Husserl's Phenomenology I

It was raining Saturday. But the rain did not detain many from attending a talk on phenomenology at the Shamshuipo  premises of the HKSHP given  by Dr. Leung Po Shan, who studied German philosophy under the famous Husserl scholar Klaus Held,  who is also the supervisor of another frequent speaker at the talks sponsored by the HKSHP, the Ph D candidate Mr Ip Tat Leung who also specializes on phenomenology. But Dr. Leung's Ph D thesis was on the philosophy of Heidegger. a pupil of Husserl.

Before attending the talk, I looked up the entry "phenomenology" in the website of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and found not a few initial ideas. I set out below what I found. Phenomenology is the study of "the structures of consciousness as experienced from the first person point of view". From the point of view of phenomology, an  "experience" is always directed towards an "object" of such experience through "its contents or meaning" which such "object of experience"  has for the "subject" of such experience under certain "specific enabling conditions". Therefore phenomenology is related to many fields of experience like ontology (the study of being or what the inherent nature of things and people are), epistemology (the study of how we can obtain knowledge and the status of knowledge obtainable by various strategies), logic (the study of the rules of the reasoning process e.g  how to draw proper or valid inferences and conclusions from certain premises) and ethics (the study of right and wrong conduct and conditions allowing for the same). But although phenomenology has been around and in fact been practised by various philosophers for centuries, it did not become a subject on its own until philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others gave it special attention.  Such philosophers wrote on subjects like intentionality, consciousness, qualia, first person point of view etc.

Literally, "phenomology" is the the study of  "phenomena" or how things "appear" to our mind or consciousness, how we in fact "experience" them and how what "appears" to us in our "experience"  may have "meaning" for us. Phenomenology always studies how the world may "appear" to us from a "subjective" or "first person point of view.". This peculiar point of view is thus different from those adopted by traditional ethics and metaphysics which usually concentrates on or discuss "reality" as if it were completely "objective" or from those of other types of more or less objective epistemology.  But what constitutes the best  methods for observing "reality" or the "objects of experience" is still being debated by various phenomenologists  and it is still an open question what the full extent of its boundaries should be. 

Although in the recent philosophy of mind, the term "phenomenology" is often restricted to a rather narrow aspect of our observational process i.e. the sensory qualities of our seeing, hearing, feeling etc or what it is like to have certain sensation from our various sensory organs,  the contents of our experience are certainly wider than merely our "sensations" eg. what significance or meaning does what we sense have for us, what is the significance of objects, events, tools, the flow of time for us, what is the relationship of the self with other people as and when things impinge upon our perception and as they are experienced by us in our actual "life-world". Phenomenologists thus also study things like perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, volition, bodily awareness, embodied action, social activity, including linguistic activity. 

According to Husserl, our experience is always a consciousness or awareness "of" or "about " something and thus there is what Husserl calls a certain "intentionality" or "directedness" towards the object of our experience: we always "experience" things through  particular "concepts", ïdeas", ïmages", "analologies", "metaphors" etc.  and though such concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, analogies, metaphors may have something to do with what is being perceived, they are properly speaking not part of what is being perceived: they are the pre-conditions under which we may "experience" other objects, things, events etc. We always perceive the world "through" the network of such subjective "perceptual apparatus".  If we analyze our perceptual apparatus, we will find that they are even more complicated: we may further divide it into our awareness of "time" within the "stream of our consciousness". We may have "spatial" awareness of external objects or events  and within our visual field,. We may focus more on some aspects of our external reality than on some other aspects (there is foreground and background).  We may also have an awareness of who we are, what we are, how we are in our "self-awareness " or "self-consciousness" and within our consciousness itself , we may be playing different "roles" when we think or when we act. We may also be aware of our relationship with the external physical world (e.g our orientation "vis à vis the world in our physical environment and even our kinesthetic awareness of our own movement in space) . We may form "intention" with regard to the external environment : we may decide to do certain things and refrain from doing certain other things towards the objects of our perception. We may also be aware of "other people": we may feel with them in empathy or if we feel we are superior to them, we may feel sympathy towards them. We may be aware of our relationship with others in our "social interaction" with them and we may agree or disagree with their own ideas or perception about what we regard as our own objective reality in "intersubjectivity". We may "articulate" or "verbalize" our perception of the world in language which thus involves the creation of meaning. We communicate in different kinds of language with others and we try to understand their words and their conduct and we try also to get ourselves understood by others through the use of language. We may also act for a common cause with others in "collective action"  or against them when we regard the others as our "enemies" or our "opponents". 

Finally, we may have to see, act and experience whatever it is that we see and experience within a cultural world with certain rules about what is permssible and what is not, what is assumed and what is not. To understand the external world, we have to understand, our intentions, our bodily skills, our cultural context, our language and other social practices, social backgrounds, and the contextual aspect of our intentional activities. Thus the study of phenomeonoly may involve us with the study of the conditions under which our consciousness may have to operate.

