PHENOMENOLOGY: ORIGIN, WHAT IT STUDIES, CHARACTERISTICS - PHILOSOPHY - 2025

The Phenomenology is a philosophical proposed resolution of all philosophical problems from the intuitive experience, also called apparent. This means that it examines the beings and actions that are manifested in the world; therefore, his subject matter is all that is perceptible and has essence.

It can be said that one of the foundations of this philosophical trend is the conviction that in the consciousness of our living we can reach the discovery of necessary truths. These truths, synthesized in the essence and the ideal and timeless sense of things, can be discovered thanks to intentionality.

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl, founder of phenomenology

In this way, phenomenology is decided by the viability and intelligibility of supersensible knowledge. He considers that this knowledge serves both to guide life and to understand the world, and uses the life of consciousness to achieve that ideal intelligibility.

Its initiator was Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859-1938), a philosopher and mathematician from Moravia, a disciple of Franz Brentano. It is precisely from the descriptive or phenomenological psychology proposed by Brentano, that Husserl began to model his concept of phenomenology.

Years later, Husserl postulated transcendental phenomenology. With this name and reflecting on the intentional experience, he tries to explain the origin and meaning of the world.

His ideas were expanded and modified over time, with whom were his disciples and followers. However, the term phenomenology cannot be associated with a collective movement; in reality they are philosophers who, based on Husserl, put forward their own theory.

Origin and history

Although the founder of phenomenology is Edmund Husserl, his concepts are based on those of his teacher, the German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838-1927).

Brentano blamed psychologism for the reduction of consciousness, the soul and its actions in terms of the material, genetic and organic, among other aspects. From there he developed what was known as phenomenological or descriptive psychology.

This psychology is based on experience and empirical tests that allow it to reveal necessary laws. It also identifies its object in the experiences, whose peculiarity is that they have objective content.

Beginning of Husserlian phenomenology

In the Logical Investigations, published in 1900 and 1901, Husserl raised his concept of phenomenology. In addition to criticizing psychologism, here he expanded the concept of intentional experience already developed by Brentano.

Husserl describes intentionality as a property of experiences as they are necessarily referred to objects; hence these objects related to experiences are called intentional, and the life of consciousness is also considered intentional.

For this reason, phenomenology is understood to be the science that studies both the structures of experiences and intentional objects and the relationships between the two.

Phenomenology proposes a methodology for its procedure. This phenomenological method has several elements and among these the eidetic variation stands out, which allows the comparison between different intentional objects to find the essential that is common and, in this way, study said essence as a mere possibility.

Transcendental phenomenology

This theory of phenomenology began to take shape from the concept of transcendental reduction. With the denomination of epojé transcendental, Husserl made the proposal of access to the pure consciousness or transcendental subjectivity through what he called reductions.

Although the reductions had already been raised in the Logical Investigations -as is the case of the eidetic reduction-, in the work Ideas relative to a pure phenomenology and a phenomenological philosophy the concept of transcendental reduction appears.

With the transcendental reduction, Husserl proposes a way to disconnect from the belief that the world is real, so that whoever carries out said reduction realizes that the world is such as long as he lives it. Therefore, just by neglecting the world as real, one can attend to the world as each one lives it personally.

On the other hand, it calls the transcendental attitude the attitude that the person, whether he knows it or not, holds within the transcendental reduction.

From these concepts Husserl indicates that the world is what the experience of the person refers to and, simultaneously, it is the context in which one lives.

What does phenomenology study?

In a general sense, phenomenology tries to elucidate the meaning that the world has for man in his daily life.

In a particular framework, it applies to any situation or personal experience, allowing the underlying to be described. In other words, it allows the construction of the meaning that the person gives to an experience.

Bearing this in mind, taking both man and things and the world as phenomena makes them objects of knowledge. This implies that everything can be investigated, which allows for a closer approach to the truth.

Likewise, in the very conception of the phenomenon the possibility of investigating, doubting, rethinking and speculating is embedded, and this is what phenomenology points out, concluding with all definitive truth. Due to this particularity, the phenomenological method can be used in all disciplines of knowledge.

Phenomenological method

This method allows the researcher to approach a phenomenon such as it happens in a person, so that someone's consciousness is accessed to apprehend what that consciousness may manifest with reference to a phenomenon that that person experienced.

An example of how this methodology is applied can be seen in the phenomenological interview.

This interview is a meeting between an interviewee and an interviewer through dialogue, which allows us to apprehend a phenomenon through language. In this, any value judgment, classification, prejudice, categorization or prejudice is left out.

The interviewer is the one who listens, captures and lives with the phenomenon, which comes to him through the interviewee's speech. Said speech is recovered by the same person, referring to an experience experienced in the present or in the past and that has remained in his consciousness because it has been significant to him.

