Jayzer Billones 2014-14609

Anth 193

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the science of phenomena. Phenomenology has different definitions at

different contexts. Basically, it is about trying to provide how things come to our awareness and
how the world appears to us in terms of our subjective experience of the phenomena. It can also
be about reflecting to our everyday experience in order to gain some sense of its order, structure
and coherence. Phenomenology has two kinds: Existential phenomenology which is linked with
later philosophers like Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre; and
Pure or Transcendental phenomenology which is associated with Edmund Husserl.

Phenomenology concentrates on the details of the phenomenon. It gives importance to

the realm of appearance or the phenomenon. It is also about the description of what is given to
our knowledge and that it provides a careful description of experiences that can be seen at the
surface level. Phenomenologists argue that at the surface level of the realm of appearance, there
is an underlying structure that can be described. But this description is not just mere inventory of
things. Beacause of this phenomenology is often described by scholars as ‘descriptivism’.
Phenomenological description is about making sense of what is happening around you. As what
Husserl said in his works, “… the entire objective world is for me, and so as it is for me.”
meaning how we perceive the things that is happening around us.

Husserl divided phenomenology into two types, the static and genetic phenomenology.
Static phenomenology is all about investigating how things appear to awareness in terms of their
static and unchanging perceptual properties. Genetic phenomenology is all about analyzing how
things appear to our awareness in terms of how they emerge into our conscious awareness over
time.

We view reality into two different ways. First is the natural, or the empirical attitude
which is the usual way we see reality. This type of attitude is about viewing reality as a
fundamentally separated from our subjective experience of things. This attitude is common in
natural sciences which promote the masses to be empirical in viewing things. Like everything
should be based solely on experiment, facts, data, etc. The other way to view reality is in terms
of phenomenological or the transcendental attitude. It is where people try to reflect and view
reality in terms bracketing (epoche). This bracketing permits us to draw our attention to the
fundamental activity of consciousness to which our experience of reality is found. This is what
makes phenomenology an interesting way in viewing the world because it carefully examines
our lives by being aware of what is the basic structure of our lives. Phenomenology sees reality
by taking into account our subjective experience and consciousness instead of just taking these
things for granted. A minute of time for example, the natural attitude describes a minute of time
as merely a minute of time regardless of how, when, or where we spend it while the
phenomenological attitude can have various ways of viewing a minute of time depending upon
the experience of the person undergoing it. If a person is bored, he can say that that minute of
time was very sluggish; or an exited person can say, that minute of time was very rapid. The
phenomenological attitude did not dwell into just measuring a minute of time. Note that the
meaning of time varied in a different way depending upon which attitude is used to view the
phenomenon. Another example is when we describe what I am doing at the moment, in a natural
attitude of viewing the world I may say that “I am sitting on a desk facing the computer typing
the summary of phenomenology; in a phenomenological or transcendental attitude I would say
that “I am anxious about this summary that I am typing at the moment because I am afraid that
what I am writing may not be acceptable to my professor.” We may see that the natural/empirical
attitude is a way of describing reality by merely making inventories of phenomena and the
phenomenological/transcendental attitude concentrated on the subjective experience of the being.
Thus we can say that phenomenology encourages us to describe things in accordance to the
question, ‘what was it like when you were there?”. We must not conclude and abandon the
naturalistic way of viewing reality but rather accept phenomenological attitude as another way of
seeing reality.

Husserl has this motto of phenomenology, “back to things themselves”. This means that
we must return to what is objective, logical, etc. as an object of consciousness. It also meant the
things that we experience should not be taken for granted like we usually do. This statement was
also a response to Kant’s idea of transcendental empiricism.

Another key figure that will be discussed in this summary is the French philosopher
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was associated with the other type of phenomenology which is
termed as existential phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty was considered as an existential
phenomenologist that denies the possibility of bracketing existence. His works is central to the
idea that there is a relationship between the human being (not focused on the consciousness), as a
psychological and social being, and the world of nature of the human organism. He stresses the
interlinking features of world with inseparable elements such as the ‘body’ and the world.

