Edmund Husserls Phenomenology

This entry defines some of the key aspects of the work of the post-Neo-Kantian philosopher Edmund Husserl, called phenomenology. It provides some introductory details and makes links to some of his influence in contemporary philosophy, psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. What these developments share is theorising about how the mind works by attending to the conscious experiences of oneself and others in relation to the common objects of attention around us. It could be called a qualitative cognitivism or the experiential interpretation of mental acts in relation to their objects of awareness. More formally, phenomenology can be defined as studying noesis-noema correlations, in a neutrally believed attitude, in the 1913 presentation of it: Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy: First book (Husserl, 1982, 87-127, but particularly 130132, 149-150). But different wordings are equivalent to this early notation. Other equivalent terms are intentional analysis, noetic phenomenology, and the explication towards the objects of our attention with an explication of the intentional processes involved. To the degree that people are following both the attention towards objects of attention, meanings of various sorts and towards the mental processes that made them, for one person or more, then they are carrying out what Husserl wanted (or not as the case may be). But the first thing to note is that there are two types of phenomenology. Husserls work came to maturity in 1927 in the work Formal and Transcendental Logic (Husserl, 1969, 1974) and the drafts that were written for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1997a, 1997b). The first introductory type of phenomenology is called pure psychology. It is a theoretical psychology preparatory for any applied psychology. It is social as well as individual. The stance that was being urged would now be called a biopsychosocial perspective. In 1930, Husserl mentioned it as the genuine psychology of intentionality (...ultimately a psychology of pure intersubjectivity) that reveals itself through and through as the constitutive phenomenology of the natural attitude, (1989, p 426). This means that this philosophical or theoretical approach concerns how people have commonsense meanings. The aim is to find how mental processes are necessary to create the sense of shared or disputed reality for actual groups of people. The second type of phenomenology is transcendental phenomenology. It studies how there is a world of meaning for more than one person. Transcendental phenomenology is an

abstract study preparatory for philosophy and the applied sciences. It concerns how ideal, verbal and non-verbal meanings exist for consciousness in its social habitat. It is allegedly devoid of influences from specific worlds of meaning. The word transcendental means finding the enabling conditions of possibility for meaning to exist in a shared cultural world. Pure psychology and transcendental phenomenology share a number of aspects of method and stance. Their focus is on meaning in the sense that it is assumed that intentionalities (mental processes) create specific lived conscious senses of an object of attention in some context. Intentionalities are mental processes that can be grouped into families of ways of being aware. Some of these are perceiving (sight, hearing), conceptual (speech, writing, mathematics), more complex types such as understanding the perspective and intentions of others (empathy or empathic presentiation), or the way that canvases depict in visual art (depictive presentiation), for instance. Both types of phenomenology are preparatory to applications of thought in decisionmaking and the sciences in that they make theoretical conclusions from lived experience generally and about the general nature of consciousness understood socially. In this way, Husserls work is the development of Immanuel Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (1993). In Kantian terms, phenomenology is a priori in that it is not empirical. (Yet phenomenology has qualitative and mentalistic methods). Phenomenology is transcendental in that it is about the enabling conditions of possibility for meaning. The conclusions of phenomenology are like geometry in relation to the applications of geometry. Its conclusions are about the universal and constant structures of the mind in social life. Both types of phenomenology are not only focused on the objects of attention but also interpret how the intentionalities work together - when any person remembers something, for instance: Remembering something is the re-playing of a prior perception superimposed on the current perceptions. What follows below are two sections. The first shows some details of the intricate stance of Husserls mature phenomenology. The second section makes some comments on how it has influenced various areas of study. 1 Some details common to both types of phenomenology Phenomenology comprises a number of methods of interpreting conscious experience. They begin with reflection from an interpretative position concerning what appears and what must be occurring in ones own or others experience. It concludes on invariant structures of

