Phenomenology

Phenomenology, in itself, is a simple enough concept. The phenomenological movement was launched under the batde cry of ‘Back to the things themselves!’. The ‘things themselves’, as phenomenologists understand the phrase, are phenomena that present themselves immediately to us as conscious human beings. Phenomenology suggests that, if we lay aside, as best we can, the prevailing understandings of those phenomena and revisit our immediate experience of them, possibilities for new meaning emerge for us or we witness at least an authentication and enhancement of former meaning (Crotty 1996a).

This line of thought presumes that there are ‘things themselves’ to visit in our experience, that is, objects to which our understandings relate. That there are indeed such objects is what the notion of intentionality proclaims and it lies at the heart of phenomenology. Husserl (1931, p. 245) describes intentionality as ‘a concept which at the threshold of phenomenology is quite indispensable as a starting-point and basis’. Natanson (1973, p. 103) calls it ‘the axis of phenomenology’.

We have been introduced to intentionality in considering constructionism. It denotes the essential relationship between conscious subjects and their objects. Consciousness is always consciousness of something. An object is always an object for someone. The object, in other words, cannot be adequately described apart from the subject, nor can the subject be adequately described apart from the object. From a more existentialist viewpoint, intentionality bespeaks the relationship between us as human beings and our world. We are beings-in-the-world. Because of this, we cannot be described apart from our world, just as our world—always a human world—cannot be described apart from us.

We might recall at this point the distinction we made between constructivism and constructionism. Constructivism describes the individual human subject engaging with objects in the world and making sense of them. Constructionism, to the contrary, denies that this is what actually happens, at least in the first instance. Instead, each of us is introduced directly to a whole world of meaning. The melange of cultures and sub-cultures into which we are bom provides us with meanings. These meanings we are taught and we leam in a complex and subde process of enculturation. They establish a tight grip upon us and, by and large, shape our thinking and behaviour throughout our lives.

Our cultural heritage can therefore be seen as pre-empting the task of meaning making so that, for the most part, we simply do not do what constructivism describes us as doing. Phenomenology, however, invites us to do it. It requires us to engage with phenomena in our world and make sense of them direcdy and immediately. What about the understandings we are already saddled with? These we have to ‘bracket’ to the best of our ability and let the experience of phenomena speak to us at first hand (Crotty 1996b). Thus, we find phenomenologists talking about ‘primordial phenomena’, the ‘immediate, original data of our consciousness’, the ‘phenomena in their unmediated and originary manifestation to consciousness’. Big words, some of them, but they refer to what we directly experience; that is, the objects of our experience before we start thinking about them, interpreting them or attributing any meaning to them. These are the things themselves.

That phenomenology requires us to place our usual understandings in abeyance and have a fresh look at things has been driven home to us by phenomenologist after phenomenologist.

• Phenomenology invites us to ‘set aside all previous habits of thought, see through and break down the mental barriers which these habits have set along the horizons of our thinking … to learn to see what stands before our eyes’ (Husserl 1931, p. 43).
• Phenomenology is ‘a return to the unadulterated phenomena’ and an ‘unusually obstinate attempt to look at the phenomena and to remain faithful to them before even thinking of them’ (Spiegelberg 1982, pp. 680, 717).
• Phenomenology ‘exhorts a pristine acquaintance with phenomena unadulterated by preconceptions: it encourages the inquirer to sustain an intuitive grasp of what is there by “opening his eyes”, “keeping them open”, “looking and listening”, “not getting blinded’” (Heron 1992, p. 164).
• ‘Phenomenology asks us not to take our received notions for granted .. to call into question our whole culture, our manner of seeing the world and being in the world in the way we have learned it growing up’ (Wolff 1984, p. 192).
• ‘It is the task of phenomenology … to make us conscious of what the world was like before we learned how to see it’ (Marton 1986, p. 40).
• Phenomenology is an ‘attempt to recover a fresh perception of existence, one unprejudiced by acculturation’ (Sadler 1969, p. 377).

