In the Göttingen years, Husserl drafted the outline of Phenomenology as a universal philosophical science. Its fundamental methodological principle was what Husserl called the phenomenological reduction. It focuses the philosopher’s attention on uninterpreted basic experience and the quest, thereby, for the essences of things.

Husserl developed the phenomenological method to make possible “a descriptive account of the essential structures of the directly given.” Phenomenology emphasizes the immediacy of experience, the attempt to isolate it and set it off from all assumptions of existence or causal influence and lay bare its essential structure.

Husserl suggested that only by suspending or bracketing away the “natural attitude” could philosophy becomes its own distinctive and rigorous science, and he insisted that phenomenology is a science of consciousness rather than of empirical things. Indeed, in Husserl’s hands phenomenology began as a critique of both psychologism and naturalism.

Husserl’s phenomenology maps or models human encounters and the sense contained therein. It is a self-conscious theoretical enterprise at one level. At other levels, it involves the practices of awareness, reflection on and analysis of one’s own lived experience, and paying attention to the lived experiences of social wholes of other people.

In particular, transcendental phenomenology, as outlined by Edmund Husserl, aims to arrive at an objective understanding of the world via the discovery of universal logical structures in human subjective experience.