balrāj
- Jan 7

An Introduction to Existential Phenomenology (Part 1: What is Phenomenology?)

In the second part of this heuristic introduction to phenomenology, we explore how to do existential phenomenology.

“[Phenomenology] brings into view something with which we are at once deeply intimate but at the same time, of which we are typically neglectful: our own experience.”

- Joel Smith, Experiencing Phenomenology: An Introduction (xiii).

“Without doing phenomenology, it may be practically impossible to understand phenomenology.” “…without entering into the doing, the basic thrust and import of phenomenology is likely to be misunderstood at the least or missed at most.”

- Don Ihde, Experimental Phenomenology (3, 4).

Phenomenology—from the Greek phenomena + logos—means something like an account (logos) of appearances (phenomena).

The Greek phainomenon is derived from phainesthai, which means to appear, become visible, or show itself. The term logos is derived from the Greek legein, which means ‘to assemble’, ‘to gather’. In the 200+ ancient Greek compound nouns ending in -logos, the term refers either to (1) this notion of ‘gathering up’ and/or ‘assembly’, or (2) ‘word’ or ‘speech’, forming words such s ‘conversation’ or ‘dialogue/discourse’. In either case, the root (leg, from legein) can convey both meanings, as in ‘gathering up and saying’ or even gathering up and then letting something be seen/apprehended/understood/experienced—i.e., making it available for seeing—by being vocalized or recorded.

Phenomenology is not concerned with questions about a phenomenon’s ontological status—i.e., what it is or might be “in reality”, beyond/beneath what/how we experience it in our lives); phenomenology does not presume/seek a metaphysical/essential substance that lies behind/beneath what is experienced in everyday life, and doesn’t permit these types of assumptions to affect taking account of the way a phenomenon shows itself. Similarly, Phenomenology is also not concerned with questions about ‘why’ a phenomenon exists (essentially or accidentally); phenomenology does not presume/seek any explanation about the cause of the phenomenon, and doesn’t allow these types of assumptions to affect taking account of the appearing of a phenomenon. Existential phenomenologists take account in order to reveal (i.e., render visible) the thing that shows itself (in the manner that it shows itself, however it appears),

In phenomenology, what counts specifically as a phenomenon is anything that appears “in” (or “as”) experience. By experience, phenomenologists mean something quite precise. The German word for this specific thing is Erlebnis, meaning “lived experience”. Lived experience is your everyday, immediate experience. It is your everyday experience of the ‘real’, the world within which you find yourself and within which you have your individual experiences. The terms of the ‘real’ are not something that you dictated; you cannot transform it at will or ‘turn it off’ (in the way that you could do turn off or transform something in your imagination). Your individual actions are carried out “within” the ‘real’, the latter which you have not constructed.

Phenomenology wants to give an account of this—lived experience. It wants to give an account of the natural, immediate experiencing of some phenomenon by assembling words that reveal or disclose this immediate experience as it is experienced—and through this account allows it to be experienced (by another).

ERLEBNIS: LIVED EXPERIENCE

In order to ‘see’ phenomenologically, it is imperative to directly orient oneself to ‘lived experience’. Without this direct experience of that to which ‘lived experience’ is referring, much of phenomenology makes little/no sense.

The German term for ‘lived experience’, Erlebnis, contains leben, which means ‘to live’. The verb erleben means to ‘live through something’, a definition in which we could locate both an aspect of activity (a being-active: live through something) and one of passivity (a being-passive: live through something): lived experience is living through the [something] given. This is the most immediate way in which thing are ‘given’. Phenomenologists use the word ‘given’ to describe the most basic character of experience: appearing is happening, and this appearing (i.e., experience, or, simply, awareness) is not subject to my will. It is thus, they say, ‘given’. Lived experience, in others words, is your living through the uninterrupted stream of appearing.

Lived experience is not sensory experience. In my everyday, natural, immediate life, I do not experience myself as compiling sensations in order to make meaning. Instead, things are immediately “meaningful”. Things appear as ‘always already’ meaningful—they already ’make sense’ in a basic enough way so that I am not disoriented. In other words, I’ve already made sense of it in a basic enough way so that it fits into my immediate experience, even if the way something fits into my immediate experience is as something (some individual thing) that is meaningless/trivial (within the larger background experience against which the specific thing is trivial). In other words, phenomenological meaning is not constructed by reflective study. It is what is directly meaningful as if unmediated. Philosopher Max van Manen—in his 2014 book, Phenomenology of Practice, writes that lived experience is “…a kind of immediate awareness that is not (yet) aware of itself” (225).

