Phenomenology (philosophy)

This article treats the philosophical movement of phenomenology. For other meanings see Phenomenology (Disambiguation).

Phenomenology has two meanings in philosophical history, one derived from G.W.F. Hegel in 1807, and one derived from Edmund Husserl in 1920. For Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is an approach to philosophy that takes the intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract from it the essential features of experiences and the essence of what we experience. It stems from the School of Brentano and was mostly based on the work of the 20th century philosopher Edmund Husserl, and was developed further by philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Max Scheler, Hannah Arendt, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Emmanuel Levinas. As such, phenomenological thought influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach in Germany and Alfred Schütz in Austria); and Paul Ricoeur.

Historical overview of the use of the term

While the term "phenomenology" was used several times in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method. Following is a list of thinkers in rough chronological order who were instrumental in the development of phenomenology, with brief comments on their contributions:

Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (1702-1782) (German pietist) for the study of the "divine system of relations"
David Hume (1711-1776) Scottish philosopher, called variably a skeptic or a common sense advocate. While this connection is somewhat tendentious, Hume in his A Treatise of Human Nature does take a seemingly phenomenological or psychological tack, describing the process of reasoning causality (what he may be most famous for) primarily in psychological terms and also being the source of the Kantian distinction between phenomenological and noumenal reality.
Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777) (mathematician, physician and philosopher) for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.
Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) declared that human beings can only know phenomena, and that the truth, the thing-in-itself, the noumena, is beyond the capability of the human mind.
Hegel (1770–1831) developed the term, phenomenology, in an entirely different way than Husserl. Hegel 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. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, prompted many opposing views including the existential work of Søren Kierkegaard and Sartre, as well as the materialist work of Marx and his many followers.
Franz Brentano (1838-1917) seems to have used the term in some of his lectures at Vienna. Also, he had Edmund Husserl as a disciple, and could have influenced his views on intentionality.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) redefined it at first as a kind of descriptive psychology and later as an epistemological, foundational eidetic discipline to study essences. He is known as a "father" of phenomenology.
Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) used it to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
Max Scheler (1874-1928)developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. He influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II and Edith Stein.
Alfred Schutz (1899-1959) developed a phenomenology of the social world on the basis of everyday experience. He influenced the more popular sociologists such as Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann.

Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl's introduction and use of the term. This branch of philosophy differs from others in that it tends to be more "descriptive" than "prescriptive".

Husserl and the origin of Phenomenology

Husserl derived many important concepts that are central to phenomenology from the works and lectures of his teachers, the philosophers and psychologists Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. An important element of phenomenology that Husserl borrowed from Brentano was intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. Intentionality, which could be summarised as "aboutness", describes the basic structure of consciousness. Every mental phenomenon or psychological act is directed at an object — the intentional object. Every belief, desire, etc. has an object to which it refers: the believed, the desired. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, is the key feature which distinguishes mental/psychical phenomena from physical phenomena (objects), because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether. Intentionality is the key concept by means of which phenomenological philosophy attempts to overcome the subject/object dichotomy prevalent in modern philosophy.

Precursors and influences

Skepticism (for the concept of the epoché)
Descartes (Methodological doubt, ego cogito)
British empiricism (Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill)
Immanuel Kant and neokantianism (for Husserl's transcendental turn)
Franz Brentano (for the concept of intentionality and the method of descriptive psychology)
Carl Stumpf (psychological analysis, influenced Husserl's early works)

Phenomenology in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen (1900/1901)

In the Logical Investigations, his first major work (still under the influence of Brentano), Husserl still conceives of phenomenology as descriptive psychology. Husserl analyzes the intentional structures of mental acts and how they are directed at both real and ideal objects. The Logical Investigations begin with a devastating critique of psychologism i.e. the attempt to subsume the a priori validity of the laws of logic into psychology. Husserl establishes a separate field for research in logic, philosophy and phenomenology, independently from the empirical sciences.

Transcendental phenomenology after the Ideen (1913)

Some years after the publication of the Logical Investigations, Husserl made some key elaborations which led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).

"noetic" refers to the intentional act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)
"noematic" refers to the object or content (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (respectively the believed, wanted, hated and loved ...).

What we observe is not the object as it is in itself, but how and inasmuch it is given in the intentional acts. Knowledge of essences would only be possible by "bracketing" all assumptions about the existence of an external world and the inessential (subjective) aspects of how the object is concretely given to us. This procedure Husserl called epoché.

Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now (transcendental) phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practice to the study of the noemata and the relations among them. German philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique "Against Epistemology", which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.

Transcendental phenomenologists include: Oskar Becker, Aron Gurwitsch and Alfred Schutz.

Realist phenomenology

After Husserl's publication of the Ideen in 1913, 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.

Realist phenomenologists include: Adolf Reinach, Alexander Pfänder, Johannnes Daubert, Max Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and Nicolai Hartmann.

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. Such hubris was a key part of the writings of Heidegger, a hubris that Husserl particularly criticized.

Instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or a foundational discipline, Heidegger took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy". Yet to confuse phenomenology and ontology is an obvious error. Phenomena are appearances, and by definition are not the foundation or Ground of Being.

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".

However, ontological being and existential being are different categories, so Heidegger's conflation of these categories is, according to Husserl's view, the root of Heidegger's error. Husserl charged Heidegger with raising the question of ontology but failing to answer it, instead switching the topic to the Dasein, the only being for whom Being is an issue. That is neither ontology nor phenomenology, according to Husserl, but mere abstract anthropology.

(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

Journals

External links