatively they must always be taking on new
habitual properties. In this connexion / far-reaching problems <163>
of static and genetic constitution make themselves keenly felt,
those of genetic constitution as part of the problem of all-em-
bracing genesis, which presents so many enigmas. For example:
regarding personality, not only the problem of the static consti-
tution of a unity of personal character, over against the multi-
plicity of instituted and subsequently annulled habitualities,

1 In accordance with Typescript C and the French translation, the passage be-
ginning "We see ..." has been transposed. See the preceding note.

136 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

but also the genetic problem, which leads back to enigmas con-
cerning "innate" character.

For the present it must suffice that we have indicated these
problems of a higher level as problems of constitution and thereby
made it understandable that, with the systematic progress of
transcendental-phenomenological explication of the apodictic
ego, the transcendental sense of the world must also become
disclosed to us ultimately in the full concreteness with which it
is incessantly the life-world for us all. That applies likewise to
all the particular formations of the surrounding world, wherein
it presents itself to us according to our personal upbringing and
development or according to our membership in this or that
nation, this or that cultural community. All these matters are
governed by essential necessities; they conform to an essential
style, which derives its necessity from the transcendental ego
and then from the transcendental intersubjectivity which dis-
closes itself in that ego — accordingly, from the essential forms
of transcendental motivation and transcendental constitution.
If we succeed in uncovering these forms, the aforesaid apriori
style acquires a rational clarification that has the highest
dignity, the dignity of an ultimate, a transcendental intelli-
gibility.

§ 59. Ontological explication and its place within constitutional
transcendental phenomenology as a whole.

By our coherent bits of actually executing analysis and, in
part, by the accompanying predelineation of inevitable new
problems and the form of order they demand, we have acquired
philosophically fundamental insights. Starting from the ex-
periential world given beforehand as existent and (with the shift
to the eidetic attitude) from any experiential world whatever,
conceived as given beforehand as existent, we exercised transcen-
<164> dental reduction — that is: we went back to the / transcendental
ego, who constitutes within himself givenness-beforehand and
all modes of subsequent givenness; or (with eidetic self -variation)
we went back to any transcendental ego whatever.

The transcendental ego was conceived accordingly as an ego
who experiences within himself a world, who proves a world

FIFTH MEDITATION 137

harmoniously. Tracing the essence of such constitution and its
egological levels, we made visible an Apriori of a completely 1
novel kind, namely the Apriori of constitution. We learned to
distinguish, on the one hand, the self-constitution of the ego for
himself and in his primordial own-essentialness and, on the other
hand, the constitution of all the aliennesses of various levels, by
virtue of sources belonging to his own essentialness. There
resulted the all-embracing unity of the essential form belonging
to the total constitution accomplished in my own ego — the
constitution as whose correlate the Objectively existing world,
for me and for any ego whatever, is continually given before-
hand, and goes on being shaped in its sense-strata, with a 2
correlative apriori form-style. And this constitution is itself an
Apriori. With this most radical and consequential explication
of what is intentionally included and what becomes intentionally
motivated in "my" ego and in my essential variants, it becomes
apparent that the universal de facto structure of the given Ob-
jective world — as mere Nature, as psychophysical being, as
humanness, sociality of various levels, and culture — is, to a
very great extent (and perhaps much further than we yet can
see), an essential necessity. An understandable and necessary
consequence is that the task of an apriori ontology of the real
world — which is precisely discovery of the Apriori belonging to
this world's universality — is inevitable but, on the other hand,
one-sided and not philosophical in the final sense. Such an onto-
logical Apriori (for example: of Nature, of the psychophysical,
of sociality and culture) does indeed confer on the ontic fact, on
the de facto world in respect of its "accidental" features, a rela-
tive intelligibility, that of an evident necessity of being thus and
so by virtue of eidetic laws ; but it does not confer philosophical
— that is, transcendental, intelligibility. Philosophy, after all,
demands an elucidation by virtue of the ultimate and most
concrete essential necessities; and these are the necessities that
satisfy the essential rootedness of any Objective world in
transcendental subjectivity and thus make the world intelligible
concretely: as a constituted sense. Only then, moreover, / do the <165>

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

2 Reading "eimm" instead of "meinem" (my), as in both the published text and
Typescript C Cf. the French translation: "une forme".

