Terminology Tuesday: PHENOMENOLOGY

Philosophers have commonly distinguished between the objective world and consciousness of that objective world, and have viewed the latter, the phenomenal world, as being ontologically or epistemologically privileged. To take this view is to be an idealist. The distinction, which goes back to the Greeks, has played a central role in modern philosophy: in the work of *rationalists, such as *Descartes and in the work of empiricists, such as *Locke and *Hume. Its most celebrated exponent is Immanuel *Kant. However, although Kant’s ‘transcendental idealism’ affirms a distinction between the ‘phenomenal’ and the ‘noumenal’ worlds, one of Kant’s many famous contributions to philosophy was his ‘Refutation of Idealism’, his contention that knowledge claims concerning the phenomenal world necessarily presuppose knowledge of an objective world. By contrast, the twentieth-century school of thought which is called ‘phenomenology’ affirmed the primacy of the phenomenal world and attempted to construct a philosophy upon it.
Phenomenology is, therefore, a form of *idealism. It is a sustained attempt to describe experiences and phenomenal ‘things themselves’ without metaphysical speculation or commitment. In so doing, it rejects both naturalism, the attempt to study nature using the methods of the natural sciences, and psychologism, the collapsing of the normative discipline of logic into descriptive psychology, claiming to construct a distinctive science of consciousness rather than a science of material objects.
Kant’s defence of a priori concepts in The Critique of Pure Reason, especially his contention that phenomenal description presupposes the integrity of a priori concepts, is as devastating when directed against phenomenology as when directed against Hume; and as recent work by Strawson and Stern demonstrate, the issue remains at the heart of contemporary *epistemology and *metaphysics.
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) is viewed by many as the founder of the ‘phenomenology’ movement. Spells of his career spent at the universities of Halle, Göttingen and Freiberg marked significant milestones in his intellectual development.
When at Halle, he published his first major work on the philosophy of mathematics, On the Concept of Number (1887), which attempted to explain the synthetic unities of many-ness. These reduced to two: a physical unity, relating to the content of the mental representation; and an imposed psychical unity, based upon a unifying mental act that sets representational content into its various relationships. However, Husserl then went on to contrast with them a non-synthesized unity, the unity which is displayed by living organisms whose parts are continuous and come apart only in the process of analysis.
In Logical Investigations (1900) Husserl attacks ‘psychologism’ on the grounds that it treats logical relationships as being no different in kind from all other non-rational mental operations, mathematics thus collapsing into a branch of psychology. Timeless mathematical and logical principles would be transformed, in this account, into temporally instantiated and self-validating descriptions.
Husserl’s third major work, Ideas 1 & 2 (1913 and 1952) sees the emergence of his transcendental phenomenology, his correlation of all forms of unity in a ‘principle of principles’. The unity in question was not a unity of different elements, because, logically, prior to each kind of unity there is oneness which overrides individual subjectivity to reveal a form of trans-subjectivity which is at the heart of everything.
The intelligibility and coherence of Husserl’s philosophy has been widely challenged, especially in the Anglo-American analytic tradition. To be successful, his account must show how the ego secures both the unity of the known object and the unity of the knowing subject. Even if his account of this is ultimately unsuccessful—as it shows only the possibility of the noetic project rather than its success in any particular case—it constitutes the most imaginative aspect of his later work.
Later writers in the phenomenological tradition have included Martin *Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques *Derrida and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although sharing Husserl’s general approach to philosophy, these writers developed key aspects of phenomenology in original and distinctive ways. Heidegger, for example, understood ‘phenomenal reduction’ *ontologically and in a way that reveals ‘the Being of beings’. Since the things which are under analysis—numbers, relations, colours, people—differ greatly, their being differs also. He was led, therefore, to postulate a ‘pre-ontological form of being’ which is independent of our understanding of any of the specific beings under analysis. Sartre, sympathetic to central phenomenological theses, developed a distinctive account of intentionality. In particular, he rejects belief in an ego which synthesizes the experiences of a given subject. The unity of consciousness is achieved, rather, through the temporal structuring of experience.
These are only a few of the ways in which later writers, though in the phenomenological tradition, differed from Husserl over important issues.
Clearly, its practitioners believed that phenomenology has implications for all of the great branches of traditional philosophy: for metaphysics, logic, epistemology and *ethics. We should also note its interaction with the study of religion.
The phenomenology of religion seeks the meaning of *religion by focusing on experiential aspects of religion, especially the consciousness of the worshipper. Writers such as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade (1907–86) have tried to study systematically the universal and transcendent aspects of sacred reality, aspects of reality which evoke dread, wonder and awe. They seek to exclude analysis or rational criticism from their accounts, and so their work might be regarded as a preliminary to *philosophy of religion rather than part of that discipline itself. This phenomenological approach to religion often provides the intellectual underpinning for writers in the traditions of *liberal theology and *postmodern Christianity.

Bibliography
M. Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. W. Trask (London, 1959); E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, tr. J. N. Findlay (London, 1973); idem, The Essential Husserl, ed. D. Walton (Bloomington, 1999); R. Otto, The Idea of the Holy (London, 1958); B. Smith and D. W. Smith (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Husserl (Cambridge, 1995); R. Stern, Transcendental Arguments and Scepticism (Oxford, 2000); P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London, 1966).

Bunting, H. (2016). Phenomenology. In M. Davie, T. Grass, S. R. Holmes, J. McDowell, & T. A. Noble (Eds.), New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic (Second Edition, pp. 667–669). London; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press; InterVarsity Press.