03 phenomenology

Phenomenology
The “lived”
experience

What we will cover
• Phenomenology as a
Philosophy/History
– Transcendental
– Hermeneutic
– Existential
• Phenomenology as a
methodology
– Descriptive
– Interpretive
• What Phenomenologists believe
and do
• Strengths and Weaknesses
• Disciplines that use
phenomonology

Phenomenology is…
A Philosophy A Methodology
AND
“The renewed interest in phenomenology
has seen a return to the much discussed
question of what phenomenology is, for
which a definitive answer has yet to be
found” (Rouback, 2004)

Phenomenologists
assert that the study
of phenomenaphenomena is
the correct and most
primordial objective
of philosophers.

The Form and its Phenomenon
Reality versus our experience of reality.

The problem of the (im)possibility of
objective experience has been a focus
for Metaphysics since the beginning of
philosophy and has consequences for
nearly all branches of philosophical
thought.
Phenomenology is an attempt to answer
this (seemingly) basic question:
How can we have knowledge ofHow can we have knowledge of
the world,the world, as it really is?as it really is?

How can we distinguish between the
shadow of a rabbit and a rabbit?

Descartes also approached
this question. Employing the
method of radical doubt he
concluded that the only
thing that one can know
with certainty is that a thing
is doing some thinking:
Cogito Ergo Sum

This thinking may
be described as
RationalismRationalism.

In contrast Empiricists
approach the problem by
rejecting the existence of
extra-worldly phenomena
like ideas/spirit/soul and
seek an explanation from
observable phenomena.

This thinking may
be described as
Empiricism.Empiricism.

Phenomenology as a Philosophy
Transcendental
Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl
“Father”
1920
Hermeneutic (interpretive)
Phenomenology
Martin
Heideggar
1927
Existential Phenomenology
Merleau-Ponty
and
Jean-Paul
Sartre
conflict
Post WWII
Positivism

What is Phenomenology?
CONTRA Descartes and Locke, Husserl
argues that in order to answer the
question of how we can
have knowledge of the world ; we ought
to turn our attention to the study of
our experience of it.
Phenomenology studies the structure of
various types of experience
including:
Perception
Thought
Memory
Imagination
Transcendental Phenomenology
Edmund HusserlEdmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Transcendental
Phenomenology
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)
• Sprouted from post WWII
positivism. Phenomenology
rejects positivism.
• This can be achieved
through reduction (Epoché)
• “transcend” the experience
to discover meaning.
There is “natural attitude” (our
everyday involvement in the
world) and “phenomenological
attitude” (the philosophical act of
pure reflection (where we
suspend the natural attitude).
• knowing is always and
only through a state of pure
consciousness…the mind is
directed toward objects of
consciousness that can be
reflected upon.
Lived world

What is Phenomenology?
The structure of these forms of experience typically
involves what Husserl called "intentionalityintentionality", that is,
the directedness of experience toward things in the
world, the property of consciousness that it is a
consciousness of or about something.
According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our
experience is directed toward things only through
particular concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc.
These make up the meaning or content of a given
experience, and are distinct from the things they
present or mean.

Transcendental
(descriptive) Phenomenology
• Within the range of unique experiences,
there is a larger, transcending, essential
and unvarying quality of a
phenomenon…that can be discovered!
Unvarying Quality
Of a
Phenomenon

“BACK TO THE
THINGS
THEMSELVES!!”
By “going back to the things themselves” Husserl meant
the entire field of original experience. He came to the
point that the ultimate root of Philosoiphy and of all
rational assertions was not to be found in a concept, nor
in a principle, not in the Cogito in the whole field of our
lived experience.
Going back to the phenomenon, to that which presents
itself to man, seeing things as they really are,
independent of any prejudice.

Returning to the Hammer
Transcendental

As what do we experience this hammer? It is many things to
many people.
To a carpenter it is a TOOL.
To a retailer it is MERCHANDISE..
To a killer it is a WEAPON.
To a lecturer it is a PROP.
To my girlfriend it is a NUISANCE.
To a communist it is a SYMBOL.
Transcendental

Edmund Husserl
Describing experiences?
Feelings?
Emotions?
Fantasies?
Dreams?

