Summary: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (page 2)

Experience may play a role in the sciences of essence, but only as illustration, not as experience in the empirical sense.

The geometer, when drawing figures on the blackboard, traces lines that physically exist on the board, which itself is a real, existing object. However, neither the physical act of drawing nor the sensory experience of the drawn figure provides the foundation for the intuition and thought directed towards the geometrical essence.¹

By contrast, the biologist observes and experiments; that is, he tests an existence through experience. For him, experience is the fundamental act upon which everything else is based.²

This approach is radically different from that of the geometer, who explores not realities but ideal possibilities.³

The ideal of the eidetic sciences is to achieve the highest degree of rationality by reducing all mediate approaches to subsumptions under system-forming axioms. This is an ideal of mathematisation: to encompass the totality of knowledge within a small number of axioms, bound together by relations of pure deductive necessity.

To designate this ideal, Husserl employs the expression "mathesis universalis", already found in Descartes' Rules for the Direction of the Mind.

The eidetic and empirical sciences are distinct, but are they entirely independent of each other? They are not. There is a unilateral dependence of one on the other: an eidetic science, in principle, refuses to incorporate the theoretical results of the empirical sciences. On the other hand, no science of fact, once complete, can remain entirely free of eidetic knowledge.⁴

In fact, the empirical sciences do not present their results arbitrarily; rather, they articulate judgments within arguments and chains of reasoning, and as such, they must adhere to the universal and necessary rules of logic—an eidetic science if ever there was one.

Moreover, insofar as they seek to understand an object, they must respect the laws of objectivity in general, and hence the principles of formal ontology.

In Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology, Husserl defines formal ontology as the science of the object in general, insofar as it contains within itself the forms of all possible ontologies.

Logical categories are the fundamental concepts or axioms that constitute the object in general—for example, the concepts of property, quality, state of affairs, relation, identity, and number. These categories belong to the essence of the proposition.

Husserl distinguishes different regions of being. It is necessary to identify the supreme genera that govern the concrete and classify all individual being, as given in intuition, into regions of being. Each of these regions corresponds to both an eidetic and an empirical science, which is in principle distinct from any other.⁵

Transcendental phenomenology grounds the regional ontologies themselves, although it is first introduced as the ontology of the "region" of consciousness.

Husserl opens a debate with empiricism, which rejects ideas and essences—in short, which denies the very possibility of eidetic knowledge.⁶

Husserl is struck by the fact that the natural sciences—such as physics and biology—which have achieved such a high degree of scientific rigour through mathematics, have nonetheless aligned themselves with philosophical empiricism. This hostility to Ideas, he predicts, will ultimately hinder the progress of these sciences.

Empiricism begins with the justified notion that one must settle on things themselves and interrogate them as they present themselves.⁷

However, empiricism ultimately rejects all ideas and essences, dismissing them as mere scholastic entities or metaphysical phantoms.⁸

In truth, the empiricist's error lies in uncritically assuming that experience is the only act that grants access to things themselves.⁹ He also fails to see that things are not purely and simply the things of nature.¹⁰

He must recognise that the originary giving act we call experience pertains only to the reality of nature,¹¹ and not to reality in general.

¹ §7, p.31
² §7, p.32
³ ibid.
⁴ §8, p.34
⁵ §17, p.58
⁶ §18, p.62
⁷ §19, p.63
⁸ ibid., p.64
⁹ ibid., p.65
¹⁰ ibid.
¹¹ ibid.