Phenomenology

What does phenomenology try to do?

Think of the coffee cup on the table. Physics explains it as an arrangement of atoms and molecules. But that is not the cup we actually experience. It has a handle we can grip, it holds something warm we can drink, and even when we see only its front we know it has a back. If our grandmother gave it to us, memories come with it. Phenomenology is the philosophy that describes experience carefully, just as it appears to consciousness, in order to show how that experience is structured.

The word comes from Greek phainomenon (what appears) and logos (speech, study). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines phenomenology as "the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view". German reference works describe it as the movement that locates the origin of knowledge in what is immediately given, in phenomena. The core attitude is not to build a theory first and force experience into it, but to start from what experience itself shows.

Who used the word first?

The word "phenomenology" dates from the eighteenth century. In his Neues Organon (1764) Johann Heinrich Lambert proposed a "phenomenology, or doctrine of appearance" as a tool for seeking truth. Kant used the term too. In Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) it means the forms that consciousness passes through from bare sense-certainty to absolute knowledge. For Hegel the concrete activity of human beings plays an important role in that process, which sets his usage apart from today's phenomenology. Franz Brentano described mental phenomena under the name "descriptive psychology". Phenomenology became a philosophical method in its own right only with Husserl at the beginning of the twentieth century.

What does "to the things themselves" mean?

In the Logical Investigations (1900–1901) Husserl wrote: "We want to go back to the 'things themselves'." The phrase became the motto of the whole phenomenological movement. It expresses an aversion to empty speculation and high-flying abstract theory and an insistence on attending carefully to what is actually given.

At the time "psychologism", the view that even the laws of logic are in the end psychological processes in people's heads, was gaining ground. Husserl attacked it in the first volume of the Logical Investigations. That two plus two is four holds no matter who calculates it or in what mood, so the validity of logic cannot be reduced to psychology. What Husserl wanted was philosophy as a "rigorous science" that starts from evidence directly experienced, free of the preconceptions and existential assumptions built into the natural sciences.

What is intentionality?

Phenomenology starts from "intentionality", taken over from Brentano: consciousness is always consciousness of something. To fear is to fear something; to wish is to wish for something. There is no consciousness of "fear in general" without an object. Hoping, doubting, regretting and affirming are each directed at an object in their own way.

This sounds trivial, but it opened a new way into a problem philosophy had long wrestled with: having split the world into a subject "inside" and an object "outside", how does the subject reach the object? Phenomenology starts from the fact that consciousness is open to the world from the outset. Husserl analysed this structure into the act of consciousness (noesis) and its meaning-content (noema).

What are the epoché and the reduction?

The phenomenologist suspends the everyday "natural attitude". Normally we live in the belief that the world simply exists independently of us. Husserl proposed neither denying nor affirming this belief but first putting it "in brackets". This is the epoché, Greek for "holding back judgement". German accounts sum it up as "bracketing the being of the world". With emotional preconceptions, theoretical assumptions and inherited knowledge all suspended, one looks only at how the object is given to consciousness.

For instance, without deciding whether the scene before me is a dream or reality, I can still describe how it appears. The next step is the intuition of essences. One varies the object freely in imagination and looks for what never changes. Scarlet and wine-red are different shades, yet both are red; what remains common through all the variations is the essence. In 1913, in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Husserl formulated this method as a form of "transcendental idealism", and some students who had read the Logical Investigations as realism turned away from him.

How did Heidegger change phenomenology?

Martin Heidegger, Husserl's assistant, took over his teacher's method but turned it sharply. He objected that describing human beings within the epoché leaves out precisely what makes them human: their "existence". Instead of bracketing belief in the world, he set out to analyse how human beings exist, already living within the world.

In Being and Time (1927), dedicated to Husserl, Heidegger defined the phenomenon as "that which shows itself in itself" and concluded that "ontology is possible only as phenomenology". Where Husserl asked how objects are given, Heidegger asked about the meaning of Being itself. The central concept of that analysis is treated in the entry on Dasein.

How did it continue in France?

In France in the 1930s and 1940s phenomenology became the root of existentialism. In Being and Nothingness (1943) Jean-Paul Sartre distinguished the "being-in-itself" of things that simply are from the "being-for-itself" of human beings, who make themselves through their relation to nothingness, and vividly described freedom of choice and the "look" of the Other.

