Have you ever felt that you saw the world in a very different way from others? Did they tell you about a place and when you met it it was nothing like what they told you? It happens to all of us, our experience changes our perspective on things; that sensation of the discovery of the essence of the world is exactly what phenomenology studies.
Positivism in the 19th century affirmed as true knowledge that obtained through the scientific method. Science was taken as true knowledge. However, philosophy was displacing that notion, it sought to be a promoter of real knowledge through studies on phenomenology.
The intellectual banner of phenomenology was the mathematical philosopher Edmund Husserl. This German, formed within other great figures such as F. Brentano and C. Stumpf, began the phenomenological philosophical movement that most influenced the development of knowledge in the 20th century, and which is still present in this century.
Phenomenology is based on the study of the manifestations of the world in human consciousness from the philosophical plane; in other words, it is in charge of the analysis of the mental dispositions in the subjective perception of the concrete and abstract entities in all the planes of the universe.
Despite the fact that his study method was completely empirical, because it was based on observation and other kinds of perception through the senses; it has as a differential feature compared to the pure sciences that it does not try to explain the phenomena by conceiving them as objects external to the subject that perceives them. The phenomenological empirical method aims to describe and understand entities from a subjective level.
The subject of phenomenology is deep and somewhat complex; however, it can be clarified by explaining examples from daily life. So don’t get too complicated trying to understand everything at once, little by little you will discover the importance of the phenomenological method in scientific and philosophical advances by reading this post.
Instructions
From the 14th century to the 20th century, modern thought contemplates the notion of the subject and reason as central axes for the investigation of the manifestations of the world; that is, of the phenomena. Thus, the “transcendental” became a substantially strong motivation for a shift in philosophical studies from the idealistic existentialist thought of Kant to the phenomenological study.
This tendency in psychology to reduce all manifestations of reality towards the subject’s perspective set the pattern in Husserl’s time. Therefore, the study of the states of consciousness seen from phenomenology separates the noesis, the very fact of thinking, from the noema, which comes to be the thought reality.
Between these two planes, noema and noesis, a concept is established that determines them as parallel realities, which is called the intention. Therefore, Husserl understands logic as a science that does not deal with acts of thought but with the behavior of ideal objects.
These ideal essences are the ones that phenomenology studied precisely, because they were not impregnated with the subjective, such as numbers and the property of things. For this reason, phenomenology is defined as the science of the universal essences of things.
The world of ideas
For Plato, the true reality was in the ideas , because he affirmed that existing things are imperfect in themselves and what matters is how the human being conceives them; he stated that perfect realities are only found in “the world of ideas”; then, for phenomenologists, that world of ideas comes to represent the validity of things in the mind or psychological reality of man.
Consequently, Husserl does not intend to show an existentialist position as such, rather he wants to move away from metaphysical conceptions; For this reason, he only raises the validity of psychological realities, without labeling them as true. However, for phenomenological thought, these perceptions of reality will be true as long as some individual perceives and conceives them as such.
Now, understanding that the study of ideal objects necessarily implies significations, Husserl did not want to enter into evaluations of things or signifiers of things; but through a descriptive method he sought to reach the ideal concepts that are represented by things to discover meaning.
In conclusion, phenomenology tries to analyze the essentials of reality. For example, what is the essence of “table”, describing the features that make a table a table and differentiate it from other things. For this, the phenomenological method focuses on the analysis of a particular case; such as a specific table.
This method seeks to avoid prejudices regarding the idea of a table and investigates the elements that constitute it. Once all the semantic or ideal features of a table have been identified, it will be possible to determine what a table “is” and what “every table is”; in other words, the essence of the table.
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The spirit and the mind have in common their transcendental character. This feature was studied by philosophy, especially by phenomenology, thanks to the subjective nuance involved in all the processes that are related to them.
Phenomenology from its transcendental perspective opposed positivism, giving strength to the experience of the subject and the intentionality of the relationships that it manifests with its external reality. Thus, the transcendental will be defined as the product subtracted from the experience that configures the ideal idea or concept which defines the elements of the world.
