A Fundamental Grounding for Philosophy

From Husserl's Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy:

The ideal of the philosopher to work out once and for all a systematically complete logic, ethics, metaphysics, etc., which he could at any time justify to himself and to others on the basis of absolutely compelling insight, this ideal I had to forsake long ago and still deny myself today, and for no other reason than that the insight was always, and continues to be, indubitable for me that a philosophy simple cannot begin naively at random. That is, it cannot begin the way the positive sciences do, settling on the pregiven soil of world-experience, a soil presupposed as obviously existing... A philosophy with problematic foundations, with paradoxes due to the unclarity of its fundamental concepts, is no philosophy and contradicts the very sense of philosophy. Philosophy can take root only in radical reflections on the sense and possibility of its own enterprise. Through these reflections it must first of all appropriate, by its own activity, its own proper soil, the absolute soil of pure experience, and must then create, again as self-active, the original concepts that adequately fit the measurements of this soil, and must in this fashion proceed altogether by way of an absolutely transparent method.