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AN ANALYSIS OF THE KANTIAN FOUNDATION OF HUSSERLIAN 

TRANSCENDENTAL PHENOMENOLOGY 

 

Prof. Chiedozie Okoro 

Department of Philosophy 

University of Lagos, 

Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria, 

cokoro@unilag.edu.ng 

 

& 

 

Sirajudeen Owosho, Ph.D. 

Department of Philosophy 

University of Lagos, 

Akoka, Lagos, Nigeria. 

 

Abstract 

The quest of an ultimate and absolute foundation and justification of knowledge was a 

persistent occupation of Edmund Husserl. From his first beginnings in philosophy, Husserl 

turned to the realm of subjectivity for his foundation and justification. The problem is to 

account for the validity of knowledge and objectivity of the objects of knowledge in terms of 

acts of consciousness through which the objects are apprehended and knowledge is constituted, 

and this happens to be the goal of his phenomenology. With regards to transcendental 

phenomenology, this paper aims to analyse Kant and Husserl’s similarities and differences, in 

terms of methodologies and interpretations, with a view to showing that Kant provided the 

epistemological manure for the fruitful germination of Husserl’s transcendental 

phenomenology. Husserl’s recognition of phenomenology as ineluctably transcendental 

philosophy forced him to confront Kant whom he had been reading seriously. He agreed with 

Kant’s general view that the profusion of different philosophical systems was testimony that 

philosophy had failed to live up to its aspiration to be a science. Furthermore, Husserl, like 

Kant, believed that philosophy could only become a genuine science after it had embarked on 

a radical critique of its claim to be able to be a science at all. This involved a critique of the 

instrument of knowledge. Husserl sees Kant as correctly understanding the need for a 

transcendental critique of the sciences, one which saw them as subjective cognitive 

accomplishments. It is therefore the position of this paper that Immanuel Kant’s Critique of 

Pure Reason provided a strong basis for the emergence of Husserl’s transcendental 

phenomenology. 

 



 
 

14 
 

Keywords: Consciousness, Knowledge, Phenomenology, Philosophy, Transcendental 

Phenomenology. 

 

Introduction 

Husserl’s phenomenology could be said to have taken its beginnings in neo-Kantian soil, and 

went on to become an independent philosophical organism. This ambivalence of 

phenomenology’s relationship to Kant, this dependence upon and yet reaction against 

Kantianism is reflected in Husserl’s own attitude towards the philosopher of Kronisberg: at 

times he credits Kant with anticipating and even attaining phenomenological status, at other 

times, he severely criticizes his thought (Kern, 1965, 192). To determine exactly how Husserl 

is related to Kant thus becomes an extremely delicate matter, calling for the most sensitive 

historical and philosophical analysis. Husserl saw phenomenology as the final answer to the 

question of epistemology: How is knowledge possible? He sees Kant as representing a crucial 

stage on the way to the emergence of his own transcendental phenomenology, and provides 

interesting criticisms of Kant from that standpoint. 

 

Kant as Precursor of Transcendental Phenomenology 

Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is the culmination of the turn to the subject that takes 

place in Descartes, but how does it relate to Kant? In Husserl’s view, Kant’s significance lies 

in the fact that he succeeds in converting Descartes’ subjectivism into philosophy, which is 

genuinely transcendental. Descartes subject remains an item in the world (Hussel, 1982, 10). 

Kant’s subject is transcendental in the sense that it is a subject in which the world as object is 

constituted. In the view of Gorner, such philosophy is the only one able to answer the 

epistemological question: How is knowledge possible? and it does this by showing how the 

world is “constituted” in transcendental subjectivity (2006, 503). An inevitable consequence of 

Husserl’s conception of transcendental phenomenology is transcendental idealism, and Husserl 

not only accepts this but enthusiastically proclaims it. He sees his own transcendental idealism 

as Kant’s idealism rendered consistent. Given the acknowledgement of Kantian influence by 

Husserl, this shall further be examined by comparing the two philosophers on some 

phenomenological themes such as transcendental subjectivity, views on psychologism, Things 

in Themselves, Life-World and its constitution, and transcendental philosophy.  

