Phenomenology

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Edmund Husserl's central methodological move is easy to state and hard to actually perform: the epoche, from the Greek for suspension, asks the philosopher to bracket, or set aside, the question of whether the objects of experience actually exist outside the mind, in order to describe with total precision how those objects are given to consciousness in the first place. This is not skepticism. Husserl is not asking anyone to doubt that the tree outside the window is real, the way Descartes doubted the evidence of his senses in order to find something certain underneath. He is asking a different question entirely: bracket the existence question, and look instead at the structure of the experiencing itself, what a philosopher after him would call the phenomenon, the appearing, rather than the thing that appears. Every act of consciousness, Husserl held, is intentional, meaning it is always consciousness of something, a perceiving of a tree, a remembering of a birthday, a fearing of a storm, and phenomenology's task is to describe the different ways an object can be given, perceived, remembered, imagined, judged, without smuggling in assumptions borrowed from natural science or common sense about what is really out there. The method sounds abstract until it is applied to an actual experience, tracing exactly what is perceived, what is merely anticipated or assumed, and what the describing itself takes for granted before any theory has been allowed to speak. Later phenomenologists split sharply over how far to take Husserl's own bracketing. Heidegger thought the method should turn toward the structures of practical, everyday existence rather than staying inside a purified transcendental consciousness, and Merleau-Ponty relocated the whole inquiry into the lived, moving body. But the founding gesture, describe experience exactly as it gives itself, before any theory says what it must be, is Husserl's, and it is why phenomenology reads less like a set of doctrines than like a discipline of looking.

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Martin Heidegger studied under Edmund Husserl and was appointed in 1928 to the chair at Freiburg that Husserl had previously held. The year before, in his own founding book, Being and Time (1927), he had dedicated it to Husserl in friendship and admiration. Their relationship was in fact complicated and occasionally strained even at its most cordial. He also, in that same book, redirected phenomenology so thoroughly that some historians treat it as a second founding rather than a continuation. Husserl's phenomenology started from consciousness, the transcendental ego bracketing the world to examine how objects are given to it. Heidegger thought this starting point already smuggled in centuries of philosophical assumption, that a human being is fundamentally a knowing subject standing apart from a world of objects it observes. His own starting point was Dasein, being-there, his term for the distinctively human way of existing, which he insisted is never first a detached observer but always already thrown into a world of practical concern, using tools, inhabiting relationships, absorbed in projects before it ever stops to contemplate anything. The illustrative case is a fountain pen: when writing is going well, Heidegger argued, a person does not perceive the pen as an object with properties at all, it affords writing, and in affording writing it sends the writer to the paper, the paper to the desk, the desk to the chair, disappearing into the activity itself, and it is only when the pen runs dry or is missing that it surfaces as a thing to be looked at and reasoned about. Ordinary theoretical knowing, on this account, is not the basic relationship between a person and the world, it is a breakdown mode, parasitic on a more fundamental, practical absorption Husserl's method had passed over. Heidegger called his own project fundamental ontology, the question of what it means for anything to be at all, approached through the one being that already has some understanding of being built into its own way of existing. The break cost the two men their relationship in the years that followed, but the philosophical break was real independent of the personal one: it reoriented phenomenology from a theory of consciousness toward a theory of existence, and that reorientation is what made Sartre's and later existentialist phenomenology possible at all.