Contemporary Philosophy:
Introduction to Phenomenology
National University of Ireland
Milltown Institute
April 2008
Introduction to Phenomenology
 Phenomenology and its Predecessors
 Edmund Husserl
 Martin Heidegger
Introduction to Phenomenology
 Phenomenology and its Predecessors
 Edmund Husserl
 Martin Heidegger
Introduction to Phenomenology
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Phenomenology is both a philosophical movement and
method.
It is many things to many people and its definition is
hotly contested in a way that is, perhaps, symptomatic
of the heterogenous development within contemporary
philosophy.
It is perhaps most helpful to think of it as a
solution to a problem.
Introduction to Phenomenology
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Phenomenologists assert that the study of
phenomena is the correct and most primordial
objective of philosophers.
Introduction to Phenomenology
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
This would be in contrast to:
Ethics - The Study of Right and Wrong
Epistemology - The Study of Knowledge
Introduction to Phenomenology
The field of Phenomenology begins with Plato and his
Allegory of the Cave:
Plato argued that people uneducated in the forms would
mistake the shadows on the wall for the real thing. Put
another way we could say that they would mistake the
phenomena with the real thing itself.
The was the birthplace of the classical greek distinction
between:
The Form and its Phenomenon
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Reality
Versus
Our experience of reality.
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Or put another way:
The distinction between things themselves
and our experience of them.
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
The problem of the (im)possibility of
objective experience has been a focus for
Metaphysics since the beginning of
philosophy and has consequences for
nearly all branches of philosophical thought.
Phenomenology is an attempt to answer this
(seemingly) basic question:
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
How can we have knowledge
of the world, as it really is?
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
How can we distinguish between the
shadow of a rabbit and a rabbit?
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
 Despite having its roots as far back at Plato;
Phenomenology came into its own in the
work of the German turn-of-the-century
Philosopher Edmund Husserl
Introduction to Phenomenology
 Phenomenology and its Predecessors
 Edmund Husserl
 Martin Heidegger
Edmund Husserl
• Edmund Husserl was born April 8, 1859, into a Jewish family in the town of Prossnitz in Moravia, then a part of the
Austrian Empire.
• He went to school in Vienna and was a mediocre student keen on Mathematics and Science.
• 1876 Went to Leipzig University and continued his studies in Maths, Physics and now Philosophy.
• After a spell in Berlin, he completed his PhD Studies in Vienna on a theory of the calculus of variations in 1883.
• In 1886 he went to Halle and wrote on a theory of numbers, was baptised as a Christian and the next year was married.
• They h ad 3 children one of which died during the First World War at Verdun.
• In 1916 he was appointed to professorship at Freiburg University. It was there that he acquired the brilliant protégé, Heidegger.
• Later, during the Nazi persecution of the jews Husserl, with the help of his own student, Heidegger, was removed from office
at Freiburg.
Before dying in 1938 he likened himself to a great explorer who has discovered the promised land of Phenomenology.
The cultivation of its fields would only come after his death.
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
How can we have knowledge
of the world, as it really is?
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Descartes also approached this question.
Employing the method of radical doubt he
concluded that the only thing that one can
know with certainty is that a thing is doing
some thinking: Cogito Ergo Sum
This thinking may be described as
Rationalism.
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
In contrast Empiricists approach the
problem by rejecting the existence of extraworldly phenomena like ideas/spirit/soul and
seek an explanation from observable
phenomena.
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Phenomenology and its Predecessors
Edmund Husserl
What is Phenomenology?
CONTRA Descartes and Locke, Husserl argues that in order to answer the question of how we can
have knowledge of the world ; we ought to turn our attention to the study of our experience of it.
Phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience including:
Perception
Thought
Memory
Imagination
Edmund Husserl
What is Phenomenology?
The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called "intentionality",
that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness
that it is a consciousness of or about something.
According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward things only
through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc.
These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things
they present or mean.
Edmund Husserl
Returning to the Hammer
Edmund Husserl
As what do we experience this hammer? It is many things to many people.
To a carpenter it is a TOOL.
To a retailer it is MERCHANDISE..
To a killer it is a WEAPON.
To a lecturer it is a PROP.
To my girlfriend it is a NUISANCE.
To a communist it is a SYMBOL.
Edmund Husserl
Describing experiences?
Feelings?
Emotions?
