Husserl wants philosophy to become a rigorous science. Philosophy as a rigorous science requires a solid foundation. Husserl seeks the foundation in a new theory of knowledge. The new theory of knowledge will concern itself with consciousness. Naturalistic philosophy has until now been approaching the situation all wrong. Naturalists claim that psychology, as a factual science, should be the foundation for all philosophy. According to Husserl, however, natural science and its naturalized psychology are not valid foundations for philosophy as a rigorous science. The foundation necessary for philosophy as a rigorous science is a theory of knowledge that directs itself toward a scientific essential knowledge of consciousness, towards that which consciousness itself "is" and "means" according to its essence. This is a tough task. Consciousness in its entirety and all its different forms enters into all possible cognitive functions. The task is made easier by realizing that the clarification of all these fundamental kinds of objectivities lies precisely in the investigation of correlations. This is infact what he call the study of phenomenology. Psychology and phenomenology are related in that they are both concerned with consciousness but are different in that psychology is concerned with "empirical" consciousness and phenomenology is concerned with "pure" consciousness. Psychology however will never fully grasp consciousness because an experimental approach is necessarily flawed. A phenomenological analysis will not be empirical and therefore be able to bring concepts from the state of confusion into a state of clarity and objective validity. Husserl claims that the psychical does not constitute a world for itself; it is given as an ego, or as the experience of an ego, and reveals itself empirically bound to certain physical things. Relationships in the psychical sphere are totally different from those in the physical sphere. Communication occurs only through empathy. There is no difference in the realm of the psychical between appearance and being. Interestingly, Husserl thus calls things that occur in the psychical exactly phenomena. Phenomena then has no unity. It has no real parts, no real changes, and no causality. It comes and goes. Unlike the natural, the psychical cannot be objectively determinable, divisible, or analysable.
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