History of Phenomenology

1) What is Phenomenology?

The study of the structure of various types of experience, such as perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, and so on, is known as phenomenology. Phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness, spatial awareness, attention, awareness of one’s own experience, self-awareness, the self in various roles, embodied action, purpose or intention in action, awareness of others, linguistic activity, social interaction, and everyday activity in our surrounding world.

Initially, phenomenology can be defined as the study of experience structures or consciousness. Phenomenology is literally the study of “phenomena”: the appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, and thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology is the study of conscious experience as experienced from a subjective or first-person perspective. This branch of philosophy is then distinguished from and related to the other major branches of philosophy, which include ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong action), and so on.

The phenomenological historical movement is the philosophical tradition founded in the first half of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others. In that movement, phenomenology was regarded as the proper foundation of all philosophy, as opposed to, say, ethics, metaphysics, or epistemology. Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century.

2) Aristotle’s Position:

Phenomenology is not the study of nature; it is the study of spirit or mind that experiences nature or itself. Aristotle explicitly discussed the way human consciousness becomes aware of something in works such as De Anima, Metaphysics, Topics, Categories, and Prior and Posterior Analytics. Aristotle discussed human consciousness by focusing on concepts such as substance, essence, accident, property, form, categories of Being, causes, active and passive intellect, and sense perception.

Aristotle defines knowledge as knowing the causes and principles that can explain the existence of something. These include, for example, the existence of a connection between an attribute and a substance, the cause of the connection between an attribute and a substance, the existence of a specific thing, and the cause of its existence, as depicted in his Posterior Analytics.

According to Aristotle, a similar substance, notwithstanding its changing ways of being, retains its identity, and can exist in different modalities. Aristotle very strictly maintains that by identity he means that the same thing, nominated by a name, cannot differ from itself. Intentionality has a special significance in Aristotle’s philosophy; it appears as a bridge between an object and its awareness.

Whether explicitly or implicitly, the development of phenomenological philosophy through its key figures—Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others—has sought to measure itself, its distance and proximity, in relation to Aristotle’s thinking. This presence of Aristotle and Aristotelianism within phenomenological thought has taken various forms, with different thematic orientations (the body, time, language, metaphysics, etc.) and modes of engagement.

3) Brentano’s Position:

Brentano was heavily influenced by Aristotle and the Scholastics, as well as the early nineteenth-century empiricist and positivist movements. On the one hand, because of his introspectionist approach to describing consciousness in the first person, and his rigorous style, as well as his contention that philosophy should be done with exact methods like the natural sciences, Brentano is often considered a forerunner of both the phenomenological movement and the tradition of analytic philosophy.

According to Brentano, the central concern of philosophy is to understand the nature and content of awareness in ways that illuminate the distinction between the mental and the nonmental. Brentano proposed in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874) that every mental act be understood to have a doubly significant representational function, designating both itself reflectively and a phenomenal object intentionally.

Indeed, for Brentano, the distinction between acts and their objects precisely defines the crucial distinction, because “intentionality is the mark of the mental.” Mental acts of various modalities—believing, imagining, etc.—can all be used to intend the same phenomenal object. Thus, Brentano held that, while each intentional act is subjective in and of itself, its intention is an objective thing or a fact.

In The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong (1889), Brentano used a similar set of distinctions in moral theory. Although our emotional attitudes toward human behaviour are entirely subjective, the specific human actions they intend are objective features of the world that can sometimes carry self-evident value in the same way that other correct judgments do.

Brentano distinguished between descriptive and genetic psychology. Whereas genetic psychology seeks the causes of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines and categorizes these phenomena, which include perception, judgement, emotion, and so on. Brentano claims that every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object, and that only mental phenomena are so directed. Brentano’s descriptive psychology was defined by this thesis of intentional directedness. Brentano coined the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology in 1889, paving the way for Husserl’s new science of phenomenology.

