Phenomenological Traditions

Intentionality

Brentano rediscovers the concept of intentionality, but Husserl gives it the rich and poignant content that enabled him to distinguish the phenomenological approach from other philosophical approaches. In phenomenology, intentionality indicates that the mind is always directed toward an object. Being conscious always means being conscious of something. This notion allows Husserl to formulate what he thinks is the central question that philosophy has to investigate: “How does the world appear to human consciousness?” Whether there is a world outside the mind becomes from this perspective an irrelevant question. Husserl expresses this suspension of judgments about the existence or nonexistence of the external world with the words “transcendental reduction” or “epoché.” His famous credo “Zu den Sachen selbst” (back to the things themselves) should therefore not be understood as a defense of a kind of ontological realism. The “things” that he is talking about refer to the activities of consciousness and the objects that appear in those activities. The pure examination of what is given in consciousness enables, according to Husserl, an unbiased and rigorous scientific investigation of reality. Phenomenology aims to reveal the world that is always already there, before it becomes an object independent of our perception.

Not a School but a Movement

As expressed by the title of Herbert Spiegelberg’s famous book The Phenomenological Movement, phenomenology is more a movement than a doctrine or a philosophical school: phenomenology is not so much founded but has rather grown in different directions. Although Husserl can be considered the father of phenomenology, virtually all phenomenologists after him attempt in different ways to detach themselves from his Cartesian-oriented approach, that is, from the idea that the human mind is the only reliable source for acquiring certain knowledge. Moreover, post-Husserlian phenomenologists develop very different approaches. It is therefore more adequate to speak about phenomenological traditions than a phenomenological tradition. But despite their significant differences and antagonistic relations, all phenomenologists share a certain basic attitude: they all endorse in one way or another Husserl’s appeal “back to the things themselves.[Page 1228]” They all share the basic idea that one needs to examine how things appear to our consciousness in concrete experiences, as much as possible independent of certain conceptual presuppositions. This also means that all kinds of (theoretical) judgments about the phenomena—real or apparent, objective or subjective, absolute or relative—must be suspended.

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