Phenomenology is one of the most influential philosophical movements of the 20th century. The founder of phenomenology is the German philosopher-idealist, mathematician Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), who sought to turn philosophy into a "rigorous science" through the phenomenological method. His students Max Scheler, Gerhard Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Roman Ingarden introduced phenomenological principles into ethics, sociology, jurisprudence, psychology, aesthetics, literary criticism. Phenomenology is close to existentialism, which, having become the most influential trend in Western European culture after the Second World War, was based on Husserl's phenomenology to the same extent as on the philosophy of S. Kierkegaard. According to Husserl's definition, phenomenology denotes a descriptive philosophical method that established at the end of the last century an a priori psychological discipline that turned out to be able to create the basis for the construction of all empirical psychology. In addition, he considered phenomenology to be a universal philosophy, on the basis of which a methodological revision of all sciences can be made. Husserl believed that his method was the key to understanding the essence of things. He did not divide the world into appearance and essence. Analyzing consciousness, he investigated subjective cognition and its object at the same time. The object is the activity of consciousness itself; the form of this activity is an intentional act, intentionality. Intentionality - the constitution of an object by consciousness - is a key concept of phenomenology. The first attempt to apply phenomenology to the philosophy of art and literary criticism was made by W. Konrad in 1908. Konrad considered the "aesthetic object" to be the subject of phenomenological research and distinguished it from the objects of the physical world.

The next important step in the history of phenomenology is the activity of the Polish scientist Ingarden. As an object of research, Ingarden chose fiction, the intentional nature of which he considered obvious, trying to show that the structure of a literary work is both a way of its existence and its essence. The existentialist version of the phenomenological approach to literature is characterized by a shift in emphasis from "transcendent subjectivity" to "human existence". Phenomenology in its Husserlian version strove to be a science. Existentialists, and above all M. Heidegger, often replaced the tradition of logical methodological research with intuitive calculations. Heidegger's Being and Time (1927) had a marked influence on French existentialism. If Husserl's phenomenological reduction led him to pure consciousness, the essence of which was a constitutive act, intentionality, then Heidegger turned pure consciousness into a type of existential "primitive consciousness". The most complete use of the phenomenological-existential orientation in the study of literary creativity E. Steiger in the book "Time as a Poet's Imagination" (1939). W.Kaiser's monograph "A Work of Verbal Art" (1938) continued the study of literature in this direction. J. Pfeiffer, the popularizer of the work of Heidegger, Jaspers and M. Geiger, in his thesis of 1931 defined the phenomenological semantic method of research. The main principle of the phenomenological-existentialist approach to literature is the consideration of a work of art as a self-contained and “perfect” expression by a person of his ideas. According to this concept, a work of art fulfills its purpose by the very fact of its existence, it reveals the foundations of human existence. It is pointed out that a work of art should not and cannot have a purpose other than ontological and aesthetic. A distinctive feature of the French philosophers of art is that they adhere to a more scientifically rigorous methodology and are much more rational in their approach to a work of art (M. Dufrenne, J.P. Sartre, M. Merleau-Ponty).

The methodological principles of the phenomenological analysis of a literary work are based on the assertion that phenomenology - a descriptive scientific method that considers a phenomenon out of context, based on itself. Complex phenomena are dissected into separate components, levels, layers, thereby revealing the structure of the phenomenon. The phenomenological description and disclosure of the structure constitutes the first methodological step in the study of a literary work. Descriptive and structural analysis lead phenomenologists to an ontological study of the phenomenon. The application of ontology in literary studies constitutes the second most important aspect of the phenomenological approach to literature. The third essential issue of the phenomenological approach is related to the identification of the relation of a work of art to reality, i.e. with the identification of the role of causality in the phenomenological concept of a work of art.

Phenomenological method

The method of identifying layers in a phenomenological description was first used by Husserl, who built a “model” of the layered structure of an object perceived by consciousness, the essence of which is that its layers, representing each separately an independent unit, together create an integral structure. Ingarden applied this principle to a literary work. It was phenomenologists who first approached the study of the structure of a work of art, i.e. applied the methodology used later by structuralism. Some Eastern European scientists (Z.Konstantinovich, G.Vaida) consider phenomenological method of research by the German equivalent of Russian formalism(see Formal School) and the Anglo-American New Criticism. The most widely accepted idea is that the phenomenological method considers a work of art as a whole. Everything that can be found out about a work is contained in it, it carries its own value, has an autonomous existence and is built according to its own laws. The existentialist version of the phenomenological method, based on the same principles, differs only in that it highlights the inner experience of the interpreter of the work, emphasizes his “parallel flow” with the work, his creative abilities necessary for the analysis of the work of art. The phenomenological method considers the work of art outside the process of reality, separates it from the sphere of reality and “brackets” not only reality that exists outside of consciousness, but also the subjective psychological reality of the artist’s consciousness in order to approach “pure” (transcendental) consciousness and pure phenomenon (essence). ).

In the United States, since the early 1970s, there has been a gradual, but clearly tangible change in orientation from the neopositivist model of cognition to phenomenological. The appeal to the phenomenological methodology, which postulates the inseparability of subject and object in the act of cognition, was explained by the desire to offer something new in comparison with the traditional methods of "new criticism". The consideration of a work of art as an object that exists independently of its creator and the subject that perceives it, under the influence of the revision of subject-object relations in philosophy, has been replaced by the development of a set of problems related to the “author-work-reader” relationship. European in origin varieties of receptive aesthetics, which analyzes the relationship "work - reader" and the Geneva School, which reveals the relationship "author - work", are becoming relevant in a new way for American criticism. In the United States, there are three schools of phenomenological methodology: receptive criticism, or the reader's reaction school; criticism of consciousness; Buffalo School of Critics. The subject of research in these literary-critical schools is the phenomena of consciousness.

However, there are significant differences between these schools, and above all in terms of the basic concept - the relationship "reader - text". Critics of consciousness view the text as the embodiment of the author's consciousness, which is mystically shared by the receptive reader. Critics of the Buffalo school argue that the reader unconsciously shapes and determines the text in accordance with his personality. Receptionists consider the text as a kind of "controller" of the reader's response process. The unprincipledness of the discrepancies is removed by the conviction that any characteristics of the work should be derived from the activity of the cognizing subject. All varieties of phenomenological criticism emphasize the active role of the reader as the subject of aesthetic perception.

The word phenomenology comes from English phenomenology, German Phanomenologie, French phenomenologie.

David Woodruff Smith

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of the structures of consciousness as they are experienced from a first-person perspective. The main structure of experience is its intentionality, focus on something, since it is an experience of some object or about it. The experience is directed towards the object in consequence of its content or meaning (representing the object), together with the corresponding conditions for the possibility of this.

Phenomenology as a discipline is distinct from, but related to, other major philosophical disciplines such as ontology, epistemology, logic, and ethics. Phenomenology has been practiced for centuries in a variety of guises, but it gained independence at the beginning of the 20th century in the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others. The phenomenological problems of intentionality, consciousness, qualia, and first-person perspective came to the fore in discussions modern philosophy of consciousness.

1. What is phenomenology?

Phenomenology is usually understood in one of two ways: as one of the philosophical disciplines, or as one of the movements in the history of philosophy.

Phenomenology as a discipline can initially be defined as the study of the structures of experience, or consciousness. In the literal sense, phenomenology is the study of "phenomena", the appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways in which we experience things, and hence the meanings that things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience experienced from a subjective point of view, or from a first-person perspective. This area of ​​philosophy, therefore, must be distinguished from its other main areas: ontology (the study of being, or what is), epistemology (the study of knowledge), logic (the study of formally correct reasoning), ethics (the study of right and wrong actions) etc., and correlated with them.

Phenomenology as a historical movement is a philosophical tradition begun in the first half of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre and others. This movement extolled phenomenology as a discipline as the true foundation of all philosophy - in contrast to for example, ethics, metaphysics or epistemology. The methods and characteristics of this discipline were widely discussed by Husserl and his followers; these discussions continue to this day. (The definition of phenomenology given above will thus be contested by, for example, Heideggerians, but it remains the starting point for describing this discipline.)

In the modern philosophy of consciousness, the term "phenomenology" is often used only to characterize the sensory qualities of seeing, hearing, etc. - what it is like to have different kinds of sensations. However, our experience is usually much richer in content and is not limited to just sensation. Accordingly, in the phenomenological tradition, phenomenology is interpreted much more broadly and deals with the meanings of things in our experience, in particular, the meaning of objects, events, tools, the flow of time, the self, etc. - to the extent that these things arise and are experienced in our "life the world."

Phenomenology as a discipline was central to the tradition of continental European philosophy throughout the 20th century, while the philosophy of mind originated in the Austro-Anglo-American tradition of analytic philosophy that developed throughout the 20th century. But the essential character of our mental activity has been treated in these two traditions in such a way that their analyzes overlap. Accordingly, the perspective of phenomenology outlined in this article will take both traditions into account. The main task here will be to characterize phenomenology as a discipline within its modern boundaries, while noting the historical tradition that led to the independence of this discipline.

In essence, phenomenology studies the structure of various types of experience - from perception, thinking, memory, imagination, emotion, desire and volition to bodily consciousness, embodied action and social activity, including language activity. The structure of these forms of experience, as a rule, contains what Husserl called "intentionality", i.e., the orientation of experience to things in the world - that property of consciousness, due to which it is consciousness of something or about something. According to classical Husserlian phenomenology, our experience is directed towards things—represents or “intends” them—exclusively. through concrete concepts, thoughts, ideas, images, etc. They constitute the meaning or content of the corresponding present experience and are different from the things they represent or imply.

The essential intentional structure of consciousness, as we discover in reflection or analysis, presupposes other forms of experience that complement it. Thus, phenomenology develops a complex concept of awareness of time (within the stream of consciousness), awareness of space (primarily in perception), attention (distinguishing between focal and marginal, or "horizontal" consciousness), awareness of the appropriation of experience (self-consciousness - in one of the senses ), self-consciousness (consciousness of oneself), the self in its various roles (as thinking, acting, etc.), embodied action (including kinesthetic awareness of one's own movement), purpose and intention in action (more or less explicit) awareness of other personalities (in empathy, intersubjectivity, collectively), language activities (including giving meaning, communication and understanding of others), social interaction (including collective action) and daily activity in the life world around us (in a particular culture ).

