Within the landscape of qualitative research, the phenomenological method is assigned an important role and a wide dissemination: indeed, it is considered suitable for analysing the lived experience that is the subject of the human and social sciences. However, phenomenology was developed by Husserl as a method for eidetic research, not for empirical research. This evidence raises radical, inescapable questions that have not been adequately addressed in the literature: phenomenological philosophy has indeed been metabolized within the culture of empirical research with too much epistemological levity. Instead, it is necessary to ask whether it is possible to outline an empirical phenomenology, and if so, under what conditions. Moreover, it is necessary to ask what heuristic principles can guide a phenomenological method suitable for empirical research. The paper aims to address these questions with the goal of conceptualizing a rigorous theory that can ground a method for the human and social sciences that studies lived experience through in-field investigations. In this sense, the essay aims to contribute to the epistemology and methodology of phenomenological research by recovering and re-reading certain concepts of the first Husserlian production, such as those of the “essence of concrete” and “successive adumbrations”, which turn out to be central for the foundation of an empirical phenomenology.