In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter III The Disclosure of the System’s Lowermost Limit: Subjectivity  F ollowing the preliminary considerations that make up the first two parts of Ideas I, Husserl stands on the threshold to phenomenology’s proper field of inquiry, pure consciousness. It is in his analyses of this field that the contours of the system of his thought first begin to take on determinacy. He starts with pure subjectivity and moves upwards towards reason —these are the extremes of his system. Yet before entering the field they mark out, Husserl looks back on the foregoing so as to account for the expositions there, as well as to specify further the nature of phenomenology and thereby point the ensuing path of thought. This is the last step before he engages in phenomenology proper, that is, before undertaking concrete, transcendental -phenomenological analyses. 1. The Science of Pure Phenomenology To this point Husserl’s account has been largely proleptic in character due to his expectation that his claims on behalf of phenomenology would be met with a “fundamental mood of skepticism,” the natural response to the thoroughly disconcerting because paradoxical nature of phenomenology. Its paradoxicalness is most obvious in its express challenge to the prevailing habits of thinking .1 The phenomenological attitude stands in an exclusive relationship to the natural attitude. Phenomenology asserts a radically new field of inquiry, which initially excludes the familiar fields in their naturalness so as to encompass all of them in a transformed sense; it encompasses them, namely, as their ground.2 Yet it is not first and foremost phenomenology’s challenge that threatens to hinder its success in breaking out of the confines of the natural attitude and  103  establishing itself as a new science, but rather—and this is the primary respect in which phenomenology is paradoxical—its unnaturalness: both this science and its field are not merely new in the usual sense of supplementing existing fields of natural inquiry and thereby extending their scope; rather, phenomenology and its field are so new that they lie completely beyond everything that is familiar to the “naturally minded.” On account of this, the relevance of phenomenology is not immediately apparent; it is not clear that the measures it calls for are at all necessary; and that generates resistance on the part of those living in the natural attitude. Consequently, if he is to dissolve the skeptical climate in which phenomenology is born and must establish itself, Husserl must become an intermediary. He is obliged to demonstrate not only the possibility but, more importantly, the necessity of phenomenology. That means that he must introduce the unfamiliar and make it familiar. This is the “most difficult” beginning, as Husserl says, but it must be undertaken if he is to help the uninitiated reader make the leap to phenomenology’s radically new attitude from what is otherwise familiar. Husserl’s guiding intention in the expositions making up the first two parts of Ideas I has been nothing but this, and it continues to guide him in his first thematization of phenomenology as a science to follow them. This thematization has alternating negative and positive sides. Due to the radical unnaturalness of phenomenology over against the “natural” sciences , the negative account must come first in each instance—Husserl must make a case for the unfamiliar based upon his analyses of the familiar—so as to defuse the skeptical mood it anticipates. This means that he must say what phenomenology is not before he can specify what it is. In taking this path, Husserl abides by his requirement that one start out always only from the ground. Hence in the foregoing he began with what is first for us, with what is immediately familiar to us, and that means: on the one hand, with matters of fact and the experiential-factual sciences. From these he distinguished essence and the eidetic sciences, respectively; they proved to be more fundamental than the former. On the other hand, he began with the world as we encounter it in the natural attitude. Ultimately, however, this led to a differentiation of the ground, which entailed a differentiation of attitudes. For it turns out that the natural attitude, and thus what is first for us, only seems to give us access to the ground, to what is first by nature. By contrast, if we are to reach the true ground, we must move beyond this semblance, and that can be achieved only through phenomenology and its method, the epoché. 1...

Share