Fantasies?
Dreams?
Edmund Husserl
If this all sounds a bit like Psychology…..it should!
Husserl was greatly influenced by the fledgling discipline
pioneered by his contemporaries:
Edmund Husserl
Franz Brentano
1838 - 1917
Sigmund Freud
1856-1939
William James
1842 - 1910
Edmund Husserl
Logical Investigation
Objective Facts
Psycho-Logical Investigation
Subjective Events
Edmund Husserl
Critique of Science
Husserl argued that the scientific method was delusional.
The impossibility of casual passive observation meant that the notion of
1.
2.
3.
Observing the world
Discerning Patterns
Deriving Laws
Was not as simple as scientists would have us believe.
Rather, our attention is always directed at the object of our experience and so
before the scientist can only prove the accuracy of their original assumption.
Put simply, Science was not fundamental in a way that would satisfy Husserl
Because if refused to concede the presuppositions upon which its enquiries
were based.
Edmund Husserl
In order to draw the distinction between these two different ways of
our experiences of the world he employed two greek terms:
noesis
The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis. Phenomenology describes the objects
of consciousness.
noema,
The Ideal contect of noesis is noema. Phenomenology also describes consciousness itself.
In this way it seeks to draw from both scientific and psychological descriptions of the world.
The Objective and Subjective are correlative but never reducible to eachother.
Edmund Husserl
The Phenomenological Reduction
The purpose of this inquiry into the structure of experience is, remember, to
provide a basis for knowledge about the world.
Husserl argued that all consciousness is consciousness of something.
There is always something towards which consciousness is directed.
Therefore: If we are to gain knowledge about the object of consciousness we
must first examine consciousness.
The consequence of this is that consciousness is the pre-condition for
knowledge.
Let us return to our hammer.
Edmund Husserl
The Phenomenological Reduction
Let us consider the following:
Each of us is currently having an experience of the hammer. We are having a
noesis of this object.
However we are unable to get knowledge of noema or the thing in itself because
we are unaware of the schematic, psychological and scientific preconceptions
upon which our experience (noesis) rests.
Husserl argued through a radical reduction, it is possible to bracket off these
schema and gain knowledge of the thing as it is in itself.
In what he describes as an epoche the subject [brackets off] the natural attitude.
The place to begin this enquiry is from our own experience of the world. From
Our first-person-point-of-view.
Edmund Husserl
The Phenomenological Reduction
In the phenomenological reduction one needs to strip away the theoretical or scientific conceptions
and thematizations that overlay the phenomenon one wishes to study, and which prevents one
from seeing the phenomenon in a non-abstracting manner.
The Epoche is the moment in which we break free from our everyday experience of the world.
An everyday experience in which we rely upon unquestioningly and unaware of a number of the
suppositions of science.
This moment is transcendental.
If the epoche is the name for whatever method we use to free ourselves from the captivity of the
unquestioned acceptance of the everyday world. Then the reduction is the recognition of that
acceptance as an acceptance.
Hammer Reduction
Let us return to our hammer; we have already spoken about the different
ways we may encounter it, as a tool, a weapone etc.
But have we gone far enough?
Our questioning is only beginning.
What are the assumptions governing your experience of this hammer at this
moment?
Scientific Assumptions
Perceptive Assumptions
Sociological Assumptions
How do these affect your experience?
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger was a protégé of Husserl’s and subscribed to many of his ideas.
However, he had his own ideas about the method of Phenomenology.
Husserl ‘bracketed out’ the question of the existence of the real world
and focussed instead on the fundamental experience of consciousness within
It. This has been characterised as a transcendental turn and has inspired much
comparison with Buddhist meditation.
For Heidegger the transcendental turn was the wrong move for phenomenology.
Heidegger argued that ‘bracketing out’ the question of the existence of the real
world was not helpful.
For him, the study of experience had to being where experiences occur and for
whom.
Heidegger proposed that Phenomenology was a ‘fundamental Ontology’. Put
simply the description of experiences has to begin with People in the World.
Martin Heidegger
Phenomenologist
Ontologist
Philosopher
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Martin Heidegger
Ontology
Epistemology seeks to answer the question: How can we have knowledge?
Ontology seeks to answer the question: What is Being?
Heidegger concurred with Husserl that neither radical empiricism or rationalism
would provide a solid understanding of our experience of the world.
