Key Arguments

• Husserl distinguishes between merely describing the harmonious course of transcendental experiencing and critically testing it: “Actual demonstration that such is the case would be a great task, the task of a criticism of transcendental self-experience with respect to its / particular interwoven forms and the total effect produced by the universal tissue of such forms.”
• He explicitly orders the stages, saying criticism “would belong to a higher stage, since it would presuppose that, first of all, we had followed the harmonious course of transcendental experiencing as it functions in a certain naïve manner, that we had made inquiries about its data and described them in respect of their universal properties.”
• He generalizes this into a two‑stage schema for transcendental phenomenology: “We see in advance that the scientific efforts for which we found the collective name, transcendental phenomenology, must proceed in two stages.”
• He characterizes the first stage as exploratory and non‑critical with respect to ultimate apodicticity: “In the first stage the realm accessible to transcendental self experience (a tremendous realm, as we soon discover) must be explored — and, at first, with simple devotion to the evidence inherent in the harmonious flow of such experience, while questions pertaining to an ultimate criticism, intent on apodictic principles governing the range of evidence, are set aside.”
• This first stage is said to be not yet ‘philosophical in the full sense’ and is explicitly compared to natural science’s pre‑critical stance toward experience: “In this stage accordingly — a stage that is not yet philosophical in the full sense — we proceed like the natural scientist in his devotion to the evidence in which Nature is experienced, while for him, as an investigator of Nature, questions pertaining to a radical criticism of experience remain altogether outside the field of inquiry.”
• He then defines the second stage precisely as the critical one: “The second stage of phenomenological research would be precisely the criticism of transcendental experience and then the criticism of all transcendental cognition.”
• By structuring phenomenology this way, Husserl motivates his present restriction: problems “relating to the range covered by transcendental knowledge” must initially be excluded, because they belong to the later, critical stage rather than to the first, descriptive one.

Source Quotes

§ 13. Necessity of at first excluding problems relating to the range covered by transcendental knowledge Actual demonstration that such is the case would be a great task, the task of a criticism of transcendental self-experience with respect to its / particular interwoven forms and the total effect produced by the universal tissue of such forms. Obviously that task would belong to a higher stage, since it would presuppose that, first of all, we had followed the harmonious course of transcendental experiencing as it functions in a certain naïve manner, that we had made inquiries about its data and described them in respect of their universal properties.

Necessity of at first excluding problems relating to the range covered by transcendental knowledge Actual demonstration that such is the case would be a great task, the task of a criticism of transcendental self-experience with respect to its / particular interwoven forms and the total effect produced by the universal tissue of such forms. Obviously that task would belong to a higher stage, since it would presuppose that, first of all, we had followed the harmonious course of transcendental experiencing as it functions in a certain naïve manner, that we had made inquiries about its data and described them in respect of their universal properties. The broadening of the Cartesian meditations, which was just now effected, will motivate our further procedure, as we aim at a philosophy in the Cartesian sense already described.

The broadening of the Cartesian meditations, which was just now effected, will motivate our further procedure, as we aim at a philosophy in the Cartesian sense already described. We see in advance that the scientific efforts for which we found the collective name, transcendental phenomenology, must proceed in two stages. In the first stage the realm accessible to transcendental self experience (a tremendous realm, as we soon discover) must be explored — and, at first, with simple devotion to the evidence inherent in the harmonious flow of such experience, while questions pertaining to an ultimate criticism, intent on apodictic principles governing the range of evidence, are set aside.

We see in advance that the scientific efforts for which we found the collective name, transcendental phenomenology, must proceed in two stages. In the first stage the realm accessible to transcendental self experience (a tremendous realm, as we soon discover) must be explored — and, at first, with simple devotion to the evidence inherent in the harmonious flow of such experience, while questions pertaining to an ultimate criticism, intent on apodictic principles governing the range of evidence, are set aside. In this stage accordingly — a stage that is not yet philosophical in the full sense — we proceed like the natural scientist in his devotion to the evidence in which Nature is experienced, while for him, as an investigator of Nature, questions pertaining to a radical criticism of experience remain altogether outside the field of inquiry.

In the first stage the realm accessible to transcendental self experience (a tremendous realm, as we soon discover) must be explored — and, at first, with simple devotion to the evidence inherent in the harmonious flow of such experience, while questions pertaining to an ultimate criticism, intent on apodictic principles governing the range of evidence, are set aside. In this stage accordingly — a stage that is not yet philosophical in the full sense — we proceed like the natural scientist in his devotion to the evidence in which Nature is experienced, while for him, as an investigator of Nature, questions pertaining to a radical criticism of experience remain altogether outside the field of inquiry. The second stage of phenomenological research would be precisely the criticism of transcendental experience and then the criticism of all transcendental cognition.

In this stage accordingly — a stage that is not yet philosophical in the full sense — we proceed like the natural scientist in his devotion to the evidence in which Nature is experienced, while for him, as an investigator of Nature, questions pertaining to a radical criticism of experience remain altogether outside the field of inquiry. The second stage of phenomenological research would be precisely the criticism of transcendental experience and then the criticism of all transcendental cognition. A science whose peculiar nature is unprecedented comes into our field of vision: a science of concrete transcendental subjectivity, as given in actual and possible transcendental experience, a science that forms the extremest contrast to sciences in the hitherto accepted sense, positive, “Objective” sciences.

Key Concepts

• Actual demonstration that such is the case would be a great task, the task of a criticism of transcendental self-experience with respect to its / particular interwoven forms and the total effect produced by the universal tissue of such forms.
• it would presuppose that, first of all, we had followed the harmonious course of transcendental experiencing as it functions in a certain naïve manner, that we had made inquiries about its data and described them in respect of their universal properties.
• We see in advance that the scientific efforts for which we found the collective name, transcendental phenomenology, must proceed in two stages.
• In the first stage the realm accessible to transcendental self experience (a tremendous realm, as we soon discover) must be explored — and, at first, with simple devotion to the evidence inherent in the harmonious flow of such experience, while questions pertaining to an ultimate criticism, intent on apodictic principles governing the range of evidence, are set aside.
• In this stage accordingly — a stage that is not yet philosophical in the full sense — we proceed like the natural scientist in his devotion to the evidence in which Nature is experienced, while for him, as an investigator of Nature, questions pertaining to a radical criticism of experience remain altogether outside the field of inquiry.
• The second stage of phenomenological research would be precisely the criticism of transcendental experience and then the criticism of all transcendental cognition.

Context

Opening of § 13, where Husserl justifies temporarily excluding questions about the ultimate range and apodicticity of transcendental evidence by articulating a two‑stage program for transcendental phenomenology: a first, descriptive stage and a second, critical stage.