4 Duane H.

Davis

The General Sense of the Phenomenological Method

The phenomenological method is an attempt to offer prescriptive descriptions of the
world in which we live.2 It involves the transformation of the way we understand our
world such that we can be astonished before it—­the attempt to see our world as if for
the first time, through unjaded eyes. This transformation is to be affected by suspending
our habitual and theoretical presuppositions and thus allowing the world to appear as it
becomes what it is and as it matters to us.
When we read that phenomenology is the account of appearances, we see that
there is something at stake here that does not come down to subjective perspective or
worldview—­the way something appears to someone, to one’s culture, or even to any
one culture. Appearances in the phenomenological sense are not psychic construc-
tions. Likewise, the account of appearances-­as-­they-­are does not connote an objective
account. Appearances in the phenomenological sense are not abstractions bereft of
a world. The phenomenological method is not an attempt to purge subjective bias to
reveal objective truth—­instead it regards the pretense of traditional objectivity as a bias
every bit as much as the caprice of subjectivity. As we shall see, it is helpful to remember
that phenomenology seeks to give accounts of appearances as processes—­of the coming-­
to-­appear. The principal aspects of the phenomenological method we shall consider
here include intentionality, the epochē, the phenomenological and eidetic reductions, and
transcendental subjectivity. Each of these aspects of the phenomenological method is
intertwined with the others, yet we should attempt to distinguish these aspects in order
to reveal the promise of critical phenomenology.
Undoubtedly the foundational insight of the phenomenological method is intention-
ality: our understanding is always engaged within the world. We stand in the world
we are understanding. This means that neither subjectivity nor objectivity is an epi-
phenomenal illusion determined at the exclusion of the other, but both are instead
ineluctably bound together. The principle of intentionality thus offers a new standpoint
to seek understanding of the world, since we are no longer equating consciousness with
some interiority standing over against some exteriority which must be related through
metaphysical sleight of hand. Instead, phenomenological intentional consciousness is
the relation itself such that consciousness is always “consciousness of ” something. As
existential phenomenologists (i.e., Heidegger, Merleau-­Ponty, Beauvoir, and Sartre)
expanded upon Husserl’s position, they explored intentionality as an intimate relation
and explored its significance in ways not restricted to its epistemological formulation.
That is, consciousness is not merely a knower-­known relation but is also “being-­in-­the-­
world” or “the flesh of the world.”
However it is construed, this phenomenological intentional consciousness is not
easy to come by; it is an achievement—­a radical alteration of everyday and theoreti-
cal consciousness. Our most common ways of understanding are motivated by biases
and habits that can originate individually or culturally. Phenomenology is, as the name
implies, an account of appearances, and it begins as a reflection upon experiences as
we live them. Lived experience (Erlebnis) is transient, fleeting, and not intrinsically
reliable as a form of understanding. Yet this is the kind of understanding that prevails
in our everyday ways of acting and interacting in the world. Husserl’s name for this
The Phenomenological Method 5

uncritical affirmation of the world is the natural standpoint, to which he contrasts the
phenomenological standpoint. Phenomenology involves a radical alteration of conscious-
ness—­a complete shift in attitude toward what appears that involves a suspension of
the natural attitude.3 Yet this “mere change of standpoint” holds “the key to all genuine
philosophy.”4
According to Husserl, at least, phenomenology was to be a presuppositionless phi-
losophy. In order for phenomena to appear in an unencumbered way as the intentional
relations of phenomenological consciousness, we must suspend our everyday assump-
tions about phenomena as well as our theoretical predispositions. This process of
“bracketing” or “putting out of play” is what Husserl adopted a term from the ancient
Greek skeptics to describe: the epochē. Only through this arduous critical exercise can
we reveal phenomena as they are.
The phenomenological and eidetic reductions are the other side of the same coin, so to
speak, of the epochē. Implementing the epochē is the first step in the phenomenological
reduction. (It is first logically rather than temporally.) We can think of the word reduc-
tion in its culinary sense such that a sauce is reduced to its essence: its defining character
becomes unmistakably manifest. By setting aside habitual biases, the phenomenological
reduction provides free access to real and potential experience of phenomena con-
ceived within the intentional relationship, while the eidetic reduction provides access to
“invariant essential structures” of phenomena.5 These ideals or essential structures are
possible only through transcendental reflection. That is, the conditions of the possibility
of the appearances are disclosed through this intense reflection.
And so, by implementing the skeptical attitude of the epochē and at once engaging
in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions, a field of transcendental subjectivity
is revealed as the condition of the possibility of the appearance of phenomena within
intentional relations.6 It is important to note here that Husserl did not equate transcen-
dental subjectivity with the sovereign subjectivity of early modern Western philosophy’s
models of the individual. Transcendental reflection reveals that the subjectivity of the
Cartesian “I think,” for example, is but one psychological aspect of the intentional rela-
tion of consciousness in all its possibilities.
So phenomenology is a rigorous quest asking after the essential structures of appear-
ances. They can be disclosed only within the context of intentionality. By bracketing out
the natural attitude—­the aforementioned habitual biases and theoretical biases—the
phenomenon is reduced to its essence. The disclosed structures of phenomena bespeak
a certain propriety. For Husserl, especially, the phenomenological method leads us to
the things themselves.7
Husserl’s phenomenology developed constantly throughout his career, yet its status
as a purification project remained constant. The purification process of knowledge is
achieved only through transcendental phenomenology. It is to be “won,” as Husserl fre-
quently states. This rhetoric of winning out against the limitations, biases, errors, and
vicissitudes of everyday experience and theoretical presuppositions alludes to a crisis in
our understanding of the world. Husserl believed that these crises, both theoretical and
practical, could be addressed only through employing the phenomenological method.
Now we must consider anew the value of critical phenomenology in addressing con-
temporary crises that we understand in terms of intersectionality.