Phenomenology
Phenomenology
Since the middle of the Eighteenth Century, “Phnomenologie,” like its English equivalent, has been a name for several disciplines, an expression for various concepts. Lambert, in his Neue Organon (1764), attached the name “Phnomenologie” to the theory of the appearances fundamental to all empirical knowledge. Kant adopted the word to express a similar though more restricted sense in his Metaphysische Anfangsgrnde der Naturwissenschaft (1786). On the other hand, in Hegel’s Phnomenologie des Geistes (1807) the same word expresses a radically different concept. A precise counterpart of Hegel’s title was employed by Hamilton to express yet another meaning. In “The Divisions of Philosophy” (Lectures on Metaphysics, 1858), after stating that “Philosophy properly so called” is “conversant about Mind,” he went on to say”If we consider the mind merely with the view of observing and generalizing the various phaenomena it reveals, . . . we have . . . one department of mental science, and this we may call the Phaenomenology of Mind.” Similarly Moritz Lazarus, in his Leben der Seele (1856-57), distinguished Phnomenologie from PsychologieThe former describes the phenomena of mental life; the latter seeks their causal explanation.
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was the first to apply the name “Phnomenologie” to a whole philosophy. His usage, moreover, has largely determined the senses commonly attached to it and cognate words in the Twentieth Century. In his Logische Untersuchungen (1900-01), Husserl gave the name to such investigations and theories as make up most of that work and of the only published volume of his Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891). This established what was to remain the primary denotation of the term in all his later writings. On the other hand — owing to changes in his concept of his unchanging theme — the explicit connotation of the term, as used by him, underwent development and differentiation.
In the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen phenomenology was defined (much as it had been by Hamilton and Lazarus) as descriptive analysis of subjective processes Erlebnisse. Thus its theme was unqualifiedly identified with what was commonly taken to be the central theme of psychology; the two disciplines were said to differ only in that psychology sets up causal or genetic laws to explain what phenomenology merely describes. Phenomenology was called “pure” so far as the phenomenologist distinguishes the subjective from the objective and refrains from looking into either the genesis of subjective phenomena or their relations to somatic and environmental circumstances. Husserl’s “Prolegomena zur reinen Logik” published as the first part of the Logische Untersuchungen, had elaborated the concept of pure logic, a theoretical science independent of empirical knowledge and having a distinctive themethe universal categorial forms exemplified in possible truths, possible facts, and their respective components. The fundamental concepts and laws of this science, Husserl maintained, are genuine only if they can be established by observing the matters to which they apply. Accordingly, to test the genuineness of logical theory, “wir wollen auf die ‘Sachen selbst’ zurckgehen”we will go, from our habitual empty understanding of this alleged science, back to a seeing of the logical forms themselves. But it is then the task of pure phenomenology to test the genuineness and range of this “seeing,” to distinguish it from other ways of being conscious of the same or other matters. Thus, although pure phenomenology and pure logic are mutually independent disciplines with separate themes, phenomenological analysis is indispensible to the critical justification of logic. In like manner, Husserl maintained, it is necessary to the criticism of other alleged knowledge; while, in another way, its descriptions are prerequisite to explanatory psychology. However, when Husserl wrote the Logische Untersuchungen, he did not yet conceive phenomenological analysis as a method for dealing with metaphysical problems.
The most radical changes in this concept of phenomenology and its relations to other disciplines had taken place before Husserl wrote his Ideen zu einer reinen Phnomenologie und phnomenologischen Philosophie, of which the only published volume, “General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology,” appeared in 1913. They resulted from a development having two main aspects.
1. Phenomenological analyses, partly summarized in the Logische Untersuchungen, had led Husserl to the view that material (generic and specific) as well as logically formal universals or essences are themselves observable, though non-individual, objects. Further analyses showed that awareness of an essence as itself presented might be based on either a clear experiencing or a clear phantasying (fictive experiencing) of an example. In either case, the evidence of the essence or eidos involves evidence of some example as ideally possible but not as actual. Consequently, a science like pure logic, whose theme includes nothing but essences and essential possibilities, — in Husserl’s later terminology, an eidetic science — involves no assertion of actual existence. Husserl used these views to redefine phenomenology itself. The latter was now conceived explicitly as the eidetic science of the material essences exemplified in subjective processes, qua pure possibilities, and was accordingly said to be pure also in the way pure logic is pure. A large proportion of the emendations in the second edition of the Logische Untersuchungen serve to clarify this freedom of phenomenology from all presuppositions of actual individual existence — particularly, psychic existence.
