Classical Phenomenology: The Big Four

In today’s techno-scientific world, phenomenology as a field of study offers us an opportunity to understand the world as we experience it instead of breaking it down to dissect its parts. It is a field that studies phenomena, or things as they appear. In our own country, we have the rich tradition of darshanic philosophy, which is profoundly phenomenological in orientation. However, phenomenology also refers specifically to the 20th Century European philosophical movement. In this sense phenomenology centers experience and studies it from the first-person perspective. This experience is laid down in terms of the ‘how’ question of phenomenon instead of ‘what’. The latter is a concern of a scientific discourse that mostly presents its findings in a punctual manner. Hence, phenomenology lays bare its investigations in the form of structures of experience or structures of consciousness. And because it studies experience from the first person perspective, it deals with phenomenon as it appears to us as against the real. One of the tools that phenomenology utilises to do so is intentionality. Intentionality describes experience as always directed towards something because of the meaning that belongs to the thing.

The term intentionality in phenomenology was first used by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) who laid the foundation of phenomenology as a method or a field of study in philosophy. He borrowed this term from Franz Brentano who used it in the context of ‘descriptive psychology’. Husserl’s main aim was to develop a method that can lay down the foundation of all forms of knowledge. Many philosophers followed this route of phenomenology but with their own versions. Some philosophers, like Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), unveiled their phenomenology as being radically different from Husserl’s. Other major phenomenologists include Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and many others. 

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)

Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 in the then Austrian Empire. He studied at Vienna and later at Leipzig, when he was inspired by the philosophy lectures of Wilhelm Wundt, who is now considered one of the fathers of modern psychology. Despite completing his education including his doctorate in mathematics, he remained interested in philosophy. At the age of 25, the philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano introduced him to the work of Bernard Bolzano, Hermann Lotze, J S Mill and David Hume. Husserl was influenced a lot by Brentano, especially when it came to intentionality. Simply, intentionality is the main characteristic of consciousness, its “aboutness”. Consciousness is always consciousness of (something), there is always an object. 

Husserl observed that by default there is a natural attitude, i.e. a belief in a certain world of objects separate to the perceiving subject. Thinking along Cartesian lines, he proposed that systematic “pre-supposition-less” philosophers must bracket questions about the natural or “real” world. Instead, Husserlian phenomenology provided a radical new way of looking at how the subject constitutes objects via intentionality. 

Husserl also differentiated between the act and object of consciousness. This would be possible only by bracketing all our assumptions about the world and the objects that we perceive, which he named epoché. 

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976)

There were a lot of phenomenologists who followed Husserl but by far the most important and impactful of them is Martin Heidegger. He studied directly under Husserl and even dedicated his magnum opus, Being and Time to him “in friendship and admiration”. Their relationship isn’t a simple one, it was complicated mostly due to Heidegger’s Nazi inclinations and Husserl’s Jewish origins. In 1928, Heidegger took over the chair at the University of Freiburg, succeeding Rickert and Husserl. After the rise of Hiltler, Heidegger was elected Rector of Freiburg University in April 1933. He became a member of the Nazi Party on May 1st and as Rector oversaw the university’s integration into the ideological framework of the Nazi regime.

Husserl and Heidegger’s relation was not only strained politically and personally but also philosophically. Both were concerned with the things-in-themselves as their phenomenologies but for Husserl it was the apodictic essence of  the things after bracketing existence that drives our assumptions about them but for Heidegger things show themselves in their Being. Heidegger is one of the most cryptic philosophers. This is partly because of his concern with Being where Being is the most universal concept that often appears as the most empty one because one cannot speak of Being without speaking of beings giving the speech about this concept a kind of circularity. Metaphorically, it is as we are trying to look at our eyes through our eyes. This circularity is characteristic of his texts and portrays Being not as an object that is interrogated but as that which is found out as a consequence of this manner of speaking. 

By focusing on Being, Heidegger attempts to re-contextualize human existence. To understand Being we must confront the facts of our human existence rather than bracketing them. He does this by exploring our “thrownness” into this world that makes us beings that are never separate from the world, that is, it makes us beings-in-the-world. Heidegger in his later life wrote largely on aesthetics and everyday life reflecting his origins in Messkirch Germany where his father worked as a skilled master cooper. 

