Phenomenology and Hermeneutics

Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a philosophical method, first developed by Edmund Husserl (HUHSS-erel), that proposed "phenomenological reduction" so that everything not "immanent" to consciousness must be excluded; all realities must be treated as pure "phenomena" and this is the only absolute data from which we can begin. Husserl viewed consciousness always as intentional and that the act of consciousness, the thinking subject and the object it "intends," are inseparable. Art is not a means of securing pleasure, but a revelation of being. The work is the phenomenon by which we come to know the world (Eagleton, p. 54; Abrams, p. 133, Guerin, p. 263).

Hermeneutics
Hermeneutics sees interpretation as a circular process whereby valid interpretation can be achieved by a sustained, mutually qualifying interplay between our progressive sense of the whole and our retrospective understanding of its component parts. Two dominant theories that emerged from Wilhelm Dilthey's original premise were that of E. D. Hirsch who, in accord with Dilthey, felt a valid interpretation was possible by uncovering the work's authorial intent (though informed by historical and cultural determinants), and in contrast, that of Martin Heidegger (HIGH-deg-er) who argued that a reader must experience the "inner life" of a text in order to understand it at all. The reader's "being-in-the-world" or dasein is fraught with difficulties since both the reader and the text exist in a temporal and fluid state. For Heidegger or Hans Georg Gadamer (GAH-de-mer), then, a valid interpretation may become irrecoverable and will always be relative.

Key Terms:

Dasein - simply, "being there," or "being-in-the world" - Heidegger argued that "what is distinctive about human existence is its Dasein ('givenness'): our consciousness both projects the things of the world and at the same time is subjected to the world by the very nature of existence in the world" (Selden and Widdowson 52 - see General Resources below).

Intentionality - "is at the heart of knowing. We live in meaning, and we live 'towards,' oriented to experience. Consequently there is an intentional structure in textuality and expression, in self-knowledge and in knowledge of others. This intentionality is also a distance: consciousness is not identical with its objects, but is intended consciousness" (quoted from Dr. John Lye's website - see suggested resources below).

Phenomenological Reduction - a concept most frequently associated with Edmund Husserl; as explained by Terry Eagleton (see General Resources below) "To establish certainty, then, we must first of all ignore, or 'put in brackets,' anything which is beyond our immediate experience: we must reduce the external world to the contents of our consciousness alone....Everything not 'immanent' to consciousness must be rigorously excluded: all realities must be treated as pure 'phenomena,' in terms of their appearances in our mind, and this is the only absolute data from which we can begin" (55).

Phenomenology: Bracketing Experience
Late in the nineteenth century, a group of Austrian philosophers grew dissatisfied with the excessive subjectivity fostered by the philosophy of the later German idealists. Borrowing their methods from the emerging sciences of psychology and sociology, these phenomenologists sought to restore a proper balance by securing the objectivity of experiential content at all costs.
Brentano

The basic approach of phenomenology was first developed by Franz Brentano, who was influenced both by scholastic versions of Aristotelian thought and by the radical empiricism of Hume. The central concern of philosophy, Brentano supposed, is to understand the nature and content of awareness in ways that illuminate the distinction between the mental and the non-mental.

In Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt (Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint) (1874) Brentano proposed that every mental act be understood to have a doubly significant representational function, designating both itself reflectively and a phenomenal object intentionally. Indeed, this distinction between acts and their objects precisely delineates the crucial distinction for Brentano, since "intentionality is the mark of the mental." One and the same phenomenal object can be intended by mental acts of different modalities—believing, imagining, etc. Thus, Brentano held that although each intentional act is itself subjective, its intention is an objective thing or fact in the world.

Brentano applied a similar set of distinctions with respect to moral theory in Vom Ursprung sittlicher Erkenntnis (The Origin of Our Knowledge of Right and Wrong) (1889). Although our emotional attitudes about human behavior are thoroughly subjective, the particular human actions they intend are objective features of the world, which sometimes carry self-evident value in the same way that other right judgments do.

Meinong

Brentano's emphasis on the objectivity of intentional objects gives rise to a serious question about our ability to think about non-existent objects. If "the golden mountain" does not exist, what feature of reality preserves the objectivity of our intention? Alexius Meinong tried to provide a systematic answer to such questions by introducing a third element that mediates between a mental act and its object, the content of the act (rather like Frege's sense). Extrapolating from this idea, Meinong distinguished several levels of reality among objects and facts about them in Über Möglichkeit und Wahrscheinlichkeit (On Possibility and Probability) (1915):

* existent objects participate in actual (true) facts about the world
* subsistent (real but non-existent) objects appear in possible (but false) facts
* objects that neither exist nor subsist can only belong to impossible facts

Although Meinong's scheme successfully guarantees the objective reality of intentional objects of every sort, its ontological cost is high. The world according to Meinong is crowded with false facts and non-existent realities. It was (at least partly) in reaction to such a lush landscape that Russell and Quine later developed more parsimonious notions about what is.

Husserl

Another of Brentano's students, Edmund Husserl, developed the phenomenological method in a less formal vein. In his Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations) (1901, 1913) and Meditations Cartésiennes (Cartesian Meditations) (1931), Husserl aimed for a science of pure abstract thought that arrives at truth about the atemporal essenses of things. From our experience of the phenomena, Husserl supposed, we must somehow intuit the genuine, lasting character of what most truly persists through all. Thus, although human consciousness remains supremely important as the unique source of our knowledge, our goal must always be to transcend the temporal limitations of ordinary experience in order to fathom the timeless reality that underlies it. It was this version of phenomenology that most significantly influenced the philosophy of Heidegger.
Further references:

* Blanchot, Maurice. The Space of Literature.
* Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena, and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs.
* Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Crossroad, 1982.
* Habermas, Jürgen (JUR-gen HAH-bur-mahs). Communication and the Evolution of Society.
* Halliburton, David. Poetic Thinking: An Approach to Heidegger.
* Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie. New York: Harper & Row, 1962.
* Hirsch, E.D. The Aims of Interpretation.
* Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.
* Magliola, Robert R. Phenomenology and Literature: An Introduction.
* Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.
* Palmer, Richard. Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schliermacher.
* Ricouer, Paul. The Conflict of Interpretation: Essays in Hermeneutics.

Suggested Websites:

* "Phenomenology" - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
* Phenomenology Online - page developed by Max van Manen
* "Phenomenology" - Wikipedia
* "Phenomenology: Bracketing Experience" - by Garth Kemerling (Philosophy Pages)
* "Some Principles of Phenomenological Hermeneutics" by Dr. John Lye (Brock University)