How did Husserl’s phenomenology attempt to connect empiricism and rationalism?

Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology attempts to bridge the divide between empiricism and rationalism by grounding knowledge in immediate experience while simultaneously seeking universal, essential structures.12

Husserl shared with traditional empiricism an unconditional respect for the positive data of experience, famously claiming, "We are the true positivists". However, he rejected the empiricist restriction of data to mere sense experience. Instead, he expanded the scope of experience to include non-sensory, "categorial" data—such as relations and values—provided they present themselves intuitively.2

Simultaneously, Husserl distanced himself from a rationalism that relies solely on conceptual reasoning detached from experience. He insisted that all concepts and a priori claims must be founded upon and verified by intuition, characterizing his approach as a philosophy from "below" rather than "above". Through the eidetic reduction, he moved beyond factual, empirical observations to grasp the invariant, essential structures (eidos) of phenomena. By doing so, Husserl sought to establish philosophy as a "rigorous science" that discovers necessary truths without relying on speculative constructs or mere empirical generalization.2341