INTRODUCTION
Phenomenology By Drake Omonode
…. I can enter no world other than the one that gets its sense and acceptance or status in and from me, myself”
The word phenomenology comes from the Greek word ‘phenomenon’ which means ‘show himself' (Ray 1994: 119), and this summarises the intention of phenomenology, namely the study of the essence of an experience. Within the broad field of phenomenological philosophy we can distinguish a large variety of phenomenological schools and movements such as transcendental, hermeneutic, existential, linguistic and ethical phenomenology (Embree e.a. 1997: 3-7; van Manen 2005: 32-35). We will only further explore the first two movements in this short overview. Although the origin of phenomenology can be traced back to Emmanuel Kant and Georg Hegel, the German mathematician and philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)1 is considered to be the founder.
This write-up aims to first clarify the notion of phenomenology by offering sayings of different experts of this genre. Thereafter, it attempts to briefly trace its genesis and classify this broad idea in the school hermeneutic. After discussing very precisely on each of these schools, it focuses on the premises of phenomenology as a method for doing research. The purpose of this essay is to collect and exhibit a crude paradigmatic clue of doing a phenomenological research. During the course, it emphasizes on the metaphysical stance, methodological grounds, quality concerns and ethical issues that contribute to its paradigmatic assumptions.
Defining phenomenology
Phenomenology is an umbrella term encompassing both a philosophical movement and a range of research approaches.
The phenomenological movement was initiated by Husserl (1859-1838) as a radically new way of doing philosophy. Later theorists, such as Heidegger (1889-1976), have recast the phenomenological project, moving away from a philosophical discipline which focuses on consciousness and essences of phenomena towards elaborating existential and hermeneutic
(interpretive) dimensions (Finlay, 2009).
Finlay (2009) further states that applied to research, phenomenology is the study of phenomena: their nature and meanings. The focus is on the way things appear to us through experience or in our consciousness where the phenomenological researcher aims to provide a rich textured description of lived experience.
Langdridge (2007) defines phenomenology as a discipline that "aims to focus on people's perceptions of the world in which they live in and what it means to them; a focus on people's lived
experience" (p.4). She further clarifies that phenomenology as a qualitative method focuses on human experience as a topic in its own right. It concerns with meaning and the way in which
meaning arises in experience.
Phenomenology has been conceptualized as a philosophy, a research method and an overarching perspective from which all qualitative research is sourced (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994).
Merleau-Ponty (1962) in his famous book 'Phenomenology of Perception' has identified four qualities that are considered as 'celebrated themes' or characteristics common to different
schools of phenomenology. These qualities are description, reduction, essences and intentionality.
According to Merleau-Ponty (1962) the aim of phenomenology is description of phenomena. Reduction is a process that involves suspending or bracketing the phenomena so that the 'things themselves' can be returned to. Likewise an essence is the core meaning of an individual's experience that makes it what it is. Finally, intentionality refers to consciousness since individuals are always conscious to something. This means intentionality is the total meaning of the object or the idea which is always more than what is given in the perception of a single perspective.
According to Berrios (1989) the term phenomenology refers to a set of philosophical doctrines loosely sharing; a) assumptions
as to what the world is like (ontological) and how it can be known (epistemological) and b) strategies for the descriptive management of the mental entities relating to such a world.
They all strive to capture experiential essences which are but higher forms of knowledge with which the phenomenologists expects to reconstruct reality on a firmer footing. A more simplistic definition about phenomenology is offered by Grbich (2007) who states phenomenology as an approach to understand the hidden meanings and the essences of an experience together. Max van Manen (1990) another noted name who considers phenomenology as the appropriate most
method to explore the phenomena of pedagogical significance elaborates phenomenology as a response to how one orients to lived experience and questions the way one experiences the
world. These definitions of phenomenology offered by different scholars focus that it is phenomenology that has the potential to penetrate deep to the human experience and trace the essence of a phenomenon and explicate it in its original form as experienced by the individuals. This quality of illumination of the core state of being of a phenomenon requires a very careful
attention and the outcome is naturally greater than the sum of its parts.
