“It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—even the godless anti-metaphysicians we know today draw our fire from the flame of a thousand years of faith, from the Christian faith which is Plato’s belief that God is true, that truth is divine.” ~ Nietzsche
Michel Foucault studied the tranches of history to report changes in “epistemes.” unconscious assumptions that define what counts as knowledge at a given time. For me, the early 20th century saw a paradigm shift in Western civilization that can be seen in physics, painting, music, literature, psychology, and other fields. philosophy. This change was precisely what Nietzsche discovered: our faith in the possible objectivity of “science” was equal to our faith 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 simultaneously alive and dead until the mind opens the lid.
- Picasso and Braque painted guitars, bottles, and faces from multiple angles at the same time.
- Duchamp’s Descending the bare stairs described the movement itself as the subject.
- Proust demonstrated In search of lost time this memory Reconstruction, not reconstruction – the past is not stored in a place waiting to be accessed, it is created by someone who is engaged in remembering.
- Stravinsky’s Spring ceremony This caused a stampede in the audience – the patrons were angry that Stravinsky had abolished the tonal center, the fixed harmonic house, that had established Western music for 300 years.
- Schoenberg did the same with the twelve-tone scale, building a system in which no note is more important than any other—no objective center, only a democracy of equals.
- Freud It turned out that what we consciously think we know about ourselves is the smallest part of what makes the play happen – and Freud didn’t stumble upon the unconscious like an anthropologist digging up a buried hieroglyph, he built it up with its repressions, drives, and interpretations. dreams.
In this tranche of history we can see a departure from the episteme of objectivity.
Edmund Husserl, the founder of the discipline as we know it, called Phenomenology. Husserl rightly pointed out that we cannot subtract the observer from the observed and what remains we call “knowledge”. Contrary to the belief that the empirical method of the Enlightenment is the only legitimate path to truth and that science allows us to understand the world as it is, Husserl reminded us that we have forgotten the perceiver – Picasso, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and every musician who always believed in their riffs.
Husserl’s method was rigorous: to “bracket” our assumptions and describe exactly what appears in the mind before the theory colonizes it, trying to account for the structure of our own perception. But today the word “phenomenological” is not used that way. The word is detached from the method that gave it meaning, and no longer displays so much an epistemological modesty as a virtue, but a virtue. Philosophy has anointed the understanding of the word – this word means that there is another option with its existence.
But what does non-phenomenological analysis look like, analysis without a human observer? Every account of reality is already and always the account of a perceiving human being who cannot go beyond the categories from which they come—categories that are not neutral or found “out there” in the world. My cat Evelyn – no matter how much I am anthropomorphization it does not (as far as I know) divide the tree into its trunk, bark, leaves, and roots. And as Derrida reminds us, when we look up “trunk” or “leaf” in the dictionary, we find more words. Language refers to infinitely more language. These are turtles.
So when academics announce that they offer “phenomenological analysis,” using that twenty-dollar word undermines whatever argument they’re making. They may also say they offer “human analysis” – as if it could be anything else. Every scientist who has measured anything, every physicist who has knocked down a wave of probability, every artist who has chosen where to stand, every composer who has trusted the riff in his head – all have engaged in phenomenology. It means none of them. If everything is phenomenological, then nothing is phenomenological. So maybe it’s time to put a moratorium on the word? Not because it shows anything wrong, but because it shows nothing at all, and its use betrays a lack of critical thinking that its users believe it is showing wrong.