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) 

Despite his renown as an existentialist thinker, Jean-Paul Sartre has also made important contributions to phenomenology, notably in The Transcendence of the Ego (1936). Sartre's encounter with phenomenology—documented by none other than de Beauvoir herself—happened in a Parisian bar, listening to his friend Raymond Aron describe an apricot cocktail. Sartre became fascinated by Husserl's methodology and took it up as a means for his own philosophical project—attempting to understand objects as they were experienced and the philosophy that this process revealed. In his novel Nausea, the protagonist describes a process where he experiences ordinary languages as slowly losing their meaning, until there is an episode where he encounters pure being at the foot of the chestnut tree. 

In Sartrean phenomenology, the important aspect of consciousness is a phenomenon, and phenomena are the objects that I experience, for each object there is a consciousness-of-an-object. For example, the chestnut tree that Nausea’s protagonist encounters would be a phenomenon presenting itself, and the tree itself would be the being-in-itself that hides behind it. The being-for-itself in the Sartrean paradigm is consciousness itself, since consciousness also has a pre-reflective self-consciousness. 

Phenomenological investigation involves reflecting on the structures of consciousness, which Sartre often does by making great use of his literary skills in fictional works—analysing different experiences and different situations through a phenomenological, interpretive lens. Additionally, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre emphasises freedom and/of choice, especially while engaged in the project of making oneself. He also describes the experience of alterity through the look of the Other, which others like Simone de Beauvoir take up in much more politically significant ways. In the next article, we will explore the perspectives of feminist and queer phenomenology of embodiment. 

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty born in  Rochefort-sur-Mer in France was another famous existential phenomenologist with origin ideas on embodiment, psychology, history, arts and aesthetics. Towards the end of his life, in 1952, he was appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at the Collège de France, the highest esteemed position for a philosopher in France. He was the youngest person to have ever held this position. In 1961 he died at an early stage of 53. Unlike Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty followed Husserl’s phenomenological method of bracketing, albeit with important differences. Instead of radically bracketing our existence, he merely asked us to “loosens the intentional threads” that attach us to the world. 

He was equally influenced by Heidegger because Merleau-Ponty most questions and doubts about the world in philosophy are unnecessary as the world is always already there. Hence, the goal of phenomenology as Husserl asserted is the essence of the world but one should not remove these essences from their existence. We must start from the facticity as such. This facticity, for Merleau-Ponty, is grounded within our perception. It emerges from the rich complex background of experience that takes place through the body. The body is not a third person inert object but a first person subjective lived body that is not in space but that inhabits space. It is through this lived body that Merleau-Ponty tries to organically unite extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism. His is a philosophy that instead of chasing apodicticity promotes tacit experience and ambiguity. 

Thus, phenomenology most importantly is concerned with experience. An experience that is not only filled with sensations but sensations as they are informed by concepts and meanings making them intentional. It attempts to describe experience as it appears to us. While certain characteristics of some phenomenologies can be problematic such as its claim to apodicticity or its humanist character but because of its focus on experience and intentionality, it promises to provide a more situated account of various phenomena. Hence, contemporary phenomenology has potential to unshackle areas like gender studies, environment, disability, post-truth world, aesthetics, ethics and technology from the dominant reductive description informed by a cartesian scientific ontology.

About the authors

Darshna Kumar: Darshna is a Ph.D. scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Gandhinagar. Her doctoral research, grounded in phenomenology, explores the texture of encounters between human and nonhuman bodies and the world, focusing on how these bodies creatively produce themselves within these interactions. She holds a Master of Arts in Society and Culture from IIT Gandhinagar, where her Master’s thesis examined the ethical dimensions of everyday violence between humans and nonhumans, and she completed her Bachelor's degree at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Simran is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and a writer from Pune, with a BA in Philosophy from Fergusson College and an MSc in Cognitive Science from IIT Gandhinagar. Their research interests include gendered embodiment and gender dysphoria, sexual and gender-based violence, feminist and queer philosophy, contemporary phenomenology, and 20th Century French philosophy. Recently, they were awarded the Transformative Arts and Research Initiatives Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality at Ashoka University, where they worked on a project in trans phenomenology criticizing and re-orienting the current pathological understanding of gender dysphoria.