reduction

In Ideas I Husserl presents his method of phenomenological “reduction”:we are to study pure consciousness by “bracketing” the general thesis of the “natural standpoint,” the thesis that there is a natural world of objects beyond our consciousness. By this method of bracketing, we turn our attention from the objects of consciousness (things in the surrounding world of nature) to our consciousness of these objects, regardless of whether they exist. At one point (§49), Husserl says that the world does not exist “absolutely” but only “relatively,” in intentional relation to our consciousness. That at any rate is the doctrine of transcendental idealism often attributed to Husserl following his neo-Kantian transcendental turn. A more subtle interpretation holds instead that, for Husserl in Ideas I, any object in the world around us exists independently of our consciousness, but it exists “for us” – we know and experience it – only in acts of consciousness through specific meanings or “noemata,” through which we understand it in a particular way. Then the point of bracketing is to turn our attention from the objects that normally concern us to our consciousness of these objects, and to the meanings through which we experience them.