"Phenomenology" came up the other day in our reading of Suzanne J. Kessler & Wendy McKenna
Kessler & McKenna "elaborate the concept of 'gender attribution,' the process through which we all assign a gender to every person with whom we interact . . . . "
Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as
experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure
of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward
something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An
experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or
meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate
enabling conditions.
Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other
key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic,
and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for
centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the
works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others.
Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and
first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of
mind.
1. What is Phenomenology?
Phenomenology is commonly understood in either of two ways: as a
disciplinary field in philosophy, or as a movement in the history of
philosophy.
The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the
study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally,
phenomenology 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. This field of philosophy is then to be
distinguished from, and related to, the other main fields of
philosophy: ontology (the study of being or what is), epistemology (the
study of knowledge), logic (the study of valid reasoning), ethics (the
study of right and wrong action), etc.
The historical movement of phenomenology is the philosophical
tradition launched in the first half of the 20
th century by
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul
Sartre,
et al. In that movement, the discipline of
phenomenology was prized as the proper foundation of all
philosophy—as opposed, say, to ethics or metaphysics or epistemology. The
methods and characterization of the discipline were widely debated by
Husserl and his successors, and these debates continue to the present
day. (The definition of phenomenology offered above will thus be
debatable, for example, by Heideggerians, but it remains the starting
point in characterizing the discipline.)
In recent philosophy of mind, the term “phenomenology” is often
restricted to the characterization of sensory qualities of seeing,
hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of various kinds.
However, our experience is normally much richer in content than mere
sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition,
phenomenology is given a much wider range, addressing the meaning
things have in our experience, notably, the significance of objects,
events, tools, the flow of time, the self, and others, as these things
arise and are experienced in our “life-world”.
Phenomenology as a discipline has been central to the tradition of
continental European philosophy throughout the 20
th century,
while philosophy of mind has evolved in the Austro-Anglo-American
tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the
20
th century. Yet the fundamental character of our mental
activity is pursued in overlapping ways within these two traditions.
Accordingly, the perspective on phenomenology drawn in this article
will accommodate both traditions. The main concern here will be to
characterize the discipline of phenomenology, in a contemporary
purview, while also highlighting the historical tradition that brought
the discipline into its own.
Basically, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of
experience ranging from perception, thought, memory, imagination,
emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and
social activity, including linguistic activity. The structure of these
forms of experience typically involves what Husserl called
“intentionality”, 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—represents or
“intends”—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.
The basic intentional structure of consciousness, we find in
reflection or analysis, involves further forms of experience. Thus,
phenomenology develops a complex account of temporal awareness (within
the stream of consciousness), spatial awareness (notably in
perception), attention (distinguishing focal and marginal or
“horizonal” awareness), awareness of one’s own experience
(self-consciousness, in one sense), self-awareness
(awareness-of-oneself), the self in different roles (as thinking,
acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of
one’s movement), purpose or intention in action (more or less
explicit), awareness of other persons (in empathy, intersubjectivity,
collectivity), linguistic activity (involving meaning, communication,
understanding others), social interaction (including collective
action), and everyday activity in our surrounding life-world (in a
particular culture).
Furthermore, in a different dimension, we find various grounds or
enabling conditions—conditions of the possibility—of
intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context,
language and other social practices, social background, and contextual
aspects of intentional activities. Thus, phenomenology leads from
conscious experience into conditions that help to give experience its
intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on subjective,
practical, and social conditions of experience. Recent philosophy of
mind, however, has focused especially on the neural substrate of
experience, on how conscious experience and mental representation or
intentionality are grounded in brain activity. It remains a difficult
question how much of these grounds of experience fall within the
province of phenomenology as a discipline. Cultural conditions thus
seem closer to our experience and to our familiar self-understanding
than do the electrochemical workings of our brain, much less our
dependence on quantum-mechanical states of physical systems to which we
may belong. The cautious thing to say is that phenomenology leads in
some ways into at least some background conditions of our
experience.
2. The Discipline of Phenomenology
The discipline of phenomenology is defined by its domain of study,
its methods, and its main results.
Phenomenology studies structures of conscious experience as
experienced from the first-person point of view, along with relevant
conditions of experience. The central structure of an experience is its
intentionality, the way it is directed through its content or meaning
toward a certain object in the world.
We all experience various types of experience including perception,
imagination, thought, emotion, desire, volition, and action. Thus, the
domain of phenomenology is the range of experiences including these
types (among others). Experience includes not only relatively passive
experience as in vision or hearing, but also active experience as in
walking or hammering a nail or kicking a ball. (The range will be
specific to each species of being that enjoys consciousness; our focus
is on our own, human, experience. Not all conscious beings will, or
will be able to, practice phenomenology, as we do.)
Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we
experience
them, we live through them or perform them. Other things in the world
we may observe and engage. But we do not experience them, in the sense
of living through or performing them. This experiential or first-person
feature—that of being experienced—is an essential part
of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we say, “I see /
think / desire / do …” This feature is both a phenomenological
and an ontological feature of each experience: it is part of what it is
for the experience to be experienced (phenomenological) and part of
what it is for the experience to be (ontological).
How shall we study conscious experience? We reflect on various types
of experiences just as we experience them. That is to say, we proceed
from the first-person point of view. However, we do not normally
characterize an experience at the time we are performing it. In many
cases we do not have that capability: a state of intense anger or fear,
for example, consumes all of one’s psychic focus at the time. Rather,
we acquire a background of having lived through a given type of
experience, and we look to our familiarity with that type of
experience: hearing a song, seeing a sunset, thinking about love,
intending to jump a hurdle. The practice of phenomenology assumes such
familiarity with the type of experiences to be characterized.
Importantly, also, it is types of experience that phenomenology
pursues, rather than a particular fleeting experience—unless
its type is what interests us.
Classical phenomenologists practiced some three distinguishable
methods. (1) We describe a type of experience just as we find it in our
own (past) experience. Thus, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty spoke of pure
description of lived experience. (2) We interpret a type of experience
by relating it to relevant features of context. In this vein, Heidegger
and his followers spoke of hermeneutics, the art of interpretation in
context, especially social and linguistic context. (3) We analyze the
form of a type of experience. In the end, all the classical
phenomenologists practiced analysis of experience, factoring out
notable features for further elaboration.
