Phenomenology
Returning "to the things themselves": describing lived experience as it gives itself to consciousness.
1900 – …
Inaugurated by at the turn of the twentieth century, phenomenology was born of a precise battle: against psychologism, which reduced the laws of logic to mere facts of our mind, and against naturalism, which treats consciousness as one object in the world among others. Husserl forged a method of rigorous description, extended and then bent by his heirs, whose divergence is the school's very history: , his assistant, turned it into an analytic of existence ( Being and Time, 1927); shifted it toward perception and the body ( Phenomenology of Perception, 1945); drew from it an ontology of freedom. Out of this lineage came , and its influence later ran through much of French thought, from hermeneutics to deconstruction. What the school shares lies less in a doctrine than in a demand: to return "to the things themselves" as they give themselves.
Philosophy must first describe faithfully experience as it gives itself in the first person, rather than explain it from outside as one fact among facts.
All consciousness is consciousness of something: the meaning of the world does not lie ready-made in nature, it is constituted in the subject's intentional relation to what appears to it.
I do not own a body like an object, I am a living body: it is through it, not above it, that the world appears to me.
Justification
Husserlian phenomenology means to be a rigorous science, able to ground knowledge against psychologism and skeptical relativism. Its gesture is the : suspending the naive thesis of the world in order to return to the things themselves, as they give themselves to consciousness. There lie apodictic data, indubitable because grasped without intermediary in intuitive self-evidence, the bedrock of a certain knowledge. This quest for an absolute foundation brings Husserl close to a Cartesian-inspired foundationalism, even if his heirs, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, will abandon that ideal of apodicticity.
Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science · Husserl, Cartesian Meditations
2 more
Justification
Phenomenology refuses the empiricism / rationalism alternative: against the sensualism that reduces the mind to impressions, and against deductive rationalism, it returns to the intuition of what gives itself. The brings out the essential structures of experience, grasped in an intuition of essences (Wesensschau) that is both a priori and grounded in lived experience. Hence a third-way position, close to criticism.
Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology, I · Husserl, Logical Investigations
Justification
The fulcrum is intentionality, taken over from : all consciousness is consciousness of something, never a content sealed upon itself. It follows that the object cannot be severed from the act that aims at it: meaning and objectivity are not brute facts deposited in nature but are constituted in that relation. The target is objectivist naturalism, which takes the world for an in-itself independent of all consciousness and forgets that it has itself posited it. Husserl thus shows that scientific idealities are rooted in the lifeworld (Lebenswelt), forgotten as their ground; Merleau-Ponty recalls that science is a second-order expression of the perceived world. The stance leans toward constructivism, without sliding into relativism.
Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) · Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), preface
Justification
Every causal explanation already presupposes a world that appears to someone: science itself operates on phenomena given to a consciousness it forgets. From this observation the phenomenologists draw an order of priority: one must first describe faithfully how things give themselves to lived experience, before seeking their cause. The method, against common sense, requires the , the bracketing of our spontaneous theses about the existence of objects, so as to retain only their mode of appearing. This is why Heidegger questions being from the entity that we are, and Merleau-Ponty makes lived perception, not the physiological fact, the first ground of philosophy.
We want to go back to the things themselves.Logical Investigations, II
Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (1913) · Husserl, Cartesian Meditations (1931) · Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945), preface
Justification
The description of perception reveals what Cartesian dualism conceals: I never experience my body as an extended object set before a consciousness, but as the lived body from which a world is ordered, with an up and a down, a near and a far. My body is not in space, it is my anchorage in space: perspective, sidedness and touch prove that every point of view on the world is first a bodily position. Hence the refutation of 's disembodied subject: there is no thought that would own a body as an instrument, but an embodied subject for whom perceiving and inhabiting the world are one and the same.
Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception; Husserl, Ideas II
Justification
With Heidegger, phenomenology makes death a structure of existence: Dasein is being-toward-death, and it is by resolutely anticipating its ownmost, insuperable and non-shareable end that it tears itself from the idle talk of the "they" and authentically takes hold of itself. Death is not a distant event but what, here and now, individualizes existence and gives it its weight.
Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 46-53
2 more
Justification
Phenomenology holds meaning to be constituted, not found ready-made in things: through intentionality, consciousness gives significance to the world, and Heidegger's Dasein is the being for whom its own being is in question. The meaning of existence is neither inscribed in a cosmic order nor purely absurd: it is won in the way each takes up and unfolds its relation to the world.
Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences · Heidegger, Being and Time
Justification
Against the naturalism that ranks consciousness among determined processes, phenomenology restores a free subject, an intentional activity that gives meaning to the world and is not reduced to it. Husserl sets the mind against the causality of nature; his heirs, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, radicalize this motif into an embodied, situated freedom. The movement therefore leans clearly toward freedom, against psychophysical determinism.
Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences · Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
1 more
Justification
Against reducing affects to merely subjective, irrational states, the phenomenological tradition grants them a cognitive reach: moods open a distinctive access to the world. Heidegger makes attunement (Stimmung) a fundamental mode through which Dasein finds itself always already disclosed to its world, anxiety revealing its very being; Sartre analyzes emotion as a meaningful way of apprehending the world, not a mere disturbance. Affect is thus held to be disclosive, without thereby making feeling the foundation of morality.
Heidegger, Being and Time (1927), §29-30 · Sartre, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939)