Experiencing Phenomenology

An Introduction

Joel Smith

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317241614
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Philosophie
• Thema: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Phenomenology is the general study of the structure of experience, from thought and perception, to self-consciousness, bodily-awareness, and emotion. It is both a fundamental area of philosophy and a major methodological approach within the human sciences.

Experiencing Phenomenology is an outstanding introduction to phenomenology. Approaching fundamental phenomenological questions from a critical, systematic perspective whilst paying careful attention to classic phenomenological texts, the book possesses a clarity and breadth that will be welcomed by students coming to the subject for the first time.

Accessibly written, each chapter relates classic phenomenological discussions to contemporary issues and debates in philosophy. The following key topics are introduced and explained:

• the methodological foundations of phenomenology
• intentionality as the 'mark of the mental' and the problem of non-existent objects
• perceptual experience, including our awareness of things, properties, and events
• the experience of body, self, and others
• imaginative and emotional experience
• detailed discussions of classical phenomenological texts, including:
• Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
• Husserl's Logical Investigations, Cartesian Meditations, and On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
• Heidegger's History of The Concept of Time, and Being and Time
• Stein's On the Problem of Empathy
• Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, and The Imaginary
• Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception.

Also included is a glossary of key terms and suggestions for further reading, making this book an ideal starting point for anyone new to the study of phenomenology, not only in Philosophy but related disciplines such as Psychology and Sociology.

1 The science of experience

we must go back to the ‘things themselves’

Husserl, Logical Investigations

I sit down at my desk on a sunny September afternoon and open my laptop with the intention of writing this introduction. I glance out of the window and see the sycamore, branches gently swaying in the breeze, its leaves just beginning to show the faintest sign of autumn colour. Noticing its shadow cast across the neighbour’s improbably green grass, I picture how the garden would look had I cut the grass yesterday, as planned. My daughter bursts through the door, angry with me for not having taken her swimming this afternoon. Feeling slightly ashamed and conscious of the awkward way in which I have twisted my body in order to face her, I am acutely aware of just how unconvincing my excuse must sound.

This passage, describing a short stretch of experience in which a variety of things appear in a number of different ways, contains all of the major topics covered in this book. The book is about experience. Phenomenology, as the word suggests, is the study of phenomena, alternatively appearances. This notion of appearing is, in turn, related to that of experience since things appear in experience. Phenomenology can thus be described as the study of experience and of things as experienced. What this amounts to, though, and why one might be interested in such a thing is not obvious. It is, nevertheless, something that captured the imagination of some of the most significant philosophers working in the twentieth century, and continues to do so in the twenty-first.

In the second volume of her autobiography, The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir describes how she and Jean-Paul Sartre were introduced to phenomenology:

Raymond Aron was spending a year at the French Institute in Berlin and studying Husserl simultaneously with preparing a historical thesis. When he came to Paris he spoke of Husserl to Sartre. We spent an evening together at the Bec de Gaz in the Rue Montparnasse. We ordered the speciality of the house, apricot cocktails; Aron said, pointing to his glass: ‘You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’ Sartre turned pale with emotion at this. Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years – to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process. Aron convinced him that phenomenology exactly fitted with his preoccupations: by-passing the antithesis of idealism and realism, affirming simultaneously both the supremacy of reason and the reality of the visible world as it appears to our senses. On the Boulevard Saint-Michel Sartre purchased Lévinas’s book on Husserl, and was so eager to inform himself on the subject that he leafed through the volume as he walked along, without even having cut the pages.

(de Beauvoir, 1960, p. 112)

What was it that so enthralled Sartre? It is the purpose of this chapter to give some sense of what phenomenology is and why it has seemed to many to be such a radical break from the philosophical tradition.

1 Introducing phenomenology

There are a number of ways in which one can get an initial grip on what phenomenology is. Below I outline three: we can compare it with other areas of philosophical inquiry, we can see how phenomenological questions are thrown up in a number of areas, and we can approach it historically. It is also useful to distinguish between broad and narrow conceptions of phenomenology. Since it will be the primary focus of this book, I begin by articulating a narrow conception. What a broader conception amounts to, and the place of the narrow conception within it, will be addressed in §1.3.

