Key Arguments

• Husserl explicitly states what is gained through epoché: ‘On the contrary 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 also the wider)1 phenomenological sense.’
• He characterizes the epoché as ‘the radical and universal method by which I apprehend 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.’ This defines transcendental self‑apperception as the methodological achievement of epoché.
• Anything belonging to the world is said to exist for me only in and through such subjective processes: ‘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.’
• He associates this totality of subjective acts with Descartes’ cogito: ‘Descartes, as we know, indicated all that by the name cogito.’
• On this basis he asserts: ‘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 cogitationes.2 In these my whole world-life goes on, including my scientifically inquiring and grounding life.’
• He then draws the decisive transcendental consequence: by placing himself above this life and abstaining from straightforward belief in the world, and by directing his regard exclusively to life as consciousness of the world, he ‘thereby acquire[s] myself as the pure3 ego, with the pure stream of my cogitationes.’
• Thus, transcendental subjectivity is thematized as the pure ego together with its pure conscious life, the universal medium in and through which any objective world has sense and validity for me.

Source Quotes

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 “phenomenological epoché” and “parenthesizing” of the Objective world — therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. On the contrary 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 also the wider)1 phenomenological sense. The epoché can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend 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.

On the contrary 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 also the wider)1 phenomenological sense. The epoché can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend 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.

The epoché can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend 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.

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.

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 straightforwardly as existing — if I direct my regard exclusively to this life itself, as consciousness of “the” world — I thereby acquire myself as the pure3 ego, with the pure stream of my cogitationes. Thus the being of the pure ego and his cogitationes, 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.

Key Concepts

• 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 also the wider)1 phenomenological sense.
• The epoché can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend 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.
• If I put myself above all this life and / refrain from doing any believing that takes “the” world straightforwardly as existing — if I direct my regard exclusively to this life itself, as consciousness of “the” world — I thereby acquire myself as the pure3 ego, with the pure stream of my cogitationes.

Context

Middle to later part of § 8, where Husserl moves from describing the effects of epoché on experience to articulating what it positively discloses: the pure ego and its pure conscious life as transcendental subjectivity and as the condition for the world’s sense and validity.