4) Husserl’s Contribution:

This pair of terms, derived from the Greek nous (mind), designate respectively the real content, noesis, and the ideal content, noema, of an intentional act in Husserl’s phenomenology, which is quite common (an act of consciousness). The noesis is the part of the act that gives it a specific sense or character (for example, judging or perceiving something, loving or hating it, accepting or rejecting it). The noesis is always correlated with a noema; for Husserl, the full noema is a complex ideal structure comprising at least a noematic sense and a noematic core.

Husserl was more concerned with the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. To eliminate any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction. The only thing that remained was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego.

For Husserl, phenomenology combines a type of psychology with a type of logic. It advances descriptive or analytic psychology by describing and analyzing various types of subjective mental activity or experience, or, in other words, acts of consciousness. However, it develops a type of logic—a theory of meaning (what we now call logical semantics)—in that it describes and analyses objective contents of consciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or noematic meanings, of various types of experience.

These contents can be shared by various acts of consciousness, and thus they are objective, ideal meaning. Husserl was opposed to any reduction of logic, mathematics, or science to mere psychology, or how people happen to think, and he distinguished phenomenology from mere psychology in the same way. Phenomenology, according to Husserl, would investigate consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. The engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness would be ideal meaning.

5) Heidegger’s Contribution:

Philosophers following Husserl argued about the proper characterization of phenomenology, disputing its results and methods. For such philosophers, phenomenology should not be used to dismiss questions of being or ontology, as the epoch method would suggest. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl’s early writings and developed his own phenomenological ideas. Heidegger unfurled his phenomenology in Being and Time (1927). Because our being, according to Heidegger, is being-in-the-world, we do not study our activities by defining the world, but rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking at our contextual relations to things in the world. Phenomenology, according to Heidegger, resolves into “fundamental ontology.” We must distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case by investigating our own existence in the activity of “Dasein.”

Husserl’s neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us, resisted Heidegger. Heidegger, on the other hand, believed that our more fundamental ways of relating to things are in practical activities such as hammering, where phenomenology reveals our situation in the context of equipment and being-with-others.

From Aristotle to many other thinkers, Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being into phenomenological issues. The ultimate source of our understanding of beings and their being is phenomenology. The connection to classical issues of ontology is more obvious here, and it is consistent with Husserl’s vision in the Logical Investigations.

Heidegger’s concept of the “ground” of being, which looked to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us, was one of his most innovative ideas. Heidegger questioned contemporary technological concerns, and his writing may imply that our scientific theories are historical artefacts that we use in technological practice rather than systems of ideal truth, contrary to what Husserl believed.

6) Sartre’s Contribution:

The practice of phenomenology, according to Sartre, begins with a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre’s method is, in effect, a literary style of interpretive description of various types of experience in relevant situations—a practice that does not really fit either Husserl’s or Heidegger’s methodological proposals, but makes use of Sartre’s great literary skill.

Sartre’s phenomenology in Being and Nothingness served as the philosophical foundation for his popular existentialism, which he sketched in his famous lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945). Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice in Being and Nothingness, particularly the project of choosing one’s self, the defining pattern of one’s past actions. Sartre laid the groundwork for the concept of the Other’s contemporary political significance by vividly describing the “look” of the Other (as in other groups or ethnicities). Indeed, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong companion, launched contemporary feminism with her nuanced account of women’s perceived role as Other in The Second Sex (1949).

7) Merleau-Ponty’s Contribution:

Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology in Phenomenology of Perception (1945), emphasizing the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to experimental psychology, analysing amputees’ reported experiences with phantom limb sensations.

Merleau-Ponty rejected both associationist psychology, which was concerned with correlations between sensation and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, which was concerned with rational construction of the world in the mind. Instead, Merleau-Ponty concentrated on “body image,” or our perception of our own body and its role in our activities. Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body by expanding Husserl’s account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body). For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm.

The breadth of Merlau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception reflects the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because he drew generously on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of the body, the body in sexual being and speech, other selves, temporality, and the freedom character so important in French existentialism. In a nutshell, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and the body is similarly infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).