138 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

"supreme and final' ' questions become disclosed, those that are
still to be addressed to the world even as understood in this manner.
One consequence of the beginning phase of phenomenology
was that its method of pure but at the same time eidetic intu-
ition led to attempts at a new ontology, fundamentally different
in essence from the ontology of the eighteenth century, which
operated logically with concepts remote from intuition ; or, this
being the same thing, attempts to draw directly from concrete
intuition, in order to build particular apriori sciences (pure
grammar, pure logic, pure jurisprudence, the eidetic theory of
intuitively experienced Nature, and so forth) and, embracing
them all, a universal ontology of the Objective world. As regards
this, nothing prevents starting at first quite concretely with the
human life-world around us, and with man himself as essentially
related to this our surrounding world, and exploring, indeed
purely intuitively, the extremely copious and never-discovered
Apriori of any such surrounding world whatever, taking this
Apriori as the point of departure for a systematic explication of
human existence and of world strata that disclose themselves
correlatively in the latter. But what is acquired there
straightforwardly, though it is a system of the Apriori, becomes
philosophically intelligible and (according to what was said just
now) an Apriori related back to the ultimate sources of under-
standing, only when problems of constitution, as problems of
the specifically philosophical level, become disclosed and the
natural realm of knowledge is at the same time exchanged for
the transcendental This implies that everything natural, every-
thing given beforehand in straightforward intuition, must be
built up again with a new originariness and not interpreted
merely sequaciously as already definitive. That a procedure
drawing insight from eidetic intuition is called phenomenological
and claims philosophical significance is justified only by the
circumstance that every genuine intuition has its place in the
constitutional nexus. For this reason every intuitive ascer-
tainment, in the attitude of positivity, concerning the sphere
of eidetically necessary (axiomatic) fundamentals serves as
preliminary work and is even indispensible a priori. It furnishes x

1 Reading with Typescript C and the French translation. According to the publish-
ed text: "Its result must become . . .".

FIFTH MEDITATION 139

the transcendental clue for discovery of the full constitutive
concretion, as having both a noetic and a noematic aspect.

Regardless of the fact that it / uncovers hidden horizons of <166>
sense on the ontic side (the overlooking of which seriously re-
stricts the value of apriori ascertainments and makes their
application uncertain), the significance and complete novelty
of this going back into the constitutive is shown by the "monad-
ological" results of our investigation.

§ 60. Metaphysical results of our explication of experiencing

someone else.

Our monadological results are metaphysical, if it be true that
ultimate cognitions of being should be called metaphysical. On
the other hand, what we have here is anything but metaphysics
in the customary sense: a historically degenerate metaphysics,
which by no means conforms to the sense with which meta-
physics, as "first philosophy", was instituted originally. Phe-
nomenology's purely intuitive, concrete, and also apodictic
mode of demonstration excludes all "metaphysical adventure",
all speculative excesses.

Let us bring into relief some of our metaphysical results and
at the same time draw further consequences.

A priori, my ego, given to me apodictically — the only thing
I can posit in absolute apodicticity as existing — can be a world-
experiencing ego only by being in communion with others like
himself: a member of a community of monads, which is given
orientedly, starting from himself. In that the Objective world
of experience shows itself consistently, other monads show
themselves consistently to be existent. Conversely, I cannot
conceive a plurality of monads otherwise than as explicitly or
implicitly in communion. This involves being a plurality of
monads that constitutes in itself an Objective world and that
spatializes, temporalizes, realizes itself — psychophysical^ and,
in particular, as human beings — within that world. It is es-
sentially necessary that the togetherness of monads, their mere
co-existence, be a temporal co-existence and then also an existence
temporalized in the form: "real" temporality.

But that entails further extremely important metaphysical

140 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

results. Is it conceivable (to me, the subject who asks this, or,
starting from me, any conceivable subject who might ask it) —
is it, I ask, conceivable that two or more separate pluralities of
monads, i.e. pluralities not in communion, co-exist, each of which
accordingly constitutes a world of its own, so that together they
< 1 67 > constitute two / worlds that are separate ad infinitum, two
infinite spaces and space-times? Manifestly, instead of being a
conceivability, that is a pure absurdity. A priori, as the unity
of an intersubjectivity (an intersubjectivity, moreover, that
possibly lacks every actual relation of community with the
other intersubjectivity), each of two such groups of monads has,
to be sure, its possibly quite different looking " world". But the
two worlds are then necessarily mere "surrounding worlds", be-
longing to these two intersubjectivities respectively, and mere
aspects of a single Objective world, which is common to them.
For indeed the two intersubjectivities are not absolutely iso-
lated. As imagined by me, each of them is in necessary com-
munion with me (or with me in respect of a possible variant of
myself) as the constitutive primal monad relative to them.
Accordingly they belong in truth to a single universal community,
which includes me and comprises unitarily all the monads and
groups of monads that can be conceived as co-existent. Actually,
therefore, there can exist only a single community of monads, the
community of all co-existing monads. Hence there can exist
only one Objective world, only one Objective time, only one Ob-
jective space, only one Objective Nature. Moreover this one
Nature must exist, if there are any structures in me that involve
the co-existence of other monads. This alone is possible: that
different groups of monads and different worlds are related to
one another as those that may belong to stellar worlds we
cannot see are related to us — that is, with animalia who lack
all actual connexion with us. Their worlds, however, are sur-
rounding worlds with open horizons that are only de facto, only
accidentally, undiscoverable to them.