We may have to study not just the subjective, practical, and social conditions of our lives. As our knowledge of our brain functions increases, we may also have to study the neural substrate of experience and how our perception, thinking, feeling, acting etc  may be affected the physiological activities of our brain. In the practice of phenomenology, we thus seek to classify, describe, interpret and analyze the structures of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience under categories like subject, act, content, object. This is what Husserl calls the structures of "intentionality". The "content" or "object" of our experience, Husserl calls "noema". The word "phenomena" which concerns only "appearance" is thus opposed to "reality" what something is supposed to be in itself, beneath its external "appearance".

Originally, in the 18th century, the term "phenomenology" meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances and was first introduced by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff and was also used from time to time by Kant and Johann Gottleib Fichte. In 1807, Hegel wrote a book called Phänomenologie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Spirit). In 1889, Franz Brentano used this term to characterize his "descriptive psychology". Then Husserl adopted this term for his new science of "consciousness". 

How then should we approach the various "phenomena"? To the empiricists, what "appears" before our mind are merely sensory data or qualia eg. the patterns of our different senses ( sight, hearing, touch) and secondary qualities like how flowers "look" and "smell" to the subject as an integrated feeling.  But to the rationalists, what "appears" before the mind are "ideas", rationally formed "clear and distinct ideas" (Descartes' ideal). To Kant, what "appears" to our mind are "things as they appear" or "things as they are represented" . In August Comte's theory of science, phenomena are merely the "facts" (faits) that a given science seeks to explain. Phenomena are thus the starting point of science, the starting point for the building up knowledge, ie. whatever it is that we observe and seek to explain. 

But starting from Franz Brentano's Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (1874), phenomena became "acts ( contents) of our consciousness" . For Brentano, physical phenomena exist "intentionally" in "acts of consciousness". More generally, phenomena are whatever we are conscious of: objects, events, other people and in our self-reflection, our own conscious experiences as and when we experience ourself being engaged in that act of "contemplation" "inward reflection" or the Buddhist "mindfulness" of our internal bodily sensation, the images passing through our own mind, our feelings and our thought upon those thoughts and feelings as and when they occur. But except in self-reflection or meditation, phenomena are "things" as they are given to our consciousness (in perception, imagination, thought or volition). Brentano distinguishes between descriptive psychology from genetic psychology which seeks to explain the various types of mental phenomena which descriptive psychology has defined, classified like perception, judgement, emotion etc. ( through examining their genesis through its history in time). To Brentano, every mental phenomenon or act of consciousness, is "directed" towards some "object" or other but only "mental phenomena" are so "directed".   

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) started the modern study of phenomenology with his Logical Investigations (1900-01). In this book, he tried to combine two different lines of development in European philosophy, the objective and the subjective, the world and man, reason or logic and the pre-logical: the descriptive psychology of Franz Bretano and the logical or semantic theory of Bernard Bolzano ( a founder of modern logic along with Gottlieb Frege) both lines of research being traceable ultimately to Aristotle. In his Theory of Science (1835), Bolzano distinguished between the subjective and objective ideas or representations (Vorstellungen) and criticized Kant and the other classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this distinction and thereby made phenomena merely subjective.

Logic normally studies objective ideas including various logical propositions but by contrast, psychology studies subjective ideas, the concrete contents of mental activities of a given individual at a given point in time. Husserl tried to combine both lines of development within the same discipline! To do so, he "re-envisage" or "re-conceive" phenomena as "objective intentional contents (or sometimes called intentional objects)" of "subjective acts of consciousness".  Some 13 years later, when he consolidated some of his ideas in Ideas I (Book One) (1913), he introduced two Greek words to clarify what he was after: noesis and noema from the Greek word noéö meaning "to perceive, to think, to intend", from which we derive the word "nous" or mind), to correspond to Bolzano's subjective and objective ideas. He calls "the intentional process of consciousness"  "noesis"  and its "ideal contents" its "noema." Husserl characterized "the noema of an act of consciousness" both as its ideal meaning and as "the object as it is intended".  Thus the phenomenon or "object as it appears" becomes the noema or "the object as it is intended". He thus combines both logic and psychology into a more unified study of consciousness. He analyzes objectively the contents of consciousness: idea, concepts, images, propositions or the ideal meanings of various types of mental activity that serve as the "intentional contents" or "noematic meanings" of various types of mental experiences, Since such contents are shareable by different acts of consciousness and in that sense, they are the "objective" or their "ideal" meanings. He refuses to reduce either logic or mathematics or phenomenology to mere psychology and to how people just happen to think. He does not wish to reduce the objective shareable meanings that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. To him ideal meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.