PHENOMENOLOGY
European
Philosophy this century has been much influenced by a movement in philosophy
called phenomenology or the phenomenological movement. The most
prominent early representative of this movement and the source of much of its
methodology and many of its ideas was Edmund HUSSERL (1859--1938), himself
influenced by another German, Franz Brentano, ex-Dominician, 1838--1917. Another early proponent, also German: Max
SCHELER, 1874--1928 --somewhat independent of Husserl, quite influential in the
phenomenology of morals.
The people
influenced include in particular the more philosophical of the Existentialists
(see later), such as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (the latter two are French), who are sometimes referred to accordingly
as existential phenomenologists. But it includes
others as well: you don't have to be an existentialist to be a phenomenologist.
Husserl himself is not. Nor are certain phenomenological Thomists, such as Karl
Wojtyla (The Acting Person, Analecta Husserliana Vol. 10) and other
members of the so-called
More
generally, almost everyone on the continent of
The below is
an introduction to certain general determinants of phenomenology as a movement
in philosophy, concentrating on the contribution of Husserl himself. For the
history of it, see especially Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological
Movement, 3rd revised and enlarged
edition (Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, 1982).
(I)
PHENOMENOLOGY AS METHOD
(A) Phenomenology is essentially a method of
working in philosophy and also e.g. in cultural anthropology or the study of
religions and social sciences generally, rather than a series of
doctrines.
·
Compare
the definition of Spiegelberg, p. 717: the unusually obstinate attempt to look
at the phenomena and to remain faithful to them before even thinking about
them.
·
It
is thus first of all a method of careful accurate description.
·
The
idea is that before you start talking about something, first to describe it accurately
as it shows itself, not as you want it
to be, or as your theory tells you it must be, but as it shows itself, to approach the phenomena without prejudices,
theories or presuppositions, whether it
be sense-perception or the coming to know mathematical or scientific truths, or
human emotions like love or fear, or particular religions or cultures. The
slogan which motivates the movement: back
to the things themselves, i.e. to the things themselves, as they present
themselves, not as science or common sense or our own religion or culture tells
us they ought to be.
·
The
term phenomenology comes from two Greek words: phenomenon: that which shows itself, in this context anything which
presents itself in any way to man or woman's consciousness; logos: in the sense of word, talk, discourse,
account.
Phenomenology therefore = talking or writing for the sake of letting that which shows itself be
seen as it shows itself. See
Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 50--51, p. 58--59.
·
Phenomenology,
then, is a method of description, to bring the things themselves to speech,
either for its own sake or as preliminary to some other kind of investigation
whether it be causal or a question of validity or whatever. It would seem to be
an essential first step in any scientific enterprise. In certain fields however it becomes valuable
for its own sake --especially in respect of the study of certain human
practices, which we want to understand in order to do better rather than
explain in order to predict.
·
This
is to follow Heidegger. Merleau-Ponty
places more emphasis on what distinguishes phenomenology from mere
story-telling, the study of essences, the search for the universal in the
particular. See below, on ‘eidetic
reduction’ and also later on, ‘the intuition of essences’.
(B) To do this careful accurate describing,
for the sake of letting that which shows itself be seen as it shows itself, requires
a certain amount of discipline. In
particular it requires a certain amount of bracketing, the phenomenological 'epoche', or 'reduction', reduction in the
double sense of reducing the prejudices and leading us back to the things
themselves.
·
Husserl
himself distinguishes four levels of bracketing or reduction:
·
(a)
most fundamentally, an historical bracketing: --a putting in brackets of everything we have
received in the way of theories and opinions on the matter in question, whether
through education, from everyday life, science or religious faith; not to deny
however but to make no use of them, bracketing rather than doubt. The thing
must speak for itself, back to the things themselves as they present
themselves, as they are immediately given and intuited by consciousness.
·
(b)
an existential bracketing:
--abstracting from all existential judgements: e.g. in religion -- whether
the gods of this group exist or not you don't worry about, nor whether the
miracle really happened; you concentrate instead on how the gods appear to this
particular group, what meaning their religious practices have for them. Nor,
when you study the process of perception, do you worry whether or not the
perceived object actually exists --that is not relevant to what you are doing
at the moment.
·
©
the eidetic
reduction: --from eidos, idea, form, pattern, essence: we
are interested in the essence of the phenomenon, so leave out of consideration
all that belongs to e.g. love, as this particular love, e.g. perception of external objects as
perception of an apple rather than a pear, e.g. human existence, as this, e.g.
my particular existence.