2. Under the influence of Franz Brentano (1838-1917), Husserl coined the name “Intentionalitt” for what he saw is the fundamental character of subjective processes. The reflectively experienceable part of one’s stream of consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of subjective processes as immanent in the stream itself and, on the other hand, consciousness of other objects as transcending the stieam. This character of subjective processes as consciousness of, as processes in which something is intended, is a property they have intrinsically, regardless of whether what is intended in them exists. Seeing intentionality as the fundamental attribute of subjective processes, Husseil held that phenomenology must describe them not only with respect to their immanent components but also with respect to their intended objects, as intended, in the language of his Ideen, phenomenological description must be “noematic,” as well as “noetic” and “hyletic.”
Every conscious process intends its objects as in a context with others, some intended as presented, others intended as to become presented if intended future consciousness takes a particular course. In other words, consciousness is always an intentional predelineating of processes in which objects will be intended, as the same or different within an all inclusive objective contextthe world. A pure phenomenology should therefore describe not only paiticular intended objects but also the intended world, as intended — as part of the “noematic-objective” sense belonging to consciousness by virtue of the latter’s intrinsic intentionality. To be sure, in such noematic-objective description the phenomenologist must still disregard the actual relations of the described subjective processes to other entities in the world. But, Husserl contended, when one disregards everything except the intrinsic nature of subjective processes, one still can see their intentionality; therefore all the entities and relations from which one has abstracted can — and should — reappear as noematic-intentional objects, within one’s isolated field. In particular, the disregarded status of the observed stream of consciousness itself, its status as related to other entities in the world, reappears — as a noematic-objective sense which the observed consciousness intends. Moreover, as purely eidetic, phenomenology finds that the intrinsic character of any actual consciousness, as intending a world and itself as in that world, is an essentially necessary determination of any possible consciousness.
Husserl noted, however, that even when one’s analyses are thus pure, both abstractively and eidetically, one naturally takes it for granted that possible consciousness is possible in some (otherwise indefinite) possible world. That is to say, besides finding “the world” as part of the intentional objective sense posited in the consciousness under investigation, the investigator continues to apprehend this consciousness as essentially worldly, even though he successfully disregards even its possible relations to other worldly objects. At this point, what Husserl considered as the philosophically decisive change in his concept of phenomenology ensues.
Before writing the Ideen, he had come to believe that, as the reflective observer of one’s subjective processes, one can establish and maintain the attitude of a mere onlooker, who does not participate even in his own natural attitude of believing in a possible world and apprehending his consciousness as essentially possible in that world. If this attitude of self-restraint (epoche) is consistently maintained, one can discriminate a status of one’s consciousness more fundamental than its actuality or its possibility in a world and one can see that this essential worldliness of consciousness is a reflexive consequence of its more fundamental character as consciousness of a world. One can then see, furthermore, that every intendable object is essentially, and most fundamentally, a noematic-intentional object (a phenomenon) and has its being and nature because consciousness — regardless of the latter’s secondary status as in the world — is intrinsically an (actual or potential) intending of that object, in a certain manner, as having certain determinations. Such was Husserl’s contention.
In the Ideen and in later works, Husserl applied the epithet “transcendental” to consciousness as it is aside from its (valid and necessary) self-apperception as in a world. At the same time, he restricted the term “psychic” to subjectivity (personal subjects, their streams of consciousness, etc.) in its status as worldly, animal, human subjectivity. The contrast between transcendental subjectivity and worldly being is fundamental to Husserl’s mature concept of pure phenomenology and to his concept of a universal phenomenological philosophy. In the Ideen, this pure phenomenology, defined as the eidetic science of transcendental subjectivity, was contrasted with psychology, defined as the empirical science of actual subjectivity in the world. Two antitheses are involved, however eidetic versus factual, and transcendental versus psychic. Rightly, they yield a four-fold classification, which Husserl subsequently made explicit, in his Formale und Transzendentale Logik (1929), Nachwort zu meinen Ideen (1930), and Meditations Cartesiennes (1931). In these works, he spoke of psychology as including all knowledge of worldly subjectivity while, within this science, he distinguished an empirical or matter-of-fact pure psychology and an eidetic pure psychology. The former is “pure” only in the way phenomenology, as explicitly conceived in the first edition of the Logische Untersuchungen, is pureactual psychic subjectivity is abstracted as its exclusive theme, objects intended in the investigated psychic processes are taken only as the latter’s noematic-intentional objects. Such an abstractive and self-restraining attitude, Husserl believed, is necessary, if one is to isohte the psychic in its purity and yet preserve it in its full intentionality. The instituting and maintaining of such an attitude is called “psychological epoche”; its effect on the objects of psychic consciousness is called “psychological reduction.” As empiricism, this pure psychology describes the experienced typical structures of psychic processes and of the typical noematic objects belonging inseparably to the latter by virtue of their intrinsic intentionality. Description of typical personalities and of their habitually intended worlds also lies within its province. Having acquired empirical knowledge of the purely psychic, one may relax one’s psychological epoche and inquire into the extrapsychic circumstances under which, e.g., psychic processes of a particulai type actually occur in the world. Thus an empirical pure intentional psychology would become part of a concrete empirical science of actual psychophysical organisms.