 

Transcendental Subjectivity 

Kant’s view of subjectivity implies a two-fold consideration of the idea of subject. On the one 

hand, there is the empirical self, and on the other hand, there stands the transcendental subject 

as the principle of the unity of experience, and therefore, as the principle of the existence of the 

empirical self. Kant’s idea of transcendentality of the subject is a response to Hume’s empirical 

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formulation that reduces the idea of the self to a “bundle of perceptions”. Kant claims that there 

should be a unifying principle prior to empirical experiences of a particular person so that the 

idea of the self can emerge. One major problem with Kant’s view of transcendental subjectivity 

is that, it does not supply sufficient argumentation to support his claim about the existence of 

such a subject. That is, it fails to explain how the empirical self is related to the transcendental 

subject. He does not arrive at the idea of transcendental subjectivity but simply asserts it (Azeri, 

2010, 281). 

Edmund Husserl does not argue that transcendental consciousness must have such and such 

structures if knowledge is to be possible. Phenomenology is essentially a form of seeing. The 

constitution of objects in transcendental subjectivity is something which can become the object 

of what Husserl calls transcendental experience. Access to the kinds of active and passive 

synthesis in which objects and ultimately the world are constituted requires the carrying out of 

transcendental reduction. Husserl concludes that Kant’s account of the constitution of the world 

by the transcendental subject lacks a proper conception of the phenomenological method, and 

operates with mythical constructions (Husserl, 1970, 30). 

Husserl thinks that because Kant never really appreciated the need for a transcendental 

reduction, he was always in danger of falling back into psychologism (Hussel, 1974, 9-15). In 

the very early stages of his encounter with Kant, Husserl thought that Kant was guilty of 

psychologism, trying to explain the necessity and universality of a priori truths by tracing them 

back to our psychological constitution which makes assent to them inevitable. By the time of 

Logical Investigations, he had come to see that this view of Kant is false even though traces of 

pyschologism remained (Husserl, 2020, 30). According to Gorner, Kant explains the possibility 

of a priori knowledge in terms of the faculties of sensibility, imagination and understanding, 

and these are human psychological faculties. But as items in the world, human beings cannot 

fulfill a transcendental role (Gorner, 2006, 107). From the philosophical standpoint of Husserl’s 

transcendental phenomenology, human beings are entities in the world constituted in 

transcendental subjectivity, which is not an entity in the world. 

The transcendental subjectivity Husserl speaks about is no other than human transcendence, 

which is the human ability to project from the physical world of experience into the 

supersensible world or non-physical world, which is made possible by the productive and 

reproductive imagination. It is the ability of the mind to form connectedness or synthesis. 

Transcendence shows how the sensible faculty of the mind interconnects with the non-sensible 

faculties of mind. The sensible part of the mind is referred to as immanent, while the non-

sensible parts of the mind are referred to as transcendent. By the act of interconnectedness or 

synthesis, the mind projects from the experienced world into the non-experienced world and 

vice versa, making possible mental visioning or mental imaging of the world (Kant, 2003, 307). 

This very act of visualizing or imagining the world, is an act of synthesis, which Kant refers to 

as the synthetic a priori knowledge, which is made possible by the power of the imagination 

to form heterogeneity into homogeneity. 



 
 

16 
 

Synthesis in general, as we shall hereafter see, is the mere result of the power 

of imagination, a blind but indispensable function of the soul, without which we 

should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are scarcely ever 

conscious.  To bring this synthesis “to concepts’ is a function which belongs to 

the understanding, and it is through this function of the understanding that we 

first obtain knowledge properly so called. (Kant, 1970, 112) 

There is an ambivalence involved in the above statement of Kant concerning the power of the 

imagination to form synthesis. In one fell swoop, he acknowledges that synthesis is the act and 

process of imagination, yet he refers to the imagination as – a blind but indispensable function 

of the soul, without which we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but of which we are 

scarcely ever conscious.  

There were a number of problems that confronted Kant concerning the matter of transcendental 

subjectivity. First, he began his intellectual quest as an anthropologist and later matured into 

the stage of critical ontology or transcendental philosophy. Second, event at the matured stage 

of transcendental philosophy, his thinking was still dominated and directed by his initial stage 

of anthropological analysis of human nature. Third, he was limited to the traditional rivalry 

between idealism and materialism in metaphysics, and rationalism and empiricism in 

epistemology such that synthesis for him became a reconciliation of the opposing parties. It is 

in this sense that he saw the synthetic a priori as a fusion of rationalism and empiricism in 

classical epistemology as well as an amalgamation of induction and deduction in traditional 

logic. It is in this sense that he understood the transcendental aesthetic as the analysis of the 

inductive process which follows the empiricist procedure of abstracting totality from particular 

experiences of sense knowledge (i.e. sensibility as a process and source of a posteriori 

knowledge). The transcendental dialectic on the other hand, deals with the deductive procedure, 

which portrays the rationalist process of applying general rules to particular experiences (i.e. 

