Phenomenology - Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler And Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-ponty
world experience century
Phenomenology is the study of experience, how things appear to us. The word comes from the Greek but was elaborated in the early nineteenth century on the basis of Immanuel Kant's conception of the world as phenomenon, the world of our experience (as opposed to the world as noumenon, the world as it is "in itself"). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel famously employed the term in Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807; The Phenomenology of Spirit), suggesting that all knowledge was a matter of appearance with no world "in itself" other than the one we know. But phenomenology came of age with Edmund Husserl, who turned the Hegelian perspective into a rigorous philosophical method. Husserl in turn gave birth to a number of remarkable students, who together would set the tone for much of European philosophy in the twentieth century. Among them are Martin Heidegger, Max Scheler, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
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As a movement and a method, as a "first philosophy," phenomenology owes its life to Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), a
German-Czech (Moravian) philosopher who started out as a mathematician in the late nineteenth century and wrote a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891; The Philosophy of Arithmetic). His view was that there was a strict empiricis…
Martin Heidegger (1889–1971) was a student of Husserl. Before that, he was a theology student, interested in much more concrete matters of human existence than his teacher, and his questions concerned how to live and how to live "authentically"—that is, with integrity, in a complex and confusing world. His use of phenomenology was subservient to this quest, although the…
Max Scheler (1874–1928) was also a student of Husserl, but he, too, took phenomenology in a different direction, toward ethics (which had been ignored by both Husserl and Heidegger). Scheler was an intense man whose considerable contribution to philosophy was the introduction of emotion into the overly formal Kantian conception of ethics that still ruled the Continent. In Wesen und Formen d…
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) attended Husserl's lectures at the Sorbonne, and he became an enthusiast of phenomenology. He was first of all concerned with the nature of human freedom and the correlative sense of responsibility. Sartre's phenomenology is largely modeled on Heidegger's work, but in his L'être et le néant (1943; English trans. Being and No…
After the war, Sartre's younger colleague Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961) convinced him that he should modify his "absolute" insistence on freedom in his later works, although his insistence on freedom and responsibility remains. Merleau-Ponty went on to develop his own radical revision of the phenomenology of freedom and the essentially embodied nature of human consc…
Brentano, Franz. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint. Edited by Oskar Kraus and Linda L. McAlister. Translated by Antos C. Raucella et al. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1973. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper, 1962. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964. —&#x…
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