Phenomenology

Introduction

Phenomenology is the twentieth-century philosophical tradition founded by Edmund Husserl that takes the systematic description of the structures of conscious experience as the methodological foundation of philosophy. The tradition's organizing slogan, Zu den Sachen selbst (To the things themselves), captures the methodological commitment: instead of imposing prior theoretical frameworks on experience, philosophy should describe the structures of experience as they actually present themselves to consciousness. The tradition produced, across the twentieth century, the major continental alternative to analytic philosophy and shaped the parallel developments of existentialism, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, and contemporary continental thought.

Founding moment

Founded by Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) with the two-volume Logical Investigations (Logische Untersuchungen, 1900–1901), which reversed the psychologistic position of his earlier Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891) and gave the founding statement of the phenomenological program. The reversal turned on the recognition that the structures of meaning, logical inference, and conceptual content cannot be reduced to empirical-psychological processes; what is required is a systematic descriptive science of these structures, grasped in their essential rather than empirical features.

The systematic articulation of the transcendental phenomenology that defined the mature tradition appeared in Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology (the Ideen, Book I, 1913). The book introduced the technical apparatus of the epoché (bracketing the natural attitude), the phenomenological reduction (the methodological turn to the structures of conscious experience), and the eidetic reduction (the move from particular experiences to their essential features) that constitute the mature method.

The Göttingen years (1901–1916) gathered around Husserl the early phenomenological school — Adolf Reinach, Edith Stein, Roman Ingarden, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, Alexandre Koyré — that constituted the first institutional phenomenological tradition. The transcendental turn of the Ideen produced internal disagreement; many of the early Göttingen phenomenologists were realists who rejected the transcendental framework. The Freiburg period (1916–1938) saw the later work, the relationship with Martin Heidegger (Husserl's chosen successor in the Freiburg chair), and the development of the late framework of the Lebenswelt in the Crisis of European Sciences (1936).

Core doctrines

Phenomenology is more a method than a doctrine, but the shared methodological commitments are substantial.

1. Description over construction. Philosophy should describe the structures of experience as they actually present themselves rather than construct theoretical accounts of what those structures must be. The methodological priority is given to careful description.
2. Bracketing the natural attitude. The everyday assumption that the world is independently real and that consciousness is one item in it (the natural attitude) is methodologically suspended to allow attention to focus on the structures of conscious experience themselves.
3. Intentionality. Consciousness is structurally directed toward an object — every conscious act is consciousness of something. The Husserlian distinction between the noesis (the act of intending) and the noema (the object as intended in the act) provides the technical framework for analyzing the various modes of conscious experience.
4. Essential structures. Phenomenology aims at the essential rather than the empirical structures of experience. The eidetic reduction moves from particular conscious experiences to their essential features.
5. The transcendental turn. In the mature Husserlian framework, phenomenology becomes the systematic study of transcendental subjectivity — the consciousness that constitutes the appearance of any object whatever. The transcendental turn was contested within the phenomenological tradition itself.
6. The life-world. The late Husserlian concept of the Lebenswelt identifies the pre-theoretical world of everyday lived experience that grounds and orients all theoretical inquiry.
7. Embodiment. The post-Husserlian development, especially through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945), emphasized the embodied character of conscious experience and the constitutive role of the lived body in the structures of perception, action, and self-relation.

