ABSTRACT
The realm of transcendental consciousness had proved, as a result of phenomenological reduction, to be, in a certain definite sense, a realm of “absolute” Being. It is the original category of Being generally (or, as we would put it, the original region), in which all other regions of Being have their root, to which they are essentially related, on which they are therefore one and all dependent in an essential way. The doctrine of Categories must take its start unreservedly from this the most radical of all distinctions of Being—Being as Consciousness and Being as “declaring” itself in consciousness, or as “transcendent” Being, a distinction which, as is clearly apparent, can be drawn in all its purity and properly justified only through the method of phenomenological reduction. The relations between phenomenology and all other sciences, a topic we have frequently touched on, but must go into more deeply at a later stage, have their ground in this essential relation between transcendental and transcendent Being. Their very meaning implies that the domain over which phenomenology rules extends in a certain remarkable way over all the other sciences from which it has none the less disconnected itself. The disconnexion has also the character of a change of indicator which alters the value of that to which the indicator refers, but if this change of indicator be reckoned in, that whose value it serves to alter is thereby reinstated within the phenomenological sphere. Or to put it metaphorically: the bracketed matter is not wiped off the phenomenological slate, but only bracketed, and thereby provided with a sign that indicates the bracketing. Taking its sign with it, the bracketed matter is reintegrated in the main theme of the inquiry.
