Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception Explained

Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, developed a philosophical approach that studies phenomena—how things appear or seem to us—from a first-person perspective, distinguishing three domains of inquiry: nature (the physical world studied by natural sciences), culture (the realm of organic and animate beings studied by biologists), and spirit or Geist (the world of consciousness belonging to philosophy of mind). Husserl argued that consciousness belongs to the category of mind rather than physical nature, making it fundamentally irreducible to natural scientific explanation; he concluded that natural science overlooks the inherent and inescapable subjective standpoint, which serves as the ultimate yardstick for all objective sciences.

Husserlian phenomenology faced significant challenges from within the tradition, particularly from Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Heidegger's critique centered on the idea that Husserl's transcendental approach was insufficient for addressing fundamental questions of being. Sartre and other French phenomenologists also contributed to the transformation of phenomenological thought, leading to what some consider the end of the classical Husserlian tradition.

Husserl developed phenomenology as a philosophical method that builds upon Kant's concepts of transcendental and phenomenon. Phenomenology is the method that allows us to describe the meaning of things as they appear to consciousness. It focuses on phenomena (what appears to the subject) rather than things-in-themselves. Phenomena are what appear to the subject's consciousness and are elaborated according to the schemes of reason. In Husserl's framework, phenomena are phenomena of consciousness because there are no phenomena that are not of consciousness. Consciousness relates to phenomena not only through knowledge but also through affective and experiential dimensions. Each consciousness has its own unique way of experiencing the world, meaning there are as many classes of experience as there are consciousnesses. The contents of consciousness are ontologically real and cannot be removed, even through logical thought.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher who developed phenomenology, a philosophical method that brackets questions about the external world to focus on analyzing everyday experiences. Initially attracted to psychologism, he realized this approach was inadequate and established phenomenology as a distinct method separate from natural sciences. He distinguished between phenomena (things as they appear) and noumena (things as they truly exist), largely agreeing with Fichte and Schelling's rejection of unknowable noumena. Husserl adopted the epoché method from ancient skeptics, bracketing questions about God, the external world, and other beings. He introduced the concept of lifeworld (Lebenswelt)—direct, unmediated experiences of reality—and argued that modern sciences have forgotten these experiences by overemphasizing mathematical descriptions. The fundamental task of phenomenology is to return to these direct experiences, reconnecting with the lived encounters that form the foundation of all knowledge.