The purpose of the phenomenological approach is to illuminate the specific, to identify phenomena
through how they are perceived by the actors in a situation. In the human sphere this normally translates into gathering ‘deep’ information and perceptions through inductive, qualitative methods
such as interviews, discussions and participant observation, and representing it from the perspective
of the research participant(s). Phenomenology is concerned with the study of experience from the
perspective of the individual, ‘bracketing’ taken-for-granted assumptions and usual ways of perceiving. Epistemologically, phenomenological approaches are based in a paradigm of personal
knowledge and subjectivity, and emphasise the importance of personal perspective and interpretation. As such they are powerful for understanding subjective experience, gaining insights into people’s motivations and actions, and cutting through the clutter of taken-for-granted assumptions and conventional wisdom. Phenomenological methods are particularly effective at bringing to the fore the experiences and perceptions of individuals from their own perspectives, and therefore at challenging structural or normative assumptions. Adding an interpretive dimension to phenomenological research, enabling it to be used as the basis for practical theory, allows it to inform, support or challenge policy and action. Finally, phenomenological approaches are good at surfacing deep issues and making voices heard. This is not always comfortable for clients or funders, particularly when the research exposes takenfor- granted assumptions or challenges a comfortable status quo. On the other hand, many organisations value the insights which a phenomenological approach can bring in terms of cutting through taken-for-granted assumptions, prompting action or challenging complacency.
What is phenomenology?
• Phenomenology is the philosophical name for the method of investigating or inquiring into the meanings of our experiences as we live them. The method is phenomenological reflecting on pre-reflective or lived experience
• Any experience whatsoever can be studied phenomenologically
• The approach is called “phenomenological” reflection because it uses the method of the epoché and the reduction
• Lived experience is prereflective in that it is experience as we are in it, live
through it—while not, or not yet, reflecting on it, or making sense of it, or theorizing about it.
Phenomenological Epoché
To arrive at reality, Husserl maintains that one must first of all set aside all philosophical presuppositions, and accept ideas about things. This includes one’s ideas about God, the world, man and society. It concerns the knowledge one has about the distinctions of things, and the relations between primary and secondary qualities. It involves all the information one has received about interior and exterior worlds and the internal and the internal and external senses.
The term epoché is a Greek word which means “bracketing”. Husserl uses this term to describe his method of phenomenological suspension or putting aside of all naïve prejudices that have been the givenness of the natural attitude; it extends to the suspension of all phenomena, all the elements of experience – peoples, things, beliefs, cultural situations so that one is able to see things as they really are. Thus, one important requirement of phenomenology is that the inquirer should distance himself from the object of his inquiry and to let it manifest itself clearly as it is. The epoché (bracketing) is designed by Husserl to achieve this phenomenological aim. With the ‘epoché’ we destroy all interest in order to reconstruct experience or to reconstitute the world. Epoché is the
demolition exercise motivated by the genuine desire to reconstruct. The virtue of the phenomenological epoché is that we gravitate towards the essential structures of experiences or that we construct the world as it is when we suspend all judgements as we focus attention on any given fact of experience. At this juncture, it is good to note that Husserl unlike Descartes, who doubted everything, including all phenomena and the world, brackets all phenomena, all the elements of experience, by refusing to assert whether the world does or does not exist. Husserl ‘brackets’ the whole stream of experienced life. To bracket all these phenomena means only to look upon them without judging whether they are realities or appearances and to abstain from rendering any opinions, judgements, or valuations about the world. The phenomenologist must set aside all he had previously known and make a fresh start without taking anything for granted. Husserl made the above point clearer as he succinctly writes: “We can no longer accept the reality of the world as a fact to be taken for granted … As radically meditating philosophers, we now have neither knowledge that is valid for us nor a world that exists for us. We can no longer say that the world is real”.