This is how the phenomenological researcher recovers discourses, speech, but not to give meaning to the experience; on the contrary, it is the experience that is already signified by the interviewee. The researcher only makes an observation that raises the person-space.

characteristics

Phenomenology is characterized by:

-Be a science of a priori and universal ideal objects, because it is a science of experiences.

-Based on causes and first principles, leaving aside any explanation of objects.

-Using intellectual intuition as a procedure.

-To neutrally describe the objects present without being associated with beliefs, prejudices or preconceived ideas, with reference to their real existence; therefore, its existence is neither denied nor affirmed.

-Conceiving the reduction or apojé as fundamental in the phenomenological method, since through it everything factual, accidental and fortuitous is excluded or left in parentheses, to orient only in what is necessary or essential of the object.

-View consciousness as an activity whose fundamental property is intentionality.

Main representatives and their ideas

Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (1859-1938)

Founder of phenomenology. In addition to the concepts already explained above, there are other fundamentals within his thinking:

Intentionality

For Husserl objects appear in consciousness intentionally, and the way in which these objects appear is part of his being. Thus, he maintains that things appear as they are and are as they appear.

It is precisely through intentionality that the model of believing in the division of reality to the exterior and consciousness as interior is overcome. The proposal is to go back to the previous plane, which is the real one, in which there is no difference between object and subject.

The most common form of intentionality is cognitive or theoretical, which unites perception with judgment, and it is through linguistic acts of significance that Husserl initiates the theoretical analysis.

Temporality

Temporality is a property of the person's consciousness. However, this consciousness of time, as also happens with all phenomena, has different layers. The first is the time of the world, which is located in the things and events that occur.

The second is the internal time, which is subjective, in which the events of conscious life take place. This time cannot be quantified the same for all in contrast to the first, which can be measured quantitatively.

The third stems from being aware of inner time. It is about an awareness of yourself as temporary, a self-awareness that flows and does not need anything else.

This consciousness of internal time is what enables the consciousness of the continuous identity of people as agents, and of the identity of things as objects within the world.

Phenomenological me

When one looks at one's own self, two realities are perceived: the first is the self as a thing that belongs to the world and is in it. Husserl calls this the empirical ego; the second is the self that understands, which is given the name of transcendental, because it precisely transcends the objects of the world, knowing them.

This transcendental self performs rational or spiritual operations and takes charge of the human, such as perceiving values, loving, morally deciding, etc.

In turn, it is perceived when the transcendental reduction takes place, in such a way that the natural self has a world in which it believes; instead, the transcendental self sees the world in itself and sees itself in an enriched way. In short, the self recognizes and identifies itself at different successive levels:

- A first level in which it is seen as someone who lives different perceptions.

- A second level in which the self that practices categorical or essential insights stands out. This is lived identical to the self that perceives in a sensitive way.

- A third level, in which he realizes that it is the same self that also reflects on his transcendental and natural activity.

The transcendental self is also an individual who constitutes the world with a responsibility for that world and a commitment to humanity.

Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)

German philosopher who also did work in art, aesthetics, literary theory, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines.

Martin Heidegger is considered an existentialist and not a phenomenologist. However, it can be framed in this philosophical conception due to the concept of intentionality linked to basic consciousness and prior to all objectification.

For Heidegger, intentionality was the ontological relationship of the human being with the world and not a characteristic of consciousness as for Husserl. It is for this reason that Heidegger investigated the appearance of being in man, which is the place where being is revealed.

From there Heidegger considered subjectivity framed in temporality, while for Husserl the temporal transcended, since it is formed by habits, beliefs, desires, etc.

On the other hand, Heidegger believed that Husserl was an intellectualist because he did not commit himself enough to the planet. Instead, he saw man involved in the world and therefore committed to it, to its salvation and transformation.

Another difference between the two is that Husserl rejected traditions because he considered them harmful to intuit experiences in the pure essence. Heidegger, on the contrary, emphasized the return to the historicity of worldviews and traditions.

Jan Patocka (1907-1977)

Czech philosopher, follower of Husserl and Heidegger. In addition to being a strict phenomenologist, he was a freedom fighter, opposing first the Nazis and then the Communists.

His main contribution is the introduction of the historical in phenomenology by analyzing the notion of "responsibility", with which the principles of civilization are put aside, as do totalitarianism.

Patocka takes up Husserl's idea of ​​"world-of-life". According to him, the emptiness of the modern world derives from separation and artificiality: the tie of ideas and things with immediate and concrete experience has been broken.

It is from this crisis that Husserl set out to make the relative and subjective world of life a new science. Its purpose was to discover the meaning of being and the truth of the world.

Patocka reinterprets and deepens Husserl's concept, arguing that this "world-of-life" is accessed not by reflection but by action. You only get to that world because you act in it.

It is because of this that politics is not done by intervening in elements of the management but at the moment in which men and women are encouraged to opt for a philosophical style based on questioning and understanding the world. In this way, the "world-of-life" takes a political approach.

References

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