Reduction and Intersubjectivity

This chapter examines Edmund Husserl's philosophical reflections on reduction and intersubjectivity. According to Husserl, method and phenomenology constitute an identity without which the reduction might appear to be a mere procedure or simple technique for gaining access to the phenomena that he calls pure and that, once attained, would no longer need the reductive method to become the objects of the new science of phenomenology. But if all authentic phenomenology occurs by means of the reduction, the question that arises is whether we must still consider the Logical Investigations as relevant to phenomenology. Husserl speaks explicitly of the “phenomenological reduction” beginning only in 1907, in The Idea of Phenomenology, but he used the expression “phenomenological reduction” for the first time in 1905. The chapter considers Husserl's proposal to extend phenomenological reduction to intersubjectivity—that is, to introduce intersubjectivity in the “thematic” field of pure phenomenology.