This post is the second in a series on the main branches of mature phenomenology.  You might want to start with the prior post about transcendental phenomenology if you have not already done so.

Husserl formulated the basic outline of the phenomenological method and also his own more specific methodology for this, which became the basis for the transcendental branch that was described in the previous section.  There were some thinkers who were inspired by the basic outline of this new discipline, but who nonetheless rejected some of the precepts that would be applied to the transcendental branch in particular but that didn’t necessarily apply to phenomenology in general.

Martin Heidegger, the most famous of Husserl’s students, conceived a different way of going about phenomenology that is focused on the exploration of the nature and meaning of existence.  In addition to prior phenomenologists such as Husserl, Heidegger drew from several sources including existentialists such as Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche.  Heidegger felt that Husserl’s transcendental approach was too theoretical, abstract, and insufficiently concerned with concrete human existence and the situations that we find ourselves living through.  Heidegger’s works detail his stream of consciousness as he went about trying to understand the fundamental question of the nature and reality of being.

Heidegger’s existential phenomenology has several notable differences from transcendental phenomenology.  Unlike Husserl, Heidegger did not see the need or the possibility of bracketing or epoche and he rejected the idea that one could suspend all preconceived notions.  Heidegger also resisted the idea that phenomenology could be a rigorous science.  As Dermot Moran wrote: “For Heidegger, phenomenology is the attempt to make manifest the matters as they manifest themselves.  As a radical allegiance to the things themselves, phenomenology can never be a single method”.

Whereas Husserl emphasized introspection as a way of understanding things in themselves, Heidegger instead preferred circumspection, which is the careful observation of one’s surroundings while going about daily life, mundane as it often is, and dealing with the occasional unexpected events that occur.  He argued that circumspection involves understanding which way one is oriented and understanding the most basic aspects of existence.  For Heidegger, experience is continuous and flowing and needs to be understood as a whole in the process of doing rather than through stepping back and thinking.

This process usually begins with when one is dealing with problems that arise in mundane, normal life.  One does not then withdraw and meditate and actively seek mindfulness as they would in the transcendental method.  Instead, a deeper meaning of existence is sought through active engagement with the world and through circumspection, wherein one might come to understand the relation between one’s self and the world, including how their body is related to the world and is an integral part of the world.  The inner tensions and angst can then be put into perspective, which can allow one to cope with the world into which they have been thrown.

Heidegger put these tools to use in his critique of modern philosophy, which focused primarily on the idea, articulated by Descartes and assumed by many others both before and after him, that humans are fundamentally rational beings.  He saw that the basic fundamental sense of human existence is pre-rational, pre-scientific.  It involves complex interconnections of lived experience that are not normally reflected upon nor analyzed, but that flow through our live constantly.

In his existential phenomenology, his focus was on what he called “Dasein”, which contained all of the aspects of self-reflective conscious experience that he thought were essential to this sort of being.  This can perhaps be understood as self-reflective first person experience, including the emotions felt while interacting with commonplace situations and including the occasional considerations for the meaning or purpose of one’s existence in the face of angst and anxiety, and also of concern or interest in one’s experience of their world, the totality of their known world, and the so-called authentic way of living.  He saw an inherent connection between care and authenticity.  We tend engage in activities and think about things that we care about, and doing so is authentic living.  Doing contrary to this is bad faith.

He sought to understand the concept of being and how it relates to time.  Prior to Heidegger, nearly all philosophers in the Western tradition had assumed that objects exist at instances in time and that as time moves forward these objects can either change or stay the same.  Heidegger argued that this preconception regarding the concept of being is mistaken and he used his version of phenomenology to argue that being cannot be separated from time.  It is not that an object exists at different instances in time, Husserl argued, but that the passing of time is an essential component of being.  An analogy he used is that it is not a hammer that constitutes being but hammering.  He used this conception of being to further address the nature of human existence.

