erl stated, I am aware of the flow of phenomena for I “the monad.” Husserl described this state of witnessing the monad in the first Cartesian Meditation (1973a, pp. 22-23): In such experience the ego is accessible to himself originaliter. But at any particular time this experience offers only a core that is experienced ‘with strict adequacy,’ namely the ego’s living present (which the grammatical sense of the sentence, ego cogito, expresses); while beyond that, only an indeterminately general presumptive horizon extends, comprising what is strictly non-experienced but necessarily also meant.At this stage the phenomenal horizon has opened and I experience the phenomenal flow of my “living present.” My horizon is still limited, however, in the sense that my view is limited to what presents itself to me at this moment in my experience as transcendental subject. Therefore this stage does not represent the culmination of phenomenology. While I have freed myself from the egoic naïveté of the natural attitude, thereby gaining the mode of transcendental I, I now recognize another form of naïveté. As Husserl put it, If I hold fast the ground of the transcendental monad world, then reflection upon my monadic action would itself be given a place in my monad and monadic world, analogously to the way it is with the natural world. (Fink & Husserl, 1995, p. 180)In other words, I now risk of simply consolidating, or “holding fast to” a new vantage point, that of the transcending I, the monad. This consolidation would represent yet another kind of blindness or restriction of the horizon of perception—another kind of naïveté. As Fink wrote (Fink & Husserl, 195, p. 5), Having overcome world naïveté, we stand now in a new naïveté, a transcendental naïveté. It consists in our unfolding and explicating transcendental life only in the presentness in which it is given us by the reduction, without entering by analysis into the ‘inner horizon’ of this life, into the performances of constitution. At this stage I am still viewing the flow of phenomena in a type of natural attitude; the flow of phenomena for me, the monad, continues to possess a kind of givenness for me, and I, as a seemingly self-subsisting monad, continue to possess a kind of naïve givenness for myself despite the fact that I am transcending myself as empirical ego. We might say, I am here in a kind of altered state of perception, having bracketed my normal, egoic attitude (the empirical I-the-man), yet I am still naïve with respect to the ultimate sense of the transcendental I and the world. Namely, the source or the ground of all that is present to me is still concealed from me.The antidote for this second form of naïveté is to perform a second reflection by carrying out the transcendental reduction—in this case, I am bracketing the seeming facticity of I-the-monad, the transcending I, and the world given to me. In Husserl’s words (Fink & Husserl, 1995, p. 180), “by a reflection at a second level I absolutely and concretely obtain the phenomenologizing I and life, both ‘worlds’ become phenomena at a second level. Each straightforwardly existent in correspondingly different anonymity.” With this second bracketing I thematize the flow of phenomena itself and am able to reflect upon constitution itself. Husserl wrote (Fink & Husserl, 1995, p. 180) “At the hitherto highest level I have therefore the third I, the third I-life, perceiving, etc., eidetically—the eidetics of the I that phenomenologizes, that constitutes the universe of monads, and that thereby constitutes the world.” More will be said below about the nature of this “constitution.” I am now able to reflect upon the life of the transcendental subject itself and the way in which transcendental subjectivity constitutes world: this is the third mode of intentionality Husserl identifies, constitutive intentionality. This is the vantage point from which transcendental life itself emerges as a theme to be investigated—previously I experienced myself as transcendental yet was naïve to myself as transcendental subject; in other words, I transcended empirical ego and witnessed the flow of phenomena, but I was still identified with this flow—I did not yet thematize this transcending and witness myself as the transcending I who constitutes world. Is the phenomenologist in danger of falling into an infinite regress, an endless cycle of discovering one’s ground to be naïve, thematizing it in reflection, rediscovering ground again, only to recognize this ground, too, is naïve? Fink (Fink & Husserl, 1995) addressed this objection in his discussion of phenomenology’s “self-reference.” Logical or historical inquiry, he writes, “subsumes the thematizing action itself into the complex which is its theme,” (p. 17) hence there is no infinite regress. Psychological inquiry, however, seems to pose a unique problem, to which Fink responded in two ways. First, he noted that if the psychologist’s goal is to bring “the individual being [Sein] of psyches [Seelen] to exhaustive cognition,” that is to render a psyche absolutely transparent, an infinite regress appears to be required (p. 17, marginal note). However such a task Fink stated, is senseless: “no psyche, neither my own nor another’s, is in this sense fully knowable, in its full individuality…” (p. 17). Instead, recognition of one’s “abiding existence [Dasein]” is the task of psychology, which does not require an infinite regress. Secondly, expanding on this theme, Fink noted that the objective of psychological inquiry it not to explicate the totality of “the particular functioning I…precisely in that specific actual moment of its functioning” (p. 18). Doing so would be an attempt to view every possible content of psyche in this moment as a fact to be identified and explicated: an infinite regress of empirical reflection would be required. Psychology’s goal, Fink wrote, is not this but rather the identification and explication of structures of consciousness common to a multiplicity of psychic acts. Automatically then, psychology requires no regress.De Muralt (1974) addressed the infinite regress somewhat differently, pointing to Husserl’s claim that presuppositionlessness [Vorurteilslosigkeit] “is grounded and explicated in transcendental self-consciousness” (p. 109). For Husserl phenomenology is the science of transcendental foundation; hence “the process of reflective regress resolves into a transcendental self-normation or pure constitutive act