·
(d)
for Husserl but not for everyone: the transcendental
reduction: --transcendental as in
Kant = having to do with the a priori conditions of possibility of
knowledge; --indicates reduction to
transcendental consciousness or the transcendental ego, consciousness
considered precisely in its functions as condition of possibility for the sense
of beings. --even to put the reality of my own consciousness in brackets, that
is not important to our task --to get back to a realm of pure consciousness,
which incidentally but importantly for Husserl's ambitions in philosophy is an
ideal realm of apodictic certainty, like the consciousness of Descartes.
Most of the followersof Husserl stop before this last: there
is no such thing as pure consciousness, it exists only as instantiated in
corporeal, language using, beings, in the world and with others -- it is these
latter which are the conditions of possibility of conscious experience, whose
features allow the world to give itself in its sense.
(C) We may speak, in fact, of at least
three kinds of phenomenology, all of which Husserl himself practiced at some
stage in his philosophical development:
(1)
Descriptive phenomenology: going (only) as far as the eidetic
reduction;
(2)
Transcendental phenomenology: including the transcendental reduction;
(3)
Genetic phenomenology: below everyday consciousness, to a
more primitive level out of which everyday consciousness is constructed.
(4)
Following
Heidegger, we may talk also of a fourth kind: Hermeneutic phenomenology: trying to understand well the human situation
from within the human situation, for the sake among other things of coming to
understand what good understanding is-- involved therefore in a kind of
hermeneutical circle. According to
this, one of the lessons to be learnt from the failure of Husserl's own
projects is that there is no such thing as entirely pre-supposition-less human
understanding --can only be relatively presupposition-less, it is sometimes
more important to be aware of your presuppositions than not to have any, and
indeed presuppositions can have a positive and not only a negative function in
the knowing or understanding process, provided they are immersed in a dialogal process
with the facts/experience/the text to be understood and not held dogmatically
(cf. Gadamer).
(II) SOME KEY DOCTRINES OF THE
PHENOMENOLOGICAL MOVEMENT: ‘INTENTIONALITY’,
‘CONSTITUTION’, ‘HORIZON’
While
phenomenology is essentially a method, there are some doctrines which most
phenomenological philosophers would share. One of Husserl's central doctrines,
which all of his philosophical followers take over in some form, is his notion
of INTENTIONALITY.
(A)
Intentionality
is a fact about consciousness, one of the more evident facts which the
application of the phenomenological method serves to reveal:
·
Consciousness,
that is, human awareness, human conscious life in its various forms, is in-tentional,
i.e. an intending of, directness towards, opening out on (usually) what is not
consciousness. Thinking is thinking of
something. It is not very often that you think of a piece of thinking itself,
and even then, the thinking of the thought is not the same as the thought which
is thought of. I can think of a cat, and I can think of the thought of a cat.
Similarly, perception is perception of, joy is joy at, love is always love of
someone, fear is (almost) always fear of something or someone, belief is always
belief that etc. Even moods are
intentional in character: when I'm in a sad mood, the whole world looks sad, to
be in a sad mood is to project, intend, be opened out onto the world as a sad
place.
·
This
is an (alleged) correction of the notion of intentionality in Brentano and
which Brentano gets from the Scholastics (and which e.g. Lonergan takes over
from Brentano). For Brentano, the object
of consciousness is immanent to consciousness, whereas for Husserl,
consciousness is directedness usually to what is not consciousness at all. It
is the experience, or equivalently the appearance of the object which is
immanent to consciousness, but we do not know and are not usually aware of,
directed to or opened out on the appearance or experience. The appearance is not a mere appearance, a
screen between myself and the appearing object, but the event of the appearing
object giving itself to me.
(B)
intentionality
is secondly a fact about the relationship between consciousness or the human
subject and what we call reality:
·
it
is the intentionality of consciousness, the opening out, the directedness
towards, which enables objects to give themselves in their sense. Consciousness includes an element of
interpreting activity, analogous to what makes the difference between a mark on
paper and a meaningful word, an element of construing, of apprehension or
interpretation. This element of interpretation makes experiences or appearances
be experiences or appearances of an object with a particular sense, e.g. a table,
a human being, the number 3. That is to say, I interpret or construe what is
happening to me as the appearing of such and such an object. For example, the
table gives itself to me when I direct myself towards it as a table, which
requires that I do the right things like be awake and open my eyes and have and
apply the recipes for certain geometrical shapes and secondarily for
tables. On the one hand, when I do this
the object itself gives itself in its sense, e.g. as watch or biro or table, or
the tableness of the table or threeness.