Heidegger’s existential phenomenology influenced many thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Hannah Arendt, who were influential in their own right.  Sartre focused on the concept of being in contrast with nothingness and contingency and what this means for human existence.  Sartre was concerned with real human situations and how the experience of emotions such as angst, nausea, and anxiety relate to human freedom.  Merleau-Ponty is notable for mixing existential and transcendental phenomenology, along with the psychological science of his time.  He used these tools in his analysis of perception and behavior from a first-person point of view, so as to understand the nature of embodied existence. He saw that the mind is thoroughly entangled with the body, conception with perception, and thought with feeling.  Merleau-Ponty used his embodied phenomenology, which can be seen as a variant of the existential branch, analyze the connection between perception and habitual behavior.  These insights have been used by therapists to help patients identify cause of the internal conflicts that might be happening within their body and/or in the relation between their body and the outside world.  Arendt studied and analyzed the phenomenological side of human action in the public realm.  Her focus was on the relation between common human experiences at the individual level and larger-scale public matters such as politics, labor, public action, and social life.

This post is the first in a series on the main branches of mature phenomenology.  In past posts, I argued that there was proto-phenomenology in the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions going all the way back to ancient times.  We can recognize probably four major branches of mature phenomenology.  Each of these evolved from a synthesis and outgrowth of the schools of thought that were developed in the late Nineteenth Century.  While there is some overlap between them, each of the four had their own unique origin and they each also had their own major proponents in the generations that followed their initial formulation.

Transcendental Phenomenology

In the early Twentieth Century, Edmund Husserl sought a new way to understand reality that could be more comprehensive and more reliable than any that had been proposed up to that point.  The biggest problem that he saw with the intellectual landscape of his time was that there were a few different mutual incompatible worldviews that were enjoying significant popular support, but they were each based on overarching assumptions and complex edifices of beliefs.  Especially with regard to the mind and what it is and how it works, there were widely diverse opinions floating around.

At that time, there were some philosophers who were idealists and some who were material realists.  The idealists of the day, often times being rationalists, tended to think of reality as ultimately being in the mind and that everything that one perceives is entirely mental.  Material realists of the day, most often being empiricists, believed that the mind was a material thing and that it is driven by natural laws and that anything we can think about or know must be understood within that framework.  The advocates of these frameworks tried to make their most convincing case for their way of conceptualizing the mind and reality, but Husserl saw that there was no universal way that one could sort out which of these was more correct than the others.

Husserl saw a way to sort this out by getting to the heart of how empiricism works and by focusing on the experiential side of things.  It is through the assumption of empiricism that the scientific method becomes possible.  In the centuries leading up to Husserl’s time, scientific methodology had become increasingly detailed and the results gained from scientific experiments were increasingly reliable and allowed people to understand the world in a way that was never before possible.  In the century since and leading up the present, the belief in empiricism among those pursuing a greater understanding of nature has helped make incredible achievements happen.  Amazing progress has been made in widely diverse areas of inquiry and continues to be made every day.

There are, however, reasons to believe that science need not be restricted by positivist and material realist assumptions, as was already becoming the overarching assumption of most empiricists in the early Twentieth Century.  Husserl realized the usefulness of science in his day, but he wished to apply it in a way that was slightly different than that of its conventional empiricist roots.  He thought that the direct, first-person study of conscious experience could become a rigorous science and through this one could understand reality better than any based solely on the positivism of his day and also better than what was offered by the variations of idealism that were popular in his time.

His contention is that we should not start with any fundamental assumptions about the way the world is or how the mind works when we start our investigation.  We are looking for certainty here, and any of our foundational assumptions can be wrong and can lead us down the wrong path.  As such, we can set all of that aside and try to take experience as it is directly given, we can focus on the things themselves as they are presented to us in our conscious experience, and we can then to use that as the most certain thing that we know.  It is only after we have that understanding in place that we might be able to figure out a more reliable system that incorporates materialistic science.

Husserl developed a methodology for this process and called it phenomenology.  This word had been used prior to him, but he was the first to apply it to a specific method.  Though the word “phenomenology” was used by Kant and also Hegel, prior to Husserl the definition of this word was not clearly established.  Summaries of Husserl’s life and work often portray him as the inventor of phenomenology, but even if this word is defined quite narrowly, this assertion is highly debatable.  In this work, we are going with a broader definition of “phenomenology” that can be used as an umbrella term for any way of studying experience that relies heavily on introspection and/or other forms of conscious/mental information gathering with the aim of building intersubjective knowledge.

