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"Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience. It is a significant movement in twentieth-century philosophy and continues to be explored today. Broadly, phenomenology aims to understand existence through the way we experience the world. Phenomenologists blur the boundary between the perceiving mind/body/subject and the perceptible world/object, seeking to understand how each informs the other.
Phenomenology literally means the study of phenomena. A phenomenon is anything experienced, and any object of thought. As Dan Zahavi writes in Phenomenology: The Basics (2018), phenomenology is “interested in the how rather than in the what of objects.” Zahavi explains,
Rather than focusing on, say, the weight, rarity, or chemical composition of the object, phenomenology is concerned with the way in which the object shows or displays itself, i.e., in how it appears. [...] From this or that perspective, in strong or faint illumination, as perceived, imagined, wished for, feared, anticipated, or recollected. Briefly stated, phenomenology can be seen as a philosophical analysis of these different types of givenness. [...]
Husserl aimed to create a philosophy grounded in the “lifeworld,” or the world we live in and experience in daily life. According to Zahavi, Husserl and phenomenologists following him believed that the lifeworld had been “forgotten and repressed” by science: “In its search for objective knowledge, science has made a virtue of its ability to move beyond and surpass bodily, sensuous, and pragmatic experience, but has frequently overlooked to what extent it is enabled by those very same experiences” (Zahavi, 2018). Husserl called for a return to the “things themselves.”
While Husserl certainly launched phenomenology and his ideas echo throughout the movement, many later phenomenologists have responded to, (mis)interpreted, and rejected his theories to approach phenomenology in their own ways. The French philosopher Paul Ricœur went so far as to suggest that “phenomenology in the broad sense is the sum of Husserl’s work plus the heresies stemming from Husserl” [...]
A major philosophical idea which phenomenology diverges from is the clear separation between inner mind and outer world, between observing subjects and observed objects. In Cartesian philosophy, named after René Descartes (1596–1650), the outer, “true” reality is separate and distinct from the inner, experienced reality. Phenomenology takes issue with this simple divide, viewing consciousness and reality in a reciprocal relationship with each other; one cannot truly be separated from the other. This new perspective marked an important shift in philosophy: rather than seeking “objective” truth beyond specific perspectives or experiences, phenomenology proposed that truth could be discovered through an analysis of subjective experience."
"If I move around the table or lift it from the desk, I might be able to inspect different parts of the clock, but other parts will disappear. Yet, I never doubt that the whole clock is there, that there is more to the object than what I perceive from a given perspective. Some parts and properties are perceptually absent, but they still play a role in how I perceive the clock.
Zahavi emphasizes that “what we see is never given in isolation, but is surrounded by and situated in a horizon that affects the meaning of what we see” (2018). This context not only encompasses the perceptually absent aspects of the clock but also extends to the background surrounding the object. The clock is located in a particular setting, and whether this is “a salesroom, a study, or a lawyer’s office, the alarm clock will appear in different ways, with different meanings” (Zahavi, 2018). The clock may be surrounded by other objects which can influence my perception of it.
Zahavi also notes, “When highlighting the importance of context and horizon, we shouldn’t merely think of this in spatial terms, but also in temporal terms” (2018). The present is informed by the remembered past and the expected future. This includes my immediate past with this object, the information I retain from my exploration of the clock (which allows me to remember each side, even if I turn it around), and the past more broadly: I may have decided to look at the clock because I remember my friend saying that he needed a new one. Looking at the clock, I might try to anticipate my friend’s reaction to seeing it. Zahavi concludes this example with a final point:
When the alarm clock appears, it appears to me, but it does not appear to me as my private object. Rather, it is very much given to me as a public object, as one that others can also observe and utilize. [...] Even if the alarm clock only presents part of itself to me, others can simultaneously perceive aspects of it that are currently unavailable to me. (2018)
Throughout the above example, we can see the attention to experience and perception that lies at the foundation of phenomenology. This investigation of the alarm clock illustrates three essential elements of phenomenology.
The First-Person Perspective
Phenomenologists examine the world from a first-person perspective. It is the nature of visual perception that I can only see the alarm clock from one view at a time; I can only describe the object as it reveals itself to me, not in its ideal form. Phenomenology does not claim to achieve a universal or “objective” third-person perspective. Rather, phenomenology emphasizes that “there is just as much ‘objectivity’ and truth in the subjective access to the world once it is articulated and intersubjectively confirmed” (Luft and Overgaard, 2013). Phenomenologists generally posit that “once subjects put themselves in the position of describing the manner in which things are given or appear to them, they will quickly discover that these descriptions are valid not only for their own private selves, but for others too” (Luft and Overgaard, 2013).
Many phenomenologists, especially after Husserl, view this first-person perspective as inherently embodied. In order to observe the clock, I must be in spatial relation to it, and I engage my body as I explore it (I tilt my head, lean down, etc.). There is “no purely intellectual point of view” because there is “no view from nowhere, there is only an embodied point of view” (Zahavi, 2018).
Description
Speaking from the first-person perspective, the phenomenologist aims to describe experience. This task, however, is not as simple as it seems. While acknowledging the subjectivity of a first-person perspective, phenomenology (ideally and traditionally) attempts to proceed without biases and presuppositions. Husserl calls this “bracketing,” putting aside any commitment to values, ideologies, or theoretical assumptions; the process of bracketing is called the epoché. Ideally, a phenomenologist brackets anything that might have a distorting effect on the description of experience. Philosophers debate precisely what Husserl encouraged phenomenologists to “bracket” — previous biases and traditional theories; our habitual way of encountering the world; and/or our assumption that the world exists independently of us, able to be examined from a perspective not immersed within it (Zahavi, 2018).