LIVED EXPERIENCE: AN EXAMPLE

We can further define more clearly this notion of ‘lived’ experience by distinguishing it from accounts of experience that emerge from ‘reflective’ awareness. The task of reflective awareness is to thematize, organize, conceptualize, theorize, etc.—i.e., to stabilize and so provide conceptual or theoretical clarity to the flow of our immediate experience. The task of phenomenology is to reanimate through description the lived experience that is prior to this reflection. We might thus also call our ‘lived experience’ something like pre-reflective experience. Let’s use an example from Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (347-9):

Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole. (…) behind that door a spectacle is presented as ‘to be seen,’ a conversation as ‘to be heard’. The door, the keyhole are at once both instruments and obstacles; they are presented as ‘to be handled with care’; the keyhole is given as ‘to be looked through close by and a little to one side’, etc. (…) But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me!

Sartre’s description is of the lived experience of looking through a keyhole and then being caught doing so. A keyhole is small, and so one can imagine the pains through which one would have to put oneself to see the spectacle in its spatial entirety (as if it were on a stage). Voices are likely muffled. There are moments when nothing can be seen, and so he might ‘glue’ his ear to the door to get something, anything. Sensing movement behind the door—or due simply to impatience, or both—he returns his eye to the hole. His awareness is fully ‘thrown’ through the keyhole, behind the door… until he hears the footsteps behind him. He turns around. He’s been caught, and in that very instant feels his awareness in his very own flesh.

If we asked Sartre to tell us what happened, his report would be some variation of “I got caught looking through a keyhole”—which is exactly what happened. This reporting is formulated reflectively, or looking back unto the event in order to provide details relevant to the question, “What happened?” From the perspective of reflective awareness—a position which we may describe as ‘objective’ or even ‘third person’—Sartre looked through the keyhole, tried to see or hear what was going on behind the door, and was caught. None of this is false.

This reporting, however, requires adopting quite a different stance on the experience when compared to the experience he actually had of attempting to capture what was happening behind the keyhole. When he was at the keyhole, he was fully absorbed in what was appearing, and not at all reflecting self-consciously on the fact that he was experiencing. Phenomenological description must remain at this level of experience. Sartre’s description is itself an example of such a phenomenological description, because it aims precisely to portray the situation as it was lived and not as it subsequently appeared in explicit self-reflection. In other words, it aimed at reanimating the experience as it was experienced.

Notice that Sartre’s feeling-objectified (i.e., his being given himself in being caught) is not an ‘appearance’ in the way that, say, a person appears when they enter a room. In this example, the appearance of the feeling of being objectified ”appears” in the body, affectively. This particular phenomenon—this particular appearance—is not an appearance that appears to the eyes but is rather experienced.

We can notice, further, that the ‘I’ appears differently in lived experience than it does in reflective experience: in the lived experience of peering through the keyhole, Sartre’s ‘self’, in a word, disappears. In any similar such experience—of being engaged in something, such as peering or even typing—we typically are not explicitly aware of ourselves. Our awareness is ‘thrown’ elsewhere—through the keyhole or on the computer screen while typing. My ‘self’ resurfaces when I report that ‘I was looking through the keyhole’ or that ‘I was typing’. In other words, it is only in reflective awareness that both ‘I’ and whatever ‘what’ I was doing become objects of reflection. In a reflective stance, to the question ‘what are you doing’, I would respond “I am writing”, but in the act of writing itself—our attention thrown unto the screen—the lived experience itself could perhaps be better described by something like “I am writing.” Don Ihde writes in his book, Experimental Phenomenology (31)—“the phenomenological ‘I’ takes on its significance through its encounter with things, persons, and every type of otherness it may meet”. In other words, my ‘self’ is always already wrapped up in a world that precedes it, and this pre-reflective, passive having of experience—this implicit awareness—is the condition for explicit self-awareness (i.e., of my being able to say “I”). In yet other words, there is an implicit awareness we have of ourselves while explicitly being aware of some object or situation. Sartre shows that awareness itself is not an object, per se, but is more of a happening. In our everyday, lived experience, we are always aware of something; the specific ‘thing’ may change, but awareness in general, awareness of something—i.e., being wrapped up in something that is beyond oneself—does not.