We can say that Husserl initiated, at least within the Western philosophical tradition, the first mature phenomenology wherein there isn’t supposed to be an overarching speculative assumption of some metaphysical system that is both entirely beyond firsthand experience and is not subject to possible revision on the basis of such experience.  Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel all did much of this with their complex metaphysical systems.  Within mature phenomenology, there also isn’t supposed to be an overarching assumption that everything is physical and that everything that we experience is to be explained in terms of this.  Lots of notable thinkers since ancient times have done that, starting with the Ancient Greek atomists, the Epicureans, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Auguste Comte, etc.  There can, however, be times where a philosopher does describe their experience and their metaphysics might be understood to be constructed from a generalization of what is going on.  All phenomenologists do this.  The key to mature phenomenology, however, is that you shouldn’t speculate very much and what you do come up with should be reproducible through intersubjective reasoning and it should be refinable and open to alternate interpretations, which means that the entire edifice you construct could be torn down through subsequent investigation.

Certainly, phenomenology provides a different approach to studying consciousness than do the natural sciences that are based on objectivity and positivism.  Dermot Moran explained this difference and also how such sciences can be seen as complementary to phenomenology:

It is important to grasp the difference between the phenomenological approach and other kinds of scientific approach, for example, the psychological, physiological or causal-explanatory approaches prevalent in the natural sciences.  Husserl insisted on this point, but it still gives rise to endless confusion.  First of all, Husserl is emphatically not challenging the importance, necessity or validity of explanatory scientific accounts.  Investigations into the physical and chemical nature of the brain and its processing are a necessary part of science.  But that is not the function of a phenomenological description, which is a mode of approach that can be used in all areas of science, but which specifically focuses on the manner objects are constituted in and for subjects.  It focuses on the structure and qualities of objects and situations as they are experienced by the subject.[1]

Francisco Varela explained how Husserl saw the relationship between phenomenology and the natural science:

Husserl’s famous dictum: ‘Back to the things themselves!’ which for him meant – the opposite of a third-person objectification – a return to the world as it is experienced in its felt immediacy.  It was Husserl’s hope, and still the basic inspiration behind phenomenological research, that a true science of experience would be gradually established which could not only stand on equal footing to the natural sciences, but in fact would give them a needed ground, for all knowledge necessarily emerges from our lived experience.[2]

In other words, phenomenology cannot assume or utilize the results of any other science in its investigations.  Instead, scientific thinking needs to be recognized as a subset of firsthand lived experience.  It is perfectly acceptable to construct frameworks for deeper understanding of the natural world, but we should remain primarily oriented toward our immediate experience and conceptualize these frameworks in terms of what is more immediately given to us in such experience.  Phenomenology encourages us to get to a more basic and foundational experience of consciousness that is free from the edifice of our prior worldview so that it can be reconstructed on more stable ground.

This general outline of phenomenology was influential to many thinkers, who in some cases were inspired to formulate innovative phenomenological methods and sub-types.  Those will be covered in the subsections to follow, but first we need to examine the specific way that Husserl outlined for phenomenology, which involves a process for getting into a transcendental state of consciousness, wherein one can supposedly detach from all forms of public opinion and grasp the essence of consciousness itself.

He argued that the best way to isolate the central structures of subjectivity is to suspend all prior judgments, which is a process called epoche.  Husserl argued that one can take anything that they believe, even those most central to their life, and “bracket” them, which means to set them aside during careful and systematic introspection and reflection.  In this he took inspiration from Descartes, who detailed in his Meditations how he tried to doubt everything he believed to be true as much as he could and found that the one thing that he could not doubt was his own existence.  Similar to Descartes, Husserl argued that it is possible for anyone to suspend all existing preconceptions of reality and to re-interpret everything in terms of immediate experience.