Logical Investigation
Objective Facts
Psycho-Logical Investigation
Subjective Events

Critique of Science
Husserl argued that the scientific method was delusional.
The impossibility of casual passive observation meant that the notion of
1. Observing the world
2. Discerning Patterns
3. Deriving Laws
Was not as simple as scientists would have us believe.
Rather, our attention is always directed at the object of our experience
and so before the scientist can only prove the accuracy of their
original assumption.
Put simply, Science was not fundamental in a way that would satisfy
Husserl because if refused to concede the presuppositions upon
which its enquiries were based.
Transcendental (descriptive) Phenomenology

Husserl came up with the main insight of
phenomenology: THE INTENTIONALITY OF
CONSCIOUSNESS. Every conscious act intends
something.
Consciousness is consciousness of something other
than itself. If an act is present, the object is also present.
Therefore, the character of the object is co-determined
by the character of the act.
Consciousness does not just adapt itself to the object
passively but rather, its very essence is to form meaning,
to give meaning to the objectto give meaning to the object.

noesis
The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis.
Phenomenology describes the objects of consciousness.
noema,
The Ideal context of noesis is noema. Phenomenology
also describes consciousness itself.
In this way it seeks to draw from both scientific and
psychological descriptions of the world.
The Objective and Subjective are correlative but never
reducible to each other.
In order to draw the distinction between these two different ways of
our experiences of the world Husserl employed two greek terms:

For a phenomenologist, then, there is no
object without the subject, and no subject
without the object.
The subject-of-the-objectsubject-of-the-object is the noesis, and
the object-for-the-subjectobject-for-the-subject is the noema.
Put in other words, there is no world without
man, and there is no man without the world.
The world is a human world and man is a
being-in-the-world.

The Phenomenological Reduction
The purpose of this inquiry into the structure of experience is, remember,
to provide a basis for knowledge about the world.
Husserl argued that all consciousness is consciousness of something.
There is always something towards which consciousness is directed.
Therefore: If we are to gain knowledge about the object of consciousness
we must first examine consciousness.
The consequence of this is that consciousness is the pre-condition for
knowledge.
Let us return to our hammer.

Let us consider the following:
Each of us is currently having an experience of the hammer. We are
having a noesisnoesis of this object.
However we are unable to get knowledge of noemanoema or the thing in itself
because we are unaware of the schematic, psychological and scientific
preconceptions upon which our experience (noesisnoesis) rests.
Husserl argued through a radical reduction, it is possible to bracket off
these schema and gain knowledge of the thing as it is in itself.
In what he describes as an epoche the subject [brackets off] the natural
attitude.
The place to begin this enquiry is from our own experience of the world.
From OUR FIRST-PERSON-POINT-OF-VIEW.

In the phenomenological reduction one needs to strip away the
theoretical or scientific conceptions and thematizations that overlay the
phenomenon one wishes to study, and which prevents one
from seeing the phenomenon in a non-abstracting manner.
The Epoche is the moment in which we break free from our everyday
experience of the world.
An everyday experience in which we rely upon unquestioningly and
unaware of a number of the suppositions of science.
This moment is transcendental.
If the epoche is the name for whatever method we use to free ourselves
from the captivity of the unquestioned acceptance of the everyday
world. Then the reduction is the recognition of that acceptance as an
acceptance.

Let us return to our hammer; we have already spoken about
the different ways we may encounter it, as a tool, a weapon
etc.
But have we gone far enough?
Our questioning is only beginning.
What are the assumptions governing your experience of this
hammer at this moment?
Scientific Assumptions
Perceptive Assumptions
Sociological Assumptions
How do these affect your experience?

Hermeneutic (interpretive)
Phenomenology
• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
• Hans-George Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur
• Disagrees with Husserl’s epoche.
• An effort to “get beneath” the subjective
experience and find the genuine,
objective nature of things.
• Focuses on the relationship between the
event and the person, and how meaning
is formed in that relationship.
• Leads to endless possibilities and
endless interpretations.
• Our relationship with things is not the
object/subject relationship.
“The
“natural
attitude” is
integral to
knowing”
“reduction is
impossible!!”
Being in the world

Heidegger was a protégé of Husserl’s and subscribed to many of his ideas.
However, he had his own ideas about the method of Phenomenology.
Husserl ‘bracketed out’ the question of the existence of the real world
and focussed instead on the fundamental experience of consciousness within
It. This has been characterised as a transcendental turn and has inspired much
comparison with Buddhist meditation.
For Heidegger the transcendental turn was the wrong move for phenomenology.
Heidegger argued that ‘bracketing out’ the question of the existence of the real
world was not helpful.
For him, the study of experience had to being where experiences occur and for
whom.
Heidegger proposed that Phenomenology was a ‘fundamental Ontology’. Put
simply the description of experiences has to begin with People in the World.
Hermeneutic (interpretive) Phenomenology