Further, in a different plane, we find various grounds or conditions for realization - conditions for possibility - intentionality, including embodiment, bodily skills, cultural context, language and other social practices, social background and contextual aspects of intentional activity. Thus, phenomenology leads us from conscious experience to the conditions that help it acquire intentionality. Traditional phenomenology has focused on the subjective, practical, and social conditions of experience. Modern philosophy of consciousness, however, has focused primarily on the neural substratum of experience, on how conscious experience and mental representations or intentionality are based on brain activity. It remains a difficult question to what extent these foundations of experience fall within the realm of phenomenology as a discipline. After all, cultural conditions seem to be more closely related to our experiences and habitual self-esteem than the electrochemical processes in the brain are related to them, not to mention the quantum mechanical states of physical systems with which we can relate. It is safe to say that phenomenology, at least in some way, leads us to some background conditions of our experiences.

2. Phenomenology as a discipline

Phenomenology as a discipline is defined by its field of study, methods and main results.

Phenomenology studies the structures of conscious experience as they are experienced from a first-person perspective, as well as the relevant conditions of experience. The central structure of experience is its intentionality, the way it is directed towards some object in the world - through its content or its inherent meaning.

We all experience different types of experience, including perception, imagination, thinking, emotions, desires, volitions, and actions. So the field of phenomenology is a set of experiences, including the types mentioned (along with others). Experiences are not only relatively passive, as with sight or hearing, but also active - when we walk, hammer a nail or kick a ball. (The scope of experience will be different for each kind of conscious being; we are interested in our own, human experience. Not all conscious beings will or will be able to practice phenomenology like we do.)

Conscious experiences have a unique feature: we we are going through them, we live or realize them. Other things in the world we can observe and deal with. But we do not experience them in the sense of living or realizing them. This experiential or subjective characteristic - experientiality - is an essential part of the nature or structure of conscious experience: as we put it, "I see/think/wish/do...". This trait is both a phenomenological and an ontological characteristic of every experience: it is an element of what it means to experience (phenomenological) and an element of what it means to be an experience (ontological).

How should we study conscious experience? We think about different types of experiences in the same way that we experience them. In other words, we start from a first-person point of view. Usually, however, we do not characterize the experience at the moment of its realization. In many cases, we are deprived of such an opportunity: states of intense anger or fear, for example, absorb all the mental attention of the subject. Having experienced a certain experience, we rather gain some background and familiarity with the corresponding type of experience: listening to a song, watching a sunset, thinking about love, intending to jump over a barrier. Phenomenological practice presupposes such familiarity with the types of experiences it characterizes. It is also important that phenomenology deals precisely with types of experiences, and not with specific fluid experiences, unless we are interested in their types.

Classical phenomenologists practiced three different methods. (1) We describe a certain type of experience as we find it in our own (past) experience. That is why Husserl and Merleau-Ponty said that one only needs to describe the experience. (2) We interpret a particular type of experience by relating it to relevant contextual characteristics. In this vein, Heidegger and his followers talked about hermeneutics, the art of interpreting in context, especially social and linguistic. (3) We analyze the form of the type of experience. Ultimately, all classical phenomenologists analyzed experiences, highlighting their important features for processing.

In recent decades, these traditional methods have branched out, expanding the range of methods available to phenomenology. So, in (4) of the logical-semantic model of phenomenology, we specify the conditions for the truth of a certain type of thoughts (when, for example, I think that dogs chase cats) or the conditions for the realization of a certain type of intentions (say, when I intend or want to jump over a barrier) . (5) In the experimental paradigm of cognitive neuroscience, we devise empirical experiments aimed at confirming or disproving the presence of some aspect of experience (when, for example, a brain scanner shows electrochemical activity in a particular region of the brain that is believed to serve a certain type of vision, emotion or motor control). This kind of "neurophenomenology" suggests that conscious experience is based on neural activity in embodied action in the appropriate environment - mixing pure phenomenology with biology and physics in a way that cannot be recognized as the fully congenial approaches of traditional phenomenologists.

What makes an experience conscious is the subject's awareness of the experience while experiencing or realizing it. This form of inner awareness has been the subject of many discussions that have spanned centuries since the question was posed in Locke's concept of self-consciousness, which develops Cartesian's idea of ​​consciousness ( conscience, consciousness). Does this awareness of the experience consist in a kind of internal observation of the experience, as if the subject were doing two things at once? (Brentano argued not.) Is this a high-level perception of the subject's mental activity, or a high-level thought of such activity? (Modern theorists have proposed both solutions.) Or is it another form of essential structure? (Sartre took this position, relying on the ideas of Brentano and Husserl.) These questions are beyond the scope of this article, but note that the results of the phenomenological analysis mentioned above outline the field of study and the methodology appropriate to it. After all, awareness of experience is a defining feature of conscious experience, a feature that gives it a subjective, experienced character. It is the lived character of experience that makes it possible to study the object of study, namely experience, from the position of the first person, and such a perspective is a characteristic feature of the methodology of phenomenology.

Conscious experience is the starting point of phenomenology, but this experience graduates to less explicitly conscious phenomena. As Husserl and others have emphasized, we are only vaguely aware of things in the margins or periphery of attention, and we are only implicitly aware of the wider horizon of things in the world around us. Moreover, as Heidegger emphasized, in practical matters, for example, when we walk, hammer a nail, or speak our native language, we are not explicitly aware of our habitual patterns of action. Moreover, as psychologists have noted, most of our intentional mental activity is not conscious at all, but can become so in the course of therapy or questioning, when we become aware of how we feel or think about something. We must therefore admit that the realm of phenomenology - our own experience - extends from conscious experience to semi-conscious and even unconscious mental activity, along with relevant background conditions implicitly involved in our experience. (These are debatable points; the point of these remarks is to be puzzled by the question of where to draw the boundary line separating the field of phenomenology from other fields.)

For an elementary exercise in phenomenology, consider a number of typical experiences that we can have in everyday life and taken from the perspective of the first person.

I see this fishing boat at the shore in the twilight coming over the Pacific Ocean.

I hear the sound of a helicopter approaching the hospital.

I think that phenomenology is different from psychology.

I want warm rains to come from the Gulf of Mexico, just like last week.

I imagine a terrible creature, like from my nightmare.

I'm going to finish the text by noon.

I carefully walk around the broken glass on the sidewalk.

I send a diagonal backhand with a characteristic twist.

I choose words to express my thoughts in a conversation.

These are rudimentary characteristics of certain habitual types of experience. Each sentence is a simple form of phenomenological description, articulating in everyday Russian the structure of the type of experience so described. The subjective term "I" serves as an indicator of the structuredness of experience from the position of the first person: intentionality stems from the subject. The verb indicates the type of intentional activity described: perception, thinking, imagination, etc. The way in which conscious objects are represented or intended in our experiences is important, especially the way we see, imagine, or think about objects. The direct object expression ("that fishing boat by the shore") articulates the way in which the object is represented in experience: the content or meaning of the experience, the essence of what Husserl called "noema". In fact, this objective phrase expresses the noema of the described act to the extent that the corresponding expressive possibilities of the language allow it. The general form of this sentence articulates the basic form of intentionality in experience: subject-act-content-object.

A rich phenomenological description or interpretation, such as those we can find in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and others, will be very different from the simple phenomenological descriptions presented above. But such simple descriptions reveal the basic form of intentionality. By expanding the phenomenological description, we can assess the relevance of the context of the corresponding experience. And we can turn to the broader conditions for the possibility of this type of experience. Similarly, in the course of phenomenological practice, we classify, describe, interpret, and analyze the structures of experience according to our own experience.

In such interpretative-descriptive analyzes of experiences, we directly observe that we are analyzing the habitual forms of consciousness, the conscious experience of something. Intentionality, therefore, occupies a key place in the structure of our experience, and phenomenology is largely the study of various aspects of intentionality. Thus we explore the structures of the stream of consciousness, the enduring self, the embodied self, and bodily action. In addition, in thinking about how these phenomena work, we turn to the analysis of the relevant conditions that make possible our experiences as we have them and allow them to be represented and intended in their own way. Phenomenology thus leads to analyzes of the conditions for the possibility of intentionality, including motor skills and habits, background social practices, and often language, with its special place in human affairs.

3. From phenomena to phenomenology

The Oxford English Dictionary offers the following definition: Phenomenology. a. The science of phenomena other than being (ontology). b. A section of any science that deals with the description and classification of phenomena. From Greek phainomenon, phenomenon". In philosophy, the term is used in the first sense, while questions of theory and methodology are controversial. In physics and philosophy of science, it is used in the second sense, although it is used only sporadically in this area.

In its original meaning, therefore, phenomenology is the study phenomena, i.e. - literally - phenomena, not reality. Philosophy began with this ancient distinction when we emerged from Plato's cave. But phenomenology as a discipline did not get its development until the 20th century, and is still poorly understood in some circles of modern philosophy. What is this discipline? And how did philosophy go from the original concept of phenomena to phenomenology as a discipline?

Initially, in the 18th century, "phenomenology" was understood as the theory of phenomena essential for empirical knowledge, primarily sensory phenomena. The Latin term "Phenomenologia" was introduced by Christoph Friedrich Oettinger in 1736. Subsequently, the German term "Phänomenologie" was used by Johann Heinrich Lambert, a follower of Christian Wolff. In a number of writings, this term was used by Immanuel Kant, as well as by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. In 1807, G. W. F. Hegel wrote a book entitled "Phänomenologie des Geistes" (the title of which is usually translated as "Phenomenology of the Spirit"). By 1889 Franz Brentano was using the term to characterize what he called "descriptive psychology". From this Husserl took this term for his new science of consciousness, the rest is known.

Suppose we say that phenomenology studies phenomena: what appears to us and its appearances. But how to understand phenomena? The term has had a rich history over the past centuries, in which we can find traces of the emerging discipline of phenomenology.

