phenomenology

—phenomenological /fi nom'euh nl oj"i keuhl/, phenomenologic, adj. —phenomenologically, adv. —phenomenologist, n.

/fi nom'euh nol"euh jee/, n. Philos.

1. the study of phenomena.

2. the system of Husserl and his followers stressing the description of phenomena.

[1790-1800; PHENOMEN(ON) + -O- + -LOGY]

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Philosophical discipline originated by Edmund Husserl.

Husserl developed the phenomenological method to make possible "a descriptive account of the essential structures of the directly given." Phenomenology emphasizes the immediacy of experience, the attempt to isolate it and set it off from all assumptions of existence or causal influence and lay bare its essential structure. Phenomenology restricts the philosopher's attention to the pure data of consciousness, uncontaminated by metaphysical theories or scientific assumptions. Husserl's concept of the life-world

as the individual's personal world as directly experienced

expressed this same idea of immediacy. With the appearance of the Annual for Philosophical and Phenomenological Research (1913–30), under Husserl's editorship, his personal philosophizing flowered into an international movement. Its most notable adherents were Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger.

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▪ philosophy

Introduction

      a 20th-century philosophical (metaphysics) movement, the primary objective of which is the direct investigation and description of phenomena (phenomenon) as consciously (consciousness) experienced, without theories (epistemology) about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions. The word itself is much older, however, going back at least to the 18th century, when the Swiss-German mathematician and philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert (Lambert, Johann Heinrich) applied it to that part of his theory of knowledge that distinguishes truth from illusion and error. In the 19th century the word became associated chiefly with the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of Mind, 2nd ed., 1931), by G.W.F. Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), who traced the development of the human spirit from mere sense experience to “absolute knowledge.” The so-called Phenomenological movement did not get under way, however, until early in the 20th century. But even this new Phenomenology includes so many varieties that a comprehensive characterization of the subject requires their consideration.

Characteristics of Phenomenology

      In view of the spectrum of Phenomenologies that have issued directly or indirectly from the original work of the Austrian-born German philosopher Edmund Husserl (Husserl, Edmund), it is not easy to find a common denominator for such a movement beyond its common source. But similar situations occur in other philosophical as well as non-philosophical movements.

Essential features and variations

      Although, as seen from Husserl's last perspective, all departures from his own views could only appear as heresies, a more generous assessment will show that all those who consider themselves Phenomenologists subscribe, for instance, to his watchword, Zu den Sachen selbst (“To the things themselves”), by which they meant the taking of a fresh approach to concretely experienced phenomena, an approach, as free as possible from conceptual presuppositions, and the attempt to describe them as faithfully as possible. Moreover, most adherents to Phenomenology hold that it is possible to obtain insights into the essential structures and the essential relationships of these phenomena on the basis of a careful study of concrete examples supplied by experience or imagination and by a systematic variation of these examples in imagination. Some Phenomenologists also stress the need for studying the ways in which the phenomena appear in men's object-directed (“intentional (intentionality)”) consciousness.

      Beyond this merely static aspect of appearance, some also want to investigate its genetic aspect, exploring, for instance, how the phenomenon intended—for example, a book—shapes (“constitutes”) itself in the typical unfolding of experience. Husserl himself believed that such studies require a previous suspension (epochē) of belief in the reality of these phenomena, whereas others consider it not indispensable but helpful. Finally, in existential Phenomenology, the meanings of certain phenomena (such as anxiety) are explored by a special interpretive (“hermeneutic”) Phenomenology, the methodology of which needs further clarification.

Contrasts with related movements

      It may also be helpful to bring out the distinctive essence of Phenomenology by confronting it with some of its philosophical neighbours. In contrast to Positivism and to traditional Empiricism, from which Husserl's teacher at Vienna, Franz Brentano, had started out and with which Phenomenology shares an unconditional respect for the positive data of experience (“We are the true positivists,” Husserl claimed in his Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie [1913; “Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy”]), Phenomenology does not restrict these data to the range of sense experience but admits on equal terms such non-sensory (“categorial”) data as relations and values, as long as they present themselves intuitively (intuition). Consequently, Phenomenology does not reject universals; (universal) and, in addition to analytic (analytic proposition) a priori (a priori knowledge) statements, whose predicates are logically contained in the subjects and the truth of which is independent of experience (e.g., “All material bodies have extension”), and the synthetic a posteriori statements, whose subjects do not logically imply the predicate and the truth of which is dependent on experience (e.g., “My shirt is red”), it recognizes knowledge of the synthetic a priori, a proposition whose subject does not logically imply the predicate but one in which the truth is independent of experience (e.g., “Every colour is extended”), based on insight into essential relationships within the empirically given.

