Phenomenology

Conceptual Overview

There have been four generations of phenomenological thought. The first (Edmund Husserl) focused on achieving knowledge—on how the known can be freed from prejudice, unwarranted assumptions, and outright blindness. The second generation explored the relationship in perception between the knower and the known, where perception is conceived to be fundamental to all knowledge. This resulted in a focus on radical interrelatedness, such as that between subject and object, perceived and perceiver, and self and world. Philosophers such as Martin Heidegger attended to the being of the knower and the known—fostering existentialism—and Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the life-world (i.e., lived or experienced world) of awareness, perception, and sensemaking.

Third generation phenomenology has pursued the theme of the social nature of perception where knowing is relational, interactive, and shared. Human perception requires consciousness, but relationship, coevolution, and being-together are crucial to the nature, possibilities, and establishment of consciousness. Social ethics, the hermeneutic study of understanding, and social phenomenology typify this approach.

Fourth generation phenomenology currently examines the commonality between the world and subject, the material and the human, in which, via consciousness studies and complexity theory, the old dichotomies are questioned. Mind and body, brain and consciousness, are seen through the perspective of relationality; that is, as interdependent, coevolutionary, and interactive. It is argued that the complex interconnectivity and dialogic structure of the brain parallels the communicative intricacy of language and sociability. Material, conscious, and social aggregation levels are explored not as contradictory or mutually exclusive, but as fundamentally complementary and parallel. Relationality applies across and between the various levels of the material, conscious, and social.

Edmund Husserl famously directed attention “back to the things themselves” (Zurück zu den Sachen selbst). But this call, made in 1900–1901, has had an ironic fate. Husserl's intention was to escape psychological relativism (the claim that all thought is mere thinking, so many mental processes, or just complex forms of relatedness). But the philosophical despair of 1900—born of Husserl's inability to identify absolute truth or objective reality—has returned in a postmodern guise. Phenomenology has flipped from antisubjectivism—that is, the rejection of relativism and psychologism—to attention to affect, particularity, and experiential unicity.

Husserl realized that objectification, quantification, and rationalization could lead away from the things themselves to prejudice, blind assumptions, and uncritical opinions. Thus, although there may be no reality to be drawn from psychological solipsism, the result of insufficiently examined beliefs is no better. Lived-awareness and experienced observation have been proposed as methodolical solutions. But the life-world (lebenswelt) is only as rich (or poor) as the attention that is paid to circumstance(s). Therefore, all issues of the nature and quality of relationality have been (re)opened.

Relationality does not have an inherent object of study, such as the unconscious for psychoanalysis, or bureaucracy for Weber. Instead phenomenology is a process approach and, as such, has always entailed procedural techniques of research. Typically, this involves four sequential

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