Phenomenology - What is it? And what does it do?

by Ian R. Owen MA

This paper demonstrates how phenomenology is useful in studying the personal and social facets
of making psychological knowledge and searching for philosophical truth. Most introductions
miss the full span of Husserl's writings. This introduction aims to give a brief overview of the
sum total of his theory and practice.

Phenomenology is a radical psychological and philosophical practice that has been a central
influence in European philosophy this century. The early protagonists have influenced
psychology, social psychology, sociology, psychopathology and anthropology (Brentano 1973,
Husserl 1970a, 1975a, Heidegger 1962, Macann 1993, Jaspers 1963). Phenomenology also has
links to structuralism, linguistics, theology and deconstructive literary criticism. It is also linked
to existentialism which began before phenomenology in the philosophies of Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche. When Heidegger summarised phenomenology and applied it to existential themes, he
produced existential-phenomenology, the investigation of the ontological essences of humanity
(Heidegger 1996). When Husserl died in 1938 aged 79, he left behind 45,000 pages of
unpublished shorthand notes, 15,000 of which have now been published as the twenty nine
volumes of his German collected works, the Husserliana (Husserl 1950).
Husserl was a transcendental philosopher of science and philosophy (Kocklemans &
Kisiel 1970, Husserl 1980). What this means is that he was primarily interested in the conditions
for science and philosophy to be grounded in an absolute manner. His writings cover many
psychological subjects including: truth and verification, perception, imagination, lived
experiences of the body, empathy and identification, as well as temporality, choice, value,
willing, feeling, signification, potential and heterosexuality (Husserl 1970b, 1981a).
Phenomenology aims for truth, logic, and rigorously self-critical thought. All forms of
knowledge including the sciences, are regarded as being ultimately grounded on lived experience
in relations of orderly, regular structures of consciousness. Phenomenology starts with what
appears: primarily non-verbal awareness, and studies the overall relations of meaning that
appears through sensation to verbalised thought, which may also include the awareness of others,
history, teleology, ethics and values. In general, it attempts to ground any academic discourse in
its definitive experiences.
It is claimed that all sciences are founded on the subjective experience of making finely
detailed judgements, categorisations, and interpretations. Phenomenology is the method of
turning abstract philosophical thoughts and imperatives towards regularising this grounding, by a
detailed analysis of object-directed awareness. Phenomenology in any of its forms does not
assume causality or try to assume anything which cannot be derived from what is given to
conscious experience primarily. What it claims to do is to ground all distinctions with a new
future context that it is building for itself.

Overview

In the 1907 definition of phenomenology Husserl states that the starting point for his method is
to reflect on the connection between immanent appearances for consciousness and the
transcendent beliefs and alleged nature of the world (Husserl 1964). He is anguished and
searches for epistemological answers: How can objective truth occur about what is outside of
consciousness itself? How might humans be able to have reliable knowledge about what is not
immanent to their own senses? Phenomenology is primarily a method based on the work of
Descartes, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Mill, Kant, Dilthey, Natorp and Brentano, rather than a set of
specific beliefs imposed onto the world. Husserl's thought went through many twists and turns.
Reading his work is complicated by his fondness for inventing alternative terms for the same
concepts. Three identifiable periods in his work begin with an early mathematical, Brentano-
influenced period of 1887 to 1901, and an idealistic middle period lasts from about 1905 to 1927.
A final mature period of his retirement from 1929 to 1938 is the most informative for
psychologists who wish to build an alternative vision of theory, research and practice.
Phenomenology argues that eidetic assumptions or prerequisites are necessarily in place
for shared understanding to occur. Phenomenology is primarily a study of essences (definitive
reflective acts) and the meanings of exemplary cases, to find the possibilities for objective
thought. Seeing essences is primarily about attending to the sensual experience of that which
appears. Secondly it involves naming the definitive whatness of any object, and hence, is about
the categories for naming. For instance, sciences are built on the essences, categories and
boundaries they draw up, which define legitimate academic discourse. The study of essences
aims is to find out how "the same things" are recognised as such. It wonders what key
characteristics, something or someone must have, to enable them to be categorised as the same,
or as different. For instance, if a hundred representations of an apple are viewed, they may all be
different, in the sense that they are not identical. But they can also be recognised as being of an
apple. Husserl was interested in essences because he wished to turn philosophy into a process
which could find logic, laws and absolute facts, founded on a perfect method. Husserl hoped that
his method would have no crises of its foundations, by which he meant that it would contain no
paradoxes, whilst being internally coherent, and based on indubitable self-evident truths (Husserl
1981b).