For Heidegger however the goal of phenomenology was not to allow an access
‘to the things themselves!’.
The goal of phenomenology was to make transparent the Being of Being
transparent to the Being for whom Being is an issue.
Put another way:
Martin Heidegger
The Hammer has no Being-in-itself. The Being for whom Being is an
issue is the human being (Dasein).
Heidegger makes the distinction between:
Being
beings
Sein
seindes
If Phenomenology is to describe our experience of the world; then it
ought to begin with the most basic experiences. Things like our
experience of picking up a hammer to put up a shelf.
As what do we experience the hammer? We experience it as a tool
ready-to-hand to be employed in the process of hammering.
Martin Heidegger
The most important experience that phenomenology has to provide an
account of is the experience of being.
For Heidegger then Phenomenoloy was transformed into fundamental
Ontology.
Martin Heidegger
Ontology
He seeks to describe this entity we call Being (Da-Sein) in its average
everydayness.
He denotes the categories of experience as existentiale: In answer to the
question: What is Being?
Heidegger replies that a fundamental and reflective approach to
descriptive phenomenology reveals the following categories of Being:
Being-In-The-World
Being-With-Others
Being-Towards-Death
Martin Heidegger
Being-In-The-World
It does not make sense to talk of experience occurring outside-of-theworld as in the Cartesian exercise.
Dasein (Being) is always being-in-the-world at a certain place and time.
But the World should not be thought of as a collection of objects as under
the extreme empiricist viewpoint.
Rather the World is understood as the horizon in which experience takes
place.
Being is Being-In-The-World.
Martin Heidegger
Being-With-Others
Being in the world is Being-With-Other people.
This signifies that we are with other Beings in a way more complex than
we are being alongside beings.
How is this kind of Being-With-Others characterised? It is characterised
by our caring about other people.
Being is Being-With-Others
Martin Heidegger
Being-Towards-Death
To be is not to be.
One of the fundamental facets of Being is the fact that all Being is BeingTowards-Death.
Being is Being-Towards-Death.
Martin Heidegger
Hermeneutics
Hermione was a messenger between mortals and gods in ancient
Greece.
She was also a terrible trickster figure and would often deliberately
miscommunicate the messages of the gods.
This obfuscation inspired the school of thinking called Hermeneutics.
Heidegger wrote that Ontology is the Hermeneutics of Facticity.
Factical objects in the world are never uncovered without preconceptions.
Martin Heidegger
Authentic and Inauthentic Being: A Qualitative Distinction
For Heidegger one could have an authentic or inauthentic attitude
towards one’s Being.
As what does one experience oneself in everyday existence?
It is both shocking and unnerving to hear that in everyday existence we
do not experience ourselves as anything like we truly are.
Instead we have an inauthentic apprehension of our selves.
Most tragic is an inauthentic being-towards-death.
How to Philosophise with a
Hammer
To conclude our example of the hammer:
The Cartesian/Rational Approach would deny the possibility of having certain
knowledge; under the method of radical scepticism.
The Empirical Approach would affirm the scientific existence of the hammer
but would give us no information about the hammer as we experience it.
The Husserlian Transcendental model would ask us to gain knowledge of the
hammer as-it-is-in-itself by bracketing off the presuppositions and schema that
we bring to the act of perceiving it.
The Heideggerean/Hermeneutic model would argue that the hammer has no
Being. Any knowledge we can gain about the hammer must be first examined for
hermeneutic impurities and is subject to change.
In Conclusion
What are the common threads of Phenomenology?
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
In order to gain knowledge of the world we must examine experience.
To achieve this in a fundamental way we must avoid all existing
preconditions to our understanding of experience: Sciientific, Historical,
Aesthetic, Historical.
A demand that we reject the stale, arid and non-vital examination of the
world typified by Neo-Kantian tradition. Experience is a living, vital and wet
thing.
A desire to enhance the richness and vitality of everyday lived experience.
A fear and avoidance of the kind of thinking that results in the doubting of the
existence of the ‘outside’ world.
Sartre’s Nausea as
Phenomenology
Sartre’s Nausea can be considered a definitive phenomenonological text;
describing the experiences of its protagonist in vivid and incredible detail it
Is perhaps the best description of the moment at which a person experience’s
The groundlessness of existence and for Sartre this radical freedom of
self-determination dispelled his Nausea.
“