Phenomenology

Use of the word phenomenology in modern science is described in the separate article phenomenology (science).

Historical overview of the use of the term

While the term "phenomenology" was used several times in the history of philosophy before Husserl, modern use ties it more explicitly to his particular method.

• Friedrich Christoph Oetinger (German pietist) for the study of the "divine system of relations"
• Johann Heinrich Lambert (mathematician, physician and philosopher) for the theory of appearances underlying empirical knowledge.
• Immanuel Kant used it in a similar vein.
• Hegel used it in his Phänomenologie des Geistes.
• Brentano seems to have used it in some of his lectures at Vienna.
• Edmund Husserl redefined it at first as a kind of descriptive psychology and later as an epistemological, foundational eidetic discipline to study essences. He is known as a "father" of phenomenology.
• Carl Stumpf used to refer to an ontology of sensory contents.
• Max Scheler developed further the phenomenological method of Edmund Husserl and extended it to include also a reduction of the scientific method. As a curiosity, he influenced the thinking of Pope John Paul II.

Husserl and the origin of Phenomenology

Some years after the publication of his main work, the Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations; first edition, 1900-1901), Husserl made some key discoveries that led him to the distinction between the act of consciousness (noesis) and the phenomena at which it is directed (the noemata).

• "noetic" refers to the act of consciousness (believing, willing, hating and loving ...)
• "noematic" refers to the object (noema) which appears in the noetic acts (respectively the believed, wanted, hated and loved ...).

Husserl in a later period concentrated more on the ideal, essential structures of consciousness. As he wanted to exclude any hypothesis on the existence of external objects, he introduced the method of phenomenological reduction to eliminate them. What was left over was the pure transcendental ego, as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. Now (transcendental) phenomenology is the study of the essential structures that are left in pure consciousness: this amounts in practise to the study of the noemata and the relations among them.

Heidegger's "phenomenology" and differences with Husserl

Heidegger himself phrases their differences this way:
:For Husserl the phenomenological reduction is the method of leading phenomenological vision from the natural attitude of the human being whose life is involved in the world of things and persons back to the transcendental life of consciousness and its noetic-noematic experiences, in which objects are constituted as correlates of consciousness. For us phenomenological reduction means leading phenomenological vision back from the apprehension of a being, whatever may be the character of that apprehension, to the understanding of the being of this being (projecting upon the way it is unconcealed).

According to Heidegger philosophy was not at all a scientific discipline, but more fundamental than science itself. Therefore, instead of taking phenomenology as prima philosophia or foundational discipline, he took it as a metaphysical ontology: "being is the proper and sole theme of philosophy". While for Husserl in the epoché being appeared only as a correlate of consciousness, for Heidegger being is the starting point. While for Husserl we would have to abstract from all concrete determinations of our empirical ego, to be able to turn to the field of pure consciousness, Heidegger claims that: "the possibilities and destinies of philosophy are bound up with man's existence, and thus with temporality and with historicality"

(NB: Heiddegger's quotes taken from The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1954), published by Indiana University Press, 1975. Introduction, p. 1 - 23 reproduced at www.marxists.org.)

See also