Husserl believed that through this sort of mental reduction one transcends their natural attitude toward the world and thus achieves a transcendental state of consciousness.  Whereas in the natural attitude, one’s introspective findings are inevitably contaminated by preconceptions and prejudices, once the transcendental state is achieved, more accurate findings can be reached with regards to the structures of consciousness.  Thus, transcendental phenomenology is an analysis of our immediate and pure perceptions of reality, which puts aside all preconceptions about it.  To practice this, you attempt to clear your head of all biases, prejudices, and mental comments on what you see, and you perceive things purely and simply. The product of this is fundamental knowledge which precedes all systematic descriptions of reality.  In order for one to make any statements about reality, they must begin with what their consciousness perceives. Phenomenological reality is precisely that which is perceived by the mind, which would have to have already been there before any thinking about it takes place in the intellect.

What this means is that if one goes through the process of epoche and eliminates all preconceived notions, including all assumed scientific knowledge and ordinary matters of fact, and then focuses solely on what is immediately given to them by experience, they should be able to intuitively grasp the essence of any object or basic concept.  This is based on the process known as eidos, wherein one conceptualizes the form and function of things and understands how they are similar or different and how they can be categorized and structured.  A crucial aspect of the reduction is that all features of conscious experience must be taken as they appear, without our attempting to categorize them as false or illusory and without assessing their validity as such.  The idea is that we cannot always know what our immediate experience means, what it was caused by, nor what it might refers to in the outside world, but we can take inventory and focus on our experiences for what they are.

Like Brentano before him, Husserl saw that consciousness consists of intentions, which is the experience of having ideas that are directed at something, but he expanded this notion to apply more universally regardless of whether these be actual objects in the world or mere imaginations.  He argued that all intentions consist of multiple components, including the quality of the intentional act, such as willing, believing, etc. and the object or content that the intentional act is directed towards, such as that which is willed, that which is believed, etc.  Husserl built on the concept of intentionality to formulate what he called constitution, which is the process through which many intentions form a greater conception of an object, either at a given moment in time or as an object changes through the passing of time.

Husserl then uses the concept of constitution to formulate the highest understanding of conscious experience, which he calls the life-world.  This is one’s conception of the interrelatedness of all things in their conception of reality as they go about their life.  In more advanced forms, this can involve unwinding, piece by piece, the assumptions and the ideology and the beliefs that constitute a worldview and also being cognizant of how these beliefs are structured and are built on top of each other.

The transcendental phenomenology that Husserl formulated was continued by some of his successors.  Among the most notable in this regard are Max Scheler, who extended Husserl’s work into an examination of the essences of emotions and intuition, Roman Ingarden, who used it to analyze how art and aesthetics relate to our lived experience, and Edith Stein, who sought to ground morality in our sense of empathy for one another.  Husserl’s most accomplished student was Martin Heidegger, who took phenomenology in a different direction by integrating it with existentialism and hermeneutics.  These ways of integrating phenomenology with other philosophical disciplines often accompany one another, most notably in Heidegger’s work, but other phenomenologists have been able to separate them to a large extent, and thus we will address each of these forms of phenomenology in the next few blog posts.

This post continues the series on the Nineteenth Century intellectual movements and schools that influenced the development of mature phenomenology in the early Twentieth Century.  If you haven’t yet read the earlier post on existentialism, you might want to start there.

This week I’ll focus on hermeneutics.  Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation.  More specifically, this involves the interpretation of the meaning of artifacts of communication, which can include various types of written texts, audio and/or visual recordings, personal observations and interactions with other people, and perhaps other forms of communication.  To say that someone is interpreting the meaning of something communicated by another, be it a written text or spoken verbally or communicated through some other means, is to say that they are attempting to understand the meaning that the other was trying to convey and/or to understand the mental state of the other when they were formulating the content of the communication.

There are diverse ways of practicing hermeneutics and there is very little in common across the various hermeneutic methods, but nonetheless there are certain fundamental assumptions that are essential any time one is attempting to interpret the meaning of artifacts of communication.  This process necessarily involves intersubjectivity, as communicative acts by a conscious subject are inherently related to the communicator’s structures of consciousness and also to their attempt at conveying some sort of information to others.  Communication is inherently related to the subjectivity of the communicator and therefore any attempt to interpret communication is an attempt to create socially verified intersubjectivity.

