Key Arguments

• Husserl explicitly rejects the Cartesian strategy of treating ego cogito as a premise to infer a transcendent subjectivity: “instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying a transcendent subjectivity”.
• He proposes a different methodological focus: “we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenomenological epoché lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.”
• By characterizing this as an “infinite realm of being of a new kind” and a “sphere of a new kind of experience”, he indicates that the grounding of knowledge is to be achieved by systematic exploration of this transcendental field, not by metaphysical deduction from a first proposition.
• This reorientation preserves the Cartesian aim (grounding of science and world in subjectivity) but radically alters the method: instead of logical inference beyond experience, phenomenology remains within what the epoché discloses as given to transcendental experience.
• Thus the transcendental grounding is experiential (in a specific, transcendental sense) and eidetic rather than deductive in the traditional, ordine geometrico sense.

Source Quotes

But perhaps, with the Cartesian discovery of the transcendental ego, a new idea of the grounding of knowledge also becomes disclosed: the idea of it as a transcendental grounding. And indeed, instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying a transcendent subjectivity, we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenomenological epoché lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.1 When we take it into consideration that, for each kind of actual experience and for each of its universal variant modes (perception, retention, recollection, etc.), there is a corresponding pure phantasy, an “as-if experience” with parallel modes (as-if perception, as-if retention, as-if recollection, etc.), we surmise that there is also an apriori science, which confines itself to the realm of pure possibility (pure imaginableness) and, instead of judging about actualities of transcendental being, judges about ‹its› apriori possibilities and thus at the same time prescribes rules a priori for actualities.1 / But admittedly, when we let our thoughts hasten on in this manner, to the conception of a phenomenological science destined to become philosophy, we immediately run into the already-mentioned difficulties raised by the fundamental methodological demand for an apodictic evidence of the ego. For, as we have already seen,2 no matter how absolute the apodictic evidence of the ego’s existence may be for him, still it is not necessarily evidence for the existence of the manifold data of transcendental experience.

Key Concepts

• instead of attempting to use ego cogito as an apodictically evident premise for arguments supposedly implying a transcendent subjectivity, we shall direct our attention to the fact that phenomenological epoché lays open (to me, the meditating philosopher) an infinite realm of being of a new kind, as the sphere of a new kind of experience: transcendental experience.1

Context

Middle of § 12, where Husserl contrasts the phenomenological use of the ego cogito with Cartesian metaphysical deduction and introduces the notion of ‘transcendental experience’ as the proper domain for grounding knowledge.