These traditional methods have been ramified in recent decades,
expanding the methods available to phenomenology. Thus: (4) In a
logico-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the truth conditions
for a type of thinking (say, where I think that dogs chase cats) or the
satisfaction conditions for a type of intention (say, where I intend or
will to jump that hurdle). (5) In the experimental paradigm of
cognitive neuroscience, we design empirical experiments that tend to
confirm or refute aspects of experience (say, where a brain scan shows
electrochemical activity in a specific region of the brain thought to
subserve a type of vision or emotion or motor control). This style of
“neurophenomenology” assumes that conscious experience is grounded in
neural activity in embodied action in appropriate
surroundings—mixing pure phenomenology with biological and physical science in a way
that was not wholly congenial to traditional phenomenologists.
What makes an experience conscious is a certain awareness one has of
the experience while living through or performing it. This form of
inner awareness has been a topic of considerable debate, centuries
after the issue arose with Locke’s notion of self-consciousness on the
heels of Descartes’ sense of consciousness (
conscience,
co-knowledge). Does this awareness-of-experience consist in a kind of
inner observation of the experience, as if one were doing two things at
once? (Brentano argued no.) Is it a higher-order perception of one’s
mind’s operation, or is it a higher-order thought about one’s mental
activity? (Recent theorists have proposed both.) Or is it a different
form of inherent structure? (Sartre took this line, drawing on Brentano
and Husserl.) These issues are beyond the scope of this article, but
notice that these results of phenomenological analysis shape the
characterization of the domain of study and the methodology appropriate
to the domain. For awareness-of-experience is a defining trait of
conscious experience, the trait that gives experience a first-person,
lived character. It is that lived character of experience that allows a
first-person perspective on the object of study, namely, experience,
and that perspective is characteristic of the methodology of
phenomenology.
Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but
experience shades off into less overtly conscious phenomena. As Husserl
and others stressed, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margin
or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the
wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger
stressed, in practical activities like walking along, or hammering a
nail, or speaking our native tongue, we are not explicitly conscious of
our habitual patterns of action. Furthermore, as psychoanalysts have
stressed, much of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at
all, but may become conscious in the process of therapy or
interrogation, as we come to realize how we feel or think about
something. We should allow, then, that the domain of
phenomenology—our own experience—spreads out from conscious
experience into semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity,
along with relevant background conditions implicitly invoked in our
experience. (These issues are subject to debate; the point here is to
open the door to the question of where to draw the boundary of the
domain of phenomenology.)
To begin an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider some
typical experiences one might have in everyday life, characterized in
the first person:
- I see that fishing boat off the coast as dusk descends over the
Pacific.
- I hear that helicopter whirring overhead as it approaches the
hospital.
- I am thinking that phenomenology differs from psychology.
- I wish that warm rain from Mexico were falling like last week.
- I imagine a fearsome creature like that in my nightmare.
- I intend to finish my writing by noon.
- I walk carefully around the broken glass on the sidewalk.
- I stroke a backhand cross-court with that certain underspin.
- I am searching for the words to make my point in conversation.
Here are rudimentary characterizations of some familiar types of
experience. Each sentence is a simple form of phenomenological
description, articulating in everyday English the structure of the type
of experience so described. The subject term “I” indicates the
first-person structure of the experience: the intentionality proceeds
from the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity
described: perception, thought, imagination, etc. Of central importance
is the way that objects of awareness are presented or intended in our
experiences, especially, the way we see or conceive or think about
objects. The direct-object expression (“that fishing boat off the
coast”) articulates the mode of presentation of the object in the
experience: the content or meaning of the experience, the core of what
Husserl called noema. In effect, the object-phrase expresses the noema
of the act described, that is, to the extent that language has
appropriate expressive power. The overall form of the given sentence
articulates the basic form of intentionality in the experience:
subject-act-content-object.
Rich phenomenological description or interpretation, as in Husserl,
Merleau-Ponty
et al., will far outrun such simple
phenomenological descriptions as above. But such simple descriptions
bring out the basic form of intentionality. As we interpret the
phenomenological description further, we may assess the relevance of
the context of experience. And we may turn to wider conditions of the
possibility of that type of experience. In this way, in the practice of
phenomenology, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze structures
of experiences in ways that answer to our own experience.
In such interpretive-descriptive analyses of experience, we
immediately observe that we are analyzing familiar forms of
consciousness, conscious experience of or about this or that.
Intentionality is thus the salient structure of our experience, and
much of phenomenology proceeds as the study of different aspects of
intentionality. Thus, we explore structures of the stream of
consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action.
Furthermore, as we reflect on how these phenomena work, we turn to the
analysis of relevant conditions that enable our experiences to occur as
they do, and to represent or intend as they do. Phenomenology then
leads into analyses of conditions of the possibility of intentionality,
conditions involving motor skills and habits, background social
practices, and often language, with its special place in human
affairs.
3. From Phenomena to Phenomenology
The Oxford English Dictionary presents the following
definition: “Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena as distinct
from being (ontology). b. That division of any science which describes
and classifies its phenomena. From the Greek
phainomenon,
appearance.” In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, amid
debates of theory and methodology. In physics and philosophy of
science, the term is used in the second sense, albeit only
occasionally.
In its root meaning, then, phenomenology is the study of
phenomena: literally, appearances as opposed to reality. This
ancient distinction launched philosophy as we emerged from Plato’s
cave. Yet the discipline of phenomenology did not blossom until the
20th century and remains poorly understood in many circles of
contemporary philosophy. What is that discipline? How did philosophy
move from a root concept of phenomena to the discipline of
phenomenology?
Originally, in the 18th century, “phenomenology” meant the
theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially
sensory appearances. The Latin term “Phenomenologia” was
introduced by Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736. Subsequently, the
German term “Phänomenologia” was used by Johann
Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Immanuel Kant used
the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb
Fichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel wrote a book
titled
Phänomenologie des Geistes (usually translated
as
Phenomenology of Spirit). By 1889 Franz Brentano used the
term to characterize what he called “descriptive
psychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his
new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.
Suppose we say phenomenology studies phenomena: what appears to
us—and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The term
has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of
the emerging discipline of phenomenology.