reason as a transcendent faculty of ideas that legislates the pre-experiential condition which 

forms the spectacle for organizing experience). Hence, the whole essence of his transcendental 

logic concerns how to achieve synthesis of these two traditional processes of logic, which, for 

him, represent logical procedures or functions of the mind.  

Fourth, at his earlier stage of anthropology, Kant had developed a metaphysical theory of 

human nature based on racism by which he pegged the human power of transcendence on skin 

colour. At his matured stage of critical ontology, his research into the inner depths of human 

ontology ledge him to the realization that the imagination (not reason) is the faculty responsible 

for synthesis by which process human transcendence is achieved. Since the acknowledgement 

of this new discovery would amount to a nullification of his earlier stand in his anthropology, 

Kant detoured from ontology back into anthropology. Fifth, the recoil from the analysis of 

human ontology, means making anthropology the foundation of his critical ontology. This 

anomaly, led him to introduce a process known as subsumption into his theory of human 

ontology. By this act, the powers and functions of the imagination were subsumed or 

incorporated under the faculty of the understanding, which now functions as the faculty 

responsible for the production and synthesis of both rational and empirical concepts through 

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the process of schematism (Heidegger, 1962, xix). Consequently, Kant labelled the 

imagination: “The Transcendental Object X, a Nothing and an unknown root” (112). 

A sixth fundamental anomaly in Immanuel Kant’s transcendental ontology is that the twelve 

(12) categories of the understanding actually belong under the faculty of imagination. This is 

because concepts deal with rules of direction, not synthesis. This wise, the twelve categories 

rightly belong under the imagination which is the faculty of image formation. Image as a 

symbol, is a fusion of both rational and empirical knowledge. Hence, by ceding the functions 

of the imagination to the understanding, Kant derailed from the project of showing how the 

human mind comes about the act and process of synthesis. It is on this basis that Edmund 

Husserl accuses Kant of not being able to squarely deal with the problem of psychologism. 

This accusation stems from the ground that Kant is not able to comprehensively discuss the 

problem of human subjectivity and how human subjectivity gives rise to objectivity.   

 

The Conception of Noumena 

Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason distinguished between two types of reality: Phenomena 

and Noumena. That is the knowable and the unknowable. Whereas the phenomena is the world 

of experience, that is, things as they are perceived, the noumena is the world of intelligence 

that is “thing in itself”. Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity 

of the categories are called phenomena. But if I postulate things which are mere objects of 

understanding, and which, nevertheless, can be given as such to an intuition, although not to 

one that is sensible…such things would be entitled noumena (Kant, 2003, 123). As far as Kant 

is concerned, we can only know things as they are given to consciousness, through our sense 

perception, but we cannot know thing in itself, that is, we can never say anything at all about 

things as, they are in themselves because they are not given to consciousness. 

In actual fact, the bifurcation of reality into phenomena and noumena by Kant, is a further 

manifestation of his detour into anthropology. In the first place, it is contradictory for Kant to 

say that what the mind is capable of knowing are appearances (phenomena), not things-in-

themselves (i.e. noumena) and at the same time state about the source of metaphysics thus: 

As it concerns the source of metaphysical cognition, its very concept implies 

that they cannot be empirical. Its principles (i.e. propositions and concepts) must 

never be derived from experience. It must not be physical but metaphysical, that 

is, knowledge lying beyond experience. It can therefore have for its basis neither 

external experience, which is the source of physics proper, nor internal, which 

is the basis of empirical psychology. It is therefore a priori cognition, coming 

from pure understanding and pure reason. (Kant, 1983, 107) 

If the source of metaphysics is neither empirical nor physical, but always metaphysical, does it 

not imply that as beings endowed with the power of transcendence, humans have the 

transcendental ability to peruse noumena? However, since Kant’s had the double agenda of 



 
 

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making metaphysics scientific and at the same time laying a metaphysical foundation for 

science, he conjectured that a genuine metaphysics should exclude the religious/spiritual world 

(i.e. which for him belonged in the realm of noumena) and focus on the investigation of the 

phenomenal world with a view to enabling the scientific transformation of the society. This 

accounts for a main reason why he recoiled from making a delineation of the powers and 

functions of the imagination and chose to concentrate on the architectonics of pure reason and 

pure understanding. This preceding point is well articulated by Martin Heidegger thus: 

This fundamental constitution of the essence of, “rooted” in the transcendental 

imagination, is the “unknown” of which Kant must have had an intimation when 

he spoke of “the root unknown to us”; for the unknown is not that which we 

know absolutely nothing but that of which the knowledge makes us uneasy.  

