The Emendation of the Intellect, or the Purpose of Phenomenological Reduction

I said we would practice phenomenological reduction all the time before discussing it (Chap. 3 , Sect. 1 ). Skipping one more presentation of what would become, in the Husserlian corpus, the overgrown protreptic to the exercise of eidetic and axiologic Sachlichkeit, we took up this exercise for the elucidation – based on given examples – of what Husserl means by essence, value, truth, and reason. The idea was to elucidate these concepts while adopting the right, receptive attitude towards the sovereignty of objects, welcoming them as inexhaustible sources of essential and axiological truths. Demythologizing the language of the Faculties of the Mind – Consciousness, Reason, Emotion, Will – by gaining awareness of the inescapable first-personal perspective that we engage in the presence of the never-ending self-unfolding of things, shaken by their affective impact on us, harassed by the demand of reason: that was part of the job. In short, the idea was to revive an awkward and overworn phenomenological language by filling its terms with actualized intuitive meaning.