      In contrast to phenomenalism, a position in the theory of knowledge (epistemology) with which it is often confused, Phenomenology—which is not primarily an epistemological theory—accepts neither the rigid division between appearance and reality nor the narrower view that phenomena are all that there is (sensations or permanent possibilities of sensations). These are questions on which Phenomenology as such keeps an open mind—pointing out, however, that phenomenalism overlooks the complexities of the intentional structure of men's consciousness of the phenomena.

      In contrast to a Rationalism that stresses conceptual reasoning at the expense of experience, Phenomenology insists on the intuitive foundation and verification of concepts and especially of all a priori claims; in this sense it is a philosophy from “below,” not from “above.”

      In contrast to an analytic philosophy that substitutes simplified constructions for the immediately given in all of its complexity and applies “Ockham's razor,” Phenomenology resists all transforming reinterpretations of the given, analyzing it for what it is in itself and on its own terms.

      Phenomenology shares with Linguistic Analysis a respect for the distinctions between the phenomena reflected in the shades of meaning of ordinary language (ordinary language analysis) as a possible starting point for phenomenological analyses. Phenomenologists, however, do not think that the study of ordinary language is a sufficient basis for studying the phenomena, because ordinary language cannot and need not completely reveal the complexity of phenomena.

      In contrast to an Existential (Existentialism) philosophy that believes that human existence is unfit for phenomenological analysis and description, because it tries to objectify the unobjectifiable, Phenomenology holds that it can and must deal with these phenomena, however cautiously, as well as other intricate phenomena outside the human existence.

Herbert Spiegelberg

Origin and development of Husserl's Phenomenology

Basic principles

      Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Its fountainhead was Edmund Husserl, who held professorships at Göttingen and Freiburg im Breisgau and who wrote Die Idee der Phänomenologie (The Idea of Phenomenology, 1964) in 1906. Yet, even for Husserl, the conception of Phenomenology as a new method destined to supply a new foundation for both philosophy and science (science, philosophy of) developed only gradually and kept changing to the very end of his career. Trained as a mathematician, Husserl was attracted to philosophy by Franz Brentano (Brentano, Franz), whose descriptive psychology seemed to offer a solid basis for a scientific philosophy. The concept of intentionality, the directedness of the consciousness toward an object, which is a basic concept in Phenomenology, was already present in Brentano's Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte (1874): “And thus we can define psychic phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which, precisely as intentional, contain an object in themselves.” Brentano dissociated himself here from Sir William Hamilton (Hamilton, Sir William, 9th Baronet), known for his philosophy of the “unconditioned,” who had attributed the character of intentionality to the realms of thought and desire only, to the exclusion of that of feeling.

      The point of departure of Husserl's investigation is to be found in the treatise Der Begriff der Zahl (1887; “The Concept of Number”), which was later expanded into Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische Untersuchungen (1891). Numbers are not found ready-made in nature but result from a mental achievement. Here Husserl was preoccupied with the question of how something like the constitution of numbers ever comes about. This treatise is important to Husserl's later development for two reasons: first, because it contains the first traces of the concepts “reflection,” “constitution,” “description,” and the “founding constitution of meaning,” concepts that later played a predominant role in Husserl's philosophy; and second, because it reflected two events—(1) a criticism of his book by Gottlob Frege (Frege, Gottlob), a seminal thinker in logic, who had charged him with confusing logical and psychological considerations, and (2) Husserl's discovery of the Wissenschaftslehre (1837; Logic and Scientific Methods, 1971) by Bernard Bolzano (Bolzano, Bernhard), a Bohemian mathematician, theologian, and social moralist, and his view concerning “truths in themselves”—which led Husserl to an analysis and critical discussion of psychologism, the view that psychology could be used as a foundation for pure logic, which he clearly felt to be no longer possible.

      In the first volume of Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; Logical Investigations, 1970), entitled Prolegomena, Husserl began with a criticism of psychologism. And yet he continued by conducting a careful investigation of the psychic acts in and through which logical structures are given; these investigations, too, could give the impression of being descriptive psychological investigations, though they were not conceived of in this way by the author. For the issue at stake was the discovery of the essential structure of these acts. Here Brentano's concept of intentionality received a richer and more refined signification. Husserl distinguished between perceptual and categorical intuition and stated that the latter's theme lies in logical relationships. The real concern of Phenomenology was clearly formulated for the first time in his Logos article, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (1910–11; Philosophy as Rigorous Science, 1965). In this work Husserl wrestled with two unacceptable views: naturalism and historicism.

