Throughout the above example, we can see the attention to experience and perception that lies at the foundation of phenomenology. This investigation of the alarm clock illustrates three essential elements of phenomenology.
The First-Person Perspective
Phenomenologists examine the world from a first-person perspective. It is the nature of visual perception that I can only see the alarm clock from one view at a time; I can only describe the object as it reveals itself to me, not in its ideal form. Phenomenology does not claim to achieve a universal or “objective” third-person perspective. Rather, phenomenology emphasizes that “there is just as much ‘objectivity’ and truth in the subjective access to the world once it is articulated and intersubjectively confirmed” (Luft and Overgaard, 2013). Phenomenologists generally posit that “once subjects put themselves in the position of describing the manner in which things are given or appear to them, they will quickly discover that these descriptions are valid not only for their own private selves, but for others too” (Luft and Overgaard, 2013).
Many phenomenologists, especially after Husserl, view this first-person perspective as inherently embodied. In order to observe the clock, I must be in spatial relation to it, and I engage my body as I explore it (I tilt my head, lean down, etc.). There is “no purely intellectual point of view” because there is “no view from nowhere, there is only an embodied point of view” (Zahavi, 2018).
Description
Speaking from the first-person perspective, the phenomenologist aims to describe experience. This task, however, is not as simple as it seems. While acknowledging the subjectivity of a first-person perspective, phenomenology (ideally and traditionally) attempts to proceed without biases and presuppositions. Husserl calls this “bracketing,” putting aside any commitment to values, ideologies, or theoretical assumptions; the process of bracketing is called the epoché. Ideally, a phenomenologist brackets anything that might have a distorting effect on the description of experience. Philosophers debate precisely what Husserl encouraged phenomenologists to “bracket” — previous biases and traditional theories; our habitual way of encountering the world; and/or our assumption that the world exists independently of us, able to be examined from a perspective not immersed within it (Zahavi, 2018).
Describing the full appearance of a phenomenon includes attending to its background. Context affects the object — the alarm clock appears differently if it is on a store table versus a nightstand — and phenomenologists account for these specificities, describing how an object appears, for what purpose, and with what meaning.
Intentionality
While first-person perspective and description are elements of phenomenology’s method, intentionality speaks to philosophical beliefs, and Luft and Overgaard suggest it is the only paradigm agreed upon by the whole phenomenological movement. Phenomenologists propose that to be conscious means to be conscious of something: I see (the alarm clock), I hear (the store clerk), I remember (my breakfast from that morning), I expect (my friend’s birthday party tomorrow). This idea that consciousness is always directed toward something is intentionality, a term introduced by Brentano but made key to phenomenology by Husserl. Intentionality captures the connection between “internal” representations of objects within one’s consciousness and “external” objects. Luft and Overgaard argue that “whereas one will rarely find ‘intentionality’ featured as a prominent term in phenomenological works after Husserl (at least the ‘classical’ ones), it is nevertheless the case that what is essentially meant by it — the correlation between first-person experience and its content — lives on under different guises” (2013).
Notable contributors and works: Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938)
Although some would point to Franz Brentano’s Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874, [2014]) as the origin of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl is largely considered phenomenology’s founder. His Logical Investigations, Volume One (1900, [2012]) and Volume Two (1901, [2013]) is a groundbreaking work in which he introduces phenomenology as a descriptive science. Theorizing the idea of intentionality, Husserl argues that consciousness consists of mental acts (i.e. seeing, remembering, hating, desiring). These mental acts could be linguistic (thinking or talking about an object), pictorial (viewing a representation of the object), or perceptual (encountering the object directly). According to Husserl, it is only through perceptual acts that the object is given to us directly. Logical Investigations inspired a strand of early phenomenologists to return to lived reality, rejecting a philosophical emphasis on ideals and understanding the world as such, separated from human consciousness. Consciousness, intentionality posited, was always in relation to the world around it.
When Husserl published his next work, Ideas (1913, [2012]), he created something of a divide in the burgeoning phenomenological movement. Labeling phenomenology a “transcendental philosophy,” Husserl seemed, to some scholars, to abandon his emphasis on realism in pursuit of ideal forms. In Ideas, Husserl writes of the aims of “pure phenomenology”: