PHENOMENOLOGY

From the Greek φαινόμενον and λόγος, the setting forth or articulation of what shows itself. [For an etymological derivation and exposition of the term, see M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York 1962).] The word was first used in the 18th century by J. H. Lambert (1728–77), then by I. Kant; finally it became a fundamental notion in the celebrated work of G. W. F. hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Würzburg 1807). In the 20th century the term was revived and given fresh meaning by E. husserl, and it is from his work that contemporary usage derives its basic connotation.

Intentionality. Guided by the doctrine of the intentionality of consciousness, which he had acquired from his teacher F. brentano, Husserl was led to repudiate and criticize his own earlier views on the nature of knowledge. In the Logische Untersuchungen (2 v. Halle 1900–01), he laid bare the logical inconsistency in psychologism, the prevalent view that the laws of thought and the nature of thinking were attained by inductive generalization from the observation or introspection of one's mental states. Thus, J. S. mill held that the principle of contradiction was a generalization from the fact that belief and disbelief were two different "mental states" excluding one another. Husserl showed that such formulations not only could never attain the certainty and specific character of logical laws, but that they disastrously confused the act of thinking and the object of thought, so that what one thought was conceived as a content of the mind (and as subject to its laws) just as much as the thinking itself. In opposition to this, he argued that what presents itself to consciousness—what one judges, imagines, and remembers—is not an element or ingredient of the stream of conscious acts (judging, imagining, remembering, etc.) but transcends them in some way, as evidenced by the fact that one can return to the same thought indefinitely many times. To speak of consciousness as intentional is to refer to this essential characteristic of all conscious experiences, their intrinsic reference to an object that is not a real element of the experience. All consciousness is consciousness of something beyond it, something presented to it but not contained in it (i.e., the mind is not a container).

This doctrine of the intentional structure of consciousness is the cornerstone of phenomenology, but it is only the cornerstone. The influence and importance of phenomenology lie not in the recovery of this notion, but in its twofold analysis: one toward the ontological ground of this structure (and from this emerges contemporary existentialism) and the other toward the classification and clarification of the many different types of intentionality and intentional objects (perceptual, volitional, aesthetic, psychic, etc.).

Once the objectivity of the objects of consciousness is secured, Husserl lays out the foundations of phenomenology as a "prephilosophical" descriptive protoscience, whose concern will be with the systematic delineation and classification of (not the stream of consciousness, but) the fundamental types of intentional objects and, correspondingly, the intentional acts of the subject presenting them. If this can be done, one will have at hand the fundamental data on which all systematic knowledge is founded.

Phenomenological Method. Such an effort, to be successful, requires that the phenomena be described as they really give themselves, free from any cultural, philosophical, or ontological bias: it requires an ascetic neutrality in one's attitude toward the phenomena of one's awareness. To achieve this neutrality is the purpose of the reductions that are sketched in bk. 1 of the Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (Halle 1913); tr. W. B. Gibson, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (New York 1931). There is, first, the philosophical epoché, or bracketing, the setting aside of all philosophical presuppositions about reality, the world, man, the distinctions of primary and secondary qualities, the exterior and interior worlds, etc. The eidetic reduction focuses one's attention on the essential structures of what appears, so that one is dealing not with an empirical description, nor with a description of subsistent Platonic Forms, but with the sense or meaning of what appears. The phenomenological reduction crowns this process by bracketing the reality of the phenomena (whether psychical or physical) that one spontaneously and implicitly accepts as existing. To do this is not to deny or ignore their reality, but rather to focus on precisely what in their appearance or mode of appearing gives them the index of real.

At this point, one is at the center of the labyrinth of phenomenological method and presumably prepared to proceed with an absolutely pure (i.e., unbiased) description of the structures of conscious experience: its temporality, the acts by which various intentional objects are constituted or rendered present, and the various types of objects themselves—perceptual, imagined, etc. Husserl goes further and seems to contend that the intentional acts and objects of consciousness exist absolutely, whereas physical objects exist only for consciousness, being nothing more than the system of their concordant appearances. Although the word is not used in the Ideen, it seems that idealism is the direction of development here indicated. At least, this is the way in which many of Husserl's "first generation" of students read it and repudiated it, while accepting the phenomenological reduction (or the transcendental-phenomenological reduction, as it was later called) as a methodological device. To this first group belonged such eminent thinkers as Jean Hering, Alexander Koyré, and a notable group of later converts to Catholicism such as Dietrich von hildebrand, Max scheler, and Edith Stein.

Meaning and Experience. Some other characteristic elements of Husserl's phenomenology developed in the Ideen and later works are the following. First is the distinction between empty and filled meaning-intentions, corresponding roughly to the distinction between "I understand what you mean" and "I see that it is the case." The formulation of a hypothesis and its verification would exemplify this, but so also would the anticipation of how a melody now being heard will be resolved and

its actual heard resolution. The latter example is significant because the anticipation is not a hypothesis, nor is it conceptual, but it is part of the meaning of the unfinished melody in process.

Second is the affirmation that every object of awareness (perceptual, conceptual, etc.) is given in a horizon or field of other objects or meanings that contributes to its significance. Thus Husserl holds, as do the Gestaltists, that perception is not of the individual object but of a figure on a ground of some kind. Moreover, Husserl extends the notion of horizon to the implicitly anticipated perceptions that one could have of the object before him if, e.g., he walked around it. He calls this the internal horizon of the object and insists that the not-yet-given-butanticipated perceptions (the "protentions") are part of the meaning of the aspect of the object that is actually given to the perceiver. His view of perception, therefore, is not Humean in the sense that one is presented with naked sense data: there is a potential as well as an actual element in the objects of which man is perceptually aware. Moreover, the protentions are pre-predicative or pre-conceptual: they are not, as has been noted, hypotheses about what will come next. This reflects the phenomenological position that it is the appearing of the object that constitutes the phenomenon, not apparent objects about whose external status one has still to decide.

Third is the distinction between noesis and noema. Every conscious experience is, phenomenologically, extraordinarily complex. The fundamental composition is that of the intentional object, or noema, and the act of intending, or noesis: for example, that which one judges and the act of judging. Noesis and noema are correlative in the sense that every distinct kind of intentional object is rendered present to man's awareness by a distinct type of noetic act. Moreover, each intentional object is itself a synthetic unity of many distinct noematic aspects. Thus every noema, in addition to its fundamental sense or meaning, presents itself with the index of really existing, or being unreal (imagined, dreamt, etc.); with this or that aspect focused on by attention; with affective and volitional aspects (desirable, valued, sacred, etc.); and with a "doxic" character (possible, probable, problematic, doubtful, etc.). To each of these aspects of the full or complete noema corresponds a noetic element of consciousness (e.g., for the last series of doxic modalities: supposition, conjecture, question, and doubt).

Phenomenology and Idealism. In the later works of his middle period, Husserl's idealism grew more pronounced and more explicit. In the Cartesian Meditations (Paris 1931; tr. D. Cairns, The Hague 1960), phenomenology is described as a "transcendental idealism," and every dimension of conscious experience is said to fit into the schema "ego-cogito-cogitatum." Already in this work and increasingly in the 1930s, there are elements that resist subsumption into such idealism: the notions of history and the alter ego, of a time both constituted and constituting, of passive constitution and the genesis of meaning, and, perhaps most importantly, of the world as the passive pre-given ground of all intentional objects. Two posthumous works, Erfahrung und Urteil (ed. L. Landgrebe, Prague 1939) and the essays collected under the title of Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (v.6 of Husserliana, The Hague 1954), have a decidedly more realistic tone, and in their development of the notion of the Lebenswelt, or vital world of everyday life, served to lay out the frame of an ontological structure of consciousness as being-in-the-world.

It is as yet not possible to pass definitive judgment on the import of these late years for Husserl's own conception of phenomenology. What is clear is that it is primarily from the problems and orientation of this last period that the existential phenomenology of the 1940s and 1950s took its bearings. Among the themes of these writings, still only partially published, perhaps the most influential has been that of the Lebenswelt.

Lebenswelt. The Lebenswelt is the encompassing world of man's daily life, whose primordial structures tend to be lost sight of under a "clothing of ideas," basically the ideas or attitudes of the physical sciences. For example, there is, according to Husserl, a primordial experience of spatiality that is neither Euclidean nor Riemannian nor Lobachevskian, i.e., not geometrical at all. It is structured around such basic poles as near and far, home ground and away, etc. Its central foundation is the earth, not in the sense of the circling globe of Copernicus, but as the ground upon which all motion takes place and which itself neither moves nor is stationary. All concrete, perceived motion requires a ground against which the motion is given. True, one can think about the motion of particles in mechanics without reference to this ground, but to do so is precisely to abstract from one's concrete experience and to leave behind part of its essential structure. The abstraction may indeed be truly revealing of a dimension of the real world, but insofar as it is taken to be the fundamental world-picture on the basis of which one must account for the perceived world, it represents an inversion of viewpoint rooted in a forgetfulness of its origins.

It is this forgetfulness of its concrete origins that underlies the contemporary crisis of the sciences of the West, in Husserl's view. To overcome this crisis, what is needed is a reduction that recovers (or rather uncovers) the primordial levels of the experience of living-in-the-world. Only then will one be able to secure the foundations of scientific knowledge by seeing how it arises out of, and hence is rooted in, the Lebenswelt. It was to the phenomenological exploration and description of the Lebenswelt that most of Husserl's work in the 1930s was addressed, and it is in large part around this theme that the later development of phenomenology has crystallized. A good example of this is the Phenomenology of Perception, by M. merleau-ponty (Paris 1945; tr. C. Smith, New York 1962), which provides descriptive accounts of the basic structures of living-in-the-world: perception, the body, things, space, time, other persons, etc.

Existential Phenomenology. In spite of the continuity of theme and approach, however, there are fundamental criticisms of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology in the writings of these more recent philosophers, so much so that it is appropriate to distinguish a second major phase of the phenomenological movement as a whole, a phase that has been called existential phenomenology. Three of these fundamental differences may be noted: the status of reduction and constitution, the role of pre-predicative intentionalities, and the significance of the body.

Reduction and Constitution. The transcendental epoché had as its goal the reduction of all objects of consciousness whatsoever to the status of cogitata, i.e., intentional-theoretic objects of the transcendental ego, the absolutely disengaged observer. The obverse of the reduction is the "constitution" of the mundane objects from which one began: once one has "unpacked" all the implicit and explicit intentionalities that make up the meaning of the objects he experiences, he is in a position to see and say how these objects are constituted for himself, namely, by the thus delineated intentional acts of the transcendental ego. For a transcendental idealistic phenomenology, then, reduction and constitution are coextensive and exhaustive: every possible nonego element of conscious experience can be reduced and produced. For the existential phenomenologists, however, the reduction does not reveal a disengaged transcendental ego for whom all else can be rendered objective, but discovers a world whose reality coconstitutes the ego rather than being constituted for the ego. It discovers a radical and irreducible involvement of consciousness with the world. It discovers, in sum, an ontological structure of participation: being-in-the-world. (Merleau-Ponty attributes this discovery to Husserl, in the form of the distinction between the intentionality of the acts of the ego and an operative intentionality that others have called "exsistence.")

Pre-predicative Intentionality. For existential phenomenology, then, there is a gap between reduction and constitution. The world as the encompassing ground of all constituted objects is itself pre-given, pre-objective, and unconstituted. The genesis or constitution of the "true and exact" world of objective science is still a problem consequent upon the reduction to the pre-objective world of the Lebenswelt, but the latter is only to be described, not constituted or constructed. The fundamental structures of the Lebenswelt underlie and thus escape from what Husserl in his idealist period considered to be the all-encompassing matrix of meaning: the ego-cogito-cogitatum. There are perceptions of meaning (e.g., of sexuality, of other persons, of the world) that are not cogitationes envisaging cogitata.

Intentionality remains, for the existential phenomenologists, the "defining" characteristic of awareness, although it is not primarily the intentionality of ego related to object through its thetic or explicit acts, but the irreducibly pre-reflective intentionality of an ontological situation. The critical operative element in this ontological structure, that which effects the in-the-world dimension of the being of consciousness, is its incarnation.

Significance of the Body. Perhaps no difference between classical modern philosophy and phenomenology is more striking and at the same time more significant than that of the status of the body. From R. descartes on, the body has been an object for consciousness, bound to the ego in a unique way, no doubt, yet on the same footing with other objects in the world. This is still true for the early Husserl. For the existential phenomenologists, on the other hand, it is the lived body as a dimension of one's subjectivity that is the source of the (prereflective) intentionalities that structure the Lebenswelt.

Problems of Evaluation. The difficulty involved in making any final evaluation of Husserl's thought was mentioned, and it is perhaps clearer now why this is the case. It is simply not clear as yet (and may never be so) whether in his late years he abandoned the project of a transcendental idealism or whether the solidity of the Lebenswelt represented merely a temporary detour in the path of the transcendental reduction. In any case the phenomenological movement is beyond question the dominant philosophical current on the Continent. It seems to have laid to rest the epistemological problem of "inside" and "outside" worlds and to have at least blunted the conflict between science and philosophy by basing philosophy on the description of a pre-objective world of experience.

