Biemel, Walter and Spiegelberg, Herbert. "phenomenology".

Encyclopedia Britannica,
26 May. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/phenomenology. Accessed 5 July
2023.

Phenomenology (ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA)

philosophy
Print Cite Share Feedback 
Written by 

Walter Biemel, 
Herbert SpiegelbergSee All
Fact-checked by 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: May 26, 2023 • Article History

Edmund Husserl
See all media
Key People:
 
Jean-Paul Sartre Max Scheler Maurice Merleau-Ponty Alfred Schutz Edith Stein
Related Topics:
 
phenomenology of religion phenomenological psychology life-world Uppsala
school reduction
...(Show more)
See all related content →
phenomenology, a philosophical movement originating in the 20th century, the primary
objective of which is the direct investigation and description
of phenomena as consciously experienced, without theories about their
causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and
presuppositions. The word itself is much older, however, going back at least to the 18th
century, when the Swiss German mathematician and philosopher Johann Heinrich
Lambert applied it to that part of his theory of knowledge that
distinguishes truth from illusion and error. In the 19th century the word became
associated chiefly with the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; Phenomenology of
Mind), by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who traced the development of the human
spirit from mere sense experience to “absolute knowledge.” The so-called
phenomenological movement did not get under way, however, until early in the 20th
century. But even this new phenomenology included so many varieties that
a comprehensive characterization of the subject requires their consideration.
Characteristics of phenomenology
In view of the spectrum of phenomenologies that have issued directly or indirectly from
the original work of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl, it is not easy to find a
common denominator for such a movement beyond its common source. But similar
situations occur in other philosophical as well as nonphilosophical movements.
Essential features and variations
Although, as seen from Husserl’s last perspective, all departures from his own views
could appear only as heresies, a more generous assessment will show that all those who
consider themselves phenomenologists subscribe, for instance, to his watchword, zu den
Sachen selbst (“to the things themselves”), by which they meant the taking of a fresh
approach to concretely experienced phenomena—an approach as free as possible
from conceptual presuppositions—and the attempt to describe them as faithfully as
possible. Moreover, most adherents to phenomenology hold that it is possible to obtain
insights into the essential structures and the essential relationships of these phenomena
on the basis of a careful study of concrete examples supplied by experience or
imagination and by a systematic variation of these examples in the imagination. Some
phenomenologists also stress the need for studying the ways in which the phenomena
appear in object-directed, or “intentional,” consciousness.
Beyond this merely static aspect of appearance, some also want to investigate its genetic
aspect, exploring, for instance, how the phenomenon intended—for example, a book—
shapes (“constitutes”) itself in the typical unfolding of experience. Husserl himself
believed that such studies require a previous suspension of belief (“epochē”) in the
reality of these phenomena, whereas others consider it not indispensable but helpful.
Finally, in existential phenomenology, the meanings of certain phenomena (such
as anxiety) are explored by a special interpretive (“hermeneutic”) phenomenology,
the methodology of which needs further clarification.
Contrasts with related movements
It may also be helpful to bring out the distinctive essence of phenomenology by
comparing it with some of its philosophical neighbours. In contrast to positivism and to
traditional empiricism, from which Husserl’s teacher at Vienna, Franz Brentano, had
started and with which phenomenology shares an unconditional respect for the positive
data of experience (“We are the true positivists,” Husserl claimed in his Ideen zu einer
reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie [1913; “Ideas for a Pure
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy”]), phenomenology does not restrict
these data to the range of sense experience but admits on equal terms such nonsensory
(“categorial”) data as relations and values, as long as they present
themselves intuitively. Consequently, phenomenology does not reject universals, and, in
addition to analytic a priori statements, whose predicates are logically contained in the
subjects and the truth of which is independent of experience (e.g., “All material bodies
have extension”), and the synthetic a posteriori statements, whose subjects do not
logically imply the predicate and the truth of which is dependent on experience (e.g.,
“My shirt is red”), it recognizes knowledge of the synthetic a priori, a proposition whose
subject does not logically imply the predicate but one in which the truth is independent
of experience (e.g., “Every colour is extended”), based on insight into essential
relationships within the empirically given.
In contrast to phenomenalism, a position in the theory of knowledge (epistemology)
with which it is often confused, phenomenology—which is not primarily an
epistemological theory—accepts neither the rigid division between appearance and
reality nor the narrower view that phenomena are all that there is (sensations or
permanent possibilities of sensations). These are questions on which phenomenology as
such keeps an open mind—pointing out, however, that phenomenalism overlooks the
complexities of the intentional structure of consciousness of the phenomena.

Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content.

Subscribe Now
In contrast to a rationalism that stresses conceptual reasoning at the expense of
experience, phenomenology insists on the intuitive foundation and verification of
concepts and especially of all a priori claims; in this sense it is a philosophy from
“below,” not from “above.”
In contrast to some strains of analytic philosophy that substitute simplified constructions
for the immediately given in all of its complexity and apply “Ockham’s razor,”
phenomenology resists all transforming reinterpretations of the given, analyzing it for
what it is in itself and on its own terms.
Phenomenology shares with ordinary-language philosophy a respect for the distinctions
between the phenomena reflected in the shades of meaning of ordinary language as a
possible starting point for phenomenological analyses. Phenomenologists, however, do
not think that the study of ordinary language is a sufficient basis for studying the
phenomena, because ordinary language cannot and need not completely reveal the
complexity of phenomena.
In contrast to an existential philosophy that believes that human existence is unfit for
phenomenological analysis and description, because it tries to objectify the
unobjectifiable, phenomenology holds that it can and must deal with these phenomena,
however cautiously, as well as other intricate phenomena outside human existence.
Herbert Spiegelberg
Origin and development of Husserl’s phenomenology
Basic principles
Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Its fountainhead was Husserl, who held
professorships at Göttingen and Freiburg im Breisgau and who wrote Die Idee der
Phänomenologie (The Idea of Phenomenology) in 1906. Yet, even for Husserl,
the conception of phenomenology as a new method destined to supply a new foundation
for both philosophy and science developed only gradually and kept changing to the very
end of his career. Husserl was trained as a mathematician and was attracted to
philosophy by Brentano, whose descriptive psychology seemed to offer a solid basis for
a scientific philosophy. The concept of intentionality, the directedness of
the consciousness toward an object, which is a basic concept in phenomenology, was
already present in Brentano’s Psychologie vom empirischen
Standpunkte (1874; Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint): “And thus we can
define psychic phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which, precisely as
intentional, contain an object in themselves.” Brentano dissociated himself here from
the Scottish philosopher Sir William Hamilton, known for his philosophy of the
“unconditioned,” who had attributed the character of intentionality to the realms of
thought and desire only, to the exclusion of that of feeling.
The point of departure of Husserl’s investigation is to be found in the treatise Über den
Begriff der Zahl (1887; Concerning the Concept of Number), which was later expanded
into Philosophie der Arithmetik: Psychologische und logische
Untersuchungen (1891; Philosophy of Arithmetic: Psychological and Logical
Investigations). Numbers are not found ready-made in nature but result from a mental
achievement. Here Husserl was preoccupied with the question of how something like
the constitution of numbers ever comes about. This treatise is important to Husserl’s
later development for two reasons: first, because it contains the first traces of the
concepts “reflection,” “constitution,” “description,” and the “founding constitution of
meaning,” concepts that later played a predominant role in Husserl’s philosophy; and
second, because criticism of the book by the German logician Gottlob Frege, who
charged Husserl with confusing logical and psychological considerations, subsequently
led Husserl to an analysis and critical discussion of psychologism, the view that
psychology could be used as a foundation for pure logic.
In the first volume of Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; Logical Investigations),
entitled Prolegomena, Husserl began with a criticism of psychologism. Yet he
continued by conducting a careful investigation of the psychic acts in and through
which logical structures are given; these investigations too could give the impression of
being descriptive psychological investigations, though they were not conceived of in
this way by the author, for the issue at stake was the discovery of the essential structure
of these acts. Here Brentano’s concept of intentionality received a richer and more
refined signification. Husserl distinguished between perceptual and
categorical intuition and stated that the latter’s theme lies in logical relationships. The
real concern of phenomenology was clearly formulated for the first time in his article
“Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft” (1910–11; “Philosophy as Rigorous Science”).
In this work Husserl wrestled with two unacceptable views: naturalism and historicism.
Naturalism attempts to apply the methods of the natural sciences to all other domains of
knowledge, including the realm of consciousness. Reason becomes naturalized.
Although an attempt is then made to find a foundation for the human sciences
(Geisteswissenschaften) by means of experimental psychology, it proves to be
impossible, because in so doing one is unable to grasp precisely what is at stake in
knowledge as found in the natural sciences.
What a philosopher must examine is the relationship between consciousness and Being,