If we think in a strictly empiricist way, then sense data or qualia are sent to consciousness: either the patterns of the subject's own sensations (seeing red here and now, feeling tickled, hearing a booming bass), or sensory patterns of the objects around us in the world, for example, the sight and smell of flowers. (what John Locke called the secondary qualities of things). If we argue in a strictly rationalistic way, then the mind is the ideas, rationally formed "clear and distinct ideas" (in accordance with the ideal of Rene Descartes). In Immanuel Kant's theory of cognition, which combines rationalistic and empiricist goals, phenomena are defined to consciousness as things-as-they-are or things-as-they-represent (in the synthesis of sensory and conceptual forms of objects-as-they-are-cognized by us). In Auguste Comte's theory of science, phenomena ( phenomena) are facts ( faits, happening), which should be explained by one or another scientific discipline.

Epistemology of the 18th and 19th centuries Phenomena thus turn out to be the starting point for the construction of knowledge and, above all, of science. Accordingly, phenomena in the usual and still common sense are everything that we observe (perceive) and want to explain.

After the emergence of psychology as a discipline at the end of the 19th century, the phenomena, however, took on a somewhat different form. In Psychology from an Empirical Point of View (1874) by Franz Brentano, phenomena are what happens in the mind: mental phenomena are acts of consciousness (or their content moments), and physical phenomena are objects of external perception, starting with colors and shapes. From Brentano's point of view, physical phenomena exist "intentionally" in acts of consciousness. This view revives the medieval concept that Brentano called "intentional inner existence", but its ontology remains undeveloped (what does it mean to exist in the mind, and do physical objects exist only in the mind?). In a more general form, we could say that phenomena are everything that we are aware of: objects and events around us, other people, ourselves, and even (in reflection) our own conscious experiences as they are experienced. In a certain technical sense, phenomena are things because the they are given to our consciousness, whether in perception, imagination, thought or volition. This understanding of phenomena was destined to form a new discipline - phenomenology.

Brentano distinguished between descriptive and genetic psychology. Genetic psychology looks for the causes of various types of phenomena, and descriptive psychology defines and classifies such types, such as perception, judgment, emotion, etc. According to Brentano, every mental phenomenon, or act of consciousness, is directed towards some object, and so directed only mental phenomena. The intentionality thesis was a hallmark of Brentano's descriptive psychology. In 1889, Brentano used the term "phenomenology" for descriptive psychology, which paved the way for Husserl's creation of a new science - phenomenology.

Phenomenology as we know it was founded by Edmund Husserl in his Logical Investigations (1900–1901). This monumental work combined two essentially different theoretical lines: a psychological theory, continuing the ideas of Franz Brentano (and also William James, whose Principles of Psychology appeared in 1891 and made a great impression on Husserl), and a logical or semantic theory, continuing the ideas Bernard Bolzano and a number of Husserl's contemporaries who created modern logic, including Gottlob Frege. (It is curious that both lines of research go back to Aristotle, and that both produced important new fruits in Husserl's time.)

Husserl's "logical investigations" are inspired by Bolzan's ideal of logic using Brentano's concept of descriptive psychology. In his Teachings of Science (1835), Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations ( Vorstellungen). In fact, Bolzano criticized Kant and the earlier classical empiricists and rationalists for their lack of such a distinction, which made phenomena only subjective. Logic is the study of objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn constitute the objective theories we find, for example, in the sciences. Psychology, on the other hand, would study subjective ideas, the specific content (episodes) of mental activity going on in specific minds at one time or another. Husserl sought to realize both goals within a single discipline. Phenomena, therefore, must be rethought as objective intentional contents (sometimes called "intentional objects") of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology, therefore, studies this conglomeration of consciousness and phenomena correlated with it. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduces two Greek words meant to convey his version of Bolzan's distinction: knowledge and noema, from the Greek verb no éō (νοεω), meaning "perceive", "think", "mean", hence the noun nous, or mind. The intentional process of consciousness is called knowledge, and its ideal content is noema. Husserl described the noema of an act of consciousness as both an ideal meaning and an "intentional object". Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-appearance, becomes a noema, or intentional object. Various interpretations of Husserl's theory of the noema have been put forward, associated with different ways of developing the fundamental theory of intentionality for Husserl. (Is it an aspect of the noema of the intentional object, or is it rather a medium for the intention?)

For Husserl, therefore, phenomenology combines a kind of psychology with a kind of logic. It develops a descriptive or analytical psychology by describing and analyzing types of subjective mental activity or experience, in a word, acts of consciousness. But it also develops a kind of logic - a theory of meaning (today we would say "logical semantics"), describing and analyzing the objective content of consciousness: ideas, concepts, images, propositions - in a word, all sorts of ideal meanings that serve as intentional content or noematic meanings of various types of experience. This content can be broadcast by various acts of consciousness and in this sense is an objective, ideal meaning. Following Bolzano (and, to a certain extent, the Platonic logician Hermann Lotze), Husserl opposed the reduction of logic, mathematics, or science to mere psychology, to how people actually think. In the same vein, he distinguished between phenomenology and mere psychology. From the point of view of Husserl, the subject of phenomenology is consciousness, and at the same time, the objective and translatable meanings of experiences are not reduced to purely subjective episodes. Ideal meaning is the engine of intentionality in acts of consciousness.

A clear understanding of phenomenology was waiting in the wings - Husserl's development of a clear model of intentionality. Indeed, both phenomenology and the modern notion of intentionality go back to Husserl's Logical Investigations (1900-1901). In the "Investigations" Husserl laid the theoretical foundations of phenomenology, and the very promotion of this radical new science took place in his "Ideas I" (1913). Alternative versions of phenomenology soon appeared.

4. History and varieties of phenomenology

Phenomenology acquired an independent status thanks to Husserl, just as epistemology gained such a status thanks to Descartes, and ontology or metaphysics - thanks to Aristotle following Plato. Yet phenomenology has been practiced, named or not, for many centuries. When Hindu and Buddhist philosophers thought about the states of consciousness achieved through various kinds of meditation, they practiced phenomenology. When Descartes, Hume, and Kant characterized the states of perception, thought, and imagination, they were practicing phenomenology. When Brentano was classifying varieties of mental phenomena (defined in terms of the direction of consciousness), he was practicing phenomenology. When James was evaluating various kinds of mental activity in the stream of consciousness (speaking, among other things, of their embodiment and their dependence on habit), he also practiced phenomenology. Phenomenology has often been practiced by modern analytical philosophers of consciousness, dealing with the problems of consciousness and intentionality. And yet, despite centuries of roots, phenomenology flourished as a discipline only in Husserl.

Husserl's writings caused an avalanche of phenomenological texts in the first half of the 20th century. The diversity of traditional phenomenology is evident from the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology ( EncyclopediaofPhenomenology, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997, Dordrecht and Boston), which contains various articles on seven types of phenomenology. (1) Transcendental constitutive phenomenology studies how objects are constituted in pure or transcendental consciousness, leaving aside questions about any relation to the natural world around us. (2) Naturalistic constitutive phenomenology studies how consciousness constitutes or perceives things in the natural world, assuming - together with the natural attitude - that consciousness is part of nature. (3) Existential phenomenology studies concrete human existence, including the experience of free choice or action in specific situations. (4) Generative historicist phenomenology studies the generation of the meaning of our experiences in the historical processes of collective experience. (5) Genetic phenomenology studies the genesis of the meanings of things in the subjective stream of experiences. (6) Hermeneutic phenomenology studies the interpretive structures of experience, how we understand and interact with the objects around us in the world of human existence, including ourselves and other people. (7) Realistic phenomenology studies the structure of consciousness and intentionality, assuming the existence of this structure in the real world, which for the most part occupies an external relation to consciousness and is in no way produced by consciousness.

The most famous of the classical phenomenologists were Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. These four thinkers understood phenomenology differently, practiced different methods, and got different results. A brief overview of these differences will allow us to convey the characteristics of a key period in the history of phenomenology and, at the same time, a sense of the diversity that characterizes the entire field of phenomenology.

In Logical Investigations (1900–1901), Husserl gave an outline of the many-part system of philosophy in its progress from logic to the philosophy of language, then to ontology (the theory of universals and parts of the whole) and the phenomenological theory of intentionality, and finally to the phenomenological theory of knowledge. Then, in Ideas I, he focused directly on phenomenology. Husserl defined phenomenology as the "science of the essence" of consciousness, centered on the defining characteristic of intentionality, explicitly examined from a "first person" perspective (see Husserl, Eden I, paras. 33 et seq.). Arguing in this vein, we can say that phenomenology is the study of consciousness - that is, different types of conscious experience - as they are experienced from the point of view of the first person. In this discipline, we study various forms of experience, namely because they are experienced by us, from the perspective of the subject experiencing or fulfilling them. Thus, we characterize the experiences of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking, feeling (i.e. emotions), dreams, desires, volitions, as well as actions, i.e. embodied volitional acts - walking, speaking, cooking, woodworking etc. But not every characteristic of experiences belongs here. The phenomenological analysis of this or that type of experience will contain an indication of how we ourselves would experience this form of conscious activity. And the main property of the types of experiences known to us is intentionality, that they are consciousness of something or about something, about something experienced in a certain way, represented or involved. How I see, conceptualize, or understand the object I am dealing with determines the meaning of that object in my current experience. Phenomenology thus contains the study of meaning, in a broad sense, including not only what is expressible in language.

In Ideas I, Husserl expounds phenomenology with a transcendental emphasis. In part this means that Husserl adopts the Kantian idiom of "transcendental idealism" in search of conditions for the possibility of knowledge or consciousness in general, and seems to turn his back on any reality beyond phenomena. But Husserl's transcendental turn also implied his discovery of the method epoché (from the notion of refraining from persuasion used by the Greek skeptics). We must practice phenomenology, said Husserl, "bracketing" the question of the existence of the natural world around us. In this way, we direct our attention in reflection to the structure of our own conscious experience. Our first significant result is the observation that every act of consciousness is consciousness about something, that is, intentional or directed towards something. Take my visual experience of looking at a tree on the other side of the square. In phenomenological reflection, we should not be interested in whether the tree exists: I have the experience of the tree whether or not the tree exists. However, we should be interested how the given object is comprehended or intended. I see eucalyptus, not yucca; I see this object as a eucalyptus of a certain shape, with peeling bark, etc. Thus, by bracketing the tree itself, we direct our attention to the experience of the tree, especially to its content or meaning. Husserl calls this tree-as-perceived the noema or the noematic sense of experience.