experience that are allegedly common to all human beings. Its technical language refers to conscious similarities and differences in meaningful experience. Husserl championed a qualitative perspective as a necessary starting point in academia. He employed interpretative practices to differentiate forms of intending meaning, experientially and linguistically. He applied rational principles and a novel set of interpretations because mental processes themselves do not appear: Their conscious endproducts do. Husserls approach is a hermeneutic cognitivism and is close to the areas currently called social constructionism, theory of mind and qualitative research. What Husserl meant by a mathematics of the mind, (1977a, 4, p 36), is a theory about consciousness in its social habitat of the consciousness of others, for use in any applied psychology, for instance. In summary of this overview, there are five essential steps to phenomenology. First, there is a need to become self-reflexive about the forms of intentionality that create different types of sensation, meaning and temporal givenness in relation to meaningful objects in the world of human consciousness. What Husserl actually did was to interpret the implicit, after considering explicit objective appearances of different types. Reflected-on experience is the raw data in order to begin such conclusions. Second, reductions are methodical steps to create attitudes towards a referent and making regions of raw data for study. There is a manner of looking for finding constancies in relation to a what. The what is how any object is experienced as perceptual, imagined, remembered, empathised, empathised as someone else remembering, so on and so forth. Third, what is found is that the different senses of meaning-objects, for instance, appear with added sense, often as a result of previous learning from past contexts. The past meanings get added to sensation in the current context. The past meanings need distinguishing through reflection on their source. In some cases, anticipated meanings are added and they may also have a relation to the past. Fourth, raw data is refined through eidetic imaginative variations. These are thought experiments for the purpose of determining variables and constancies of sense and intentional relation. Variation is a means of finding the inherent structure of consciousness. For instance, one such structure is the relation of intentionality to the constituted sense of a specific object. Another is the relationship between a self, another and a cultural object (any public object, be it a thing, an idea, a piece of music, another person, a social event or anything that is conceivable).

Fifth, phenomenology concludes on ontologically more independent qualities and relations - in relation to varieties of less fundamental, more dependent sorts of objects and intentionality. Phenomenological concepts have a direct mode of referring to what everybody can acknowledge in first-hand experience for themselves and in the second-hand empathy of others experiences. Husserl held a theory of consciousness that interprets what appears in the following way. The meaning of an object (or region of objects) of any academic discipline exists relative to the attitude taken towards it. The answer to the problem of attitudes that dictate their results is to become self-reflexive about assuming fundamental ideas and creating claims. Phenomenology constrains the means for claiming understanding, through interpreting intentionality between contexts. The method compares and contrasts different types of the givenness of objects and interprets their co-constituting intentionalities. Givenness means how an object appears as remembered, perceived or written about. The answer is that objects are appresented with other objects and other contexts, and the addition of retained past learning. The term appresented means that meanings are added to appearance. Any learned meaning is maintained and updated across time with new senses and co-occurrences of sense. Such learning is co-empathised and intersubjective. It is developed and becomes automatically recognisable through prolonged, contact with it. These learnings form a basis for understanding the past, present and future. In conclusion, phenomenology is a re-interpretation of the everyday experience of being involved through intentionalities with the cultural objects of attention. The experience of the world and the meanings of others are considered as explicit and implicit intentionality, (Husserl, 1977b, 42, p 90). This is because many types of intentionality are found by intellectually working out how and from where a meaning has arisen. Psychological meanings, like other types, are abstract in the sense that they are not perceptual. But they occur in relation to the perception of the physical bodies and speech of other people in a variety of contexts. Like Immanuel Kant, Husserl judged between the conceivable and the inconceivable.

