Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a philosophy of experience. For phenomenology the ultimate source of all meaning and value is the lived experience of human beings. All philosophical systems, scientific theories, or aesthetic judgments have the status of abstractions from the ebb and flow of the lived world. The task of the philosopher, according to phenomenology, is to describe the structures of experience, in particular consciousness, the imagination, relations with other persons, and the situatedness of the human subject in society and history. Phenomenological theories of literature regard works of art as mediators between the consciousnesses of the author and the reader or as attempts to disclose aspects of the being of humans and their worlds. The modern founder of phenomenology is the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), who sought to make philosophy 'a rigorous science' by returning its attention 'to the things themselves'. He does not mean by this that philosophy should become empirical, as if 'facts' could be determined objectively and absolutely. Rather, searching for foundations on which philosophers could ground their knowledge with certainty, Husserl proposes that reflection put out of play all unprovable assumptions (about the existence of objects, for example, or about ideal or metaphysical entities) and describe what is given in experience. The road to a presuppositionless philosophy, he argues, begins with suspending the 'natural attitude' of everyday knowing, which assumes that things are simply there in the external world. Philosophers should 'bracket' the object-world and, in a process he calls epoché, or 'reduction', focus their attention on what is immanent in consciousness itself, without presupposing anything about its origins or supports. Pure description of the phenomena given in consciousness would, Husserl believes, give philosophers a foundation of necessary, certain knowledge and thereby justify the claim of philosophy to be more radical and all-encompassing than other disciplines.

Later phenomenologists have been skeptical of Husserl’s contention that description can occur without presuppositions, in part because of Husserl’s own analysis of the structure of knowledge. According to Husserl, consciousness is made up of 'intentional acts' correlated to 'intentional objects'. The 'intentionality' of consciousness is its directedness toward objects, which it helps to constitute. Objects are always grasped partially and incompletely, in 'aspects' that are filled out and synthesized according to the attitudes, interests, and expectations of the perceiver. Every perception includes a 'horizon' of potentialities that the observer assumes, on the basis of past experiences with or beliefs about such entities, will be fulfilled by subsequent perceptions.

Extrapolating from Husserl’s description of consciousness, Martin Heidegger(1889–1976) argues that understanding is always 'ahead of itself', projecting expectations that interpretation then makes explicit. In the section 'Understanding and Interpretation' in Being and Time (1927) Heidegger argues that inherent in understanding is a 'forestructure' of assumptions and beliefs that guide interpretation. Heidegger’s account of the interdependence of understanding and expectations is in part a reformulation of the classic idea that interpretation of texts is fundamentally circular, inasmuch as in interpretation the construal of a textual detail is always necessarily based on assumptions about the whole to which it belongs. His theory of understanding also reflects his own assumptions about human existence, which he describes as a process of projection whereby we are always outside of and beyond ourselves as we direct ourselves toward the future. Heidegger’s conception of the anticipatory structure of understanding is important for later versions of phenomenology that focus on interpretation and reading. Hermeneutic phenomenology explores further the role of presuppositions in understanding, and phenomenological theories of textual reception investigate how literary works are understood differently by audiences with different interpretive conventions.

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