KEY CONCEPTS IN PHENOMENOLOGY, REQUIREMENTS FOR BECOMING A PHENOMENOLOGIST AND MAIN STAGES IN PHENOMENOLOGICAL CULTURE.

KEY CONCEPTS IN PHENOMENOLOGY, REQUIREMENTS FOR BECOMING A PHENOMENOLOGIST AND MAIN STAGES IN PHENOMENOLOGICAL CULTURE.

INTRODUCTION

Phenomenology is essentially the study of “lived-experience” or the “life-world”. It emphasizes the world as lived by a person, not the world or reality as something separated from the person. The life-world is understood as what we experience pre-reflectively, without resorting to categorization or conceptualization, and quite often includes what is taken for granted, or those things that are commonsensical. The phenomenological discipline owes its provenance to the German Jew, Edmund Husserl.

            The key concepts in phenomenology are: Epoche, Intentionality and Subjectivity.

Epoche (Objective Bracketing): This is called the phenomenological epoche by Husserl. Epoche is objective bracketing, which entails the inquirer’s self-distancing from the object of inquiry in order to let the object manifest itself clearly as it is.  In objective bracketing, the phenomenologist disengages personal interest and reduces his/her personal involvement in the study to aid objective study of the immanent data of human subjective conscious experience. With the epoche, we detach our personal, emotional involvements; we destroy all interest in order to reconstruct experience or reconstitute the world. Hence, with the epoche, phenomenology graduates into a science purified of unwarranted prior interpretations, constructions and assumptions, or a flawless ‘description of the pervasive traits of experience, not the concern with regional specialties within experience, as is the case with the laboratory sciences.’

Intentionality (quality of aboutness): The doctrine of intentionality is an admirable hangover from Franz Brentano, Husserl’s teacher. In phenomenology, consciousness is manifested in intentionality. Intentionality is the notion that consciousness is always consciousness of something intended by the subject. Intentionality signifies the fact that consciousness is directional, that it is given in experience as an outward-moving vector. The object of consciousness is called the “intentional object” and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, through perception, memory, retention, etc.

In order to identify, describe and interpret the meaning of phenomena, phenomenologists must be attentive to the internal structures of their data: to the internal structures of consciousness with their intended referent.

Subjectivity: The thrust of subjectivity is that the phenomenological subject and its objects are correlative. To be at all is to be the object of some subject’s contemplation, and to contemplate at all is to be the subject of some object. Objectivity thus has meaning only in relation to subjectivity. Objects neither have meaning in the abstract nor are they intelligible a priori. They are only meaningful for us. It is impossible to confront an object which cannot be intended or meant by a subject. There are no objects except intentional objects, and intentional objects are intelligible because and insofar as we understand them.

From these, it is to be gleaned that whatever has meaning for or is intelligible to the subject must be connected to the world in one way or the other. And whatever is presented to the subject as an object in the world, must, in some sense be real about the world.

REQUIREMENTS FOR BECOMING A PHENOMENOLOGIST

To become a phenomenologist:

1) One must first of all acquaint himself/herself with what authors and competent experts of phenomenology have said about the discipline whether favourably or unfavourably. In other words, becoming a phenomenologist calls for a thorough mastery of the available literature (not necessarily all of them) on the subject-matter and also, a demonstration of competence at critical exposition and/or defense of phenomenology.

2) In becoming a phenomenologist, it is pertinent that one expounds the concept of phenomenon which is a preliminary stage in the phenomenological enterprise. This, Heidegger did in Being and Time and Sartre did in Being and Nothingness.

3) A prospective phenomenologist should also imbibe and adopt the doctrine of Epoche. Even if explicit adoption of the Husserlian doctrine of Epoche is not entailed here, it is entailed that the prospective phenomenologist put in abeyance all previous hang-ups about the object of inquiry which in essence is an implicit performance of the Epoche.

4) A to-be phenomenologist should be able to distinguish the task before him from that of the psychologist for instance. Maintaining a bias-free attitude to objects of enquiry is highly required of the to-be phenomenologist, whose interest is principally on the ‘what’ of his/her experience. The focus of the phenomenologist is immediate experience, and he/she analyses precisely as it occurs to him/her.

5) The initiate is also required to understand that the phenomenologist deals with the object of thought itself and not the existence or non-existence of an object. Thus, while the experimental psychologist deals with facts, the phenomenologist deals with the meaning of ‘this’ regardless of whether such a ‘this’ exists or not.

6) One who wants to be a phenomenologist must be able to perform intentional analysis (by which we mean a thorough exhibition of the structures of experience precisely as it occurs in consciousness), which according to Richard Schmitt, follows immediately from transcendental reduction.

Now, if, as Heidegger puts it, one cannot acquire full mastery of the phenomenological enterprise merely by reading phenomenological literature, it behoves the aspiring phenomenologist to pass through the three main stages of the phenomenological culture.

THE MAIN STAGES IN THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL CULTURE

            The main stages in the phenomenological culture are three (3). According to Husserl, the primary task of phenomenology as a critical a priori research is the clarification of the question concerning the possibility of cognition. Phenomenology is the only science that can handle this important task of clarification. What then are the main stages?

First stage:

Phenomenology here is regarded as a critique of knowledge and it proceeds in the fashion of Descartes’ Methodic doubt. But, how can phenomenology as a critique of cognition proceed with the task of questioning all cognition if it is itself a form of cognition, i.e. a cognition of cognitions? This apparent difficulty in the methodological procedure of a critique of cognition was surmounted by Husserl on two counts. In the first, Husserl argues that the casting of doubt on all forms of knowledge does not imply the dubiousness or impossibility of all knowledge. What the question concerning the possibility of cognition seeks to clarify is not whether knowledge of some sort is possible, but whether what a form of cognition purports to accomplish is actually accomplished given its methodological procedure. Second, a critique of knowledge which concerns itself with the possibility of cognition which is itself beyond all reasonable doubts, a form of cognition about which the question as to whether it actually accomplishes what it purports cannot be legitimately raised. Thus, the first stage in a phenomenological culture is to uncover the indubitable data of cognition of a special kind about which no reasonable doubt is possible.

Second Stage:

This is the stage of eidetic reduction. In this stage, we intuit essences or ‘see’ pure phenomenon as the truly absolute datum. This intuition forms a multiplicity of variations of what is given, and while maintaining the multiplicity, one focuses attention on what remains unchanged in it. Thus, there is a transition from the consciousness of individual and concrete objects to pure essences, thence, an achievement of an intuition of the eidos of a thing or a being. In this stage of eidetic reduction, we grasp the objectivity of essences. In this stage too, we are enabled to see clearly and distinctly what is objectively given; equipped to grasp or intuit pure essences and the disavowal of all psychologistic interpretation of evidence in terms of feelings.

Third Stage:

Phenomenology seeks absolute data which provides the essential criteria for all forms of evaluation. It seeks a kind of universal essence. After perceiving something (say a sound for instance), and arriving at a pure datum of sound by executing the epoche, we get to the essence of phenomenological sound, that is, what makes a sound a sound irrespective of its variety via eidetic reduction.  Then, in this stage, we universalize our perception and retention of its essence, we posit a universal essence of sound.