In this same vein, Merleau-Ponty tells us (1962, p. xiv) that ‘in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it’. The outcome, he assures us, is ‘nothing but the unmotivated upsurge of the world’. It is as if Merleau-Ponty sees the world as a seething cauldron of potential meaning that is held down by our received notions. Once phenomenology ‘slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world’, we experience the upsurge and can ‘watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire’ (1962, p. xiii). Merleau-Ponty employs yet another metaphor—the blossoming of wild flowers. Our phenomenological endeavour to break with inherited understandings ‘awakens a wild-flowering world and mind’. ‘This renewal of the world’, Merleau-Ponty assures us (1964, p. 181), ‘is also mind’s renewal, a rediscovery of that brute mind which, untamed by any culture, is asked to create culture anew’.

Lying behind this attempt to put our culturally derived meanings in abeyance and renew culture in this radical fashion is a deeply rooted suspicion of culture and the understandings it imposes on us. * Phenomenology is much more than a suspension of assumptions. The phenomenological reduction is a change of attitude that throws suspicion on everyday experiences’ (Armstrong 1976, p. 252).

Why be suspicious of culture? Surely we owe it our very humanness. Phenomenologists are happy to acknowledge that debt. They recognise that it is culture that allows us to emerge from our immediate environment and reflect upon it. They agree that it is because of culture —our symbols, our meaning systems—that we know our past and can plan our future. Yes, our culture is liberating. However, as we have already noted, in agreeing that culture is liberating, phenomenologists remain very aware that it is also limiting. It sets us free but at the same time it sets boundaries. It makes us human but in and through this particular culture, this special system of significant symbols, these meanings. This is circumscribing. In imposing these meanings, it is excluding others. And we should never lose sight of the fact that the particular set of meanings it imposes has come into being to serve particular interests and will harbour its own forms of oppression, manipulation and other forms of injustice.

Another way to look at this matter is to underline the difference between a reality and any concept we might have of it. Because we are the kind of beings we are, we rely on concepts. We have a need to define and classify. Unfortunately, our definitions and classifications displace what they stand for in our experience of them so that, rather than concepts pointing us to realities, realities are relegated to being mere exemplifications of concepts. Yet a concept is never able to exhaust the richness of a phenomenon. As many philosophers and social scientists have pointed out, there is always so much that the concept fails to express. It leaves so much behind. Adorno, for one, is most conscious of this. His reflections, Tertulian tells us (1985, p. 95), ‘always gravitate around the ineluctable gap between the concept’s inherent abstraction and the rich density of the web of phenomena’. Following Benjamin, Adorno wants attention paid to ‘everything that has slipped through the conventional conceptual net’ (1981, p. 240). John Dewey too talks of what is ‘left over’, seeing it ‘excluded by definition from full reality’ (1929, p. 48).

The need we experience to define and classify proves to be a two- edged sword, therefore. Giving ourselves over to it, Cioran emphasises (1976, p. 222), dries us out and renders us barren. Our inmost aridity results from our allegiance to the rule of the definite, from our plea in bar of imprecision, that innate chaos which by renewing our deliriums keeps us from sterility.’

There is still more. Not only is our symbol system limited and limiting; it is also a barrier. It stands for things but it also comes to stand between things and us, that is, between us and our immediate experience of objects. It tends to substitute itself for what we actually see, hear, feel, smell, taste or even imagine. We have already seen a number of thinkers describing cultural understandings as nothing less than masks, screens or blindfolds. Heidegger goes so far as to describe them as a seduction and a dictatorship (1962, pp. 164, 213).

Phenomenology is about saying ‘No!’ to the meaning system bequeathed to us. It is about setting that meaning system aside. Far from inviting us to explore our everyday meanings as they stand, it calls upon us to put them in abeyance and open ourselves to the phenomena in their stark immediacy to see what emerges for us. True enough, the phenomena in their stark immediacy—the ‘things themselves’—will prove elusive. In describing what comes into view within immediate experience (or even in thinking about what comes into view), we necessarily draw on language, on culture. For that reason, we end, not with a presuppositionless description of phenomena, but with a reinterpretation. It will be as much a construction as the sense we have laid aside, but as reinterpretation—as new meaning, or fuller meaning, or renewed meaning—it is precisely what we as phenomenologists are after.

