Phenomenology

Use of the word phenomenology in modern science is described in the separate article phenomenology (science).

Phenomenology is a current in philosophy that takes intuitive experience of phenomena (what presents itself to us in conscious experience) as its starting point and tries to extract 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 Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Phenomenological thought influenced the development of existential phenomenology and existentialism in France, as is clear from the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and Munich phenomenology (Johannes Daubert, Adolf Reinach) in Germany.

Contents

1 Historical overview of the use of the term 2 Husserl and the origin of Phenomenology 3 Heidegger's "phenomenology" and differences with Husserl 4 See also 5 External links

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.

• Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (German pietist) for the study of the "divine system of relations"
• Johann Heinrich Lambert (mathematician, physician and philosopher) for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.
• Immanuel Kant used it in a similar vein.
• Hegel used it in his Phänomenologie des Geistes.
• Brentano seems to have used it in some of his lectures at Vienna.
• Edmund Husserl 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 used to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
• Max Scheler developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. As a curiosity, he influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II.

Later usage is mostly based on or (critically) related to Husserl's introduction and use of the term. It should be noted that 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 took over from Brentano was intentionality, the notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional. While often summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of mental phenomena. Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has a content, is directed at an object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that it is about: the believed, the wanted. The property of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to distinguish psychical phenomena (minds) and physical phenomena (objects), because physical phenomena lack intentionality altogether.

Some years after the publication of his main work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations; first edition, 1900-1901), Husserl made some key discoveries that 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 act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)
• "noematic" refers to the object (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 practise to the study of the noemata and the relations among them.

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. Therefore, instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or foundational discipline, he took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy". 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".

(NB: Heidegger's quotes taken from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1954), published by Indiana University Press, 1975. Introduction, p. 1 - 23 reproduced at www.marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/heidegge.htm).)

See also

• Important publications in phenomenology

External links

• What is Phenomenology? (http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/phenom.htm)
• About Phenomenology (http://www.connect.net/ron/phenom.html)
• About Edmund Husserl (http://www.husserlpage.com/)
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/)de:Phänomenologie

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