However, this suspension or bracketing simply means coming into awareness of the very meaning of the natural attitude itself – a casting of phenomenological doubt on the traditional commonsense which has been taken for granted. It means that this naïveattitude which I took for granted, I now review in the phenomenological attitude. In the Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, Husserl describes phenomenological epoché as he writes:
We put out of action the general thesis which belongs to the essence of the natural standpoint, we place in brackets whatever it includes respecting the nature of being: this entire natural world therefore which is continually “there fore us”, “present to our hand”, and will ever remain there, is a “fact-world” of which we continue to be conscious, even though it pleases us to put it in bracket On further consideration of the above quotation, one gets the impression that “putting out of action” suggests or implies eliminating the world. Far from such conception, putting out of action or bracketing does not, in any way, suggest eliminating or denial of the world. In other words, such keeping in abeyance does not mean that we are simply to get rid of all our beliefs in the bracketed world. What Husserl means by that is to break from attaching weight to the belief we have about the world. In his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl reinforces that phenomenological epoché does not imply the disappearance or non existence of objects from our field of existence. He writes:
The philosophically reflective Ego’s abstention from position – takings, his depriving them of acceptance, does not signify their disappearance from his field of experience. The concrete subjective processes, let us repeat, are indeed the things to which his attentive regard is directed:
but the attentive Ego, qua philosophizing Ego, practices abstention with respect to what he intuits. Likewise everything meant in such accepting or positing processes of consciousness (the meant judgment, theory, value, end, or whatever it is) is still retained completely – but with the acceptance – modification.
The question may be asked, why do we bracket the world or suspend the world of the natural attitude of its existence, when the world is the field in which we can make our perceptive explorations and enquires? Even though we bracket the world, as we have said earlier, we do not deny the world. The world still remains there like “the bracketed in the bracket, like the disconnected outside the connectional system”. Expressing this in another way, the experiences, which are prior to this bracketing, can be regarded as lived (Erlebnis) experiences, but we make no use of them. It is only by bracketing the world that we are able to examine properly before we arrive at pure knowledge of things as meant in their essential form. He neither eliminates the world out of existence nor do we completely repudiate its contents. Husserl unequivocally clarifies,
If I do this … as I am free to do, I do not deny this ‘world’, as though I were a sophist, I do not doubt that it is there as though I were a skeptic; but I like the phenomenological epoché, which completely bars me from using any judgment that concerns spatiotemporal existence. Husserl’s phenomenological epoché therefore, does not deny the existence of objects at hand but rather it offers us the opportunity to focus on the phenomenon as it presents itself to us. Hence, “we must not make assertions about that which we do not ourselves see”. By this token, Husserl rejects those aspects of Kant’s philosophy, which transcend the immediate phenomenal realm. He first limits the scope of philosophy to the realm of cogitation (object), but also reveals the pure ego, that is, one who is performing the epoché. Husserl therefore maintains that through the phenomenological epoché, we discover and apprehend ourselves as pure ego, and perceive an object as meant, that is as reduced phenomena. He writes: This phenomenological epoché and parenthesizing of the objective world therefore does not leave us confronting nothing. What we acquire
by it is my pure living, with all the pure subjective processes making this up, and everything meant in them, purely as meant in them. Theepoché can also be said to be the radical and universal method by which I apprehend myself purely: as Ego, and with my own pure conscious life, in and by which the entire objective world exists for me and is precisely as it for me. Anything belonging to the world
From the above citation, one would clearly see that phenomenological epoché is the device through which we apprehend ourselves as ‘pure ego’. And it is through this ‘Ego’ can the world have any meaning for us.
Eidetic Reduction
This is the second stage in the phenomenological enterprise. A stage in which we
intuit essence or see ‘pure phenomenon’ as they really are. In the eidetic reduction, we
achieve a higher level of clarity concerning the object of inquiry. Reduction is a transition
from common – place or ordinary knowledge we have about reality to the reflective
possession of those realities. In reduction, the mind reduces the ordinary knowledge. It
methodologically shifts it out of existence and now settles to penetrate the inner layers of
the reality as it shines out to the mind.
