I) On Edmund Husserl

II) On Phenomenology:

1.         A) Epoché
   

        B) Natural Attitude &

             Phenomenological Attitude

        C) Perspectival Viewing

       D) Phenomenological Exercise

I) On Edmund Husserl (1859-1938):

II) On Phenomenology:

Phenomenology is both a celebrated school of contemporary Continental philosophy begun by Husserl and a primarily epistemological method that he envisioned as applicable to diverse areas of life and theoretical study.  The theory behind the school and method is that one can reliably capture and describe how an abstracted event, like an encounter with the unexpected, gives one pause and permits a flood of visions, each an aspect of experience commonly overlooked.  Phenomenology’s coda, that the world gives itself to us as we give ourselves to the world, locates the creation of meaning in this communal giving and indicates a mode of experience wherein our presumptions of having an egoistic supremacy over an essentially independent world (in which we are its sole interpreter and judge of its value) are unsettled.  This suspension of bias, called the epoché, reveals our relation with the world to be more reciprocal than we regularly presume, letting us see, more clearly, what is essential within this interaction and its dynamism. 

The task of this theory of knowledge is primarily methodological: to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself.  Husserl instructs us to attend to the things themselves, and we honor his maxim by engaging the fluidity of perspectives of experience without bias.   This method reveals the essential meaning of the world by laying bare the nature of experience—that is, meaning is founded by our interaction with the world.  According to an etymological interpretation of phenomenology, through phainomenon and logos, by Husserl’s student Martin Heidegger, the things themselves, the essential nature of the world and its contents, present a “seeming” that requires a “seeing” and “discourse.”  In other words, the world seems, thus requiring a subject to see it, listen to it, and participate in its appearance and elaboration, which forms its meaning.  Thus, phenomenology is a methodological study of everything that shows itself and explicates itself to us when we turn our focused gaze upon it—which, it reminds us, we do not often do in the hasty course of daily life.

Being primarily epistemological (epistemology is the study of knowledge), phenomenology seeks to yield essential descriptions of the interrelationships of the world and humanity in order to produce better, truer knowledge.  But, this epistemology is not a removed, objective study; it is the knowledge of lived experience, of an embedded, aware subject actively engaged with her environment—this emphasis permitted the predominately French adopters of the method (namely the existentialists) and even those who became its later critics (many of the post-structuralists) to render the method both ethical and inspirationally pragmatic.  Its demand for the attentive focus of our gaze cultivates multi-dimensional observation that inspires us to see potential while suspending preconceived ideas.  Its resultant contemplation gives us an ethical goal and reveals the steps along a path from reality to the attainment of that ideal.

In his Crisis of the European Sciences, Husserl elaborates this idea of a complicated world as the Lebenswelt, the life-world or the world of lived experience, in contrast to a world constituted by a mathematization of nature.  Galileo geometrized nature as Descartes and Leibniz arithmetized it wherein, according to the scholar David Carr’s reading, “nature becomes a mathematical manifold and mathematical techniques provide the key to its inner workings.”  Science, Husserl argued, sought to find in nature a precision and uniformity that is lacking in its everyday experience.  This exactness is achieved, first, by abstraction from the appearances given to perception and, then, by their interpretation.  The result is that science imposes on nature a precision foreign to any actual experience of it.  Further gilding this faux-precision, Husserl argues, science imposes an ontological claim, to be is to be measurable, and then extrapolates, as consequences, even further various epistemological claims, ultimately abstracting nature further and further from actual dirt, weather, and wildlife.  Science that begins from such a mathematized foundation bases all its subsequent theories of knowledge upon an abstraction from reality that presumes the world to be uniform and predictable.  Strains of contemporary science reject these presumptions, but any simple encounter with nature—be it wilderness, a park, or a bunch of daffodils growing amidst urban rubble—plainly shows the experience of nature to be of events neither uniform nor predictable, but certainly full of meaning that extends far beyond the empirically measurable. 