Husserl's followers argued about the proper characterization of phenomenology, as well as its results and methods. Adolf Reinach, one of Husserl's early students (who died in World War I), argued that phenomenology must retain its alliance with realist ontology, as in Husserl's Logical Investigations. Roman Ingarden, the next generation of Polish phenomenologist, continued to resist Husserl's turn towards transcendental idealism. Such philosophers believe that phenomenology should not bracket questions about being or ontology, which is assumed by the method epoché . And they were not alone. Husserl's early work was studied by Martin Heidegger. He was Husserl's assistant in 1916, and in 1928 succeeded him at the prestigious post at the University of Freiburg. He had his own ideas about phenomenology.

In Being and Time (1927) Heidegger laid out his version of phenomenology. From Heidegger's point of view, we and our activity are always "in the world", and our being is being-in-the-world, so that we study our activity not by isolating the world; rather, we interpret it and the meanings that things have for us by paying attention to our contextual relationship to things in the world. And phenomenology for Heidegger essentially boils down to what he called "fundamental ontology." We must distinguish what is from its being, and we begin our investigation of the meaning of being in our own case, by examining our own existence in the activity of "dasein" (such a being whose being is always my own being). Heidegger resisted Husserl's neo-Cartesian emphasis on consciousness and subjectivity, including the emphasis on being represented by the perception of things around us. He himself believed that the more fundamental way we relate to things is through practical activities like wielding a hammer, and phenomenology reveals the position in which we are in the context of the means at our disposal and our being-with-others.

In Being and Time, Heidegger approaches phenomenology with a quasi-poetic idiom referring to the original meanings of logos and phenomena, so that phenomenology is defined as the art or practice of "allowing things to show themselves." In Heidegger's inimitable linguistic game with Greek roots, ""phenomenology" means... allowing what shows itself to be seen by itself just as it shows itself to itself" (see Heidegger, Being and Time, 1927, §7c) . Here Heidegger unequivocally parodies Husserl's call "To the things themselves!", or "To the phenomena themselves!". Heidegger goes on to stress the importance of practical forms of reference or behavior ( Verhalten) like hammering a nail as opposed to representational forms of intentionality such as seeing or thinking about a hammer. Much of Being and Time is devoted to expounding the existential interpretation of our modes of being, including the famous discourse on our mode of being-to-death.

In a completely different style, clear analytic prose, in a lecture course called The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology (1927), Heidegger traces the question of the meaning of being from Aristotle and many other subsequent thinkers to phenomenological discussions. Our understanding of beings and their being comes ultimately through phenomenology. Here the connection with classical questions of ontology is more obvious, and the echoes with Husserl's vision in the Logical Investigations (which inspired Heidegger at an early stage) are more noticeable. One of Heidegger's most innovative ideas was his concept of the "foundation" of existence, an appeal to modes of being more fundamental than the things around us (from trees to hammers). Heidegger called into question the modern fascination with technology, and his writings may suggest that our scientific theories are historical artifacts that we use in technological practice, and not systems of ideal truth (as Husserl believed). From the point of view of Heidegger, our deep understanding of being in our own case comes rather from the side of phenomenology.

In the 1930s, phenomenology migrated from Austrian and then German philosophy to French philosophy. The path was paved by Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, in which the narrator details his vivid memories of past experiences, including his famous associations with the smell of Madeleine cookies. This sensitivity to experience goes back to the writings of Descartes, and French phenomenology was an attempt to retain the main thing in Descartes, while discarding his dualism of soul and body. The experience of one's own body or the living, living body of someone else has been an important motivation for many twentieth-century French philosophers.

In the novel Nausea (1936), Jean-Paul Sartre described the strange course of the protagonist's experiences, describing in the first person how everyday things lose their meaning - up to the moment when he encounters pure being at the foot of a chestnut tree, gaining at that moment a feeling own freedom. In Being and Nothing (1943, also written during his captivity during the war), Sartre developed the concept of phenomenological ontology. Consciousness is the consciousness of objects, as Husserl emphasized. In Sartre's model of intentionality, the main role in consciousness is played by the phenomenon, and the manifestation of the phenomenon is nothing but the consciousness of the object. The chestnut tree I see is, according to Sartre, just such a phenomenon of my consciousness. In fact, all things in the world, as they are usually given to us in experience, are phenomena, under which or behind which their "being-in-itself" lies. Consciousness, on the other hand, is endowed with “being-for-itself”, since any consciousness is not only the consciousness of an object, but also a pre-reflexive consciousness of itself ( consciencedesoi). True, unlike Husserl, Sartre believed that the “I” or selfhood is only a sequence of acts of consciousness (like a Humean bunch of perceptions), to which he, as you know, included acts of radically free choice.

Phenomenological practice, according to Sartre, involves a deliberate reflection on the structure of consciousness. Sartre's method actually turns out to be a literary style of interpretive description of various types of experiences in appropriate situations - a practice that is not really adequate to the methodological principles of Husserl or Heidegger, but allows Sartre to apply his rare literary skill. (Sartre wrote many plays and novels and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.)

Sartre's phenomenology, developed in Being and Nothingness, laid the philosophical foundation for his popular philosophy of existentialism, an outline of which is presented in the famous lecture "Existentialism is Humanism" (1945). In Being and Nothing, Sartre emphasized the experience of freedom of choice, especially in the context of choosing oneself, which determines the patterns of one's own actions. With vivid descriptions of the "look" of the Other, Sartre created the prerequisites for the modern political significance of the concept of the Other (in particular, in relation to other groups or ethnic groups). Moreover, Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre's companion in life, in The Second Sex (1949), outlined the concept of modern feminism with a detailed description of the perception of the role of women as Others.

In the 1940s in Paris, Maurice Merleau-Ponty joined the company of Sartre and de Beauvoir in the development of phenomenology. In The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty presents a rich variety of phenomenology that emphasizes the role of the body in human experience. Unlike Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, Merleau-Ponty turned to experimental psychology, analyzing the stories of amputees who sensed these phantom body parts. He rejected both associationist psychology, focused on the correlations of sensations and stimuli, and intellectualist psychology, focused on the rational construction of the world in consciousness (cf. more modern behavioral and computational models of consciousness in empirical psychology). Merleau-Ponty himself was focused on the "image of the body", on our experience of our own body and its significance in our activity. By expanding Husserl's concept of the experienced body (as opposed to the physical body), Merleau-Ponty resisted the traditional Cartesian separation of mind and body. After all, the image of the body is neither in the mental nor in the mechanical-physical reality. Rather, my body is, so to speak, myself in my interaction with the objects I perceive, among which there are other people.

The scope of the Phenomenology of Perception characterizes the breadth of classical phenomenology, not least because Merleau-Ponty makes generous references to Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre, while creating his own innovative vision of phenomenology. His phenomenology considered: the role of attention in the phenomenal field, the experience of the body, the spatiality of the body, the mobility of the body, sexual and speech corporality, other personalities, temporality, as well as the characteristics of freedom, so important for French existentialism. At the end of the chapter on cogito(Cartesian “I think, therefore I am”) Merleau-Ponty gives a brief formulation of his vision of phenomenology, emphasizing corporeality and existential moments:

If, reflecting on the essence of subjectivity, I find that it is connected with the essence of the body and the essence of the world, this means that my existence as subjectivity [= consciousness] is one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and that, in after all, the subject, which I am, concretely speaking, is inseparable from this very body and this very world.

In a word, consciousness is embodied (in the world), and the body is merged with consciousness (with knowledge of the world).

In the years following the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and the other authors mentioned above, phenomenologists delved into all these classical themes, including discussions of intentionality, time consciousness, intersubjectivity, practical intentionality, and the social and linguistic contexts of human action. A significant place in this work was occupied by the interpretation of historically significant texts by Husserl and others - both because these texts are rich in content and complex, and because the historical dimension is itself part of the practice of continental European philosophy. After the 1960s philosophers trained in the methods of analytical philosophy also delved into the foundations of phenomenology, relying also on the works of the 20th century. on the philosophy of logic, language and consciousness.

Phenomenology has already been linked to logical and semantic theory in the Logical Investigations. Analytic phenomenology starts from this connection. In particular, Dagfil Follesdal and J. N. Moanti explored the historical and conceptual relationship between Husserl's phenomenology and Frege's logical semantics (from his On Meaning and Meaning, 1892). According to Frege, an expression refers to an object through meaning, so that two expressions (such as "Morning Star" and "Evening Star") can refer to the same object (Venus) but express different meanings in different ways of presenting it. Similarly, for Husserl, an experience (or an act of consciousness) intends or relates to an object through a noema or noematic sense: thus, two experiences can relate to the same object, while having different noematic senses with their different ways of presenting a given object (when , for example, the same object is observed from different sides). Moreover, Husserl's theory of intentionality is a generalization of the theory of linguistic reference: just as linguistic reference is mediated by meaning, so intentional reference is mediated by noematic meaning.

More recently, analytic philosophers of consciousness have rediscovered the phenomenological problems of mental representation, intentionality, consciousness, sensory experience, intentional and conceptual content. Some of these analytic philosophers of mind draw on William James and Franz Brentano, the pioneers of modern psychology, while others draw on empirical research in recent cognitive neuroscience. Some researchers are trying to interface phenomenological questions with problems in neuroscience, behavioral research, and mathematical modeling. Such studies extend the methods of phenomenology, following Zeitgeist. We'll talk more about the philosophy of mind below.

5. Phenomenology and ontology, epistemology, logic, ethics

Phenomenology as a discipline is one of the main areas of philosophy, but there are others. How does phenomenology differ from these other fields and how does it relate to them?

Traditionally, philosophy has included at least four key areas or disciplines: ontology, epistemology, ethics, and logic. Let us suppose that phenomenology is added to this list. Consider now the following elementary definitions:

• Ontology is the study of beings or their being - that which is.
• Epistemology is the study of knowledge - how we know.
• Logic is the study of formally correct reasoning - how to reason.
• Ethics is the study of right and wrong - how we should act.
• Phenomenology is the study of our experience - how we experience it.

The fields of study in these five areas are obviously different from each other, and they seem to require different methods of research.