The term ‘eidetic’ comes from the Greek word ‘eidos’, which means essence or
form. Eidetic reduction reduces the problem of sense and meaning to that of essence
(eidos). Edmund Husserl himself uses it to mean essence or pure essence. For this reason,
his phenomenology is chiefly concerned with phenomenal objects in themselves. In his
Logical Investigation, he defines his own science of phenomenology as a descriptive
psychology dealing with the general essence of various structures of the things and not
with their concrete existence as individual thing. Eidetic reduction basically enables us to focus attention on the essential structures of object in question as it offers itself to the experiencing and thinking mind. When this is done, Husserl says that we are no longer at the descriptive phase of reality; rather we are brought face – to – face with the meaning or the sense of reality under consideration. One is here at the deeper level of hermeneutics: the theory of meaning, the work of interpretation of what is before one, based on that presence, not on any pre-given knowledge. Eidetic reduction moves consciousness from the realm of facts to the realm of general essence. It consists in moving from the givenness of experience to essences, and from empirical particularity to essential universality”. For Husserl, to perform an eidetic reduction is to put aside all existential and particularizing characteristics of the object of experience and focus attention on essential features in order to grasp its essence and only its essence. Thus, it is a reduction whereby the various acts of consciousness must be made accessible so that their essences can be grasped. A means of grasping the essence is the Nessensschau, the intuition of essence – a process whereby one forms a multiplicity of the given, one focuses his attention on that unchanged residuum in the multiplicity. The essence is that identical something that continuously maintains itself .
during the process of variation. Edmund Husserl refers to it as the invariant. This means that essence does not change or vary. We therefore, need to direct our consciousness in such a way that we grasp the essence which are the universally and the unchangeable structure of things. This actually demands that we should concentrate on objects merely as they are given to consciousness and should bracket off all our precious notions about things.
It is therefore, Husserl’s solemn belief that with these methods of epoché and eidetic reduction, unbiased, unprejudiced, indubitable and above all certain knowledge could be achieved. But the bogging questions still remain. To what extent does the method of phenomenology ensure certainty of knowledge considering the fact that phenomenological description could be highly subjective. In other words, can phenomenology completely eliminate error in our epistemological venture? The
techniques/methods of phenomenology and its concentration on essences and universal structures (phenomenological epoché and eidetic reduction) are specifically designed by Husserl to reduce the effect of personal idiosyncrasies, misconceptions and prejudices, but could the personal attitudes of the investigator or the phenomenologist not suffice in such description? Besides could it be said without equivocation that there can really be a presuppositionless enquiry as Husserl has just pointed out in his phenomenology? These are some of the questions that we would attempt to answer in our next chapter as we make conscientious move to sift out the epistemological content by critically evaluating m his phenomenology.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL QUESTIONS
What kinds of questions does phenomenology ask?
Phenomenology asks originary meaning questions
Any experience whatsoever can be a phenomenological topic:
phenomenology studies the unique lived meaning aspects of a
“possible human experience”
What kinds of questions does phenomenology ask?
Phenomenology asks originary meaning questions
In focusing on a particular phenomenon, it asks:
• What is this phenomenon like? And how do we need to describe it so
that its phenomenological meaning becomes understandable and resonates with our lived experience?
• How does this phenomenon give or show itself in consciousness?
• What existential structures of meaning lie at the core of this
phenomenon?
• What makes this phenomenon or lived experience unique and
singularly different from other phenomena?
Collecting research data
Among the many methods of collecting research data, there are a few that fit phenomenological research better. There is, as it were, a certain affinity. Usually one uses interviews, diaries, participative observation, reflexive and introspective notes of the researcher himself (Finlay 2003 en 2005).
The psychologist Linda Finlay (2005) describes the most important task of the researcher in collecting research data as follows: “The first challenge for phenomenological researchers like myself is to help participants express their sense of self/embodiment and lived relations with others as directly as possible. We then have to find a way to express this in language, a way that captures the complexity, ambiguities and nuances of the experience described.”
