A Romp Through Phenomenology
Phenomenology, many struggle through learning it. I must admit, over the past couple weeks I have been studying for this article, I have had some real issues trying to really grasp it. I have been meaning to write this article for a while, “how hard could it really be?” I thought, how naïve. However, through vigorous re reading, and countless hours of frustration trying to understand texts, Phenomenology, at its core is very simple: the study of our experiencing of things. Phenomenology looks at things like when I see a table, I am the one that sees this table in my mind. My perspective, that’s what we are talking about here. This is related to, however different from something else that is more central to my thinking of existentialism. In this essay, we will be going through the four major Phenomenologists, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. (It should be noted that Hegel was a large player in Phenomenology as well, however, Hegel will not be covered in this piece.)
Edmund Husserl
Husserl was primarily concerned with the fact that Philosophical questions don’t have a clear answer. When posed with questions like “what is justice,” or “what is beauty,” and we don’t have an agreement on it, we don’t really “know” what they are. If we don’t really “know” what they are, we can’t really even talk about them at all. Husserl wanted to be able to answer these questions with the same kind of certainty that we can have in questions like what the score was for last nights game, or how many cookies there are in the cookie jar. Husserl thought that all of this knowledge came from experiences, but that experience alone did not add up to knowledge, due to things like biases. What Husserl eventually suggested was that we treat experiences as we do sciences, that is to say, that if we took a scientific approach towards our experiences, we can get that same kind of certainty about these Philosophical questions. The result he called Phenomenology: a Philosophical investigation of the phenomena of experience.
Martin Heidegger
Heidegger wanted to know what it means to “be,” as he thought all Philosophical questions were really questions of being. In order to do this, he thought, we must first understand how we could even go about analyzing what it means to be human. He did this from what he called “the insiders position.” Which means that we have to look at human life, from within our own lives, to understand what it means to be human. In essence, Heidegger says that asking the question “what does it mean to be human?” Is the wrong question to actually get the answer, the right question is “what is it like to be human?” Heidegger thought that in order to answer questions about existence, we need to look at it from the perspective of the thing in question. He realizes that most things don’t really wonder about its existence or being, except one, humans. It is by this that Heidegger said “we are ourselves the entities to be analyzed.” What he is saying is that in order for us to even begin to understand what existence is, we need to analyze ourselves. In doing this, Heidegger wrote the book “Being and Time,” where he recognizes humans as temporal things, in context of time. We engage in a world with things that predate us, learning languages, or attempt to find love. It is through these projects that we do through our lifespans time that we project ourselves towards different possible futures. In essence, we define our existence. However, we sometimes recognize the limits of our projects, that is, being left unfinished. The limits are our death. This is where he says “the furthest horizon of our being is death,” which is his way of actually talking about our life. Heidegger says that if we just spend our lives on our projects, we are living inauthentically, we need to “be there” or have dasein as he called it, in order to really live authentically.
Jean-Paul Sartre
We have taken a look at Sartre in a different article, actually, in my first article on medium on existentialism. Much of what is said there is carried over here. The main points for Phenomenology, however, are directed at his main statement: “existence precedes essence.” The main thing that we should point at here in this article is that Sartre starts by saying that when we make something, we do it for a purpose. But we are not made for any purpose. So, if we are existing, and existing things exist because of their purpose, we must make a purpose for ourselves in the end. In a weird way, we exist before our purpose, unlike most other things. When we make a bird house, we have in mind its purpose before we even begin to build it. We, however, are not such a thing as a being in ourselves. He expresses this by saying “First of all man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and only afterwards defines himself.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Merleau-Ponty begins with the idea that Philosophy starts with our ability to wonder about the world. In doing this, he differs with Husserl on one crucial point: we wonder about the world itself. While Husserl “bracketed” the idea that there is an external world at all, Merleau-Ponty recognized that the things we wonder about are “out there” so to speak. He also thought that the mind and body are not separate entities due to this, that is, we wonder about our body, which is part of us after all. Because he wanted a new look at the subject of experience, he started by looking at examples of abnormal experiences, like the “phantom limb” phenomena (which is that an amputee still “feels” their amputated limb). What Merleau-Ponty thought the phantom limb phenomena must mean is that the body is not a machine, if it were, the body would acknowledge that the limb no longer exists. However, it still exists for the subject, the person, as it has always been bound up with the subjects will. The body is not “just” a body, but a “lived” body.
Conclusion
As we have seen through our little romp through the major players of Phenomenology, the main questions are very, subjective, if you will excuse the pun. The answers are aimed at the one thing nobody else can ever do for us, experience the world. Phenomenology gives a unique look at what others experiences actually are like and who or what we really are.
Want More?
While you are surely already following me here on Medium, you can always catch me on my facebook page, five minute philosophy where I post Philosophy meme’s daily, and you can always get articles early by supporting me on Patreon.
