Why did Edmund Husserl use the phrase “To the things themselves”?

Edmund Husserl adopted the slogan "To the things themselves" to emphasize a reorientation of philosophical inquiry toward the objects of knowledge as they are actually experienced by human beings, rather than through the lens of abstract theories or presuppositions.1

Husserl believed that the standard epistemological theories of his time were inadequate because they failed to focus on the immediate, lived experience of phenomena. By calling for a return "to the things themselves," he sought to recover a sense of what is given in experience itself through careful, descriptive analysis. This approach formed the basis of phenomenology, which he envisioned as a "rigorous science" free from the biases of naturalism, historicism, or traditional philosophical dualisms.123

It is important to note that this phrase was not a demand for realism; rather, it directed philosophers to examine the acts of consciousness and the objective entities constituted within them—the phenomena. To achieve this, Husserl utilized the epoché, a technique of "bracketing" or suspending all prior beliefs and theories to allow for a pure, presuppositionless intuition of essences.213