A practical and at the same time much nuanced description of undertaking phenomenological interviews is given by Jonathan Smith and Mike Osborn. Different aspects and difficulties are mentioned and suggestions are made (Smith & Osborn 2003).
Phenomenological research can be applied to a single case or to several accidentally or consciously chosen cases. Though studies based on one certain case make it possible to bring forward discrepancies, it is still harder to make positive deductions if one does not dispose of a minimum number of participants. In research with several participants, the power of the conclusions will be reinforced as soon as an aspect of the experience returns with more than one participant. Here, we have to make a clear distinction between statistic and qualitative validity: phenomenological research is good in indicating the different aspects of a certain experience, but one has to be careful to extend the conclusions to the entire groups from which the participants come (Lester 1999).
Analysing research data
Also for the analysis we find different approaches in the literature. On the one hand we find supporters of an intuitive, and even poetical approach with which writing talent is more important to do justice to the experience than a thorough analysis. On the other end of the spectrum we find elaborated methods in which researchers are guided and can go through the process of analysis step by step.
The more intuitive researchers do not even want to regard it as an analysis. They prefer to use the word ‘explicitation’. Hycner thinks the term analysis is useless in phenomenological research, because the word indicates a division, a breaking up in parts and hence a loss of the phenomenon as a whole. Explicitation implies rather a study of the components of a phenomenon, while the totality remains noticeable (Hycner 1999: 161). Important is that the research data are read thoroughly so that the researcher develops a ‘feeling’, a sensitivity for what the participants tell. Max van Manen thinks the understanding of the perspective of others is necessarily done in an intuitive way: “Phenomenological understanding is distinctly existential, emotive, enactive, embodied, situational, and nontheoretic; a powerful phenomenological text thrives on a certain irrevocable tension between what is unique and what is shared, between particular and transcendent meaning, and between the reflective and the prereflective spheres of the life world” (van Manen 1997: 345). David Jardine tells researchers not to look for similarities, but for analogies, correspondences. Only this way we do justice to the social life which we study (Jardine 1990: 227). These vague notions are, again, not very easy to grasp for inexperienced researchers in phenomenology. Kate Caelli gives in her article for starting researchers a frank, and especially understandable report of her quest in phenomenological research practice (Caelli 2001). Linda Finlay (1999) presents a method of analysis that can be followed step by step, but that still does justice to the phenomenological approach by having attention for the components as well as for the whole. She divides her analysis in two parts, i.e. 1. the analysis of the individual interviews and 2. the analysis of all interviews together. Within each phase there are successively some steps to go through in which one goes from encodings to codes to themes. This methodology is strongly inspired by the Grounded Theory of Strauss & Corbin.
Also Jonathan A. Smith and colleagues (Smith, Jarman & Osborn 1999) present a plan with steps to do phenomenological research. His Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) addresses specifically researchers who have interest in phenomenological research, but who have hardly experience with its methodology and analysis.
The analysis remains, no matter which method one follows, necessarily ‘dirty’, because the data do not fall automatically in nicely delineated categories. A problem is also that phenomenological research generates usually a very large quantity of interview notes, recordings or other documents, that all have to be analysed. For qualitative research several computer programs were developed that can help coding the research data, think for example of Kwalitan, Atlas.ti, Maxqda or Folio Views. But it remains, no matter what, the researcher himself that has to interpret connections and place the research data in a larger perspective. The result of phenomenological research is always a reflection of what that specific researcher could see and understand.
