5.2.1 Transcendental phenomenology
The founder of phenomenology, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859- 1938), introduced the term in his book Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1958). As formulated by Husserl after 1910, phenomenology is the study of the structures of consciousness that enable consciousness to refer to objects outside itself. This study requires reflection on the content of the mind to the exclusion of everything else. Husserl called this type of reflection the phenomenological reduction. Because the mind can be directed toward nonexistent as well as real objects, Husserl noted that phenomenological reflection does not presuppose that anything exists, but rather amounts to a “bracketing of existence,”
that is, setting aside the question of the real existence of the contemplated object.
What Husserl discovered when he contemplated the content of his mind were such acts as remembering, desiring, and perceiving and the abstract content of these acts, which Husserl (1958) called meanings. These meanings, he claimed, enabled an act to be directed toward an object under a certain aspect; and such directedness, called intentionality, he held to be the essence of consciousness. Transcendental phenomenology, according to Husserl, was the study of the basic components of the meanings that make intentionality possible.
Husserl described phenomenology as the rigorous science of all conceivable transcendental phenomena. For Husserl, phenomenology is a rigorous, human science precisely because it investigates the way that knowledge comes into being and clarifies the assumptions upon which all human understandings are grounded.
A contemporary exponent of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology is Amedeo Giorgi (1986,1989, 1994). He too speaks about phenomenology as a rigorous science. Giorgi criticizes the interpretive approaches to phenomenology. In his view, phenomenological inquiry should be a descriptive method, since it is through analysis and description of how things are constituted in and by consciousness that we can grasp the phenomena of our world.
5.2.2 Existential phenomenology
All phenomenologists follow Husserl in attempting to use pure description. Thus, they all subscribe to Husserl's idea of keeping to the things themselves. They differ among themselves, however, as to whether the phenomenological reduction can be
performed, and as to what is manifest to the philosopher giving a pure description of experience.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Husserl's colleague and critic, claimed that phenomenology should make manifest what is hidden in ordinary, everyday experience. He thus attempted in Being and Time (1927; trans. 1962) to describe what he called the structure of everydayness, or being-in-the-world, which he found to be an interconnected system of equipment, social roles, and purposes.
Because, for Heidegger (1962), one is what one does in the world, a phenomenological reduction to one's own private experience is impossible; and because human action consists of a direct grasp of objects, it is not necessary to posit a special mental entity called a meaning to account for intentionality. For Heidegger, being thrown into the world among things in the act of realizing projects is a more fundamental kind of intentionality than that revealed in merely staring at or thinking about objects, and it is this more fundamental intentionality that makes possible the directness analyzed by Husserl.
Merleau-Ponty (1962) provides an existential interpretation of Husserl's ideas in his Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty describes consciousness as embodied awareness of primordial experience. Consciousness is existence in and toward the world through the body. While Husserl's phenomenology is oriented to transcendental essences, Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology is existential, oriented to lived experience, the embodied human being in the concrete world. The purpose of phenomenological analysis for Merleau-Ponty is not the intuition of essences, but rather it is concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world. Instead of striving for certain knowledge Merleau-Ponty believed that phenomenological inquiry can never yield indubitable knowledge. For Merleau-Ponty, the most important lesson that the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction.
5.2.3 Hermeneutical phenomenology
Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur are the foremost representatives of the movement of hermeneutic phenomenology. Phenomenology becomes hermeneutical when its method is taken to be interpretive (rather than purely descriptive as in transcendental phenomenology). This orientation is evident in the work of Heidegger who argues that all description is always already interpretation. Every form of human awareness is interpretive. Especially in Heidegger's later work he increasingly introduces poetry
and art as expressive works for interpreting the nature of truth, language, thinking, dwelling, and being.
Heidegger's student, Hans-Georg Gadamer, continued the development of a hermeneutic phenomenology, especially in his famous work Truth and Method (1975). In it, he explores the role of language, the nature of questioning, the phenomenology of human conversation, and the significance of prejudice, historicality, and tradition in the project of human understanding.
Paul Ricoeur (1974) argues that meanings are not given directly to us, and that we must therefore make a hermeneutic detour through the symbolic apparatus of the culture. Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology examines how human meanings are deposited and mediated through myth, religion, art, and language. He elaborates especially on the narrative function of language, on the various uses of language such as storytelling, and how narrativity and temporality interact and ultimately return to the question of the meaning of being, the self and self-identity.
5.2.4 Linguistical phenomenology
Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Gadamer have been highly concerned with the role and significance of language in the context of phenomenological inquiry. Also the work of Foucault (1974) on the nature of language and discourse contributes to certain explorations of the relation between understanding, culture, historicality, identity, and human life.
Van Manen (2000) states that it is especially in the work of Derrida (1977) and his followers where we can speak of a radical linguistical phenomenology. During the 1950s Derrida read the works of Husserl and Heidegger extensively while studying with Levinas and Ricoeur.