Consequently, the method of transcendental phenomenology identifies the meaning of things or external entities, to determine their meaning in light of human intentionality; finally opening with it, the scientific path to describe the pure or truly transcendental consciousness of man.
The phenomenological study of the spirit
Hegel, for his part, proposes a phenomenological study of spirit. In this current, immaterial arguments of knowledge were analyzed as concrete productions; science, religion and ontology were some of the pillar studies of this method.
When it was proposed that nature and spirit are the absolute, the dialectical notion of thought was also introduced. In congruence, W. Hegel raised a dialectic of forms, indicating the dynamics of thought as a phenomenological fact of consciousness that is gestated from individual sensation, which finally projects universal reason, this fruit was called absolute knowledge.
Hegel’s philosophy affirmed that the totality of the real developed from the seizure of the historical totality of society; which he exposes in his book, The Phenomenology of the Spirit in 1807. Reason appropriates all reality because it is the realization of human history, understanding the being of man as what he does and not what he says; Thus, what man does is his substance.
The phenomenological method in psychology is based on the analysis of intuition from a descriptive nature mainly. Psychologists searched for a way to understand the meaning of what of human beings from the interpretation of facts in pursuit of essences, suspending their own judgment.
Consequently, the phenomenological method found its way into psychology, since it focuses on describing acts of consciousness without the need to explain them. In this way, man is contemplated as an indivisible, integrated and universal being; from a Hegelian point of view, it would be interpreted as the finality of being.
However, from the psychological vision of the phenomenological method, not everything real is rational, because as Hegel could affirm, everything real is the expression of a reason constituted historically by man; however, that history enters into a future of intentions.
Tips
Intention is understood from the phenomenological perspective as a form of intuitive and innate behavior of the human being; which is immersed in the act of expressing itself from its way of perceiving the world. Perception, for its part, is influenced by each person’s particular experience of living.
In this way, the perception of the world defines the intentionality of the actions of a subject; Therefore, it tends to be problematized, insofar as it is relative to a synthetic chain of perceived referents. Now, you may be wondering, what does perception have to do with intentionality in phenomenological analysis? Well, a lot.
It turns out that the perception of the synthetic chain of referents gives men specific information to build their prejudices. For example, fear can bias an intention because of a misleading perception; somewhat reminiscent of Plato, when he states that he felt “afraid of the threatening figure of a man who was actually a bush”.
Intention and self
The intention, according to Husserl, is the essence of consciousness as one of its essential characteristics along with the self. Therefore, intentionality does not subjectively characterize consciousness, the self is contained in the action it produces, the action produced or knowledge is inevitably impregnated with intention.
Husserl conceived the possibility of a transcendental philosophy in the study of intentionality as the basis of consciousness; because it would be the intentionality of the subjects that would sustain the transcendence of their ideas.
The transcendental reduction and the state of affairs
transcendental reduction as a method is the process in which the individual leaves a natural attitude to understand the world, conceiving “reduction” as a re-direction of consciousness. This process is based on the meaning that the world has for each person in particular from their daily life.
In this way, the universal belief in the reality of the world will develop as long as the subjective disconnection of the individuals’ own beliefs and prejudices is achieved. So, to achieve this, phenomenology in psychology and philosophy concentrate on the field of consciousness of the real.
In this way, to build the transcendental reduction, one must reflect on the intentional nature of the meaning of the actions; which implies the study of signification and the conceptualization of meaning as such.
All intentional experience will present a duality: the way of perceiving the world and the reality of the world itself. These bases will give meaning to the world of the individual when reflecting on said experience; therefore, the suppositions do not represent more than a state of consciousness, but not the phenomenological state of things.
In short, phenomenology focuses on ideal objects, the individual’s perception of them, and the intentionality of their actions. These points are analyzed from a transcendental reductionist method; which must be interpreted as a re-direction of pure consciousness for the interpretation of the real world.