In a strict empiricist vein, what appears before the mind are
sensory data or qualia: either patterns of one’s own sensations (seeing
red here now, feeling this ticklish feeling, hearing that resonant bass
tone) or sensible patterns of worldly things, say, the looks and smells
of flowers (what John Locke called secondary qualities of things). In a
strict rationalist vein, by contrast, what appears before the mind are
ideas, rationally formed “clear and distinct ideas” (in René
Descartes’ ideal). In Immanuel Kant’s theory of knowledge, fusing
rationalist and empiricist aims, what appears to the mind are phenomena
defined as things-as-they-appear or things-as-they-are-represented (in
a synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-known). In
Auguste Comte’s theory of science, phenomena (
phenomenes) are
the facts (
faits, what occurs) that a given science would
explain.
In 18
th and 19
th century epistemology, then,
phenomena are the starting points in building knowledge, especially
science. Accordingly, in a familiar and still current sense, phenomena
are whatever we observe (perceive) and seek to explain.
As the discipline of psychology emerged late in the 19
th
century, however, phenomena took on a somewhat different guise. In
Franz Brentano’s
Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint
(1874), phenomena are what occur in the mind: mental phenomena are acts
of consciousness (or their contents), and physical phenomena are
objects of external perception starting with colors and shapes. For
Brentano, physical phenomena exist “intentionally” in acts of
consciousness. This view revives a Medieval notion Brentano called
“intentional in-existence”, but the ontology remains undeveloped (what
is it to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the
mind?). More generally, we might say, phenomena are whatever we are
conscious of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves,
even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences, as we experience
these. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things
as
they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception or
imagination or thought or volition. This conception of phenomena would
soon inform the new discipline of phenomenology.
Brentano distinguished
descriptive psychology from
genetic psychology. Where genetic psychology seeks the causes
of various types of mental phenomena, descriptive psychology defines
and classifies the various types of mental phenomena, including
perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental
phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed toward some object,
and only mental phenomena are so directed. This thesis of intentional
directedness was the hallmark of Brentano’s descriptive psychology. In
1889 Brentano used the term “phenomenology” for descriptive psychology,
and the way was paved for Husserl’s new science of phenomenology.
Phenomenology as we know it was launched by Edmund Husserl in his
Logical Investigations (1900–01). Two importantly different
lines of theory came together in that monumental work: psychological
theory, on the heels of Franz Brentano (and also William James, whose
Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and greatly
impressed Husserl); and logical or semantic theory, on the heels of
Bernard Bolzano and Husserl’s contemporaries who founded modern logic,
including Gottlob Frege. (Interestingly, both lines of research trace
back to Aristotle, and both reached importantly new results in
Husserl’s day.)
Husserl’s
Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano’s
ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano’s conception of descriptive
psychology. In his
Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano
distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations
(
Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before
him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this
sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective.
Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn
make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by
contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences)
of mental activities in particular minds at a given time. Husserl was
after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be
reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called
intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology
would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated
phenomena. In
Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two
Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction:
noesis and
noema, from the Greek verb
noéō (νοέω), meaning to
perceive, think, intend, whence the noun
nous or mind. The
intentional process of consciousness is called
noesis, while
its ideal content is called
noema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl
characterized both as an ideal meaning and as “the object
as
intended”. Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the
noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl’s
theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments
of Husserl’s basic theory of intentionality. (Is the noema an aspect of
the object intended, or rather a medium of intention?)
For Husserl, then, phenomenology integrates a kind of psychology
with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytic psychology
in that it describes and analyzes types of subjective mental activity
or experience, in short, acts of consciousness. Yet it develops a kind
of logic—a theory of meaning (today we say logical
semantics)—in that it describes and analyzes objective contents of
consciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions, in short, ideal
meanings of various types that serve as intentional contents, or
noematic meanings, of various types of experience. These contents are
shareable by different acts of consciousness, and in that sense they
are objective, ideal meanings. Following Bolzano (and to some extent
the platonistic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed any reduction
of logic or mathematics or science to mere psychology, to how people
happen to think, and in the same spirit he distinguished phenomenology
from mere psychology. For Husserl, phenomenology would study
consciousness without reducing the objective and shareable meanings
that inhabit experience to merely subjective happenstances. Ideal
meaning would be the engine of intentionality in acts of
consciousness.
A clear conception of phenomenology awaited Husserl’s development of
a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, phenomenology and the modern
concept of intentionality emerged hand-in-hand in Husserl’s
Logical
Investigations (1900–01). With theoretical foundations laid in the
Investigations, Husserl would then promote the radical new
science of phenomenology in
Ideas I (1913). And alternative
visions of phenomenology would soon follow.
4. The History and Varieties of Phenomenology
Phenomenology came into its own with Husserl, much as epistemology
came into its own with Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics came into
its own with Aristotle on the heels of Plato. Yet phenomenology has
been practiced, with or without the name, for many centuries. When
Hindu and Buddhist philosophers reflected on states of consciousness
achieved in a variety of meditative states, they were practicing
phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized states of
perception, thought, and imagination, they were practicing
phenomenology. When Brentano classified varieties of mental phenomena
(defined by the directedness of consciousness), he was practicing
phenomenology. When William James appraised kinds of mental activity in
the stream of consciousness (including their embodiment and their
dependence on habit), he too was practicing phenomenology. And when
recent analytic philosophers of mind have addressed issues of
consciousness and intentionality, they have often been practicing
phenomenology. Still, the discipline of phenomenology, its roots
tracing back through the centuries, came to full flower in Husserl.
Husserl’s work was followed by a flurry of phenomenological writing
in the first half of the 20
th century. The diversity of
traditional phenomenology is apparent in the
Encyclopedia of
Phenomenology (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and
Boston), which features separate articles on some seven types of
phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies
how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness,
setting aside questions of any relation to the natural world around us.
(2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness
constitutes or takes things in the world of nature, assuming with the
natural attitude that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential
phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including our
experience of free choice or action in concrete situations. (4)
Generative historicist phenomenology studies how meaning, as found in
our experience, is generated in historical processes of collective
experience over time. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of
meanings of things within one’s own stream of experience. (6)
Hermeneutical phenomenology studies interpretive structures of
experience, how we understand and engage things around us in our human
world, including ourselves and others. (7) Realistic phenomenology
studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming it
occurs in a real world that is largely external to consciousness and
not somehow brought into being by consciousness.
