What is phenomenon and what should be phenomenology?

An interesting phenomenon that I found about the Hegelian philosophy is the fate of his Phenomenology. Although it was such an ingenious invention when he used the term Phenomenology for the name of a new field that is about how phenomena are created in this world at all, he has been literally excluded from the society of the so-called Phenomenology (See Appendix) for the past century.

Now a critical question is: “what is phenomenon?” The person who first correctly answered this question was Kant. By separating phenomenon with the so-called Noumenon, Kant correctly pointed out that phenomenon is not objective as always assumed before him, but subjective. This assertion has been proved by modern sciences, especially modern psychology. Today, it’s already a common knowledge, especially with the help of the so-call virtual reality or augmented reality, that what you see is what your brain tells you, which might not what it is in the real world.

Once we are clear that phenomenon is subjectively created by mind, people then would naturally come to ask the next question: “how is phenomenon created by mind?” What Hegel did in his “Phenomenology of Mind” is exactly to answer this question by taking the position of mind itself to observing how mind creates phenomenon. It is probably still the only philosophical work so far that attempts to do so.

However, even though his “Phenomenology of Mind” is the best philosophical work so far that complements Kant’s work through examining the process of creating phenomenon in mind, Hegel clearly disliked Kant’s theory about the separation of phenomenon from Noumenon as he stated in his “Science of Logic”:

Absurd as this would be, it would not be more so than a true knowledge which did not know the object as it is in itself.

His reason was also quite straightforward: since everything, including human mind and any object, is the manifestation of the Absolute Idea, then human mind would definitely know things in themselves, and thus we should not assume “mind can only know phenomenon while there is still an unknown Noumenon”.

Although it might sound ironical to have this conflict between the investigation of how mind creates phenomenon and the rejection of a theory that basically tells that phenomenon is subjectively created, Hegel was not totally wrong with his rejection of the theory of the separation of phenomenon and Noumenon if we look beyond the world of physical objects and take every content of mind as a phenomenon. Since we do know what we are thinking, for otherwise Hegel would not be able to observe how mind created phenomenon, Hegel was partially right about our ability of knowing things-in-themselves.

Therefore, both Kant and Hegel were correct in their own right, and Hegel indeed enhanced Kant’s claim that the phenomenon of an object is subjectively created by mind although he clearly mocked the separation of phenomenon from Noumenon.

After we are clear about “what is phenomenon” and “how phenomenon is created”, then it might be quite straightforward for us to accept that the best fit for the term “Phenomenology” is a science or a contemplation about the process in which phenomenon is created, which is exactly the what Hegel was doing in his “Phenomenology of Mind”. In this sense, it is quite a strange and confusing act of the professional community of philosophy to take the name of Phenomenology away from Hegel, after his “Phenomenology of Mind” had already been famously known for decades, and then exclude him from the nowadays community of Phenomenology. Considering the fact that the “Phenomenology of Mind” of Hegel is not an easy-to-read book because of the strange writing style used by Hegel in that book, it would be very confusing for young readers when the “Phenomenology of Mind”, a book that fits best to the term Phenomenology with its contents, is excluded out of the society of Phenomenology.

Regarding the language style, Hegel has been vehemently criticized, especially by his compatriot, the famous Schopenhauer, for his language in his two famous works, “Phenomenology of Mind” and “Science of Logic”. But those criticisms against his use of language, just as all kinds of exaggerated eulogies for him, are not always fair. Those who exaggerated his positive contribution to the world overlooked the defects in Hegelian system, including the negative effect of his strange language in the books; however those who over criticized his use of language ignored one fact that his relevant work in those books were unprecedented and thus he did not have an existing vocabulary to pick up for the subjects he needed to attack. His language use could be the best choice for him to express what he was contemplating, and we might share his feeling of struggle by looking at the fact that we might all choose the best way to clearly express things out first when we are struggling with very difficult issues.

 

Appendix

As of today, I just went online to both Wikipedia and the well respected Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website, and found the following descriptions by experts in the field of the professional philosophy:

Wikipedia: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy) accessed on 11-24-2018)

Phenomenology (from Greek phainómenon "that which appears" and lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany. It then spread to France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl's early work.^[1]

Phenomenology is not a unitary movement; rather, different authors share a common family resemblance but also with many significant differences. Gabriella Farina states:

A unique and final definition of phenomenology is dangerous and perhaps even paradoxical as it lacks a thematic focus. In fact, it is not a doctrine, nor a philosophical school, but rather a style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience having different results, and this may disorient anyone wishing to define the meaning of phenomenology.^[2]

Phenomenology, in Husserl's conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomenathat appear in acts of consciousness. Phenomenology can be clearly differentiated from the Cartesian method of analysis which sees the world as objects, sets of objects, and objects acting and reacting upon one another.

Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been criticized and developed not only by himself but also by students such as Edith Stein and Roman Ingarden, by hermeneutic philosophers such as Martin Heidegger, by existentialists such as Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, and by other philosophers such as Max Scheler, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Michel Henry, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida, and sociologists Alfred Schütz and Eric Voegelin.

……

Although previously employed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in his Phenomenology of Spirit, it was Husserl's adoption of this term (circa 1900) that propelled it into becoming the designation of a philosophical school. As a philosophical perspective, phenomenology is its method, though the specific meaning of the term varies according to how it is conceived by a given philosopher. As envisioned by Husserl, phenomenology is a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias that has dominated Western thought since Plato in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual's "lived experience."[7] Loosely rooted in an epistemological device, with Sceptic roots, called epoché, Husserl's method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing. Sometimes depicted as the "science of experience," the phenomenological method is rooted in intentionality, i.e. Husserl's theory of consciousness (developed from Brentano). Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality that are representations of it in the mind. Husserl countered that consciousness is not "in" the mind; rather, consciousness is conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). Hence the phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.

 

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ accessed 11-24-2018):

Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object. An experience is directed toward an object by virtue of its content or meaning (which represents the object) together with appropriate enabling conditions.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from but related to other key disciplines in philosophy, such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced in various guises for centuries, but it came into its own in the early 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others. Phenomenological issues of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective have been prominent in recent philosophy of mind.

…….

Originally, in the 18th century, “phenomenology” meant the theory of appearances fundamental to empirical knowledge, especially sensory appearances. The Latin term “Phenomenologia” was introduced by Christoph Friedrich Oetinger in 1736. Subsequently, the German term “Phänomenologia” was used by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. Immanuel Kant used the term occasionally in various writings, as did Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel wrote a book titled Phänomenologie des Geistes (usually translated as Phenomenology of Spirit). By 1889 Franz Brentano used the term to characterize what he called “descriptive psychology”. From there Edmund Husserl took up the term for his new science of consciousness, and the rest is history.

Suppose we say phenomenology studies phenomena: what appears to us—and its appearing. How shall we understand phenomena? The term has a rich history in recent centuries, in which we can see traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.

Although Hegel’s name is still mentioned, but is mentioned to exclude him from the society of Phenomenology.