However, Kant did not carry out the primordial interpretation of the 

transcendental imagination; indeed, he did not even make attempt, despite the 

clear indications he gave us concerning such an analytic. (167) 

 

Reason as the faculty of ideas functions by way of legislation and dissection, which involves 

the dispassionate distancing of the object of investigation. Understanding as the faculty of 

concept formation, can only avail us schemas, models or rules (both empirical and rational) of 

direction for structuring things into pattern. It is imagination as the faculty of image formation 

that is capable of perusing into the hiddenness of things. Hence, by failing to forage into the 

nature and structure of the imagination, Kant limited his entire philosophy to the mere perusal 

of appearances. 

For Husserl, a genuinely transcendental philosophy cannot countenance things-in-themselves, 

which cannot themselves be presented or given to consciousness. This explains why Husserl 

dismisses the noumena theory of Kant by focusing his phenomenology on the egological 

perusal of the phenomenal world. Thus, the realism in Husserl’s phenomenology is that the 

phenomenal world is not populated by appearances but real objects which the ego can peruse. 

The marvel in Husserl’s phenomenology is that epoche as the process of eidetic bracketing, 

which happens by way of intentional correlation of the subject and object of knowledge, is the 

very process of imaginative visualization which results into the perusal of the essences of 

objects of knowledge.   

At the core of Husserl’s phenomenology is the strict correlation between being (Sein) and 

consciousness (Husserl, 1982, 43). Given this correlation, the idea of an unknowable “thing in 

itself” makes no sense to Husserl. Although, it is possible to interpret Kantian “things in 

themselves” in a way compatible with Husserl transcendental philosophy, there is still the 

strong suggestion that they have a causal role in Kant’s epistemology, which Husserl thinks is 

obscured. This explains why Husserl’s transcendental idealism is more radical than that of 

Kant. 

 

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The World and its Constitution 

Ordinarily, one would have thought that this conventional or classical rendition of phenomena 

would have been corrected by Immanuel Kant, since he had as his cardinal objective, the 

rehabilitation or deconstruction of metaphysics.  But to our utter dismay, in Kant, phenomena 

remain the appearing of the non-appearing and the comprehension of the incomprehensible.  In 

the third chapter of “The Transcendental Analytic” (which forms the first part of 

“Transcendental Logic” under “The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements”) entitled; “The 

Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment”, Kant speaks of “the ground of the distinction of all 

objects in general into phenomena and noumena.” (Kant, 2003, 257). But what exactly does 

Kant mean by the categorization of all objects of experience into phenomena and noumena.  

Let Kant speak for himself. 

If the assertion, that the understanding can employ its various principles and its 

various concepts solely in an empirical and never in a transcendental manner, is 

a proposition which can be known with certainty, it will yield important 

consequences.  The transcendental employment of a concept in any principle is 

its application to things in general and in themselves; the empirical is its 

application merely to appearances; that is, to objects of a possible experience.  

That the latter application of concepts is alone feasible is evident from the 

following considerations. (259) 

For Kant, the structure or categories of thought or consciousness is such that we are never able 

to perceive things-in-themselves or noumena.  What we are capable of perceiving are 

appearances or phenomena, and this is so because by the rule of empiricality or experience, we 

can never get beyond the empirical or physical knowledge of things.  Once more, we let Kant 

speak for himself: 

Now the object cannot be given to a concept otherwise than in intuition; for 

though a pure intuition can indeed precede the object a priori, even this 

intuition can acquire its objects, and therefore objective validity, only through 

the empirical intuition of which it is the mere form.  Therefore, all concepts, and 

with them all principles, even such as are possible a priori, relate to empirical 

intuitions, that is, to the data for a possible experience.  Apart from this relation 

they have no objective validity, and in respect of representations are a mere play 

of imagination or of understanding. (259) 

Kant’s assertion that the understanding or apperception, is a priori or ‘pre-experiential” by 

nature, but is however, never able to get beyond the realm of experience or the intuited, is in 

agreement with his doctrine of epistemology.  This position, no doubt, contradicts his doctrine 

of ontology and limits the imagination to the realm of experience alone.   