The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl,
Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. In these four thinkers we find
different conceptions of phenomenology, different methods, and
different results. A brief sketch of their differences will capture
both a crucial period in the history of phenomenology and a sense of
the diversity of the field of phenomenology.
In his
Logical Investigations (1900–01) Husserl outlined a
complex system of philosophy, moving from logic to philosophy of
language, to ontology (theory of universals and parts of wholes), to a
phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to a
phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then in
Ideas I (1913)
he focused squarely on phenomenology itself. Husserl defined
phenomenology as “the science of the essence of consciousness”,
centered on the defining trait of intentionality, approached explicitly
“in the first person”. (See Husserl,
Ideas I,
¤¤33ff.) In this spirit, we may say phenomenology is the
study of consciousness—that is, conscious experience of various
types—as experienced from the first-person point of view. In
this discipline we study different forms of experience just
as
we experience them, from the perspective of the subject living through
or performing them. Thus, we characterize experiences of seeing,
hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e., emotion), wishing,
desiring, willing, and also acting, that is, embodied volitional
activities of walking, talking, cooking, carpentering, etc. However,
not just any characterization of an experience will do.
Phenomenological analysis of a given type of experience will feature
the ways in which we ourselves would experience that form of conscious
activity. And the leading property of our familiar types of experience
is their intentionality, their being a consciousness of or about
something, something experienced or presented or engaged in a certain
way. How I see or conceptualize or understand the object I am dealing
with defines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Thus,
phenomenology features a study of meaning, in a wide sense that
includes more than what is expressed in language.
In
Ideas I Husserl presented phenomenology with a
transcendental turn. In part this means that Husserl took on the
Kantian idiom of “transcendental idealism”, looking for
conditions of the possibility of knowledge, or of consciousness
generally, and arguably turning away from any reality beyond
phenomena. But Husserl’s transcendental turn also involved his
discovery of the method of
epoché (from the Greek skeptics’ notion of abstaining
from belief). We are to practice phenomenology, Husserl proposed, by
“bracketing” the question of the existence of the natural
world around us. We thereby turn our attention, in reflection, to the
structure of our own conscious experience. Our first key result is the
observation that each act of consciousness is a consciousness of
something, that is, intentional, or directed toward
something. Consider my visual experience wherein I see a tree across
the square. In phenomenological reflection, we need not concern
ourselves with whether the tree exists: my experience is of a tree
whether or not such a tree exists. However, we do need to concern
ourselves with
how the object is meant or intended. I see a
Eucalyptus tree, not a Yucca tree; I see that object as a Eucalyptus,
with a certain shape, with bark stripping off, etc. Thus, bracketing
the tree itself, we turn our attention to my experience of the tree,
and specifically to the content or meaning in my experience. This
tree-as-perceived Husserl calls the noema or noematic sense of the
experience.
Philosophers succeeding Husserl debated the proper characterization
of phenomenology, arguing over its results and its methods. Adolf
Reinach, an early student of Husserl’s (who died in World War I),
argued that phenomenology should remain allied with a realist ontology,
as in Husserl’s
Logical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, a
Polish phenomenologist of the next generation, continued the resistance
to Husserl’s turn to transcendental idealism. For such philosophers,
phenomenology should not bracket questions of being or ontology, as the
method of
epoché would suggest. And they were not
alone. Martin Heidegger studied Husserl’s early writings, worked as
Assistant to Husserl in 1916, and in 1928 succeeded Husserl in the
prestigious chair at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger had his own
ideas about phenomenology.
In
Being and Time (1927) Heidegger unfurled his rendition
of phenomenology. For Heidegger, we and our activities are always “in
the world”, our being is being-in-the-world, so we do not study our
activities by bracketing the world, rather we interpret our activities
and the meaning things have for us by looking to our contextual
relations to things in the world. Indeed, for Heidegger, phenomenology
resolves into what he called “fundamental ontology”. We must
distinguish beings from their being, and we begin our investigation of
the meaning of being in our own case, examining our own existence in
the activity of “Dasein” (that being whose being is in each case my
own). Heidegger resisted Husserl’s neo-Cartesian emphasis on
consciousness and subjectivity, including how perception presents
things around us. By contrast, Heidegger held that our more basic ways
of relating to things are in practical activities like hammering, where
the phenomenology reveals our situation in a context of equipment and
in being-with-others.
In
Being and Time Heidegger approached phenomenology, in a
quasi-poetic idiom, through the root meanings of “logos”
and “phenomena”, so that phenomenology is defined as the
art or practice of “letting things show themselves”. In
Heidegger’s inimitable linguistic play on the Greek roots, “
‘phenomenology’ means …—to let that which
shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows
itself from itself.” (See Heidegger,
Being and Time,
1927, ¦ 7C.) Here Heidegger explicitly parodies Husserl’s call,
“To the things themselves!”, or “To the phenomena
themselves!” Heidegger went on to emphasize practical forms of
comportment or better relating (
Verhalten) as in hammering a
nail, as opposed to representational forms of intentionality as in
seeing or thinking about a hammer. Much of
Being and Time
develops an existential interpretation of our modes of being
including, famously, our being-toward-death.
In a very different style, in clear analytical prose, in the text of a
lecture course called
The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
(1927), Heidegger traced the question of the meaning of being from
Aristotle through many other thinkers into the issues of
phenomenology. Our understanding of beings and their being comes
ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical
issues of ontology is more apparent, and consonant with Husserl’s
vision in the
Logical Investigations (an early source of
inspiration for Heidegger). One of Heidegger’s most innovative ideas
was his conception of the “ground” of being, looking to
modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees
to hammers). Heidegger questioned the contemporary concern with
technology, and his writing might suggest that our scientific theories
are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, rather
than systems of ideal truth (as Husserl had held). Our deep
understanding of being, in our own case, comes rather from
phenomenology, Heidegger held.
