Phenomenology is not a unified movement; rather, different authors share a common family resemblance but also with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states:A unique and final definition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this may disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning of phenomenology.[2]
Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.
Husserl's
Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by himself but also by students and colleagues such as Edith Stein, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, by existentialists such as Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, by hermeneutic philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur, by later French philosophers such as Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida, and by sociologists such as Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin.
In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.[3]
There are several assumptions behind phenomenology that help explain its foundations:
- Phenomenologists reject the concept of objective research. They prefer grouping assumptions through a process called phenomenological epoché.
- They believe that analyzing daily human behavior can provide one with a greater understanding of nature.
- They assert that persons should be explored. This is because persons can be understood through the unique ways they reflect the society they live in.
- Phenomenologists prefer to gather "capta", or conscious experience, rather than traditional data.
- They consider phenomenology to be oriented toward discovery, and therefore they research using methods that are far less restrictive than in other sciences.[4]
Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.[5] An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano is intentionality (often described as "aboutness"), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it.
Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when the constitution of an identical coherent thing is specified by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described here: the ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time.[6]
Although previously employed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, it was Husserl's adoption of this term (c. 1900) that propelled it into becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of ref
There are several assumptions behind phenomenology that help explain its foundations:
Husserl derived many important concepts central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf.[5] An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano is intentionality (often described as "aboutness"), the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through, for instance, perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object; consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it.
Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when the constitution of an identical coherent thing is specified by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described here: the ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenolog
Though many of the phenomenological methods involve various reductions, phenomenology is, in essence, anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to these descriptions. In other words, when a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when the constitution of an identical coherent thing is specified by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, these surfaces, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described here: the ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the person experiencing it. Phenomenology is a direct reaction to the psychologism and physicalism of Husserl's time.[6]
Although previously employed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, it was Husserl's adoption of this term (c. 1900) that propelled it into becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience."[7] Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché, Husserl's method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the "science of experience," the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, i.e. Husserl's theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not "in" the mind; rather, consciousness is conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.
According to Maurice Natanson (1973, p. 63), "The radicality of the phenomenological method is both continuous and discontinuous with philosophy's general effort to subject experience to fundamental, critical scrutiny: to take nothing for granted and to show the warranty for what we claim to know." In practice, it entails an unusual combination of discipline and detachment to bracket theoretical explanations and second-hand information while determining one's "naive" experience of the matter. (To "bracket" in this sense means to provisionally suspend or set aside some idea as a way to facilitate the inquiry by focusing only on its most significant components.) The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to his or her primordial experience of the matter, whether the object of inquiry is a feeling, an idea, or a perception. According to Husserl the suspension of belief in what we ordinarily take for granted or infer by conjecture diminishes the power of what we customarily embrace as objective reality. According to Rüdiger Safranski (1998, 72), "[Husserl's and his followers'] great ambition was to disregard anything that had until then been thought or said about consciousness or the world [while] on the lookout for a new way of letting the things [they investigated] approach them, without covering them up with what they already knew."
Martin Heidegger modified Husserl's conception of phenomenology because of what Heidegger perceived as Husserl's subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the primacy of one's existence (i.e., the mode of being of Dasein), which cannot be reduced to one's consciousness of it. From this angle, one's state of mind is an "effect" rather than a determinant of existence, including those aspects of existence of which one is not conscious. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology. As one consequence of Heidegger's modification of Husserl's conception, phenomenology became increasingly relevant to psychoanalysis. Whereas Husserl gave priority to a depiction of consciousness that was fundamentally alien to the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious, Heidegger offered a way to conceptualize experience that could accommodate those aspects of one's existence that lie on the periphery of sentient awareness.[8][9]
Phenomenology has at least three main meanings in philosophical history: one in the writings of G. W. F. Hegel, another in the writings of Edmund Husserl in 1920, and thirdly, succeeding Husserl's work, in the writings of his former research assistant Martin Heidegger in 1927.
- For G. W. F. Hegel, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that begins with an exploration of phenomena (what p
Although the term "phenomenology" was used occasionally in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following is a list of important thinkers, in rough chronological order, who used the term "phenomenology" in a variety of ways, with brief comments on their contributions:[13]
- Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702–1782), German pietist, for the study of the "divine system of relations"[14]
- Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), mathematician, physician and philosopher, known for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.[15]
- Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in the Critique of Pure Reason, distinguished between objects as phenomena, which are objects as shaped and grasped by human sensibility and understanding, and objects as things-in-themselves or noumena, which do not appear to us in space and time and about which we can make no legitimate judgments.
- G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) challenged Kant's doctrine of the unknowable thing-in-itself, and declared that by knowing phenomena more fully we can gradually arrive at a consciousness of the absolute and spiritual truth of Divinity, most notably in his Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807.
- Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), student of Brentano and mentor to Husserl, used "phenomenology" to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.[16]
- prescriptive".