Philosophers have sometimes argued that one of these areas is the "first philosophy", the most fundamental discipline on which all philosophy, knowledge or wisdom depends. Historically (it can be argued) Socrates and Plato put ethics first, then Aristotle metaphysics or ontology, Descartes epistemology, Russell logic, and then Husserl (in the late transcendental period) phenomenology.

Take epistemology. As we have seen, phenomenology, according to modern epistemology, helps to establish the phenomena on which claims to knowledge are based. At the same time, phenomenology itself claims knowledge about the nature of consciousness, a special kind of first-person knowledge through one of the forms of intuition.

Let's take logic. As we have seen, the logical theory of meaning led Husserl to the theory of intentionality, the heart of phenomenology. According to one interpretation, phenomenology explicates the intentional or semantic power of ideal meanings, and propositional meanings occupy a central place in logical theory. But the logical structure is expressed in a language - ordinary or in symbolic languages ​​like the language of predicate logic, mathematics or computer systems. An important controversial point remains the question of in what cases language forms specific types of experience (thinking, perception, emotions) and their content or meaning, and whether it does so at all. So between phenomenology and logico-linguistic theory, especially when talking about philosophical logic and philosophy (as opposed to mathematical logic as such), there is an important relationship (although it is not indisputable).

Let's take an ontology. Phenomenology studies (among other things) the nature of consciousness, which is the main question of metaphysics or ontology - a question leading to the traditional mind-body problem. Husserlian methodology would have taken out the question of the existence of the surrounding world, thereby separating phenomenology from the ontology of this world. At the same time, Husserl's phenomenology relies on the theory of species and individuals (universals and concrete things), as well as on the theory of relations between the part and the whole and ideal meanings, but all these theories are parts of ontology.

Well, let's take ethics. Phenomenology could play a role in ethics, providing an analysis of the structure of will, appreciation, happiness, concern for others (in empathy and sympathy). Historically, however, ethics has been on the horizon of phenomenology. Husserl for the most part avoided talking about ethics in his main works, although he noted the role of practical interests in the structure of the life-world or Geist(spirit, culture, as in Zeitgeist), and once gave a course of lectures in which he gave ethics (as well as logic) a fundamental place in philosophy, pointing out the importance of the phenomenology of sympathy in founding ethics itself. In Being and Time, discussing a variety of phenomena - from care, conscience and guilt to "fall" and "authenticity" (all of these phenomena have theological echoes), Heidegger declared that he did not deal with ethics. In Being and Nothing, Sartre made a subtle analysis of the logical problem of "bad faith", but developed an ontology of value produced by volition in good faith (looking like a revision of the Kantian foundation of morality). De Beauvoir produced an outline of an existentialist ethic, and Sartre himself left unpublished notes on ethics. A distinctly phenomenological approach to ethics is associated, however, with the work of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian phenomenologist who attended lectures by Husserl and Heidegger in Freiburg and then moved to Paris. In Totality and the Infinite (1961), transforming the themes of Husserl and Heidegger, Levinas focused on the significance of the “face” of the other, working out in detail the foundations of ethics in this area of ​​phenomenology and producing his texts in an impressionistic style with allusions to religious experience.

Ethics is closely related to political and social philosophy. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were involved in the political life of Paris in the 1940s, and their (phenomenologically based) existential philosophies implied a political theory based on individual freedom. Sartre subsequently made an unequivocal attempt to combine existentialism with Marxism. Yet political theory remained on the periphery of phenomenology. Social theory, however, was more closely connected with phenomenology as such. Husserl analyzed the phenomenological structure of the life world and Geist in general, including our role in social activities. Heidegger emphasized social practice, which he considered more fundamental than individual consciousness. Alfred Schutz developed the phenomenology of the social world. Sartre continued his phenomenological study of the meaning of the Other, fundamental social formation. Starting from phenomenological problems, Michel Foucault explored the genesis and significance of various social institutions, from prisons to insane asylums. And Jacques Derrida for a long time practiced a kind of phenomenology of language in search of the social meaning of "deconstruction" of various texts. A number of aspects of the French theory of "post-structuralism" are sometimes interpreted as broadly phenomenological, but these issues are beyond the scope of our review.

So, classical phenomenology is connected with some areas of epistemology, logic and ontology and leads to a number of areas of ethical, social and political theory.

6. Phenomenology and philosophy of consciousness

It should be obvious that phenomenology has a lot to say in the field called philosophy of mind. However, the traditions of phenomenology and analytic philosophy of mind, despite overlapping interests, were not closely related. So it is appropriate to conclude this review of phenomenology by turning to the philosophy of mind, one of the most actively debated areas of modern philosophy.

The tradition of analytic philosophy began in the early years of the 20th century with the analysis of language, most notably in the work of Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Then, in The Concept of Consciousness (1949), Gilbert Ryle made a series of linguistic analyzes of various mental states, including sensations, beliefs, and will. Although Ryle is generally regarded as a philosopher of ordinary language, he himself said that The Concept of Consciousness could be called a phenomenology. Essentially, Ryle was analyzing our phenomenological understanding of mental states as they are reflected in everyday statements about consciousness. Based on this linguistic phenomenology, Ryle argued that the Cartesian dualism of mind and body contains a category error (the logic or grammar of mental verbs - "convinced", "see", etc. - does not mean that we attribute belief, sensation, etc. p. "ghost in the car"). Ryle's rejection of the mind-body dualism led to the resurrection of the mind-body problem: what exactly is the ontology of mind in the context of the body, and how are mind and body related?

René Descartes, in his landmark Meditations on the First Philosophy (1641), argued that the spirit and the body are two different kinds of being or substance with two different kinds of attributes or modes: bodies are characterized by space-time physical properties, while spirits characterized by mental properties (including vision, feeling, etc.). In a few centuries, phenomenology in the person of Brentano and Husserl will discover that mental acts are characterized by consciousness and intentionality, and natural science will find out that physical systems are characterized by mass and force, and ultimately by gravitational, electromagnetic and quantum fields. Where is consciousness and intentionality to be found in the quantum-electromagnetic-gravitational field that has been suggested to govern everything in the natural world in which we humans and our consciousnesses exist? This is what the mind-body problem looks like today. In a word, phenomenology - under whatever name it may appear - is at the very core of the modern mind-body problem.

After Ryle, philosophers began to search for a more detailed and generalized naturalistic ontology of the mental. In the 1950s, new materialistic arguments were put forward, convincing the truth that mental states are identical with states of the central nervous system. According to the classical theory of identity, each particular mental state (of a particular person at a particular time) is identical to a particular state of the brain (of that person at that very time). More radical materialism assumes that each type of mental state is identical to some type of brain state. But materialism does not fit well with phenomenology. It is not obvious how conscious mental states in their experienced quality - sensations, thoughts, emotions - can be just complex neural states that facilitate or implement them. If mental and neural states are simply identical, whether in their specific manifestations or in their types, where phenomenology appears in our scientific theory of consciousness - is it not simply replaced by neuroscience? But experiences are part of what neuroscience has to explain.

In the late 1960s and into the 1970s. a computer model of consciousness appeared, and functionalism became the dominant model of consciousness. According to this model, consciousness is not what the brain consists of (electromagnetic interactions in huge complexes of neurons). Consciousness is rather what brains do: their function is to mediate the information that enters the organism and the behavior of that organism. The mental state is thus the functional state of the brain or the human (animal) organism. More specifically, according to a favorite variation of functionalism, consciousness is a computing system: consciousness is to the brain in the same way that a program is to computer hardware; thoughts are nothing more than programs running on the "raw" apparatus of the brain. Since the 1970s the trend in the cognitive sciences - from experimental studies of cognition to neuroscience - has been to combine materialism and functionalism. Gradually, however, philosophers discovered that the phenomenological aspects of consciousness posed a number of problems for the functionalist paradigm as well.

In the early 1970s Thomas Nagel in the article "What is it like to be a bat?" argued that consciousness itself - especially the subjective nature of what it is like to have certain experiences - is outside the physical theory. Many philosophers have insisted that sensory qualities - what it is like to feel pain, see red, etc. - are not touched upon or analyzed in physical explanations of the structure and function of the brain. Consciousness has its own properties. Yet we know that it is intimately connected to the brain. And neural activity, at one of the levels of description, implements calculations.

In the 1980s John Searle argued - in Intentionality (1983) and later in Rediscovering Consciousness (1991) - that intentionality and consciousness are essential characteristics of mental states. From Searle's point of view, our brain generates mental states with their characteristic properties of consciousness and intentionality, all of which are part of our biology, despite the fact that consciousness and intentionality need a first-person ontology. Searle also argued that while computers simulate intentional mental states, they themselves lack them. According to his argument, a computer system has a syntax (processing symbols of a certain kind), but not a semantics (these symbols are meaningless: we interpret them). Accordingly, Searle rejected both materialism and functionalism, while insisting that consciousness is a biological property of organisms like us: our brains "excrete" consciousness.

The analysis of consciousness and intentionality is central to our interpretation of phenomenology, and Searle's theory of intentionality appears to be a modernized version of Husserl's theory. (Modern logical theory speaks of conditions for the truth of propositions, and Searle characterizes the intentionality of mental states by specifying "the conditions for their satisfaction.") But there is an important difference in their background theories. The fact is that Searle unequivocally uses the worldview settings of natural science, considering consciousness to be a part of nature. Husserl explicitly brackets this assumption, and subsequent phenomenologists, including Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, seek refuge for phenomenology outside of the natural sciences. Yet phenomenology itself must be largely neutral with regard to theories about the origin of experiences, in particular from brain activity.

In the period since the late 1980s. and especially since the late 1990s, a number of authors working in the field of philosophy of mind have focused on the question of the fundamental characteristics of consciousness, which ultimately belongs to phenomenology. Does consciousness always presuppose self-consciousness, or consciousness of consciousness, and is there an essential connection between the two, as Brentano, Husserl and Sartre (diverge in details) believed? If so, then every act of consciousness either includes the consciousness of this consciousness, or is accompanied by it. Does this self-consciousness have a kind of internal self-monitoring? If so, does this monitoring refer to a higher level, when each act of consciousness is accompanied by an additional mental act that monitors this basic act? Or is such monitoring on the same level as the basic act, being its own part, without which this act itself could not be conscious? Many models of this self-consciousness have been proposed, the authors of which sometimes explicitly relied on the ideas of Brentano, Husserl and Sartre or adapted them for their own purposes. These issues are addressed in two recent collections of papers: and.