AN EXPOSITION OF HUSSERL’S PHENOMENOLOGY
Phenomenology: Etymological and Classical Meanings
The term ‘phenomenology’ has had quite a long history in philosophy and to dabble into the rigorous ratiocinative exercise of defining it is to find oneself intellectually trapped in a web of lexical and conceptual confusion. It is a term that has been used in different senses in modern philosophy. Kant has occasionally used it to depict the study of phenomenon or appearances in contrast to the things – in – themselves. Hegel, on his part, used the term phenomenology to refer to the different stages which our consciousness has to pass through to arrive at absolute knowledge. For Martin Heidegger, phenomenology is used to apply to the question of existence. This is found in his famous work Being and Time. He used it as a way to achieve the vision of consciousness. His phenomenology is hermeneutic, that is, interpretative. In the recent times, phenomenology has usually been understood as referring to the philosophy developed by Edmund Gustav Abrecht Husserl a German Jew, who lived between 1859 and 1938. For Husserl, who is regarded as the ‘father’ of phenomenology, phenomenology is a philosophy or a method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. It is a presuppositionless inquiry or a critical research concerned with the descriptive delineation of what presents itself to consciousness as it present itself and in so far as it presents itself1. According to Husserl, objects of experience show themselves exactly as they are. What leads to distortion of reality are not the way things appear but the way and manner we position ourselves in relation to them. If we approach objects and events from a position of bias, prejudice, pre-conception or predisposition we end up with a grotesque and distorted picture of such objects and events. But phenomenology, for him, enables us to approach things from a predispositionless, unbiased, unprejudiced, presuppositionless position and we understand things as they are for we are enabled to grasp their essences. In Husserl’s conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection takes place from a highly modified ‘first person’ point of view, studying phenomena not as they appear to ‘my’ consciousness, but as they may appear to any conscious – mind whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a ‘rigorous science’.
Etymologically, phenomenology is derived from the two Greek words namely ‘phainómenon’ and ‘lógos’. The word phaìnómenon means to appear, to come to light or to show itself, a verb which may be traced back to the Indo-European root ‘pha’ connected with the idea of light or clarity. Phaìnómenon therefore, is “that which shows itself in itself; that which appears in the light, the manifest”. However, sometimes we talk of mere appearance implying that which shows itself is unreal and that reality remains hidden. When we turn to the second constituent of the word phenomenology namely: ogos, it also means showing or ‘Legein’. Legein is saying and also apophainoutai. Hence, it is either showing or saying. Thus, when we bring the logos to the phenomenon as it were, a second level of showing takes place. Speech articulates it so that phenomenology as a method is used to see phenomenon in such a way that obstructions are removed and we are made to notice the structure and interconnections that had hitherto been concealed or not brought to the light. Thus, Martin Heidegger captures it\ more aptly when he defines phenomenology as “that which shows itself to be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself”].
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), Husserl’s student, rejected the theory of knowledge known as epistemology, and adopted ontology, the science of being. Heidegger developed interpretive phenomenology by extending hermeneutics, the philosophy of interpretation . He broadened hermeneutics by studying the concept of being in the world rather than knowing the world. Hermeneutics moves beyond the description or core concepts of the experience and seeks meanings that are embedded in everyday occurrences. Thus, the critical question for Heidegger was: What is being? Heidegger, who was interested in interpreting and describing human experience, believed that bracketing was not warranted because hermeneutics presumed prior understanding. Heidegger believed it was impossible to negate our experiences related to the phenomenon under study, for he believed personal awareness was intrinsic to phenomenological research. Heidegger rejected understanding how we know as humans, but accepted knowing
as what it means to be . According to Dahlberg, Drew and Nystrom , “Heidegger asserted that human existence is a more fundamental notion than human consciousness and human knowledge. His philosophy makes it clear that the essence of human understanding is hermeneutic, that is, our understanding of the everyday world is derived from our interpretation of it”. When would a researcher choose to use either Husserl’s descriptive or Heidegger’s interpretive phenomenology? Researchers who choose to understand and conduct either descriptive or interpretive phenomenological research need to be interested in how an individual’s consciousness perceives their description or interpretation of an object or an event. Hence, in the moment of perceiving, the individual implicitly describes or interprets the meaning of the experience through patterns that embody the gestalt of the phenomenon . Interpretive phenomenology is used when the research question asks for the meaning of the phenomenon and the researcher does not bracket their biases and prior engagement with the question under study. Descriptive phenomenology is used when the researcher wants to describe the phenomenon under study and brackets their biases.
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