IEP 405: Phenomenology and Environment

AWAYMAVE - The Distance Mode of MA in Values and the Environment at Lancaster University

Week 2. Some Key phenomenological Componants

SOME KEY COMPONENTS EXPLORED IN MORE DETAIL

Phenomenologists are often accused of using obfuscating jargon rather than just explaining things clearly and I think you will find that some texts do seem to throw in terms that, in order to make sense, rely on a lot of prior knowledge. In order to make sense of some of the texts we will be studying and to understand what is being asked for in an exercise it is going to be necessary to unpack some of the specialist terminology. Once this is done we can then see that, in some areas, what we call jargon is actually an essential shorthand that we use to communicate with others who have also grasped the same key ideas and are starting to use them. Without these specialist terms, or agreed substitutes for them, we would always be starting from scratch rather than moving on from where we got to last time.

Intentionality

A good example of exactly this process in action is given by Sokolowski in his first chapter where he examines the meaning of intentionality for phenomenology.

Please read chapter 1 of Sokolowski's Introduction to Phenomenology now.

An aspect of intentionality that Husserl identifies that is worth just emphasising is that it is not as if there is consciousness as an entity and now and again it becomes conscious of something and thus becomes intentional. The idea that the nature of consciousness is intentionality means that consciousness is always consciousness of something.

Exercise 2.1

Think before going on. Jot down in a sentence or two what you understand (from what you have read) to be the relationship between intending (your consciousness being directed towards X) and the thing intended (X as it is in your consciousness).

This is quite a hard question to start off with, but I want to prompt you to start thinking about this and then when we come to some further specialist terms later you will be alive to the problem that they solve.

Horizons, absent profiles and the ‘carried along with’.

When we start to explore a phenomenon in consciousness one of the striking aspects that Husserl drew attention to was what he called its "horizonal intentionality". This looks like more jargon, but what this term is getting at is the way a thing appears to us as more than just, for example with a thing we see, the profile that is presented. What we experience is not the profile as if it is a cardboard cut-out, but the thing as we have come to understand it to be.

For example, sitting around a table at dinner and looking at the neck of a wine bottle I see it as a wine bottle on the table even though the body of the bottle is obscured by a cake. I could be wrong, someone could move the cake and reveal a wire sculpture that just happens to have a neck of a wine bottle as its uppermost flourish. What our normal operation of consciousness is able to do is take in the context, fill in the gaps, imaginatively switch my position to being at the other side of the table and so on.

Have a go at imaginatively placing yourself at the opposite side of the table, how do things look from there?

Now read chapter 2 of Sokolowski to explore this idea further

Husserl uses the example of a die but also that of a tree and talks of how the tree perception is never just the profile but always the co-intended. His claim is not that we see the profile of a tree and we add to that lots of other stuff which may or may not be accurate. What he wants to bring to awareness is that to see the tree as a tree our seeing a tree experience has to have those extended horizons or as he sometimes calls them “anticipations”.

Exercise 2.2

Last week you were asked to have a go at a phenomenological description (exercise 1.1), please now return to your description and see if you can identify any record of identifying extended horizons. You were perhaps thinking of more abstract presuppositions, for example, seeing a branch on the ground ‘as potential firewood’ rather than seeing a branch on the ground ‘as having fallen from the tree next to it’.

If you didn’t do the exercise relating to the phenomenological description, please go back and have a go now. In this module there will be quite a bit of going back to previous work and taking things forward from where you got to last time. It is, therefore, essential that you do carry out and keep a record of what you did. If an exercise is ever just an optional clarification or pointer I will indicate that this is the case.

We tend to think of presuppositions as a bad thing and indeed one of the strengths of phenomenology is purported to be its ability to strip away presuppositions so that we see the phenomenon as it really is, not as our prejudices present it to us. And, yes, I think that is a strength that it can lay claim to.

However, to get at how it does this, we need to be clear about the way in which all perception, if it is to have meaning for us, will entail extended horizons. They just are the co-intending of absent aspects and without them we would, I guess, live in a world of meaningless single profiles.

Let us go back to Sokolowski now for a bit more on presences and absences and their relationship to intentionality.

Please now read chapter 3 of Sokolowski. Do look out for the helpful definition of intuition.

To check your understanding, please jot down your own examples of

1. pieces and wholes
2. an identity in a manifold
3. your own experience of a filled and an empty intention.

In coming up with these examples I am sure you will notice that the distinctions being made are in one sense utterly banal and yet, by drawing attention to them, we begin the process of attending to our experience of the world in a slightly different way.

The natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude

A fundamental distinction is made by Husserl between our normal, everyday, way of going about our business in the world and our ability to stand back and reflect on that normal mode. Everything we have looked a so far (intentionality, horizons etc.) has involved drawing attention to things we do not normally draw attention to when we are in the natural attitude. A central characteristic of the natural attitude is our unproblematic acceptance of the world existing, prior to any theorising the world is just there for us. Phenomenology is often mistakenly believed to be about destroying that naïve view and replacing it with a form of scepticism about anything other than our own intending. This is not the case and a careful reading of the next Sokolowski chapter will reveal the relationship between the two attitudes: the natural and the phenomenological as understood by Husserl.

Please now read chapter 4 of Sokolowski

Sokolowski makes the point that the natural attitude can be thought of as our default mode and it has a central component of presenting the world as existing. However, there are within it specialist forms of understanding, for example, a medical doctor, a traffic flow expert, a botanist will look upon the same street scene with different vocabularies, aspects highlighted and theoretical knowledge entailed. Nevertheless, they are all in the natural attitude, they are just attending to different aspects of the street scene. As individuals we have probably all experienced shifting our perspective within the natural attitude; some new knowledge or interest means that we see the world differently we attend to things that we did not use to notice.

Exercise 2.3

Think of an example of this from your own experience.

The example that often gets used in texts is ‘the scientific’ as part of the natural attitude. This was Husserl’s focus and can then be followed through to examining a problem with the foundations of science as presented (as if from outside of the natural attitude) and the intrusion of scientific reasoning into aspects of life where it does not necessarily have a place (scientism).

However, it is useful to see some others as well so that we don’t think that the natural attitude is another term for the scientific attitude. We could have a natural attitude that is flavoured by sports cars or pet dogs or architectural heritage as well as having all the background of usual shared understandings and beliefs within a culture. At the core of the natural attitude is belief in the existence of the world and it is reflection on this core aspect that is at the heart of the phenomenological method.

Reductions, bracketing and the epoché

When we bracket something we set it aside for later consideration, the term is taken by Husserl from mathematics and it is a useful one that has entered more general language by the same route. I noted in a meeting the other day someone, who is neither a phenomenologist nor a mathematician, saying about a particular aspect of the item under discussion, ‘let’s bracket that side of the issue and get on with whether it could be implemented’. There are many things we might ‘bracket’ for many purposes and in phenomenology a range of these are discussed and the process is sometimes called a reduction. For example, to get at the essence of a particular phenomenon I might choose to bracket the terms in which it is usually spoken of. Here I am perhaps suspicious that the terms might be value laden or might be making me view the phenomenon in a preordained way. A good example that came up in the class last year was that of calling a particular set of behaviours ‘delinquent’. By bracketing the term we could look again and reflect on the behaviours just as a set of behaviours or even just events: X happened, Y happened, Z happened. We are then in a position to look further and reflect further on the stream of events and we might see them in a new light. We might decide that the label delinquent was an apposite one, but not before we had allowed the events some openess or room to reveal themselves. What is revealed could then be examined for alternative interpretations.

The most radical form of bracketing is termed in Phenomenology the epoché and this is simply a putting to one side all questions about the existence or inexistence of the phenomenon that we are intending (have in our conscious experience). I say it is simply this, but that does not mean it is easy to actually do.

Exercise 2.4

Take a particular phenomenon, a pen or book, something in front of you, as your focus and have a go at bracketing any assumptions or beliefs about its existence in the world. Write down any observations about this process.

Noesis Noema distinction

In reflecting on your phenomenon as experienced in the exercise above you are in a good position to perhaps tease out the distinction between these two terms correctly. Sokolowski gives a good clear treatment of this on pages 59-61. (in all fairness I should point out that there is a disagreement within phenomenology about the interpretation of what a noema is for Husserl, but for our purposes – to find something that can be carried out and have purchase on and in the world – the interpretation given is the most useful and, I think, the correct one.)

In the natural attitude I see that there is a book in front of me and I don’t even think about whether it exists or not. There is the book on the desk and I can think about it. In the phenomenological attitude I need this specialist terminology to explain what is going on. Because I have bracketed lots of beliefs and assumptions including ‘that the book exists’ I now have the book I have in my consciousness (the noema) and the activity of intending -being directed toward- the book (the noesis). The noema is not a way of talking about the book as an object on the table separate from me, but a way of talking about being aware of a book in my consciousness. Because bracketing or the epoche is not fundamentally about doubt it is not the case that the only book we can talk about is some kind of idealist manifestation of a book in my consciousness unrelated to the book on the table. However, because we are being very rigorous about what we can be sure of all we can say is that the noema is, in this case, the book on the table as viewed from the phenomenological attitude. So the noema is the book as-it-is-intended. The noesis is not problematic at all as it just means the activity of intending. An easy way to picture this relationship is to see it as the thing thought and the act of thinking about it. This also brings out the reciprocal nature of the relationship between noema and noesis. They are like two sides of the same coin.

I asked at exercise 2.1 that you jot down your understanding of the relationship between intending and that which is intended. Have a look at what you wrote then and see if the noema / noesis distinction would help you out.