A) The Epoché

Phenomenology is, of course, also an abstraction; indeed, its central most important insight is a method of abstraction: the epoché:

The Epoché is a transitioning act—it is something that shifts us from one attitude (an everyday one he calls The Natural Attitude) to another (a philosophical one he calls The Phenomenological Attitude)—it is a “method of parenthesizing,” that is, a method of bracketing out of consideration all of our biases and presumptions.  “We put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with respect to being: thus the whole natural world which is continually ‘there for us,’ ‘on hand,’ and which will always remain there according to consciousness as an ‘actuality’ even if we choose to parenthesize it.”  In other words, the epoché is an act of not considering all the everyday assumptions that we make (e.g., the history of something, its scientific classification, natural laws it is subject to, psychological presumptions, etc.).  We don’t deny or reject or falsify any of these presumptions, we just bracket them from our observations.

Thus, while phenomenology is an abstraction, it is acutely aware of its own nature and avoids abstraction’s traps.  That is, precisely because it employs a method of abstraction, it cannot overlook its origin in and the meaningfulness of the Umwelt, the world that is intuitively given and from which one can then abstract all the secondary qualities of appearance.  Husserl names this the “pre-scientific life-world” and, instead of fearing the elusive and vague, non-uniform appearances, it is a perspective that seeks to take in the vagaries and be moved by them.  All that is, is a nebulous flux of appearances, but it is also a world; grasping the cohesion of difference is to give it meaning.  Our attention to the immediately given reveals that the world is not an abstraction, formula, or mere, static mental image.  Instead, the mathematized world of the early moderns is just one perspective of the world amongst many, from merely one attitude, one mode from the plethora for perception. 

B) Natural Attitude & Phenomenological Attitude

In addition to the mathematical attitude, Husserl differentiates two further, more fundamental modes of perception: The Natural Attitude and The Phenomenological Attitude. 

The Natural Attitude is the one we have in the everyday world in which we live.  In this world, I get up in the morning, make coffee, go to school; I know how to drive a car, which directions to take, etc., all without thinking about it.  This is the everyday lived experience we have of the world; nothing herein is shocking.  In this everyday attitude we are not doing philosophy, science, or any theoretical study; we are just living.  Philosophy begins in this attitude because we need to recognize the world in which we live; living in the world gives us lots of knowledge, these pieces of information give us presumptions or biases (e.g., when I wake up, I am not shocked that the sun is up or the floor is solid beneath my feet).  But then, in order to study the world in which we live, we step away from these value judgments (no matter how mundane or truthful or pure fact they seem to be), and this stepping away is the epoché (the parenthesizing, reduction, or bracketing act).  In The Phenomenological Attitude, I move from a recognition of the everyday world to a recognition of the world as an object of study, and myself as an object of study within that world.  This is an attitude wherein we have child-like eyes, pure, full of wonder, free from presumptions.  Specifically, our experience, intentionality, and reflection all undergo purification (described below).

Within the natural attitude, one is within the everyday, automatically directed through pre-given frameworks of intentional relations by which one naturally accords independent existence to the correlates of consciousness or things intended.  That is, I take myself to be the central perspective, but also a mere actor in a staged world where the set has meaning, even without me around.  For example, I purposefully cut across the busy street; I am the subject of this world, taking it on presumption that cars will stop because their light is red, I can walk across the crosswalk and can enter the café and order an espresso from a person standing behind its counter, because that is his or her job to make and sell espresso: that is how the world works.  In the natural attitude, I take each element (cars, crosswalk, café, barista) to have independent, objective existence and predetermined meaning.  In contrast, in the phenomenological attitude, one redirects one’s attention from the objects themselves to the intentional relation in and through which one posits the objects as such.  In this attitude, I reconsider my relation to and with the environment, my presumptions about the universality of laws and conventions, the complexity involved in what is an ‘everyday’ action or communication.