Edmund Husserl, founder of phenomenology, was a revolutionary thinker who challenged established philosophical traditions. His students were initially surprised by his revolutionary nature, as they had expected the author of phenomenology to be non-revolutionary. The First World War had created hopes for a new beginning in human thought, and Husserl's phenomenology represented a genuine revolution. He was a refined, cultivated, and modest man who spoke without pathos. His distinctive teaching style involved a circular hand gesture that described movements without looking at what was around him. Phenomenology represents a high conception of philosophy that rivals the Hegelian path, aiming at human self-understanding in the form of philosophy. Drawing on Aristotle's concept of telos, it is first and foremost a journey or path that presents itself as experience and meditation within immanent time. Since Descartes and Maine de Biran, phenomenology has emphasized the role of intimate consciousness of time. In 1959, phenomenology was commonly identified with philosophy itself. What fascinated Husserl's disciples was his courage to pose the problem of the beginning without end, and consequently, the questioning of presuppositions and the presuppositions of presuppositions. This is why Husserl is not a philosopher who delivers a message but one who always returns to the origin of questions. We are never in front of the first appearance - the things around us are already covered by our words, already elaborate constructions of culture. To return to what is original, what is native, and what appears, one needs a work of purification - a sort of asceticism of the gaze and reflection. This can be described as a will to objectify, since what we call objects are largely cultural products upon which our language and action have passed and repassed endlessly. The phenomenon of language being there was itself astonishing - that language exists at all. In sum, man is always speaking, and one does not know what is before language. The mute presences are rather like horizons of research. Phenomenology is a way of speaking - logos phenomenology. What we seek is the logos, the truth signified by all appearances. Husserl showed that consciousness is always outside itself - this is what he called intentionality, one of the master words of phenomenology. When Husserl says consciousness is intentional, it means it is not first present to itself, not first a gaze upon itself, but rather a gaze upon the world. In other words, one is outside, always outside oneself, always a gaze upon something - perception of something, desire for something. The atmosphere of the philosophical era was dominated by positivism, socialist psychology, and idealism that seemed to enclose the mind within itself and cut it off from the world. Phenomenology, the new conception of spirit developed by Husserl, represented a liberation. The doctrine of intentionality of consciousness allowed one to feel again in contact with the world, to reconquer objectivity, the world of objective values, and the world of reality. Phenomenology opens to the world of reality, not only the sensible world of everyday reality but also the world of values and the world of ideal entities. It opens the access to a philosophy that could explain the essential structure of the world. The students of Husserl at Göttingen formed a kind of community united in a philosophical society organized weekly. They would visit Husserl, and on Saturdays they would go for walks in the mountains, take tea, and discuss philosophical problems. This represented a return to objectivism and realism. Husserl's philosophy was very different from what prevailed later, and most of his first students did not follow his evolution. In 1923, after the war, he explained the last phase of his thought and the transcendental turn to students who were unable to understand him. Despite this, he remained profoundly modest, honest in his thoughts, and always seeking more clarity in his analyses. Husserl was first a mathematician, and the will to rigor visible in all his works was learned from the daily experience of the mathematician. However, phenomenological rigor is not the same as mathematical exactitude. While mathematical sciences are exact sciences, phenomenology is a rigorous science but cannot be an exact science because the data of the phenomenologist are not exact data - they are fluxes of consciousness. The true origin of phenomenology is to be found in Husserl's book 'Introduction to Pure Logic' rather than in his earlier 'Philosophy of Arithmetic' when he was still in the psychological phase. What Husserl wanted to do was a philosophical foundation of logic, but he recognized that in its technique itself, not in meditation on its foundations, logic must be a mathematical logic. The problem of reflection on logic is to go to the search for what goes of itself - there is no scientific preparation but rather a preparation of a new attitude, a search for origins. Husserl regretted that logic had already been taken by science and said that phenomenology should be archaeology - a search for principles that are buried, that are sedimented in scientific culture. Daily life is naive - living thus means engaging in the world given by experience and thought, acting, and making value judgments. All these intentional functions of experience through which objects are simply present in an impersonal manner - the subject knows nothing of them. This is also the case with active thought. Only one self-awareness of oneself is radical - that of phenomenology. This is a theme of freedom, conceived on the model of evidence that seems to dominate all of Husserl's philosophy, which emerges successively from his theory of intentionality, the phenomenological reduction, and time. The crisis of European sciences is not merely a crisis of knowledge but becomes almost a moral crisis because Husserl introduces an ethics into philosophy - a philosophy of responsibility.

Empiricism is the view that knowledge mostly comes from using your senses to observe the world. A student who claims 'I cannot see it, I won't believe it' can be classified as an empiricist because they require sensory evidence to accept knowledge. In contrast, rationalism is any view appealing to intellectual and deductive reasoning as the source of knowledge or justification, opposing sensory experience or religious teachings. A rationalist would encourage students to develop their reasoning power to the fullest to arrive at knowledge.

The key differences between rationalism and empiricism are: (1) Role of senses and reason—rationalists trust reason exclusively, while empirists require sensory data as foundation; (2) Innate ideas—rationalists believe in ideas present from birth, empirists deny them entirely; (3) Model of science—rationalists prefer mathematics, empirists prefer experimental sciences like physics; (4) Epistemological stance—rationalists are dogmatic, believing reason can achieve complete knowledge, while empirists are skeptical, with Hume being most radical in doubting reason's capacity for secure knowledge.

This section covers the core epistemological disagreement between rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists hold that reason is the source of knowledge, with innate ideas present from birth, and they favor deductive reasoning where conclusions necessarily follow from premises. Empirists argue that all knowledge comes from sensory experience, viewing the mind as a blank slate (tabula rasa), and they prefer inductive reasoning based on observing multiple cases. The section also covers intellectual intuition (direct rational grasp of reality) versus sensible intuition (perception through senses), and the ideal sciences: mathematics for rationalists (pure deduction) versus natural sciences for empirists (inductive observation).

Empiricism is the philosophical approach that uses senses and sensory evidence to understand and discover truth. Rationalism is the approach that uses reason and pure logic to investigate and discover truth. Historically, these were opposing schools of thought, but Kant unified them by showing both have legitimate roles in knowledge acquisition.

Intelectualism is an epistemological position that synthesizes rationalism and empiricism. While rationalism holds that knowledge is produced by the mind itself, and empiricism holds that knowledge comes from experience, intellectualism proposes that the subject can extract knowledge content from experiences with physical things in the world. The human intellect has the capacity to illuminate objects wrapped in darkness, revealing their true nature. Knowledge is the substance itself extracted from things through the intellect, involving moments of illumination and reception. This represents a third way that combines elements of both positions, with the truth of knowledge residing in the thing being known rather than in the subject who knows.