What is Phenomenology?

One of the questions that emerged at the Merleau-Ponty Circle events in Mississippi (glossy travelogue to follow upon my return) concerned the orientation of phenomenology. The question arose from the paper that I gave, which was divisive at best, “inflammatory” at worst (the latter term, not mine but another delegate’s). Either way, part of the resistance to the paper was due to the fact that its conclusions are unpalatable. Here, there is a tension far broader than that of the initial resistance to the paper. On the one hand, I was fully aware that the conclusion I had arrived at in this paper was unsatisfactory in terms of both being congenial to “humanist values” and contributing a unified account of experience. Indeed, the paper is flawed in its lack of resolution but successful in engineering a sense of awkwardness in its reception. To some extent this is deliberate, though not in a post-modernist sense of theory as ironic play, but in the sense of not discussing the pernicious aspects of the paper in advance, and instead allowing those tensions to interweave with the talk.

On the other hand, despite being aware of these points of division, it never occurred to me to modify the findings in order to fulfil a pregiven mission of what phenomenology ought to conclude. This kind of thought of sculpting a conclusion in order to contribute to a generalised ethos is totally foreign to me, and it is also foreign to my sense of doing phenomenology. What I discern in a particular reading or experience as disagreeable to my “self” as a human person in the world, is neither here nor there. Honesty must underscore phenomenological work, and personal psychology must be put to one side. In short, pleasure and pain ought to be totally indifferent to the work of phenomenology, with only the experience of strangeness as a guarantor of the fruits of inquiry.

To this end, I do not see why phenomenology necessarily has an obligation to construct a set of ethical values in light of its research. This is not to say that ethics is not desirable, of course. But privileging ethical discourse as a point of departure risks engineering a direction in advance, and it seems to me that there is some value in the idea of the phenomenological epoché, even if it is not that of Husserl’s.

Why do I point this out? Because after the talk, I was talking to an eminent scholar, and I was surprised that he more or less asserted a manifesto for how he conducts phenomenology at this particular event. For instance, I was told that this particular event was a “refugee” from the world, and the focus here is to reinforce and celebrate the unity of human life. I found this peculiar. At the same time, this same person gave a talk on the importance of resolving being “lost in space,” with some instances of architecture as un-ethical in their propensity to dislocate us from time (he also insisted he was right on “95%” of things). I also found such a claim very odd. To speak of either a “felicitous phenomenology” or a “dark phenomenology” seems absurd. Phenomenology has no obligation to appease the dignity/harmony/security/cultural values of the subject any more than the natural world does. Phenomenology is not the handmaid of our desire for a common humanity, even if a common humanity is found. As Merleau-Ponty points out, at the heart of lived experience is the anonymity of the body and an “inhuman nature,” which yields things that are “hostile and alien.” This side of Merleau-Ponty is overlooked in general.

Should phenomenology proceed irrespective of the nature of its findings? I realise that this presents the method as autonomous from the subject, which is certainly dubious. But this does not mean we have to fall back into the Nietzschean territory that all philosophy is side effect of one’s biography. After all, there is a world prior to ethics, prior to politics, and above all, prior to gender, in which, if phenomenology is to have an ethical duty, then it ought to be toward uncovering that prepersonal world.

[UPDATE: Tom Sparrow of Plastic Bodies has a thoughtful response to this post at his blog. As does Patrick Craig of Of the Event, each of whom are grad students at Duquesne, incidentally. Both good finds.]