1.1 What phenomenology is not

We can see what phenomenology is by way of an understanding of how it compares to other areas of philosophical enquiry such as metaphysics and epistemology. Consider some domain, for example that of concrete, three-dimensional objects such as tables, chairs, protons, and galaxies; that which is sometimes referred to in the epistemological literature as ‘the external world’. If we are engaged in metaphysics, we will be interested in the nature of these things. What is it for something to be a concrete, as opposed to an abstract, object? Are all concrete, three-dimensional objects simple or are some composed of smaller parts? Is there a clear distinction between objects and events? And so on.

If we are engaged in epistemology we will be interested in a different range of questions, one centred on the concept of knowledge. What are the different ways we have of coming to know about concrete objects? Do we have any such knowledge at all? If we do, what is the relation between such knowledge and knowledge of other things, for example of our own ‘inner’ experiences, or of God? And so on.

If we are engaged in phenomenology we will be concerned with a still different range of questions. Unlike the metaphysician, and like the epistemologist, the phenomenologist is concerned not so much with the nature of the external world, but with our mode of access to it. However, for the phenomenologist the central concept is not that of knowledge but is rather that of experience or, equivalently, consciousness. Thus, we might ask: What ways do we have of experiencing concrete, three-dimensional objects? What is involved in the experience of something as concrete rather than abstract? How do concrete, three-dimensional objects appear (how are they presented or given) to us in experience? And so on.

Put in this way, phenomenology may strike some as being closely related to the philosophy of mind. And so it is. Indeed a number of topics currently discussed within the philosophy of mind have a clear phenomenological aspect. One should not conclude from this, however, that phenomenology is just the same thing as the philosophy of mind. The philosophy of mind incorporates questions that are not properly phenomenological, most obviously questions concerning the metaphysics and epistemology of mind. For example, one of the perennial preoccupations of philosophers of mind concerns the right way to think about the relation between consciousness and the brain. Although phenomenology may well have something to contribute to this issue – and to other non-phenomenological debates about the mind – the so called ‘mind-body problem’ is not an issue that phenomenologists directly address. For the question of the relation between consciousness and the brain is not a question about how things appear per se, but rather about the relation between such appearances and what goes on inside our skulls. Phenomenology, it might seem, is radically independent of such a question. For we can ask about how things appear without needing to consider how such appearances are realised in the brain.

Philosophers of mind often talk about consciousness, noting that there is ‘something it is like’ to be in a conscious state. The ‘hard problem’ of consciousness involves asking how this ‘what it is likeness’ of consciousness can be located within the physical world. Further, the word ‘phenomenology’ is often used as a name for this feature. So, for example, bodily sensation is typically said to ‘have a phenomenology’. But to say that this is a rather thin characterisation would be a rather monumental understatement. To say that there is something it is like to have a headache is merely the very beginning of a phenomenological account of pain. The phenomenologist quite rightly asks for more.

Phenomenology, understood narrowly, concerns appearance, just as epistemology concerns knowledge. This, I suggest, is the most fundamental way of singling out phenomenology as a distinctive philosophical enterprise. It is this concern to ‘describe objects just as he saw and touched them’, and to do so in a way that side-steps traditional questions in metaphysics and epistemology, that so excited Sartre. Phenomenology, on this view, is something that can be pursued whilst remaining neutral on perennial metaphysical disputes, turning our back on esoteric debates about the fundamental nature of reality and taking as our theme our ordinary, everyday experience.

1.2 How phenomenological questions arise

Questions of a phenomenological sort arise in both philosophical and scientific contexts. First, consider a philosophical example. The epistemological problem of other minds is sometimes posed in the following way: When I look at you, all that I can see is your behaviour. You are wincing, say. I cannot see the mental state that is causing the behaviour. However, I do not simply judge you to be wincing, I judge you to be in pain. I must, then, be able to reasonably infer that you are in pain from the visible fact that you are wincing. But, for reasons that do not much matter here, there is reason to think that any such inference will not, in fact, be reasonable. Since all I have to go on is your outwardly visible behaviour, I am never justified in believing, and so never know, that you are in pain.