But the sense of this uniqueness of both the monadological
world and the Objective world "innate" in it must be correctly
understood, Naturally Leibniz is right when he says that in-
finitely many monads and groups of monads are conceivable
but that it does not follow that all these possibilities are com-

FIFTH MEDITATION 141

possible) and, again, when he says that infinitely many worlds
might have been "created", but not two or more at once, since
they are imcompossible. It is to be noted in this connexion that,
in a free variation, I can phantasy first of all myself, this apodictic
de facto ego, as otherwise and can thus acquire the system of
possible variants of myself, each of which, however, is annuled
by each of the others and by the ego who I actually am. It is a
system of apriori / incompossibility. Furthermore the fact, "I <168>
am", prescribes whether other monads are others for me and
what they are for me. I can only find them; I cannot create
others that shall exist for me. If I phantasy myself as a pure
possibility different from what I actually am, that possibility
in turn prescribes what monads exist for him as others. And,
proceeding in this fashion, I recognize that each monad having
the status of a concrete possibility predelineates a compossible
universe, a closed "world of monads", and that two worlds of
monads are incompossible, just as two possible variants of my
ego (or of any presupposedly phantasied ego whatever) are
incompossible.

Such results and the course of the investigations leading to
them enable us to understand how questions that, for traditional
philosophy, had to lie beyond all the limits of science can acquire
sense (regardless of how they may be decided) — for example,
problems we touched on earlier.

§ 61. The traditional problems of " psychological origins" and their
phenomenological clarification.

Within the world of men and brutes, we encounter the familiar
natural-scientific problems of psychophysical, physiological, and
psychological genesis. Among them is included the problem of
psychic genesis. It is suggested to us by the development, in the
course of which every child must build up his "idea of the
world". The apperceptive system in which a world, as a realm
of actual and possible experience, is there for him and always
given beforehand must first of all become constituted in the
course of the child's psychic development. The child, considered
Objectively, comes "into the world". How does he come to a
"beginning" of his psychic life?

142 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

This psychophysical coming into the world leads back to the
problem of live-bodily (purely "biological") individual develop-
ment and phylogenesis, which, for its part, has its parallel in a
psychological phylogenesis. But does that not point to corre-
sponding interconnexions among the transcendental absolute
monads, since indeed, so far as their psyches are concerned, men
and brutes are self-Ob jectivations of monads? Should not this
whole situation indicate most serious essential problems for a
constitutional phenomenology, as "transcendental philosophy" ?/
< !69> To a great extent genetic problems, and naturally those of the
first and most fundamental level, have indeed already been
dealt with in the actual work of phenomenology. The funda-
mental level is, of course, the one pertaining to "my" ego in
respect of his primordial own-essentialness. Constitution on the
part of the consciousness of internal time and the whole phe-
nomenological theory of association belong here; and what my
primordial ego finds in original intuitive self-explication applies
to every other ego forthwith, and for essential reasons. But with
that, to be sure, the above-indicated genetic problems of birth and
death and the generative nexus of psychophysical being have not
yet been touched. Manifestly they belong to a higher dimension
and presuppose such a tremendous labor of explication per-
taining to the lower spheres that it will be a long time before
they can become problems to work on.

Within the working sphere, however, let us indicate more
precisely certain vast domains of problems (both static and
genetic) that bring us into a closer relation to the philosophical
tradition. Our connected intentional clarifications of the experi-
ence of someone else and the constitution of an Objective world
took place on a basis given us beforehand in the transcendental
attitude: a structural articulation of the primordial sphere, in
which we already found a world, a primordial one. It had become
accessible to us starting from the concrete world, taken qua
"phenomenon", by means of that peculiar primordial reduction
of the latter to what belongs to my ownness: a "world" of
immanent transcendencies. It included the whole of Nature,
reduced to the Nature appertaining to me myself by virtue of
my pure sensuousness ; but it included likewise the psychophysi-
cal man (with his psyche) as correspondingly reduced. As regards

FIFTH MEDITATION 143

"Nature", not only "sight things", "touch things", and the like,
but also to some extent complete physical things as substrates
of causal properties were included, along with the all-embracing
forms: space and time. Obviously the first problem for the
constitutional clarification of the existential sense of the Ob-
jective world is to clarify the origin of this primordial "Nature"
and that of the primordial unity x of animate organism and
psyche — to clarify the constituting of them / as immanent <170>
transcendencies. Actually to do so requires extraordinarily ex-
tensive investigations.

In this connexion we are again reminded of the problems
concerning the "psychological origin" of the "idea of space",
the "idea of time", the "idea of a physical thing" — problems
dealt with so often in the last century by the most distinguished
physiologists and psychologists. Much as the great projects bore
the stamp of their distinguished authors, no actual clarification
has as yet been attained.

When we turn from them to the set of problems that we have
delimited and fitted into the phenomenological system of levels,
it is evident that the whole of modern psychology and episte-
mology has failed to grasp the proper sense of the problems to
be set here, both psychologically and transcendentally — their
sense, namely, as problems of (static and genetic) intentional
explication. To grasp it was, after all, impossible even for those"
who had accepted Brentano's doctrine of "psychic phenomena"
as intentional processes. There was a lack of understanding for
the peculiar character of an intentional "analysis" and all the
tasks disclosed by consciousness as such, in respect of noesis and
noema, a lack of understanding for the fundamentally novel
methods these tasks require. About problems that concern the
"psychological origins of the ideas of space, time, and the physi-
cal thing" no physics or physiology and no experimental or
non-experimental psychology that moves similarly in the realm
of inductive externalities has anything to say. Those are quite
exclusively problems of intentional constitution that concern
phenomena which are already given us beforehand as "clues"
(or perhaps can become given beforehand, in particular, with

1 Reading ,,Einheit" instead of "Einheiten" (unities) as in both the published
text and Typescript C. In the French translation: "uniUs".

