Phenomenology

Historic Groundings

In order to understand phenomenology, it is critical to consider the landscape of ideas from which it arose. Since the time of René Descartes (1596–1650), science had been developing in a way characterized by an increasing disregard for lived experience and the body [Page 614]as a source of ‘truthful knowing’. Rather than relying on faulty bodily senses, ‘truth’ was seen to be achievable through abstractions and the application of formal rules of logic. Rather than relying on experience, ‘ideals' were the touchstones for determining knowledge.

The importance of subjective experience was not totally lost, however, and the term phenomenology was used by philosophers as early as the eighteenth century to signify the role played by human experience as a source of knowing. The two German philosophers credited with introducing the term in the way taken up by Husserl, however, are Franz Brentano and Ernst Mach. Most famously, Mach suggested that electricity should be described in a way that embraces our ‘experiences' of it. This indicates the importance phenomenology places on ‘human experience’ rather than just the physical properties of a phenomenon. In his Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), Dermot Moran suggests that in this way phenomenology recaptures the richness of human experience and makes it a valid field for knowing.

Husserl outlined his phenomenological project in two volumes, Logical Investigations 1 and 2, published in 1901 and 1902, respectively. However, a lecture presented rather late in his life in Vienna in 1935, titled Crisis of the European Sciences, sets out the need for a phenomenological approach most clearly. In it, he argues that the kinds of questions which positivist science is equipped to answer are not those of crucial import for human beings in the living of their lives. For instance, natural science cannot begin to answer questions such as ‘What is it to live a good life?’, ‘How should I demonstrate my care for other human beings?’ or even ‘Who am I?’. In other words, although positivist science can be helpfully applied to understanding the world ‘as it is' from a physical standpoint, it cannot answer questions such as ‘How should the world be?’ or, more important, ‘How do I experience the world?’. Such vital questions require an approach which affords human experience a central role.

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