Varieties
The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology:[17]
- Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world.
- Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology (see naturalism) studies how consciousness constitutes things in the world of nature, assuming with the natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature.
- Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our experience of free choice and/or action in concrete situations.
- Generative historicist phenomenology (see historicism) studies how meaning—as found in our experience—is generated in historical processes of collective experience over time.
- Genetic phenomenology studies the emergence/genesis of meanings of things within one's own stream of experience.
- Hermeneutical phenomenology (also hermeneutic phenomenology[18] or post-phenomenology/postphenomenology[19][20] elsewhere; see hermeneutics) studies interpretive structures of experience. This approach was introduced in Martin Heidegger's early work.[21]
- Realistic phenomenology (also realist phenomenology elsewhere) studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality as "it occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and not somehow brought into being by consciousness."[17]
The contrast between "constitutive phenomenology" (German: konstitutive Phänomenologie; also static phenomenology (statische Phänomenologie) or descriptive phenomenology (beschreibende Phänomenologie)) and "genetic phenomenology" (genetische Phänomenologie; also phenomenology of genesis (Phänomenologie der Genesis)) is due to Husserl.[22]
Modern scholarship also recognizes the existence of the following varieties: late Heidegger's transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology[23] (see The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997) features separate articles on the following seven types of phenomenology:[17]
- Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in transcendental consciousness, setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world.
- Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology (see German: konstitutive Phänomenologie; also static phenomenology (statische Phänomenologie) or descriptive phenomenology (beschreibende Phänomenologie)) and "genetic phenomenology" (genetische Phänomenologie; also phenomenology of genesis (Phänomenologie der Genesis)) is due to Husserl.[22]
Modern scholarship also recognizes the existence of the following varieties: late Heidegger's transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology[23] (see transcendental philosophy and a priori), Maurice Merleau-Ponty's embodied phenomenology[24] (see embodied cognition), Michel Henry's material phenomenology (also based on embodied cognition),[25] Alva Noë's analytic phenomenology[26] (see analytic philosophy), J. L. Austin's linguistic phenomenology[27] (see ordinary language philosophy), and Paul Crowther's post-analytic phenomenology[28] (see postanalytic philosophy).
Concepts
Intentionality
In everyday language, we use the word evidence to signify a special sort of relation betwee
In everyday language, we use the word evidence to signify a special sort of relation between a state of affairs and a proposition: State A is evidence for the proposition "A is true." In phenomenology, however, the concept of evidence is meant to signify the "subjective achievement of truth."[29] This is not an attempt to reduce the objective sort of evidence to subjective "opinion," but rather an attempt to describe the structure of having something present in intuition with the addition of having it present as intelligible: "Evidence is the successful presentation of an intelligible object, the successful presentation of something whose truth becomes manifest in the evidencing itself."[30]
Noesis and noema
In phenomenology, empathy refers to the experience of one's own body as another. While we often identify others with their physical bodies, this type of phenomenology requires that we focus on the subjectivity of the other, as well as our intersubjective engagement with them. In Husserl's original account, this was done by a sort of apperception built on the experiences of your own lived-body. The lived body is your own body as experienced by yourself, as yourself. Your own body manifests itself to you mainly as your possibilities of acting in the world. It is what lets you reach out and grab something, for instance, but it also, and more importantly, allows for the possibility of changing your point of view. This helps you differentiate one thing from another by the experience of moving around it, seeing new aspects of it (often referred to as making the absent present and the present absent), and still retaining the notion that this is the same thing that you saw other aspects of just a moment ago (it is identical). Your body is also experienced as a duality, both as object (you can touch your own hand) and as your own subjectivity (you experience being touched).
The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available – available to all other subjects. Th
The experience of your own body as your own subjectivity is then applied to the experience of another's body, which, through apperception, is constituted as another subjectivity. You can thus recognise the Other's intentions, emotions, etc. This experience of empathy is important in the phenomenological account of intersubjectivity. In phenomenology, intersubjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience as objective is experienced as being intersubjectively available – available to all other subjects. This does not imply that objectivity is reduced to subjectivity nor does it imply a relativist position, cf. for instance intersubjective verifiability).
In the experience of intersubjectivity, one also experiences oneself as being a subject among other subjects, and one experiences oneself as existing objectively for these Others; one experiences oneself as the noema of Others' noeses, or as a subject in another's empathic experience. As such, one experiences oneself as objectively existing subjectivity. Intersubjectivity is also a part in the constitution of one's lifeworld, especially as "homeworld."
The lifeworld (German: Lebenswelt) is the "world" each one of us lives in. One could call it the "background" or "horizon" of all experience, and it is that on which each object stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning it can only hold for us. The lifeworld is both personal and intersubjective (it is then called a "homeworld"), and, as such, it does not enclose each one of us in a solus ipse.
Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900/1901)
