The radical reduction consists of focusing on the way that a phenomenon gives itself as itself, while applying the epoché to all senses of subjectivity or agency. The radical reduction censures out consciousness, subjectivity, or the person that constitutes the meaning of the world by focusing only on the self that gives itself. Jean-Luc Marion regards Husserl’s eidetic reduction as the first form, Heidegger’s ontological reduction as the second form, and his self-givenness as the third form of the reduction-proper, a radical reduction. Phenomenology should not depend on any constituting or sense-making subject or agency and solely attend to the self-givenness of phenomena.
Marion argues that the classical “first principle” of phenomenology—to return to the things themselves—is not radical enough because the Husserlian phenomena are ultimately intentional objects that originate in the subjectivity (consciousness) of the subject, or in the intersubjective agency of the transcendental ego.