An Excerpt: "Phenomenology" from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics.

Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.

1. What is Phenomenology?

The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally, phenomenology is the study of “phenomena”: appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience.

The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical tradition launched in the first half of the 20^th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, et al.

Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20^th century, while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20^th century.

Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed toward—represents or “intends”—things only through particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. These make up the meaning or content of a given experience, and are distinct from the things they present or mean.

Thus, phenomenology leads from conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of mind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or intentionality are grounded in brain activity.

Cultural conditions thus seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we may belong.

2. The Discipline of Phenomenology

The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study, its methods, and its main results.

Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning toward a certain object in the world.

Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we experience them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person feature—that of being experienced—is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience… This feature is both a phenomenological and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is for the experience to be experienced (phenomenological) and part of what it is for the experience to be (ontological).

Importantly, also, it is type of experience that phenomenology pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience—unless its type is what interest us.

What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of the experience while living through or performing it… For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person, lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience, and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of phenomenology.

The overall form of the given sentence articulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience: subject-act-content-object.

In this way, in the practice of phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.

Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and much of phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of intentionality.

3. From Phenomena to Phenomenology

In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato’s cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the 20^th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of contemporary philosophy.

Brentano distinguished descriptive psychology from genetic psychology… This thesis of intentional directedness was the hallmark of Bretano’s descriptive psychology. In 1889 Bretano used the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology, and the way was paved for Husserl’s new science of phenomenology.

Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900-01)… (Interestingly, both lines of research trace back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in Husserl’s day.)

So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness.

These contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they are objective, ideal meanings… For Husserl, phenomenology would study consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.

4. The History and Varieties of Phenomenology

The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty.

Husserl defined phenomenology as “the science of the essence of consciousness”, centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly “in the first person”… How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus, phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that includes more than what is expressed in language.

For Heidegger, we and our activities are always “in the world”, our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology resolves into what he called “fundamental ontology”… Heidegger resisted Husserl’s neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and in being-with-others.

Much of Being and Time develops an existential interpretation of our modes of being including, famously, our being-toward-death.

One of Heidegger’s most innovative ideas was his conception of the “ground” of being, looking to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us.

In Sartre’s model of intentionality, the central player in consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon just is a conscious-of-an-object. Indeed, all things in the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or behind which lies their “being-in-itself”. Consciousness, by contrast, has “being-for-itself”, since each consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (conscience de soi). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the “I” or self is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of preceptions).

Sartre’s phenomenology in Being and Nothingness became the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, sketched in his famous lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945).

Through vivid description of the “look” of the Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political significance of the concept of the Other.

In Phenomenology of Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience.

Merleau-Ponty focused on the “body image”, our experience of our own body and its significance in our activities. Extending Husserl’s account of the lived body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is, as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including other people.

In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).

5. Phenomenology and Ontology, Epistemology, Logic, Ethics

Historically, though, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology… An explicitly phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist… In Totality and Infinity (1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focused on the significance of the “face” of the other, explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of phenomenology.

Still, political theory has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however, has been closer to phenomenology as such… Aspects of French “poststructuralist” theory are sometimes interpreted as broadly phenomenological.

Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical, social, and political theory.

6. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind

The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20^th century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will.

In short, phenomenology by any other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem.

But materialism does not fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious mental states as we experience them—sensations, thoughts, emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow subserve or implement them.

The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle’s theory of intentionality reads like a modernized version of Husserl’s… However, there is an important difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later phenomenologist—including Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty—seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from brain activity.

The philosophy of mind may be factored into the following disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind: Phenomenology, Neuroscience, Cultural analysis, and Ontology of mind

7. Phenomenology in Contemporary Consciousness Theory

But now a problem remains. Intentionality essentially involves meaning, so the question arises how meaning appears in phenomenal character. Importantly, the content of a conscious experience typically carries a horizon of background meaning, meaning that is largely implicit rather than explicit in experience. But then a wide range of content carried by an experience would not have a consciously felt phenomenal character.

from Phenomenology: Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy