DANIEL BALLESTER MARQUES

In the first edition of his Logical Investigations, Edmund Husserl rejected the idea of a pure ego that would unify conscious experience. A decade later, the author revisited that work in light of his mature thought. In a new edition, Husserl added a note stating that he had learned, since then, to find the pure ego he had once rejected. This apparent shift in the author’s understanding of the ego is interpreted by some scholars as a fracture in Husserl’s thought. There are those, however, who see this change as the natural culmination of the project that was started in the Investigations. This research aims to clarify the concept of the ego and its evolution in Husserl’s work between 1900 and 1913. I will argue that, in spite of the initial rejection of an ego pole that unifies the flow of consciousness, its later acceptance is in accordance with the development of ideas set in motion in the Logical Investigations. As the phenomenological method is refined and applied more extensively, Husserl’s initial assumptions come under scrutiny, leading to the emergence of new dimensions within Phenomenology. As a result, new demands also take hold, requiring a foundation for the possibility of a new immanent layer of investigation and a new understanding of the
constitution of transcendence.