Introduction to Phenomenology Book

Let's talk about the obvious.

Introducing the subject matter of phenomenology is a notoriously difficult affair to pull off. Perhaps no other domain of inquiry, aside from philosophy itself, finds it so difficult to introduce itself and to carve out its subject matter in a definite way. This can be seen from the way that Husserl spent his whole career introducing readers - and himself - to phenomenology over and over again. The unshakable sense of dissatisfaction that Husserl felt with each completed introduction, which led him to seek ever new angles into this domain of inquiry, is quite instructive. It reveals something about how phenomenology, as a subject, is distinct from others. I think Sokolowski's work here does a good job of bringing out the meaning of phenomenology as a distinct field of inquiry into things so obvious that they are generally deemed theoretically uninteresting.

He shows the way that phenomenology is hard to talk about not because it deals with something mysterious, remote from our ordinary understanding of our experience, or because its practitioners are inebriated with obscurantism. Rather, he points out again and again that the oftentimes cumbersome conceptual and terminological apparatus is introduced by theorists in their efforts to as precisely as possible make explicit the merely implicit, presupposed, and taken-for-granted structures of our experience. He shows that phenomenologists are that strange breed of human that finds a source of wonder in the obvious. However, talking about the obvious brings them up, again and again, against the limits of discourse. We have grown used to the ways that extraordinary, exotic phenomena - such as those disclosed by contemporary physics - push us towards the limits of representation. We are a bit less familiar with the way that the obvious, no less than the extraordinary and the radically other, involves us in a similar difficulty. It seems to be a definitive tendency of theoretical discourse to increase in complexity the closer it gets to articulating the obvious. The more obvious the datum described, the more opaque the discourse describing it. That is, provided that the discourse does its job and succeeds in clarifying all the distinctions that are there to be had in the original datum. The limits of our ability to discursively articulate the structure of experience being what they are, Sokolowski points out that phenomenology seems obscure only because it asks us to look at and to accurately describe (or thematize) those structures that we are used to just seeing through.

Moreover, phenomenology is strange in another respect: it is the beginner's philosophy, and as such it starts its questioning further upstream than virtually all other schools of philosophy (even the Kantian) do. Since phenomenology concerns itself with making explicit how any phenomena are constituted, or made present to consciousness, it asks its questions, starts its descriptions and poses its problems a few steps back from where others begin, with phenomena already constituted and distinctions already cemented. Sokolowski's work has the virtue of clearly and economically expressing the philosophical significance of phenomenology as the discipline concerned with articulating the structures that determines our inescapable starting point. Moreover, Sokolowski understands how this feature of phenomenology can alienate people unfamiliar with the practice. An analysis of the obvious is equated by such readers with an analysis of the trivial and the unnecessary. Perhaps this kind of outlook bars people from phenomenology. As Sokolowski suggests, this outlook obscures the key strength of phenomenology, which is its ability to bring any given discipline to a self-reflexive, self-critical understanding of the structures of experience that allow us to disclose and to conceptualize the objective domain that the discipline maps out:

"So long as a science is merely objective, it is lost in positivity. We have truth about things, but we have no truth about our possession of these things. We forget ourselves and lose ourselves even as we are fascinated by the things we know. The scientific truths are left floating and unpossessed. They seem to be nobody's truth. To round out the science, to be fully scientific, we would need to investigate the subjective structural activities at work in the science, and to do so is not simply to continue doing molecular biology or solid state physics. It is to turn from such sciences and to enter into a new, reflective stance, the phenomenological, which does justice to the intentionalities that we exercise but do not make thematic in our prior scientific endeavours." (53)

Hence, Sokolowski does a great job of showing how phenomenology is intended as a method that can disclose the meaning of the scientific domains that already exist, since it discloses the kinds of intentional activities that constitute those domains but that are not brought to explicit awareness in any of them (since the sciences merely presuppose them, and are, as such, not in a position to explicate them).

Unlike other readers on here, who criticize Sokolowski for his lack of scholarly detail, I rather liked his approach to the problem of introducing phenomenology. He is focused on presenting his own understanding (really, a distillation) of key phenomenological terms such as intentionality. Take for instance this passage describing the essential interrelation of self and world in intentionality:

"The world as a whole and the I as the center are the two singularities between which all other things can be placed. The world and the I are correlated with one another in a way different from the manner in which a particular intentionality is correlated with the thing that it intends. The world and the ego provide an ultimate dual, elliptical context for everything." (44)

Such passages give an elegant, economical, and a quite accurate characterization of the basic logic of such terms as intentionality. Moreover, Sokolowski clarifies such key terms and doctrines without getting tangled up in the scholarly, interpretive mess of teasing apart and of comparing/contrasting different theorists' understandings of these terms and doctrines. It is, after all, too much to ask of the beginner to negotiate these interpretative thickets when they might not even be familiar with the data that phenomenology purports to describe or with the language that it uses to describe it. Best to leave the whole hacking through the weeds for later. Also, this approach is refreshing because too much phenomenology is bogged down by an almost scholastic, sterile tendency to exegesis. What Sokolowski does instead is just present a skeletal understanding of the key terms that you can then use to orient yourself in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, or Merleau-Ponty. He gives you a pattern to look for and to move out from in your future readings (should you choose to suffer through more, that is). Having just spent the last nine months combing through Husserl's Cartesian Meditations, I really was regreting after reading Sokolowski that I had not read his work first. He offers a highly simplified exposition of some of the key conclusions that are to be found in the thicket of the Cartesian Meditations.

What I didn't like about Sokolowski's introduction is that this book was thin on argumentation. It is really just a compilation of definitions of phenomenological terms, illustrated by some descriptions. However, to get a sense as to why anyone might want to include these terms into their conceptual toolkit, or why phenomenologists felt compelled to postulate them to begin with, you have to go back to the original arguments of the phenomenologists. None of them were so crude as to beg the question against competing theories and to just dogmatically postulate, say, intentionality as a first principle of inquiry. The way this introduction proceeds, it would seem that intentionality really does have the status of an unargued-for, presupposed first principle. It doesn't show the way that phenomenologists argue that seeing experience as intentional, or as world-involving, provides explanatory benefits over both the atomistic view of experience that the classical empiricists proposed, and the unsituated view of reason of classical rationalists. This omission on the author's part paints an unfortunate image of phenomenology as a series of doctrines that one just has to accept as self-evident and to adopt wholesale. To that I say, who the hell should care about it if that is what it is? Moreover, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty provide intricate arguments as to why we should even take the phenomenological attitude at all (in short, it is presupposed not just by the natural attitude and thus by science, but also by a full analysis of the meaning of objective knowledge). You can find some schematic gesturing towards these arguments, but none is really given in full. Too much emphasis is placed by him on phenomenology as description rather than on phenomenology as a technique of transcendental argument. This can make phenomenology seem to be just a collage of pretty pictures, not a rigorously argued discipline. Again, while the pictures are lovely, their significance cannot be fully appreciated without going through the arguments that make it necessary for us to paint these pictures.

Zahavi's works tend to do a better job of introducing not just the key findings of phenomenological method, but also some of the arguments for and against various foundational phenomenological tenets. He also situates phenomenology in relation to contemporary theories in cognitive science and Anglo-American philosophy of mind, and shows some of the explanatory benefits of phenomenology - i.e. some of the concrete research problems that it helps us solve. In particular, I'd recommend Zahavi and Gallagher's The Phenomenological Mind as a tightly argued introduction that clarifies the central concepts, while also engaging with competing contemporary theoretical approaches.