The experience of the tree in full flower, in the natural attitude, is as Erfahrung: the viewer experiences a presentation of the tree as a substance possessing properties of one kind or another—it is a Macintosh, an old, established one, healthy and abundant.  In the phenomenological attitude, experience becomes Erlebnis, lived experience: this is a dynamic encounter wherein the ego is engaged in meaning formation—the tree moves me, its beauty affects me—as opposed to passively receiving a static, predetermined presentation of the tree. 

Intentionality, in the natural attitude, is presented as if the ego posits the tree as existing entirely distinctly and independently of the consciousness.  In the phenomenological attitude, the positional consciousness becomes explicitly intentional, wherein it is not the object itself so much as it is the intentional relation to the object that now becomes the focus of attention. 

Finally, reflection, in the natural attitude, intervenes only as a specific re-direction of attention from the object to the subject—I pause my deduction that its cultivar is Macintosh to think about whether or not I like Macintosh apples.  In the phenomenological attitude, in contrast, one becomes aware that all consciousness is implicitly reflective in character—I am instantly and intuitively aware of the reflexive, meaningful relation between the tree and me. 

1. 
   

2. C) Perspectival Viewing
   

Thus, in other words, phenomenology provokes a concise shifting of my attention from the tree or the street, crosswalk, and café to my interrelation with them on these many levels.  This shift transforms reflection into an awareness of how relation is an implicitly interwoven, yet overlooked, feature of all consciousness.  And, while to know anything about these things around me I invoke my past experiences, phenomenology’s epoché permits me to come to know them more essentially without bias.  I no longer think of the street as busy, the cars as obedient to colored lights, the barista as a mechanism to get espresso, but think, instead, of how I give myself to the street or café and how they give themselves to me.  Phenomenologically, my encounter spurs ideas of activity, tempo, and caffeination.  My natural interrelation with it was one of ignorance; as busy street melded with the crosswalk’s white stripes, eliminated was all spark, passion, life, and color from the surroundings, I ignored its existence until something pulled me from my mechanized ignorance, sparked the act of epoché—I could sit down at my desk and perform an act of epoché in order to study something, or some event in the world could happen and jolt me into the act, for example, it could be something big and absurd, like a polar bear suddenly appearing from around the corner, or something little, catching a rift from that song last played ay my friend’s wedding, or maybe the barista says they are all out of espresso—and re-colored my experience.  Husserl envisions this epoché, the break or abstraction from the everyday, as a scientific method.  The goal is to describe all that appears to us free from our presumptions and biases.  What we find when we do this is that we are not all-powerful subjects for whom the world exists as a mute object; instead, we see how we are fluid beings who engage the world and are engaged by it. 

D) A Phenomenological Exercise:

So … engage the epoché.  Think about how you can experience the world.  Remember how Husserl elaborated the three modes of experience: Experience, Intentionality, and Reflection.  Also remember how these modes vary in the Natural and Phenomenological Attitudes.  Finally, remember the idea of perspectival viewing.

In the natural attitude:

You experience [Erfahrung] things as presentations: you take them to be objects or substances with properties.

You posit these things to exist independently of you (so if you leave, they still persist).

You then reflect on the thing by specifically re-directing your attention from the object to the subject, yourself.

In the phenomenological attitude:

You experience [Erlebnis] things dynamically, as opposed to statically.

Instead of a positing consciousness, it is intentional; you become implicitly aware of the “of” of consciousness, e.g., you are conscious of the tree—of the relation between you and it.

You realize that all consciousness is implicitly, if not explicitly, reflective in character. 

(1) So… begin by describing your surroundings. 

(2) Then, reconsider your description.  What therein is described in terms of the natural attitude?  How do these descriptions work?  What therein is described in terms of the phenomenological attitude?  If there is nothing there described such, how do you develop one of your reflections in the natural attitude into a phenomenological account? 

(3) Reflect now on the advantages and disadvantages of these two attitudes.  When would each be a benefit?  When would each be unnecessary or even harmful?