Husserl and Pfänder on the phenomenological reduction

pp. 62-82

in: Herbert Spiegelberg, The context of the phenomenological movement, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1982

Abstract

By speaking of the reduction in the singular I do not want to imply that the term "reduction" as used in phenomenological philosophy has only one referent. It has little, if anything, to do with what we mean ordinarily when we speak of reduction outside philosophy and of the fallacy of reductionism in general philosophy. But even phenomenologists, quite apart from the founder of the Phenomenological Movement, Edmund Husserl, speak of reduction in at least two senses: (1) the so-called "eidetic reduction," leading from particulars to universal essences (eide), a sense shared by those phenomenologists who subscribed to the platform at the head of the first volume of Husserl's Jahrbuch für Philosophie and phänomenologische Forschung which in 1913 specified intuition (Anschauung) and the essential insight (Wesenseinsichten) based on it as the common ground of all phenomenology, and (2) the more specific — and controversial — sense of reduction which Husserl called the "phenomenological" or "transcendental reduction," for him its fundamental form, in fact, the entrance gate to pure phenomenology or phenomenology proper. The question which I am raising here is whether the reduction in this latter sense is really indispensable for phenomenology or whether a phenomenology is possible and perhaps even actual without this radical procedure.