Edmund Husserl/ Transcendental- Phenomenology

The actual problem of Descartes, that of transcending egological (interpreted as internalpsychological)validities, including all manners of inference pertaining to the external world,the question of how these, which are, after all, themselves cogitationes in the encapsuled soul, are able to justify assertions about extra-psychic being — these problems disappear in Locke or turn into the problem of the psychological genesis of the real experiences of validity
or of the faculties belonging to them. That sense-data, extracted from the arbitrariness of their production, are affections from the outside and announce bodies in the external world,is not a problem for him but something taken for granted.

Especially portentous for future psychology and theory of knowledge is the fact that Locke makes no use of the Cartesian first introduction of the cogitatio as cogitatio of cogitata —that is, intentionality; he does not recognize it as a subject of investigation (indeed the
7most authentic subject of the foundation-laying investigations) . He is blind to the wholedistinction. The soul is something self-contained and real by itself, as is a body; in naive naturalism the soul is now taken to be like an isolated space, like a writing tablet, in his famous simile, on which psychic data come and go. This data-sensationalism, together with
the doctrine of outer and inner sense, dominates psychology and the theory of knowledge for centuries, even up to the present day; and in spite of the familiar struggle against “psychic atomism,” the basic sense of this doctrine does not change. Of course one speaks quite unavoidably, even in the Lockean terminology, of perceptions, representations “of” things,
or of believing “in something,” willing “something,” and the like. But no consideration is given to the fact that in the perceptions, in the experiences of consciousness themselves, that
of which we are conscious is included as such that the perception is in itself a perception of something, of “this tree.”
How is the life of the soul, which is through and through a life of consciousness, the intentional life of the ego, which has objects of which it is conscious, deals with them through
knowing, valuing, etc. — how is it supposed to be seriously investigated if intentionality is
overlooked? How can the problems of reason be attacked at all? Can they be attacked at all
as psychological problems? In the end, behind the psychological-epistemological problems,
do we not find the problems of the “ego” of the Cartesian epoche, touched upon but not grasped by Descartes? Perhaps these are not unimportant questions, which give a direction
in advance to the reader who thinks for himself. In any case they are an indication of what will become a serious problem in later parts of this work, or rather will serve as a way to
a philosophy which can really be carried through “without prejudice,” a philosophy with the most radical grounding in its setting of problems, in its method, and in work which is systematically accomplished.