There have been active hermeneutic schools in various regions of the world since the advent of writing.  All societies throughout history in which some people were literate must also have had a tradition of how one can interpret written texts that they had on hand and which they considered significant.  These specific methods of interpretation often varied widely from one literate society to another and were often closely coupled with the specific texts to which they were applied.  Although hermeneutics, as broadly defined, has a very long history, the modern hermeneutic tradition goes back to the early Nineteenth Century and owes much to the work of Friedrich Schleiermacher, whose approach to hermeneutics involved an attempt to shift away from more specific methods of interpretation, such as ways of interpreting biblical or classical texts, and instead to focus more generally on the way in which people understand texts.

Schleiermacher’s approach to interpretation emphasized that one who wishes to interpret a text would need to understand the text as a necessary precondition to interpreting it.  Understanding would have to involve repeated circular movements between the parts and the whole.  This then leads to the notion of an interpretive or hermeneutic circle, which is an acknowledgment that the understanding of the whole is dependent on understanding the parts, and vice-versa.  But this is not a vicious circle because the interpreter begins with a basic understanding and they use an iterative process to gain more and more understanding, which is a cycle that does not ever end.  Understanding the meaning of a text is not necessarily about decoding the author’s intentions, but instead it is involves establishing and building relationships between reader, text, and context.  If practiced effectively then the same exact ground should not be covered repeatedly because progress is being made as the interpreter’s understanding of the text grows.  Thus, this process of interpretation can be likened not to a circle, but to a spiral that expands outward with increasing understanding.

Following Schleiermacher, there were others such as Wilhelm Dilthey who expanded the application of hermeneutics beyond mere textual interpretation so as to also include other forms of communication.  Dilthey wished to establish this expanded form of hermeneutics as the foundation of the social sciences.  His reasoning was that social sciences such as psychology, sociology, and historiography are necessarily centered around the interpretation of human behavior.  In each of these sciences, one must attempt to understand people’s motives for doing things.  Dilthey argued that people’s lives and deeds could be studied, and their motives interpreted much the same whether it be the case that the those being studied are living and their actions occurring at the present time or whether they are long past.

Dilthey sought objectivity with regards to the understanding of human communication and of the lived experiences of humans and he thought there could be a scientific methodology through which objectivity in these areas of study could be achieved.  Dilthey argued that the human sciences, with the methodologies he outlined or borrowed from as developed by his predecessors, was self-sufficient as a body of knowledge, independent from the natural sciences.  He insisted that the human sciences should not borrow their methods from the natural sciences, as advocates of positivism had claimed.

Dilthey offered a generalized outline of a method for social science, which can be summarized as follows: He thought one could carefully observe other people and consider everything that is known about them so that it is possible to truly empathize with them.  If enough information is taken into account then one can try to imagine the subject’s life-world, life experiences, thoughts, and feelings.  In studies of history, Dilthey advocated interpretation of others in their historical setting that they lived, even if this was generations ago.  He argued that with the aid of detailed contextual information of the time and place in which the human subjects lived, empathizing with them becomes possible.  He also argued that it is also essential to begin these studies with a clear and honest understanding of our own lives and how we build knowledge from our own experiences.  Dilthey’s method is therefore both an individual and communal social experience and activity.  As Kurt Mueller-Vollmer explains in The Hermeneutics Reader:

Dilthey maintains that in their daily lives human beings find themselves in situations where they have to ‘understand’ what is happening around them so that they may act or react accordingly.  Thus, their actual behavior reflects their lived understanding and comprehension of their social or cultural environment.  Dilthey claimed that all ‘higher’ or complex manifestations of understanding, including those found in the human sciences, derived from these ‘lower’ or primitive forms of comprehension.[1]

Dilthey practiced this method in his own work and argued that it was effective, even as he admitted that it needed further refinement in order to truly achieve the high standard of objectivity in the conclusions that are produced from the studies.  Although Dilthey aimed for objectivity in his work, it is not possible to achieve this in matters that depend on the interpretation of other people’s inner experiences, but intersubjectivity is possible through a sufficient degree of rigorous examination of everything that can be objectively known about someone, including what they did, said, wrote, etc.  His method has similarities to the social sciences, which are more or less objective sciences.  In the Twentieth Century, several thinkers were inspired by the works of Schleiermacher and Dilthey (among others) and further developed hermeneutic theories in conjunction with phenomenology and these thinkers and their ideas will be considered in the next several blog posts.