·
Appearance
is the self-givenness of the transcendent object, the event of the object out
there giving itself to me. On the other hand, the object needs me in order to
give itself, this event is made possible by the interpreting activity of
consciousness, the object to give itself requires this interpreting activity of
consciousness. 'Subjectivity' therefore does not stand in the way of objects
giving themselves, something to be negated perhaps in getting back to the
object in itself. On the contrary, the work of consciousness (which happens
mostly automatically) enables the giving, there is no giving without it.
·
In
Husserl'slanguage, it is consciousness
which constitutes the sense of
appearing being, and phenomenology for Husserl is centrally the study of constitution: in other words the study of the manner in
which the subject constitutes the sense
of what appears. Cf. Hume and Kant. Constitute
for a start however means nothing more sinister for Husserl than allow to
emerge: it is my interpreting activity which allows the object in its own sense
to emerge for consciousness, which enables the object to give itself in its
sense. It is by no means sceptical in its consequences nor is it idealist.
Reality requires us to come into unconcealedness, nor does it give itself to
dumb people, nor does it often give itself well without hard work. This early view allows for a new solution to the problem of the nature
of perception and of knowing generally.
·
Later
on, however, Husserl himself moves to a kind of idealism, on two levels: the
intended object becomes once more something immanent to consciousness,
cf.Descartes, and ‘constitute’ starts to take on the sense of creates --it is the activity of
consciousness which creates the sense of what appears, cf. Kant, rather than
just allowing the sense which it has to emerge. Most people prefer the earlier
idea.
Possible Implications:
(a) If the
earlier (rather than later) Husserl is correct, then consciousness is no longer
the self-enclosed realm of the psychical as Descartes thought. Consciousness
and human beings as consciousness are essentially relational, a kind of
distancing, a kind of nothingness, leaning so to speak on things and on other
selves in order to exist as consciousness.
Indeed, explicit self-consciousness is always a secondary phenomenon in
a literal sense, consciousness of myself as conscious of ..., or perhaps
consciousness of self as the object of someone
else's consciousness, cf. Sartre's story.
What
existential phenomenologists in particular draw from this is that the existence
of the external world and of other selves is not a genuine problem --the
external world and other selves are quiteas real as my own consciousness, they
presuppose and constitute each other, no consciousness without a world to be
opened out on, no meaningful world without people, I am constituted by the look
of the other, as much as they are constituted by me, things and particularly
other selves allow me to emerge in my sense --even for me --just as I allow
them to emerge in theirs, both for me, and to some extent for them. The ego no
longer has any epistemological primacy, therefore. Human being = essentially (embodied)-being-conscious-in-the-world-with-others.
(b) the
(early, realist) doctrine of intentionality, among other things, provides a new
solution to the problem of the nature of perception and of the knowledge of the
external world:
·
naive realism:
I'm directly in contact with the real world --can't handle illusions of
various kinds, can't even handle perspective.
·
Such
problems usually lead philosophers to adopt a theory of representationalism: I'm
directly aware of, in immediate contact with, appearances, sensations, sense
data, representatives; and deduce the existence of the things and what they are
like from the appearances or sense data or representatives of which I am
directly aware. Cf. Descartes, or Locke. Problem: if I am never directly aware
of the things themselves, how can I ever know that the representatives or
appearances are good copies of them, or even that one causes the others. Thus Berkeley and Hume. A problem which Kant solved only by
distinguishing world for us, which we know, and world in itself, which we
don't.
·
Phenomenological realism:
I am directly aware of, opened out on, the thing itself through the appearance. Our consciousness aims at, directs itself
towards, the thing, not the appearance --I am not even usually aware of the
appearance as an appearance, and I certainly don't deduce the existence of the
thing from the appearance by a piece of causal reasoning. The appearance is not
a mere appearance, a screen between myself and the appearing object, but the
event of the appearing object giving itself to me, provided I do the right
things, e.g. the table giving itself to me as an out of shape parallelogram,
the straight stick giving itself to me as bent in water, if it didn't give
itself to me as bent it would't be straight.
(C)
phenomenologists/existential
phenomenologists etc. go on to talk of intentionality in a second sense of
your/my/his/her/their intentionality, = the
quality of my opening out or intending, as determining how much I can see,
how much I can appreciate or understand. Co-relative with this is the notion of HORIZON, in the sense of going overseas
to broaden my horizons, by analogy with the visual horizon, = how much/how far
I can see, comprehend, appreciate, understand.