Causality. At the same time, a number of basic questions remain unanswered or answered unsatisfactorily. One of these is the relation of causality to intentionality. The phenomenologists tend to deny any causal relation between nature and consciousness: the physical world acts on consciousness only by "offering it a meaning"; by at most, then, a kind of solicitation. Although they have addressed themselves to such objections as, e.g., an aspirin eliminating a headache, there is as yet no general consensus on how to state the relation between the "lived body" and the "object-body." Yet the latter is clearly involved in causal interactions with nature.

Eternal Truths. A second problem is that of eternal truths. There are, according to Merleau-Ponty, for example, no absolute certainties or eternal truths about anything other than the ontological structures of being-in-the-world; and since these are not objects of consciousness but dimensions of its subjectivity, there are no eternal truths about things in the world. However, it appears that this position commits the same fallacy as did that of D. Hume; namely, it purports to state an eternally true rejection of eternal truths. (see truth.)

Metaphysics. A third problem, related to both the former, is the relation of phenomenology to metaphysics. Merleau-Ponty and J. P. sartre, among others, have leveled lethal criticisms at the pretensions of modern rationalism to pass from being-for-us to being-in-itself. The only meaning that being can have for man, according to them, is the meaning that it presents to him in his experience; in other words, it can have no consistent transphenomenal meaning. What is at issue here is the possibility of a metaphysics in general and of statements about a transcendent being in particular, but it seems that the challenge is to a metaphysics vitiated by a rationalistic univocity rather than to one recognizing that there is no common res significata that is realized imperfectly in the finite and perfectly in the infinite being. If one recognizes for certain terms, of which man grasps only a "phenomenal" meaning, that they are predicable of a transfinite being, without knowing precisely what they mean in Him, this seems to be sufficient both to establish the possibility of a metaphysics and to avoid this type of criticism.

Extent of Movement. In Germany, Husserl's former disciples have gone from describing the basic structures of Dasein, or human existence to focusing on the question of the meaning of being. The work of heidegger, in particular, has been an influential source for the transmission of the phenomenological problematic and method to theology, philosophy of religion, and psychology. Among Husserl's earlier students who did significant work in phenomenology, one may note the writings of Alexander Pfänder in logic and psychology, Adolf Reinach on essences and social philosophy, Moritz Geiger on aesthetics, Edith stein on psychology and social philosophy, as well as the relation between Thomism and phenomenology, Max scheler in ethics and religion, and Roman Ingarden in ontology and aesthetics.

In France, apart from the writings of former students such as Jean Hering in religion, Alexander Koyré in history of science, Gaston Berger, and Emmanuel Levinas, the major sources of phenomenological influence have been the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Paul ricoeur.

In the U.S., where phenomenological writings and interest in them have thus far been scant, the studies of Marvin Farber stood almost alone until the rise of Hitler brought a number of German phenomenologists to America. Men such as Alfred Schuetz, Felix Kaufmann, Fritz Kaufmann, Aron Gurwitsch, and Herbert Spiegelberg have had a definite influence on the growth of interest in phenomenology among American philosophers. The corresponding interest in existentialism and the increasing prominence of the phenomenological approach in theology, psychology, psychiatry, and the social sciences suggest that its present influence is likely to increase.

See Also: objectivity; subjectivity; consciousness.

Bibliography: h. spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2 v. (The Hague 1960). The Husserl Archives at Louvain are publishing a series of studies on or influenced by phenomenology, Phenomenologica (The Hague; 1958–). Recent translations of Husserl include The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (1904–10), ed. m. heidegger tr. j. churchill (Bloomington, Ind. 1964); The Idea of Phenomenology (from 1907), tr. w. alston and g. nakhnikian (The Hague 1964). A yearbook was founded by Husserl, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (Halle 1913–30); the American journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research was founded by m. farber in 1940 as its continuation. In France the collection Épiméthée directed by j. hyppolite has pub. several trs. of Husserl's works and studies of his thought, as well as original phenomenological studies. m. farber, The Foundations of Phenomenology (Cambridge, Mass. 1943). p. ricoeur, Philosophie de la volonté, 2 v. in 3 (Paris 1950–60). m. merleau-ponty, The Structure of Behavior, tr. a. l. fisher (Boston 1963).

[f. j. crosson]