144 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

the aid of an experiment), but which must now be interrogated
for the first time according to the intentional method and within
the universal complexes of psychic constitution. The kind of uni-
versality meant here is shown with sufficient distinctness in the
case of the systematic unitary complex of those constitutions
that are explicata of my ego, in respect of what is peculiar to my
own self and what is other.

Phenomenology signifies indeed a fundamental refashioning
of psychology too. Accordingly, by far the greater part of psycho-
logical research belongs in an apriori and pure intentional psycholo-
gy. (Here the word "pure" means: kept free from everything
psychophysical.) It is the same psychology, concerning which we
<171 > have already/indicatedrepeatedlythat,by meansof achangeof the
natural into the transcendental attitude, it is open to a " Copernican
conversion", wherewith it assumes the new sense of a completely
radical transcendental consideration of the world and impresses
this sense on all phenomenological-psychological analyses. This
sense alone makes such a psychology utilizable for transcen-
dental philosophy and, indeed, gives it a place within a transcen-
dental "metaphysics". Precisely in this lies the ultimate clari-
fication and overcoming of the transcendental psychologism that
has misled and paralysed the whole of modern philosophy.

As in the case of transcendental phenomenology, so also in
the parallel case of intentional psychology (as a "positive"
science) our exposition has manifestly predelineated a funda-
mental structure, a division of the corresponding investigations
of eidetic psychology into those that explicate intentionally
what is included in the concrete own-essentiality of any psyche
whatever and those that explicate the intentionality pertaining
to the otherness that becomes constituted therein. To the former
sphere of research belongs the chief and fundamental part of the
intentional explication of one's "idea of the world" — stated
more precisely, explication of the "phenomenon", which makes
its appearance within the human psyche : the existing world, as
the world of universal experience. If this experiential world is
reduced to the world constituted primordially in the single
psyche, it is no longer everyone's world, the world that gets its
sense from communalized human experience, but is exclusively
this intentional correlate of the experiencing life that goes on in

FIFTH MEDITATION 145

a single psyche, and first of all my experiencing life and its sense-
fashionings in primordial originariness at various levels. Tracing
these fashionings, intentional explication has to make consti-
tutionally understandable this primordial core of the phenome-
nal world — this core, which every one of us men and, above
all, every psychologist can acquire by the already-described
exclusion of sense-moments pertaining to "otherness". If,
within this primordial "world", we abstract from the reduced
psychophysical being, "I, the man", primordial bare Nature
remains, as the Nature pertaining to my own "bare sensuousness".
As an initial problem concerning the psychological origin of the
experiential world, there emerges here the problem concerning
the origin of the "thing-phantom", or "thing pertaining to the
senses", with its strata (sight thing, <touch thing, > and so forth)
and their synthetic unity. The thing-phantom is / given (always <172>
within the limits set by this primordial reduction) purely as a
unity belonging to modes of sensuous appearance and their
syntheses. The thing-phantom, in its variants as "near thing"
and "far thing", all of which belong together synthetically, is
not yet the "real thing" of the primordial psychic sphere. Even
in this sphere the "real thing" becomes constituted at a higher
level, as a causal thing, an identical substrate of causal properties
(a "substance"). Obviously substance and causality indicate
constitutional problems of a higher level. The constitutional
problem of the thing pertaining to the senses, along with the
problem of the spatiality and temporality that are fundamen-
tally essential to it, is precisely the problem just now indi-
cated. It is a problem of descriptive inquiry that concerns only
the synthetic complexes of thing-appearances (apparencies,
perspective aspects). Moreover, it is one-sided. The other side
concerns the relation of the appearances back to the functioning
animate organism, which in turn must be described in respect
of its self -constitution and the signal peculiarity of its consti-
tutive system of appearances.

When we proceed in this manner, new problems of descriptive
explication continually arise, all of which must be solved system-
atically if even the constitution of the primordial "world", as
a world of "realities" — along with the great problem of the
constitution of spatiality and temporality, as essential to

146 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

' 'realities" in that world — is to be dealt with seriously. As
its execution shows, this task alone comprises a tremendous
province of investigations ; still it furnishes only the underlying
level for a full phenomenology of Nature, as Objective and yet
as pure Nature — which itself is far from being the concrete

world.

Our discussion of psychology has given us occasion to translate
the distinction between what is primordial and what is consti-
tuted as alien into terms of the purely psychic and to sketch as
psychological problems (though only hastily) the problems re-
lating to a primordial, and to an Objective, Nature.

If, however, we return to the transcendental attitude, our
outlines of the problems relating to the psychological origin of
the "idea of space 1 ', and the like, provide us conversely with
outlines for the parallel problems of transcendental phenome-
nology — namely the problems involved in a concrete explication
of primordial Nature and the primordial world as a whole. This
fills a great gap in our earlier statement of the problems relating
<i73>to / constitution of the world as a transcendental phenomenon.

