Phenomenology is a philosophical trend that developed in the 20th century. Its main task is the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their causal explanations, and as free as possible from undeclared biases and premises. However, the concept itself is much older: in the 18th century, the German mathematician and philosopher Johann Heinrich Lambert applied it to that part of his theory of knowledge that distinguishes truth from illusion and error. In the 19th century, the word was associated mainly with the phenomenology of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who traced the development of the human spirit from mere sensory experience to "absolute knowledge."
Definition
Phenomenology is the study of the structures of consciousness from the point of view of the first person. The central structure of experience is its intentionality, its focus on something, be it experience orsome subject. Experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which the object represents) along with the appropriate enabling conditions.
Phenomenology is a discipline and method of studying philosophy, developed mainly by the German philosophers Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It is based on the premise that reality is made up of objects and events ("appearances") as they are perceived or understood in the human mind. The essence of the phenomenological method is actually reduced to the search for the evidence of each phenomenon.
This discipline can be seen as a branch of metaphysics and philosophy of mind, although many of its proponents claim that it is related to other key disciplines in philosophy (metaphysics, epistemology, logic and ethics). But different from others. And it's a clearer view of philosophy that has implications for all of these other areas.
If we briefly describe the phenomenological method, then we can say that this is the study of experience and how a person experiences it. It studies the structures of conscious experience from the point of view of the subject or first person, as well as its intentionality (the way in which experience is directed towards a certain object in the world). All these are objects of the phenomenological method. It then leads to an analysis of the conditions for the possibility of intentionality, conditions associated with motor skills and habits, background social practices, and often language.
What is learning
Experience in the phenomenological senseincludes not only the relatively passive experience of sensory perception, but also imagination, thought, emotion, desire, will, and action. In short, it includes everything a person experiences or does. At the same time, as Heidegger pointed out, people are often not aware of the obvious habitual patterns of action, and the field of phenomenology can extend to semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity. The objects of the phenomenological method are, firstly, unconditional evidence, and secondly, ideal cognitive structures. Thus, an individual can observe and interact with other things in the world, but does not actually perceive them in the first place.
Accordingly, phenomenology in philosophy is the study of things as they appear (phenomena). This approach is often referred to as descriptive rather than explanatory. The phenomenological method in philosophy differs, for example, from the causal or evolutionary explanations that are characteristic of the natural sciences. This is because its main purpose is to give a clear, undistorted description of how things came to be.
In total, there are two methods of phenomenological research. The first is phenomenological reduction. The second, direct contemplation as a method of phenomenology, comes down to the fact that it acts as a descriptive science, and only the data of direct intuition act as material.
Origin
The term "phenomenology" comes from the Greek phainomenon, whichmeans "appearance". Hence, this study of appearances as opposed to reality, and as such has its roots in Plato's Allegory of the Cave and his theory of Platonic idealism (or Platonic realism), or perhaps further back in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. To varying degrees, the methodological skepticism of René Descartes, the empiricism of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Mill, as well as the idealism of Immanuel Kant, all played a role in the early development of the theory.
Development history
Phenomenology actually began with the work of Edmund Husserl, who first considered it in his Logical Investigations in 1901. However, one should also consider the pioneering work on intentionality (the notion that consciousness is always intentional or directed) by Husserl's teacher, the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838-1917) and his colleague Karl Stumpf (1848-1936).
Husserl first formulated his classical phenomenology as a kind of "descriptive psychology" (sometimes called realistic phenomenology), and then as a transcendental and eidetic science of consciousness (transcendental phenomenology). In his Ideas of 1913, he established a key distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (noemata). In the later period, Husserl focused more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness and introduced the method of phenomenological reduction specifically to eliminate any hypothesis of the existence of external objects.
Martin Heidegger criticized and extended Husserl's phenomenological study (particularly in his 1927 Being and Time) to encompass the understanding and experience of Being itself, and developed his original theory of non-dualistic man. According to Heidegger, philosophy is not a scientific discipline at all, but is more fundamental than science itself (which for him is one of the ways of knowing the world without specialized access to truth).
Heidegger accepted phenomenology as a metaphysical ontology, and not as a fundamental discipline, as Husserl considered it. Heidegger's development of existential phenomenology had a great influence on the subsequent movement of French existentialism.
Besides Husserl and Heidegger, the most famous classical phenomenologists were Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), Max Scheler (1874-1928), Edith Stein (1891-1942.), Dietrich von Hildebrand (1889-1977), Alfred Schutz (1899-1959), Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995).
Phenomenological reduction
Getting ordinary experience, a person takes for granted that the world around him exists independently of himself and his consciousness, thus sharing an implicit belief in the independent existence of the world. This belief forms the basis of everyday experience. Husserl refers to this positioning of the world and the entities within it, defining them as things that transcend human experience. Thus, reduction is what reveals the main subject of phenomenology - the world asgivenness and givenness of the world; both are objects and acts of consciousness. There is an opinion that this discipline should operate within the framework of the method of phenomenological reduction.
Eidetic reduction
The results of phenomenology are not intended to collect specific facts about consciousness, but rather are facts about the essence of the nature of phenomena and their abilities. However, this limits the phenomenological results to facts about the experience of individuals, excluding the possibility of phenomenologically valid general facts about experience as such.
In response to this, Husserl concluded that the phenomenologist must make a second reduction, called eidetic (because it is associated with some vivid, imaginary intuition). The goal of eidetic reduction, according to Husserl, is a complex of any considerations regarding the contingent and chance and the concentration (intuition) of the essential natures or essences of objects and acts of consciousness. This intuition of essences comes from what Husserl calls "free variations in the imagination."
In short, eidetic intuition is an a priori method of gaining knowledge of needs. However, the result of eidetic reduction is not only that a person comes to the knowledge of essences, but also to intuitive knowledge of essences. Essences show us categorical or eidetic intuition. It can be argued that Husserl's methods here are not so different from the standard methods of conceptual analysis: imaginary thought experiments.
Heidegger's method
For Husserl, reduction is a method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural relation of man, whose life is involved in the world of things and people back into the transcendental life of consciousness. Heidegger considers the phenomenological reduction as the leading phenomenological vision from the awareness of the being to the understanding of the being of this being.
Some philosophers believe that Heidegger's position is incompatible with Husserl's doctrine of phenomenological reduction. For, according to Husserl, the reduction must be applied to the "general position" of the natural relation, that is, to faith. But according to Heidegger and those phenomenologists he influenced (including Sartre and Merleau-Ponty), our most fundamental relationship to the world is not cognitive but practical.
Criticism
Many analytic philosophers, including Daniel Dennett (1942), have criticized phenomenology. On the grounds that her explicit first-person approach is incompatible with a third-person scientific approach. Although phenomenologists object that natural science can only make sense as a human activity that presupposes the fundamental structures of a first-person perspective.
John Searle criticized what he calls the "phenomenological illusion", believing that what is not phenomenologically present is not real, and what is phenomenologically present is in fact an adequate description of how everything actually.
