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We can’t perceive the world the way it really is because the world is outside of, or transcends, us. When we look out at the world, our senses/mind/unconsciousness/biases/past experiences/societal influences intermingle with reality and form a complex relationship that is difficult to disentangle. The end product of this relationship is what Husserl calls the “phenomenon,�� or the picture of the world that we actually perceive but is quite different from reality. Sure, this image or painting is influenced by reality, but it is also influenced by those other forces I mentioned (e.g mind, biases). Instead of seeing and knowing the real world, we see and know phenomena.

In our day-to-day lives and in the natural sciences, we just kind of assume that we get to “know�� things, that somehow our mind wraps itself around some aspect of reality and now it “knows�� it. What is the process of knowing something, though, anyway? Once we ask this question and pair it with our earlier insight that the real world is outside of/transcends us, then we quickly realize that knowing things is a lot more complicated than we initially thought.

If we’re going to be confident that we actually know what we think we do, we can’t start with that which is outside of us. We have to start with the stuff that is already inside of, or “immanent,�� to us and our consciousness. Well, what things are immanent to us? Just about the only things that are actually immanent to us are phenomena, those mind-pictures. The practice of admitting the limits of our knowledge and trying to figure out all that we actually know through phenomena is called, by Husserl, “phenomenology.�� Hence, the title. In that inquiry, the process of sticking to what we actually know (what is immanent to us) instead of all the stuff that our mind has already polluted (what is transcendent to us) is called the “phenomenological reduction.�� If we’re going to do phenomenology right, we have to perform and maintain the phenomenological reduction in our analysis.

In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl doesn’t do a ton of phenomenological inquiry; this text is mainly for introducing Husserlian phenomenology, framing the problems it seeks to solve, and providing the rationale behind how Husserl will conduct phenomenological inquiry for the rest of his career.

"Once reflection on the relation between knowledge and the object is awakened, abysmal difficulties open up. Knowledge, the thing taken most for granted in natural thinking, suddenly stands before us as a mystery."