The extraordinarily vast complex of researches pertaining to
the primordial world makes up a whole discipline, which we may
designate as "transcendental aesthetics" in a very much
broadened sense. We adopt the Kantian title here because the
space and time arguments of the critique of reason obviously,
though in an extraordinarily restricted and unclarified manner,
have in view a noematic Apriori of sensuous intuition. Broadened
to comprise the concrete Apriori of (primordial) Nature, as
given in purely sensuous intuition, it then requires phenome-
nological transcendental supplementation by incorporation into
a complex of constitutional problems. On the other hand, it
would not be consistent with the sense of the correlative Kantian
title, "transcendental analytics' 1 , if we used this as a name for
the upper stories of the constitutional Apriori, which pertain to
the Objective world itself and the multiplicities constituting it
(at the highest level, the Apriori pertaining to the "idealizing"
and theorizing acts that ultimately constitute scientific Nature
and the scientific world). The theory of experiencing someone
else, the theory of so-called "empathy", belongs in the first
story above our "transcendental aesthetics". There is need only

FIFTH MEDITATION 147

to indicate that what we said about the psychological problems
of origin in the lower story applies here as well: For the first
time, the problem of empathy has been given its true sense, and
the true method for its solution has been furnished, by consti-
tutional phenomenology. Precisely on that account all previous
theories (including Max Scheler's) have failed to give an actual
solution, and it has never been recognized that the otherness
of "someone else" becomes extended to the whole world, as its
"Objectivity", giving it this sense in the first place.

We would also state expressly that it would of course be
pointless to treat the positive science of intentional psychology
and transcendental phenomenology separately. Obviously the work
of actual execution must devolve upon the latter, whereas psy-
chology, unconcerned about the Copernican shift, will take over
the results. Yet it is important to note that, just as the psyche
and the whole Objective world do not / lose their existence and <174>
existential sense when considered transcendentally (since they
are merely rendered originarily understandable, by the un-
covering of their concrete all-sidedness), so positive psychology
does not lose its rightful content but rather, freed of naive
positivity, becomes a discipline within universal transcendental
philosophy itself. From this point of view we may say that,
among the sciences that have been raised above the level of
naive positivity, intentional psychology is intrinsically the
first.

Indeed, it enjoys yet another advantage over aU other positive
sciences. If it is built up in the positive attitude according to
the right method of intentional analysis, it can have no
"problems of fundamentals", like those that infect the other
positive sciences: problems that arise from the one-sidedness of
naively constituted Objectivity, which finally demands that, in
order to attain all-sidedness, we shift to a transcendental con-
sideration of the world. But intentional psychology already has
the transcendental hiddenly within itself; only a final clarifi-
cation of its sense is needed in order to make the Copernican
shift, which does not change the content of psychology's in-
tentional results but only leads back to its "ultimate sense".
Psychology has just one fundamental problem [Fundamental-
problem], which (it may be objected) is ultimately a problem of

148 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

fundamentals [Grundlagenproblem], albeit the only one: the
concept of the psyche..

§ 62. Survey of our intentional explication of experiencing
someone else.

Let us return now, at the conclusion of this chapter, to the
objection by which at first we let ourselves be guided, the ob-
jection to our phenomenology, so far as, from the very beginning,
it claimed to be transcendental philosophy and, as such, to have
the ability to solve the problems that concern the possibility of
Objective knowledge. The objection runs as follows. Starting
from the transcendental ego of the phenomenological reduction
and thenceforth restricted to him, phenomenology is incapable
of solving those problems. Without admitting that it does so,
it lapses into a transcendental solipsism; and the whole step
leading to other subjectivity and to genuine Objectivity is
possible only by virtue of an unacknowledged metaphysics, a
concealed adoption of Leibnizian traditions. /
<175> Our actual explications have dissipated the objection as
groundless. The following is to be noted above all. At no point
was the transcendental attitude, the attitude of transcendental
epochs, abandoned; and our "theory' ' of experiencing someone
else, our "theory" of experiencing others, did not aim at being
and was not at liberty to be anything but explication of the sense,
"others'', as it arises from the constitutive productivity of that
experiencing: the sense 1 , "truly existing others", as it arises
from the corresponding harmonious syntheses. Wha.t I demon-
strate to myself harmoniously as "someone else" and therefore
have given to me, by necessity and not by choice, as an actuality
to be acknowledged, is eo ipso the existing Other for me in the
transcendental attitude: the alter ego demonstrated precisely
within the experiencing intentionality of my ego. Within the
bounds of positivity we say and find it obvious that, in my own
experience, I experience not only myself but others — in the
particular form : experiencing someone else. The indubitable 2

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "des $inne$'\ instead of l *des Limes' 1 (the limit),
Cf. the French: "lesens".

* Reading with Typescript C, "zweifellose" instead of "xw&ifello$" (indubitably).

