Phenomenological psychology's comprehensive task is the sys tematic examination of the types and forms of intentional ex perience, and the reduction of their structures to the prime inten tions, learning thus what is the nature of the psychical, and comprehending the being of the soul.
The validity of these investigations will obviously extend beyond the particularity of the psychologist's own soul. For psychical life may be revealed to us not only in self-consciousness but equally in our consciousness of other selves, and this latter source of experience offers us more than a reduplication of what we find in our self-consciousness, for it establishes the differences between "own" and "other" which we experience, and presents us with the characteristics of the "social-life." And hence the further task accrues to psychology of revealing the intentions of which the "social life" consists.
Phenomenological-psychological and Eidetic Reductions. —The Phenomenological psychology must examine the self's experience of itself and its derivative experience of other selves and of society, but whether, in so doing, it can be free of all psycho-physical admixture, is not yet clear. Can one reach a really pure self-experience and purely psychical data? This difficulty, even since Brentano's discovery of intentionality, as the funda mental character of the psychical, has blinded psychologists to the possibilities of phenomenological psychology. The psychologist finds his self-consciousness mixed everywhere with "external" ex perience, and non-psychical realities. For what is experienced as external belongs not to the intentional "internal," though our experience of it belongs there as an experience of the external. The phenomenologist, who will only notice phenomena, and know purely his own "life," must practice an kroxi7. He must inhibit every ordinary objective "position," and partake in no judgment concerning the objective world. The experience itself will remain what it was, an experience of this house, of this body, of this world in general, in its particular mode. For one cannot describe any intentional experience, even though it be "illusory," a self contradicting judgment and the like, without describing what in the experience is, as such, the object of consciousness.
Our comprehensive iroxii puts, as we say, the world between brackets, excludes the world which is simply there! from the subject's field, presenting in its stead the so-and-so-experienced perceived-remembered-judged-thought-valued-etc., world, as such, the "bracketed" world. Not the world or any part of it appears, but the "sense" of the world. To enjoy phenomenological expe rience we must retreat from the objects posited in the natural attitude to the multiple modes of their "appearance," to the "bracketed" objects.
The phenomenological reduction to phenomena, to the purely psychical, advances by two steps : (I) systematic and radical 7r-ox?1 of every objectifying "position" in an experience, prac tised both upon the regard of particular objects and upon the en tire attitude of mind, and (2) expert recognition, comprehension and description of the manifold "appearances" of what are no longer "objects" but "unities" of "sense." So that the phe nomenological description will comprise two parts, description of the "noetic" (voeco) or "experiencing" and description of the "noematic" (vOnytt.) or the "experienced." Phenomenological ex perience, is the only experience which may properly be called "internal" and there is no limit to its practice. And as a similar "bracketing" of objective, and description of what then "appears" ("noema" in "noesis"), can be performed upon the "life" of another self which we represent to ourselves, the "reductive" method can be extended from one's own self-experience to one's experience of other selves. And, further, that society, which we experience in a common consciousness, may be reduced not only to the intentional fields of the individual consciousness, but also by the means of an inter-subjective reduction, to that which unites these, namely the phenomenological unity of the social life. Thus enlarged, the psychological concept of internal experience reaches its full extent.