Major figures

• Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) — the founder; the Logical Investigations, the Ideen, and the Crisis are the major systematic works.
• Adolf Reinach (1883–1917) — the major early Göttingen phenomenologist of social ontology and the philosophy of law; killed in World War I.
• Edith Stein (1891–1942) — Husserl's assistant and phenomenologist of empathy and the human person; subsequently a Carmelite nun; killed at Auschwitz.
• Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) — Husserl's chosen successor; Being and Time (1927) modified phenomenology in the direction of fundamental ontology. The most influential single phenomenologist after Husserl.
• Max Scheler (1874–1928) — the major early phenomenologist of value, sympathy, and the human person.
• Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) — the major Polish phenomenologist of literature and aesthetics; realist phenomenologist against Husserl's transcendental turn.
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) — the major French phenomenologist of perception and the embodied self; Phenomenology of Perception (1945) is the canonical French systematic work.
• Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) — the major French existential phenomenologist; Being and Nothingness (1943) extends the tradition into existential ontology.
• Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) — the major French phenomenologist of ambiguity and the situated subject.
• Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995) — the major French phenomenologist of the encounter with the other; Totality and Infinity (1961) is the canonical work.
• Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005) — the major French hermeneutic phenomenologist.
• Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) — German hermeneutic continuation; Truth and Method (1960) is the canonical work.
• Jan Patočka (1907–1977) — the major Czech phenomenologist; dissident under communism; founder of Charter 77.

Major texts

• Husserl, Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Ideas (Book I 1913), Cartesian Meditations (1931), Crisis of European Sciences (1936–38)
• Heidegger, Being and Time (1927)
• Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Value (1913–16)
• Sartre, Being and Nothingness (1943)
• Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945)
• Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), The Second Sex (1949)
• Levinas, Totality and Infinity (1961), Otherwise than Being (1974)
• Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)
• Ricoeur, Time and Narrative (three volumes, 1983–85)

Internal tensions and rival schools

The major internal disagreement within phenomenology, dating from the period of the Ideen (1913) onward, was over the transcendental turn. Husserl took transcendental phenomenology to be the necessary methodological framework for the systematic phenomenological project; many of the early Göttingen phenomenologists rejected it as importing Cartesian and Kantian commitments. The realist phenomenologists (Reinach, Ingarden, Conrad-Martius) continued the descriptive method without the transcendental framework; the Munich phenomenological school (Pfander, Geiger) similarly preserved a more realist orientation.

The second major internal disagreement was over the relation of phenomenology to ontology. Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) explicitly subordinated phenomenology to the fundamental ontology of Being, treating phenomenology as the methodological propaedeutic to a larger ontological project rather than as the systematic foundation of philosophy in its own right. The disagreement between Husserl and Heidegger, fully visible by the late 1920s, structured the development of the tradition into the existentialist direction.

The great external rivals were analytic philosophy (with which the phenomenological tradition had only limited contact through the mid-twentieth century), the various Marxisms (with which phenomenology had complex relations in the post-war French context), the structuralism that displaced phenomenology in French intellectual life in the 1960s, and the post-structuralist developments of the 1970s and 1980s.

Legacy

Phenomenology's legacy is the entire continental tradition of the twentieth century. The existentialism of Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty is recognizably an extension of phenomenological method; the hermeneutic tradition of Gadamer and Ricoeur is the application of phenomenological method to interpretation; the post-structuralist tradition through Derrida (whose early Speech and Phenomena of 1967 is a engagement with Husserl) and Foucault is a continuation and critique; the contemporary engagement through Habermas's engagement with the Lebenswelt concept in The Theory of Communicative Action (1981) is a development.

The contemporary engagement is and ongoing. The cognitive science engagement with phenomenology, beginning with Hubert Dreyfus's What Computers Can't Do (1972) and continuing through the work of Shaun Gallagher (How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005), Dan Zahavi (whose Subjectivity and Selfhood, 2005, has been a major recent monograph), and Evan Thompson (Mind in Life, 2007), has produced a body of work integrating phenomenological method with empirical cognitive science. The phenomenology of medicine (Havi Carel's Illness, 2008; Drew Leder's The Absent Body, 1990) has developed a field. The phenomenology of race (Linda Martín Alcoff, George Yancy, Lewis Gordon) and gender (Sara Heinamaa, Iris Marion Young) have developed recent literatures.

