OUGD601 - RESEARCH - Introduction To Phenomenology

INTRODUCTION TO PHENOMENOLOGY:
Dermot Moran

- 'phenomenology was announced by Edmund Husserl in 1900-1901 as a bold, radically new way of doing philosophy, in an attempt to bring philosophy back from abstract metaphysical speculation wrapped up in pseudo-problems, in order to come into contact with the matters themselves, with concrete living experience' (pg.xiii).

What is phenomenology?
- 'phenomenology is best understood as a radical, anti-traditional style of philosophising, which emphasises the attempt to get to the truth of matters, to describe phenomena, in the broadest sense as whatever appears in the manner in which it appears, that is as it manifests itself to consciousness, to the experiencer'.
- 'as such, phenomenology's first step is to seek to avoid all misconstructions and impositions placed on experience in advance, whether these are drawn from religious or cultural traditions, from everyday common sense, or indeed, from science itself'.
- 'explanations are not to be imposed before the phenomena have been understood from within' (p.4).
- 'phenomenology was seen as reviving our living contact with reality'.
- 'in the 1930's, both Satre and Merleau-Ponty saw phenomenology as a means of going beyond narrow empiricist, psychological assumptions about human experience, broadening the scope of philosophy to be about everything, to capture life as it is lived'.
- 'Satre sees phenomenology as allowing one to delineate carefully one's own affective, emotional and imaginative life, not in a set of static objective studies such as one finds in psychology, but understood in the manner in which it is meaningfully lived' (p.5).
- 'our experience properly described must acknowledge that it presents itself as the experience of engaging directly with the world'.
- 'above all else, phenomenology must pay close attention to the nature of consciousness as actually experienced, not as it is pictured by common sense, or by the philosophical tradition'.
- 'phenomenology must carefully describe things as they appear to consciousness. In other words, the way problems, things and events are approached must involve taking their manner of appearance to consciousness into consideration' (p.6).

The origins of the term 'phenomenology':
- 'phenomenology for Kant is that branch of science which deals with things in their manner of appearing to us, for example, relative motion, or colour, properties which are dependant on the human observer'. (Gestalt psychology links?)
- first used the term in letters sent in 1770 and 1772.
- Franz Brentano first employed the term in 1889 - Husserl's inspiration for the use of the term (p.7).

Phenomenology in Brentano:
- attempt to rethink psychology as a science.
- 'Brentano had proposed a form of descriptive psychology which would concentrate on illuminating the nature of inner self-aware acts of cognition, without appealing to casual or genetic explanation. In other words, Brentano was proposing a kind of philosophical psychology, or philosophy of the mind'.
- 'we are not able to observe our mental acts while occupying them, but can reflectively grasp them as they occur. There is no act without an object; an empty act cannot be conscious of itself'.
- 'however, acts can have a secondary moment whereby they become conscious of themselves. This accompanying act of reflection is so built into the original act that it cannot be wrong about the nature of the act upon which it is reflecting' (p.8).

The structure of intentionality:
- 'the basic insight which allowed Husserl to explicate this conception of objectivity-for-subjectivity was his radical understanding of the intentional structure of consciousness'.
- 'Husserl presented this as the basic thesis that all conscious experiences are characterised by 'aboutness'. E.g. every act of loving is a loving of something, every act of seeing is a seeing of something'.
- Husserl - 'disregarding whether or not the object of the act exists, it has meaning and a mode of being for consciousness, it is a meaningful correlate of the conscious act'.
- 'phenomenology turns to consciousness, it is proposing above all to be a science of consciousness based on elucidating the intentional structures of acts and their correlate objects, what Husserl called the noetic-noematic structure of consciousness' (p.16).

REFERENCE: Moran, D. (2000) Introduction To Phenomenology. London: Routledge.