But why is the understanding never able to get beyond the bounds of experience?  Kant replies 

as follows: 



 
 

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This domain (the understanding) is an island, enclosed by nature itself within 

unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth-enchanting name!  surrounded by a 

wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and 

many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores, 

deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging 

him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to 

completion (258). 

Although the rules of the understanding are not only true a priori, they are the source of all 

truth, but only as they contain in themselves the ground for the possibility of experience viewed 

as the sum of all knowledge where in objects can be given to us.  For whether as constituted a 

priori (i.e. as with the principles of mathematics), or as merely regulative (i.e. dynamical), the 

understanding is but a pure schema of possible experience.  A power or function of the mind 

fortified by the synthetic unity of the imagination, a faculty of the mind which according to 

Kant, is under the guide of the understanding whose function is to harmonize appearances, that 

is to say, experiences as data readily stand a priori in relation to, and in agreement with, that 

synthetic unity (258). 

Kant’s bifurcation of reality into noumena (things-in-themselves) and phenomena (things as 

appearances) left his successors in disarray.  This pandemonium sparked off by Kant led to the 

emergence of two antagonistic schools of thought; idealism, symbolized in Hegel and 

materialism, championed by Karl Marx.  Both Hegel and Marx made evaluations of phenomena 

and tried to show that nothing like an unknowable realm exists. 

In the opinion of Husserl, Kant starts too high a level since he ignores the life-world and the 

constitution of the life-world (Husserl, 1970, 103-123). The synthetic a priori principle whose 

possibility Kant seeks to explain is supposed to be the fundamental principles of natural 

science. But in Husserl, the concepts employed in the formulation of such knowledge refer 

back to experience of the life-world. So what is needed is first an account of the constitution of 

the life-world and its structures. 

 

Transcendental Philosophy 

In The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant carefully distinguishes four senses of metaphysics.  The 

whole of the metaphysical system he says, “consists of four main parts: (1) ontology; (2) 

rational physiology; (3) rational cosmology; (4) and rational theology” (Kant, 1970, 662). But 

how did Kant arrive at these four categories of metaphysics?  His categorization of metaphysics 

into four stems from his initial distinction between transcendental metaphysics (as ontology) 

and physiological metaphysics (as anthropology).  Kant’s view on this is very emphatic.  He 

says, 

Metaphysics, in the narrower meaning of the term, consists of transcendental 

philosophy and physiology of pure reason.  The former treats only of the 

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understanding and of reason, in a system of concepts and principles which relate 

to objects that may be given (ontologia); the latter treats of nature, that is, of 

the sum of given objects (whether given to the senses, or, if we will, to some 

kind of intuition) and is therefore physiology although only rationalis. (662) 

The distinction between understanding and rationalis marks the difference between 

metaphysics as ontology (or transcendental philosophy) and metaphysics as anthropology (or 

physiology).  In Kant’s view, transcendental philosophy or ontology concerns itself with the 

study of the structure of human consciousness which makes it possible for man to ontologize 

or metaphysicize.  Anthropology or physiology so to speak, deals with the study of nature and 

the so many essences that constitute nature. 

But how come that metaphysics could be anthropological or physiological?  Kant replies that 

even that which has been designated metaphysical anthropology is in a way transcendental.  It 

is at this realm or level of metaphysics that distinction is made between physics as the study of 

nature and metaphysics as the study of that which goes beyond the physical.  Kant’s view about 

this is clear; 

The employment of reason in this rational study of nature is either physical or 

hyperphysical, or, in more adequate terms, is either immanent or transcendent.  