To take a fresh look at phenomena is, of course, to call into question the current meanings we attribute to phenomena. Phenomenology, it is often said, calls into question what is taken for granted. It is critique and grounds a critical methodology. This has been said many times over from the very beginning of the phenomenological movement:

… the science having the unique function of effecting the criticism of all others and, at the same time, of itself is none other than phenomenology. (Husserl 1970a, vol. 1, p. 45)

Phenomenology is a reflective enterprise, and in its reflection it is critical. (Larrabee 1990, p. 201)

Phenomenological philosophy is first of all philosophical criticism … I disengage from a claim in order to criticise it … in the systematically adopted attitude of disengagement. (Zaner 1970, pp. 79-80)

The value of phenomenology from a critical point of view is evident. The programme of reflecting upon all knowledge and experience, with the ideal of the ‘self-givenness’ in experience of what is meant, may well have an emancipating effect. (Farber 1991, p. 234)

From what we have considered to this point, two clear characteristics of phenomenology emerge. First of all, it has a note of objectivity about it. It is in search of objects of experience rather than being content with a description of the experiencing subject. Second, it is an exercise in critique. It calls into question what we take for granted.

In both respects it contrasts sharply with what is usually presented today as phenomenology, at least in the English-speaking world. Here phenomenology is generally seen as a study of people’s subjective and everyday experiences. For a start, researchers claiming to be phenomenological talk of studying experience from the ‘point of view’ or ‘perspective’ of the subject. What these researchers are interested in is ‘everyday’ experience, experience as people understand it in everyday terms. If they talk at all of ‘phenomenon’, it is either used interchangeably with ‘experience’ or presented as an essence distilled from everyday accounts of experience, a total picture synthesised from partial accounts.

The phenomenological method as understood by these researchers is geared towards collecting and analysing data in ways that do not prejudice their subjective character. It puts in place a number of procedures to prevent, or at least minimise, the imposition of the researcher’s presuppositions and constructions on the data. For a start, in most cases the researcher’s own knowledge and presuppositions are said to be ‘bracketed’ so as not to taint the data. (‘Bracketing’ is a term introduced by Husserl and used by later representatives of the phenomenological movement, but here it is being used in an essentially different sense.) To ensure that the subjective character of the experiences is not prejudiced, these researchers tend to gather data by way of unstructured interviews in which only open-ended questions, if any, are asked. The researchers also want to make sure that the themes pinpointed in the data do, in fact, arise out of the data and are not imposed on them. So they talk of ‘intuiting’ the data and invite others (often including the subjects) to support their claim that the themes they point to are genuinely to be found in the data.

What has emerged here under the rubric of ‘phenomenology’ is a quite single-minded effort to identify, understand, describe and maintain the subjective experiences of the respondents. It is self-professedly subjectivist in approach (in the sense of being in search of people’s subjective experience) and expressly uncritical.

In this attempt to understand and describe people’s subjective experience, there is much talk of putting oneself in the place of the other. This is sometimes styled ‘the great phenomenological principle’. Even so, the emphasis typically remains on common understandings and the meanings of common practices, so that phenomenological research of this kind emerges as an exploration, via personal experiences, of prevailing cultural understandings.

This is a new understanding of phenomenology and one may well ask how it came to be. As argued elsewhere (Crotty 1995, 1996a), it is very much a North American development. When phenomenology arrived on the shores of that continent, it was slow to receive any kind of welcome at all. In the end, within philosophy and to some extent and for some time within sociology, it gained a measure of acceptance and a number of adherents, but overall the indigenous forms of philosophy (pragmatism) and sociology (symbolic interactionism) won out. In psychology there was even less acceptance. In the 1960s, when phenomenologists like van Kaam and Giorgi and Colaizzi began expounding their stepwise methodologies for phenomenological research, humanistic psychology was already at centre stage and not about to surrender its hold on the audience. What seems to have happened is that, instead of being genuinely transplanted west of the Atlantic, phenomenology was grafted onto local stock. It was not permitted to set down its own roots. Consequendy, its fruit embodies the American intellectual tradition far more than any features of its parent plant. It has been assimilated to that tradition. Its ‘foreignness’ has been removed. It has been translated into something familiar.