and in doing so, he must realize that from the standpoint of epistemology, Being is
accessible to him only as a correlate of conscious acts. He must thus pay careful
attention to what occurs in these acts. This can be done only by a science that tries to
understand the very essence of consciousness, and this is the task that phenomenology
has set for itself. Because clarification of the various types of objects must follow from
the basic modes of consciousness, Husserl’s thought remained close to psychology. In
contradistinction to what is the case in psychology, however, in phenomenology
consciousness is thematized in a very special and definite way—viz., just insofar as
consciousness is the locus in which every manner of constituting and founding meaning
must take place. In human intuition, conscious occurrences must be given immediately
in order to avoid introducing at the same time certain interpretations. The nature of such
processes as perception, representation, imagination, judgment, and feeling must be
grasped in immediate self-givenness. The call “To the things themselves” is not a
demand for realism, because the things at stake are the acts of consciousness and the
objective entities that get constituted in them: these things form the realm of what
Husserl calls the phenomena.
Thus, the objects of phenomenology are “absolute data grasped in pure, immanent
intuition,” and its goal is to discover the essential structures of the acts (noesis) and the
objective entities that correspond to them (noema).
Wilhelm Dilthey
On the other hand, phenomenology must also be distinguished from historicism,
a philosophy that stresses the immersion of all thinkers within a particular historical
setting. Husserl objected to historicism because it implies relativism. He gave credit to
the German philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, author of “Entwürfe zur Kritik der
historischen Vernunft” (“Outlines for the Critique of Historical Reason”), for having
developed a typification of worldviews, but he doubted and even rejected
the skepticism that flows necessarily from the relativity of the various types. History is
concerned with facts, whereas phenomenology deals with the knowledge of essences.
To Husserl, Dilthey’s doctrine of worldviews was incapable of achieving the rigour
required by genuine science. Contrary to all of the practical tendencies found in
worldviews, Husserl demanded that philosophy be founded as a rigorous science. Its
task implies that nothing should be accepted as given beforehand but that the
philosopher should try to find the way back to the real beginnings. This is tantamount to
saying, however, that he must try to find the way to the foundations of meaning that are
found in consciousness. Just as for the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel
Kant, the empirical has merely relative validity and never an absolute, or apodictic,
validity, so for Husserl too what is to be searched for is a scientific knowledge of
essences in contradistinction to a scientific knowledge of facts.
Basic method
The basic method of all phenomenological investigation, as Husserl developed it
himself—and on which he worked throughout his entire lifetime—is the “reduction”:
the existence of the world must be put between brackets, not because the philosopher
should doubt it but merely because this existing world is not the very theme of
phenomenology; its theme is rather the manner in which knowledge of the world comes
about. The first step of the reduction consists in the phenomenological reduction,
through which all that is given is changed into a phenomenon in the sense of that which
is known in and by consciousness, for this kind of knowing—which is to be taken in a
very broad sense as including every mode of consciousness, such as intuition,
recollection, imagination, and judgment—is here all-important. There are several
reasons why Husserl gave a privileged position to intuition; among them is the fact that
intuition is that act in which a person grasps something immediately in its bodily
presence and also that it is a primordially given act upon which all of the rest is to be
founded. Furthermore, Husserl’s stress on intuition must be understood as a refutation
of any merely speculative approach to philosophy.
This reduction reverses—“re-flects”—the human direction of sight from a
straightforward orientation toward objects to an orientation toward consciousness.
The second step is to be found in the eidetic reduction. To get hold of consciousness is
not sufficient; on the contrary, the various acts of consciousness must be made
accessible in such a way that their essences—their universal and unchangeable
structures—can be grasped. In the eidetic reduction, one must forgo everything that is
factual and merely occurs in this way or that. A means of grasping the essence is
the Wesensschau, the intuition of essences and essential structures. This is not a
mysterious kind of intuition. Rather, one forms a multiplicity of variations of what is
given, and while maintaining the multiplicity, one focuses attention on what remains
unchanged in the multiplicity; i.e., the essence is that identical something that
continuously maintains itself during the process of variation. Husserl, therefore, called it
the invariant.
Up to this point, the discussion of reduction has remained within the realm of
psychology, albeit a new—namely, a phenomenological—psychology. The second step
must now be completed by a third, the transcendental reduction. It consists in a