The former is concerned with such knowledge of nature as can be applied in 

experience (in concreto), the latter with the connection of objects of experience 

which transcends all experience. (662) 

That which is immanent, deals with experience in general and consists of physics or rational 

physics (the metaphysics of corporeal nature) and both come under rational physiology which 

in turn consists of physicarationalis (i.e. mathematics, as distinct from the metaphysics of 

nature as physicageneralis) and psychologiarationalis.  On the other hand, transcendent 

physiology has as its objects either an “inner” connection or an “outer” connection, both, 

however, transcending possible experience.  As dealing with an inner connection it is the 

physiology of nature as a whole, that is, the transcendental knowledge of the world (rational 

cosmology); and as dealing with an outer connection, it is the physiology of the relation of 

nature as a whole to a being above nature, that is to say, it is the transcendental knowledge of 

God otherwise known as rational theology (Kant, 1970, 662-663). 

But whether as dealing with things immanent or things physiologically transcendent, 

metaphysical anthropology is basically a priori.  Without the a priori categories of the 

understanding physical knowledge (a posteriority) of the world would be impossible.  This 

being so, Kant concluded that the technical implication of the “architectonics of pure reason” 

is that ontological transcendental knowledge or transcendental metaphysics is the foundation 

of all forms of knowledge, be they physiological, cosmological or theological. 

Husserl accuses Kant of not subjecting his transcendental philosophy to transcendental self-

criticisms. According to him, we do not expect a natural scientist to be able to give an account 

of how natural-scientific knowledge is possible. If he or she should do so, it is not qua scientist 



 
 

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but qua philosopher. But we are right to expect a philosopher to be able to give an account of 

how philosophical knowledge is possible. That is simply because philosophy is essentially self-

reflective. It does not raise, let alone answer, the prior question of how transcendental 

philosophy is possible (Husserl, 1999, 63). 

It is important to note that, inspite of these criticisms; Husserl still regards himself as the heir 

to Kant’s transcendental philosophy. If this assertion by Husserl is anything to go by, then there 

are two fundamental respects in which this can be questioned. Firstly, there is something 

essentially Cartesian about Husserl’s conception of transcendental philosophy. 

Phenomenological reflection is a kind of purified introspection. It is purified in being carried 

out on the basis of phenomenological reduction, whereas “ordinary introspection takes place 

within the natural attitude and on the basis of the general thesis. This is something quite alien 

to Kant’s conception of philosophy (Gorner, 504). 

 

Secondly, Husserl’s conception of the a priori is really quite different from that of Kant. Kant’s 

synthetic a priori judgements are characterized by necessity and strict universality. The 

synthetic a priori transcendental principles have those characteristics by virtue of being 

conditions of the possibility of experience. Husserl also uses the notion of synthetic a priori 

judgements but his conception of such judgements involves something which is entirely alien 

to Kant namely the intuition of essences (Husserl, 1982, 43-44). 

For Husserl, it is not only individuals but also universals which can be intuited. Every 

contingent something has an essence or “eidos”. An individual object is not simply a “this, 

here”, but also has an essential “what”. Every specific sound, for example, has a universal 

essence “sound as such”. Likewise, every material thing has its essence. At a higher level of 

generality there is the essence “material thing as such” and included in this, “temporal 

determination as such”, “duration as such” and “materiality as such”. Everything which 

belongs to the essence of an individual can also belong to another individual, and essences of 

the highest levels of generality demarcate “regions” or “categories” of individuals (Gorner, 

505). 

Edmund Husserl maintains that, every “what” of an individual can be separated from that 

individual and apprehended as an idea. Empirical or individual intuition can thus be converted 

into essential intuition, and what is then intuited is the pure essence or eidos. The essence is a 

new kind of object, just as what is given in an individual or empirical intuition is an individual 

object, so what is given in essential intuition, is a pure essence. Husserl insists that the talk of 

intuition is genuinely intuition and the eidetic object is genuinely an object. Essential intuition 

is a mode of consciousness of something in which the object, the essence is itself given. The 

eidos, the pure essence, can be intuitively exemplified in what is given in experience, in 

perception or memory, but it can equally well be exemplified in imagination. In order to 

apprehend an essence itself, we can start out from either corresponding experiential intuitions 

or non-experiential intuitions in which existence is not apprehended, that is to say from 

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intuitions in which something is merely imagined. For example, essences of spatial forms, 

melodies, social processes, acts of experience, pleasure, displeasure, or willing can be intuited 

on the basis of purely imagined instances of such things. The positing and intuitive 

apprehension of essences does not imply the slightest positing of any individual existence. Pure 

essential truths do not certain the least assertion about facts. Consequently, not even the most 

trivial factual truth can be inferred from them. 

 

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