In this chapter, I want to look at Husserl's first-person singular account of experience, as he develops it in writings after the Investigations. This account of experience is methodologically solipsistic. By this I mean that Husserl acknowledges the existence of an external world and other minds, but insists on suspending belief in the existence of the external world and other minds in order to explain how external objects and other minds are to be understood by each of us individually. I shall argue that Husserl is not completely successful in reconstructing the intersubjective and objective world from within the perspective of methodological solipsism.

THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION AND THE TRANSCENDENTAL EGO

The phenomenological reduction is the key theoretical tool that Husserl develops after the Investigations for engaging in a distinctively philosophical form of reflection on experience. In the first volume of his Ideas on a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy (hence-forth Ideas 1), Husserl talks of different phenomenological reductions but does not explicitly distinguish between the psychological, phenomenological, and eidetic reductions. In subsequent work, especially his lectures on First Philosophy (1923–4: Hua 8), Husserl distinguishes between three forms of reduction: (1) A psychological reduction is one in which one reflects on the contents of consciousness. We restrict our attention to what we are aware of in self-conscious reflection. But we do not abstract from the existential commitments of the mental stages upon which we reflect. (2) In the phenomenological or transcendental reduction, we understand the contents and objects of consciousness as objects of a purely theoretical investigation that takes no interest in the objects of reflection other than a theoretical one.