In the philosophy of mind, the following disciplines or theoretical levels relevant to mind can be identified:

1. Phenomenology studies the lived conscious experience by analyzing the structure - types, intentional forms and meanings, the dynamics and conditions of possibility - perception, thinking, imagination, emotions, volition and action.

2. Neuroscience studies neural activity, which serves as a biological substrate for various kinds of mental activity, including conscious experience. The context of neuroscience will be set by evolutionary biology (explaining the evolution of neural phenomena), and ultimately by fundamental physics (explaining how biological phenomena are based on physical ones). This is a complex area of ​​natural sciences. They partly explain the structure of experience, the analysis of which gives phenomenology.

3. Cultural analysis studies social practices that help shape various types of mental activity, including conscious experience, usually manifested in embodied actions, or serve as their cultural substratum. Here we examine the contribution of language and other societal practices, including background attitudes and assumptions to which particular political systems can sometimes be attributed.

4. The ontology of consciousness studies the ontological types of mental activity in general, from perception (including the causal contribution to the experience of the environment) to voluntary action (including the causal effect of volition on bodily movement).

This division of labor in the theory of consciousness can be seen as a development of the ideas of Brentano, who originally proposed to distinguish between descriptive and genetic psychology. Phenomenology offers a descriptive analysis of mental phenomena, neuroscience (and, more broadly, biology, and ultimately physics) models for explaining what causes or causes mental phenomena. Cultural theory offers an analysis of social activity and its impact on experience, including how language shapes our thinking, emotions, and motives. Ontology places all these results in the fundamental scheme of the structure of our world, which also includes our own consciousnesses.

The ontological distinction between form, phenomenon and substratum of conscious activity is detailed in D. W. Smith's book "Mind World" (2004), in the essay "Three Sides of Consciousness".

Meanwhile, from an epistemological point of view, all these types of theories of consciousness begin with how we observe the phenomena that appear to us in the world, reflect on them and try to explain them. But this is where phenomenology comes in. Moreover, the question of how we understand each fragment of the theory, including the theory of consciousness, is central to the theory of intentionality - so to speak, the semantics of thought and experience in general. And this is the heart of phenomenology.

7. Phenomenology in the modern theory of consciousness

Phenomenological questions, under whatever name they may be, play a very important role in modern philosophy of mind. Continuing the theme of the previous section, we note two similar questions: about the form of inner awareness by which mental activity becomes apparently conscious, and about the phenomenal character of conscious cognitive mental activity in thinking, perceiving and acting.

Since Nagel's 1974 article "What's it like to be a bat?" the notion of what it is like to experience a mental state or activity has become a challenge to reductive materialism and functionalism in the theory of consciousness. This subjective phenomenal character of consciousness is said to constitute or define consciousness. What is the form of this phenomenal character found in consciousness?

One of the most significant lines of analysis is to recognize that the phenomenal character of mental activity lies in some kind of awareness of it - an awareness that, by definition, makes it conscious. Since the 1980s many models of this kind of awareness have been developed. As noted above, among them are models that define such awareness as monitoring of a higher level, in the form of internal perception of this activity (a kind of internal feeling, according to Kant), or internal consciousness (according to Brentano), or an internal thought about this activity. . Another model presents such awareness as an integral part of the experience, as a form of self-representation within the experience itself (again, see about this).

Yet another, somewhat different model may be closer to the type of self-consciousness sought by Brentano, Husserl, and Sartre. According to this "modal" model, internal awareness of experience takes the form of an integral reflexive awareness of "this very experience". This form of awareness is recognized as a constitutive element of experience that makes it conscious. As Sartre expressed this thesis, self-consciousness constitutes consciousness, but this self-consciousness itself is “pre-reflexive”. This reflective awareness is then not part of a separate high-level monitoring, but rather built into consciousness itself. According to the modal model, this awareness partly determines the very nature of the experience: its subjectivity, phenomenality, consciousness. This model is developed in D. W. Smith's Mind World (2004), in the essay "Return to Consciousness" (and others).

But whatever the concrete nature of the phenomenal character may be, the question remains of the distribution of this character over the mental life. What is phenomenal in different types of mental activity? This raises questions related to cognitive phenomenology. Is phenomenality limited to the "feeling" of sensory experience? Or is phenomenality also present in the cognitive experience of thinking about something, in perception loaded not only with sensual but also with conceptual content, or in volitional or motivated bodily acts? These issues are discussed in the collection Cognitive Phenomenology.

The limiting view is that only sensory experiences have a truly phenomenal character, that it is only in relation to them that one can speak of what it is like to have them. Seeing a color, hearing a sound, smelling a smell, feeling pain - only these types of conscious experience, according to this concept, are endowed with a phenomenal character. Strict empiricism would limit phenomenal experience to pure sensations, although even Hume seems to have allowed for phenomenal "ideas" beyond pure sensory "impressions". A somewhat broader view of the problem would recognize that perceptual experience has a distinctly phenomenal character even when sensations are framed in concepts. Looking at a yellow canary, hearing clearly in middle C on a Steinway piano, smelling the pungent odor of anise, feeling the pain of being pricked by a doctor's syringe—all these conscious experiences have a "what it's like to be" character, shaped by conceptual content that, according to this concept is also "felt". The Kantian conception of conceptual-sense experience, or "contemplation", would also recognize the presence of a phenomenal character in these types of experience. Indeed, phenomena in the Kantian sense are precisely things as they appear in consciousness, so that their appearances, of course, have a phenomenal character.

An even broader view would allow for a distinctly phenomenal character in all conscious experience. The idea that 17 is a prime number, that the red color of a sunset is caused by the light waves of the Sun distorted by the air, that Kant was closer to the truth than Hume in speaking of the foundations of the knowledge that economic principles are at the same time political - even activity, having such a pronounced cognitive character, is not devoid, according to this broad view, of the nature of what it is like to think this and that.

There is no doubt that classical phenomenologists such as Husserl or Merleau-Ponty shared a broad view of phenomenal consciousness. As noted above, the "phenomena" that are the focus of phenomenology were recognized as bearers of rich experiences. Even Heidegger, despite his removal of the emphasis on consciousness (a Cartesian sin!), spoke of "phenomena" as something that appears or is shown to us ( Dasein) in our daily activities like hammering nails. Like Merleau-Ponty, Gurvich (1964) explores in detail the "phenomenal field" that encompasses everything that is given in our experience. It can be argued that for these thinkers, each type of conscious experience is endowed with its own special phenomenal character, its own "phenomenology" - and the task of phenomenology (as a discipline) is to analyze this character. Note that in modern discussions the phenomenal character of experience is often referred to as its "phenomenology" - whereas, according to the standard usage, the term "phenomenology" designates the discipline that studies such "phenomenology".

Since, according to Brentano, Husserl et al., intentionality is an essential property of consciousness, the very nature of intentionality will be phenomenal as part of what it is like to experience a certain type of intentional experience. But it is not only intentional perception and thinking that have distinct phenomenal characters. An embodied action will have a similar character, including the experienced qualities of kinesthetic sensation and conceptual volitional content, when, for example, we feel how we kick a soccer ball. The “living body” is exactly the body as it is experienced in everyday embodied voluntary actions like running, kicking a ball, or even talking. Husserl wrote at length about the "living body" (Leib) in Ideas II, and Merleau-Ponty continued this line with detailed analyzes of embodied perception and action in The Phenomenology of Perception. See Terence Horgan's entry on conative phenomenology in the collection, and the entries by Charles Sievert and Sean Kelly in the collection.

But there remains a problem. Intentionality is essentially connected with meaning, so that the question arises about its appearance in a phenomenal character. The content side of conscious experience, importantly, usually has a horizon of background meaning - meaning, for the most part implicitly, and not explicitly present in experience. But in this case, a significant amount of experiential content will be devoid of a consciously felt phenomenal character. So it can be argued. This line of phenomenological theory has yet to be developed.

Bibliography

• Brentano, F., 1995, psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, Trans. Antos C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister, London and New York: Routledge. From the German original of 1874.

• Brentano's descriptive psychology, a forerunner of Husserl's phenomenology, with the concept of the intentionality of mental phenomena and an analysis of inner consciousness distinct from inner observation.

• Heidegger, M., 1962, Being and Time, Trans. by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. From the German original of 1927.

• The main work of Heidegger, which outlines his version of phenomenology and existential ontology, including the difference between being and its being; practical activities are also emphasized here.

• Heidegger, M., 1982, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. Trans. by Albert Hofstadter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. From the German original of 1975. The text of a lecture course in 1927.

• The clearest exposition by Heidegger of his understanding of phenomenology as a fundamental ontology; discusses the history of the question of the meaning of being since Aristotle.

• Husserl, E., 2001, Logical Investments. Vols. One and Two Trans. J. N. Findlay. Ed. with translation corrections and with a new Introduction by Dermot Moran. With a new Preface by Michael Dummett A new and revised edition of the original English translation by J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. From the Second Edition of the German. First edition, 1900-01; second edition, 1913, 1920.

• Husserl's main work, which presents his system of philosophy, including the philosophy of logic, the philosophy of language, ontology, phenomenology and epistemology. Here the foundations of Husserl's phenomenology and his theory of intentionality are laid.

• Husserl, E., 2001, The Shorter Logical Investigations. London and New York: Routledge.

• Abridged version of the previous edition.

• Husserl, E., 1963, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson. New York: Collier Books. From the German original of 1913, originally titled Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book. Newly translated with the full title by Fred Kersten. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1983. Known as ideas I.

• A mature version of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology, including the notion of intentional content as a noema.

• Husserl, E., 1989, Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book. Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers. From the German original unpublished manuscript of 1912, revised 1915, 1928. Known as ideas II.

• Detailed phenomenological analyzes envisioned in Ideas I, including analyzes of body consciousness (kinesthesis and motor skills) and social consciousness (empathy).

• Merleau-Ponty, M., 2012, Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Donald A. Landes. London and New York: Routledge. Prior translation, 1996, Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. Colin Smith. London and New York: Routledge. From the French original of 1945. Quoted from the Russian edition: Merleau-Ponty M. The Phenomenology of Perception. St. Petersburg: Yuventa, Nauka, 1999.