      Naturalism attempts to apply the methods of the natural sciences to all other domains of knowledge, including the realm of consciousness. Reason becomes naturalized. Although an attempt is then made to find a foundation for the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) by means of experimental psychology, it proves to be impossible, because in so doing one is unable to grasp precisely what is at stake in knowledge as found in the natural sciences.

      What a philosopher must examine is the relationship between consciousness and Being; and in doing so, he must realize that from the standpoint of epistemology, Being is accessible to him only as a correlate of conscious acts. He must thus pay careful attention to what occurs in these acts. This can be done only by a science that tries to understand the very essence of consciousness; and this is the task that Phenomenology has set for itself. Because clarification of the various types of objects must follow from the basic modes of consciousness, Husserl's thought remained close to psychology. In contradistinction to what is the case in psychology, however, in Phenomenology, consciousness is thematized in a very special and definite way, viz., just insofar as consciousness is the locus in which every manner of constituting and founding meaning must take place. In man's intuition, conscious occurrences must be given immediately in order to avoid introducing at the same time certain interpretations. The nature of such processes as perception, representation, imagination, judgment, and feeling must be grasped in immediate self-givenness. The call “To the things themselves” is not a demand for realism, because the things at stake are the acts of consciousness and the objective entities that get constituted in them: these things form the realm of what Husserl calls the phenomena.

      Thus, the objects of Phenomenology are “absolute data grasped in pure, immanent intuition,” and its goal is to discover the essential structures of the acts (noesis) and the objective entities that correspond to them (noema).

      On the other hand, Phenomenology must also be distinguished from historicism, a philosophy (history, philosophy of) that stresses the immersion of all thinkers within a particular historical setting. Husserl objected to historicism because it implies relativism. He gave credit to Wilhelm Dilthey (Dilthey, Wilhelm), author of “Entwürfe zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft” (“Outlines for the Critique of Historical Reason,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 12 vol. [1914–36], vol. 5, 6), for having developed a typification of world views, but he doubted and even rejected the skepticism that flows necessarily from the relativity of the various types. History is concerned with facts, whereas Phenomenology deals with the knowledge of essences. To Husserl, Dilthey's doctrine of world views was incapable of achieving the rigour required by genuine science. Contrary to all of the practical tendencies found in world views, Husserl demanded that philosophy be founded as a rigorous science. Its task implies that nothing be accepted as given beforehand but that the philosopher should try to find the way back to the real beginnings. This is tantamount to saying, however, that he must try to find the way to the foundations of meaning that are found in consciousness. Just as for Immanuel Kant the empirical has merely relative validity and never an absolute, or apodictic, validity, so for Husserl, too, what is to be searched for is a scientific knowledge of essences in contradistinction to a scientific knowledge of facts.

Basic method

      The basic method of all Phenomenological investigation, as Husserl developed it himself—and on which he worked throughout his entire lifetime—is the “reduction”: the existence of the world must be put between brackets, not because the philospher should doubt it but merely because this existing world is not the very theme of Phenomenology; its theme is rather the manner in which knowledge of the world comes about. The first step of the reduction consists in the phenomenological reduction, through which all that is given is changed into a phenomenon in the sense of that which is known in and by consciousness; for this kind of knowing—which is to be taken in a very broad sense as including every mode of consciousness, such as intuition, recollection, imagination, and judgment—is here all-important. There are several reasons why Husserl gave a privileged position to intuition: among them is the fact that intuition is that act in which a person grasps something immediately in its bodily presence and also that it is a primordially given act upon which all of the rest is to be founded. Furthermore, Husserl's stress on intuition must be understood as a refutation of any merely speculative approach to philosophy.

      This reduction reverses—“re-flects”—man's direction of sight from a straightforward orientation toward objects to an orientation toward consciousness.

      The second step is to be found in the eidetic reduction. To get hold of consciousness is not sufficient; on the contrary, the various acts of consciousness must be made accessible in such a way that their essences—their universal and unchangeable structures—can be grasped. In the eidetic reduction one must forego everything that is factual and merely occurs in this way or that. A means of grasping the essence is the Wesensschau, the intuition of essences and essential structures. This is not a mysterious kind of intuition. Rather, one forms a multiplicity of variations of what is given, and while maintaining the multiplicity, one focusses attention on what remains unchanged in the multiplicity; i.e., the essence is that identical something that continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. Husserl, therefore, called it the invariant.

