Phenomenology

Phenomenology is a philosophical movement that seeks to describe phenomena as they appear to consciousness, before any theoretical explanation or assumption about their causes. Its starting point is lived experience: what we see, feel, remember or anticipate, and the way the world shows itself to the subject who perceives it.

The word comes from the Greek phainómenon, that which appears, and it had various meanings in the history of philosophy, such as in Kant, who distinguished between phenomenon and noumenon. As a movement, however, phenomenology is mainly associated with Edmund Husserl, who in the early twentieth century proposed a method for examining experience without presupposing its reality. Through the so-called reduction, or epoché, one sets aside the usual beliefs about an object. Husserl aimed to found a rigorous philosophy able to describe the essential structures of consciousness, such as intentionality, the fact that consciousness is always directed toward something.

Other thinkers extended or transformed this programme. Martin Heidegger oriented it toward human existence and being-in-the-world, while Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, stressed the role of the body in experience. In psychology, Carl Stumpf defended a description of phenomena distinct from the mental functions that produce them, and in literature, writers such as Camil Petrescu explored attention to subjective experience and the lived sense of time.

Today the term is used in many fields, from philosophy of mind to sociology and the theory of art. A lasting debate concerns whether phenomenology can reach a neutral description of experience or whether every description is already shaped by an interpretive horizon, as well as its relation to empirical science.