SOURCE: “Transcendental Phenomenology: Muddle or Mystery?” in Phenomenology and Existentialism, edited by Robert C. Solomon, Harper and Row, 1972, pp. 127-44.

In the following essay, Schmitt challenges the grounds of phenomenology by calling into question Husserl's distinction between the transcendental and the mundane, and, therefore, the validity of the “phenomenological reduction.”

Phenomenology is the descriptive science of the transcendental realm. [Husserl, Ideas III, 141]. The realm is accessible only by way of the phenomenological reduction. No one who has not understood what this reduction consists of, who does not know how to perform it and has, in fact, performed it can understand what phenomenology is and how to work in it. The fact that the terms employed by Husserl, for instance the word “transcendental”, are familiar must not mislead us as to the novelty of the phenomenological project. More than once Husserl surveyed the history of philosophy in considerable detail...