Phenomenological Approach
Phenomenologists conduct research in ways that share most of the following positive and negative features.
1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking;
2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also called objectivism and positivism), which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance;
3. Positively speaking, phenomenologists tend to justify cognition (and some also evaluation and action) with reference to what Edmund Husserl called evidenz, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind;
4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known;
5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called "encountering" as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon "objects as they are encountered" (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires is);
6. Phenomenologists tend to recognize the role of description in universal, a priori, or "eidetic" terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and
7. Phenomenologists tend to debate whether or not what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epochê and reduction is useful or even possible.
From the Center for Advance Research in Phenomenology.
What conveys this consistency in virtue of which innumerable types of inquiry-scientific, social, artistic, literary – may consider themselves phenomenological?
ReplyDeleteIs it not the quintessence of the phenomenological quest, namely our seeking to reach the very foundations of reality at all its constitutive levels by pursuing its logos? Inquiring into the logos of the phenomenological quest we discover, indeed, all the main constitutive spheres of reality and of the human subject involved in it, and concurrently, the logos itself comes to light in the radiation of its force (Tymieniecka).
From a review of Christian Madsbjerg. Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023 by James McCullough:
ReplyDeleteThe practical thesis of Madsbjerg’s project is the stock and trade of good phenomenology—don’t rely on what you think; go to the thing itself and begin living with it. With patience, persistence and practice, patterns will present themselves. Details and repetitions will start to cohere into the emergence of that favourite of German phenomenologists’ word-horde—a gestalt, a meaningful whole. And the pay-off is what Madsbjerg calls ‘insight’, further described in frankly spiritual terms:
When you experience an insight like this—especially after having wrestled with a particular topic for a long period of time—it is a tremendous relief. The truth of reality emerges from the patterns of the phenomenon. Your mind is finally at ease. The experience of this kind of insight is so thrilling; in fact, it justifies all the effort. It could be an end in and of itself. (209)
The late James Loder of Princeton Theological Seminary taught a process toward insight which anticipates much of what Madsbjerg writes. Loder outlined personally transformative observation (which is what Madsbjerg promotes as well) in terms of (1) the presentation of a conflict, a dissatisfaction, and conundrum, followed by (2) and “interlude for scanning,” the patient process of looking, of indwelling the art-work or situation long enough almost to become identified with it, (3) a constructive act of imagination where the latent gestalt begins to emerge resulting in a (4) eureka-type of moment like Madsbjerg describes above, and (5) the placement of this new insight within an ever-growing sense of things which gradually transforms the observer as much as it might contribute to the advancement of knowledge.