In the 1930s phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German
philosophy into French philosophy. The way had been paved in Marcel
Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator
recounts in close detail his vivid recollections of past experiences,
including his famous associations with the smell of freshly baked
madeleines. This sensibility to experience traces to Descartes’ work,
and French phenomenology has been an effort to preserve the central
thrust of Descartes’ insights while rejecting mind-body dualism. The
experience of one’s own body, or one’s lived or living body, has been
an important motif in many French philosophers of the 20
th
century.
In the novel
Nausea (1936) Jean-Paul Sartre described a
bizarre course of experience in which the protagonist, writing in the
first person, describes how ordinary objects lose their meaning until
he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, and in that
moment recovers his sense of his own freedom. In
Being and
Nothingness (1943, written partly while a prisoner of war),
Sartre developed his conception of phenomenological
ontology. Consciousness is a consciousness of objects, as Husserl had
stressed. In Sartre’s model of intentionality, the central player in
consciousness is a phenomenon, and the occurrence of a phenomenon just
is a consciousness-of-an-object. The chestnut tree I see is, for
Sartre, such a phenomenon in my consciousness. Indeed, all things in
the world, as we normally experience them, are phenomena, beneath or
behind which lies their “being-in-itself”. Consciousness,
by contrast, has “being-for-itself”, since each
consciousness is not only a consciousness-of-its-object but also a
pre-reflective consciousness-of-itself (
conscience de
soi). Yet for Sartre, unlike Husserl, the “I” or self
is nothing but a sequence of acts of consciousness, notably including
radically free choices (like a Humean bundle of perceptions).
For Sartre, the practice of phenomenology proceeds by a deliberate
reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre’s method is in
effect a literary style of interpretive description of different types
of experience in relevant situations—a practice that does not
really fit the methodological proposals of either Husserl or Heidegger,
but makes use of Sartre’s great literary skill. (Sartre wrote many
plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
Sartre’s phenomenology in
Being and Nothingness became the
philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism,
sketched in his famous lecture “Existentialism is a
Humanism” (1945). In
Being and Nothingness Sartre
emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially the project
of choosing one’s self, the defining pattern of one’s past
actions. Through vivid description of the “look” of the
Other, Sartre laid groundwork for the contemporary political
significance of the concept of the Other (as in other groups or
ethnicities). Indeed, in
The Second Sex (1949) Simone de
Beauvoir, Sartre’s life-long companion, launched contemporary feminism
with her nuanced account of the perceived role of women as Other.
In 1940s Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined with Sartre and
Beauvoir in developing phenomenology. In
Phenomenology of
Perception (1945) Merleau-Ponty developed a rich variety of
phenomenology emphasizing the role of the body in human experience.
Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty looked to
experimental psychology, analyzing the reported experience of amputees
who felt sensations in a phantom limb. Merleau-Ponty rejected both
associationist psychology, focused on correlations between sensation
and stimulus, and intellectualist psychology, focused on rational
construction of the world in the mind. (Think of the behaviorist and
computationalist models of mind in more recent decades of empirical
psychology.) Instead, Merleau-Ponty focused on the “body image”, our
experience of our own body and its significance in our activities.
Extending Husserl’s account of the lived body (as opposed to the
physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian
separation of mind and body. For the body image is neither in the
mental realm nor in the mechanical-physical realm. Rather, my body is,
as it were, me in my engaged action with things I perceive including
other people.
The scope of
Phenomenology of Perception is characteristic
of the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because
Merleau-Ponty drew (with generosity) on Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre
while fashioning his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His
phenomenology addressed the role of attention in the phenomenal field,
the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the motility of
the body, the body in sexual being and in speech, other selves,
temporality, and the character of freedom so important in French
existentialism. Near the end of a chapter on the cogito (Descartes’ “I
think, therefore I am”), Merleau-Ponty succinctly captures his
embodied, existential form of phenomenology, writing:
Insofar as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it
bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because
my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is merely one with my
existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because
the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this
body and this world. [408]
In short, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and equally body
is infused with consciousness (with cognition of the world).
In the years since Husserl, Heidegger,
et al. wrote,
phenomenologists have dug into all these classical issues, including
intentionality, temporal awareness, intersubjectivity, practical
intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human
activity. Interpretation of historical texts by Husserl
et al.
has played a prominent role in this work, both because the texts are
rich and difficult and because the historical dimension is itself part
of the practice of continental European philosophy. Since the 1960s,
philosophers trained in the methods of analytic philosophy have also
dug into the foundations of phenomenology, with an eye to
20
th century work in philosophy of logic, language, and
mind.
Phenomenology was already linked with logical and semantic theory in
Husserl’s
Logical Investigations. Analytic phenomenology
picks up on that connection. In particular, Dagfinn Føllesdal
and J. N. Mohanty have explored historical and conceptual relations
between Husserl’s phenomenology and Frege’s logical semantics (in
Frege’s “On Sense and Reference”, 1892). For Frege, an
expression refers to an object by way of a sense: thus, two
expressions (say, “the morning star” and “the
evening star”) may refer to the same object (Venus) but express
different senses with different manners of presentation. For Husserl,
similarly, an experience (or act of consciousness) intends or refers
to an object by way of a noema or noematic sense: thus, two
experiences may refer to the same object but have different noematic
senses involving different ways of presenting the object (for example,
in seeing the same object from different sides). Indeed, for Husserl,
the theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of
linguistic reference: as linguistic reference is mediated by sense, so
intentional reference is mediated by noematic sense.
More recently, analytic philosophers of mind have rediscovered
phenomenological issues of mental representation, intentionality,
consciousness, sensory experience, intentional content, and
context-of-thought. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind hark
back to William James and Franz Brentano at the origins of modern
psychology, and some look to empirical research in today’s cognitive
neuroscience. Some researchers have begun to combine phenomenological
issues with issues of neuroscience and behavioral studies and
mathematical modeling. Such studies will extend the methods of
traditional phenomenology as the
Zeitgeist moves on. We
address philosophy of mind below.
5. Phenomenology and Ontology, Epistemology, Logic, Ethics
The discipline of phenomenology forms one basic field in philosophy
among others. How is phenomenology distinguished from, and related to,
other fields in philosophy?
