Phenomenology

Definition

Phenomenology can be loosely interpreted as being a technique of acknowledging what is without preconception or prejudice. It is far more difficult than it first sounds and requires practice and mental training.

Western Phenomenology

Western Phenomenology began as a philosophical movement. It is the study of "phenomena": appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meanings things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view.

Phenomenology was developed by Edmund Husserl (1859-1917) He was influenced by Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who developed the idea that mental structures precede experience.  These ideas are still echoed today by cognitive scientists who would say mental structures filter experience. So if two people have different mental structures then their experience is different. In the image to the left a colour blind person sees the number “3”. Others see the number “8”. What you see is as much determined by the colour receptors in your retina at the back of your eye, as by the picture itself. (Ishihara colour tests)

Franz Brentano (1838-1917) was also an important influence. He emphasised the importance of subjective analysis of our own experience. He also noted the importance of the primacy of intention.

So which word do you initially see in the picture below? If you see a word in black you can intentionally look for the opposite word in the white. That is the primacy of intention in action.

The two words are  “good” and “evil”

Similarly you can alternate between two possible images in the picture below. In one the white is the foreground and the black the background. In the other image the black becomes the foreground.

Black foreground gives a profile of faces White foreground gives and image of a goblet.

So it becomes clear that acknowledging phenomena is a complicated process. An intrinsic part of our ability to be phenomenological is our ability to direct and to open our attention.  One training method to develop these abilities is mindfulness which is discussed in Chapter 8: Eastern Phenomenology.

Existential Phenomenology then developed out of the work of Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)who pointed out the impossibility of separating lived experience from the consensual background of cultural beliefs and practices (Varela 1998 p19). Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) highlighted this when he said that said that because phenomenology is a discourse after the experience, it cannot recapture the richness of the experience itself (Varela 1998 p19). So a description of a sunset is not the same as the experience of the sunset.

During the first half of the twentieth century, the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger (1881- 1966) was the first to combine psychotherapy with existentialism in working with patients as Medical Director of a sanatorium Existential phenomenology started to influence the psychotherapies more significantly with the development of existential psychotherapy in the 1960’s and 70’s as seen in the work of people such as Victor Frankl (1905-1997) and Irving Yalom (b 1931) Humanistic psychology and Gestalt Therapy were also heavily influenced by the application of existential phenomenology.

The Stanford encyclopaedia of philosophy has a very good description and summary of Western phenomenology online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology

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