Method

PHENOMENOLOGY
Husserl envisaged a process of exploring the intentionality of pure consciousness and hence producing universally valid knowledge ie free from corruption by individual and communal experiences and understanding. This would involve a number of stages.

• Bracketing - suspension of all empirical and metaphysical presuppositions
• Reduction - allowing a return to a presuppositionless world
• Free variation - imaginary variation of the reduced thing to a common variation or essence (eidos)
• Intuition - an awareness of the essence as it emerges passively from the overlap of the varying acts of intentionality
• Description - of the essential structures of of both the intended thing (noema) and the intending consciousness (noesis).

PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION
Phenomenology is in search of a "pure" or "reduced" object or process, its very essence. It seeks to strip individual objects of all that makes them particular, seeking the pure essence - what they share with other objects of the same sort. This requires putting to one side all beliefs characteristic of common sense and science, a process called "bracketing". Bracketing concentrates our awareness on the ways in which meanings appear to us as pure phenomena regardless of whether they exist as empirical entities outside of our consciousness. The mind is thus freed from the literal "reality" we normally take for granted and comes to know its own intentionality more intimately and more accurately.

PRE-OBJECTIVE INTUITION
From the outset, Husserl argued that the main purpose of phenomenology is a return to the fundaments of knowledge. Its aim is to relocate the primary point of contact between man and the world, to redirect philosophical attention to the primordial ways we perceive the world. Phenomenology works to recover the forgotten origins of scientific knowledge, to retrace a pre-objective intuition of "things themselves" in "their flesh and blood presence" in the "life-world". It asks us to rediscover the hidden intentionalities of consciousness, to examine their essential structures in a new presuppositionless manner.

INTUITION
Phenomenology places much importance on imagination and intuition. After bracketing, there occurs free variation where meaning unfolds in a free play of pure possibilities. In the unfettered horizon of our imagination, we can liberally vary or modify anything until an invariant structure is revealed. This is the essence of the thing intended. It emerges passively from the overlap of the multiple acts of our freely varying intentionality. In a single intuitive act of recognition we are taken back to the interface between consciousness and its intended object. In this way, phenomenology contrives to repeat the pre-reflective acts of our intentional experience in a reflective fashion.