Traditionally, philosophy includes at least four core fields or
disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, logic. Suppose
phenomenology joins that list. Consider then these elementary
definitions of field:
- Ontology is the study of beings or their being—what
is.
- Epistemology is the study of knowledge—how we know.
- Logic is the study of valid reasoning—how to reason.
- Ethics is the study of right and wrong—how we should
act.
- Phenomenology is the study of our experience—how we
experience.
The domains of study in these five fields are clearly different, and
they seem to call for different methods of study.
Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these fields is
“first philosophy”, the most fundamental discipline, on which all
philosophy or all knowledge or wisdom rests. Historically (it may be
argued), Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle put
metaphysics or ontology first, then Descartes put epistemology first,
then Russell put logic first, and then Husserl (in his later
transcendental phase) put phenomenology first.
Consider epistemology. As we saw, phenomenology helps to define the
phenomena on which knowledge claims rest, according to modern
epistemology. On the other hand, phenomenology itself claims to achieve
knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a distinctive kind of
first-person knowledge, through a form of intuition.
Consider logic. As we saw, logical theory of meaning led Husserl
into the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. On one
account, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic force of
ideal meanings, and propositional meanings are central to logical
theory. But logical structure is expressed in language, either ordinary
language or symbolic languages like those of predicate logic or
mathematics or computer systems. It remains an important issue of
debate where and whether language shapes specific forms of experience
(thought, perception, emotion) and their content or meaning. So there
is an important (if disputed) relation between phenomenology and
logico-linguistic theory, especially philosophical logic and philosophy
of language (as opposed to mathematical logic
per se).
Consider ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the
nature of consciousness, which is a central issue in metaphysics or
ontology, and one that leads into the traditional mind-body problem.
Husserlian methodology would bracket the question of the existence of
the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the
ontology of the world. Yet Husserl’s phenomenology presupposes theory
about species and individuals (universals and particulars), relations
of part and whole, and ideal meanings—all parts of
ontology.
Now consider ethics. Phenomenology might play a role in ethics by
offering analyses of the structure of will, valuing, happiness, and
care for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, though,
ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl largely
avoided ethics in his major works, though he featured the role of
practical concerns in the structure of the life-world or
of
Geist (spirit, or culture, as in
Zeitgeist), and
he once delivered a course of lectures giving ethics (like logic) a
basic place in philosophy, indicating the importance of the
phenomenology of sympathy in grounding ethics. In
Being and
Time Heidegger claimed not to pursue ethics while discussing
phenomena ranging from care, conscience, and guilt to
“fallenness” and “authenticity” (all phenomena
with theological echoes). In
Being and Nothingness Sartre
analyzed with subtlety the logical problem of “bad faith”,
yet he developed an ontology of value as produced by willing in good
faith (which sounds like a revised Kantian foundation for
morality). Beauvoir sketched an existentialist ethics, and Sartre left
unpublished notebooks on ethics. However, an explicitly
phenomenological approach to ethics emerged in the works of Emannuel
Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who heard Husserl and Heidegger
in Freiburg before moving to Paris. In
Totality and Infinity
(1961), modifying themes drawn from Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas
focused on the significance of the “face” of the other,
explicitly developing grounds for ethics in this range of
phenomenology, writing an impressionistic style of prose with
allusions to religious experience.
Allied with ethics are political and social philosophy. Sartre and
Merleau-Ponty were politically engaged in 1940s Paris, and their
existential philosophies (phenomenologically based) suggest a
political theory based in individual freedom. Sartre later sought an
explicit blend of existentialism with Marxism. Still, political theory
has remained on the borders of phenomenology. Social theory, however,
has been closer to phenomenology as such. Husserl analyzed the
phenomenological structure of the life-world and
Geist
generally, including our role in social activity. Heidegger stressed
social practice, which he found more primordial than individual
consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed a phenomenology of the social
world. Sartre continued the phenomenological appraisal of the meaning
of the other, the fundamental social formation. Moving outward from
phenomenological issues, Michel Foucault studied the genesis and
meaning of social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And
Jacques Derrida has long practiced a kind of phenomenology of
language, seeking social meaning in the “deconstruction”
of wide-ranging texts. Aspects of French
“poststructuralist” theory are sometimes interpreted as
broadly phenomenological, but such issues are beyond the present
purview.
Classical phenomenology, then, ties into certain areas of
epistemology, logic, and ontology, and leads into parts of ethical,
social, and political theory.
6. Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind
It ought to be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the
area called philosophy of mind. Yet the traditions of phenomenology and
analytic philosophy of mind have not been closely joined, despite
overlapping areas of interest. So it is appropriate to close this
survey of phenomenology by addressing philosophy of mind, one of the
most vigorously debated areas in recent philosophy.
The tradition of analytic philosophy began, early in the 20th
century, with analyses of language, notably in the works of Gottlob
Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then in The Concept
of Mind (1949) Gilbert Ryle developed a series of analyses of language
about different mental states, including sensation, belief, and will.
Though Ryle is commonly deemed a philosopher of ordinary language, Ryle
himself said The Concept of Mind could be called phenomenology. In
effect, Ryle analyzed our phenomenological understanding of mental
states as reflected in ordinary language about the mind. From this
linguistic phenomenology Ryle argued that Cartesian mind-body dualism
involves a category mistake (the logic or grammar of mental
verbs—“believe”, “see”, etc.—does not
mean that we ascribe belief, sensation, etc., to “the ghost in
the machine”). With Ryle’s rejection of mind-body dualism, the
mind-body problem was re-awakened: what is the ontology of mind
vis-à-vis body, and how are mind and body related?
René Descartes, in his epoch-making Meditations on First
Philosophy (1641), had argued that minds and bodies are two distinct
kinds of being or substance with two distinct kinds of attributes or
modes: bodies are characterized by spatiotemporal physical properties,
while minds are characterized by properties of thinking (including
seeing, feeling, etc.). Centuries later, phenomenology would find, with
Brentano and Husserl, that mental acts are characterized by
consciousness and intentionality, while natural science would find that
physical systems are characterized by mass and force, ultimately by
gravitational, electromagnetic, and quantum fields. Where do we find
consciousness and intentionality in the
quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that, by hypothesis, orders
everything in the natural world in which we humans and our minds exist?