Ontology
Epistemology seeks to answer the question: How can we have knowledge?
Ontology seeks to answer the question: What is Being?
Heidegger concurred with Husserl that neither radical empiricism or rationalism
would provide a solid understanding of our experience of the world.
For Heidegger however the goal of phenomenology was not to allow an access
‘to the things themselves!’.
The goal of phenomenology was to make transparent the Being of Being
transparent to the Being for whom Being is an issue.
Put another way:

The Hammer has no Being-in-itself. The Being for whom Being is an
issue is the human being (Dasein).
Heidegger makes the distinction between:
Being Sein
beings seindes
If Phenomenology is to describe our experience of the world; then it ought
to begin with the most basic experiences. Things like our experience of
picking up a hammer to put up a shelf.
As what do we experience the hammer? We experience it as a tool
ready-to-hand to be employed in the process of hammering.

The most important experience that phenomenology has to provide an
account of is the experience of being.
For Heidegger then Phenomenoloy was transformed into fundamental
Ontology.

Ontology
He seeks to describe this entity we call Being (Da-Sein) in its average
everydayness.
He denotes the categories of experience as existentiale: In answer to the
question: What is Being?
Heidegger replies that a fundamental and reflective approach to
descriptive phenomenology reveals the following categories of Being:
Being-In-The-World
Being-With-Others
Being-Towards-Death

Being-In-The-World
It does not make sense to talk of experience occurring outside-of-the-
world as in the Cartesian exercise.
Dasein (Being) is always being-in-the-world at a certain place and time.
But the World should not be thought of as a collection of objects as under
the extreme empiricist viewpoint.
Rather the World is understood as the horizon in which experience takes
place.
Being is Being-In-The-World.

Being-With-Others
Being in the world is Being-With-Other people.
This signifies that we are with other Beings in a way more complex than
we are being alongside beings.
How is this kind of Being-With-Others characterised? It is characterised
by our caring about other people.
Being is Being-With-Others

Being-Towards-Death
To be is not to be.
One of the fundamental facets of Being is the fact that all Being is Being-
Towards-Death.
Being is Being-Towards-Death.

Hermeneutics
Hermione was a messenger between mortals and gods in ancient
Greece.
She was also a terrible trickster figure and would often deliberately
miscommunicate the messages of the gods.
This obfuscation inspired the school of thinking called Hermeneutics.
Heidegger wrote that Ontology is the Hermeneutics of Facticity.
Factical objects in the world are never uncovered without preconceptions.

Authentic and Inauthentic Being: A Qualitative Distinction
For Heidegger one could have an authentic or inauthentic attitude
towards one’s Being.
As what does one experience oneself in everyday existence?
It is both shocking and unnerving to hear that in everyday existence we
do not experience ourselves as anything like we truly are.
Instead we have an inauthentic apprehension of our selves.
Most tragic is an inauthentic being-towards-death.

How to Philosophise with a Hammer
To conclude our example of the hammer:
The Cartesian/Rational Approach would deny the possibility of having certain
knowledge; under the method of radical scepticism.
The Empirical Approach would affirm the scientific existence of the hammer
but would give us no information about the hammer as we experience it.
The Husserlian Transcendental model would ask us to gain knowledge of the
hammer as-it-is-in-itself by bracketing off the presuppositions and schema that
we bring to the act of perceiving it.
The Heideggerean/Hermeneutic model would argue that the hammer has no
Being. Any knowledge we can gain about the hammer must be first examined for
hermeneutic impurities and is subject to change.

Existential
Phenomenology
• Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905-1980)
• Rejects Husserl’s belief of transcendance and
embraces the lived experience, the concrete.
• Aim is not to find a common theme, but the goal is
to "concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and
primitive contact with the world.“
• Describes everyday experience as it is perceived by
the consciousness of individuals.
• This “new” phenomenology rejects the historical
division between the inquirer and the social world
(subject/object)
• This movement marked a return to studying the
direct, lived experience of the “field worker” as a
source of knowledge about the world.
"The most
important lesson
that the reduction
teaches us…is the
impossibility of a
complete
reduction."

