Phenomenology

This article treats the history of the philosophical movement of phenomenology and some basic features of the discipline.

Phenomenology is the study of experience and the ways in which things present themselves in and through experience. Taking its starting point from the first-person perspective, phenomenology attempts to describe the essential features or structures of a given experience or any experience in general. One of the central structures of any experience is its intentionality, or its being directed toward some object or state of affairs. The theory of intentionality, the central theme of phenomenology, maintains that all experience necessarily has this object-relatedness and thus one of the catch phrases of phenomenology is “all consciousness is consciousness of.” In short, in our experiences we are always already related to the world and to overlook this fact is to commit one of the cardinal sins of phenomenology: abstraction.

This emphasis on the intentional structure of experience makes phenomenology distinctive from other modern epistemological approaches which have a strong separation between the experiencing subject and the object experienced. Starting with Descartes, this subject/object distinction produced the traditions of rationalism and empiricism which focuses on one of these aspects of experience at the expense of the other. Phenomenology seeks to offer a corrective to these traditions by providing an account of how the experiencing subject and object experienced are not externally related, but internally unified. This unified relation between the subject and object is the “phenomena” that phenomenology takes as the starting point of its descriptive analysis.

The discipline of phenomenology as a historical movement originates with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). He is considered the “father” of phenomenology and worked copiously to establish it as a rigorous science. It continued to develop in the 20th century European philosophy through the works of Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricoeur, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Marion. Given its continual development and appropriation in various other disciplines (most notably - ontology, sociology, psychology, ecology, ethics, theology, philosophy of mind) it is considered to be one of the most significant philosophical movements in the 20th century.

Husserl - The Father of Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl was born on April 8, 1859 into a Jewish family living in the then Austrian Empire. He began his academic career as a mathematician, defending his doctoral dissertation in Vienna in 1882. While in Vienna, he attended lectures by the prominent psychologist and philosopher Franz Brentano, who was exercise a considerable influence on Husserl in the years to come. In 1886, Husserl converted to Protestantism and the following year he defended his Habilitation on the concept of number at the university in Halle, where he was to spend the next fourteen years as Privatdozent. During this period, his deepening study of mathematics led him to consider several foundational problems in epistemology and theory of science. These interests resulted in his first major work, Logical Investigations (1900-1901), which is considered to be the founding text of phenomenology. From 1901-1916 Husserl was a professor at the university in Göttingen where he published his next major work Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and a Phenomenological Philosophy, Volume One (1913). This text marked his development from the descriptive phenomenology of his earlier work to transcendental phenomenology. In 1916 Husserl went to Freiburg and became the chair in philosophy and took on several assistants, most notably Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger who were the editors of Husserl’s (in)famous Lectures on the Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1928). Husserl also retired in 1928 and was succeeded by Martin Heidegger as the chair of the department in Freiburg. During the last five years of his life, Husserl fell prey to the anti-Semitism of the rising Nazi party in Germany. In 1933 he was taken off the list of university professors and denied access to the university library. Amidst his marginalization from the university milieu in Germany during the 1930s, Husserl was invited to given lectures in Vienna and Prague in 1935. These lectures were developed to comprise his last major work, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1952).

Most of the books that Husserl himself published during his life were in essence programmatic introductions to phenomenology. But they constitute only a small portion of his vast writing. Because Husserl was in the habit of writing down his phenomenological reflections each day, he also left behind approximately 45,000 research manuscripts. When these manuscripts were deemed to be in jeopardy during the Second World War, they were smuggled to a monastery in Belgium. Eventually, these manuscripts (along with other unpublished lectures, articles, and papers) were organized to create the Husserl-Archives, founded at the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven where they remain to this day. The Husserl-Archives continue to be published in a critical edition called Husserliana and continue to be a major source of phenomenological research.#

Precursors and influences

There are several precedents to Husserl’s formulation of the discipline of phenomenology. Even in ancient philosophy, one can find the distinction between phainomenon (Greek for appearance) and “reality,” a distinction that can be found in Plato’s allegory of the cave or Aristotle’s appearance syllogisms, for instance. The etymology of the term “phenomenology” comes from the compound of the Greek words phainomenon and logos, literally meaning a rational account (logos) of the various ways in which things appear. One of aspirations and advantages of phenomenology is its desire and unique ability to retrieve many of the decisive aspects of classical philosophy.

