Am I translating accurately? English speakers come in! It's going crazy!

In 1918, the whole of Europe was devastated, suffering the worst war damage in history. Trailing this catastrophe was a wave of social revolutions across the continent: circa 1920, Europe witnessed the Spartacus Uprising in Berlin and the General Strike in Vienna, the establishment of workers' soviet regimes in Munich and Budapest, and the mass occupation of factories in Italy. Although these rebellions were violently suppressed, the foundations of the European capitalist social order had been thoroughly shaken through the carnage of war and the aftermath of political upheaval. The ideology that had been customary to this consciousness-ridden social order, as well as the cultural norms by which it came to impose its domination, were also in deep disarray. Science seems to have shrunk to a useless positivism, where the categorization of facts is plagued by short-sightedness; philosophy is painfully caught between that positivism on the one hand, and an untenable subjectivism on the other. Forms of relativism and irrationalism were rampant, while in art this confused turn was reflected. It was against the backdrop of this widespread ideological crisis that the German philosopher Edmund Husserl sought to establish a new philosophical approach before the First World War, one that would bring absolute certainty to a disintegrating culture. It was a choice, Husserl wrote in his subsequent The Crisis of Science in Europe, between anti-rational barbarism and the attainment of a new spiritual birth through a "completely self-sufficient spiritual science."

Husserl, like his philosophical forebear Descartes, set out on the road to truth by temporarily dismissing what he called the "natural attitude," the commonplace, logical belief that objects exist independently of our external world and that all our information about them is reliable. Such an attitude takes the availability of knowledge for granted, and yet it is precisely this that is most questionable. What, then, is clearer and more intelligible to us? While we cannot be sure of the independent existence of things, Husserl argues that whether or not the facts we actually experience are illusions, what we can be sure of is how they suddenly appear in our consciousness. All ideation is knowledge of something, and in thinking, I realize that my thoughts point to something objective. The act of thinking and the object of thinking are intrinsically linked and interdependent. My consciousness is not merely reacting passively to the world, but actively and positively recognizing and transforming it. Then, to be clear, we must first of all ignore or set aside anything that is beyond our direct experience, and we must reduce the interference of the external world with our independent consciousness. This is called phenomenal induction, and is Husserl's first important turn. Anything that is not "inner" to consciousness must be strictly excluded, all truth must be regarded as mere "phenomena", and the only absolute data we can begin with is the appearance of things as they appear to our mind. Husserl named his philosophical method ---- phenomenology ---- from this insistence. Phenomenology is a very purely scientific phenomenon.

However, this is not enough to solve our problems. Perhaps for all our discoveries, when we examine the content of our thoughts, there is nothing more than a random flux of phenomena, a confused stream of consciousness whose certainty we can hardly find. However, this "pure" phenomenon with which Husserl is concerned is not a random individual detail, but a system of universal essences. Before discovering that it is eternal, phenomenology reflects every objective substance in flux. Phenomenological knowledge presents not merely the experience of envy or the perception of the color red, but the universal type and essence of these things. To be able to grasp any phenomenon completely and purely is to grasp its essence and eternity. The Greek word for this is Eidos, and Husserl also speaks of his way of achieving "eidetic" abstraction in addition to phenomenal induction.