phenomenology

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A phenomenon is that which appears. In the political and philosophical senses of phenomenology, the basic concept therefore is ‘the study of appearances (as unspokenly opposed to reality)’. The term was popularized by Hegel's title The Phenomenology of Spirit and later, with a different meaning, by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). For Husserl, phenomena can be studied only subjectively, not objectively—thus phenomenology is a close cousin of existentialism (see Sartre). Some psychologists borrowed the term to mean ‘as naïve and full a description of direct experience as possible’, and applied it to the perception of sensations of such things as colour and motion.

phenomenology, a philosophical movement based on the investigation of ‘phenomena’ (i.e. things as apprehended by consciousness) rather than on the existence of anything outside of human consciousness. Phenomenology was founded in the early years of the 20th century by the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, who hoped to return philosophy to concrete experience and to reveal the essential structures of consciousness. In an amended form, Husserl's phenomenology was developed by his student Martin Heidegger, and became an important influence on existentialism and the modern tradition of hermeneutics. Its impact on literary studies is most evident in the work of the Geneva school on authors' characteristic modes of awareness; but other kinds of phenomenological criticism—such as that of the Polish theorist Roman Ingarden—place more emphasis on the reader's consciousness of literary works. In this sense, phenomenology has prepared the ground for reception theory. For a more extended account, consult Robert R. Magliola, Phenomenology and Literature (1977).

A method of philosophical enquiry developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), modified by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and reinterpreted in France by, among others, Marcel, Ricœur and, notably, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

Phenomenology investigates the ground and constitution of meaning. It involves an intuitive and reflective scrutiny of the sense-giving acts of consciousness prior to their conceptual elaboration, and a description of phenomena in the various modes in which they are present to consciousness. The complementary relationship of consciousness and its objects implies that things are as they appear to us: being and appearing coincide. Phenomenology argues against the view that there are hidden ‘things-in-themselves’ which lie beyond phenomena; it attempts to transcend the opposition between the idealist reduction of the world to the knowledge we have of it and the realist postulate that the external world exists independently of the activity of the mind. The emphasis is upon the ‘intentionality’ of consciousness: i.e., the fact that consciousness is always consciousness of something, is directed towards its objects in acts not only of perception and cognition, identification and synthesis, but also of willing, desiring, imagining, etc. The goal of Husserl's investigation, to be sharply differentiated from that of traditional psychology, was to elucidate, through an ‘eidetic reduction’, the essential structures of our acts of consciousness. A necessary prior step was to eliminate, following the example of Descartes, all presuppositions and prejudices, whether philosophical, scientific, or naïve, concerning the world and our knowledge of it. A more radical and controversial aspect of Husserl's method involved a reinterpretation of the cogito whereby belief in and judgements concerning the factual existence of phenomena are suspended, thus revealing, as the only certainty to survive this ‘phenomenological reduction’, the activity of the ‘transcendental Ego’ as the absolute source of knowledge.

This apparent return to idealism was called into question by Heidegger and by the phenomenologists of the French school. Heidegger reflected not upon ‘pure’ consciousness but upon man's ‘being-in-the-world’ and upon human existence in terms of its temporality and historicity; he described such categories of experience as anxiety and authenticity, and his ultimate aim, in an ambitious move towards ontology, was to elucidate the meaning of Being itself. Sartre argued against Husserl that the Ego is a secondary construct, an object for consciousness rather than a subject within consciousness (La Transcendance de l'Ego, 1936-7); for Merleau-Ponty the inherence in the world of the embodied subject is the primordial and irreducible experience (Phénoménologie de la perception, 1945).

However, the French existential phenomenologists drew selectively upon the theories of both Husserl and Heidegger [see Existentialism]. In his early works Sartre explored the structures of emotion and imagination. For him our emotions are ways of ‘intending’ the world as hateful, hostile, or sympathetic: we unreflectively experience our emotions as though they were objective qualities of the world (Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, 1939). The act of imagining, in that it exemplifies our freedom and our ability to envisage what is not the case, is the paradigm of consciousness in its powers of projection, negation, and sense-giving detachment from the real (L'Imaginaire, 1940). In L'Être et le néant (1943) the translucent activity of consciousness or being-for-itself creates a meaningful world against the undifferentiated, opaque background of being-in-itself. Merleau-Ponty, while convinced that Husserl's ‘reductions’ fail to capture the richness of concrete phenomena, was impressed by the apparent primacy of the ‘life-world’ in his later thought. Implicitly critical of Sartre's dualistic ontology and of his apparent insistence on the translucency of consciousness, Merleau-Ponty argued that the body is the subject of pre-reflective intentionality, perception, and action. The body-subject and the world are complementary, the world offering a store of potential meanings which may be realized by the intentional acts of embodied consciousness.