reversion to the achievements of that consciousness that Husserl, following Kant, called
transcendental consciousness, though he conceived of it in his own way. The most
fundamental event occurring in this consciousness is the creation of time awareness
through the acts of protention (future) and retention (past), which is something like a
self-constitution. To do phenomenology was for Husserl tantamount to returning to
the transcendental ego as the ground for the foundation and constitution (or making) of
all meaning (German Sinn). Only when a person has reached this ground can he achieve
the insight that makes his comportment transparent in its entirety and makes him
understand how meaning comes about, how meaning is based upon meaning like strata
in a process of sedimentation.
Husserl worked on the clarification of the transcendental reduction until the very end of
his life. It was precisely the further development of the transcendental reduction that led
to a division of the phenomenological movement and to the formation of a school that
refused to become involved in this kind of system of problems (see
below Phenomenology of essences).
Basic concepts
In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote:
In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something,
willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found
inherently a being-directed-toward…. Experiences are intentional. This being-directed-
toward is not just joined to the experience by way of a mere addition, and occasionally
as an accidental reaction, as if experiences could be what they are without the
intentional relation. With the intentionality of the experiences there announces itself,
rather, the essential structure of the purely psychical.
The phenomenological investigator must examine the different forms of intentionality
in a reflective attitude, because it is precisely in and through the corresponding
intentionality that each domain of objects becomes accessible to him. Husserl took as
his point of departure mathematical entities and later examined logical structures, in
order finally to achieve the insight that each being must be grasped in its correlation to
consciousness, because each datum becomes accessible to a person only insofar as it has
meaning for him. From this position, regional ontologies, or realms of being, develop—
for instance, those dealing with the region of “nature,” the region of “the psychic,” or
the region of “the spirit.” Moreover, Husserl distinguished formal ontologies—such as
the region of the logical—from material ontologies.
In order to be able to investigate a regional ontology, it is first necessary to discover and
examine the founding act by which realities in this realm are constituted. For Husserl,
constitution does not mean the creation or fabrication of a thing or object by a subject; it
means the founding constitution of its meaning. There is meaning only for
consciousness. All founding constitution of meaning is made possible by transcendental
consciousness. Speaking of this transcendental motif, Husserl wrote:
It is the motif of questioning back to the last source of all achievements of knowledge, of
reflection in which the knower reflects on himself and his knowing life, in which all the
scientific constructs which have validity for him, occur teleologically, and as permanent
acquisitions are kept and become freely available to him.
In the realm of such transcendental problems, it is necessary to examine how all of the
categories in and through which one understands mundane beings or purely formal
entities originate from specific modes of consciousness. In Husserl’s view, the
temporalization must be conceived as a kind of primordial constitution of transcendental
consciousness itself.
Understood in this way, phenomenology does not place itself outside the sciences but,
rather, attempts to make understandable what takes place in the various sciences and
thus to thematize the unquestioned presuppositions of the sciences.
In his last publication, Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die
transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische
Philosophie (1936; The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental
Phenomenology), Husserl arrived at the life-world—the world as shaped within the
immediate experience of each person—by questioning back to the foundations that the
sciences presuppose. In Die Krisis he analyzed the European crisis of culture and
philosophy, which found its immediate expression in the contrast between the great
successes of the natural sciences and the failure of the human sciences. In the modern
era, scientific knowledge had become fragmented into an objectivistic-physicalist
knowledge and a transcendental knowledge. Until recently this split could not be
overcome. It led, rather, to the attempt to develop the human sciences in accordance
with the procedures used in the exact sciences of nature (naturalism)—an attempt
doomed to failure. In opposition to this attempt, Husserl wished to show that in the new
approach one must reflect on the activities of the scientists.
As the immediately given world, this merely subjective world, was forgotten in the
scientific thematization, the accomplishing subject, too, was forgotten and the scientist
himself was not thematized.
Husserl demonstrated this point by using the example of Galileo and his
mathematization of the world. The truth characteristic of the life-world is by no means
an inferior form of truth when compared with the exact, scientific truth but is, rather,
