Why did some of Edmund Husserl’s students reject his turn toward transcendental philosophy?

Edmund Husserl’s shift toward transcendental idealism caused a significant division within the phenomenological movement he helped establish. While Husserl increasingly focused on the transcendental ego as the ultimate foundation for the constitution of all meaning, many of his early students and associates—including figures like Alexander Pfänder, Moritz Geiger, and Adolf Reinach—refused to follow him into this system of problems.12

These early phenomenologists, who were largely based in Göttingen and Munich, were primarily interested in a "phenomenology of essences" derived from Husserl’s earlier work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations). They sought to apply phenomenological methods to specific fields such as aesthetics, the philosophy of law, and phenomenological psychology without committing to the transcendental turn. Consequently, rather than adopting Husserl’s transcendental framework, several of these thinkers attempted to develop phenomenology along the lines of realism.1