Intentionality in the second sense and the horizon co-relative to it are
determined by such factors as education, past life experiences and
involvements, languages I have learned, people I have met, and also
suchnon-logical factors as willingness to learn or to be corrected, fundamental
openness, not suffering from insecurity which sometimes will cause me to close
up. And intentionality--horizon have to
do not only with knowledge and understanding but also with valuing.
These concepts, also derived eventually from Husserl,
provide some very powerful apparatus for throwing light on lots of aspects of
human existence.
(III) EIDETIC INTUITION, THE ‘WESENSSCHAU’
:A third plank
in the platform of phenomenology in philosophy = Husserl's doctrine of the Wesensschau: Eidetic Intuition, the Intuition of Essences
--whether of idealities such as triangularity or 4-ness, or of sensible
objects, e.g . tableness, or of acts of consciousness, e.g. intentionality as
the structure of consciousness, or of various structures of human
existence.
'Eidetic
Intuition' is Husserl's solution to the epistemological problem of universals,
not whether there are universals but how do we come to know them --how do we
come to know, what is our mode of access to, universals, forms, essences,
generalities, styles, structures, the general aspects of things.
1) the
traditional, medieval solution, roughly: the senses deliver up a sense image or
'phantasm', the intellect operates on the phantasm to deliver up the universal,
the intellectus agens operating on the phantasm abstracting the forma from the
individuating characteristics, which forma is 'impressed' on the passive
intellect. According to Husserl, the traditional solution is not accurate, not
in fact what happens, much too indirect.
2) what of the
method of the empirical sciences, with its hypotheses and procedures of
verification of those hypotheses? This
however cannot be the only way we have of getting at structures: laws after all
join classes of events, some other more direct method is
already being presumed.
3) Husserl's
solution: not only things but also the essences
of things, e.g. tableness of the table, the structures of human
existence, show themselves to us when we perform certain acts, get ourselves in
the right way --when we perform certain acts, look at things in the right way,
open ourselves to them in the good way, the general comes to be present ‘before
our eyes’. E.g. tableness is given to
me in this table, this tableness which is something we can attribute to many
tables; I don't just mean tableness or invent it, tableness is given to me, the
general is given to me in the particular
when I attend in a certain way --so the process is much more immediate than the
scholastics allege.
I find out the
meaning of words like 'table' by
ostensive definition? Yes, but it is the possibility of 'intuition of essences'
which enables ostensive definition to work in individual cases.
N.B. Husserl
is not to be taken as claiming that it's easy.
The activity we need to engage in may in fact be rather complicated: to
grasp the essence it by no means suffices
to fix on it. Rather it is necessary to immerse oneself in it, follow
its suggestive connections and indications, indulge in variation in the free
field of imagination, what changes might the object undergo and still be
itself? But it is the essence or general
aspect which gives itself eventually at the end of this activity, not some
invention of our own, we allow it to emerge for us, and it emerges there in
front of us. Our knowledge of essences thereby conforms to the general
structure of intentional consciousness.
Importance:
(a)
Firstly,
in the context of Husserl's phenomenological method, it grounds the possibility
of the eidetic reduction, the move from fact to essence. Moreover, it grounds
it in such a way that we continue to stay inside phenomenology =the accurate
description of what is given.
(b)
Secondly,
it makes possible Husserl's later project of philosophy as a rigorous
foundational science: philosophy, unlike empirical science, moves in the sphere
of direct intuition, immediate givenness, the phenomenological grasp of
essences in fulfilled intentional acts, acts of meaning in which what is meant
is given before your eyes.
(c) Thirdly,
it helps to explain some of the features of the writings of the
existentialists, people who for the most part have given up the dream of
philosophy as a rigorous science. The
vivid examples they use, e.g. Sartre's stories, are not just anecdotal, nor are
they meant as confirming instances of hypotheses of one kind or another. No, you describe the concrete particular in order
to elicit the givenness of the general structure ..."you know, like
this...".
(d) One
problem with it: as a variety of "intuition", it does not allow of
correction --which is embarrassing when different people "intuit"
different structures. But there must be some such capacity in human beings,
otherwise language would never get off the ground, and it would seem to be more
direct than in the scholastic apparatus.
More like experience than thinking, the general aspect emerging for us
in the particular instance itself. As a variety of "experience' it is
relevant to our knowing. Like all experience however it is subject to
correction --by reference, eventually, to other or later experience.