What is Phenomenology For?

In his contribution to A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy) , Steven Crowell summarizes the aims of phenomonology: it is “descriptive” rather than “constructive”; it aims at “clarification, not explanation”; it is “eidetic and not a factual inquiry,” which means “it is not concerned to describe all the properties of some particular thing but to uncover what belongs to it essentially as a thing of that kind.

Most importantly, it is “reflective”: “it is not concerned directly with entities, as are the natural sciences, but with our experience of entities. It is committed to the view that descriptive clarification of the essential conditions for being X cannot be achieved by abstracting from our experience of X but only by attending to how X is given in that experience.” This is the aspect of phenomenology that Crowells finds “richest in implications” since “For it challenges entrenched philosophical theories about “mind” and “world” and demands that we attend to how ‘the things themselves,’ as Husserl put it, show themselves.”

He claims that its “more fundamental achievement” is the “recognition that meaning (Sinn) is the proper topic of philosophical inquiry, one that cannot be grasped with traditional categories of mind and world, subject and object. Here phenomenology shares a motive with the ‘language-analytic’ philosophy that emerged simultaneously with it. Both movements sought to break free of traditional philosophy, and for the same reason: in order to do justice to meaning. In contrast to early analytic philosophy, however, phenomenology does not see meaning as primarily a linguistic phenomenon. Rather, it comes into its own when Husserl takes the ‘important cognitive step’ of extending terms like meaning and signification ‘to all acts, be they now combined with expressive acts or not.’” Phenomenology consistutes a break “with mentalism and representationalism and explore meaning as encountered directly in the world of our practical and perceptual life.”