Phenomenology

Essential features and variations

Although, as seen from Husserl’s last perspective, all departures from his own views could appear only as heresies, a more generous assessment will show that all those who consider themselves phenomenologists subscribe, for instance, to his watchword, zu den Sachen selbst (“to the things themselves”), by which they meant the taking of a fresh approach to concretely experienced phenomena—an approach as free as possible from conceptual presuppositions—and the attempt to describe them as faithfully as possible. Moreover, most adherents to phenomenology hold that it is possible to obtain insights into the essential structures and the essential relationships of these phenomena on the basis of a careful study of concrete examples supplied by experience or imagination and by a systematic variation of these examples in the imagination. Some phenomenologists also stress the need for studying the ways in which the phenomena appear in object-directed, or “intentional,” consciousness.

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Beyond this merely static aspect of appearance, some also want to investigate its genetic aspect, exploring, for instance, how the phenomenon intended—for example, a book—shapes (“constitutes”) itself in the typical unfolding of experience. Husserl himself believed that such studies require a previous suspension of belief (“epochē”) in the reality of these phenomena, whereas others consider it not indispensable but helpful. Finally, in existential phenomenology, the meanings of certain phenomena (such as anxiety) are explored by a special interpretive (“hermeneutic”) phenomenology, the methodology of which needs further clarification.

Contrasts with related movements

It may also be helpful to bring out the distinctive essence of phenomenology by comparing it with some of its philosophical neighbours. In contrast to positivism and to traditional empiricism, from which Husserl’s teacher at Vienna, Franz Brentano, had started and with which phenomenology shares an unconditional respect for the positive data of experience (“We are the true positivists,” Husserl claimed in his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie [1913; “Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy”]), phenomenology does not restrict these data to the range of sense experience but admits on equal terms such nonsensory (“categorial”) data as relations and values, as long as they present themselves intuitively. Consequently, phenomenology does not reject universals, and, in addition to analytic a priori statements, whose predicates are logically contained in the subjects and the truth of which is independent of experience (e.g., “All material bodies have extension”), and the synthetic a posteriori statements, whose subjects do not logically imply the predicate and the truth of which is dependent on experience (e.g., “My shirt is red”), it recognizes knowledge of the synthetic a priori, a proposition whose subject does not logically imply the predicate but one in which the truth is independent of experience (e.g., “Every colour is extended”), based on insight into essential relationships within the empirically given.

In contrast to phenomenalism, a position in the theory of knowledge (epistemology) with which it is often confused, phenomenology—which is not primarily an epistemological theory—accepts neither the rigid division between appearance and reality nor the narrower view that phenomena are all that there is (sensations or permanent possibilities of sensations). These are questions on which phenomenology as such keeps an open mind—pointing out, however, that phenomenalism overlooks the complexities of the intentional structure of consciousness of the phenomena.

In contrast to a rationalism that stresses conceptual reasoning at the expense of experience, phenomenology insists on the intuitive foundation and verification of concepts and especially of all a priori claims; in this sense it is a philosophy from “below,” not from “above.”

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In contrast to some strains of analytic philosophy that substitute simplified constructions for the immediately given in all of its complexity and apply “Ockham’s razor,” phenomenology resists all transforming reinterpretations of the given, analyzing it for what it is in itself and on its own terms.

Phenomenology shares with ordinary-language philosophy a respect for the distinctions between the phenomena reflected in the shades of meaning of ordinary language as a possible starting point for phenomenological analyses. Phenomenologists, however, do not think that the study of ordinary language is a sufficient basis for studying the phenomena, because ordinary language cannot and need not completely reveal the complexity of phenomena.

In contrast to an existential philosophy that believes that human existence is unfit for phenomenological analysis and description, because it tries to objectify the unobjectifiable, phenomenology holds that it can and must deal with these phenomena, however cautiously, as well as other intricate phenomena outside human existence.