Lecture 3: Phenomenology

Asub-disciplinewithin philosophyanda movement in the history of philosophy.

As a discipline,it studies

  • structures ofconsciousexperience
  • “phenomena”: how things appear in our experience
  • conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view.

As a historical movement,it isthe philosophical tradition begun in the first half of the 20th century by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre (and others)

  • they treatedthe discipline of phenomenology as the foundation for all philosophy
  • our experience = more than just sensation,so phenomenology also addresses the meaning things show up as having in our experience
  • they studied the structure of various types of experience
  • perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, volition,as well as bodily awareness, embodied action, social/linguistic activity
  • this structure typically involves “intentionality” = directedness of experience toward things in the world
  • thatconsciousness = consciousness of/about something.
  • our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc.
  • these make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean (the object)

The basic form of intentionality: subject-act-content-object.

The intentional structure of consciousnessinvolves further forms of experience.

  • temporal awareness (within the stream of consciousness),
  • spatial awareness (notably in perception),
  • attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or “horizonal” awareness),
  • awareness of one’s own experience (self-consciousness, in one sense),
  • self-awareness (awareness-of-oneself),
  • the self in different roles (as thinking, acting, etc.),
  • embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one’s movement),
  • purpose or intention in action (more or less explicit)
  • awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectivity),
  • linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication, understanding others),
  • social interaction (including collective action),
  • everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a particular culture).

Also various grounds or enabling conditionsof intentionality:

  • embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background, contextual aspects of intentional activities.

Conscious experiences also have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them.

This experiential or first-person feature—that of being experienced—is taken to be an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience

Three methods

(1)pure description of lived experience.

(2)interpreting a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context

(3)analyzing the form of a type of experience

What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness of the experience while living through or performing it – this is what gives experience its first-person, lived character.

Conscious experience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena.

Phenomenology, then, is the study of things as they appear (phenomena).

It is also often said to be descriptive rather than explanatory – vs. giving causal or evolutionary explanations, as in the natural sciences.

FranzBrentano (1838 - 1917)

The discipline of psychology only emerged late in the 19th century

In Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena are what occur in the mind:

  • mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their contents)
  • physical phenomena are objects of external perception

Physical phenomena exist “intentionally” in acts of consciousness

  • descriptive psychology vs.genetic psychology:
  • genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena
  • descriptive psychology defines and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including perception, judgment, emotion, etc.
  • intentional directedness:every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and only mental phenomena are so directed.

In 1889 Brentano used the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology

Edmund Husserl (1859 - 1938)

Phenomenology as we now know it was launched by Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900–01).

Origins in a combination of psychology and logical/semantic theory

  • Psychology – Brentano,and also William James (Principles of Psychology, 1891)
  • Logical or semantic theory – Bernard Bolzano,Gottlob Frege, etc.

Inspired by Bolzano’s ideal of logic, while at the same time taking up Brentano’s conception of descriptive psychology.

In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano

  • distinguished between subjective and objective ideas/representations (Vorstellungen)
  • criticized Kant (and empiricists/rationalists) for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby treating phenomena as merely subjective

For Bolzano,

  • Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences.
  • Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time.

Husserl wanted both, combined in a single discipline.

Following Bolzano, he opposed psychologism– the reduction of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology

For Husserl, phenomenology studies consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective accidents

In his Logical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl outlined a complex system of philosophy, moving from

  • logic
  • to philosophy of language,
  • to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes),
  • to a phenomenological theory of intentionality,
  • to a phenomenological theory of knowledge.

Then in Ideas I (1913) he focused on phenomenology itself.

He defined phenomenology as “the science of the essence of consciousness”, centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly “in the first person”.

Husserl’s transcendental turn

He took on the Kantian conception of “transcendental idealism”:

  • looking for conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness generally
  • (arguably) turning away from any reality beyond phenomena

Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across the square:

  • bracketing the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree, and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience
  • thistree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the experience.

[noesis and noema, from the Greek verb noéō (νοέω), meaning to perceive, think, intend, whence the noun nous or mind]

Phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness.

Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness + correlated phenomena.

The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis, while its ideal content is called noema.

The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as “the object as intended”.

Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears = the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended.

Various interpretations of Husserl’s theory of noema:

  • is the noema an aspect of the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?
  • develops a kind of theory of meaning, in that it describes and analyzes objective contents of consciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions – ideal meanings (that serve as intentional contents) of various types of experience
  • these contents can be shared by different (acts of different) consciousnesses

The Phenomenological Reduction

In ordinary waking experience we take it for granted that the world around us exists independently of both us and our consciousness of it.

  • We share an implicit belief in the independent existence of the world
  • This belief permeates and informs our everyday experience
  • Husserl refers to this positing of the world and entities within it as things which transcend our experience of them as "the natural attitude"

In The Idea of Phenomenology, Husserl introduces what he there refers to as "the epistemological reduction," according to which we are asked to supply this positing of a transcendent world with "an index of indifference".