Phenomenological psychology

Phenomenological, or "pure" psychology has shared aims with conventional psychology and
social psychology, as well as areas of its own concern. It does not rule out an empirical approach
but argues that a philosophical analysis should be carried out first. This is because all unself-
critical, biological and physiological aspects of psychology are excluded for being part of the
provisional truths of physiology and the natural science approach. Its method is to reflect on the
possibilities for any lived experience to be able to occur, which it calls a priori eidetics. Initially,
phenomenological psychology rejects all animal, quantitative, simplistic and statistical
approaches, as being inappropriate to studying the nature of human consciousness. Only when
philosophy has been applied to the problems by this method, can an empirical psychology begin.
Phenomenological psychology is not about specific people or generalised people. It
begins with describing single exemplary essences of researchers' experiences of the true nature
of a subject - and certainly not some rehashing of their own initial biases and beliefs. Therefore,
phenomenological psychology stands in relation to conventional empirical psychology, in the
same way that geometry stands to real figures. In fact Husserl calls this discipline a "mathematics
of psychology" (Husserl 1977a: 36). One aim is to provide understanding as an end in itself.
Also, what is both present and absent to consciousness form its subject matter (Ibid: 137). "Pure
psychology" aims at the direct seeing of psychological essences to produce understanding (Ibid:
4). Husserl called pure psychology immanent, in the sense that it seeks out the intrinsic aspects
of an experience. The approach is non-reductionistic and relies on the possibility of accurate
verbal descriptions of essences in which the true nature of the object may be allowed to shine
forth from itself in some way (Husserl 1982: 44).
 Phenomenological psychology leads back to one's own, and the specific experiences of
others. Its methods are founded on the perception of oneself by oneself, called apperception or
"egology" (Husserl 1977b, Heidegger 1977: 115). Phenomenology sees individuals as caught up
in an object-directed way in the world to such a degree that people are intimately interrelated
with the norms of others' behaviour, thought and assumptions. For instance, phenomenological
psychology would rename social psychology as intersubjective psychology, as the word
intersubjective emphasizes the co-construction of these norms and the communal stream of the
psyche through time. Intersubjectivity strictly means that which exists between subjects, and so
refers to all that is face-to-face, discursive, social and cultural (Husserl 1989). Intersubjectivity is
a neutral term not implying any lack of attention to ethics.
Phenomenological psychology is also a meta-psychology as it aims to be self-reflexive
and so reform itself and the other human sciences by finding proper starting points, methods and
reasoning. So, it checks its own practices with the outcome it wishes to achieve. It criticizes the
assumptions of its own stance, as well as those of other approaches, and tries to clarify and
develop itself in a regular manner that can be employed by other colleagues. As we can see from
the method below, taken from Husserl's middle period, there is much in Husserl's work that is a
counsel of perfection.

Overall method

Husserl believed that every science should have its own pure subject, and create methods for
itself which can find the true nature of that subject. In doing this, one key term is the reduction,
from the Latin reducere, meaning to lead back to actual experiences. This is used synonymously
with another key term, the epoche, from ancient Greek philosophy, which means the suspension
of judgement, and is used in two ways in the method below. Consequently, phenomenology aims
to reject all a priori assumptions and impositions, and studies the essences and meanings of the
phenomena of consciousness (Husserl 1991, Ströker 1993).

Step 1. The psychological epoche accepts all the immanence-transcendence of consciousness and
stays in the "natural attitude" of naive assumptions of the everyday world. But unlike hard
psychological science and the scientificizing, non-reflective engagement with the everyday
appearances themselves. In the psychological reflection we remain in the world and involved
with others and our object, but we reflect on our subjective awareness about it. Try to lay aside
all assumptions and start afresh. Imagine that you have never seen the object of your studies
before, and that you know nothing about it. Contemplate, notice and observe. Treat your
experience of it as unique.

Step 2. Attempt accurate description of what appears to your senses. For Husserl phenomenology
does not entail hermeneutics. Describe both what you experience; and the manner in which you
are experiencing it. At this stage of producing verbal descriptions do not add, subtract, distort,
generalise, theorise, explain, or jump to conclusions. Do not repeat the conventional wisdom
about it.

