PHENOMENOLOGY.

Phenomenology is the study of experience, how things appear to us. The word comes from the Greek but was elaborated in the early nineteenth century on the basis of Immanuel Kant's conception of the world as phenomenon, the world of our experience (as opposed to the world as noumenon, the world as it is "in itself"). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously employed the term in Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Spirit ), suggesting that all knowledge was a matter of appearance with no world "in itself" other than the one we know. But phenomenology came of age with Edmund Husserl, who turned the Hegelian perspective into a rigorous philosophical method. Husserl in turn gave birth to a number of remarkable students, who together would set the tone for much of European philosophy in the twentieth century. Among them are Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Edmund Husserl

As a movement and a method, as a "first philosophy," phenomenology owes its life to Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), a German-Czech (Moravian) philosopher who started out as a mathematician in the late nineteenth century and wrote a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891; The Philosophy of Arithmetic ). His view was that there was a strict empiricism, but on being shown (by the great German logician Gottlob Frege) that such an analysis could not possibly succeed, Husserl shifted his ground and started to defend the idea that the truths of arithmetic had a kind of necessity that could not be accounted for by empiricism. Thus, one of the main themes of his next book, Logische Untersuchungen (1913, 1921; The Logical Investigations ), was a protracted argument against "psychologism," the thesis that truth is dependent on the human mind. Rather, Husserl argues that necessary truths are not reducible to our psychology. Phenomenology was Husserl's continuing and continuously revised effort to develop a method for grounding necessary truth.

Given Husserl's beginnings in the rigorous field of mathematics, one must appreciate the temperament that he brought to his new discipline. By the end of the nineteenth century, a new perspectivism (or some would say a relativism) had come into philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular, had argued that all knowledge is perspectival and that philosophy could not be reduced to a single perspective, that philosophy might be relative to a people, or to our particular species, or even to individual psychology. Husserl's contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey defended a milder but similar thesis, and the "sociology of knowledge" was just beginning its ascension. Against any such relativism, Husserl insisted on philosophy as a singular, rigorous science, and his phenomenology was to provide the key.

It is often debated whether phenomenology is a philosophy or a method, but it is both. As a "first philosophy," without presuppositions, it lays the basis for all further philosophical and scientific investigations. Husserl defines phenomenology as the scientific study of the essential structures of consciousness. By describing those structures, Husserl promises us, we can find certainty, which philosophy has always sought. To do that, Husserl describes a method—or rather, a series of continuously revised methods—for taking up a peculiarly phenomenological standpoint, "bracketing out" everything that is not essential, thereby understanding the basic rules or constitutive processes through which consciousness does its work of knowing the world.

The central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology is the thesis that consciousness is intentional, a doctrine that is borrowed from Franz Brentano. That is, every act of consciousness is directed at some object or other, perhaps a material object, perhaps an "ideal" object—as in mathematics. Thus, the phenomenologist can distinguish and describe the nature of the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects of consciousness, which are defined through the content of consciousness. It is important to note that one can describe the content of consciousness and, accordingly, the object of consciousness without any particular commitment to the actuality or existence of that object. Thus, one can describe the content of a dream in much the same terms that one describes the view from a window or a scene from a novel.

In Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931), Husserl distinguishes between the natural standpoint and the phenomenological standpoint. The former is our ordinary everyday viewpoint and the ordinary stance of the natural sciences, describing things and states-of-affairs. The latter is the special viewpoint achieved by the phenomenologist as he or she focuses not on things but on our consciousness of things. (This is sometimes confused by the fact that Husserl insists that the phenomenologist pay attention to "the things themselves," by which he means the phenomena, or our conscious ideas of things, not natural objects.) One arrives at the phenomenological standpoint by way of a series of phenomenological "reductions," which eliminate certain aspects of our experience from consideration. Husserl formulates several of these, and their nature shifts throughout his career, but two of them deserve special mention. The first and best-known is the epoché or "suspension" that he describes in Ideas, in which the phenomenologist "brackets" all questions of truth or reality and simply describes the contents of consciousness. (The word is borrowed from both the early Skeptics and René Descartes.) The second reduction (or set of reductions) eliminates the merely empirical content of consciousness and focuses instead on the essential features, the meanings of consciousness. Thus Husserl (like Kant) defends a notion of "intuition" that differs from and is more specialized than the ordinary notion of "experience." We have intuitions that are eidetic, meaning that we recognize meanings and necessary truths in them, and not merely the contingent things of the natural world.

In his early work, including Ideas, Husserl defends a strong realist position—that is, the things that are perceived by consciousness are assumed to be not only objects of consciousness but also the things themselves. A decade or so later, Husserl made a shift in his emphasis from the intentionality of the objects to the nature of consciousness as such. His phenomenology became increasingly and self-consciously Cartesian, as his philosophy moved to the study of the ego and its essential structures. In 1931 Husserl was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, and on the basis of those lectures published his Cartesianische Meditationen (1938; Cartesian Meditations, 1960). (The Paris Lectures were also published some years later.) He argues there that "the monadically concrete ego includes the whole of actual and potential conscious life" and "the phenomenology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology as a whole (including objects)" (Cartesian Meditations, 68, para. 33). These statements suggest the strong idealist tendency in his later philosophy.

