The exercise of epoché and the variations of the transcendent in the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl

Abstract

The epoché is initially on what is transcendent in the sense of what is outside intellectual experience. Attention is focused on what is revealed in the cogitatio. But Husserl goes beyond of the so-called “certainty of cogitatio” by generalizing the suspension of judgment. The transcendent is to be understood as the domain where we cannot eliminate the possibility of doubt as to the position of existence of things and the empirical self. Despite immanence, the intended object does not lose, in its reduced version, its otherness. We then see a third use of the term “transcendent”. This reduction reveals a new dimension of the relationship between consciousness and the world, preventing authentic immanent objectivity from disappearing.

Key words: phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, consciousness, world, transcendent.