Whether this is a good argument is, for present purposes, neither here nor there. The thing to notice is that the argument makes an implicit phenomenological assumption, one that may or may not be correct. This is that when I look at another person, all that I am visually aware of is their behaviour as opposed to their mental state itself. In asserting this, the proponent of the above argument is taking a stand on the question of how entities of a certain sort – people – are presented in visual experience. But once we notice that this assumption is being made, it becomes less obvious that it is true. What exactly is the most accurate way to characterise the visual experience of another person when they are wincing? Should we say that one’s visual experience presents their wincing and their pain is inferred, or should we say that one’s visual experience goes, as it were, all the way in to their experience itself? Do we not find it entirely natural to say that we see the pain in someone’s grimace, the joy in their smile? As we shall see in Chapter 9, some influential phenomenologists have certainly thought that this is the right way to describe the experience and so would reject the above argument as resting on a false presupposition. This is a clear example of phenomenology making a contribution to non-phenomenological, in this case epistemological, debates about the mind. Furthermore, we see here some of the radical promise of phenomenology since, arguably, getting the phenomenology right has the potential of simply doing away with (at least one version of) the traditional epistemological problem of other minds.

Second, consider an example from psychopathology, one relating to the sort of awareness that each of us has of our own body. People suffering from so-called alien limb syndrome exhibit peculiar behaviour towards one of their limbs, denying that it belongs to them and, in some cases, claiming that it doesn’t feel as though it is theirs. Since there is also evidence that at least some such patients do continue to feel sensation in the alien limb, this raises the phenomenological questions both of how it is that such patients experience their limb and, more generally, the nature of non-pathological bodily experience. In my everyday experience of my own body, are my limbs and other body parts experienced as my own, a feature that the pathological experience perhaps lacks? How is such a ‘sense of ownership’ related to the fact that I feel sensations located on or within my body? These questions concerning the phenomenology of the body seem pertinent if we wish to give an accurate description of the pathological condition, one that is appropriately sensitive to the complexities of our experiential life. Again, the phenomenological question seems to be fundamental here and yet has the tendency to slip by almost unnoticed. In explicitly asking about the sense of embodiment, phenomenology raises to the status of a philosophical problem something that even those of us engaged in philosophical enquiry ordinarily take for granted.

These considerations give us, I think, an initial sense of what phenomenology is and why it constitutes a significant topic of enquiry. We can see that, at the very least, phenomenology is concerned with offering an accurate description of experience and things as they are experienced. Of course, this is only a thumbnail sketch, and no doubt as many questions have been raised as have been answered. I hope some of these questions will receive answers as we progress.

Another thing that I hope the above examples suggest is that the answers to phenomenological questions are not all obvious. This can seem surprising. There is a long philosophical tradition associated with the view that if anything is absolutely evident to us, it is what our experience is like. Whilst we may be in error as to what there is (metaphysics), or what we know about what there is (epistemology), surely there is no room for doubt about how things appear to us (phenomenology)? There is perhaps some truth in this but it is worth noting that there is a difference between something’s being evident to those who have a clear focus on the issue, and something’s being evident to all no matter how unreflective. Consider, for example, your own visual experience. Looking straight ahead, can you see your nose? It might initially be tempting to answer in the negative, or by saying that you are not sure (after all, the ‘edge’ of the visual field is a surprisingly difficult thing to describe). But now wiggle your nose. I suspect that something moves within your field of vision. Or close one eye. Now do you see it? If you are anything like me (and I don’t think that my nose is unusually long) you can see your nose, but it is presented in what one might describe as a reclusive way. If I focus clearly on the question, it is evident to me that I can see my nose. Before applying such a reflective focus, however, it was not obvious to me at all. You will find this pattern repeated in the chapters that follow. Accurately describing conscious experience, that thing of which we are all most certain, can be a challenging task indeed. Our own experience, despite the fact that we are so familiar with it – perhaps even because of the fact that, to use a Heideggerian term, we ‘dwell’ in it – is a particularly difficult thing on which to gain a firm grip.