If the psychologist, having isolated some instance of subjectivity, considers it only as a purely possible example of subjectivity in some possible world, he is effecting a further, so-called eidetic, reduction of the psychic and is in the position to develop an eidetically pure phenomenological psychology or (as Husserl also called it) an eidetic psychological phenomenology. He can discover, not merely empirical types but essential psychic possibilities, impossibilities, and necessities, in any possible world. Moieover, eidetic reduction can be performed, not only on the psychic but also on any other abstractive region of the world, e.g., the physical, the concretely psychophysical, the cultural. We can develop purely eidetic sciences of every material region (material ontologies), an eidetic science of the formally universal region, “something or other” (formal ontology, the formal logic of possible being), and finally in all-embracing science of the essential (formal and material) compossibilities and non-compossibilities in any possible concrete world. An eidetic psychological phenomenology would thus become coordinated in a universal eidetic science of worldly being.
There is yet a third kind of epohe that allegedly enables one to discriminate subjectivity qua transcendental — by effecting yet another kind of reduction, which Husserl eventually called “transcendental-phenomenological.” (In his Ideen he called it simply “phenomenological.”) By refraining from participition in one’s inveterate (and justifiable) natural attitude of presupposing the world and the status of one’s subjectivity in the world, one can see the world (and whatever else one may intend) as fundamentally a noematic-intentional object for transcendental subjectivity — for one’s individual self, the subject whose life is one’s own transcendental stream of consciousness, and for other transcendental subjects. As one can describe one’s actual psychic subjectivity, so one can describe one’s actual transcendental subjectivity and thus produce an empirical transcendental phenomenology. Again, as in the case of the purely psychic, so in the case of the purely transcendental, an eidetic reduction enables one to produce a purely eidetic science — here an eidetic transcendental phenomenology, the theme of which is the absolutely universal domain of transcendental subjectivity in general, including the latter’s noematic-objective sensethe entire world and all its possible variants. This eidetic transcendental phenomenology is what Husserl ordinarily meant when, in the Ideen or subsequent works, he spoke simply of “phenomenology. “
Because the difference between phenomenological pure psychology and transcendental phenomenology depends on a difference in attitude towards “the same” subject matter, their contents are widely analogous. Husserl maintained, however, that genuine philosophy is possible only as transcendental phenomenology, because it alone is knowledge of that non-worldly nucleus of subjectivity in which everything intendable as immanent or as transcendent is constituted (produced, generated) as an essentially intentional object. As envisaged in the Ideen and later works, phenomenological analysis is chiefly “transcendental-constitutional” analysis of the subjective structures in which the concrete individual world is built up as an intersubjectively valid transcendent sense for transcendental subjectivity. In the course of such analysis, every legitimate philosophical problem must find its definitive solution. From the transcendental-phenomenological standpoint, however, one traditional problem, namely the relation between what are essentially objects of consciousness and “things-in-themselves” that are not essentially objects of consciousness, is seen to be spurious. On the one hand, it is evidently false that all directly presented objects of consciousness are immanent in the mind, on the other hand, the concept of an entity that is not an intentionally constituted object of transcendental consciousness is evidently self-contradictory. This is the central thesis of what Husserl called his “transcendental-phenomenological idealism.”
The diversity of concepts that Husserl himself expressed by the word “phenomenology” has been a source of diverse usages among thinkeis who came under his influence and are often referred to as “the phenomenological school.” Husserl himself always meant by “phenomenology” a science of the subjective and its intended objects qua intentional; this core of sense pervades the development of his own concept of phenomenology as eidetic, transcendental, constitutive. Some thinkers, appropriating only the psychological version of this central concept, have developed a descriptive intentional psychology — sometimes empirical, sometimes eidetic — under the title “phenomenology.” On the other hand, Husserl’s broader concept of eidetic science based on seeing essences and essentially necessary relations — especially his concept of material ontology — has been not only adopted but made central by others, who define phenomenology accordingly. Not uncommonly, these groups reject Husserl’s method of transcendental-phenomenological reduction and profess a realistic metaphysics. Finally, there are those who, emphasizing Husserl’s cardinal principle that evidence — seeing something that is itself presented — is the only ultimate source of knowledge, conceive their phenomenology more broadly and etymologically, as explication of that which shows itself, whatever may be the latter ‘s nature and ontologicil status. — D.C.