"Experience by itself is not science"

Experience, while rich and essential, does not constitute science on its own. Human beings encounter the world immediately and vividly; sensations, emotions, perceptions, and practices shape a continuous flow of lived reality. However, raw experience presents itself as an immediate presence, it lacks the structure, rigor, and systematic critical reflection characteristic of scientific inquiry.

For Husserl, scientific engagement requires more than accumulation of experiences. It involves an active process of abstraction, analysis, and methodological skepticism. To grasp the essence of phenomena, one must move beyond the naïve acceptance of appearances, submitting experience to calculation, repeated testing, careful observation, and rigorous documentation. Through these procedures, subjective impressions are scrutinized, patterns discerned, and explanations refined. Science seeks to uncover laws, regularities, and underlying structures that are not apparent within the flux of day-to-day experience.

A further distinction is drawn between the subjectivity of experience and the ideal of objectivity cultivated in science. Experience resides initially within the individual consciousness, shaped by prior knowledge, culture, language, and psychological disposition. While experience offers the raw material for inquiry, science emerges by organizing, comparing, and communicating these experiences, seeking intersubjective agreement and reproducibility. Husserl emphasizes that genuine knowledge, particularly the sort aspired to in scientific endeavors, cannot rest solely upon the immediate given of sense-experience, but must be mediated by theories, concepts, and systematic criticism.

Science is a project that transforms immediate lived experience into coherent, generalizable understanding. It filters and reconstitutes experience, aspiring to move from the particular to the universal. Every scientific discipline, from physics to psychology, arises through this transformation, beginning in the richness of experience, but only gaining validity and explanatory power through critical reflection, methodological controls, and the pursuit of objectivity. Thus, while experience is indispensable, it awaits the organizing power of scientific thought to yield true knowledge.