Describing the full appearance of a phenomenon includes attending to its background. Context affects the object — the alarm clock appears differently if it is on a store table versus a nightstand — and phenomenologists account for these specificities, describing how an object appears, for what purpose, and with what meaning.
Intentionality
While first-person perspective and description are elements of phenomenology’s method, intentionality speaks to philosophical beliefs, and Luft and Overgaard suggest it is the only paradigm agreed upon by the whole phenomenological movement. Phenomenologists propose that to be conscious means to be conscious of something: I see (the alarm clock), I hear (the store clerk), I remember (my breakfast from that morning), I expect (my friend’s birthday party tomorrow). This idea that consciousness is always directed toward something is intentionality, a term introduced by Brentano but made key to phenomenology by Husserl. Intentionality captures the connection between “internal” representations of objects within one’s consciousness and “external” objects. Luft and Overgaard argue that “whereas one will rarely find ‘intentionality’ featured as a prominent term in phenomenological works after Husserl (at least the ‘classical’ ones), it is nevertheless the case that what is essentially meant by it — the correlation between first-person experience and its content — lives on under different guises” (2013).
Notable contributors and works: Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
Although some would point to Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874, [2014]) as the origin of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl is largely considered phenomenology’s founder. His Logical Investigations, Volume One (1900, [2012]) and Volume Two (1901, [2013]) is a groundbreaking work in which he introduces phenomenology as a descriptive science. Theorizing the idea of intentionality, Husserl argues that consciousness consists of mental acts (i.e. seeing, remembering, hating, desiring). These mental acts could be linguistic (thinking or talking about an object), pictorial (viewing a representation of the object), or perceptual (encountering the object directly). According to Husserl, it is only through perceptual acts that the object is given to us directly. Logical Investigations inspired a strand of early phenomenologists to return to lived reality, rejecting a philosophical emphasis on ideals and understanding the world as such, separated from human consciousness. Consciousness, intentionality posited, was always in relation to the world around it.
When Husserl published his next work, Ideas (1913, [2012]), he created something of a divide in the burgeoning phenomenological movement. Labeling phenomenology a “transcendental philosophy,” Husserl seemed, to some scholars, to abandon his emphasis on realism in pursuit of ideal forms. In Ideas, Husserl writes of the aims of “pure phenomenology”:
[T]hat genuine philosophy, the idea of which is to realize the idea of Absolute Knowledge, has its roots in pure phenomenology, and this in so earnest a sense that the systematically rigorous grounding and development of this first of all philosophies remains the perpetual precondition of all metaphysics and other philosophy “which would aspire to be a science". (1913, [2012])
Kevin Hermberg explains that, by Absolute Knowledge, Husserl did not mean the absolute truth but rather “knowledge of what is absolutely given,” knowledge he “sought to accept as true only that for which he had appropriate evidence” (Husserl’s Phenomenology, 2006). Truth comes not from knowledge itself but from the experience of obtaining that knowledge; consciousness, for phenomenology, is no longer about what we know, but rather how we have come to know it. [...]
Phenomenology began in Germany, but it was later developed by many prominent French philosophers including Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the third major figure in the development of phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty is best known for his Phenomenology of Perception (1945, [2013]), which emphasized the embodied nature of perception and significantly influenced developments in phenomenology since it was published.
Merleau-Ponty reiterates the importance of context in phenomenology with the idea of the gestalt, the figure perceived along with its background (a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts). The figure and its context can never be separated: “The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a ‘field’ ” (Meleau-Ponty, 1945, [2013]). Scientists and philosophers often disregard the contextual aspects of the perceived world in pursuit of a decontextualized, “objective” account of things; the full field of perception obscures itself as we focus on one object. Merleau Ponty argues,
The fundamental philosophical act would thus be to return to the lived world beneath the objective world [...]; it would be to give back to the thing its concrete physiognomy, to the organisms their proper manner of dealing with the world, and to subjectivity its historical inherence; it would be to rediscover phenomena [...] it would be to awaken perception. (1945, [2013])
For Merleau-Ponty, consciousness is always embodied. He proposes the idea of the “body schema” to describe our sense of our body as a cohesive unit and our understanding of how that body relates to its environment (for example, whether it can fit through a doorway). The body schema extends beyond the physical limits of our body to objects around us. Merleau-Ponty argues that, while objects have a “positional spatiality,” the body has “situational spatiality”: it positions itself toward actual or possible tasks. When we, for example, pick up a musical instrument, the object becomes an extension of our body through what we can accomplish with it. Merleau-Ponty writes,
my body is polarized by its tasks, insofar as it exists toward them, insofar as it coils up upon itself in order to reach its goal, and the “body schema” is, in the end, a manner of expressing that my body is in and toward the world. (1945, [2013])
The body is oriented toward the tasks it performs and the tasks it can perform based on what it has done before. As Djian and Majolino explain,
The body schema mediates in this regard constantly between the currently performing body, which behaves and projects itself toward the world, and the habitual body, which determines the practical possibilities of this very body through already acquired skills and know-how. In this sense, the body is more than a ‘zero-point of orientation’; it creates a field of action or a situation. (2020)
Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment further reject the idea of an outer reality separated from an inner consciousness. He writes, “The interior and the exterior are inseparable. The world is entirely on the inside, and I am entirely outside of myself. [...] I understand the world because I am situated in the world and because the world understands me” (1945, [2013]).
Phenomenology trusts that our existence is shaped by our experience. In fact, existence is experience. By drawing attention to the context surrounding the objects we examine and ourselves as Dasein within that world, in constant shifting relationships with our environment, phenomenology has opened the door to all sorts of research possibilities and become one of the most important philosophical developments of the past century."
-Paige Allen, What is Phenomenology ? : https://www.perlego.com/knowledge/study-guides/what-is-phenomenology/
