Concept

Phenomenology

Intro

Suppose you want to explain why sunsets look beautiful. You could measure the wavelengths, describe the scattering of light through the atmosphere, and map which neurons fire in which order.

Then someone points out that you have not said one word about the beauty.

Phenomenology is the philosophical movement built around noticing that gap and refusing to paper over it. Its rule is simple to state and surprisingly hard to follow: describe the thing before you explain it. Say carefully what the experience is actually like, in its own terms, and only then ask what causes it.

That sounds obvious. It is routinely violated. People describe the mechanism of seeing and then assume they have described seeing. They describe the brain chemistry of grief and then assume they have described grief. Phenomenology treats this swap as the characteristic mistake of modern thought and builds a discipline around blocking it.

The payoff for a Christian is not that phenomenology proves anything. It does not, and its founder and most of its famous names were not believers. The payoff is that it forces the honest question. If you describe human experience carefully and completely, what is actually there? And can the view that matter is all there is account for what you found?

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In full

Phenomenology is the philosophical method, founded by Edmund Husserl in the first decades of the twentieth century, of describing the structures of conscious experience as they present themselves to a first-person perspective, with judgments about the existence and causal genesis of the objects of experience deliberately suspended.

Its programmatic slogan, zu den Sachen selbst ("to the things themselves"), announces its opposition both to the psychologism Husserl attacked in the Logical Investigations (1900 to 1901), which would reduce logical laws to contingent regularities of thought, and to the constructive theorizing that substitutes an account of causes for a description of what is to be caused.

The method's two central operations are the epoché or phenomenological reduction, the bracketing of the natural attitude's existential commitments so that the phenomenon can be examined as given rather than as posited, and the eidetic reduction, the systematic imaginative variation of a phenomenon to isolate the invariant structures without which it would not be the phenomenon it is. Its organizing discovery, inherited from Franz Brentano and radicalized, is intentionality: consciousness is always consciousness of something.

Phenomenology's importance to the codex is threefold. It supplies the analysis of perception developed at Phenomenology of Perception and the argument at Argument from Perception. It supplies the descriptive discipline behind serious treatments of religious experience, in place of the "just a feeling" dismissal. And its history contains a well-documented pattern in which practitioners who followed the method rigorously found themselves pressed toward theological conclusions, which is evidence about where careful description of human experience leads, though not by itself a proof of anything.

The method

The epoché

Ordinarily you live in what Husserl called the natural attitude: the unexamined stance in which the world is simply there, objects exist, causes operate, and your business is to get around in it. This attitude is not false. It is the correct stance for nearly all of life. But it does mean you never actually look at experiencing itself, because you are always looking through it at things.

The epoché (Greek for suspension, borrowed from the ancient skeptics; see Pyrrhonism) is the disciplined move of putting the existence question in brackets. Not denying that the tree is there. Not affirming it. Setting the question aside so that the experience of the tree comes into view as something to be described.

This is the most misunderstood part of the method. Bracketing is not skepticism, and it is not idealism. It is a change of topic, adopted temporarily and for a purpose. A physicist studying a pendulum brackets the question of who built the clock. Nobody accuses her of denying clockmakers.

The eidetic reduction

Having got the phenomenon in view, you then ask what belongs to it necessarily. The technique is imaginative variation: vary the phenomenon in thought and see what can change without destroying it, and what cannot.

Take perceiving a physical object. Change the color, and it is still perceiving an object. Change the angle, the lighting, the distance, still perceiving. Now try to imagine perceiving a physical object from no perspective at all, all sides at once, no hidden back. You cannot, and the failure is informative. Perspectival givenness is not a contingent limitation of human eyes. It belongs to what it is to perceive a spatial thing. See Phenomenology of Perception on adumbration.

Intentionality

The structural claim underneath everything: mental states are of or about something. You do not just fear, you fear the dog. You do not just believe, you believe that the bridge will hold.

Brentano proposed in 1874 that this aboutness is the mark distinguishing the mental from the physical, since no purely physical state is about anything. Husserl made it the organizing structure of consciousness, distinguishing the noesis (the act of consciousness) from the noema (the object precisely as intended in that act). The apologetic weight of this is carried at Intentionality.

The lifeworld

Husserl's late work, above all the unfinished Crisis of the European Sciences (1936), added a historical thesis. The mathematized natural science that began with Galileo achieved enormous power by treating the measurable as the real. Over three centuries this hardened into the assumption that the measurable is the real, and the Lebenswelt, the lived world of colors, meanings, purposes and persons in which science itself is conducted, came to look like a subjective film over the true world of particles.

Husserl's objection was that this inverts the actual order. The lifeworld is not derived from the scientific image. The scientific image is an achievement carried out within the lifeworld by embodied persons using instruments they perceive. Forgetting this is the crisis he named. The point converges with the codex critique of Scientism, reached by an entirely independent route.

The movement, and the pattern in it

Phenomenology is not a doctrine but a method, and its practitioners went in strikingly different directions. That divergence is itself worth noting: a method that produced both Sartre's atheism and a canonized Carmelite saint is not smuggling its conclusions in.

