“It is the same metaphysical belief on which our faith in science rests – that even we scientists today, against the godless metaphysicians, are fueled by the kindling flame of the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith, which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.” ~ Nietzsche
Michel Foucault studied the tranches of history to report changes in “epistemes,” unconscious assumptions that determine what knowledge counts at a given time. For me, there was a paradigm shift in Western civilization at the beginning of the 20th century, which I saw in physics, art, music, literature, psychology and philosophy. What this shift revealed is exactly what Nietzsche had already identified: our belief in the possible objectivity of “science” is equivalent to our belief in religion.
See what happened in one generation:
- Heisenberg showed that the act of observing a particle changes the particle.
- Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment in which a cat sealed in a box is alive and dead at the same time until consciousness opens the lid.
- Picasso and Braque painted guitars, bottles, and faces simultaneously from multiple angles.
- Duchamp Going down the stairs naked described the movement itself as a subject.
- Proust demonstrated In search of lost time that memory Not a search, but a reconstruction – the past is not stored somewhere waiting to be accessed, it is created by everyone who remembers.
- Stravinsky Spring ceremony caused consternation in the audience – patrons were outraged that Stravinsky had destroyed the tonal center, the stable harmonic home that had formed Western music for 300 years.
- Schoenberg also worked with the twelve-tone scale, creating a system in which no one note is more important than any other—no objective center, only egalitarian democracy.
- Freud showed that what we consciously think we know about ourselves is the tiniest part of what actually runs the show – and Freud didn’t stumble upon the unconscious like an anthropologist digging up a buried hieroglyph, he built it along with its repressions, drives, and interpretations. dreams.
In this piece of history we can see the transition from objective episteme.
Enter Edmund Husserl, the founding father of the discipline as we know it today, Phenomenology. Husserl rightly pointed out that we cannot remove the observer from observation and what remains cannot be called “knowledge”. Contrary to the belief that the empirical method of enlightenment was the only legitimate path to truth and that science allows us to perceive the world as it exists, Husserl reminded us that we have forgotten the perceiver – something that Picasso, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and every musician who always trusted their inner riffs.
Husserl’s method was rigorous: to “bracket” our hypotheses and describe exactly what is in consciousness before theory colonizes it, in an attempt to account for the structure of our own perception. But that is not how the word “phenomenological” is used today. The word is detached from the method that gave it meaning and now has little action but shows an epistemological humility that the user does not actually show. Philosophy has anointed understanding into a word – a word which by its very existence also means something else.
But how is non-phenomenological analysis similar to analysis without human observation? Any account of reality is already and always the account of a perceptive person, a human being who cannot go beyond the categories they come with – categories that are not neutral or found “out there” in the world. My cat Evelyn – no matter who I am to anthropomorphize he – (to my knowledge) does not divide the tree into trunk, bark, leaves and roots. And as Derrida reminds us, when we look up “trunk” or “leaf” in the dictionary, we only find more words. Language refers to more language, infinity. It’s turtles all the way down.
So when academics announce that they offer “phenomenological analysis,” their use of that twenty-dollar word undermines whatever argument they’re making. They can also say they offer “human analysis” – as if there is anything else. Every scientist who measured something, every physicist who broke the wave of probability, every artist who chose where to stand, every composer who always believed the riff in his head – they all did phenomenology. It means that none of them were. If everything is phenomenological, then nothing is phenomenological. So maybe it’s time to put a moratorium on the word? Not because it shows something false, but because it shows nothing, and its use betrays the lack of critical thinking that its users mistakenly believe they show.
