A new fundamental science, pure phenomenology, has developed within philosophy: This is a science of a thoroughly new type and endless scope. It is inferior in methodological rigor to none of the modern sciences. All philosophical disciplines are rooted in pure phenomenology, through whose development, and through it alone, they obtain their proper force.
Zu den Sachen selbst!
Experience by itself is not science
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 philosophizer's 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.
I seek not to instruct but only to lead, to point out and describe what I see. I claim no other right than that of speaking according to my best lights, principally before myself but in the same manner also before others, as one who has lived in all its seriousness the fate of a philosophical existence.
To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.
Each I not only perceives, has not only experiences that posit intuitive existence, but also it has a more or less clear or confused knowledge; it thinks, it predicates and, as a scientific person, each I does science. Thereby, the I knows itself as one which sometimes judges correctly, one which sometimes falls into error, as one which occasionally succumbs to doubts and confusions.
To every object there correspond an ideally closed system of truths that are true of it and, on the other hand, an ideal system of possible cognitive processes by virtue of which the object and the truths about it would be given to any cognitive subject.
If all consciousness is subject to essential laws in a manner similar to that in which spatial reality is subject to mathematical laws, then these essential laws will be of most fertile significance in investigating facts of the conscious life of human and brute animals.
Natural objects, for example, must be experienced before any theorizing about them can occur. Experiencing is consciousness that intuits something and values it to be actual; experiencing is intrinsically characterized as consciousness of the natural object in question and of it as the original: there is consciousness of the original as being there "in person."
At the lowest cognitive level, they are processes of experiencing, or, to speak more generally, processes of intuiting that grasp the object in the original.
It is to this world that our judgments refer. We make statements - sometimes singular, sometimes general - about things: their relations, their alterations, their functional dependencies and laws of transformation. Thus we find expression for what presents itself in direct experience. Following up on motives provided by experience itself, we infer from what is directly experienced in perception and memory to what is not experienced; we generalize; we apply in turn general knowledge to particular cases, or, in analytical thought, deduce new generalizations from general knowledge. Pieces of knowledge do not follow upon one another as a matter of mere succession. Rather, they enter into logical relations with each other, they follow from each other, they "agree" with each other, they confirm each other, thereby strengthening their logical power.
The ideal of a pure phenomenology will be perfected only by answering this question; pure phenomenology is to be separated sharply from psychology at large and, specifically, from the descriptive psychology of the phenomena of consciousness.