Phenomenology
from 1900
Describe what appears, exactly as it appears, before deciding what is really there — and find that experience is always experience of something.
- Active
- from 1900
- Where
- Göttingen, Freiburg and Paris
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Modern European
The claim
Intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something. And the epoché — bracketing the question of whether what appears exists — so that the structure of appearing can be described without prejudging it.
What it held
Husserl's target was psychologism, the view that logical laws are laws of how people happen to think. If that were so, logic would be an empirical generalisation and could have been otherwise, which he showed leads to absurdity.
What he put in its place is a method. Suspend the natural attitude — the everyday assumption that things exist independently — not to deny it but to set it aside, and describe what is given and how. The result is that experience turns out to be structured: an object is always given from a side, against a horizon, with more implied than is present.
Heidegger, his assistant, then broke with the programme by arguing that the detached describing consciousness is itself an abstraction. We are always already in a world, using things, caring about outcomes; the hammer is encountered in hammering and only becomes an object with properties when it breaks.
Merleau-Ponty took this into the body, arguing that perception is not a mind interpreting sensations but a body already at home in a world it can move through.
How it argued
Careful description of experience with existence claims bracketed, plus eidetic variation — imagining a thing altered until it stops being what it is, to find what is essential to it.
What it was arguing against
Psychologism about logic, naturalism about consciousness, and the assumption that the natural sciences give the complete account of what there is.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the epoché is possible or whether we are too involved to bracket anything, which is Heidegger's objection and Merleau-Ponty's. Whether Husserl's later transcendental turn was a mistake.
Common misconceptions
That it is introspection. Phenomenology describes the structure of experience rather than reporting inner episodes, and Husserl thought introspective psychology was part of the problem.
How it began
A mathematician who studied under Brentano, took up the problem of what mathematical objects are, and found he needed an account of how anything is given to consciousness at all.
What became of it
Living, and one of the most productive research programmes in philosophy, with active work in mind, medicine, race and gender.
Lasting influence
Existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction and much of continental philosophy descend from it. Cognitive science has taken up enactivism, which is Merleau-Ponty with laboratories.
Why it still matters
Phenomenology of illness, of disability and of racialised experience is producing some of the best current work, and clinicians use it.
Put another way
A hammer, which is invisible while you are hammering and becomes an object the moment it breaks.
Where to start
Merleau-Ponty's preface to the Phenomenology of Perception. It explains what the method is for better than any of them.
The surprising bit
Husserl left around 45,000 pages of shorthand manuscripts. A Belgian priest smuggled them out of Nazi Germany in 1938 to save them, and they are still being edited.
In their own words
We must return to the things themselves.
The world is not what I think, but what I live through.
Connections
- Answers
- Neo-Kantianism, Lebensphilosophie
- Opposed by
- Vienna Circle, Neo-Kantianism
The verdict
A method that outgrew its founder within a decade and has not stopped producing since.