Internal debates within the tradition

The defining intramural dispute is the transcendental versus realist phenomenology controversy. Husserl's mature program took the transcendental reduction — the methodological turn to the structures of transcendental subjectivity that constitute the appearance of any object — as essential to systematic phenomenology. The realist phenomenologists (Reinach, Ingarden, Conrad-Martius, and the broader Munich school) argued that the transcendental turn reintroduced Cartesian and Kantian commitments that the original phenomenological program had been designed to avoid. The dispute was never resolved on internal grounds and structured the tradition's institutional development.

A second sustained debate concerned the relation of phenomenology to ontology. Husserl took phenomenology to be philosophically foundational in its own right. Heidegger's Being and Time explicitly reversed this priority, treating phenomenology as the method of a larger ontological project (the fundamental ontology of Being). The subsequent development of the tradition through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas in the existentialist direction followed Heidegger on this point.

Third, the embodiment question divided the tradition. The mature Husserlian framework treated transcendental subjectivity as the consciousness that constitutes the appearance of objects. Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception (1945) reversed this: the lived body is not an object alongside other objects but the structural condition of any perceptual engagement with the world; transcendental subjectivity is embodied subjectivity. The contemporary development of phenomenology of medicine, gender, race, and cognitive science continues the Merleau-Pontian embodiment turn.

Fourth, the relation to ethics has been contested. Husserl's writings on ethics and value (especially the lectures from 1908–1914 and 1920–24, only fully published in the Husserliana series from the 1980s onward) developed a phenomenological framework for the analysis of ethical experience but were less influential than the corresponding work in epistemology. The post-war development through Levinas, who recentered phenomenology on the encounter with the other and produced an ethics as first philosophy, was one of the major French developments.

Fifth, the twentieth-century engagement with the natural sciences has divided the tradition. Husserl's Crisis of European Sciences treated the natural sciences as having lost contact with their grounding in the life-world. The cognitive science engagement, especially through Dreyfus and the contemporary 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition movement, has extended phenomenology into productive dialogue with empirical science. The Heideggerian tradition has been more resistant.

Texts and transmission

The foundational texts of phenomenology are scattered across publications, voluminous lecture courses, and unpublished manuscripts. Husserl's published work is gathered in the Husserliana series published since 1950 by Martinus Nijhoff (later Kluwer, then Springer), now in over 40 volumes; the Husserl Archives in Leuven manage the unpublished manuscripts (some 40,000 pages of stenographic notes rescued from Husserl's home in 1938–39 by Herman Leo Van Breda). The major English translations are by Dorion Cairns (the Cartesian Meditations), F. Kersten (the Ideas), and the more recent Edmund Husserl Collected Works series.

Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe (Klostermann, begun 1975) is now in over 100 volumes and is editorially controlled by the Heidegger family; the publication of the Black Notebooks beginning in 2014, which revealed sustained antisemitic content in Heidegger's wartime and post-war writings, has reopened the question of how much of Heidegger's phenomenology is compromised by his National Socialism. The standard English text of Being and Time is now the Joan Stambaugh translation (SUNY, 1996; revised 2010).

The French phenomenological tradition is gathered in various Gallimard, Vrin, and other publishers' series. The standard French editions of Sartre are the Pléiade volumes (Gallimard, 1981–2010); Merleau-Ponty's complete works are gathered in the Gallimard series; Beauvoir's complete works are being edited by the Beauvoir Séries from the University of Illinois Press. Levinas's corpus is available through Brill, Duquesne University Press, and the various French and American academic publishers.

The institutional transmission of phenomenology has been substantial. The Husserl Archives in Leuven (founded 1939), the H. F. Husserl Memorial Library at the New School for Social Research, the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, and the number of national phenomenological societies anchor the contemporary scholarly infrastructure. The major journals include Husserl Studies, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Continental Philosophy Review, and the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology; the Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Smith and Smith, eds., 1995) and the Cambridge Companion to Phenomenology (Mulhall, ed., 2005) anchor the introductory literature.

The twentieth-century philosophical tradition founded by Husserl that takes the systematic description of the structures of conscious experience as the foundation of philosophy. The principal continental alternative to analytic philosophy.