always a truth already presupposed in all scientific research. That is why Husserl
claimed that an ontology of the life-world must be developed—i.e., a systematic
analysis of the constitutive achievements the result of which is the life-world, a life-
world that is, in turn, the foundation of all scientific constitutions of meaning. The
stimulating change that occurred here consists in the fact that truth is no longer
measured after the criterion of an exact determination. For what is decisive is not the
exactness but, rather, the part played by the founding act.
It is in this connection that, rather abruptly, historicity too became relevant for Husserl.
He began to reflect upon the emergence of philosophy among the Greeks and on its
significance as a new mode of scientific knowledge oriented toward infinity, and he
interpreted the philosophy of René Descartes, often called the father of modern
philosophy, as the point at which the split into the two research directions—
physicalist objectivism and transcendental subjectivism—came about. Phenomenology
must overcome this split, he held, and thus help humanity to live according to the
demands of reason. In view of the fact that reason is the typical characteristic of
humans, humankind must find itself again through phenomenology.
Later developments
Phenomenology of essences
A different type of phenomenology, the phenomenology of essences, developed from a
tangential continuation of that of the Logische Untersuchungen. Its supporters were
Husserl’s students in Göttingen and a group of young philosophers in Munich,
originally students of Theodor Lipps, a Munich psychologist and philosopher—students
who had turned away from Lipp’s psychologism and discovered powerful support in
Husserl. The phenomenological movement, which then began to take shape, found its
most tangible expression in the publication of the Jahrbuch für Philosophie und
phänomenologische Forschung (1913–30), a phenomenological yearbook with Husserl
as its main editor, the preface of which defined phenomenology in terms of a return
to intuition (Anschauung) and to the essential insights (Wesenseinsichten) derived from
it as the ultimate foundation of all philosophy.
The 11 volumes of the Jahrbuch contained, in addition to Husserl’s own works, the
most important fruits of the movement in its broader application. Of the
coeditors, Alexander Pfänder contributed chiefly to the development
of phenomenological psychology and pure logic but developed also the outlines of a
complete phenomenological philosophy. Moritz Geiger applied the new approach
particularly to aesthetics and Adolf Reinach to the philosophy of law. The most original
and dynamic of Husserl’s early associates, however, was Max Scheler, who had joined
the Munich group and who did his major phenomenological work on problems of value
and obligation. A Polish philosopher, Roman Ingarden, did major work in
structural ontology and analyzed the structures of various works of art in its
light; Hedwig Conrad-Martius, a cosmic realist at the University of Munich, worked
intensively in the ontology of nature; and others made comparable contributions in other
fields of philosophy. None of these early phenomenologists, however, followed
Husserl’s road to transcendental idealism, and some tried to develop a phenomenology
along the lines of realism.
Heidegger’s hermeneutic phenomenology
Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger, one of Germany’s foremost philosophers of the first half of the 20th
century, was inspired to philosophy through Brentano’s work Von der mannigfachen
Bedeutung des Seienden nach Aristoteles (1862; On the Several Senses of Being in
Aristotle). While he was still studying theology, from 1910 to 1911, Heidegger
encountered Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen. From then on he pursued the course
of phenomenology with the greatest interest, and from 1916 he belonged to the narrow
circle of students and followers of the movement. The typical character of the
phenomenological intuition was at that time the focus of Husserl’s seminar exercises.
To be sure, there appeared very early a difference between Husserl and Heidegger.
Discussing and absorbing the works of the important philosophers in the history
of metaphysics was, for Heidegger, an indispensable task, whereas Husserl repeatedly
stressed the significance of a radically new beginning and—with few exceptions
(among them Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Kant)—wished to bracket the
history of philosophy.
Heidegger’s basic work, Sein und Zeit (1927; Being and Time), which was dedicated to
Husserl, strongly acknowledged that its author was indebted to phenomenology. In it,
phenomenology was understood as a methodological concept—a concept that was
conceived by Heidegger in an original way and resulted from his questioning back to
the meanings of the Greek concepts of phainomenon and logos. Phainomenon is “that
which shows itself from itself,” but together with the concept of logos it means “to let
that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from
itself.” This conception of phenomenology, which relied more on Aristotle than on
Husserl, constituted a change that was later to lead to an estrangement between Husserl
and Heidegger, for in Sein und Zeit there is no longer a phenomenological reduction,
a transcendental ego, or an intuition of essences in Husserl’s sense. Heidegger’s new
beginning was, at the same time, a resumption of the basic question of philosophy: that
