On Phenomenology - Discipline and Method

by Maria Odete Madeira

Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy, applied to the study of the phenomena.

Phenomenon (phainomenon) is that which reveals itself, by itself and in itself. Thus, all existing things can be considered to be phenomena.

Phenomenology is not a method, it is a disciplinary area constituted by a theoretical body, available as fundament for the construction of methods and methodologies aimed at the study of any existing reality that, genetically, by itself and in itself, reveals itself as position rooted in the world.

Criticizing the positivism as a mere construction of facts, Husserl (1907) held that the so-called crisis of the sciences had to do with a reduction of humans to constructed facts. In the positivistic model, humans, as such, were alienated in the human facticity, derooted from that which constituted them as beings that are intentionally inscribed in the world, from which they received the sense of themselves and of the things with which they related.

For Husserl, the world was the originary datum, that was turned towards humans and towards which they, themselves, turned self-reflexively, in order to determine and distinguish the sense of the things.

Protesting against the reduction of human reason to mere exercises of calculation, Husserl defended phenomenology as the science of the phenomena. In Husserl, the phenomenon is an eidos that reveals itself in an intuition that is defined by an intentionality that assigns a plenitude of presence to the eidos (phenomenon) that is aimed at. Each eidos is accessible, only, to a certain type of intuition: the intuition that refers and identifies it in an immediate way and that, because of that, captures it in all its totality.

Intuition has its origin in the Latin terms tueri (to see) and in (in, within) that conjointly mean the action of seeing directly within the things, thus, signaling a mode of immediate knowledge of an existing object that, because it exists, shows itself, as such, to the consciousness that aims at it, and, because it shows itself, it also demonstrates itself in its modes of existence, so that it can be described from its fundament (eidos).

The experience, in Husserl, assumes the sense of lived world (Lebenswelt), as that which is in the origin of the knowledge and that is before any reflexive activities. That is, the objects present themselves to the consciousness, giving themselves in their completeness (eidos) in order to be, only after, and through a conscious act of radical reflexivity, on the part of the subject, actively apprehended by the consciousness that intentionally signaled them as existents in themselves, and by themselves, and, in this way, as autonomies.

The noumenon, that was impossible to be categorized in Kant, appears, in Husserl, as that which is immediately intuited. Thus, Husserl turned away from the criteria that transcended the experience, to be able to, in the same experience (Lebenswelt) and in a direct way, capture that which, in the phenomena, was their noumenic sense.

In Heidegger, the notion of experience lost the theoretical sense present in Husserl, to mix itself with the notion of existence. The author considered that, originarily, the things do not “make their apparition” and do not “appear to be” to the humans as phenomena or objects of thought, but, instead, as entities that (co)exist in a complex system of references that constitutes the world where each human exists, understands and interprets himself as being-the-there (dasein), projectively launched to a future that he existentially anticipates.

This perspective, of a gnoseology, as activity rooted in the worldly experience, was, also, developed by Merleau-Ponty (1945), who considered that all the universe of science is constituted upon the lived world. The notions of subjectivity and objectivity are synthesized in the notion of the world, lived and understood by subjects incarnated in it. The phenomenological perception is, thus, considered as an originary pre-reflexive experience of each subject with an own body (corps propre), that body, understood, as a node of living significations that is incorporated by an operating intentionality that links it to the world of life.

In this way, the phenomenological perception constitutes itself as the ground that is previous to all reflexive activity. Assuming that knowledge is, always, the apprehension of an ontologically constituted structure, an ontologically constituted structure that, as such, is given to any originary human consciousness, (a consciousness) which is fully rooted in a world that is previous to it, exterior to it and autonomous.