Derrida (1977) takes issue with Husserl's idea that signification in language is primarily linked to consciousness and intentional experience. Like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, he too turns away from the idea of the transcendental ego. However, instead of turning to the question of being (as in Heidegger, 1962), or to the lifeworld (as in Schutz 1967, 1970), or to pre-reflective lived experience (as in Merleau-Ponty, 1962), or to language and tradition (as in Gadamer, 1975), Derrida aims to show that meaning is always primarily linguistical. For Derrida, meaning resides in language and the text rather than in the subject, in consciousness or even in lived experience.
His famous claim that there is nothing outside of the text illustrates this well. For Derrida intersubjectivity is, therefore, intertextuality. According to Derrida, the meaning of a text has an autonomy of its own, and is dependent neither on a subject
(author or reader) nor on some external reference to which the text points. Through the method of deconstruction Derrida tries to demonstrate not the invariance of human phenomena, but the essential variance.
Van Manen (2000) states that the preoccupation of French philosophers with language is also reflected in the analytic theory of Jacques Lacan, the more semiotic work of Roland Barthes, in the writings of Julia Kristeva and Helene Cixous, and in the meditative writing of Michael Serres.
5.2.5 Ethical phenomenology
According to van Manen (2000) ethical phenomenology probably originates with Max Scheler, a contemporary of Husserl. It also finds its origin in Sartre's concern with ethical themes of freedom, responsibility, and choice. Interest in a phenomenological ethics is also noticeable in The Ethical Demand of Knud Lgstrup (1971). But ethical phenomenology is especially associated with the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1989).
Partly as a result of his Jewish experience of Nazi brutality, Levinas was set to radicalise the thinking of Husserl and Heidegger into an ethical phenomenology.
Although he started out as a Husserlian phenomenologist, Levinas came to the realization that Husserl's transcendental ego remains idealistic and that Heidegger's ontological phenomenology revolves around being or presence - or in other words, with the self.
For Levinas (1989), the Husserlian focus on the essence of things and Heidegger's preoccupation with the modalities of being in the world, are manifestations of the primacy of the self or "mineness" in traditional philosophical phenomenology. For a truly profound understanding of the human reality, one must not ask for the meaning of being, self, or presence but for the meaning of what is otherwise than being, or the infinite. Levinas finds the phenomenological power of this question in the encounter with the face of the other that makes an appeal to us. In the vulnerability of the face of the other, says Levinas, we experience an appeal: we are being called, addressed (the vocative). And this response to the vulnerability of the other is experienced as a responsibility. This is an ethical experience, an ethical phenomenology.
Levinas has many followers. Especially worth mentioning are the later works of Jacques Derrida (e.g. The Politics of Friendship, 1997) and especially Alphonso Lingis the translator of many of Levinas' texts into English. The ethical engagement of the phenomenological studies of Lingis is evident in the titles of his books, such as: The Community of Those Who have Nothing in Common (1994a) and Abuses (1994b).
5.2.6 Phenomenology of practice
According to van Manen (2000), professional practitioners tend to be less interested in the philosophy of phenomenological method than its practice and application.
Therefore, when exploring the nature of phenomenological research, it is helpful to make an immediate distinction between phenomenological research performed by professional philosophers and phenomenological research conducted by professional practitioners. The interest of the professional philosopher tends to lie with philosophical topics, themes, and issues emanating from the study of historical developments of philosophical systems and from the study of issues arising from the works of leading phenomenologists. For example, a philosopher may investigate the possibility of the phenomenological constitution of the transcendental ego, or the relation between transcendental phenomenology in Husserl and ontological phenomenology in Heidegger.
In contrast, professional practitioners tend to work within the applied domains of the human sciences such as education, clinical psychology, nursing, medicine, and specializations such as psychiatry or midwifery. A practitioner in the health sciences may study concerns such as the nurse/doctor-patient relation, how young children experience pain, or how the body is experienced in illness and in health.
As van Manen (2000) states, there are, of course, exceptions to this very general distinction between philosophical and practical phenomenology. There are philosophers who apply their inquiries to every day life concerns of people and others whose writings on technology, for example, have a direct bearing on the ways that practitioners may understand their daily work.
Van Manen (2000) refers to some historical precedents for this notion of applied or practical phenomenology. The Swiss physician Binswanger was one of the first to introduce the phenomenology of Husserl, Scheler, and Heidegger into the study and practice of psychiatry. Between the 1940s and 1960s in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany there were phenomenologists who applied phenomenological methods to their practical professional concerns. Van Manen (2000) also makes note of the Utrecht School, which consisted of an assortment of phenomenologically-oriented psychologists (Buytendijk, Linschoten, van Lennep), educators and pedagogues (Langeveld, Beekman), paediatricians (Beets), criminologists and jurists (Pompe), psychiatrists (Rimke, van den Berg), and others, who formed a fairly close association of like-minded academics. Van Manen (2000) states that since the 1970s some of this work has inspired North American variations of a practice based
phenomenology - initially especially in psychology (e.g. Giorgi and Moustakas), in nursing (e.g. Benner) and in education (e.g. van Manen).