Among those acts are those of the artist and the writer. Hence the close affinity between phenomenology and the ‘worlds’ revealed in art and literature, made visible in Sartre's creative writing, in Merleau-Ponty's reflections on painting, and in the literary criticism of, for instance, Georges Poulet and Jean-Pierre Richard. For them the latent patterns of meaning of those imaginary worlds lie beneath their superficial structure at a pre-conceptual level of sensation, image, and spatial and temporal configuration: it is the task of the critic to make those patterns manifest. [See also Ricœur.

[Rhiannon Goldthorpe]

Bibliography

• H. Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 3rd edn. (1982)
• M. Hammond, J. Howarth, and R. Keat, Understanding Phenomenology (1991)

A term that emerged in the 18th century, in the writings of Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728-77) and Kant, to denote the description of consciousness and experience in abstraction from consideration of its intentional content (see intentionality). In Hegel, phenomenology is instead the historical enquiry into the evolution of self-consciousness, developing from elementary sense experience to fully rational, free, thought processes capable of yielding knowledge. The term in the 20th century is associated with the work and school of Husserl. Following Brentano, Husserl realized that intentionality was the distinctive mark of consciousness, and saw in it a concept capable of overcoming traditional mind-body dualism. The study of consciousness, therefore, maintains two sides: a conscious experience can be regarded as an element in a stream of consciousness, but also as a representative of one aspect or ‘profile’ of an object. In spite of Husserl's rejection of dualism, his belief that there is a subject-matter remaining after epochē or bracketing of the content of experience, associates him with the priority accorded to elementary experiences in the parallel doctrine of phenomenalism, and phenomenology has partly suffered from the eclipse of that approach to problems of experience and reality. However, later phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty do full justice to the world involving nature of experience. In a different usage, the phenomenology of a subject (such as religion) is the study of what it means to pursue a particular form of life, regardless of whether anything that is said in following it out is true or false.

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A set of theoretical approaches that attempt to understand the way in which people experience the world they create and inhabit; the study of human experience and consciousness in everyday life. The starting point is the idea of ‘being’ in the world, that is being situated in a physical and social space. Writing in the early 20th century, Edmund Husserl believed he could create a presuppositionless analysis of human experience, but this was challenged by Martin Heidegger who maintained that any observer was situated within the world being observed.

A philosophical approach that concentrates on the detailed description of conscious experiences. Supporters of this approach do not deny objective reality, but emphasize the importance of each person's unique subjective experience of events on the way he or she reacts to the events.

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A term used in philosophy to denote enquiry into one's conscious and particularly intellectual processes, any preconceptions about external causes and consequences being excluded. It is a method of investigation into the mind that is associated with the name of Edmund Husserl, as it was he who did most to develop it, although when Husserl's system appeared on the philosophical scene, the word already had a long history and had undergone a conspicuous semantic evolution.

The first use of it goes back to Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–77), a disciple of Christian Wolff (1679–1754). Lambert published in 1764 a treatise on epistemology dealing with the problem of truth and illusion, under the rather pedantic title of Neues Organon oder Gedanken über die Erforschung des Wahren und der Unterscheidung von Irrtum und Schein (New Organon, or Thoughts on the Search for Truth and the Distinction between Error and Appearance), in the fourth part of which he outlines a theory of illusion that he calls 'phenomenology or theory of appearance'. Although he belongs to a period in the history of philosophy in which the question of the intuition of essences had not yet been raised, his implicit definition of phenomenology, taken literally, does not sound odd to the post-Husserlian reader, except that to him, Lambert, an appearance (or phenomenon) is necessarily an illusion. More important, Lambert was acquainted with Kant, and Kant in 1770 was writing to him about the need for a 'general phenomenology' which he conceived as a preparatory step to the metaphysical analysis of natural science. According to Spiegelberg (1960), what Kant called phenomenology was in fact synonymous with his idea of the critique of pure reason, though nothing allows us to suppose that he specifically used the term forged by Lambert to qualify phenomena as antithetic to noumena or things in themselves.

It is, however, with Hegel's Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of the Mind), published in 1807, that the term is used explicitly for the first time to label a philosophical work of fundamental importance. A significant step in its evolution from Lambert to Hegel may be found in J. G. Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre (Theory of Science), in which its role is to establish the origin of phenomena as they exist for consciousness; and in Hegel's elaborate system, its basic task is primarily historical since it aims at discovering the successive steps of realization of self-consciousness from elementary individual sensations up to the stage of absolute knowledge through dialectic processes.

The few authors worth mentioning who dealt with phenomenological problems between Hegel and Husserl are William Hamilton (1788–1856), who in fact equates phenomenology with psychology as opposed to logic, Eduard von Hartmann (1842–1906), whose studies on religious, ethical, and aesthetic consciousness were greatly inspired by Hegel's phenomenology, and, to some extent, Charles Sanders Peirce, though his work on the classification of phenomena belongs more to metaphysics than to an actual phenomenology of subjective experience. Except in the case of Hegel, phenomenology was not a major field of reflection until Husserl's monumental work.