In this case, Sartre was “moved by” jealousy/curiosity/vice. Jealousy/curiosity/vice—none of which he manufactured with his will—moved or motivated him to respond to a situation that called him to respond in a particular way. Then, his attention was called his attention away from the spectacle behind the door to the “footsteps in the hall“. In a sense, he experienced a kind of provocation to—first—search with his eyes and ears (by the to-be-heard/seen event behind the door) and—second—to turn around (by the footsteps—the to-be-located—behind his body). His attention wasn’t like a spotlight; there wasn’t an internal ‘self’ (a disengaged ‘consciousness’ that stood outside/above his situation) that made the decision to be moved by jealousy/curiosity/vice, but rather the situation itself exceeded his individual will—we could say that it struck him or imposed itself on his will, and this particular imposition made available the option to look. The situation, in other words, called him to behave in a particular way. He felt compelled to investigate—or he was called to investigate—what was behind the door; he experienced the situation behind the door as compelling (and likely experienced the door itself as an obstacle).

THE FUNCTION OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL DESCRIPTION

Phenomenological description is meant to reanimate living sense. The objective is to use words to point to a lived experience that the reader must then experience him or herself. The words, in other words, must bring lived experience to life, and this bringing to life has the effect of producing in the reader a sort of lucid or striking, im-mediate and unreflective recognition, the feeling of seeing ‘into’ (in-sight) some experience, of bringing it close. Its aim is to ‘show’ prereflective livedness, to provoke or evoke it, to kindle or waken—and not to contain; to catch and release, not to capture. The objective is vocative one, meant to invoke an experience or provoke it into appearing. Alternatively, we could consider the objective to be an exhortative one, urging the reader to ‘see’ or have a particular experience. Much a like a magic spell, the incantation does its work and then disappears; we do not need the words any longer because it is done: the ghost, the effect, has (hopefully) made its appearance.

This is because the living sense of some experience cannot be said, only indicated or pointed to. Simply naming a livedness would, in a sense, destroy it. Consider the example given above. Instead of offering this example, we could have simply named the experience: getting caught. We would no longer be pointing to a living-through, but would rather be fixing it, letting the phrase stand in for it, reducing it in order to grasp it. The use of examples in reanimating living sense is paramount because the example is able to give voice to (and make knowable) a livedness—the singularity—that is not straightforwardly nameable or describable. Phenomenological examples point to or indicate an experience in its livedness (i.e., its singularity). The example—the collection of words—holds in abeyance (or suspends, as if in mid-air), so to speak, a livedness, and lets it be seen by another.

Phenomenology requires one to actively and continuously remind oneself that the word or phrase is playing this ‘invoking’ function, and is not a direct or univocal representation of a fixed thing (or its metaphysical essence/substance). In other words, one must live the words as invoking always a livedness or a living-through. When we become habituated to familiar uses of words, we tend to forget this, and can actually imagine our words to be transparently giving us things. In the habitual use of a word to stand in for a livedness, we may first let the words stand in for the thing and then let them become the thing by not living them as invocations. Such words or phrases become meaningless. Jacques Derrida—in his article ‘White Mythology’—likened these words/concepts to coins whose value-inscriptions had been ‘ground down’ (i.e., used up, detached from its specific situation). As a result, the ‘value’ of these coins (i.e., significance as referring to a livedness) became ‘absolute’ in the sense that it was referring to nothing—a coin without inscription—and so, in a sense, could mean anything.

Phenomenology cannot do its work once words/concepts stand in for the thing itself, let alone if they (are treated as having) become the thing. One may find a word or concept that describes a particular livedness so very well that it becomes a part of one’s core vocabulary. With use, however, it is possible that the word/concept loses its potency (in invoking a livedness) and—in its employment—feels empty and forced, even. Or, perhaps its detachment (from experience) becomes invisible, and one begins living it as a kind of ‘truth’, disabling one from seeing the livednesses in other descriptions. This is likely why French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty says that the phenomenologist must remain a “perpetual beginner”, one who must always return to lived experience. They must always be in touch with experience itself, ready and willing to part with their words or concepts or thinking if the latter no longer embrace a livedness.