      To this point, the discussion of reduction has remained within the realm of psychology, albeit a new—namely, a phenomenological—psychology. The second step must now be completed by a third, the transcendental (transcendental idealism) reduction. It consists in a reversion to the achievements of that consciousness that Husserl, following Kant, called transcendental consciousness, although he conceived of it in his own way. The most fundamental event occurring in this consciousness is the creation of time awareness through the acts of protention (future) and retention (past), which is something like a self-constitution. To do phenomenology was for Husserl tantamount to returning to the transcendental ego as the ground for the foundation and constitution (or making) of all meaning (German Sinn). Only when a person has reached this ground can he achieve the insight that makes his comportment transparent in its entirety and makes him understand how meaning comes about, how meaning is based upon meaning like strata in a process of sedimentation.

      Husserl worked on the clarification of the transcendental reduction until the very end of his life. It was precisely the further development of the transcendental reduction that led to a division of the Phenomenological movement and to the formation of a school that refused to become involved in this kind of system of problems (see below Phenomenology of essences (Phenomenology)).

Basic concepts

      In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote:

In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something, willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found inherently a being-directed-toward . . . . Experiences are intentional. This being-directed-toward is not just joined to the experience by way of a mere addition, and occasionally as an accidental reaction, as if experiences could be what they are without the intentional relation. With the intentionality of the experiences there announces itself, rather, the essential structure of the purely psychical.

      The phenomenological investigator must examine the different forms of intentionality in a reflective attitude because it is precisely in and through the corresponding intentionality that each domain of objects becomes accessible to him. Husserl took as his point of departure mathematical entities and later examined logical structures, in order finally to achieve the insight that each being must be grasped in its correlation to consciousness, because each datum becomes accessible to a person only insofar as it has meaning for him. From this position, regional ontologies, or realms of being, develop: for instance, those dealing with the region of “nature,” the region of “the psychic,” or the region of “the spirit.” Moreover, Husserl distinguished formal ontologies—such as the region of the logical—from material ontologies.

      In order to be able to investigate a regional ontology, it is first necessary to discover and examine the founding act by which realities in this realm are constituted. For Husserl, constitution does not mean the creation or fabrication of a thing or object by a subject; it means the founding constitution of its meaning. There is meaning only for consciousness. All founding constitution of meaning is made possible by transcendental consciousness. Speaking of this transcendental motif, Husserl wrote:

It is the motif of questioning back to the last source of all achievements of knowledge, of reflection in which the knower reflects on himself and his knowing life, in which all the scientific constructs which have validity for him, occur teleologically, and as permanent acquisitions are kept and become freely available to him.

      In the realm of such transcendental problems, it is necessary to examine how all of the categories in and through which one understands mundane beings or purely formal entities originate from specific modes of consciousness. In Husserl's view, the temporalization must be conceived as a kind of primordial constitution of transcendental consciousness itself.

      Understood in this way, Phenomenology does not place itself outside the sciences but, rather, attempts to make understandable what takes place in the various sciences and, thus, to thematize the unquestioned presuppositions of the sciences.

      In his last publication, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), Husserl arrived at the life-world—the world as shaped within the immediate experience of each man—by questioning back to the foundations that the sciences presuppose. In Die Krisis he analyzed the grounds that had led to the European crisis of culture and philosophy, which found its immediate expression in the contrast between the great successes of the sciences of nature and the failure of the sciences of man. In the modern era, scientific knowledge had become fragmented into an objectivistic-physicalist and a transcendental knowledge. Until recently this split could not be overcome. It led, rather, to the attempt to develop the sciences of man in accordance with the procedures used in the exact sciences of nature (naturalism)—an attempt doomed to failure. In opposition to this attempt, Husserl wished to show that in the new approach one must reflect on the activities of the scientists.

As the immediately given world, this merely subjective world, was forgotten in the scientific thematization, the accomplishing subject, too, was forgotten and the scientist himself was not thematized.

      Husserl demonstrated this point by using the example of Galileo and his mathematization of our world. The truth characteristic of the life-world is by no means an inferior form of truth when compared to the exact, scientific truth but is, rather, always a truth already presupposed in all scientific research. That is why Husserl claimed that an ontology of the life-world must be developed—i.e., a systematic analysis of the constitutive achievements the result of which is the life-world, a life-world that, in turn, is the foundation of all scientific constitutions of meaning. The stimulating change that occurred here consists in the fact that truth is no longer measured after the criterion of an exact determination. For what is decisive is not the exactness but, rather, the part played by the founding act.