Phenomenology as a Methodology
two camps-a resurgence in the 1970s
• DESCRIPTIVISTS
• Believe it is possible to
suspend personal opinion to
arrive at a single, essential,
descriptive presentation of a
phenomena
• Think that if there is more than
one reality, that leaves doubt,
ignorance, and a lack of clarity.
• Husserl followers
(Rapport 2006)
• INTERPRETIVIST
• There are endless number of
realities.
• Interpretations are all we have,
because description IS an
interpretive process
• Heidegger followers

Phenomenology…as a
Methodology
• …is focused on the subjective experience of individuals
or groups.
• …is personal. The world as experienced by the
individual, not relationships between people.
• …uses small, purposive samples of 3-10 participants
that have experienced the phenomenon.
• …attempts to describe accurately a phenomenon from
the person’s perspective.

Phenomenology as a Methodology
• …is where art and science collide? The interpretation of
lived experience and daily life. Understanding meaning
from the world around us.
• …assumes that “There is a structure and essence to
shared experiences that can be narrated” (Marshall 2006 p. 104)
• …assumes that the only things we can know, are those
that are directly observable and experienced. The only
reality we can know is the one we directly experience.

Phenomenologists….
• REJECT scientific realism (objects exist independently of our
knowledge of their existence).
• DISAGREE that the empirical sciences are better methods to describe
the features of the world.
• DESCRIBE the ordinary, conscious experience of things.
• OPPOSE the acceptance of unobservable things.
• REJECT naturalism and positivism.
• BELIEVE objects in the natural world, cultural world, and abstract
objects (like numbers and consciousness) can be made evident and
thus known.
• RECOGNIZE the role of description prior to explanation by means of
causes, purposes, or grounds.
• DEBATE whether Husserl’s transcendental epoche and reduction is
useful or even possible.
• STUDY the “life-world” (the taken-for-granted pattern of everyday
living).
http://www.phenomenologycenter.org/phenom.htm#2

Strengths of
phenomenology
• Efficient and Economical (only in terms of
data generation or maybe not at all. . .)
• Direct Interaction with Participants
• Allows the researcher to ask for clarification and to ask
immediate follow-up/probing questions
• Allows the researcher to observe nonverbal responses
which can be supportive or contradictory to the verbal
responses
• Data is in the participants’ own words

More Strengths
• Synergy: participants react to and build upon the
responses of other participants.
• Flexible research tool
• Applicable to a wide range of settings and individuals.
• Results are easy to understand (in terms of
people’s direct opinions and statements)
Marvin Farber 1966

Therefore, it is useful for…
• A person | student who wants to understand
human experience.
• finding a universal meaning of an experience.
• The reduction of context specific information to a more
general understanding of the phenomenon is desired.
• A researcher who is willing to become closely
entwined with the research.

Weakness of
phenomenology
• Findings are difficult to generalize to a larger population
• Small number of participants who are often attained in a convenient
manner
• Individual responses are not always independent of one another
• Dominant or opinionated members may overshadow the thoughts of
the other group members (only if group interviews are performed).
• Data is often difficult to analyze and summarize.
• Researcher may give too much credit to the results (immediacy of a
personal opinion)
• Requires a quality moderator
• It is a “soft science” at best, really it is not science, it is more like philosophy
and religion (Charles Harris, 2006)
• Critics of phenomenology think you cannot describe the unique experiences
AND make generalizations about the experiences at the same time.
Marvin Farber 1966

Disciplines that use
Phenomenology
• Nursing
• Education
• Psychology
• Social Sciences
• Urban Planning
• Art
• Pretty much anything
Concepts such as
suffering and well being
and the intersubjective
nature of the nurse-
patient relationship
cannot be studied from a
paradigm traditional to
the natural sciences.
Rapport (2006)

The Experience of Motor Disability
A Young Child’s Sense of Time and
the Clock
Awaiting the Diagnosis
The Stillness of a Secret Place
Nature Experience of 8-12 year old Children
Possibilities of the Father Role
The Nature of at Home-ness
Phenomenological Research Titles
Loneliness
ALivedExperienceof MakingaDrawing: DrawingAmy
Mathematics Teaching: Moving from Telling to
Listening
Being Nostalgic Naming our Child

“…you can’t impose method on a
phenomenon since that would do a great
injustice to the integrity of that
phenomenon…”
“…the phenomenon dictates the method.”
Hycner 1999
An Example from CSS…….

03 phenomenology

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03 phenomenology