That is the mind-body problem today. In short, phenomenology by any
other name lies at the heart of the contemporary mind-body problem.
After Ryle, philosophers sought a more explicit and generally
naturalistic ontology of mind. In the 1950s materialism was argued
anew, urging that mental states are identical with states of the
central nervous system. The classical identity theory holds that each
token mental state (in a particular person’s mind at a particular time)
is identical with a token brain state (in that person’s brain at that
time). A stronger materialism holds, instead, that each type of mental
state is identical with a type of brain state. But materialism does not
fit comfortably with phenomenology. For it is not obvious how conscious
mental states as we experience them—sensations, thoughts,
emotions—can simply be the complex neural states that somehow
subserve or implement them. If mental states and neural states are
simply identical, in token or in type, where in our scientific theory
of mind does the phenomenology occur—is it not simply replaced
by neuroscience? And yet experience is part of what is to be explained
by neuroscience.
In the late 1960s and 1970s the computer model of mind set in, and
functionalism became the dominant model of mind. On this model, mind is
not what the brain consists in (electrochemical transactions in neurons
in vast complexes). Instead, mind is what brains do: their function of
mediating between information coming into the organism and behavior
proceeding from the organism. Thus, a mental state is a functional
state of the brain or of the human (or animal) organism. More
specifically, on a favorite variation of functionalism, the mind is a
computing system: mind is to brain as software is to hardware; thoughts
are just programs running on the brain’s “wetware”. Since
the 1970s the cognitive sciences—from experimental studies of
cognition to neuroscience—have tended toward a mix of
materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers found
that phenomenological aspects of the mind pose problems for the
functionalist paradigm too.
In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel argued in “What Is It Like to
Be a Bat?” (1974) that consciousness itself—especially
the subjective character of what it is like to have a certain type of
experience—escapes physical theory. Many philosophers pressed
the case that sensory qualia—what it is like to feel pain, to
see red, etc.—are not addressed or explained by a physical
account of either brain structure or brain function. Consciousness has
properties of its own. And yet, we know, it is closely tied to the
brain. And, at some level of description, neural activities implement
computation.
In the 1980s John Searle argued in Intentionality (1983) (and
further in The Rediscovery of the Mind (1991)) that intentionality and
consciousness are essential properties of mental states. For Searle,
our brains produce mental states with properties of consciousness and
intentionality, and this is all part of our biology, yet consciousness
and intentionality require a “first-person” ontology.
Searle also argued that computers simulate but do not have mental
states characterized by intentionality. As Searle argued, a computer
system has a syntax (processing symbols of certain shapes) but has no
semantics (the symbols lack meaning: we interpret the symbols). In this
way Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting
that mind is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains
“secrete” consciousness.
The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to
phenomenology as appraised above, and Searle’s theory of intentionality
reads like a modernized version of Husserl’s. (Contemporary logical
theory takes the form of stating truth conditions for propositions, and
Searle characterizes a mental state’s intentionality by specifying its
“satisfaction conditions”). However, there is an important
difference in background theory. For Searle explicitly assumes the
basic worldview of natural science, holding that consciousness is part
of nature. But Husserl explicitly brackets that assumption, and later
phenomenologists—including Heidegger, Sartre,
Merleau-Ponty—seem to seek a certain sanctuary for phenomenology beyond the
natural sciences. And yet phenomenology itself should be largely
neutral about further theories of how experience arises, notably from
brain activity.
Since the late 1980s, and especially the late 1990s, a variety of
writers working in philosophy of mind have focused on the fundamental
character of consciousness, ultimately a phenomenological issue. Does
consciousness always and essentially involve self-consciousness, or
consciousness-of-consciousness, as Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre held
(in verying detail)? If so, then every act of consciousness either
includes or is adjoined by a consciousness-of-that-consciousness. Does
that self-consciousness take the form of an internal self-monitoring?
If so, is that monitoring of a higher order, where each act of
consciousness is joined by a further mental act monitoring the base
act? Or is such monitoring of the same order as the base act, a proper
part of the act without which the act would not be conscious? A variety
of models of this self-consciousness have been developed, some
explicitly drawing on or adapting views in Brentano, Husserl, and
Sartre. Two recent collections address these issues: David Woodruff
Smith and Amie L. Thomasson (editors), Phenomenology and Philosophy of
Mind (2005), and Uriah Kriegel and Kenneth Williford (editors),
Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness (2006).
The philosophy of mind may be factored into the following
disciplines or ranges of theory relevant to mind:
- Phenomenology
studies conscious experience as experienced, analyzing the
structure—the types, intentional forms and meanings, dynamics, and
(certain) enabling conditions—of perception, thought,
imagination, emotion, and volition and action.
- Neuroscience studies
the neural activities that serve as biological substrate to the various
types of mental activity, including conscious experience. Neuroscience
will be framed by evolutionary biology (explaining how neural phenomena
evolved) and ultimately by basic physics (explaining how biological
phenomena are grounded in physical phenomena). Here lie the intricacies
of the natural sciences. Part of what the sciences are accountable for
is the structure of experience, analyzed by phenomenology.
- Cultural analysis
studies the social practices that help to shape or serve as cultural
substrate of the various types of mental activity, including conscious
experience, typically manifest in embodied action. Here we study the
import of language and other social practices, including background
attitudes or assumptions, sometimes involving particular political
systems.
- Ontology of mind
studies the ontological type of mental activity in general, ranging
from perception (which involves causal input from environment to
experience) to volitional action (which involves causal output from
volition to bodily movement).
This division of labor in the theory of mind can be seen as an
extension of Brentano’s original distinction between descriptive and
genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers descriptive analyses of mental
phenomena, while neuroscience (and wider biology and ultimately
physics) offers models of explanation of what causes or gives rise to
mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers analyses of social activities
and their impact on experience, including ways language shapes our
thought, emotion, and motivation. And ontology frames all these results
within a basic scheme of the structure of the world, including our own
minds.
The ontological distinction among the form, appearance, and substrate
of an activity of consciousness is detailed in D. W. Smith, Mind World
(2004), in the essay “Three Facets of Consciousness”.