Step 3. Try and directly see the invariant essence of the object. Interpretation of the data
produced by the two steps above aims to find the essence of the appearance itself, and so move
towards producing accurate and reliable eidetic knowledge. The analysis aims to find both
immediate and hidden universals by imaginative variation, a technique for varying one or more
qualities of a scene to find out which are more crucial than the others.

Step 4. Phenomenological philosophy starts with a transcendental reduction for rejecting the
natural attitude and all biological aspects and assumptions of psychological causation. This
second reduction allegedly "turns off" the natural attitude to facilitate moving from particular
instances to universal transcendental essences. This transcendental epoche is the experience of
"pure philosophy" by attempting to exclude what is one's own, and factual, by turning off the
everyday belief and assumptions of the existence of taken for granted claims, beliefs, theories
and assumptions that go beyond what appears in immanent experience. Therefore: suspend all
your current formal factual and empirical claims, as well as informal psychological knowledge,
expectations, theories and received wisdom. Is there any transcendental claim about it which you
cannot doubt? This is a method of trying to become open to the nature of its existence and
describing this, after this deliberate act of scepticism, for finding out what is truly occurring, as it
can be directly perceived from experience. This will reveal what you think exists for yourself,
which can be compared to what other researchers have found through the same method1 .

1
Also, by way of adding a postscript to Husserl's method and
introducing an historical note, it is important to note that there are
interesting links between Franz Brentano and Sigmund Freud, as several
authors have noted (Barclay 1964, Ellenberger 1970, McGrath 1986, Freud
1990, Stanescu 1971). Barclay and McGrath tell how Freud as an
undergraduate was deeply impressed by attending Brentano's lectures on the
Transcendental phenomenology

Transcendental phenomenology is an applied experiential philosophy conceived of as a science

of science (Husserl 1969, 1973, 1975b). The starting point is to find out how we find ourselves to
be human beings who share the same intersubjective object-meanings in one fundamentally
shared world. This philosophy bases its study on a pure "transcendental consciousness". What is
this? It is perhaps easiest to introduce transcendental consciousness by mentioning Rene
Descartes, who tried to find indubitable facts by attempting to doubt everything. Descartes found
he could not doubt the self-evidence of his own thought. So he proclaimed, "I think therefore I
am". Husserl takes a similar route. He states that transcendental consciousness is produced by a
change of attitude, away from the acceptance of the existence of anything and the world. In
Husserl's terminology, abstract transcendental essences are the truth about the world and of an
individual's experience of it and of others. Finally, similarly to the psychological method, this
philosophical method is also a meta-philosophy, that seeks to keep itself in check, and order its
aims and methods in a self-critical manner.

Conclusion

It is now possible to see how radical and iconoclastic the phenomenological approach to
psychology and philosophy is. For Husserl, psychology has not yet begun. What currently passes
for psychology is based on anything but pure psyche. There is a rising interest in "new"
qualitative psychological methods, and some attention to the intersubjective and discursive in
social psychology, but such interest mostly ignores phenomenological psychology's preparatory
work on the invariant structures of consciousness, epistemology, method, evidence and the
interpretative aspects of making objective empirical knowledge. After Heidegger and Gadamer,
phenomenology moves conventional psychology further towards hermeneutics, the study of how
things are interpreted to be what they are. Such an approach in consciousness would also result

association of ideas and dream phenomena. For instance, there is great

similarity between Freud's concept of cathexis and Brentano's idea of
intentionality. Now we can see how the methods of free association and
free-floating attention in psychoanalysis are very similar to
phenomenological investigation. In both of these methods the researcher
does not know what is significant or what is being looked for until some
way into the investigation when the significant themes begin to show
themselves.
in an emphasis on rigorous qualitative methods, by making understanding and methods which
closely fit the nature of the lived experiences under observation. As regards contemporary
philosophy, phenomenology regards post-modernism as an illness that requires the cure of
grounding.
The consequences of phenomenology for conventional psychology and social
psychology are that it refutes the tenets and applicability of Platonic and Galilean "natural"
science, with its multitude of empirical claims and methods for attempting to know truth about
the other, through which it claims objective knowledge. Transcendental phenomenology aims to
be objective and acknowledges the great difficulty in attempting this, when human nature is
unpredictable, temporal, historical and intersubjective. Whilst phenomenological psychology is
forever relativistic and only a half way step toward transcendental phenomenology.

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