Since Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is discussed in some detail in the entry under his name, it will suffice here to underline its distinctive features. In contrast with pre-existing philosophies, it is no mere, closed, abstract construct that theoretically allows the philosopher to pronounce on the conditions of principles of experience; it is rather an endless attempt to stick to the reality of experienced phenomena in order to exhibit their universal character. In order to succeed in the endeavour, Husserl has to discard the classic dualistic view, according to which the knowing subject reaches the world only through representation — a position typical of rationalistic and idealistic systems. Hence he refers, after Brentano, to the intentional character of consciousness, and condemns psychologism (the theory that psychology is the foundation of philosophy) in view of the contradiction it brings about: that the supposedly universal laws of logic and mathematics would be dependent on the concrete functioning of psychological mechanisms.

The Husserlian standpoint is thus a radical one, since it aims at 'going back to the things themselves' by claiming that there is no reason to suppose that phenomenon and being are not identical. In other words, the noema (object content) and the noesis (knowing act) are directly related by the intentionality of consciousness, so that every phenomenon is intuitively present to the subject. However, phenomena, as they are grasped by the subject, are always given under a particular profile. No object whatsoever is given in its totality as a simultaneous exhaustible whole, but every profile conveys its essence under the form of meaning for consciousness. In order to reach the essence of any object, one is bound to proceed to unceasing variations around the object as thematic reality, i.e. to discover the essence through the multiplicity of possible profiles. This procedure applies to all phenomena, ranging from current perceptual experience to the highly intricate constructs characterizing the various fields of knowledge, such as physics and psychology.

Every phenomenon belongs to a regional ontology by virtue of its essence, as revealed by the so-called eidetic intuition, the essence (eidos) being the sum of all possible profiles. In the course of this process, consciousness operates as a constitutive moment, i.e. its activity in grasping the essence of phenomena is, perforce, part of the process of their emergence. Thus Husserl overcomes the classic dualism of subject and object. Reaching the universal essence of an object through eidetic intuition, i.e. discovering the basic structure implied by its very existence, is a process which Husserl calls eidetic reduction. This being granted, the next step consists in referring phenomena to subjectivity without falling back into psychologism, since the empirical subject, as referred to psychology's own regional ontology (or Descartes' res cogitans), belongs to a realm of contingent being, which cannot furnish by itself the necessary foundation for the organization of the absolute principles governing universal essences. Husserl is therefore bound to exclude belief in the natural world as the ultimate reference of all our intentional acts. This process is termed phenomenological reduction. It presupposes, in Husserl's terms, a provisional 'bracketing' (Einklammerung) of the natural and a description or explication of our intentional acts as referred to pure noematic structures. The final accomplishment of this process is the transcendental reduction, by which the fundamental conditions of every possible meaningful intentional relation must be elucidated. This is the core of Husserl's theory of transcendental subjectivity or transcendental ego.

Thus Husserl's phenomenology reconsidered the philosophical problem of consciousness in a radical fashion and contributed thereby to the placing of psychology — and the human sciences in general — within a new epistemological framework. Criticism of the one-sidedness of both empiricist and idealistic standpoints could be developed so that the shortcomings of dualistic views, with all their derivatives such as mechanicism, parallelism, and phenomenalism, became more apparent. As a fundamental theory of phenomena ranging from perception to creative thinking, it has provided a firm starting point for the integration of concepts of the subject at different levels: hence phenomenologically inspired hypotheses such as those that guided F. J. J. Buytendijk and V. von Weiszäcker in anthropological physiology. The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's analyses of the experienced body (1942) and perception (1945) were phenomenological works that contributed to the transforming of the classical standpoints in psychology.

(Published 1987)

— Georges Thinès

Bibliography
• Farber, M. (1943). The Foundations of Phenomenology.
• Kockelmans, J. J. (1967). Edmund Husserl's Phenomenological Psychology: A Historico-critical Study.
• Misiak, H., and Sexton, V. S. (1973). Phenomenological, Existential and Humanistic Psychologies.
• Spiegelberg, H. (1960). The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 2 vols.
• Strasser, S. (1963). Phenomenology and the Human Sciences.
• Thinès, G. (1977). Phenomenology and the Science of Behaviour.

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a branch of a science dealing with the description and classification of natural phenomena rather than with their explanation or cause.
—phenomenological adj.

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For a list of words related to phenomenology, see:

• Schools, Doctrines, and Movements - phenomenology: science of describing and analyzing classes of phenomena and consciousness (20th c.)

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - fænomenologi

Nederlands (Dutch)
fenomenologie

Français (French)
n. - phénoménologie

Deutsch (German)
n. - Phänomenologie

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - φαινομενολογία

Italiano (Italian)
fenomenologia

Português (Portuguese)
n. - fenomenologia (f)

Русский (Russian)
феноменология

Español (Spanish)
n. - fenomenología

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - fenomenologi

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
现象学

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 現象學

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 현상학

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 現象学

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) ظاهري, محسوسي‏

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n. - ‮חקר התופעות (פילוסופיה), חקר ההכרה ומושאים של חוויה ישירה (פילוסופיה)‬

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