In Ideas I, this becomes the "phenomenological epoché":

  • "We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being".

all judgements that posit the independent existence of the world or worldly entities, and all judgements that presuppose such judgements, are to be bracketed

Husserl claims that all of the empirical sciences posit the independent existence of the world, so the claims of the sciences must be "put out of play"

This epoché is the most important part of the phenomenological reduction

The reduction reveals to us the primary subject matter of phenomenology—the world as given and the givenness of the world; both objects and acts of consciousness.

Motivations for the view that phenomenology must operate within the confines of the phenomenological reduction:

  • Epistemological modesty. The subject matter of phenomenology is not held hostage to skepticism about the reality of the "external" world.
  • Allows the phenomenologist to offer a phenomenological analysis of the natural attitude itself.
  • Purity of phenomenological description; the implicit belief in the independent existence of the world will affect what we are likely to accept as an accurate description of the ways in which worldly things are given in experience

The reduction, in part, enables the phenomenologist to go "back to the things/cases themselves", meaning back to the ways that things are actually given in experience.

We must look beyond the prejudices of common-sense realism, and accept things as actually given.

It is in this context that Husserl presents his Principle of All Principles:

  • "every originarypresentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition,…to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there"

Eidetic Reduction

The results of phenomenology are supposed to be facts about the essential natures of phenomena and their modes of givenness.

  • How is this aspiration to be realized given that the method of phenomenology is descriptive, consisting in the careful description of experience?
  • Doesn't this, necessarily, limit phenomenological results to facts about particular individuals' experience?

The Husserlian answer to this difficulty: the phenomenologist must perform a second reduction called "eidetic" reduction (because it involves a kind of vivid, imagistic intuition).

The purpose of this is to bracket any considerations concerning the contingent and accidental, and concentrate on (intuit) the essential natures or essences of the objects and acts of consciousness.

This intuition of essences proceeds via what Husserl calls "free variation in imagination."

We imagine variations on an object and ask, "What holds up amid such free variations of an original […] as the invariant, the necessary, universal form, the essential form, without which something of that kind […] would be altogether inconceivable?"

…if it is inconceivable that an object of kind K might lack feature F, then F is a part of the essence of K.

Eidetic intuition = an a priori method of gaining knowledge of necessities.

However, the result of the eidetic reduction is not just that we come to knowledge of essences, but that we come to intuitive knowledge of essences.

Essences show themselves to us (Wesensschau)–not to sensory intuition, but to categorial or eidetic intuition.

Husserl's methods are perhaps not so different from those of conceptual analysis: imaginative thought experiments (Dan Zahavi).

Opponents of the transcendental turn

Adolf Reinach, an early student of Husserl’s (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology should remain allied with a realist ontology, as in Husserl’s Logical Investigations.

Roman Ingarden, a Polish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistance to Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism.

For such philosophers, phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the method of epoché would suggest. And they were not alone.

Addendum

Phenomenology and analytical philosophy

DagfinnFøllesdal and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations between Husserl’s phenomenology and Frege’s logical semantics (in Frege’s “On Sense and Reference”, 1892).

For Frege, an expression refers to an object by way of a sense: thus, two expressions (say, “the morning star” and “the evening star”) may refer to the same object (Venus) but express different senses with different manners of presentation.

For Husserl, similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refers to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: thus, two experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example, in seeing the same object from different sides).

Indeed, for Husserl, the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.

Phenomenology and formal ontology

Husserlian methodology brackets the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of the world. Yet Husserl’s phenomenology presupposesa theory about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations of part and whole, and ideal meanings—all parts of [formal?] ontology.

Phenomenology and ethics

Husserl largely avoided ethics in his major works. However, an explicitly phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emannuel Levinas. Levinas focused on the significance of the “face” of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology. See also K.E. Løgstrup – phenomenological/ontological, like Heidegger

Phenomenology and social theory

Husserl analyzed the phenomenological structure of the life-world and Geist generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed social practice. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued the phenomenological appraisal of the meaning of the other, the fundamental social formation.

Phenomenology and cognitive science/consciousness studies

Thomas Nagel argued in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974) that consciousness itself—especially the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of experience—escapes physical theory – vs. functionalism

Since the late 1980s, and especially the late 1990s, a variety of writers working in philosophy of mind have focused on the fundamental character of consciousness – ultimately a phenomenological issue.

Recommended reading, listed in order of difficulty:

English-language (also IEP and SEP; IEP better for ‘continental’ philosophy):

INTERMEDIATE:

R.Sokolowski,Introduction to Phenomenology, Cambridge University Press, 2000

ADVANCED:

D. Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology, Routledge, 2000

Polish-language:

ELEMENTARY:

M. Waligóra, Wstęp do fenomenologii, Universitas, 2014

INTERMEDIATE:

R.Sokolowski,Wprowadzenie do fenomenologii, WAM, 2012

1