In the 18th century, “phenomenology” was associated with the theory of appearances found in the analysis of sense perception of empirical knowledge. The term was employed by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a student of Christian Wolff. It was subsequently appropriated by Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and G.W.F. Hegel. By 1889 Franz Brentano (1838-1970) used the term to identify his “descriptive psychology.” Central to Brentano’s formulation of his descriptive psychology was the theory of intentionality, a concept that he revived from Scholasticism to identify the character of psychic phenomenon. Husserl, along with Alexius Meinong, Christian von Ehrenfels, Kasimir Twardowski, and Anton Marty, were students of Brentano in Vienna and their charismatic teacher exerted significant influence on them. Due to the centrality of the theory of intentionality in Husserl’s work, Brentano is considered to be the main forerunner of phenomenology.

See also:

• Skepticism (for the concept of the epoché)
• Descartes (Methodological doubt, ego cogito)
• British empiricism (Husserl had an special affinity for the works of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill)
• Immanuel Kant and neokantianism (one of Husserl's main opponents who nevertheless influenced his transcendental turn)
• Franz Brentano (for the concept of intentionality and the method of descriptive psychology)
• Carl Stumpf (psychological analysis, influenced Husserl's early works)
• William James (his Principles of Psychology (1891) greatly impressed Husserl and his "radical empiricism" bears a striking resemblance to phenomenology)

The Early Husserl of Logical Investigations

While Logical Investigations was not Husserl’s first published work, he considered it to be the first “breakthrough” of phenomenology. It is not only the founding text of phenomenology, but also one of the most important texts in 20th century philosophy. It is comprised of a debate between psychologism and logicism, a debate which forms the background to Husserl’s initial formulation of intentionality. Psychologism maintains that psychology should provide the theoretical foundation for epistemology. Because of the nature of perceiving, believing, and judging are psychic phenomenon, empirical investigations of psychology is the proper domain in which these forms of knowing ought to be investigated. According to psychologism, this applies to all scientific and logical reasoning. For Husserl, this position overlooks the fundamental difference between the domain of logic and psychology. Logic is concerned with ideal objects and the laws that govern them and cannot be reduced to a subjective psychical process. Husserl argues that the ideal objects of logic and mathematics do not suffer the temporal change of psychic acts but remain trans-temporal and objective across multiple acts of various subjects. For example, 2 + 3 = 5 no matter how many times it is repeated or the various different people who perform the operation. Thus, the fundamental error of psychologism is that it does not distinguish between the object of knowledge and the act of knowing. Logicism, on the other hand, is the view that these ideal objects and their laws constitute the foundation of knowing and remain totally autonomous from empirical conditions. Thus, the domain of logic is sui generis and does not need to trace back the structures of thinking back to pre-predicative experience of concrete objects in the world. Logicism fails, according to Husserl, because it does not take into account the ways in which subjective acts function in structuring ideal objectivity.

In order to account for the subjective processes of psychology and the ideal objectivity of logic, Husserl developed his theory of intentionality. Through it he tried to account for both acts of consciousness and the structure of ideal objects without reducing one to the other. By focusing on the relation or correlation between acts of consciousness and their objects, Husserl wanted to describe the a priori structure of these acts. In so doing, he suspended the metaphysical status of these objects of experience. More specifically, through this process of bracketing metaphysical questions he attempted to carve out an epistemological position that was neither a metaphysical realism nor a metaphysical idealism, but metaphysically neutral.

Transcendental phenomenology

As Husserl’s phenomenological investigations deepened, he began to develop the descriptive phenomenology of his earlier work into a transcendental phenomenology. This “transcendental turn” was accompanied by two methodological clarifications through the concepts of the epoché and the reduction. The epoché is a methodological shift in one’s attitude from naively accepting a certain dogmatic beliefs about the world to “bracketing” or suspending those beliefs in order to discover their true sense. It is analogous to the mathematical procedure of taking the absolute value of a certain number, e.g., taking the number 2 and indexing it - [2]. When one brackets the natural attitude, they are, in essence, bracketing its common place validity in order to discover its meaning. The reduction, on the other hand, is the term Husserl eventually used to describe the thematization of the relation between subjectivity and the world. In its literal sense, to re-duce one’s natural experience is “to lead back” one’s attention to the universal and necessary conditions of that experience. Both the epoché and the reduction are important features in freeing oneself from naturalistic dogmaticism in order to illuminate the contribution that subjectivity plays in the constitution of meaning. For this reason, transcendental phenomenology is also often called constitutive phenomenology.

The transcendental turn in phenomenology is perhaps the most controversial and contested aspect of the discipline. Husserl first developed it in Ideas I, which remains one of his most criticized works. It has most notably been critiqued by Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Paul Ricoeur who saw it as a reversion to a kind of idealism along the lines of Kant or Fichte. Others have argued that Husserl’s idealism during this period of his research does not forego the epistemological realism of his early work.