FIFTH MEDITATION 149

transcendental explication showed us not only that this positive
statement is transcendentally legitimate but also that the
concretely apprehended transcendental ego (who first becomes
aware of himself, with his undetermined horizon, when he
effects transcendental reduction) grasps himself in his own pri-
mordial being, and likewise (in the form of his transcendental
experience of what is alien) grasps others: other transcendental
egos, though they are given, not originaliter and in unqualifiedly
apodictic evidence, but only in an evidence belonging to "ex-
ternal" experience. "In" myself I experience and know the
Other; in me he becomes constituted — appresentatively
mirrored, not constituted as the original. Hence it can very well
be said, in a broadened sense, that the ego acquires — that I, as
the one who meditatingly explicates, acquire by ' 'self-expli-
cation" (explication of what I find in myself) every transcen-
dency: as a transcendentally constituted transcendency and
not as a transcendency accepted with naive positivity. Thus
the illusion vanishes: that everything I, qua transcendental
ego, know 1 as existing in consequence of myself 2 , and explicate
as constituted in myself, must belong to me as part of my own
essence. This is true only of "immanent transcendencies". As a
title for the systems of synthetic actuality and potentiality that
confer sense and being on me as ego in my own essentialness,
constitution signifies constitution of immanent objective actu-
ality. At the start / of phenomenology, when my attitude is that of <176>
someone who is only starting, who is instituting phenomenological
reduction for the first time, as a universal condition under which
to pursue constitutional research, the transcendental ego who
comes into view is, to be sure, grasped apodictically — but as
having a quite undetermined horizon, a horizon restricted only
by the general requirement that the world and all I know about
it shall become a mere "phenomenon". Consequently, when I
am starting in this manner, all those distinctions are lacking
which are made only subsequently by intentional explication
but which nevertheless (as I now see) pertain to me essentially.
There is lacking, above all, self-understanding with respect to
my primordial essence, my sphere of ownness in the pregnant

1 Reading, with Typescript C, "erkenne" instead of "erkennen".

2 Reading, with Typescript C, li aus tnir sclbtf* instead of simply "mit ' selbsf\

150 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

sense, and with respect to what, within that sphere itself, be-
comes constituted as an Other in experiencing someone else, as
something appresented but essentially non-given (and never to
become given) within my primordial sphere. I must first expli-
cate my own as such, in order to understand that, within my own,
what is not my own likewise receives existential sense — and does
so as something appresented analogically. Therefore at the be-
ginning I, the meditator, do not understand how I shall ever
attain others and myself <as one among others >, since all other
men are "parenthesized". At bottom moreover I do not yet
understand, and I recognize only reluctantly, that, when I
"parenthesize" myself qua man and qua human person, I
myself am nevertheless to be retained qua ego. Thus I can as
yet know nothing about a transcendental intersubjectivity;
involutarily I take myself, the ego, to be a solus ipse and still
regard all constitutional components as merely contents of this
one ego, even after I have acquired an initial understanding of
constitutive performances. The further explications made in the
present chapter were therefore necessary. Thanks to them, the
full and proper sense of phenomenological transcendental "ideal-
ism" becomes understandable to us for the first time. The illusion
of a solipsism is dissolved, even though the proposition that
everything existing for me must derive its existential sense
exclusively from me myself, from my sphere of consciousness
retains its validity and fundamental importance. Phenome-
nological transcendental idealism has presented itself as a monad-
ology, which, despite all our deliberate suggestions of Leibniz's
< 1 77 > metaphysics, / draws its content purely from phenomenological
explication of the transcendental experience laid open by
transcendental reduction, accordingly from the most originary
evidence, wherein all conceivable evidences must be grounded —
or from the most originary legitimacy, which is the source of all
legitimacies and, in particular, all legitimacies of knowledge.
Actually, therefore, phenomenological explication is nothing
like "metaphysical construction"; and it is neither overtly nor
covertly a theorizing with adopted presuppositions or helpful
thoughts drawn from the historical metaphysical tradition. It
stands in sharpest contrast to all that, because it proceeds within
the limits of pure "intuition", or rather of pure sense-explication

FIFTH MEDITATION 151

based on a fulfilling givenness of the sense itself. Particularly in
the case of the Objective world of realities (as well as in the case
of each of the many ideal Objective worlds, which are the fields
of purely apriori sciences) — and this cannot be emphasized
often enough — phenomenological explication does nothing but
explicate the sense this world has for us all, prior to any philoso-
phizing, and obviously gets solely from our experience — a sense
which philosophy can uncover but never alter, and which, because
of an essential necessity, not because of our weakness, entails
(in the case of any actual experience) horizons that need funda-
mental clarification.

CONCLUSION

§ 63. The task of criticizing transcendental experience and
knowledge.

In the investigations of this meditation and already in those
of the two preceding meditations, we have been moving within
the realm of transcendental experience, of self-experience proper
and experience of someone else. We have trusted transcendental
experience because of its originarily lived-through evidence; and
similarly we have trusted the evidence of predicative description
and x all the other modes of evidence belonging to transcen-
dental science. Meanwhile we have lost sight of the demand, so
seriously made at the beginning — namely that an apodictic
knowledge, as the only "genuinely scientific" knowledge, 2 be
achieved; but we have by no means dropped it. Only we pre-
ferred / to sketch in outline the tremendous wealth of problems <178>
belonging to the first stage of phenomenology — a stage which in
its own manner is itself still infected with a certain natvete (the
naivete of apodicticity) but contains the great and most charac-
teristic accomplishment of phenomenology, as a refashioning
of science on a higher level — instead of entering into the
further and ultimate problems of phenomenology: those pertaining
to its self-criticism, which aims at determining not only the

1 Supplied in accordance with Typescript C and the French translation.

2 Reading, with Typescript C, "eine apodiktische Erkenntnis, als die allein 'ccht
wissenschaftliche* ", instead of "einer apodiktischen Erkenntnis, als der allein echt
wissenschajtlichen" , which is syntactically impossible.