Franz Brentano (1838 to 1917), the forerunner. A Catholic priest who left the priesthood over the 1870 definition of papal infallibility, he supplied the intentionality thesis and taught Husserl directly.

Edmund Husserl (1859 to 1938), the founder. See Edmund Husserl.

The realist phenomenologists of the Munich and Göttingen circles took the method to be a way of getting at objective essences and resisted Husserl's later turn toward transcendental idealism. Adolf Reinach (1883 to 1917) applied it to the philosophy of law, converted to Christianity, and was killed in Flanders during the First World War. Max Scheler (1874 to 1928) produced the movement's most substantial work on value, love, and ressentiment. Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889 to 1977) developed a phenomenological ethics and became an outspoken early opponent of National Socialism.

Edith Stein (1891 to 1942) was Husserl's doctoral student and then his assistant, writing her dissertation on empathy, the problem of how one consciousness is given another as a consciousness. Born into an observant Jewish family, she became an atheist in her teens, was received into the Catholic Church in 1922 after reading Teresa of Ávila, entered Carmel, and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1942. She was canonized in 1998. Her late work attempted a synthesis of phenomenology with Thomism (see Thomas Aquinas).

Martin Heidegger (1889 to 1976), Husserl's assistant and successor at Freiburg, redirected the method from consciousness to the question of being in Being and Time (1927). His conduct during the Nazi period, including his 1933 rectorate and party membership, is a permanent and unresolved stain, and the codex cites him only where the philosophical point stands on its own.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908 to 1961) gave the method its most influential application to the body and to perception. See Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

Karol Wojtyła, later John Paul II, wrote his habilitation on whether Scheler's phenomenological ethics could ground Christian ethics, concluded that it could not do so alone, and built from that a Thomistic personalism, worked out in The Acting Person (1969), in which the person is disclosed through action.

The theological turn. In late twentieth-century France a cluster of phenomenologists took the method explicitly toward God: Emmanuel Levinas (1906 to 1995) on the ethical claim of the other person's face, Michel Henry (1922 to 2002) on life's self-affection, Jean-Luc Marion (b. 1946) on the "saturated phenomenon," the givenness that exceeds any concept the receiver brings to it, and Paul Ricoeur (1913 to 2005), a Protestant, on narrative and testimony. The label comes from Dominique Janicaud's hostile 1991 critique, which charged the group with importing theology into a method that had no business with it. The charge is worth taking seriously and does not settle the matter, since whether a description overreaches is decided by examining the description.

Apologetic use, and its limits

What phenomenology is good for here.

1. It secures the explananda. Before you argue about whether materialism can explain consciousness, intentionality, moral perception, or the sense of the holy, you have to say clearly what those are. Phenomenology is the discipline of saying so. See Consciousness and Access and Phenomenal Consciousness.
2. It takes religious experience seriously without credulity. The dismissal "that was just a feeling" is not an analysis. Phenomenological description asks what the experience presented itself as, what structure it had, and whether that structure resembles emotion, hallucination, or perception. This is the disciplined footing under Argument from Religious Experience and the comparative work at Ninian Smart.
3. It cuts under the science-versus-faith framing. The lifeworld analysis shows that the scientific image is an achievement carried out within lived experience, not a replacement for it. That is a strong independent line against Scientism that owes nothing to theology.
4. It grounds a Christian anthropology of embodiment. A tradition confessing creation, incarnation and bodily resurrection has no stake in treating the body as a container the self is trapped inside. The phenomenological account of the lived body converges with that, and the convergence is worth naming. See Imago Dei.

What it is not good for.

• It is not an argument for God. Description is not inference. The step from "here is what experience contains" to "therefore theism" is a further argument that must be made explicitly, as it is at Argument from Perception.
• Its major figures are largely not allies. Husserl was not a practicing believer for most of his career, Heidegger's relation to Christianity is contested and his personal record is worse than contested, Merleau-Ponty left the Church, Sartre used the method for atheistic existentialism. Presenting phenomenology as a Christian philosophy is false and will be caught.
• The convergence pattern is suggestive, not probative. That Reinach, Stein, von Hildebrand, Marion and Wojtyła found the method leading toward God is worth noting. It is not evidence of the same order as an argument, and should never be presented as though it were.

See also

• Phenomenology of Perception, the method applied to perceiving, and the codex's main development of it
• Intentionality, the aboutness structure at the method's core
• Edmund Husserl, the founder
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the method's most influential application to the body
• Argument from Perception, the apologetic argument built on the descriptive findings
• Epistemology, the parent domain
• Consciousness, the phenomena the method is best at securing
• Argument from Religious Experience, where phenomenological discipline replaces the "just a feeling" dismissal
• Scientism, the position the lifeworld analysis independently undercuts
• John Paul II, whose personalism grew out of a phenomenological habilitation on Scheler
• Ninian Smart, comparative religion done with phenomenological method
• Pyrrhonism, the ancient source of the term epoché
• Empiricism, the tradition whose sense-data model phenomenology rejects
• Imago Dei, the theological anthropology the embodiment analysis converges with