Phenomenology

Overview

Describe the structures of conscious experience from the first person, before you explain them away.

Husserl asks for a description of experience as it is lived, before a theory explains it away. You set aside, for a while, the question of whether the object exists in the scientist’s inventory, and you look at how it shows itself: as near, as remembered, as feared, as meant. He calls that disciplined pause a bracketing. It is not a denial of the world. It is a refusal to skip the appearing.

Where it answers

Key terms

Intentionality

Consciousness is always consciousness of something.

Epoché

Husserl’s “bracketing”: setting aside assumptions about the world to describe experience as it appears.

Lifeworld

The everyday world of lived experience, taken for granted before any science.

Being-in-the-world

Heidegger’s term for how we exist: always already caught up in a world, never detached observers.