ABSTRACT
Phenomenology is a mode of philosophizing that aims to capture and articulate the original meanings of direct experience. It is motivated by a desire to look at the world afresh from the perspective of first-person, pre-reflective, “lived” experience. As such it has a close affinity with art. Merleau-Ponty puts it thus: phenomenology “consists in re-learning to look at the world … [it] is not the reflection of a preexisting truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being” (Merleau-Ponty 1998: xx). Phenomenology as a school of thought emerged at the end of the nineteenth
century in the school of Franz Brentano, and was developed by Edmund Husserl, and further, in many different ways, by Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Roman Ingarden, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, among others. What unites these varied thinkers is their particular way of doing philosophy. In Heidegger’s words: “‘phenomenology’ signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the ‘what’ of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content but the ‘how’ of such research” (Heidegger 1996: 24). This new manner of philosophizing aims to take an unprejudiced look at the
world, untainted by what Husserl, somewhat misleadingly, refers to as “the natural attitude.” This attitude not only characterizes abstract, scientific modes of reflection but also common-sense thinking. In the natural attitude we approach the world with a particular set of attitudes and assumptions, such as the view that the world lies spread out before us in space and time, and the conception that knowledge consists of mental representations inside our consciousness. Husserl insists that it is essential to bracket or suspend such beliefs – also referred to as the “phenomenological reduction” or “epoché” – in order to regain a renewed sense of the original meaning – or “essence” – of the things that we encounter in the world. It is sometimes thought that phenomenologists are opposed to systematic theory
or science. This is not the case. They fully recognize the validity of scientific explanatory accounts of the world. They merely want to remind people that science itself is ultimately rooted in the phenomena of direct experience. As Husserl observes, “objects would be nothing at all for the cognizing subject if they did not ‘appear’ to
him, if he had of them no ‘phenomenon’” (Moran and Mooney 2002: 125). Phenomenology aims to apprehend the essences of those phenomena by means of immediate experience and direct intuition. The term “phenomenon” comes from the Greek verb phainesthai, which means “to appear” or “to manifest itself.” Phenomenology thus studies both the way things appear and the way the world reveals itself. Its method is primarily descriptive. It aims to illuminate the meaning of phenomena without resorting to causal or scientific explanations. It is important not to confuse phenomenology with the philosophical doctrine
known as phenomenalism. Although things reveal themselves through their appearance, they are not, as phenomenalists would have it, reducible to it. For Merleau-Ponty phenomenology is “a philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins – as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status” (Merleau-Ponty 1998: vii). It is a key feature of all phenomenological inquiry that it understands consciousness –
whether thinking, feeling, remembering or otherwise – as “intentional,” that is, directed towards an object. Consciousness is always consciousness of something irrespective of whether that thing actually exists (trees, houses, etc.) or not (unicorns, ghosts, etc.). Intentionality belongs to the essential structure of consciousness. Phenomenologists after Husserl have taken up different aspects of his thinking and
developed them in many directions. What unites them all, however, is the renewed attention for pre-scientific, pre-reflective experience, as it appears to first-person human consciousness. Although long neglected in the world of Anglo-American aesthetics, this focus of attention makes phenomenology a fertile source of reflection on art. Like art, phenomenology seeks to restore the richness of the world as immediately experienced. For Merleau-Ponty the phenomenological attitude involves “the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world” as can be found in the works of writers and painters such as Balzac, Proust, Valéry and Cézanne (Merleau-Ponty 1998: xxi). For Sartre, phenomenology forms the foundation of his existentialist aesthetics.
