Abstract
"Let every man be master of his time," exclaims Macbeth in his farewell to Banquo (3, I). Now, by rephrasing his words, one might say: "Let every man be master of his words." If this were to hold as our hermeneutical criterion, then the Fourth Cartesian Meditation (hereafter: CM IV) would turn out to be a real turning point both at the micro-level of the specific trajectory of CM and at the macro-level of the development of Husserl's thought.
For what concerns the former aspect, CM IV represents the very moment in which the analyses so far developed by Husserl finally acquire their own "scientific" value and significance. This happens in two different steps.
First, by more precisely determining the subject-matter of phenomenology as a "concrete subjectivity" or "monad" (§§30-33) in such a manner that "phenomenology in general" coincides with that of the self-constitution of such subjectivity (Husserl 1950, p. 103). Second, by obtaining in §34 the eidos ego in general by self-variation of "the transcendental-factual ego," i.e., "my monad" (Husserl 1950, p. 28).
Accordingly, the descriptions worked out in §§35-39, which aim at mapping out the structures of the monad, follow from the combination of these two aspects.