concerning the meaning (Sinn) of Being. His manner of questioning can be defined as
hermeneutical in that it proceeds from the interpretation of the human situation. What he
thematized is thus the explanation of what is already understood.
At the heart of Sein und Zeit lies Heidegger’s analysis of the one (the human individual)
who asks the question—who is capable of asking the question—concerning Being, who
precisely through this capability occupies a privileged position in regard to all other
beings—viz., that of Dasein (literally, “being there”). By conceiving of Dasein as
being-in-the-world, Heidegger made the ancient problem concerning the relationship
between subject and object superfluous. The basic structures
of Dasein are primordial moodness (Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen),
and logos (Rede). These structures are, in turn, founded in the temporalization
of Dasein, from which future, having-been (past), and present originate. The two basic
possibilities of human existing (from the Latin ex and sistere, “standing out from”) are
those in which Dasein either comes to its self (called authenticity) or loses itself (called
inauthenticity); Dasein is inauthentic, for example, when it lets the possibilities of the
choice for its own “ek-sisting” be given to it by others instead of deciding for itself.
Heidegger’s concept of care (Sorge, cura) has nothing to do with distress
(Bekümmernis) but includes the unity of the articulated moments of humanity’s being-
in-the-world.
The hermeneutic character of Heidegger’s thought manifested itself also in his
interpretation of poetry, in which he discovered a congenial spirit in Friedrich
Hölderlin, one of Germany’s greater poets, of whose work he inaugurated a completely
new interpretation; but it manifested itself equally in his interpretation of metaphysics,
which Heidegger tried to envision as an occurrence determined by the forgottenness of
Being, an occurrence in the centre of which humanity finds itself and of which the
clearest manifestation is to be found in “technicity,” the modern attempt to dominate the
Earth by controlling beings that are considered as objects.
The concept of transcendental consciousness, which was central for Husserl, is not
found in Heidegger—which clearly shows how Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit, had already
dissociated himself from Husserl’s phenomenology.
Other developments
Eugen Fink, for several years Husserl’s collaborator, whose essay “Die
phänomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik” (1933)
led to a radicalization of Husserl’s philosophical, transcendental idealism, later turned in
another direction, one that approached Heidegger’s position and divorced itself at the
same time from that of Husserl.
Ludwig Landgrebe, who was Husserl’s personal assistant for many years, published in
1939 Erfahrung und Urteil (Experience and Judgment), the first of
Husserl’s posthumous works devoted to the genealogy of logic. Among German-
language scholars, Landgrebe remained closest to Husserl’s original views and
developed them consistently in several works.
Dissemination of phenomenology
Phenomenology in various countries
Following upon the work of Husserl, phenomenology eventually became a worldwide
movement.
In France
Jean-Paul Sartre
One of the first French authors to become familiar with Husserl’s thought
was Emmanuel Lévinas, who combined ideas from Husserl and Heidegger in a
personalist philosophy. Similarly, Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading existentialist of France,
took his point of departure from the philosophies of Husserl and Heidegger. His first
works, L’Imagination (1936; Imagination: A Psychological Critique)
and L’Imaginaire: Psychologie phénoménologique de l’imagination (1940; The
Psychology of Imagination), remain completely within the context of Husserl’s analyses
of consciousness. Sartre explains the distinction between perceptual and
imaginative consciousness with the help of Husserl’s concept of intentionality, and he
frequently employs the method of ideation (Wesensschau).
In L’Être et le néant (1943; Being and Nothingness), an essay on
phenomenological ontology, it is obvious that Sartre borrowed from Heidegger. Some
passages from Heidegger’s Was ist Metaphysik? (1929; What Is Metaphysics?), in fact,
are copied literally. The meaning of nothingness, which Heidegger in this lecture made
the theme of his investigations, became for Sartre the guiding question. Sartre departs
from Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and introduces the position of consciousness
(which Heidegger had overcome).
The distinction between being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself (pour-soi) pervades
the entire investigation. The in-itself is the opaque matterlike substance that remains the
same, whereas the for-itself is consciousness permeated by nothingness. The influence
of Hegel becomes apparent when the author tries to interpret everything in
a dialectical way—i.e., through a tension of opposites. The dialectic of humans’ being-
with-one-another is central; thus, seeing and being-seen correspond to dominating and
being-dominated. The basic characteristic of being-for-itself is bad faith (mauvaise foi),
which cannot be overcome, because facticity (being-already) and transcendence (being-
able-to-be) cannot be combined.
More From Britannica
Western philosophy: The phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger

The phenomenological character of Sartre’s analyses of consciousness consists in the

way in which he elucidates certain modes of behaviour: love,
hatred, sadism, masochism, and indifference. Although Sartre sees and describes these
forms of behaviour strikingly and precisely, he limits himself to those modes that fit his
philosophical interpretation. The significance of psychology, recognized by Husserl,
emerges again in Sartre and leads to a demand for an existential psychoanalysis.
Sartre’s definition of “human” as a being of possibilities that finds or loses itself in the
choice that it makes in regard to itself refers to Heidegger’s definition of Dasein as a
being that has to materialize itself. For Sartre, freedom is the basic characteristic of
humanity; thus, Sartre belongs to the tradition of the great French moralist philosophers.
In his later works, as in his Critique de la raison dialectique (1960; Critique of
Dialectical Reason), Sartre turned to Marxism, though he developed a method of
understanding that was influenced by hermeneutics. Here the choice made by the
individual is limited by social and psychological conditions. Sartre’s outstanding two-
volume interpretation of Gustave Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille: Gustave Flaubert de
1821–1857 (1971; The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857), is an example of
this new method of understanding and interpretation, which combines Marxist elements
with interpretations of a highly personal nature taken from depth psychology.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who, together with Sartre and his companion, the
philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, was an important representative of
French existentialism, was at the same time the most important French
phenomenologist. His works, La Structure du comportement (1942; Structure of
Behaviour) and Phénoménologie de la perception (1945; Phenomenology of
Perception), were the most original further developments and applications of
phenomenology to come from France. Merleau-Ponty gave a new interpretation of the
meaning of the human body from the viewpoint of phenomenology and, connected with
this, of the human perception of space, the natural world, temporality, and freedom.
Starting from Husserl’s later phenomenology of the life-world, Merleau-Ponty anchored
the phenomena of perception in the phenomenology of the lived body (the body as it is
experienced and experiences), in which the perceiving subject is incarnated as the
mediating link to the phenomenal world. Such a phenomenology of human “presence”
in the world was also to offer an alternative to the
rigid dichotomy between idealism and realism, in which consciousness and world could
be reciprocally related. Phenomenology thus became a way of showing the essential
involvement of human existence in the world, starting with everyday perception.
Although it is true that Merleau-Ponty was originally close to Husserl in his thought, he
later developed noticeably in the direction of Heidegger, a change that became
particularly manifest in L’Oeil et l’esprit (1964; “Eye and Mind”).
Paul Ricoeur, a student of the volitional experience, whose translation of
Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie brought Husserl closer to the younger
French generation, wrote in a phenomenological vein but with the intention of further
developing Husserl’s conception of phenomenology. Ricoeur’s two-
volume Philosophie de la volonté (1950–60; Philosophy of the Will) also deals with the
problems involved in the theological concept of guilt.
Suzanne Bachelard, who in 1957 translated Husserl’s Formale und transzendentale
Logik: Versuch einer Kritik der logischen Vernunft (1929; Formal and Transcendental
Logic), pointed to the significance of Husserl for modern logic; and Jacques Derrida, the
father of deconstruction, combined phenomenology and structuralism in his
interpretation of literature.
In Germany
After World War II, interest in phenomenology sprang up again in its own homeland.
The influence of Ludwig Landgrebe in Cologne was particularly felt, as were the
activities of the Husserl Archives in Cologne, with editions by Walter Biemel, who also
published Philosophische Analysen zur Kunst der Gegenwart (1968; “Philosophical
Analyses of Contemporary Art”) and essays on the relationships between Husserl and
Heidegger. The circle around Gerhard Funke in Mainz, author of Phänomenologie—
Metaphysik oder Methode? (1966; Phenomenology: Metaphysics or Method?), also had
a positive influence.
In other European countries
The entire posthumous works of Husserl, as well as his personal library, were
transferred to the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain), in Belgium. Thanks to
the initiative of H.L. Van Breda, founder of the Husserl Archives, several scholars
worked intensively on the manuscripts for several decades. By the early 21st century,
more than 40 volumes of collected works had been published. Van Breda was also the
director of the Phaenomenologica series—totaling 200 volumes by the early 21st
century—in which the most important publications in the field of phenomenology
(taken in a very broad sense) were published. Thus, mainly through Van Breda’s efforts,
Leuven became the most important centre for phenomenology. Van Breda also
organized international colloquia on phenomenology. The influence of the Belgian
philosopher Alphonse de Waelhens, author of Phénoménologie et vérité (1953;
“Phenomenology and Truth”) and Existence et signification (1958; “Existence and
Meaning”), also bears mentioning.
In the Netherlands, Stephan Strasser, oriented particularly toward phenomenological
psychology, was especially influential. And in Italy, the phenomenology circle centred
around Enzo Paci. The Husserl scholar Jan Patocka, a prominent expert in
phenomenology as well as in the metaphysical tradition, was influential in the former
Czechoslovakia; in Poland, Roman Ingarden represented the cause of phenomenology;
and there were also important representatives in such countries as Portugal, the United
Kingdom, South America, Japan, and India.
In the United States
Phenomenology in the United States lived a rather marginal existence for quite some
time, notwithstanding the meritorious journal of Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research founded by Husserl’s student Marvin Farber, who was also the author of The
Foundation of Phenomenology (1943). Later, however, a noticeable change took place,
chiefly because of the work of two scholars at the New School for Social Research in
New York City: Alfred Schutz, an Austrian-born sociologist and student of
human cognition, and Aron Gurwitsch, a Lithuanian-born philosopher. Schutz came
early to phenomenology, developing a social science on a phenomenological basis.
Gurwitsch, author of Théorie du champ de la conscience (1957; The Field of
Consciousness), came to phenomenology through his study of the Gestalt psychologists
Adhemar Gelb and Kurt Goldstein. While in Paris, Gurwitsch influenced Merleau-
Ponty. The essays on phenomenology published by Gurwitsch in the United States were
among the best. His comprehensive knowledge ranged from mathematics, via the
natural sciences, to psychology and metaphysics. The work The Phenomenological
Movement (1960), by Herbert Spiegelberg, an Alsatian American phenomenologist, was
the movement’s first all-encompassing historical presentation.
Phenomenology in other disciplines