Meanwhile, from an epistemological standpoint, all these ranges of
theory about mind begin with how we observe and reason about and seek
to explain phenomena we encounter in the world. And that is where
phenomenology begins. Moreover, how we understand each piece of
theory, including theory about mind, is central to the theory of
intentionality, as it were, the semantics of thought and experience in
general. And that is the heart of phenomenology.
7. Phenomenology in Contemporary Consciousness Theory
Phenomenological issues, by any other name, have played a prominent
role in very recent philosophy of mind. Amplifying the theme of the
previous section, we note two such issues: the form of inner awareness
that ostensibly makes a mental activity conscious, and the phenomenal
character of conscious cognitive mental activity in thought, and
perception, and action.
Ever since Nagel’s 1974 article, “What Is It Like to be a Bat?”, the
notion of what-it-is-like to experience a mental state or activity has
posed a challenge to reductive materialism and functionalism in theory
of mind. This subjective phenomenal character of consciousness is held
to be constitutive or definitive of consciousness. What is the form of
that phenomenal character we find in consciousness?
A prominent line of analysis holds that the phenomenal character of
a mental activity consists in a certain form of awareness of that
activity, an awareness that by definition renders it conscious. Since
the 1980s a variety of models of that awareness have been developed. As
noted above, there are models that define this awareness as a
higher-order monitoring, either an inner perception of the activity (a
form of inner sense per Kant) or inner consciousness (per Brentano), or
an inner thought about the activity. A further model analyzes such
awareness as an integral part of the experience, a form of
self-representation within the experience. (Again, see Kriegel and
Williford (eds.) (2006).)
A somewhat different model comes arguably closer to the form of
self-consciousness sought by Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. On the
“modal” model, inner awareness of an experience takes the form of an
integral reflexive awareness of “this very experience”. That form of
awareness is held to be a constitutive element of the experience that
renders it conscious. As Sartre put the claim, self-consciousness is
constitutive of consciousness, but that self-consciousness is
“pre-reflective”. This reflexive awareness is not, then, part of a
separable higher-order monitoring, but rather built into consciousness
per se. On the modal model, this awareness is part of the way the
experience unfolds: subjectively, phenomenally, consciously. This model
is elaborated in D. W. Smith (2004), Mind World, in the essay “Return
to Consciousness” (and elsewhere).
Whatever may be the precise form of phenomenal character, we would
ask how that character distributes over mental life. What is phenomenal
in different types of mental activity? Here arise issues of cognitive
phenomenology. Is phenomenality restricted to the “feel” of sensory
experience? Or is phenomenality present also in cognitive experiences of
thinking such-and-such, or of perception bearing conceptual as well as
sensory content, or also in volitional or conative bodily action? These
issues are explored in Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011), Cognitive
Phenomenology.
A restrictive view holds that only sensory experience has a proper
phenomenal character, a what-it-is-like. Seeing a color, hearing a
tone, smelling an odor, feeling a pain—these types of
conscious experience have a phenomenal character, but no others do, on
this view. A stringent empiricism might limit phenomenal experience
to pure sensations, though Hume himself presumably recognized
phenomenal “ideas” beyond pure sense
“impressions”. A somewhat more expansive view would hold
that perceptual experience has a distinctive phenomenal character even
where sensation is informed by concepts. Seeing that yellow canary,
hearing that clear Middle C on a Steinway piano, smelling the sharp
odor of anise, feeling a pain of the jab of the doctor’s needle in
receiving an injection—these types of conscious experience
have a character of what-it-is-like, a character informed by
conceptual content that is also “felt”, on this view. A
Kantian account of conceptual-sensory experience, or
“intuition”, would endorse a phenomenal character in these
types of experience. Indeed, “phenomena”, in the Kantian
idiom, are precisely things as they appear in consciousness, so of
course their appearance has a phenomenal character.
Now, a much more expansive view would hold that every conscious
experience has a distinctive phenomenal character. Thinking that 17 is
a prime number, thinking that the red in the sunset is caused by the
sun’s light waves being bent by the atmosphere, thinking that Kant was
more right than Hume about the grounds of knowledge, thinking that
economic principles are also political—even such highly
cognitive activities have a character of what-it-is-like to so think,
according to this expansive view.
Classical phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty surely
assumed an expansive view of phenomenal consciousness. As noted above,
the “phenomena” that are the focus of phenomenology were
assumed to present a rich character of lived experience. Even
Heidegger, while de-emphasizing consciousness (the Cartesian sin!),
dwelt on “phenomena” as what appears or shows up to us (to
“Dasein”) in our everyday activities such as hammering a
nail. Like Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch (1964) explicitly studies the
“phenomenal field”, embracing all that is presented in our
experience. Arguably, for these thinkers, every type of conscious
experience has its distinctive phenomenal character, its
“phenomenology”—and the task of phenomenology (the
discipline) is to analyze that character. Note that in recent debates
the phenomenal character of an experience is often called its
“phenomenology”—whereas, in the established idiom,
the term “phenomenology” names the discipline that studies
such “phenomenology”.
Since intentionality is a crucial property of consciousness,
according to Brentano, Husserl, et al., the character of intentionality
itself would count as phenomenal, as part of what-it-is-like to
experience a given type of intentional experience. But it is not only
intentional perception and thought that have their distinctive
phenomenal characters. Embodied action also would have a distinctive
phenomenal character, involving “lived” characters of kinesthetic
sensation as well as conceptual volitional content, say, in the feel of
kicking a soccer ball. The “lived body” is precisely the body as
experienced in everyday embodied volitional action such as running or
kicking a ball or even speaking. Husserl wrote at length about the
“lived body” (Leib), in Ideas II, and Merleau-Ponty followed suit with
rich analyses of embodied perception and action, in Phenomenology of
Perception. In Bayne and Montague (eds.) (2011) see the article on
conative phenomenology by Terence Horgan, and in Smith and Thomasson
(eds.) (2005) see articles by Charles Siewert and Sean Kelly.
But now a problems remains. Intentionality essentially involves
meaning, so the question arises how meaning appears in phenomenal
character. Importantly, the content of a conscious experience typically
carries a horizon of background meaning, meaning that is largely
implicit rather than explicit in experience. But then a wide range of
content carried by an experience would not have a consciously felt
phenomenal character. So it may well be argued. Here is a line of
phenomenological theory for another day.
