What is Phenomenology and How is it Applied

Phenomenology is a philosophical method of enquiry that carefully attends to

appearing, showing, or manifestation – to “phenomena” in the widest sense. This

implies that reality from the phenomenological point of view consists of objects and

events ("phenomena") as they are perceived or understood in the human consciousness,

and not of anything independent of human consciousness. The term “phenomenology”

is gotten from the root word “phenomenon” which is multi-faceted and denotes any

appearance whether concrete or abstract. This implies that anything that appears in any

way is a “phenomenon,” whether that be concrete nouns like buildings and cars or

abstract nouns like hatred and happiness. Thus phenomena are not only the physical

objects that often serve as the privileged model for “things” in our everyday

understanding – e.g. tables, chairs, trees, and the like. Anything that is manifest in any

way is a phenomenon and as such is subject to phenomenological investigation – e.g.

emotions, beliefs, contexts, language, cultural milieus, and historical worlds.

Applying the phenomenological approach to philosophical enquiry requires

taking givenness to thought as its beginning while rejecting the Cartesian project of

finding absolute certainty. What is at stake in phenomenology is basically the manner

in which phenomena are present to consciousness. The phenomenologist attempts to do

justice to this appearance of phenomena by limiting him/herself to a strict description of

that givenness. Hence Husserl’s call to leave metaphysics behind and return “to the

things themselves” which implies returning to the things as they appear to

consciousness rather than as they might be imagined or thought to exist apart from that

appearance. Having stated this, to do phenomenology then implies carefully attending

to the ways in which phenomena are present to consciousness while putting aside

judgment about anything outside the boundaries of that givenness.