Summary: Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (page 3)

Empiricism would be well-founded if it had examined the essence of judgments to determine whether their proper meaning necessitates grounding in experience. This, however, has not been done. Empiricism is therefore one of those a priori speculative constructions that it is so quick to condemn.

In fact, science requires judgments based on originary intuitions, of which there are different types, depending on the meaning of the judgments and the nature of the objects involved.

Each judgment is founded on a specific mode of intuition rather than another.

To sum up:

It is immediate "vision"—not merely sensible, empirical vision, but vision in general, as originary giving consciousness in all its forms—that constitutes the ultimate source of legitimacy for all rational assertion.¹

And it fulfils this legitimacy-conferring function only because it is originary giving.²

Can one intuition contradict another? This would not imply that the act of seeing is not a basis for legitimacy. Husserl gives the example of conflicts of forces: The defeat of one force by another does not mean that it was not a force.³

By contrast, it is precisely empirical intuitions that contradict one another.

To conclude, Husserl replaces experience with the more general notion of intuition.

For Husserl, empiricism necessarily leads to scepticism—a tradition, in fact, initiated by Hume in A Treatise of Human Nature.

This follows from several causes. First, the fundamental principle of empiricism—that all valid thought is founded in experience⁴—is itself not grounded in experience. This contradiction undermines empiricism, which ultimately collapses into scepticism.

Moreover, direct experience provides only singular cases, and is therefore insufficient for constructing general theories of any kind.

As a result, the empiricist, like the sceptic, is led to reject any theory.

Husserl, however, also rejects idealism, on the grounds that it fails to recognise the existence of originary giving intuitions, speaking instead of a "feeling of evidence" endowed with mystical properties.

There is thus no Platonism in Husserl. Nowhere in Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology does he establish ideas or essences as objects with real being—though this accusation has been levelled against him.

This misunderstanding arises from a confusion between two meanings of the word object, which are clearly distinguished in German:
Gegenstand: the object found in reality (Wirklichkeit).
Reales: the natural object found in natural reality (Reale Wirklichkeit).

When Husserl states that an essence is an object, he means it in the logician's sense—as the object of a logical judgment. In this sense, the note C, the number 3, and any proposition are objects.

Thus, everyone, so to speak, constantly sees Ideas and essences; everyone uses them in the operations of thought and also formulates judgments about essences.⁵

Essences are concepts, but this does not mean that they are mere constructions of thought, psychological facts, or grammatical or metaphysical hypostases.⁶

For example, numbers are concepts—but are they not what they are, whether we construct them or not?⁷ We must not confuse our representation of number, which is indeed a construction of the mind, with number itself, which is timeless.

In other words: we do not construct the essence but rather our consciousness of the essence.

The idea of the centaur, like our representation of number, is a construction of the mind, but unlike number, it is not given by an originary intuition. It refers to nothing real: It has no existence in the soul, in consciousness, or anywhere else—it is nothing at all; it is pure fiction.⁸

Husserl summarises this fundamental idea in Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology as follows:

Any originary intuition is a source of legitimacy for knowledge. Everything that offers itself to us in an originary intuition must simply be received for what it gives itself to be, but without overstepping the limits within which it is given.⁹

From this, we can deduce a definition of the notion of principle: Any statement that confines itself to expressing these data, and thus constitutes an absolute beginning intended to serve as a foundation—in short, a principium.¹⁰

¹ ibid., p.66
² ibid.
³ ibid., p.67
⁴ §20, p.68
⁵ §22, p.74
⁶ ibid.
⁷ ibid., p.75
⁸ §23, p.76
⁹ §24, p.78
¹⁰ ibid., p.79