152 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

range and limits but also the modes of apodicticity . At least a
preliminary idea of the kind of criticism of transcendent al-phe-
nomenological knowledge required here is given by our earlier
indications of how, for example, a criticism of transcendental
recollection discovers in it an apodictic content. All transcen-
dental-philosophical theory of knowledge, as "criticism of
knowledge" , leads back ultimately to criticism of transcendental-
phenomenological knowledge (in the first place, criticism of
transcendental experience) ; and, owing to the essential reflexive
relation of phenomenology to itself, this criticism also demands
a criticism. In this connexion, however, there exist no endless
regresses that are infected with difficulties of any kind (to say
nothing of absurdities), despite the evident possibility of re-
ferable transcendental reflections and criticisms.

§ 64. Concluding word.

Our meditations, we may venture to say, have in the main
fulfilled their purpose, namely to show the concrete possibility
of the Cartesian idea 1 of a philosophy as an all-embracing
science grounded on an absolute foundation. To exhibit this
concrete possibility, to show the feasibility <of such a philoso-
phy > — though of course in the form of an endless program —
means exhibiting a necessary and indubitable beginning and an
equally necessary and always employable method — whereby,
at the same time, a systematic order of all sensful problems is
predelineated. This much we have actually done. The only
things that remain are the easily understandable ramifications
of transcendental phenomenology — as a beginning philosophy
that grows and branches out into particular Objective sciences
<179>_ an( j its relation to the sciences of naive positivity, which are
given beforehand as examples. We now direct our attention to
these sciences.

Daily practical living is naive. It is immersion in the already-
given world, whether it be experiencing, or thinking, or valuing,
or acting. Meanwhile all those productive intentional functions

1 Reading "det CarUsianischen Idee'\ instead of "die CarUsianische Idee'* (the
concrete possibility, the Cartesian idea), as in both the published text and Typescript
C Cf. the French; "de VidU cartisienne" .

CONCLUSION 153

of experiencing, because of which physical things are simply there,
go on anonymously. The experiencer knows nothing about
them, and likewise nothing about his productive thinking. The
numbers, the predicative complexes of affairs, the goods, the
ends, the works, present themselves because of the hidden
performances; they are built up, member by member; they
alone are regarded. Nor is it otherwise in the positive sciences.
They are naivetes of a higher level. They are the products of an
ingenious theoretical technique; but the intentional per-
formances from which everything ultimately originates remain
unexplicated. To be sure, science claims the ability to justify its
theoretical steps and is based throughout on criticism. But its
criticism is not ultimate criticism of knowledge. The latter
criticism is a study and criticism of the original productions, an
uncovering of all their intentional horizons ; and thus alone can
the "range" of evidences be ultimately grasped and, correla-
tively, the existence-sense of objects, of theoretical formations,
of goods and ends, be evaluated. Consequently we have — and
precisely at the high level attained by modern positive sciences
— problems of fundamentals, paradoxes, unintelligibilities. The
primitive concepts, which pervade the whole science and de-
termine the sense of its sphere of objects and the sense of its
theories, originated naively; they have undetermined in-
tentional horizons ; they are products of unknown, only crudely
and naively exercised intentional functions. That is true, not
only in the case of the special sciences, but also in the case of
traditional logic, with all its formal norms. Every attempt of the
historically developed sciences to attain a better grounding or
a better understanding of their own sense and performance is
a bit of self -investigation on the part of the scientist. But there
is only one radical self-investigation, and it is phenomenological.
Radical self-investigation and completely universal self-investi-
gation are inseparable from one another and at the same time
inseparable from the genuine phenomenological method of self-
investigation, in the form peculiar to transcendental, reduction :
intentional self-explication of the transcendental ego, who is
made accessible by transcendental reduction, and / systematic <180>
description in the logical form of an intuitive eidetics. But uni-
versal and eidetic self-explication signifies mastery of all the

154 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

conceivable constitutive possibilities "innate" in the ego and in
a transcendental intersubjectivity.

Therefore a consequentially progressing phenomenology con-
structs a priori (yet with a strictly intuited essential necessity
and universality), on the one hand, the forms of conceivable
worlds and, on the other hand, conceivable worlds themselves,
within the limits set by all conceivable forms of being and by
their system of levels. But it constructs them "originarily" —
that is: in correlation with the constitutional Apriori, the
Apriori of the intentional performances that constitute them.