Karl Jaspers
Of greater significance is the role of phenomenology outside philosophy proper in
stimulating or reinforcing phenomenological tendencies in such fields
as mathematics and the biological sciences. Much stronger was its impact on
psychology, in which Brentano and the German philosopher and theoretical
psychologist Carl Stumpf had prepared the ground and in which the American
psychologist William James, the Würzburg school, and the Gestalt psychologists had
worked along parallel lines. But phenomenology probably made its strongest
contribution in the field of psychopathology (see also mental disorder), in which the
German existentialist Karl Jaspers stressed the importance of phenomenological
exploration of a patient’s subjective experience. Jaspers was followed by the Swiss
psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger and several others. The phenomenological strand was
also very pronounced in American existential psychiatry and affected sociology, history,
and the study of religion. More recently, phenomenology has influenced research in
some areas of cognitive science.
Walter Biemel
appearance
Table of Contents
  Introduction
Fast Facts
 Related Content
More
 More Articles On This Topic
 Contributors
 Article History
HomePhilosophy & ReligionPhilosophical Issues
appearance
philosophy
Print Cite Share Feedback
Written and fact-checked by 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Article History
Related Topics:
 
Western philosophy reality of the external world philosophy beauty
See all related content →
appearance, in philosophy, what seems to be (i.e., things as they are for human
experience). The concept usually implies an opposition between the perception of a
thing and its objective reality.
Numerous philosophical systems, in one way or another, have posited that the world as
it appears is not the world of reality. The cosmologies that predominated in Asia
Minor in the 6th century BCE, for example, distinguished between sensible appearance
and a reality accessible only to reason. Similarly, Plato identified appearance with
opinion and reality with the truth. In the Advaita Vedanta school of Indian philosophy,
particularly as expounded by Shankara, the finite phenomenal world is regarded as an
illusory appearance (maya) of the one eternal unchanging reality (Brahman). In the
modern West, Immanuel Kant created the term noumenon to signify unknowable
reality, which he distinguished from phenomenon, the appearance of reality.

More From Britannica

Western philosophy: Epistemology of appearance
By contrast, for the empiricists, whose philosophical tradition extends back to the
Sophists of ancient Greece, data apprehensible by the senses not only partake of the
truth but constitute the sole measure by which the validity of any belief or concept may
be judged.
This article was most recently revised and updated by Brian Duignan.
synthesis
Table of Contents
 Introduction
Fast Facts
 Related Content
More
 More Articles On This Topic
 Contributors
 Article History
HomePhilosophy & ReligionPhilosophical Issues
synthesis
philosophy
Print Cite Share Feedback
Written and fact-checked by 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Article History
Related Topics:
 
philosophy
See all related content →
synthesis, in philosophy, the combination of parts, or elements, in order to form a more
complete view or system. The coherent whole that results is considered to show
the truth more completely than would a mere collection of parts. The term synthesis also
refers, in the dialectical philosophy of the 19th-century German philosopher G.W.F.
Hegel, to the higher stage of truth that combines the truth of a thesis and
an antithesis. Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophy underscores an existential type of synthesis.
In Being and Nothingness, consciousness (pour-soi) is always trying to become being
(en-soi), to achieve a synthesis, as it were, between no-thing and some-thing.