Why Phenomenology, Of All
Things?
Why phenomenology, of all
things and at this time of day? Phenomenology is useful and attractive
to me because of its resolve to undertake what Edmund Husserl famously
and heart- stoppingly called `pure presuppositionless description'. At
once calling for a return to `the things themselves' and bracketing out
the real, or things in themselves, as unknowable, phenomenology
begins and renews itself in the resolve to resist abstraction, reduction
and ideal simplification. For phenomenology, one is always already in the
kinds of situation of which one is attempting to take the measure. One
of the most interesting and telling features of phenomenology is its intentionality
or dependence upon objects. Just as, for phenomenology, there can be no
pure consciousness, only consciousness of, so similarly, there can
be no pure and essential phenomenology, only phenomenology of. Where
most philosophies work towards the framing of propositions, phenomenology
does the work of a preposition.
However, one of the things that makes me uncomfortable about trying to
characterise a new form of cultural and critical work as a sort of cultural
phenomenology is the mystical or neo-religious cast of some of the work
practised in its name. This style of phenomenology aims to give us, in
David Michael Levin's phrase, the `body's recollection of being'; 
its aim in investigating the embodiedness of being is actually to rediscover
and reaffirm the condition of embodiedness as a mystical state. This neoromantic
offer to restore unity of being is everywhere in phenomenology, and offshoots
of it like the humanistic psychology of Abraham Marlow, Carl Rogers and
Rollo May. ` "Returning to experience" without assuming anything
in advance...means making explicit how man is essentially in communion
with the world.'
This kind of thing is good for what it is and does, which is to provide
a poetic kind of religion, but it is not good for the kind of thing I presently
have in mind, namely writing plausibly about cultural objects and experiences.
I see no virtue in a form of reflection or enquiry which has made up its
mind so comprehensively and in advance what its pay-off has got to be.
By contrast, cultural phenomenology would nod its head at the account given
by Emmanuel Levinas of philosophical phenomenology as
a radical reflection, obstinate
about itself, a cogito which seeks and describes itself without being duped
by a spontaneity or ready-made presence, in a major distrust toward what
is thrust forward in knowledge...It is the presence of the philosopher
near to things, without illusion or rhetoric, in their true status, precisely
clarifying this status, the meaning of their objectivity and their being,
not answering only to the question of knowing "What is?", but
to the question "How is what is?", "What does it mean that
it is?".
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