This post continues the series on the Nineteenth Century intellectual movements and schools that influenced the development of mature phenomenology in the early Twentieth Century.  If you haven’t yet read last week’s post on existentialism, you might want to start there.

In the 200 years following the advent of modern science, human understanding of nature grew exponentially.  Researchers, experimenters, engineers, and academics were able to formulate reliable methods and discover natural laws for how the planets move, how chemicals transform from one state to another, and how species evolved, among many other discoveries that dramatically changed human society.  By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, there were some frontiers of science that were still largely unexplored, including human behavior and the human mind.  As mentioned above, there were some early modern philosophers who came up with speculative systems for how the mind works, but for a long time there was no methodology to sort out which of the competing systems were more accurate than any others.  Some scientists were able to make gradual progress in these efforts and they created the field of psychology.  These developments had significance influence on the creation of the mature phenomenology that appeared in the early Twentieth Century.

Wilhelm Wundt was one of the pioneers of psychology, which he saw as a discipline situated between the natural sciences (such as biology, chemistry, and physics) and the humanities (such as linguistics, historiography, and anthropology).  Wundt’s work got into several areas of psychology that were only beginning in his time, such as what we now identify as neuropsychology, cultural psychology, and evolutionary psychology.  However, the overall field was new and extremely broad and hadn’t yet been divided into subfields and specific methods and paradigms hadn’t yet been developed.  Wundt and his colleagues explored phenomena such as memory, perception, cognition, emotion, and motivation and tried to formulate experimental methods that would elucidate how each of these operate within the inner workings of the mind.  Toward this end, Wundt extensively used introspection in his work, although he decisively rejected any unskilled and naïve usage of introspection.  He sought ways of refining introspective methods so as to make the practice more reliable.

Around the same time, Franz Brentano formulated what he called “descriptive psychology”, which involved careful personal introspection on the content of consciousness and how it relates to the outside world.  Brentano sought to develop accurate descriptions of mental states and their causal explanations.  Brentano saw all of our internal experiences, whether they be perceptions, desires, dislikes, etc., are all about something in the world (that which is perceived, desired, etc.)  This relation between our inner world and the outside world is called intentionality, and it became the central concept of descriptive psychology.  Brentano drew from his reading of Aristotle and also certain Medieval Scholastic philosophers to formulate the concept of intentionality.  Taking inspiration from Descartes, Brentano believed in the self-evidence of one’s ability to grasp their inner mental world through inner perception and he believed that perception of the outside world was more fallible.

William James also made early advances in the science of psychology from a pragmatist standpoint.  James argued that we can consider something true if it works for us and provides us with some utility.  James formulated the notion of radical empiricism, wherein we can consider our first-person experiences such as emotions and acts of will to be empirically given truths, in the pragmatist sense.  Since one can observe their own self experiencing emotions and having a will to do certain things, those can be considered known from experience, hence they are empirical truths.  He also explored how our perceptions, emotions, habits, and wills coalesce into a holistic and continuous stream of consciousness.

Probably the most famous of the psychologists of this era was Sigmund Freud, who formulated psychoanalysis and did extensive work in subjects such as the subconscious, hidden drives and motives, and dream interpretation.  Freud came up with lots of fanciful and speculative interpretation of how the subconscious functions and what are the most significant factors driving human behavior, which supposedly are things we are usually not aware of and which are programmed into our minds at childhood.  His fame and influence notwithstanding, much of Freud’s work has been debunked and has been shown to be quite unscientific.  However, we can recognize that some of his theories and techniques were not only innovative but also had the potential to provide legitimate insights into the inner workings of the mind that are outside of our ability to understand through introspection nor through any form of direct objective observation that was available in Freud’s time.  For example, Freud developed methods and techniques to assist patients in bringing out repressed memories that were causing deep distress, even though the patients were not previously able to figure out the source of their distress.