• Merleau-Ponty's concept of phenomenology, replete with expressive descriptions of perception and other forms of experience that emphasize the role of experienced corporeality in many forms of consciousness.

• Sartre, J.-P., 1956, Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. From the French original of 1943.

• Sartre's main work, which presents in detail his concept of phenomenology and sets out his existential view of human freedom; here is an analysis of the consciousness of consciousness, the view of the Other, and many others.

• Sartre, J.-P., 1964, Nausea. Trans. Lloyd Alexander. New York: New Directions Publishing. From the French original of 1938).

• A novel in the first person with descriptions of the nature of experiences, thus illustrating Sartre's understanding of phenomenology (and existentialism) without technical terms and much theorizing.

Modern research

• Bayne, T., and Montague, M., (eds.), 2011, Cognitive Phenomenology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

• Articles discussing the limits of phenomenal consciousness.

• Block, N., Flanagan, O., and Güzeldere, G. (eds.), 1997, The Nature of Consciousness

• Large-scale studies of various aspects of consciousness in the analytical philosophy of consciousness, often affecting phenomenological problems, but with rare references to phenomenology as such.

• Chalmers, D. (ed.), 2002, Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings

• Key texts on the philosophy of mind, mainly analytical, sometimes touching on phenomenological problems; there are references to classical phenomenology; among others, excerpts from the works of Descartes, Ryle, Brentano, Nagel, and Searle (discussed in this article) are included.

• Dreyfus, H., with Hall, H. (eds.), 1982, Husserl, Intentionality and Cognitive Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

• Research into the problems of Husserlian phenomenology and the theory of intentionality in relation to early models of cognitive science, including Jerry Fodor's discussion of methodological solipsism (cf. Husserl's method of bracketing or era) and the article "Husserl's Notion of Noema" (1969) by Dagfin Vollesdal.

• Fricke, C., and Føllesdal, D. (eds.), 2012, Intersubjectivity and Objectivity in Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl: A Collection of Essays. Frankfurt and Paris: Ontos Verlag.

• Phenomenological studies of intersubjectivity, empathy and sympathy in the writings of Smith and Husserl.

• Kriegel, U., and Williford, K. (eds.), 2006, Self-Representational Approaches to Consciousness. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

• Articles about the structure of self-consciousness or consciousness about consciousness, a number of which are unequivocally based on phenomenology.

• Mohanty, J.N., 1989, Transcendental Phenomenology: An Analytic Accoun t. Oxford and Cambridge, Massachusetts: Basil Blackwell.

• The study of the structures of consciousness and meaning in the modern reading of transcendental phenomenology, the structures of consciousness and meaning in the modern reading of transcendental phenomenology, associated with the problems of analytical philosophy and its history.

• Mohanty, J.N., 2008, The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl: A Historical Development, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

• A detailed study of the evolution of Husserl's philosophy and his concept of transcendental phenomenology.

• Mohanty, J.N., 2011, Edmund Husserl's Freiburg Years: 1916-1938. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

• A thorough study of Husserl's late philosophy and his concept of phenomenology, including the concept of the life-world.

• Moran, D., 2000, . London and New York: Routledge.

• Large-scale popular discussion of the main works of classical phenomenologists and a number of other thinkers close to phenomenology.

• Moran, D., 2005, Edmund Husserl : Founder of Phenomenology. Cambridge and Malden, Massachusetts: Polity Press.

• A study of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology.

• Parsons, Charles, 2012, From Kant to Husserl: Selected Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

• A study of historical figures in the philosophy of mathematics, including Kant, Frege, Brentano and Husserl.

• Petitot, J., Varela, F. J., Pachoud, B., and Roy, J.-M., (eds.), 1999, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenmenology and Cognitive Science. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press (in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York).

• Studies of phenomenological problems in connection with cognitive science; the idea of ​​the integration of disciplines and, accordingly, the combination of classical phenomenology and modern natural science is carried out.

• Searle, J., 1983, Intentionality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

• Searle's analysis of intentionality, often close in detail to Husserl's theory of intentionality, but carried out in the tradition and style of the analytic philosophy of language and consciousness, without explicit application of phenomenological methodology.

• Smith, B., and Smith, D.W. (eds.), 1995, The Cambridge Companion to Husserl

• Detailed studies of Husserl's writings, including his phenomenology, with an introduction that provides an overview of his entire philosophy.

• Smith, D. W., 2013, Husserl, 2nd revised edition. London and New York: Routledge. (1st edition, 2007).

• A detailed study of Husserl's philosophical system, including logic, ontology, phenomenology, epistemology and ethics, of an introductory nature.

• Smith, D.W., and McIntyre, R., 1982, Husserl and Intentionality: a Study of Mind, Meaning, and Language. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company (now Springer).

• A book that develops analytic phenomenology and contains an interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology, his theory of intentionality and historical roots, as well as connections with problems of logical theory and analytic philosophy of language and consciousness; introductory character.

• Smith, D. W., and Thomasson, Amie L. (eds.), 2005, Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

• Articles combining phenomenology and analytical philosophy of consciousness.

• Sokolowski, R., 2000, Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

• A modern introduction to the practice of transcendental phenomenology, without historical interpretation, with an emphasis on the transcendental attitude in phenomenology.

• Tieszen, R., 2005, Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.

• Articles about the connection between Husserl's phenomenology and problems of logic and mathematics.

• Tieszen, R., 2011, After Godel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

• A study of Gödel's works on the foundations of logic and mathematics in relation, among other things, to Husserlian phenomenology.

• Zahavi, D. (ed.), 2012, The Oxford Handbook on Contemporary Phenomenology. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

• Collection of contemporary articles on phenomenological topics (mainly not about historical figures).

Translation by V. V. Vasiliev

How to cite this article

Smith, David Woodruff. Phenomenology // Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Translations of Selected Articles / ed. D.B. Volkova, V.V. Vasilyeva, M.O. Cedar. url ==< >.

Original: Smith, David Woodruff, "Phenomenology", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =<

Phenomenology is a philosophical doctrine, according to which the subject of research should be acts of consciousness in itself, cognized with the help of a special method. Its origin is associated with the name of Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), as well as such outstanding thinkers of the 20th century as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and others.

Evolution of the term "phenomenology":

1. In the 18th century it meant the theory of illusion. I. Kant, phenomenology is a new understanding of philosophy. G. Hegel, phenomenology is the path of knowledge from the suggestions of the sense organs to the knowledge of the absolute idea. E. Husserl, phenomenology is a method of existence, the meaning of the structures and connections of the process of cognition of the entire surrounding world.

The main ideas of phenomenology:

E. Husserl in his work "The Crisis of European Man and Philosophy" reveals the following. ideas:

1. The study of ways to obtain true knowledge without relying on the psychological processes of an individual.

2. It is important to explore the phenomena of consciousness by structuring scientific knowledge and exploring the ideas that precede all science.

3. Env. the world of existence in reality, when studying it, one cannot follow established theories - this is the possibility of analyzing “pure consciousness”.

4. Consciousness develops the meaning of objects. Everyone comprehends what is happening in his own way and this is the meaning of his freedom.

M. Heidgger developed the trace. ideas of phenomenology in the work "Being and Time":

1. The task of a person is not to lose himself and be himself.

2. The actions of a person depend on his construction: in the face of death, everything stops. impossible; the joy of communicating with a loved one transforms the world; melancholy, grief make the world gray.

3. The study of human being is not a desire to conquer nature, but to delve into the essence of its existence.

4. a person's speech is a reflection of his being. The language of poetry is more important than the language of science.

J. P. Sartre developed the trace. ideas of phenomenology:

1. A person cannot be defined initially, he exists as a “blank slate”, and later becomes the way he forms himself. Man is a certain project, this is his freedom.

2. Man is the highest goal and value, but he is always incomplete, the main thing that allows a person to live is his actions.

M. Scheler "Man as a part of living nature to dominate himself and rise."

M. Merleau-Ponty. From the point of view of phenomenology, he perceived the ideas of Marxist philosophy with interest, although he criticized their one-sided historical problems.

Phenomenological problems have been developed in various areas of psychology, ethics, aesthetics, law and sociology, religion, the history of metaphysics, the philosophy of mathematics and natural science.

Philosophical hermeneutics.

hermeneutics(Greek: hermeneutike- interpretation) as a way of systematic reflection on the specifics of the problems of understanding and interpretation is one of the influential philosophical directions of philosophical analysis of the 20th century. But the formulation of problems in the modern theory of hermeneutics remains incomprehensible without taking into account the previous hermeneutical tradition.

According to ancient Greek tradition, God Hermes - messenger Zeus rulers of gods and men. Hermes had to explain the message to the people Zeus provide them understanding.

In science, understanding is often interpreted as subsuming under a concept. They do this when they solve problems in mathematics, physics, and other academic disciplines. The hermeneutic believes that there is no true understanding here, but only explanation. Understanding must be truly vital, it must deal with beings, and science simply abstracts from many things.

A person is initially in the world of existence, is interested in it (in Latin, “to be among existence” means to be interested in it). However, things are closed from a person, they have their own boundaries. On the other hand, everyone has their own limits. Understanding will be achieved, and the truth will be revealed, if it is possible to achieve a fusion of the boundaries of the thing and the person. A few examples will clarify the situation for us.

Let's say I have a car. How to unlock its secret? Give him the opportunity to show himself comprehensively, in perfection. And for this they need to use it. But not in any way, otherwise it will simply become worthless.

To understand a text means to find answers to a number of questions in it, determined by the boundaries of the questioner, his education, taste (aesthetic, for example), talent, traditionalism. According to the German philosopher Gadamer who is considered the founder of modern hermeneutics, attempts to see the meaning of the text in the mind of its creator are futile (because the creator of the text himself is part of the world, moreover, we want to know the immediate given, more precisely: given to find the answer). The text does not have its own meaning outside of its interpretation, and within the framework of this interpretation, subjective arbitrariness is inappropriate, because the text itself is not arbitrary. Thus, understanding is achieved in ensuring the fusion of the horizons of the text and the person. In doing so, one must keep in mind the so-called hermeneutic circle . A person must understand what he is inside from the very beginning, a circular dependence connects the whole and its part. We can only understand a text as part of a whole, about which we have some pre-understanding before interpreting the text. Finally, it should be taken into account that understanding is historical, transient, temporary, and this means the variability of the very horizons of understanding. Each new generation interprets in its own way. For hermeneutics, the most important thing is to know the essence of the matter.

The main ideas of hermeneutics:

1. The knowledge and life of a person proceeds along the path of some texts to others, taking into account the current socio-cultural situation.

2. The language of communication is the basis for obtaining dialogue philosophical knowledge.

3. Cognition is based on knowledge.

4. The peculiarity of the understanding process is the basis for clarification. For the religious understanding of the text - the basis is faith.

5. It is important to overcome the one-sidedness of the facts of science, to criticize them, relying on many points of view and showing subjectivity.

6. Various interpretations of the same text are possible, which do not even coincide with the opinion of the authors.

7. Exist. difficulty in understanding nature, because it is silent.

8. Not every fact of science can be verified empirically.

9. To understand and interpret the whole, it is necessary to know its component parts.

10. In any theory, it is important to select certain facts that give rise to this theory.

11. The variety of forms of language existence: gestures, facial expressions, etc.

Phenomenology (the doctrine of phenomena) is one of the most original and significant trends in the philosophy of the 20th century. The emergence of phenomenology was facilitated by the ideas of Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley, Kant, and the neo-Kantians of the Marburg school. Dilthey made a significant contribution to the creation of phenomenology. But the founder of phenomenology as an independent doctrine is E. Husserl. The ideas of phenomenology have a number of similarities with the philosophy of Buddhism, although it is not known whether Husserl himself was familiar with it.

On the basis of Husserl's philosophy and to a large extent under his influence, phenomenology developed as a complex multifaceted current of modern philosophy. At the same time, some researchers began to develop the Husserl phenomenological idealism(M. Heidegger, G. Shpet, etc.), while others - phenomenological method analysis, applying it to the study of ethical, cultural-historical, ontological and similar problems (M. Scheler, N. Hartmann, P. Riker, etc.). Phenomenology had a serious influence on a number of other philosophical doctrines of the 20th century, primarily on existentialism and hermeneutics.

Phenomenology is based on two fundamental ideas:

First, every person has consciousness, which is self-evident for any thinking being (let us recall Cartesian: “I think, therefore I am”);

Secondly, since the tool for cognizing everything that lies outside consciousness (i.e., the external world) is consciousness, then any objects or facts of reality are known and realized by us only when they are somehow imprinted and manifested in consciousness. Consequently, everything that we know is, strictly speaking, not the objects or facts of reality themselves, but their manifestations in consciousness, i.e. phenomena or occurrences.

This idea was first explicitly formulated by Kant, and in his terminology this situation could be described as follows: what we know through our consciousness is always a “thing-for-us”, and not a “thing-in-itself” .

However, phenomenologists and, in particular, Husserl went further, generally denying the Kantian “thing-in-itself”. So, if our consciousness somehow works with this “thing-in-itself” (at least affirming its unknowability, being outside consciousness, etc.), then by the same token it turns out to be already a “thing-for-us”, those. also a phenomenon of consciousness. If consciousness in no way deals with the "thing-in-itself", then the latter simply does not exist for consciousness.

From this follows the general conclusion that the sharp opposition between the cognizing subject and the cognizable object, which has been dominant in European philosophy since the time of Plato, must be eliminated "since any cognizable object is just a phenomenon of consciousness 1 .

In everyday life and in the natural sciences, we are dealing with a naive "natural attitude", in which the external world appears to us as a collection of objectively existing things, their properties and relationships. And the working consciousness of the thinking subject is directed to this objective world opposing man. From the position of phenomenology, the only reality with which consciousness deals and with which it can only deal is phenomena, or phenomena of consciousness. And from this point of view, the differences between the things of the objective world and psychic experiences in a certain sense are erased: both of them turn out to be just material with which consciousness works.

The task of the phenomenologist is to study the activity of consciousness itself: to reveal the structure and fundamental acts of pure consciousness (that is, consciousness as such), distinguishing the form of these acts and structures from their content. To do this, you need to clear your mind with the help of special methods (phenomenological reduction).

Coming in the process of phenomenological reduction to "pure consciousness", we find that it is an irreversible and non-localized stream of phenomena in space. We cannot look at it “from above”, “from below” or “from the side”, standing above it, being outside of it (for this, consciousness would have to go beyond its limits, i.e., cease to be consciousness); to comprehend it is possible only "floating in the stream." But, studying it, we find that it has its own structure and relative orderliness, and this is precisely what makes it possible to single out individual phenomena as its elementary units.

The fate of teaching The study of the structures of "pure consciousness", carried out in phenomenology, made it possible to approach the comprehension of the processes of meaning formation and communication, the very possibility of understanding, and played a significant role in posing and studying the most urgent problem of modern computer science - the problem of "artificial intelligence". It is no coincidence that Husserl is often called the "grandfather" of "artificial intelligence".

1 It is interesting to note that Nietzsche also opposed the sharp opposition of subject and object in European philosophy, although on slightly different grounds.

Phenomenology has had a tremendous impact on the entire Western philosophy of the 20th century, especially on existentialism, hermeneutics, postmodernism, and so on. This influence was so great that one can speak of a "phenomenological turn" in Western philosophy.

Husserl

Biographical information. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) - an outstanding German philosopher, a Jew by pro-

origin (from a family of merchants), was born and lived in Germany. From 1868 to 1876 he studied at the gymnasium, where he was not very successful 1 . After graduating from high school, he studied at the University of Leipzig and Berlin, where he studied astronomy, mathematics, physics and philosophy. In 1882 he defended his dissertation in mathematics. Husserl became interested in philosophy while working as an assistant to the famous mathematician K. Weierstrass in Berlin. True, Husserl's philosophy was led not only by reflections on the philosophical problems of mathematics, but also by an in-depth study of the New Testament. Philosophy, in his opinion, was the science that allows "to find the way to God and a righteous life." In 1886, Husserl listened to the lectures of the famous philosopher F. Brentano in Vienna, after which he finally devoted his life to philosophy. In 1887 he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Gaul, from 1901 to 1916 he taught in Göttingen, from 1916 to 1928 - in Freiburg. The last years of his life, Husserl was persecuted by the Nazi regime. He was dismissed from his job, and soon he was excluded from the list of professors at the University of Freiburg altogether. Despite the moral terror, he continued his creative activity until his death in 1938. According to an old German tradition, when a professor died, the university flag was lowered on the university tower. The honorary professor at the University of Freiburg, the world-famous scientist E. Husserl, was also denied this.

Main works. Philosophy of arithmetic. Psychological and logical research” (1891), “Logical research. In 2 t." (1900-1901), "On the Phenomenology of the Inner Consciousness of Time" (lectures 1904-1905), "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" (1911), "Ideas of Pure Phenomenology" (1913), "Paris Papers" (1924), "Carte-

1 The teacher's council of the gymnasium even expressed the opinion that he would certainly fail at the final exams due to a frivolous attitude to study. Having learned about this, Husserl on the day of the exam in a matter of hours studied the necessary educational material and passed the exam brilliantly. The director of the gymnasium, speaking before the examination committee, remarked not without pride: "Husserl is the worst of our students!"

Zian reflections" (1931), "The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology" (1936).

A significant part of Husserl's works was not published during his lifetime, and their publication continues to the present day.

Philosophical views. Late XIX - early XX centuries. were marked by a crisis in science (primarily physics and mathematics 1), which led to the revival and wide spread of various areas of irrationalism and skepticism, which called into question the claims of science to the truth of its provisions and the very possibility of obtaining absolutely true knowledge. Husserl was one of the first to defend the ideals of rationalism. His goal was to build philosophy as a rigorous science, for which he set about developing a new way of thinking and a method that ensures the reliability of the knowledge gained.

Convinced of the existence of absolutely true knowledge (on the example of mathematics and logic), Husserl made an attempt to investigate the nature of this knowledge. But for this it was necessary to answer the question: how can absolute truth (the laws of logic, the provisions of mathematics) arise and exist in the individual consciousness of a person? This problem of correlation between the individual, temporal, limited human consciousness and the absolute, ideal, timeless content of scientific knowledge worried Husserl throughout his life 2 .

Antipsychologism. Husserl believed that mathematical and logical laws are absolute truth, independent of our experience. And so, in his Logical Investigations, he severely criticized the so-called psychologism in logic. Representatives of psychologism tried to derive the laws of logic from the laws of the mental process of thinking, thereby making the truth of its laws dependent on the psychological characteristics of individual consciousness or human consciousness in general. Insisting on the irrelative, absolute nature of logical laws, Husserl emphasized: truth belongs to the realm of meaning, the ideal content of cognitive acts that make up consciousness. The meaning of the act of judgment "2 + 2 = 4" is the truth, which does not depend on either the physical or psychological characteristics of the subject (mood, desires, etc.), or on any other empirical factors.

The study of the nature of true knowledge forced Husserl to turn to the study of the ideal structures of consciousness, which, ultimately, meant the construction of phenomenology.

1 On the crisis in physics, see p. 451-452, on the crisis in mathematics - on p. 453.

2 In this case, we are dealing with a new formulation of the old philosophical problem about the necessary and universal nature of scientific laws and the limitations of human experience (see diagram 122).

Phenomenology. Phenomenology for Husserl is a science that studies the world of consciousness, the world of phenomena, i.e. objects given to consciousness in various cognitive acts. Just like Kant, Husserl begins his research with an analysis of the process of cognition. It requires a critical approach to the use of unsubstantiated and untested concepts and ideas that underlie our picture of the world. First of all, the concept of "objective reality" or "reality" was subjected to criticism. Husserl demands the rejection of this concept, "putting it in brackets."

The natural, or naive, attitude of our consciousness, based on common sense, divides the world into the subjective, i.e. the world of consciousness, and the objective world, which lies outside consciousness, i.e. the world of things, properties and relations. As a human being, the philosopher is forced to accept this attitude in order to lead a normal life. But, as a philosopher, he must understand that such an attitude is introduced by the cognizing subject himself and is not a necessary characteristic of cognition itself. