Five Threats to Phenomenology’s Distinctiveness

Abstract

Phenomenology is a distinct philosophical approach that attends to the ways our experiencing bodies participate in the constitution of meaning. Its description, however, in qualitative research texts is often reduced to its association with first-person accounts of lived experience in ways that mislead and threaten its distinctive contributions as a research approach. By examining five common misperceptions in more detail, I demonstrate phenomenology’s continued relevance for qualitative researchers interested in a critical examination of the constitution and circulation of meaning.

Keywords

phenomenology constitution phenomena lived experience description

Phenomenology has a long history in philosophy and the human sciences and has played an indelible role for qualitative inquiry. In many ways it is the immanent presence of phenomenology within many of the traditions that have shaped qualitative research theories and methodologies that make phenomenology something difficult for qualitative researchers to grasp as something uniquely itself, distinguishable from the persistent traces left behind (e.g., lived subjective experience, first-person accounts of phenomena, and the elusive and ever-present intersubjective lifeworld). And yet, I will argue that we do phenomenology, and qualitative research, a disservice when we conflate them as being one and the same thing. The purpose of this article is to articulate some of the ways I believe the general literature on qualitative research might be inadvertently misleading readers on the characteristics of phenomenological research. This is not because I think there is only one conception of phenomenology. On the contrary, it is because this literature often reduces phenomenology to a basic interpretive or thematic perspective which confuses rather than enlightens those wishing to deepen their understanding of phenomenological approaches and conduct a phenomenological study.

What Is Phenomenology?

The basic premise of phenomenology is that we live in the world unaware of its effects on our thinking and doing, and that the development of awareness requires that we turn toward this relationality, not as a reflective viewer standing over lived life and venturing an interpretation, but as a becoming with phenomena as they are constituted as something manifest, graspable, or meaningful. Therefore, phenomenology is a philosophical way of attending to the way our experiencing bodies participate in the constitution of meaning, meaningfulness, subjectivity, objectivity, understanding, knowledge, truth, affect, and the like.

For example, imagine you are walking down a street without much thought about your surroundings, and then, as if from another world, a wedge of geese fly by. Their relentless and purposeful calls hit your heart even before you have turned your eyes to the sky. As you pause, searching for the source of the sound that animates your being, you have simultaneously opened your sentient capacity to a vast network of interconnected experiential encounters, many of which will fade away just as quickly as they appeared.

Phenomenologists believe phenomena manifest . . .

in the space opened up by time, space, movement, rapture, sorrow, soaring, suffering, collisions, entanglements;

at the intersections of experience and meaning-making—the hinges of the what and how of the “thing” in its appearing.

What was your felt response to the sound of the geese? Take “urgency”: a feeling of pressure, a call to act, a need to respond. Urgency does not arise out of nowhere; it is not made of nothing. Our bodies recognize it even when our minds might not know what it means. Phenomena manifest. They are already part of the fabric of meaning—whether found in, or appearing as, urgency, hope, longing, the passage of time, the witnessing of the strength of the goose’s flight, the way time penetrates the ground under our feet. When we think we already know what these things are, we silence their power to teach us something new about ourselves, our world, and the circulation of meaning.

Experiences are not illustrations of phenomena. Phenomena are not interpretations of experience. In other words, the sound of the geese are not illustrations or examples of urgency, longing, resilience. The experience of the sound is urgency, longing, resilience, and becomes alongside other experiences where urgency, longing, resilience become manifest. We are not separate from these layers of meaning nor are we able to grasp how deep and complicated this network is. The “I” is not typically in charge—just life-living, meaning-signifying, touch-touching, perception-perceiving. All we can do is learn to turn our attention to these points of intersection and bring parts of them into visibility.

What might we learn about lived life if we turn our deep attention to the phenomena formed at the junctions between body and world, meaning and matter, experience and expression? This is what phenomenologists ask. However, it is difficult for qualitative researchers new to phenomenology to find their way around this philosophical approach. Part of the reason is that the general introductory texts to qualitative research often describe phenomenology in ways that threaten its distinctiveness. Here are just a few of these threats.

Threat 1: It Is Phenomenology Because the Study Is Focused on Lived Experience

Wrong!

Lived experience is central to phenomenology but unfortunately many studies focused on lived experience take an instrumentalist view of experience. Instead of turning toward the experience of the sound of the geese as you lived it and attend to the overlapping sensations that make visible its complexity or constituent parts phenomenologically, the experience becomes a way into something else, perhaps an account of the problems geese pose for urban planners, or the ways in which an event such as a bird identification outing is made sense of as an experience evaluatively for attendees.

Here it seems important to go back to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological project to help explain what I mean by turning to the sentient unfolding of an experience as you live it. Throughout his writings, Husserl argued that naturalistic assumptions were leading science and philosophy astray (Moran, 2000). Naturalism is a doctrine that posits that the world exists objectively or naturally as something separate from human consciousness of it (Moran, 2008). Desmot Moran (2008) explains that this assumption, which Husserl named the natural attitude, “tends to treat everything as ‘given’ and hence as ‘real’ in the same way; hence it treats consciousness as a fact of nature, as a piece of the world” (p. 408).

For example, when asked to think of the geese, it is likely that you took for granted that geese exist, fly, migrate, and communicate with others during flight. One could argue that our thinking of, and experience with, the sounds of their calls is a lived experience that has meaning for us. However, when phenomenology is defined as the study of the meaning an experience has for individuals or groups without a deep understanding of the philosophical literature, there is a tendency for that “lived experience” to be conceptualized by some researchers as an experience that is significant because it resulted in a particular effect or acquired a particular meaning for an individual or group. The tendency here is to treat the experience as something separate from the reliving of the experience and from which an analysis can help understand or explain its meaning, effect, significance, and so forth.

For Husserl, however, lived experience is not our everyday “lived” experience. In his view, lived experience requires that we suspend what we know, believe, or assume about this experience and turn to another sort of lived experience: the experience of consciousness. Quentin Lauer (1958) describes this well: “A living act cannot be objectified in the way things can be objectified; an act of consciousness can be grasped correctly only by being ‘lived’” (p. 38).

In this kind of lived experience, the act of reflecting is inseparable from what is being reflected on “since the former is but a more profound ‘living’ of the latter” (Lauer, p. 38). The object provides an important source, adding to other sources, from which an essential knowledge of its being can be uncovered in our reflective living of its “being-known” (Lauer, 1958). A focus on lived experience as it is lived requires that we turn from our everyday experience of the world to the “object,” or “phenomenon” as it is experienced—a move that requires a special kind of descriptive approach of phenomena (described under Threat 4).

Phenomena, for Husserl, can be understood as “appearances of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning things have in our experience” (Smith, 2018, n.p.). Phenomenologically speaking, once we make a distinction between a world as existing and the experience of that world, we fall back into the dualisms inherent to naturalistic and idealistic approaches. As a result, any understanding, knowledge, or philosophical theorizing derived from these endeavors will be built on faulty evidence (Husserl, 1962). For Husserl, in order for science and philosophy to overcome this false premise, they must be based on an examination of phenomena in the way of their appearing as phenomena. This, for Husserl, required a series of procedures, or what he called “reductions” (Husserl, 1962), meant to get at the essence of pure consciousness. Although widely criticized as being trapped in the very conceptual issues he was trying to overcome (Moran, 2005), Husserl’s focus on the constitution of phenomena as they are experienced lives on in a variety of phenomenological traditions, whether these align themselves with Husserl’s terminology or project, or do not.

Threat 2: It Is Phenomenology Because the Data Are First-Person Accounts of Experience

Wrong!

First-person accounts are prioritized in phenomenology because they help us gain access to lived phenomena. The phenomenon, however, is the unit of analysis. Phenomenologists believe that phenomena, however conceptualized, lead the way. Unfortunately, some people interpret first-person accounts to mean we must prioritize the perspective of the experiencing subject. Rather, it is the phenomenon, which manifests in a wide variety of ways, that leads the analytical process, not the mediating subject. As Mark Vagle (2018) explains, “When we study something phenomenologically, we are not trying to get inside other people’s minds. Rather, we are trying to contemplate the various ways things manifest and appear in and through our being in the world” (p. 23).

Again, going back to the philosophical literature, part of the difficulties of understanding phenomenology is that the terminology does not necessarily align with everyday understandings. So while phenomenology is also defined as “the descriptive science of consciousness and its objects as they are experienced” (Moran, 2005, p. vii), “consciousness” does not refer to the operations of the brain. Rather, consciousness, for Husserl, is a kind of being—a being whose presence and effect can only be accessed “in examining its being-known” (Lauer, 1958, p. 7). For Husserl, all “beings” are connected in their manner of being-known or constituted. Think of Husserl’s world as a life-force, a living consciousness that holds within it the essential components of all meaning-making. Nothing exists outside this organic flow and yet its existence and transformation requires that we, as its subjects, find validity in attending to its living. In the process, we gain insight into our own being as a variant of consciousness’s potential. James Edie (1964) explains,

Consciousness does not create the world since it is experience of the world. What consciousness adds to the “real world” is a relationship to itself . . . Consciousness is constitutive of the world . . . [and] it is in and through this essential objectifying activity of consciousness that it experiences itself as subject. (p. 59)

Although phenomenologists talk about the importance of first-person accounts and ultimately believe that a deeper knowledge of anything will contribute to a deeper self-knowledge, Husserl’s phenomenological focus was on the constitution of subjectivity, our own as well as that of pure consciousness, rather than on the self. As Husserl (1997) states, “As phenomenologists we must be as it were non-participating onlookers at the life of consciousness, which can only in this way become the pure themes of our experiencing” (p. 222). The aim of phenomenology is “not necessarily [to] seek new knowledge but only a new and more profound realization of the knowledge which one already has” (Lauer, 1958, p. 38): a knowledge which constitutes us in particular ways. For Husserl, the being-known of anything occurs in the experience of its constitution. Therefore, while phenomenology can and does help us understand something about ourselves, this self-understanding is always also world-understanding.

And it is primarily by taking further this notion of constitution as being a more complicated and more situationally produced effect of-the-world rather than being solely of-the-mind that a wide variety of phenomenological variants thrive today. Notable figures influencing this move out of consciousness are Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Heidegger reoriented phenomenology as an ontological endeavor into being itself by asking, “What is the mode of being of that being in which the world constitutes itself?” (Heidegger, 1926, p. 601, as quoted in Korab-Karpowicz 2017, p. 27). Merleau-Ponty built on Husserl’s examination of the “lived-body” (Welton, 2005) to reorient perception as an embodied and reciprocal mode of orientation in the world: one which constitutes the world as it is lived-through (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

Threat 3: Anything Can Be a Phenomenon

Wrong!

Although most topics of interest can be approached phenomenologically, and, therefore, “anything can come into being as a phenomenon” (Karin Dahlberg, personal communication), it is important to understand how phenomena are conceptualized within phenomenology. Phenomena are part of lived life and arise in human encounters in the world. The human and the world are both constituted alongside the phenomenon of interest. Take sorrow, for example, the loss of a loved one provides texture, depth, and meaning to the phenomenon of sorrow, and it also brings into focus aspects of loss, the loved one lost, qualities of vulnerability, the passage of time, the movement of regrets and joys, and so forth. The point is a phenomenon is nothing without the subject who is nothing without the world. Phenomenon–subject–world come into being in this relationality. As such, they are complex, multilayered, and always changing in relation to other things. Phenomenologists use terms like intentionality, threads, co-constitution, embodiment to denote that the focus is on the “thing” constituted in this moving, intersecting space. Phenomena are therefore immanent to the how and what of their constitution within experiential encounters.

A phenomenon for phenomenologists, then, is more than an identification of “urgency” as a phenomenon, and is a turning toward the intersections of the felt and perceived coming-together of the sounds, images, words, and experiences constituting urgency in that moment when the calls of the geese were heard. For Husserl (1982), phenomena as “perception and perceived form essentially an unmediated unity” (p. 79). Humans, as the instruments of perception, must examine the structures of this unmediated unity of the object in its being-known. It is in this coming-together of perception and perceiving (whether conceived of as cognitive, embodied, multimodal, existential, and more) that phenomena become phenomena or intentional objects within phenomenology.

Threat 4: Phenomenology Belongs to the Interpretivist Paradigm Because It Is Oriented Towards Meaning and Understanding

Wrong!

Phenomenology can be interpretative, critical, embodied, queer, material, and more. What holds phenomenologies together is the belief that understanding arises out of human relationality with others and the world. When we experience anything, we bring the world together in particular ways. In this way, what we call “meaning” or “understanding” can be critical (Salamon, 2018), embodied (Merleau-Ponty, 1962), post-intentional (Vagle, 2018), existential (de Beauvoir, 1996), disorienting (Ahmed, 2006; Ngo, 2017), and more. Phenomenologists focus on the constitution of perceived, embodied, significant, meaning-filled, meaning-producing, meaning-elusive phenomena. The focus is on the coming-into-visibility of this sensing-event.

This is a deeply “descriptive” endeavor and requires that we think of description differently. Description is not what we “see” concretely and contextually when we recall or relive an experience. It is not what happened factually. Those aspects may be required as well, but a focus on constitution entails a careful description of how an object, such as “urgency,” becomes “urgency” in its appearing, and this usually means going beyond what at first is assumed to have happened to bring forward a deeper kind of noticing, one that attends to the processes and conditions that make the appearing of this phenomenon possible (see Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2020a, for further elucidation of phenomenological description). So, while Husserl believed there were particular qualities or dimensions that resulted in forming some things as “urgency” and others as “longing,” he did not believe things were given to consciousness in a pure, unmediated fashion. Phenomena always carry within their appearances layers of historical and contextual horizons shaping a phenomenon’s meaning (Mertens, 2014).

Husserl’s reductions were efforts to hold in abeyance what had already been stated as true about something whether these “truths” came from philosophy, religion, or mathematics (Husserl, 1964). He believed these assumed apriori facts of existence eclipsed the ability of scientists and philosophers to see the thing as a thing constituted within multiple meaning-giving structures. To understand how something is perceived in the way it is perceived, Husserl believed one had to stop “taking the world for granted . . . [and] begin to question how it is given” (Dahlberg & Dahlberg, 2020b, n.p.) in the way that it is given. As Helena Dahlberg and Karin Dahlberg (2020b) explain,

Philosophy does not simply add to our knowledge but rather questions its foundations. There is thus not a beginning, nor an end, to philosophy. That which is in question has already begun, and the question is infinite, because it returns again and again to that which has been taken for granted. It is a question that is not a negation or a doubt, but rather a way of joining the question that we already are. (n.p.)

Included in this questioning of world and phenomena is the idea that no single description of any phenomenon can exhaust its potential meaning or significance. As Hazel Barnes (1992) explains,

An object is revealed by—that is, appears to—consciousness in a series of what the phenomenologists call Abschattungen, a succession of glimpses, shadings, profiles, but the object is not exhausted by its appearances, which are infinite. Other ways of looking at it are always possible. (p. 14)

Therefore, what comprises a phenomenological description of the what and how of the constitution of phenomena means different things to different phenomenologists. These differences seem to lie less with the overall project of attending to phenomena as they are constituted as something, and more with what gets included as constitutive of the lived experience of phenomena. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) explains, “The perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of something else, it always forms part of a ‘field’” (p. 4). His attention to the body being our perceptual apparatus brought together a relational field constituted through the body.

A good example of an embodied approach is philosopher of medicine Kay Toombs’ (1988) study of illness as lived. A phenomenological analysis, she writes, allowed her to describe “the manner in which such fundamental features of embodiment as bodily intentionality, primary meaning, contextual organization, body image, gestural display, lived spatiality and temporality, are disrupted in illness causing a concurrent disorganization of the patient’s self and world” (p. 201). In this way, illness as a significant phenomenon is revealed to the reader through the manner in which these embodied features helped shape the lived experience of an ill body.

Attention to other phenomenal fields might form around other perceptual or constituting mediums, wherever located. For example, in The Coming of Age, a study of growing old, feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir draws on the lived experience of aging women in a variety of situations and contexts, and includes as evidence

numerous artistic, scientific, literary, economic, and medical studies of the ageing process, supplementing her analyses with fascinating autobiographical and biographical reflections concerning famous figures in these fields . . . Her phenomenological investigations . . . resulted in rich descriptions of the differential impact of one’s gender, race, age, and/or class upon an individual’s conscious experience. (Weiss, 2014, p. 95)

In Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self, philosopher Linda Alcoff (2006) explains how the lived experiences of “raced and gendered identities . . . operate in very specific ways, utilizing and invoking different features of social realities, practices, and discourses, and therefore they require analyses that will not lose sight of these particularities” (p. 10). Making visible the ways identities are “identified, enacted, and reproduced” (p. 8) does not reveal a “truth” about identity but demonstrates the ways power and privilege participate in their being-produced in particular ways and ascribed certain meanings.

There is thus a misperception that a descriptive accounting of phenomena must rely only on first-person statements of experience with phenomena. Rather, phenomena manifest in these and other accounts, first-person and otherwise. What makes them phenomenological is that the material that is included in any presentation of phenomena becomes part of the phenomenon-in-its-presentation. Disrupting the false alignment between phenomenology and a simplified understanding of the interpretivist paradigm as focused on discovering the meaning assumed to be inherent in human action (Schwandt, 2015) would go a long way to helping qualitative researchers find appropriate sources for understanding this unique approach. Phenomenology is already complicated enough without this problematic association.

Threat 5: Phenomenology Is Essentializing and Reductionist

Wrong!

Phenomenology can be, and has been, these things. A focus on constitution means that phenomenology has been directly implicated in what gets included, excluded, and normalized in the human sciences and in lived life. Nevertheless, this generalized critique misrepresents phenomenology’s dynamic and anti-essentialist potentialities, shutting any conversation about whether it is phenomenology itself that is essentializing and reductionist, or how it is conceptualized and practiced.

In the preface of Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1962) defines phenomenology as “the study of essences” (p. vii). But, he goes on to say, it “is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of [hu]man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’” (p. vii). He explains that some of the critiques of Husserl’s project created divisions between the mind and world or between experience and essence that were not necessarily intended. Merleau-Ponty (1962) writes,

The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why Husserl is constantly re-examining the possibility of the reduction. If we were absolute mind, the reduction would present no problem. But since, on the contrary, we are in the world, since indeed our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on to which we are trying to seize . . . there is no thought which embraces all our thought. (p. xiv)

A focus on phenomena brings into visibility the way living in a world filled with sedimented meanings often hides how these meanings are reinforced or altered in particular ways in our everyday actions and interactions. Phenomenological approaches that limit their descriptions of phenomena to the content of their appearances neglecting their enabling conditions risk reinforcing the very taken-for-grantedness phenomenological analyses are often seeking to disrupt. And it is easy to see how, for example, an analysis of “urgency” might lead us to forget how our orientation to this phenomenon might reproduce, rather than challenge, the way subjects and objects appear within constituting fields. It is easy to fail to recognize—especially if we are “at home” with ways of being and relating that have become normalized—that there is always already a specific slant taken in the way we orient ourselves to the world (Ahmed, 2006): that the “for granted” is already implicated in the direction constitution takes. As noted earlier, phenomenology’s focus on the manner in which phenomena appear simultaneously constitutes the world where such appearances take shape. Since we cannot step out of this constitutive movement, it seems more important than ever to learn from phenomenology’s essentializing and reductionist tendencies. As Helen Fielding (2014) explains, even as feminist phenomenologists have rethought “essences in terms of ways of being” (p. 524) and believe them to be changeable, essences are part of the fabric of meaning and must, therefore, continuously be addressed. Phenomenology offers researchers a complex and varied presentation of ways to understand, to address, and to intervene in the constitution of meaning.

Phenomenology’s Significance

Phenomenologists understand that phenomena manifest in the smallest of spaces—a gesture here, a word written there—and that the meanings emanating from these spaces can have deep and lasting impact. Husserl wanted to provide “a philosophy of beginnings” (Ströker, 1993, p. 209) upon which all knowledge—whether philosophical or scientific—would be derived. In this way, he fell prey to the very issue he was trying to overcome and believed that there was an identifiable system of thought outside of thought’s process that gave thought its shape. Husserl’s work continues to contribute significantly to the way phenomenology is conceptualized, discussed, and carried out. His approach, however, as so many philosophers and scholars have shown, while important for phenomenologists to examine, does not determine the field.

It is because of an ongoing concern with meaning constitution that phenomenology continues to thrive within diverse disciplinary fields. Phenomenology is not one thing, and its intersection with, for example, feminist studies (Fielding, 2014) or queer studies (Ahmed, 2006) has resulted in significant transformations for these fields as well as for phenomenology. For example, while phenomenology has enabled a critical examination of how structures of oppression have constituted the world in particular ways, feminist and queer scholars are helping phenomenologists understand the ways in which phenomenology has participated in this oppression by failing to grasp its own role in “how things, people and relations appear” (Fielding, 2014, p. 519). In this way, feminist and other phenomenologists continue to seek ways to transform phenomenology from within and keep it “open to transformation, instituting new ways of relating that also take the invisible and the fluid into account” (Fielding, 2014, p. 526).

My aim in this article was to demonstrate that an oversimplified presentation of phenomenology within qualitative research serves neither phenomenology nor qualitative research. Rather than reduce phenomenology to a general interpretive framework, introductory qualitative research texts could point readers to a range of philosophical texts and phenomenological studies showing how phenomenological approaches are taken up, challenged, and transformed within varied social and political landscapes. As researchers we cannot avoid participating in practices that constitute the being-known of phenomena in ways that orient our fields of knowledge toward what is believed to matter. In other words, what is revealed to the world through our research has a direct impact not only on what gets circulated, but on how the meanings generated constitute the perceptual field in which things, bodies, and matter become differentiated and defined (Ahmed, 2006). An examination of the literature on phenomenology suggests the need for more critical scrutiny of this literature by qualitative researchers, not less.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Authors would like to thank Karin Dahlberg for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Melissa Freeman

Author Biography

Melissa Freeman is professor of qualitative research and evaluation methodologies at The University of Georgia. Her research into philosophically-informed traditions has been to understand the variety of analytical strategies used to make sense of the world, to disrupt conventional ways of thinking about research, and to open up new trajectories for research and evaluation. Her most recent book is Modes of Thinking for Qualitative Data Analysis (2017, Routledge).

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