Phenomenology is the philosophical study of observed phenomena. Phenomenology is a philosophical movement originating in the 20th century, the objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions. Phenomenology is a broad discipline and method of inquiry in philosophy, developed largely by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, which is based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events called phenomena, as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness, and not of anything independent of human consciousness.
Phenomenology is a philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. The task of phenomenological sociology, like that of every other phenomenological investigation in phenomenology, is to account for, the formal structures of this object of investigation in terms of subjectivity.
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as
experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an
experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is
an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an
object by virtue of its content or meaning which represents the object, together
with appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is
distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as
ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in
various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century
in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others.
Phenomenology is understood in either of two ways: as a disciplinary field in
philosophy. The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the
study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is
the study of “phenomena”: appearances of things, or things as they appear in our
experience, or the ways we experience things. Phenomenology studies conscious
experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the
philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund
Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre. In that
movement, the discipline of phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of
all philosophy, as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The
term “phenomenology” is often restricted to the characterization of sensory
qualities of seeing, hearing, and so on: what it is like to have sensations of
various kinds. However, our experience is normally much richer in content than
mere sensation. In the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is given a much
wider range, addressing the meaning things have in our experience, notably, the
significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others,
as these things arise and are experienced in our life-world.
Phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from
perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to
bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic
activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what
Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward
things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of
or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our
experience is directed toward, represents or intends, things only through
particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, and so on. These make up the
meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they
present or mean.
Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world. Classical phenomenologists practiced some three distinguishable methods.
(1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our own experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure description of lived experience.
(2) We interpret a type of experience by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in context, especially social and linguistic context.
(3) We analyze the form of a type of experience. In the
end, all the classical phenomenologists practiced analysis of experience,
factoring out notable features for further elaboration.
Conscious
experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but experience shades off
into less overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others stressed, we are
only vaguely aware of things in the margin or periphery of attention, and we are
only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us.
Moreover, as Heidegger stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or
hammering a nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious
of our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have
stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but
may become conscious in the process of therapy or interrogation, as we come to
realize how we feel or think about something. We should allow, then, that the
domain of phenomenology—our own experience—spreads out from conscious experience
into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant
background conditions implicitly invoked in our experience.
To begin an
elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some typical experiences one
might have in everyday life, characterized in the first person:
I hear that
helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the school.
I walk carefully
around the broken glass strewn around.
Each sentence is a simple form of
phenomenological description, articulating in everyday English the structure of
the type of experience so described. The subject term “I” indicates the
first-person structure of the experience: the intentionality proceeds from the
subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity described:
perception, thought, and imagination. Of central importance is the way that
objects of awareness are presented or intended in our experiences, especially,
the way we see or conceive or think about objects.
The Oxford English
Dictionary presents the following definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of
phenomena as distinct from being (ontology). b. That division of any science
which describes and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek phainomenon,
appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid debates of
theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of science, the term is used
in the second sense, albeit only occasionally.
Originally, in the 18th
century, “phenomenology” meant the theory of appearances fundamental to
empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The Latin term
“Phenomenologia” was introduced by Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736.
Subsequently, the German term “Phänomenologia” was used by Johann Heinrich
Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally
in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel
wrote a book titled Phänomenologie des Geistes (usually translated as
Phenomenology of Spirit). By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize
what he called “descriptive psychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the
term for his new science of consciousness.