      It is in this connection that, rather abruptly, historicity, too, became relevant for Husserl. He began to reflect upon the emergence of philosophy among the Greeks and on its significance as a new mode of scientific (science, philosophy of) knowledge oriented toward infinity; and he interpreted the philosophy of René Descartes, often called the father of modern philosophy, as the point at which the split into the two research directions—physicalist objectivism and transcendental subjectivism—came about. Phenomenology must overcome this split, he held, and thus help mankind to live according to the demands of reason. In view of the fact that reason is the typical characteristic of man, mankind must find itself again through Phenomenology.

Later developments

Phenomenology of essences

      A different type of Phenomenology, the Phenomenology of essences, developed from a tangential continuation of that of the Logische Untersuchungen. Its supporters were Husserl's students in Göttingen and a group of young philosophers in Munich, originally students of Theodor Lipps (Lipps, Theodor), a Munich psychologist and philosopher—students who had turned away from Lipp's psychologism and discovered powerful support in Husserl. The Phenomenological movement, which then began to take shape, found its most tangible expression in the publication of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1913–30), a Phenomenological yearbook with Husserl as its main editor, the preface of which defined Phenomenology in terms of a return to intuition (Anschauung) and to the essential insights (Wesenseinsichten) derived from it as the ultimate foundation of all philosophy.

      The 11 volumes of the Jahrbuch contained, in addition to Husserl's own works, the most important fruits of the movement in its broader application. Of the co-editors, Alexander Pfänder contributed chiefly to the development of phenomenological psychology and pure logic but developed also the outlines of a complete Phenomenological philosophy. Moritz Geiger applied the new approach particularly to aesthetics and Adolf Reinach to the philosophy of law. The most original and dynamic of Husserl's early associates, however, was Max Scheler (Scheler, Max), who had joined the Munich group and who did his major Phenomenological work on problems of value and obligation. A Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, did major work in structural ontology and analyzed the structures of various works of art in its light; Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a cosmic Realist at the University of Munich, worked intensively in the ontology of nature; and others made comparable contributions in other fields of philosophy. None of these early Phenomenologists, however, followed Husserl's road to transcendental Idealism; and some tried to develop a Phenomenology along the lines of Realism.

Heidegger's hermeneutic Phenomenology

      Martin Heidegger (Heidegger, Martin), one of Germany's foremost philosophers at the middle of the 20th century, was inspired to philosophy through Brentano's work Von der mannigfachen Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862; “On the Multifarious Meaning of Being According to Aristotle”). While he was still studying theology, from 1910 to 1911, Heidegger encountered Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen. From then on he pursued the course of Phenomenology with the greatest interest, and from 1916 he belonged to the narrow circle of students and followers of the movement. The typical character of the Phenomenological intuition was at that time the focus of Husserl's seminar exercises. To be sure, there appeared very early a difference between Husserl and Heidegger. Discussing and absorbing the works of the important philosophers in the history of metaphysics was, for Heidegger, an indispensable task, whereas Husserl repeatedly stressed the significance of a radically new beginning and—with few exceptions (among them Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant)—wished to bracket the history of philosophy.

      Heidegger's basic work, Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time, 1962), which was dedicated to Husserl, strongly acknowledged that its author was indebted to Phenomenology. In it, Phenomenology was understood as a methodological concept—a concept that was conceived by Heidegger in an original way and resulted from his questioning back to the meanings of the Greek concepts of phainomenon and logos. Phainomenon is “that which shows itself from itself,” but together with the concept of logos, it means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself.” This conception of Phenomenology, which relied more on Aristotle than on Husserl, constituted a change that was later to lead to an estrangement between Husserl and Heidegger. For in Sein und Zeit there is no longer a phenomenological reduction, a transcendental ego, or an intuition of essences in Husserl's sense. Heidegger's new beginning was, at the same time, a resumption of the basic question of philosophy: that concerning the meaning (Sinn) of Being. His manner of questioning can be defined as hermeneutical in that it proceeds from the interpretation of man's situation. What he thematized is, thus, the explanation of what is already understood.

      At the heart of Sein und Zeit lies Heidegger's analysis of the one (the man) who asks the question—who is capable of asking the question—concerning Being, who precisely through this capability occupies a privileged position in regard to all other beings, viz., that of Dasein (literally, “being there”). By conceiving of Dasein as being-in-the-world, Heidegger made the ancient problem concerning the relationship between subject and object superfluous. The basic structures of Dasein are primordial moodness (Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen), and logos (Rede). These structures are, in turn, founded in the temporalization of Dasein, from which future, having-been (past), and present originate. The two basic possibilities of man's existing (from the Latin ex and sistere, “standing out from”) are those in which Dasein either comes to its self (called authenticity) or loses itself (called inauthenticity); Dasein is inauthentic, for example, when it lets the possibilities of the choice for its own “ek-sisting” be given to it by others instead of deciding for itself. Heidegger's concept of care (Sorge, cura) has nothing to do with distress (Bekümmernis) but includes the unity of the articulated moments of man's being-in-the-world.