For one thing, we have noted how central to symbolic interactionism is the notion of ‘taking the place of the other’. It is not central to phenomenology. One can read Spiegelberg’s massive history of the phenomenological movement (1982) from cover to cover but the so- called ‘great phenomenological principle’ is not to be found there. Why should it be there? The phenomenology of the phenomenological movement is a first-person exercise. Each of us must explore our own experience, not the experience of others, for no one can take that step ‘back to the things themselves’ on our behalf.

In all this transformation the vocabulary of phenomenology remains. There is still talk of ‘experience’ and ‘phenomenon’, of ‘reduction’ and ‘bracketing’—of ‘intentionality’, even; yet the meaning of these terms is no longer the meaning they have borne within the phenomenological movement from which they have been taken.¹¹

Does it matter that this new understanding of phenomenology has arisen? It would seem to matter a great deal. Not because a different methodology has emerged laying claim to the name of phenomenology. The phenomenological movement emanating from Husserl has no monopoly on that word. The word was used in different senses long before Husserl borrowed it from Brentano. It is used in different senses today. There is no place here for any kind of purism or the mounting of a defence of some alleged orthodoxy. Still, it is legitimate enough to lament what has been lost in the process. What has been lost is the objective character and critical spirit, so strong in the phenomenological tradition.

When the focus on the object is lost, inquiry readily becomes very subjectivist—even, at times, narcissistic. And, when the critical spirit is lost, there is at best a failure to capture new or fuller meanings or a loss of opportunities to renew the understandings that already possess us. At worst, it means that oppression, exploitation and unfreedom are permitted to persist without question. To use Walzer’s words, ‘the maxim holds here as elsewhere: Criticize the world; it needs it!’ (1989, p. x) Walzer is not speaking of phenomenology. If he were, he might need to say that the maxim holds here more than elsewhere. As critique of the very notions to be used in any further critique, phenomenology is first critique, most basic critique, a radical and necessary element in all human inquiry.

To refer to phenomenology as ‘first’ critique is already to acknowledge that it is not the only critique. Husserl often states that he is concerned with ‘beginnings’, and phenomenology may be viewed as essentially a starting point. One may wish to argue that it is a most valuable starting point—an essential starting point, even—but it is by no means the be-all and end-all of social inquiry.

Nor is the initial attempt to contemplate the immediate phenomenon the last. The sociologist will lay the phenomenological mande aside and move far afield, but needs to return to the starting point time and again. What phenomenology offers social inquiry is not only a beginning rooted in immediate social experience but also a methodology that requires a return to that experience at many points along the way. It is both starting point and touchstone.

Merleau-Ponty sounds this note for us. He warns us that, instead of attempting to establish in positivist fashion the things that ‘build up the shape of the world’, we need to recognise our experience ‘as the source which stares us in the face and as the ultimate court of appeal in our knowledge of these things’ (1962, p. 23). For Merleau-Ponty, the phenomenological return to experience is philosophy—not philosophy as a particular body of knowledge but philosophy as a vigilance that never lets us forget the origin of all our knowledge. Philosophy of this kind, he insists, is necessary to sociology ‘as a constant reminder of its tasks’. Through it ‘the sociologist returns to the living sources of his knowledge’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 110).

What, then, is the world as the phenomenologist sees it? Certainly a bountiful world, a world teeming with potential meaning.

Our experience is no less than an existential encounter with a world which has a potentially infinite horizon. This human world is not predetermined, as common sense or physicalist language would indicate; it is a world that is open for the discovery and creation of ever-new directions for encounter, and hence open to the emergence of as yet undiscovered significance. (Sadler 1969, p. 20)

Yet the phenomenologist’s world is also a world in which our received notions—the systems of significant symbols that make us human—are seen to hide that potential meaning from us and hold us back from bringing it to birth. Phenomenologists chafe under what they see to be a tyrannous culture. They long to smash the fetters and engage with the world in new ways to construct new understandings.

Research, for phenomenologists, is this very attempt to break free and see the world afresh.

Source: Michael J Crotty (1998), The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process, SAGE Publications Ltd; First edition.