As in the 1930s, Husserl again reinvented phenomenology, this time with a shift toward the practical, or what some might call the more "existential" dimension of human knowledge. Warning of a "crisis" in European civilization based on rampant relativism and irrationalism (an alarm that the logical positivists were raising about the same time in Vienna), Husserl published his Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften (1937; Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology ). In Crisis, the focus turned to the "lifeworld" and the nature of social existence, topics that played little role in his earlier investigations of the philosophy of arithmetic and the nature of individual consciousness but would come to play a much greater role in the "existential" phenomenology that would follow. But it is much to Husserl's credit that he continued to see the inadequacies of his own method and correct them, in ever-new efforts to get phenomenology right.

Martin Heidegger

Martin Heidegger (1889–1971) was a student of Husserl. Before that, he was a theology student, interested in much more concrete matters of human existence than his teacher, and his questions concerned how to live and how to live "authentically"—that is, with integrity, in a complex and confusing world. His use of phenomenology was subservient to this quest, although the quest itself soon transcended the phenomenological method. Heidegger's phenomenology is most evident in his first (and greatest) book, Sein und Zeit (1927; English trans. Being and Time, 1962). Like his teacher Husserl, Heidegger insists that philosophical investigation begin without presuppositions. But Husserl, he says, still embraced Descartes's basic picture of the world, assuming that consciousness, or "the mind," was the arena in which phenomenological investigation took place. Such a philosophy could not possibly be presuppositionless. So Heidegger abandons the language of mind, consciousness, experience, and the like, but nevertheless pursues phenomenology with a new openness, a new receptivity, and a sense of oneness with the world.

Heidegger's early work is defined by two themes: first, Heidegger displays a profound anti-Cartesianism, an uncompromising holism that rejects any dualism regarding mind and body, any distinction between subject and object, and the linguistic separation of "consciousness," "experience," and "mind." This also demands a reconsideration of the Cartesian thesis that our primary relationship to the world is one of knowledge. Second, Heidegger's early philosophy is largely a search for authenticity, or what might better be described as "own-ness" (Eigentlichkeit ), which we can understand, with some qualification, as personal integrity. This search for authenticity will carry us into the now familiar but ever-renewed questions about the nature of the self and the meaning of human existence.

To ensure that we do not fall into Cartesian language, Heidegger suggests a new term (the first of many). Dasein (literally, "being-there") is the name of this being from whose perspective the world is being described. Dasein is not a consciousness or a mind, nor is it a person. It is not distinguished from the world of which it is aware. It is inseparable from that world. Dasein is, simply, "Being-in-the-World," which Heidegger insists is a "unitary phenomenon" (not being the world). Thus, phenomenology becomes ontology (the nature of being) as well.

Being-in-the-World is not primarily a process of being conscious or knowing about the world. Science is not the primary concern of Dasein. Dasein 's immediate relation to the world is better captured in the image of the craftsman, who "knows his stuff," to be sure, but might not be able to explain it to you nor even know how to show it to you. What he can do—what he does do—is engage in his craft. He shows you that he knows how to do this and that by simply doing it. This knowing how is prior, Heidegger tells us, to knowing that. In effect, our world is essentially one extended craft shop, a world of "equipment" in which we carry out various tasks and only sometimes—often when something goes wrong—stop to reflect on what we are doing and look at our tools as objects, as things. They are, first of all, just tools and material to be used, and in that sense we take them for granted, relying on them without noticing them. Our concept of "things" and our knowledge of them is secondary and derivative.

Thus the notion of Dasein does not allow for the dualism of mind and body or the distinction between subject and object. All such distinctions presuppose the language of "consciousness." But Heidegger defends an uncompromising holism in which the self cannot be, as it was for Descartes, "a thinking thing," distinct from any bodily existence. But, then, what is the self? It is, at first, merely the roles that other people cast for me, as their son, their daughter, their student, their sullen playmate, their clever friend. That self, the Das Man self, is a social construction. There is nothing authentic, nothing that is my own, about it. The authentic self, by contrast, is discovered in profound moments of unique self-recognition—notably, when one faces one's own death. And so Heidegger's phenomenology opens up the profoundly personal arena of existentialist phenomenology.