      The hermeneutic character of Heidegger's thought manifested itself also in his interpretation of poetry, in which he discovered a congenial spirit in Friedrich Hölderlin (Hölderlin, Friedrich), one of Germany's greater poets, of whose poetry he inaugurated a completely new interpretation; but it manifested itself equally well in his interpretation of metaphysics, which Heidegger tried to envision as an occurrence determined by the forgottenness of Being, an occurrence in the centre of which man finds himself and of which the clearest manifestation is to be found in “technicity,” the attempt of modern man to dominate the earth by controlling beings that are considered as objects.

      The concept of transcendental consciousness, which was central for Husserl, is not found in Heidegger—which clearly shows how Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit, had already dissociated himself from Husserl's Phenomenology.

Other developments

      Eugen Fink, for several years Husserl's collaborator, whose essay “Die phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik” (1933) led to a radicalization of Husserl's philosophical, transcendental Idealism, later turned in another direction, one that approached Heidegger's position and divorced itself at the same time from that of Husserl.

      Ludwig Landgrebe, who was Husserl's personal assistant for many years, published in 1938 Erfahrung und Urteil (“Experience and Judgment”), the first of Husserl's posthumous works devoted to the genealogy of logic. Among German-language scholars, Landgrebe remained closest to Husserl's original views and has developed them consistently in several works.

Dissemination of Phenomenology

Phenomenology in various countries

      Following upon the work of Husserl, Phenomenology spread into a worldwide movement.

In France

      One of the first French authors to become familiar with Husserl's philosophy was Emmanuel Lévinas (Lévinas, Emmanuel), a pluralistic Personalist, who combined ideas from Husserl and Heidegger in a very personal way. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, Jean-Paul), the leading Existentialist of France, took his point of departure from the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. His first works, L'Imagination (1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique, 1962) and L'Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination (1940; The Psychology of Imagination, 1950), remain completely within the context of Husserl's analyses of consciousness. Sartre explains the distinction between perceptual and imaginative consciousness with the help of Husserl's concept of intentionality, and he frequently employs the method of ideation (Wesensschau).

      In L'Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness, 1956), an essay on Phenomenological ontology, it is obvious that Sartre borrowed from Heidegger. Some passages from Heidegger's Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; What Is Metaphysics?, 1949), in fact, are copied literally. The meaning of nothingness, which Heidegger in this lecture made the theme of his investigations, became for Sartre the guiding question. Sartre departs from Heidegger's analytic of Dasein and introduces the position of consciousness (which Heidegger had overcome).

      The distinction between being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself (pour-soi) pervades the entire investigation. The in-itself is the opaque, matter-like substance that remains the same, whereas the for-itself is consciousness permeated by nothingness. The influence of the Idealist G.W.F. Hegel becomes apparent when the author tries to interpret everything in a dialectical (dialectic) way; i.e., through a tension of opposites. The dialectic of men's being-with-one-another is central: thus, seeing and being-seen correspond to dominating and being-dominated. The basic characteristic of being-for-itself is bad faith (mauvaise foi), which cannot be overcome because facticity (being-already) and transcendence (being-able-to-be) cannot be combined.

      The Phenomenological character of Sartre's analyses of consciousness consists in the way in which he elucidates certain modes of behaviour: love, hatred, sadism, masochism, and indifference. Although Sartre sees and describes these forms of behaviour strikingly and precisely, he limits himself to those modes that fit his philosophical interpretation. The significance of psychology, recognized by Husserl, emerges again in Sartre and leads to a demand for an Existential psychoanalysis.

      Sartre's definition of man (human being) as a being of possibilities that finds or loses itself in the choice that it makes in regard to itself refers to Heidegger's definition of Dasein as a being that has to materialize itself. For Sartre, freedom is the basic characteristic of man; thus Sartre belongs to the tradition of the great French moralist philosophers.

      In his later works, as in his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Search for a Method, 1963), Sartre turned to Marxism, though he developed a method of understanding that was influenced by hermeneutics. Here the choice made by the individual is limited by social and psychological conditions. Sartre's outstanding two-volume interpretation of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la famille; Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert, Gustave) de 1821–1857 (1971), is an example of this new method of understanding and interpretation, which combines Marxist elements with interpretations of a highly personal nature taken from depth psychology.

      Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice) (died 1961), who, together with Sartre and his associate Simone de Beauvoir, a writer and novelist, was an important representative of French Existentialism, was at the same time the most important French Phenomenologist. His works, La Structure du comportement (1942; Structure of Behaviour, 1963) and Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; Phenomenology of Perception, 1962), were the most original further developments and applications of Phenomenology to come from France. Merleau-Ponty gave a new interpretation of the meaning of the human body from the viewpoint of Phenomenology and, connected with this, of man's perception of space, the natural world, temporality, and freedom.

      Starting from Husserl's later phenomenology of the life-world, Merleau-Ponty anchored the phenomena of perception in the phenomenology of the lived body (the body as it is experienced and experiences), in which the perceiving subject is incarnated as the mediating link to the phenomenal world. Such a phenomenology of human “presence” in the world was also to offer an alternative to the rigid dichotomy between Idealism and Realism, in which consciousness and world could be reciprocally related. Phenomenology thus became a way of showing the essential involvement of human existence in the world, starting with everyday perception.

      Although it is true that Merleau-Ponty was originally close to Husserl in his thought, he later developed noticeably in the direction of Heidegger, a change that became particularly manifest in L'Oeil et l'esprit (1964; “Eye and Mind,” in The Primacy of Perception, 1964).

      Paul Ricoeur (Ricoeur, Paul), a student of the volitional experience, whose translation of Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie brought Husserl closer to the younger French generation, writes in a Phenomenological vein but with the intention of further developing Husserl's conception of Phenomenology. Ricoeur's two-volume Philosophie de la volonté (1950–60; “Philosophy of the Will”) also deals with the problems involved in the theological concept of guilt.

      Suzanne Bachelard, who in 1957 translated Husserl's Formale und transzendentale Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft, has pointed to the significance of Husserl for modern logic; and Jacques Derrida (Derrida, Jacques), an original French thinker on the limits of thought and language, has combined Phenomenology and Structuralism in his interpretation of literature.

In Germany

      After World War II, interest in Phenomenology sprang up again in its own homeland. The influence of Ludwig Landgrebe in Cologne has been particularly felt, as have the activities of the Husserl Archives in Cologne, with editions by Walter Biemel, who also published Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (1968; “Philosophical Analyses of Contemporary Art”) and essays on the relationships between Husserl and Heidegger. The circle around Gerhard Funke in Mainz, author of Phänomenologie—Metaphysik oder Methode? (1966), has also had a positive influence.

In other European countries

      In Belgium, at the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain) (Leuven, Catholic University of), are located the entire posthumous works of Husserl, as well as his personal library. Thanks to the initiative of H.L. Van Breda, founder of the Husserl Archives, several scholars worked intensively on the manuscripts for several decades. By 1972, 12 volumes of collected works had been published. Van Breda was also the director of the Phaenomenologica series—totalling 42 volumes by 1972—in which the most important publications in the field of Phenomenology (taken in a very broad sense) have been published. Thus, mainly through Van Breda's efforts, Leuven has become the most important centre for Phenomenology. Van Breda also organized international colloquia on Phenomenology. The influence of Alphonse de Waelhens, a Belgian philosopher of fresh experience and author of Phénoménologie et vérité (1953) and Existence et signification (1958), also bears mentioning.

      In The Netherlands, Stephan Strasser, oriented particularly toward phenomenological psychology, has been especially influential. And in Italy, the Phenomenology circle has centred around Enzo Paci. The Husserl scholar Jan Patocka, a prominent expert in Phenomenology as well as in the metaphysical tradition, was influential in Czechoslovakia; in Poland, Roman Ingarden represented the cause of Phenomenology; and there have also been important representatives in such countries as Portugal, England, South America, Japan, and India.

In the United States

      Phenomenology in the United States has lived a rather marginal existence for quite some time, notwithstanding the meritorious journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research founded by Husserl's student Marvin Farber, who is also the author of The Foundation of Phenomenology (1943). More recently, however, a noticeable change has taken place, chiefly because of the work of two scholars at the New School for Social Research in New York, Alfred Schütz, an Austrian-born sociologist and student of human cognition (died 1959), and Aron Gurwitsch, a Lithuanian-born philosopher. Schütz came early to Phenomenology, developing a social science on a phenomenological basis. Gurwitsch, author of Théorie du champ de la conscience (1957; The Field of Consciousness, 1964), came to Phenomenology through his study of the Gestalt psychologists Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein. While in Paris, Gurwitsch influenced Merleau-Ponty. The essays on Phenomenology published by Gurwitsch in the United States are among the best. His comprehensive knowledge ranges from mathematics, via the natural sciences, to psychology and metaphysics. The work The Phenomenological Movement (2nd ed., 1965), by Herbert Spiegelberg, an Alsatian-American Phenomenologist, is the movement's first encompassing historical presentation.