1.3 The Phenomenological tradition

In the previous section I have introduced phenomenology in an entirely ahistorical way. However, once one considers the history of the topic one finds a remarkably rich tradition leading from the very beginning of the twentieth century up to the present day (the best overview of this history is Spiegelberg, 1976; also see Moran, 2000). I will use the capitalised ‘Phenomenology’ to name this historical tradition, reserving the lower-case ‘phenomenology’ for the subject itself. Another way, then, of introducing phenomenology, is via the views of leading figures within the Phenomenological tradition.

Although there is a Phenomenological pre-history, including elements of the work of David Hume (1711–1776), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Franz Brentano (1838–1917), and others, the movement really begins with the work of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and continues to some extent, and in a variety of different ways, in the work of Max Scheler (1874–1928), Adolf Reinach (1883–1917), Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), Edith Stein (1891–1942), Roman Ingarden (1893–1970), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), and others.

The most important precursor to the Phenomenological tradition is without doubt Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, which attempted to place the sciences of the mind on rigorous philosophical foundations. Of particular importance for our purposes is Brentano’s introduction of the notion of intentionality (the topic of the next chapter) into modern debates about the mind, and his insistence on the priority of a purely descriptive form of psychological inquiry. Brentano distinguished such descriptive psychology (also called ‘psychognosy’) from ‘genetic psychology’ by claiming that since genetic psychology is concerned with ‘the conditions under which specific phenomena occur’, it cannot proceed without ‘mentioning physico-chemical processes and without reference to anatomical structures’ (Brentano, 1890–1, p. 4). Descriptive psychology, on the other hand,

teaches nothing about the causes that give rise to human consciousness […]. Its aim is nothing other than to provide us with a general conception of the entire realm of human consciousness. It does this by listing fully the basic components out of which everything internally perceived by humans is composed, and by enumerating the ways in which these components can be connected. Psychognosy will therefore, even in its highest state of perfection, never mention a physico-chemical process in any of its doctrines.

(1890–1, p. 4)

As we shall see in this and the next chapter, each of these innovations – the concept of intentionality and the demarcation of a purely descriptive philosophical foundation of the sciences of the mind – had an enormous impact on what Husserl would come to call the phenomenological method.

The work usually considered to constitute the birth of phenomenology is Husserl’s Logical Investigations. This rich, two-volume work contains, amongst other things, Husserl’s celebrated attack on psychologism (the view, to which Husserl himself had previously subscribed, that logic is reducible to psychology), an account of phenomenology as the purely descriptive study of structural features of the varieties of experience, and concrete phenomenological analyses of the notion of meaning, of part–whole relations, and of intentionality. Whilst Husserl’s position in Logical Investigations does depart in many crucial ways from that of Brentano, it shares – alongside the importance of intentionality and descriptive methods – an adherence to a broadly realist philosophical perspective. Husserl saw his phenomenology as a ‘rigorous science’ that would provide the basic framework for phenomenological investigations into a wide variety of domains of inquiry, carried out within the spirit of a collaborative investigation (see Husserl, 1910–11). This outlook was shared, at least in broad outline, by a number of the philosophers that this work inspired, most of whom were students or associates of Husserl. Notable examples include, but are certainly not limited to, Scheler’s (1913/16...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• 1. The science of experience
• 2. The objects of experience
• 3. Experiencing things
• 4. Experiencing properties
• 5. Experiencing events
• 6. Experiencing possibilities
• 7. Experiencing oneself
• 8. Experiencing embodiment
• 9. Experiencing others
• 10. Experiencing emotion
• 11. Conclusion
• Suggested reading
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index