Since, with its procedure, phenomenology has no already-
given actualities or concepts of actualities, but from the very
beginning derives its concepts from the originariness of the
constitutive performance (which is itself conceived in originary
concepts), and since, owing to the necessity that all horizons be
uncovered, it is also cognizant of all differences in range, all
abstract relativities: therefore it must attain by itself the
concept-systems that determine the fundamental sense of all
scientific provinces. The concepts making up those systems
predelineate all the formal demarcations that pertain to the
form-idea of any possible world of being whatever. Hence they
must be the genuine concepts that are fundamental to all sciences.
In the case of concepts fashioned originarily in this manner,
there can be no paradoxes. This is true of all the fundamental
concepts that concern the concrete structure and the total
structural form of sciences that relate (or can become related)
to the various regions of being. Thus the investigations con-
cerning the transcendental constitution of a world, which we
have roughly indicated in these meditations, are precisely the
beginning of a radical clarification of the sense and origin (or of the
sense in consequence of the origin) of the concepts: world, Nature,
space, time, psychophysical being, man, psyche, animate organism,
social community, culture, and so forth. It is plain that the
actual carrying out of the indicated investigations would have
to lead to all the concepts which, as unexplored, function as
fundamental concepts in all positive sciences, but which accrue
:i8i> in phenomenology with an all-round clarity and / distinctness
that leave no further room for any conceivable questionableness.

CONCLUSION 155

We can now say likewise that, in apriori transcendental phe-
nomenology, all apriori sciences without exception originate
with an ultimate grounding, thanks to its correlational research,
and that, taken with this origin, they belong within an all-em-
bracing apriori phenomenology itself, as its systematically differ-
entiated branches. This system of the all-embracing Apriori is
therefore to be designated also as the systematic unfolding of the
all-embracing Apriori innate in the essence of a transcendental
subjectivity (and consequently in that of a transcendental inter-
subjectivity) — or as the systematic unfolding of the universal
logos of all conceivable being. In other words: As developed
systematically and fully, transcendental phenomenology would
be ipso facto the true and genuine universal ontology —
not, however, just an emptily formal universal ontology,
but also one that comprised in itself all regional existential
possibilities, and did so in respect of all the correlations pertaining
to them.

This universal concrete ontology (or universal and concrete
theory of science — this concrete logic of being) would therefore
be the intrinsically first universe of science grounded on an
absolute foundation. In respect of order, the intrinsically first
of the philosophical disciplines would be "solipsistically" re-
duced "egology", the egology of the primordially reduced ego.
Then only would come intersubjective phenomenology, which
is founded on that discipline; moreover it would start with a
generality that at first treated the universal questions, and
only subsequently would it branch out into the apriori
sciences.

This total science of the Apriori would then be the foundation
for genuine sciences of matters of fact and for a genuine all-em-
bracing philosophy in the Cartesian sense: an all-embracing
science of the factually existent, grounded on an absolute foun-
dation. All the rationality of the fact lies, after all, in the Apriori.
Apriori science is the science of radical universalities and ne-
cessities, to which the science of matter of fact must have
recourse, precisely in order that it may ultimately become
grounded on such radical principles. But apriori science must
not be naive; on the contrary, it / must have originated from<i82>
ultimate transcendental-phenomenological sources and be

156 CARTESIAN MEDITATIONS

fashioned accordingly into an all-round Apriori, resting on itself
and justifying itself by itself.

Finally, lest any misunderstanding arise, I would point out
that, as already stated, phenomenology indeed excludes every
naive metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves,
but does not exclude metaphysics as such. It does no violence to
the problem-motives that inwardly drive the old tradition into
the wrong line of inquiry and the wrong method ; and it by no
means professes to stop short of the "supreme and ultimate' '
questions. The intrinsically first being, the being that precedes
and bears every worldly Objectivity, is transcendental inter-
subjectivity: the universe of monads, which effects its com-
munion in various forms. But, within the de facto monadic
sphere and (as an ideal possibility) within every conceivable
monadic sphere, occur all the problems of accidental factualness,
of death, of fate, of the possibility of a "genuine" human life
demanded as "meaningful" in a particular sense — among them,
therefore, the problem of the "meaning" of history — , and all
the further and still higher problems. We can say that they are
the ethico-religious problems, but stated in the realm where
everything that can have a possible sense for us must be
stated.

Thus the idea of an all-embracing philosophy becomes actu-
alized — quite differently than Descartes and his age, guided
by modern natural science, expected: Not as an all-embracing
system of deductive theory, as though everything that exists
were included in the unity of a computation, but — with a
radical alteration of the fundamentally essential sense of all
science — as a system of phenomenological disciplines, which
treat correlative themes and are ultimately grounded, not on an
axiom, ego cogito, but on an all-embracing self-investigation.

In other words: The path leading to a knowledge absolutely
grounded in the highest sense, or (this being the same thing) a
philosophical knowledge, is necessarily the path of universal
self-knowledge — first of all monadic, and then intermonadic.
We can say also that a radical and universal continuation of
< 183 > Cartesian meditations, or (equivalently) a / universal self-
cognition, is philosophy itself and encompasses all self-accounta-
ble science,

CONCLUSION 1 57

The Delphic motto, "Know thyself!" has gained a new sig-
nification. Positive science is a science lost in the world. I must
lose the world by epoch6, in order to regain it by a universal
self-examination. "Noli for as ire" says Augustine, "in te redi,
in interior e homine habitat Veritas" x

* Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man.
J)e vera religione, 39, n. 72.

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