Phenomenology

History and Nature of Phenomenology

Phenomenology's principal founder, the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, argued that behind the shifting flux of human experience and awareness, there are certain invariant structures of cerebral consciousness, which he claimed a phenomenological method could clarify in a way that earlier philosophical traditions could not. Husserl viewed consciousness and its essential structures as a pure “region” separate from the lived realm of experience. His approach came to be known as constitutive or transcendental phenomenology.

Other philosophers, however, argued that Hus-serl's transcendental structures of consciousness were reductive existentially and could not accommodate the wide range of ways in which human beings live in, experience, and encounter the world in which they find themselves. In his 1927 book Being and Time, Martin Heidegger argued that consciousness is not distinct from but tightly intertwined with the world in which human beings find themselves. In his 1945 book Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty claimed that an integral part of this intimate commingling of people and their worlds is what he called body subject—that is, the invisible web of bodily intention expressed through action that smoothly conjoins human actions and behaviors with the everyday world at hand. This “existential turn” by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty marked a significant conceptual shift from Hus-serl's realm of pure intellectual consciousness to the realm of lived situations, experiences, and meanings. Because Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty emphasized the nature and qualities of human existence in its everyday typicality, their approach came to be known as existential phenomenology. Geographers have most often used this style of phenomenology, since their focus most often is people's experiences and understandings of real-world environments, spaces, places, landscapes, regions, and so forth.

From this existential perspective, phenomenology can be defined as the examination, description, and interpretation of phenomena, by which is meant anything that humans can experience. Any situation, event, process, living thing, or object that a human being can touch, taste, smell, hear, see, feel, sense, know, recognize, intuit, or encounter is a potential focus for phenomenological study. There can be a phenomenology of weather, of landscape, of flora and fauna, of architecture, of the home, of journey, of travel, of tourism, of learning, of privacy, of community, of conflict, of gender, of sexuality, of less-abledness, and the like. The aim is to describe the phenomenon in its own terms—in other words, as it is: a thing, a living being, an experience, an action, a situation, or an event in the actual lives of actual human beings in actual times and places. The goal is not ideographic portrayal, however, but the discovery and explication of underlying, lived structures and the relationships shared by many particular lived instances of the phenomenon.

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