Phenomenology in other disciplines

      Of greater significance is the role of Phenomenology outside of philosophy proper in stimulating or reinforcing phenomenological tendencies in such fields as mathematics and the biological sciences. Much stronger was its impact on psychology, in which Franz Brentano and the German Carl Stumpf had prepared the ground and in which the U.S. psychologist William James, the Würzburg school, and the Gestalt psychologists had worked along parallel lines. But Phenomenology has probably made its strongest contribution in the field of psychopathology (psychiatry), in which the German Karl Jaspers (Jaspers, Karl), a foremost contemporary Existentialist, stressed the importance of phenomenological exploration of a patient's subjective experience. Jaspers was followed by the Swiss Ludwig Binswanger and several others. The Phenomenological strand is also very pronounced in American Existential (Existentialism) psychiatry (psychology) and has affected sociology, history, and the study of religion.

Conclusion

      At the turn of the fourth quarter of the 20th century, it remained to be seen whether Phenomenology could make solid contributions to philosophical knowledge. To this end, it needed to develop rigorous standards, which had not always been observed by some of its most brilliant practitioners, such as Max Scheler, and which were likely to be violated in a philosophy the ultimate appeal of which had to be made to intuitive verification. With this proviso, Phenomenology may well be qualified not only to become a bridge for better international communication in philosophy but also to shed new light on philosophical problems old and new, to reclaim for philosophy parts of man's quotidian world that have been abandoned by science as too private and too subjective, and, finally, to give access to layers of man's experience unprobed in everyday living, thus providing deeper foundations for both science and life.

Walter Biemel

Additional Reading

Most of the classical works on Phenomenology were written by Edmund Husserl himself. In his Logische Untersuchungen, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1913–21; Eng. trans., Logical Investigations, 2 vol., 1970), one of the fundamental texts on Phenomenology, the phenomenological method is applied in the area of logic. The following works by Husserl appeared in the journal Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung (1913–30); Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913; Eng. trans., Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, 1931, reprinted 1969), through which Phenomenology established itself as transcendental philosophy and received worldwide reaction; Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1928; Eng. trans., The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness, 1964); and Formale und transzendentale Logik (1929; Eng. trans., Formal and Transcendental Logic, 1969); Max Scheler, Der Formalismus in der Ethik (1916); and Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927; Eng. trans., Being and Time, 1962). The following works appeared in the series Husserliana (Husserl's collected works): Cartesianische Meditationen und Pariser Vorträge (1950; Eng. trans., The Paris Lectures, 1964), which contains the text of the Paris lectures of 1929 and the subsequent elaboration; Die Idee der Phänomenologie (1950: Eng. trans., The Idea of Phenomenology, 1964), an introduction to Phenomenology in five lectures from 1907; Ideen, 3 vol. (1950–52); Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie (1954; Eng. trans., The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 1970), Husserl's later work (1934–37), significant for the problems regarding the life-world; Erste Philosophie, 2 vol. (1956–59), a critical history of ideas and a theory of reduction presented in a series of lectures, 1923–24; Phänomenologische Psychologie (1962), lectures from 1925, a different wording of the Encyclopædia Britannica article of 1927, with remarks by Heidegger and the Amsterdam addresses of 1925; Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (1966), text on the problem of time from 1893–1917 with lectures (in the middle) from 1905 on the inner time-consciousness (first edited by Heidegger); Analysen zur passiven Synthesis (1966), a phenomenological analysis having sensation as its subject matter; and Philosophie der Arithmetik (1970), early manuscripts from 1890 to 1901. His The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (1982; originally published in German., 1975), reproduces a course of lectures given in 1927. See also Joseph J. Kockelmans, Edmund Husserl's Phenomenological Psychology (1967); and Rudolf Boehm, Vom Gesichtspunkt der Phänomenologie (1968).In the series “Phaenomenologica” works are published that are written from a Phenomenological perspective; Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1965), worthy of particular mention, also appeared in this series. The journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is by no means, however, exclusively dedicated to Phenomenology. In England The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology first appeared in 1970. In the United States the following journals have appeared: Journal of Phenomenological Psychology (semi-annual); Research in Phenomenology (1971); and Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research.

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