2 Phenomenological influences Husserls phenomenology has been an inspiration for development in a large number of academic movements. These developments include returns to the phenomena in empirical psychology, the theory and practice of psychotherapy and psychiatry and for social psychology and the human sciences, as well as philosophy. The core group of Husserl and his peers were first influenced by the history of philosophy and reacted to Kant, Neo-Kantianism and worked to moderate the zealous idea that empirical sciences can answer all basic questions. The problem that Husserl set out to overcome was to help the users of ideas understand the nature of ideas. Husserls guiding thought was the role of pure mathematics in relation to applied mathematics in the real world. Contemporarily some key thinkers in phenomenology are Eduard Marbach (1993, 2005), Iso Kern (1977, 1986, 1997, Kern & Marbach, 2001), Elisabeth Strker (1980, 1993), Rudolf Bernet (Bernet, Kern & Marbach, 1993) and Dan Zahavi (2003). These writers have grasped the full extent of what Husserl intended by their knowledge of his unpublished works. There is also the connection to ontology and hermeneutics through Husserls pupil Martin Heidegger (1996, 1997). Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French philosopher who stayed close to the spirit of what Husserl was trying to achieve and brought Husserls ideas to the attention of a wider audience (1962). Aron Gurwitsch (1964) is another who was influential and mixed phenomenology with Gestalt psychology. Dorion Cairns (1972) was a major translator of Husserls works into English, although he differed in his conclusions about what is achievable. One of the major contemporary uses of Husserlian ideas is the use of intersubjectivity in child and adult development by Daniel Stern (1977, 1985), Colwyn Trevarthen (1979), Josef Perner (1991) and Stein Braten (2006). Intersubjectivity refers to the inter-responsive nature of human beings in contact with each other. In a way similar to the problem of other minds, Husserl worked to find the necessary conditions that enable there to be selves and others who together create a common world of meaning. Each self has senses of others views that are gained through social learning of what a self does not have first-hand: The view of the other is another view entirely different in physical space and not ones own. There have been a number of applications of phenomenological ideas in psychotherapy. The greatest influence has been via Heidegger to critique and develop Sigmund Freuds psycho-analysis (Boss, 1982). This produced the movement called existential psychotherapy (May, 1995, Laing, 1960) and influenced humanistic therapy. More

recently there has been a return to Husserl in the work of Ian Rory Owen who has included an attention to cognitive behavioural therapy as well as attachment and psychodynamics (2006a, 2006b, 2007a, 2007b). If a school of therapy had no formal account of how we understand the others view, then it would be insufficiently self-reflexive. Phenomenology in the human sciences makes a response to more than a century of naturalistic empirical psychology. Empirical psychology claims to be a natural science in the mould of chemistry, physics or biology. In psychiatry there has been the development of the study of mental health problems known as psychopathology by Karl Jaspers (1963) and Ludwig Binswanger. There the term phenomenology has become synonymous with the lived experience of mental health problems. The loose grouping called continental philosophy took from Husserl, Heidegger, hermeneutics and scepticism to produce existential phenomenology (Sartre, 1958), deconstructionism (Derrida, 1982) and the allied groupings of post-structuralism and postmodernism. There are a number of writers who took phenomenology forward in further addressing social reality, following the lead of Sartre. Perhaps, the most innovative is the work of Simone de Beauvoir (1949a, 1949b, 1972) who took inspiration from a wide number of sources to discuss relations between men and women and made cogent responses to Freud on the topics of child development and sexuality. There is a long list of French thinkers who have been influenced by phenomenology but to name them all detracts from the purpose of this essay. There has been some connection in analytic and post-Wittgenstein philosophy that sees some similarities between Wittgenstein and Husserl (Reeder, 1984). There is some crossover between phenomenology and cognitive science (Marbach, 1993, 2005). Finally, there is phenomenology as an empirical qualitative psychology in America (van Zuuren, Wertz & Mook, 1987, Giorgi, 1970) with further developments in areas such as nursing. In conclusion, phenomenology can be defined as being six things. 1. It is a method of making theory by imaginative variation and the contemplation of enabling conditions and necessities of various sorts. 2. It centres on empathy and intersubjectivity that form a common world of meaning where people gather around any cultural object and can grasp each others view of it.

3. It does accept the existence of temporarily unconscious objects but not permanently unconscious ones. 4. It is not empiricism, solipsism or the use description alone but requires the interpretation of mental relationships with respect to conscious mental senses. It entails hermeneutics because intentionalities can never be observed in others or oneself. 5. It is against psychologism, the natural attitude of the everyday common sense and the naturalistic attitude of natural science because they confuse the real instance with the ideal universal. 6. It can be criticism of other perspectives from its intentional and intersubjective point of view. Husserl made several approaches to empathy and intersubjectivity during thirty years of writing and lecturing. Phenomenology attends to conscious phenomena as a starting point for understanding mental processes and the enabling conditions for meaning to be social.

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