Realist phenomenology

After Husserl's publication of the Ideas I, many phenomenologists took a critical stance towards his new theories. Especially the members of the Munich group distanced themselves from his new transcendental phenomenology and preferred the earlier realist phenomenology of the first edition of the Logical Investigations. Realistic phenomenology emphasizes the search for the essential structures of various concrete situations. Adolf Reinach extended phenomenology to the field of the philosophy of law; Max Scheler added ethics, religion, and philosophical anthropology; Edith Stein focused on human sciences and gender; and Roman Ingarden expanded phenomenology to various themes in aesthetics. Other realist phenomenologists include: Alexander Pfänder, Johannnes Daubert, Nicolai Hartmann, Herbert Spiegelberg, Karl Schuhmann, and Barry Smith.

Existential phenomenology

Existential phenomenology differs from transcendental phenomenology by its rejection of the transcendental ego. Merleau-Ponty objects to the ego's transcendence of the world, which for Husserl leaves the world spread out and completely transparent before the conscious. Heidegger thinks of conscious being as always and already in the world. Transcendence is maintained in existential phenomenology to the extent that the method of phenomenology must take a presuppositionless starting point - transcending claims about the world arising from, for example, natural or scientific attitudes or theories of the ontological nature of the world.

Heidegger's "phenomenology" and differences with Husserl

While Husserl thought philosophy to be a scientific discipline that had to be founded on a phenomenology understood as epistemology, Heidegger radically changed this view.

Heidegger himself phrases their differences this way:

For Husserl the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).

According to Heidegger philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. Therefore, instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or foundational discipline, he took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy". While for Husserl in the epochè being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that: "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality".

(NB: Heidegger quotations are taken from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1954), published by Indiana University Press, 1975. Introduction, p. 1 – 23 reproduced at www.marxists.org.)

Existential phenomenologists include: Martin Heidegger (1889 – 1976), Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), Emmanuel Levinas (1906 – 1995), Gabriel Marcel (1889 – 1973), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 – 1980), and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907 – 1960).

Criticisms of phenomenology

Daniel Dennett has criticized phenomenology on the basis that its explicitly first-person approach is incompatible with the scientific third-person approach, going so far as to coin the term autophenomenology to emphasize this aspect and to contrast it with his own alternative, which he calls heterophenomenology.

Currents influenced by phenomenology

• Phenomenology of religion
• Hermeneutics
• Structuralism
• Poststructuralism
• Existentialism
• Deconstruction
• Philosophy of technology
• Emergy
• Personhood Theory

Further reading

• Important publications in phenomenological psychology
• Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (Oxford: Routledge, 2000) - Charting phenomenology from Brentano, through Husserl and Heidegger, to Gadamer, Arendt, Levinas, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida.
• Robert Sokolowski, "Introduction to Phenomenology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000) - An excellent non-historical introduction to phenomenology.
• Herbert Spiegelberg, "The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction" (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff 1965) - The most comprehensive and thorough source on the entire phenomenological movement. Unfortunately expensive and hard to find.
• David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, "Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and its Literature" (Athens: Ohio University Press 1990)
• Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth, and Russell Kent, "Understanding Phenomenology" (Oxford: Blackwell 1995)
• Christopher Macann, "Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty" (New York: Routledge: 1993)
• William A. Luijpen and Henry J. Koren, "A First Introduction to Existential Phenomenology" (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1969)
• Richard M. Zaner, "The Way of Phenomenology" (Indianapolis: Pegasus 1970)
• Pierre Thévenaz, "What is Phenomenology?" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1962)
• ed. James M. Edie, "An Invitation to Phenomenology" (Chicago: Quadrangle Books 1965) - A collection of seminal phenomenological essays.
• ed. R. O. Elveton, "The Phenomenology of Husserl: Selected Critical Readings" (Seattle: Noesis Press 2000) - Key essays about Husserl's phenomenology.
• eds. Richard Zaner and Don Ihde, "Phenomenology and Existentialism" (New York: Putnam 1973) - Contains many key essays in existential phenomenology.
• Albert Borgmann and his work in philosophy of technology.

Journals

• Bulletin d'analyse phénoménologique
• Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology
• Research in Phenomenology
• Studia Phaenomenologica
• Newsletter of Phenomenology

External links

• What is Phenomenology?
• About Phenomenology
• About Edmund Husserl
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
• Organization of Phenomenology Organizations O.P.O.
• Romanian Society for Phenomenology

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