Phenomenology started as a protest against philosophers who never leave their desks, producing clouds of smart thoughts and theories containing meanings of distant, vague understandings that are not based in reality. Edmund Husserl propagated instead to go back to things themselves: “We need to question the things themselves (die sachen[Page 1064]in German) and go back to experience and observations, which alone can give reasonable meaning to our words.”

In addition to Husserl, important phenomenological philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, Hermann Schmitz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty share an antireductionist position insofar as they reject the idea that complex problems can be solved by dividing them into smaller entities, and hoping that, in the end, the whole can be reconstructed from the pieces.

What Has to Be Accepted ...