Max Scheler and Emmanuel Lévinas

Max Scheler (1874–1928) was also a student of Husserl, but he, too, took phenomenology in a different direction, toward ethics (which had been ignored by both Husserl and Heidegger). Scheler was an intense man whose considerable contribution to philosophy was the introduction of emotion into the overly formal Kantian conception of ethics that still ruled the Continent. In Wesen und Formen der Sympathy ( 1913; English trans. The Nature of Sympathy, 1954), he resurrected moral sentiment theory and gave a central place in ethics to such emotions as love and hate. He argued that emotions have been understood by philosophers as merely "subjective" and argued a "cognitive" view, such that emotions could be construed as a source of knowledge. There is even, he argued, an emotional a priori, a universal and necessary status to the emotions that philosophers had neglected.

Scheler summed up the theme of the unfolding century between the wars in his book, Ressentiment (1961), in which he develops Nietzsche's accusation that modern morality is a "slave morality," a morality of resentment. But where Nietzsche blames Christianity, Scheler (a Catholic) exonerates his religion and shifts the blame instead to the bourgeoisie. Scheler's phenomenology, unlike Husserl's, was primarily concerned with value and, in particular, the source of values in feelings. What was becoming evident in phenomenology—and in European philosophy more generally—was a loosening up, a rejection of formality, an acceptance and an attempt to understand the less rational aspects of human existence. Worth mentioning here as well is Emmanuel Lévinas (1906–1995), who also elaborated a phenomenological ethics based on our felt relations with other people. "The face" is the focus of Lévinas's phenomenology. It is an interpersonal phenomenology rather than an Ego-or Dasein-based phenomenology, and interpersonal ethics, including love, plays a central role in it.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) attended Husserl's lectures at the Sorbonne, and he became an enthusiast of phenomenology. He was first of all concerned with the nature of human freedom and the correlative sense of responsibility. Sartre's phenomenology is largely modeled on Heidegger's work, but in his L'être et le néant (1943; English trans. Being and Nothingness, 1956) he retreats from Heidegger's attack on the Cartesian view of consciousness, Sartre argues that consciousness (described as "being-for-itself") is such that it is an activity, not a thing or substance ("no-thing"), and it is always to be distinguished from the world it intends. Consciousness is free to choose and free to "negate" (or reject) the given features of the world. Thus, Heidegger's "being-in-the world" phenomenon gives way to a conflicted portrait of human consciousness resisting and challenging the world.

As in Husserl, consciousness is essentially intentionality, but for Sartre it is nothing but intentionality, an activity directed at the world. Consciousness is active, essentially critical, and consists not just of perception, thoughts, and ideas but as much of desires, wishes, emotions, moods, impulses, and imaginings, negating the world as it is. Sartre celebrates our remarkable freedom to imagine the world other than it is. Our perceptions of the world, he argues, are always permeated by imagination, so that we are always aware of options and alternatives. Furthermore, there is no self or ego behind consciousness, no agent behind the activity. Thus, Sartre distinguishes consciousness from the self, and self, he insists, is "in the world, like the self of another [person]." The self is an ongoing project in the world.

Sartre defines his ontology in terms of the opposition of "being-in-itself" and "being-for-itself," manifested in the tension between the fact that we always find ourselves in a particular situation defined by a body of facts that we may not have chosen—our "facticity"—and our ability to transcend that facticity, to imagine, and choose—our transcendence. He tells us that consciousness "is what it is not, and is not what it is"—a playful paradox that refers to the fact that we are always in the process of "transcending" ourselves. He also defines a third ontological category, "being-for-others," which makes our lives with other people an essential part of our existence.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

After the war, Sartre's younger colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) convinced him that he should modify his "absolute" insistence on freedom in his later works, although his insistence on freedom and responsibility remains. Merleau-Ponty went on to develop his own radical revision of the phenomenology of freedom and the essentially embodied nature of human consciousness. Following Sartre, Merleau-Ponty expanded the role of the body in phenomenology. Accordingly, Husserl's intentionality becomes motility, and instead of dis-embodied perception we have the body's orientation to the world. It is a radical move, and phenomenology could not quite keep up with it. So when phenomenology was replaced in French thinking, by the new wave of poststructuralism, the body retained its now privileged position but phenomenology moved to the margins. It is still practiced by diehard Husserlians and Sartreans, and it has become a valuable tool—one among many—for researchers on all sorts of psychological topics, but as an exclusive approach to philosophy, a "first philosophy," it is now for the most part simply a part of history.

See also Continental Philosophy ; Existentialism ; Kantianism ; Structuralism and Poststructuralism .

bibliography

Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Edited by Oskar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. Translated by Antos C. Raucella et al. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1973.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962.

Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964.

——. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Translated by W. R. Boyce-Gibson. London: Macmillan, 1931.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values. 5th rev. ed. Translated by Manfred S. Frings and Roger L. Funk. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973.

——. The Nature of Sympathy. Translated by Peter Heath. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954.

Solomon, Robert C. From Hegel to Existentialism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

——. From Rationalism to Existentialism: The Existentialists and Their Nineteenth-Century Backgrounds. New York: Harper and Row, 1972.

Robert C. Solomon