Husserl's Epochē and the 'Split Ego'

"According to this splitting, the mediating self leads a double life. On the one hand, the ego continues to live naturally, absorbed in the temporal course of everyday life with its ontological commitments and positings, and yet, at the same time, the ego becomes aware of itself as the functioning of world-constituting subjectivity within the natural life and adopts the position of a disinterested onlooker of its own life with inevitable change in the manner in which it lives temporality. As Husserl puts it elsewhere: 'First the transcendental epochē and reduction release transcendental subjectivity from its self-concealment and raise it up to a new position, that of transcendental self-consciousness' (Hua XXXIV 399, my translation). The inevitable result is that natural worldly life is lived in a new register, aware of the transcendental operations that make it possible. The natural ego is, as it were, enlightened by the transcendental onlooker."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 241.

"Husserl, however, sees this disinterested theoretical stance as a first-person attitude that has arrived at final 'clarity' about its own nature. Furthermore, for Husserl, the initiation of the reduction from within the natural attitude is a matter of complete freedom of the will (akin to his understanding of the initiation of Cartesian doubt). Transcendental reduction requires an 'act of will' (Trans. Phen., p. 247; Hua IX 341)."

Dermot Moran, Husserl's Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 242.

"An attitude is arrived at which is above the pregiveness of the validity of the world, above the infinite complex whereby, in concealment, the world's validities are always founded on other validites, above the whole manifold but synthetically unified flow in which the world has and forever attains anew its content of meaning and its validity of being. In other words, we have an attitude above the universal conscious life (both individual subjective and intersubjective) through which the world is 'there' for those naïvely absorbed in ongoing life, as unquestionably present, as the universe of what there is".

Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), p. 150.

"conscious life is through and through an intentionally accomplishing life"

Husserl, Crisis, p. 204.