ABSTRACT
The most fundamental guiding clue for the initial stage of transcendental phenomenology is the "fact-essence" distinction, which guides Husserl's articulation of both the contradistinction of phenomenology's status as a science of essences to all sciences of facts and his initial account of the transcendental-phenomenological region of absolute consciousness. Transcendental phenomenology, as the eidetic science of transcendentally reduced absolute consciousness, does not have as its subject matter the phenomenological being of the region of absolute consciousness, but that of the transcendental-phenomenological essence of the being of the region of absolute consciousness. Husserl's reasons for making these initial claims, as well as his reasons for revising them, are rooted in the innermost dynamic that informs transcendental phenomenology's relation to phenomenological philosophy, a dynamic that plays itself out in the tension between what phenomenology presents as evidence and the philosophical significance of this evidence that is advanced by Husserl's philosophical self-interpretations.