The phenomenologist must themselves perform phenomenologies of their own phenomenologizing in order to see precisely how their own words/concepts function; no one can do this for them. Are these words/concepts referring to a livedness? The phenomenologist must at each turn begin at the beginning, so to speak, lest their descriptions become lifeless and flat or far too injected with reflection or theory (and so more intellectually satisfying than phenomenologically so). There is a difference between being basically satisfied with a description (“it works”) and being completely taken with one (“yes, that’s the one!”). When one’s core vocabulary no longer does the latter, it may be a sign that one has been led astray from lived experience itself. And one must always live with the awareness that even one’s core vocabulary exists only to be seen through, lest one be unable to see the livedness contained in other descriptions.

Something similar could be said about reading phenomenological descriptions. In a sense, this is more challenging because it forces you to be open to terms being used in ways in which you are not accustomed to seeing, which entails examining your own relationships with certain terms (and maybe loosening the grip that your understanding has on certain words and/or relationships between words). The concept, remember, is not what we are trying to understand. The effectiveness of a phenomenological text (including the article you are reading) depends largely on the reader’s willingness to spend the time to ‘access’ (experientially) the livednesses to which the author is referring, and not just critically evaluate/examine the words/concepts themselves.

This is why phenomenologists have historically employed various means—apart from propositional discourse—of communicating lived experiences: example or anecdote, expressive imagery or narrative, poetry, poetising, et cetera. Phenomenologists have also borrowed from novels, poetry, mythical and religious texts. This is all done in an attempt to evoke or revoke [as in ‘call back’] or re-call a lived experience, to make accessible a certain pathos—one not readily given to the logic of propositional discourse (or of summary or paraphrase in general). What is most important is not the method; it is not the case that one must use an anecdote or example in order to ‘do’ phenomenology. The specific means by which we reanimate some experience is secondary. We let the experience itself be our guide; in a somewhat strange turn of phrase, we let the experience itself tell us how to describe it, and in so doing we remain open to the expressive modes outside of traditional propositional discourse.

The standard for evaluating phenomenological description is whether or not the description resonates with the living sense of an experience. A good description will resonate with the living sense of an experience in such a way that the reader will be able to recognize her or his experience in that description; indeed, it will “spark” that experience in the reader. Further, this description will draw the reader’s attention to something in that experience that she or he had not formerly noticed. What is important to recognize is that there are no independent criteria for the specific construction of the description. Phenomenological description does not require anything specific: a specific verb tense (as in ‘only present continuous’, etc.) or specific narrative style (only prose, no poetry, or only prose and poetry, no fiction, etc.), tone (as in it must be idiomatic, prolix, poetic, etc.), et cetera. The description itself is guided by—written by, in a sense—the experiencing itself.

CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY

Of course, the terms we have at our disposal are inheritances, and are capable of doing violence to our own lived reality. As inheritances, they are historical, traditional. This by itself is not a problem. The problem is when they are disconnected from lived experience, when they are treated as (objective) ‘reality’—as the way things are and as final—and so not understood as historically (and so politically and culturally) ‘constituted’. This disconnection is also a violence, and the phenomenologist—who must perpetually remind him/herself to return to experience, who must perpetually forget—functions as an important agent of change insofar as their only loyalty is to lived experience itself.

Phenomenology, most basically, gives voice to a livedness, a givenness as given. First, this means that it gives voice to an unfolding, a process, a fluidity, an ever-changing, impermanent—and so it is never ‘complete’. Second, this means that the phenomenologist treats all phenomena as given and not as reflective of an objective reality and/or some ‘hierarchy’ therein (in which some things are objectively/“really” more ‘real’ and others less so). In short, it gives voice not to what is more real and less real, correct and incorrect, normal and abnormal, good and bad, etc., but what is given as more or less real, correct or incorrect, normal or abnormal, good or bad, et cetera. Finally, this means that phenomenology is inherently critical, precisely because of its loyalty to lived experience. In other words, it questions our existing ways of seeing, thinking, feeling, doing, and being. It uncovers norms—inclusions/exclusions/occlusions—presuppositions, habitual ways of perceiving/thinking/feeling/doing/being, that were hitherto tucked away, constituting our experience. It allows (and even encourages) us to see (or re-see or un-see) every variety of experiencing in a transformative way, allowing us to re-think and re-configure the concepts we commonly employ to interpret experience. And it also gives us a new way of engaging with non-phenomenological works, opening us up to the ways that lived experience may have motivated the construction of categories/terms/philosophies? Finally, phenomenology’s criticality means that it does not spare itself—it is self-critical:

Phenomenology continues to make us mindful to be critically and philosophically aware of how our lives (and our cognitive, emotional, embodied, and tacit understandings) are socially, culturally, politically, and existentially fashioned. But phenomenology also reminds us that these constructions themselves are always in danger of becoming imperatives, rationalities, epistemologies, and ontologies that need to be bracketed, deconstructed, and substituted with more reflective portrayals.

- Max van Manen, Phenomenology of Practice (13).

TRUTH & KNOWLEDGE IN PHENOMENOLOGY

The way most of us (most of the time) think of “truth” involves a matching up of our words or concepts with some thing/situation “in the world” (an occurrence, a state of being, etc.). Both are (and must be) fixed. The word/concept must mean something specific enough to be able to peg it to the thing in the world; then we’re able to see if the description is correct—if it’s the truth. Is the thing in the world faithful to our word/concept/description? To make this assessment we must be in possession of both of the word/concept and the thing in the world in order to judge whether or not they match up. And to be in possession of both means that both are fixed enough to be able to make any kind of equivalence. They both must, in other words, possess some kind of determinate and fixed essence so that the matter of truth can be settled/rectified. This amounts to something like the application of a method to the product of reflective awareness (i.e., after lived experience has been interpretively fixed). However, the types of claims that meet this standard—what we might readily describe as being “correct”—do not succeed in apprehending actual lived experiencing.

These fixed essences, however, are derivative of a more primordial process of experiencing; our fixed idea of “x” is derivative of our many lived experiencings of “x”. More specifically, we can simply say that I never encounter “x” outside of context. I never encounter an individual thing in splendid isolation. Even more primordially, however, there is experience as such, appearing as such. This most basic happening of experience—the singular thing ”within” which every individual thing can be said to occur—it is not subject to my will. I didn’t create it. I can’t turn it off. It’s not optional. It is—as we said above—given. It is self-given; I do nothing to preserve/maintain it. And it shows itself. And the independent, fixed (reflective) categories that we employ to pronounce on truth/falsity rest on this self-given experiencing that is always already happening. We can describe this as appearing/experience/existence as such. It is this background, always-already-there happening of experience is what phenomenology wants to contact and describe. And in making contact with the ground of our facts, we can see the norms, principles, presuppositions, etc. involved in the way we’ve established the terms into which we translate experience.

It is not the case that these two things—fixed concepts and the more original self-given appearing of experience in general—are opposed to each other. Rather, the basic, background continuous self-happening of experiencing is what allows us to see things that stand still, such as the “facts”, our principles of objective “truth”. (Of course, my ability to see things stand still is also a feature of this self-givenness.)

Phenomenological ‘knowledge’, then, consists of conclusions about experiencing based on accurate phenomenological descriptions. This kind of knowledge—phenomenological knowledge—concerns the experience of some phenomenon or, alternatively, the form or structure of some experience (e.g., drinking wine, jealousy, perception, being a gendered/raced body, illness, suffering, playing music, disability, romantic love, time, wonder, existence/being, etc.). What is meant by ‘form’ or ‘structure’ is also a (phenomenological) description of something like the general quality of an experience that allows it to be recognized as a specific kind of experience (e.g., drinking wine, jealousy, etc.). It is important to note that “form” or “structure” do not refer to some objective, metaphysical structure/substance that organises sensation or anything similar. What is given in actual, lived experience is never the thing in its entirety (never, for example, embodiment as such), and so our descriptions are never ‘final’ in any way. Phenomenological description is more about establishing an openness to engage with experience than it is about dis-covering fixed/objective realities/essences or something like metaphysical substance.

In part two of this article we’ll explore in more detail how to do phenomenology.

Works Cited

This article is a revised extraction of the first chapter of “Doing Phenomenology”, a Masters thesis written by Balraj under the supervision of Dr. John Russon. It was submitted to the University of Guelph (Canada) and published in 2016.

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