In the Phenomenology of Perception Maurice Merleau-Ponty put the body at the centre of philosophy. Before we think the world with our heads, we are engaged with it through our bodies: a body that knows how to ride a bicycle knows it even if it cannot put it into words. He tried to overcome the old dichotomies of mind and body, subject and object. Emmanuel Levinas built an ethics starting from the face of the Other. Michel Foucault was strongly influenced in his early writings by phenomenology, above all by Heidegger. Around 1954 he studied phenomenology together with Marxism and psychoanalysis to build an anthropological model of "mental illness", though in his later genealogical writings he criticized phenomenology sharply.

How did it meet Marxism?

Phenomenology starts from consciousness and experience; Marxism starts from labour and social relations. Attempts to connect these apparently distant currents came from several directions.

Herbert Marcuse. Drawn by Being and Time, Marcuse went to Freiburg in 1928 to study with Husserl and Heidegger. Between 1928 and 1932 he pursued what has been called "Heideggerian" or "phenomenological Marxism", an attempt to give Marxism a concrete philosophical foundation amid the "crisis of Marxism" in which the expected revolution had not come. Jürgen Habermas called him the "first Heideggerian Marxist". But Heidegger's turn towards National Socialism and the publication in 1932 of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts coincided, and Marcuse parted from Heidegger that year. The details are in the entry on Dasein.

Trần Đức Thảo. Born in French Indochina, the Vietnamese philosopher went to France in 1936 and studied with Merleau-Ponty at the École Normale Supérieure. In Phénoménologie et matérialisme dialectique (1951) he argued that the defects of phenomenology's account of consciousness could only be remedied by the Marxist account of labour and society. He published articles against colonialism in Indochina in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's journal Les Temps modernes, which were read by Frantz Fanon and other anticolonialists. In 1951 he returned to Vietnam to work in support of the Communist Party. After criticizing the land reform of 1956, which had cost many lives, he was caught up in the Nhân Văn–Giai Phẩm affair, in which dissident intellectuals were publicly criticized, and left his post in 1958. His work was cited favourably by Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Louis Althusser.

Karel Kosík. In Dialectics of the Concrete (1963) the Czech Marxist philosopher Karel Kosík offered an original reinterpretation of Marx in the light of Heidegger's phenomenology. He was influenced by Hegel, Marx and Heidegger alike. His concept of the "pseudo-concrete" (pseudokonkret) was later borrowed by the German social pedagogue Hans Thiersch to analyse the everyday lifeworld. The book made him internationally known as a leading philosopher of humanist Marxism. During the Prague Spring of 1968 he spoke for democratic socialism; in 1970 he was dismissed from the university and expelled from the Communist Party.

Merab Mamardashvili. The Georgian Soviet philosopher Merab Mamardashvili regarded consciousness as the ultimate subject of philosophy and studied, among other things, the role of consciousness in social being. He coined the phrase "phenomenology is the accompanying feature of all of philosophy".

Jan Patočka. Patočka was not a Marxist, but he shows where phenomenology stood in the Eastern bloc. From 1933 he studied with Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg, and in 1936 habilitated with The Natural World as a Philosophical Problem, the first systematic phenomenological study in Czech. Driven out of the university under the communist regime, he returned briefly during the Prague Spring but was forcibly retired in 1972. In 1977 he became a spokesman of Charter 77 with Václav Havel and others, was repeatedly interrogated by the secret police, and died on 13 March 1977.

How did Habermas and sociology take it up?

Sociology took up phenomenology through Alfred Schütz, who brought Husserl's concept of the lifeworld into sociology to analyse the world of everyday life and common sense, leading later to approaches such as ethnomethodology. Jürgen Habermas shared Husserl's critique of the "objectivism" with which science takes itself to mirror objective facts, but warned against falling into another objectivism that loses sight of the interests that guide knowledge. He rewrote the concept of the lifeworld as the background of communication rather than of an isolated consciousness. This line is followed in the entries on the lifeworld and the theory of communicative action.

What limits have been pointed out?

Doubts arose within phenomenology too. Eugen Fink, the interpreter Husserl himself authorized, declared at a colloquium in Brussels in 1951 that Husserl's method was not as free of presuppositions as claimed: ideas about appearance, being and objects come before the method. How the contents of consciousness can still have meaning once all existence has been bracketed is an old difficulty as well.

From the Marxist side the problem lay elsewhere. However precisely the structures of consciousness are described, the description remains abstract if it leaves out the class, the labour and the historical society in which that consciousness exists. Thảo's attempt to remedy phenomenology's defects with labour and Marcuse's conclusion that Heidegger's "concreteness" was false both bear on this point. Conversely, phenomenologists held that Marxism misses individual experience and freedom. Sartre's later explicit attempt to blend existentialism with Marxism was an effort to bridge this gap.