Before I get to this week’s post, I want to introduce the series, which is on Nineteenth Century movements that influenced phenomenology.  There were interesting and influential innovations in thought that started in the mid to late Nineteenth Century.  Science was becoming perhaps the most powerful force in the world since it lent global military and economic advantage and consequential power hegemony to the countries in Northwestern Europe.  Some thinkers sought to harness the power of science to understand the mind, which led to the establishment of psychology as a scientific discipline.  There were also attempts to understand culture and society through innovations in interpretive methods and practices.  There were also reactions against the ever-powerful scientific and rationalist framework that most academics had subscribed to.  In the next three posts, including this one, I will cover schools of thought from the mid to late Nineteenth Century that had important influences on the foundation of the fully formed phenomenology that came about in the early Twentieth Century.

How Early Forms of Existentialism Influenced Phenomenology

In the mid Nineteenth Century, some thinkers saw the systemic and academic work of philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, in both style and content, as impenetrably dense, overly theoretical, and disconnected from concrete human experience.  We can trace similar sentiment back to the birth of Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century with the work of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who sought to find authentic life in a supposedly more natural state of human life that would be free from the corrupt influences of private property and the modern world’s ubiquitous desire for maximization of material wealth.  Schopenhauer’s Romanticism tried to maintain academic rigor while also getting to the heart of the driving impulses shared across all people.  In this, he did have some limited success in connecting philosophical ideas into the passionate lived experience of common people.  This approach did resonate with some people and it served as inspiration for Nineteenth Century existentialists such as Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who felt the need to explore much more independent ways of thinking, living, and communicating than anything that was coming out of the academic milieu of their time.

Existentialism is a tradition of philosophical enquiry whose primary focus is on the meaning and purpose of existence, especially of the acting, feeling, and living human individual.  The works in this genre involve the author contemplating their own meaning, but they don’t do this in a way that preaches to the reader.  Instead, the reader is encouraged to consider this for their own self.  In response to the question “what can we know?”, an existentialist might answer that we can know the human condition, and they might say that we can know this through intuitive insight resulting from experiencing feelings such as anguish.  In the view of the existentialist, the individual’s starting point might be the feeling of existential angst, dread, disorientation, or confusion as they contemplate the apparently meaningless or absurd world.  Existentialist works often involve the exposition of a broad range of human emotions that manifest in the context of various lived experiences, and this interaction often plays a central role in examining the question of the meaning and purpose of existence.  What is common to existentialists is the centrality of self-examination and the need for authenticity in life.

Existentialism emphasized the fragility of reason, the contingency of existence, and the need for human beings to create their own essence to determine the meaning of their own lives.  Existentialists believe that the only satisfactory way to find meaning is through free and resolute action rather than through cold and calculated observation and reason.  The reader is encouraged to personally try different things and to see what works for them and the author gives a guide for what has worked for their own self and for other people that they personally know.  These stories and meditations and explorations are offered to the reader as potential guides for their own personal exploration of the meaning and purpose of their own life.

For Kierkegaard, the meaning of existence is found in faith, whereas for Nietzsche, it is found in one’s personal will to self-determination.  Kierkegaard wanted a subjective approach to philosophy.  He wanted to examine what it means to be a human being, not as a part of some grand philosophical system, but as a self-determining individual.  He studied the experience of dread and anxiety, especially as they might be presented within one’s moral choices.  Nietzsche sought to radically redefine the traditional notions of culture, values, identity, and purpose.  In all cases, existentialism involves mindfulness of one’s emotions and being the author of one’s own purpose and destiny.

All of this had an important influence on the development of existential phenomenology, which essentially merges the core of phenomenology (a disciplined approach to self-examination of the structures of consciousness and getting back to ‘the things themselves’) with existentialism.  When Edmund Husserl first formulated phenomenology, his focus was mostly on how our thoughts and conceptions of reality are constituted so that we don’t have to be beholden to overarching ideological or metaphysical assumptions and we can instead come to recognize a ground of conscious experience that is known from direct experience.  Husserl had a method of doing this that is meditative and mostly up in the head, but Martin Heidegger and his successors created an existential way of doing phenomenology was more embodied and that could allow one to find a basis in being that is even more fundamental than what Husserl had identified.