His works are unreceptive to the traditional philosophy which disregards concepts and
rules in guiding your perception of the world. His existential phenomenology has been described
as a ‘new hybrid philosophy’. His works are heavily influenced by the five different works of
scholars namely: the Hegelian Marxist which was primarily emphasizes the importance of a
dialectical approach to human life and the fundamental social nature of the human subject; the
phenomenology of Husserl which Merleau-Ponty seeks to develop the existential elements of
phenomenology in terms of Husserl’s concepts of intentionality and the human life-world; the
works of Heiddeger, Satre, and Gabriel Marcel which is concerned with the existentialist
philosophy that made the famous quote ‘I am my body’—this type of philosophy is concerned
with mysteries of the world and not with the problems; the fourth is the Gesalt psychology which
are the works of Wolfgang Kohler, Kurt Koffka, and Kurt Goldstein which pioneered the
significance of a holistic approach to biology; and the last is the structural linguistics of Saussure
and his close friend Levi-Strauss, a cultural anthropologist.

Merleau-Ponty suggested that knowledge is a result of perception and this perception is

centered to the body or subject in which is one form of reality that is not isolated from the world.
This concept of ‘body’ for Merleau-Ponty is both a thing and a consciousness. The concept of
body has an ambiguous quality and he stresses in his works that the body is not an object—the
awareness of the owner of the body is not a thought that can be combined altogether to make an
ultimate concept of the body. The body is always something rather than ‘what it is’. It can be
sexuality and the same time freedom which is thought influenced by cultural assumptions. As
what he stated in one of his books, “I am my body, at least wholly to the extent that I possess
experience, and yet at the same time my body is as it were a ‘natural’ subject, a provisional
sketch of my total being. Thus experience of one’s own body runs counter to the reflective
procedure which detaches subject and object from the each other.
Merleau-Ponty made a book entitled “Phenomenology of Perception” which he discussed
different points of perception. First is that perception is not purely a cognitive or mental process.
It is a bodily experience which is a sense perception particularly sexuality as a bodily experience.
Our body therefore is our natural self, “I am my body” as what existential philosophy stresses.
Second, before human beings make cultural representations and think, Merleau-Ponty suggests
that the humans perceive prior to expressing their thoughts (through the means of language).
This point was argued by many scholars for it devalues the importance of human cognition,
language, and culture. Third point is that perception for Merleau-Ponty is a ‘perspective towards
the world’ that we inhabit. Note that this perspective is not boxed in the knowledge itself; rather
it involves a ‘combination’ of perspectives that is anchored in bodily perceptions of the world as
we know it. Last is that perception for him, as what the book stated that “…humans exist in a
world that is completely independent of their thoughts and strivings. It is a world in which they
depend entirely for their very existence. Yet at the same time this same world has fundamentally
a human significance and value.” This point states that there is a gap between us as the subjects
and the objective world of our experience. However this gap does not cause a complete
separation between the two elements.
Lived experience and cultural experience was also discussed by Merleau-Ponty. These
two elements are important in understanding the world. There is a misguided assumption that
there is a dichotomy between these two events. This two are intertwined with each other in such
a way that they are found in the ‘distinct levels of social analyses’. Matthews articulated the
relationship between the two as he discussed in his works:

“What it is to “experience” the world, therefore, can be explained only in terms

of such “inhabiting”, rather than simply in terms of representation; indeed, we
can “represent” the world only because we are already present in it and involved
with it. (2002: 49)”

To conclude, phenomenology is not a movement against empirical attitude. It emphasizes

that all of these are the different ways to see and understand the world that we exist. It promotes
humans to view reality as not a separate entity of our daily subjective experience of the world
that humans inhabit. Phenomenologists promote to save the appearance and the appearance itself
has an underlying structure, processes, and must not be taken for granted.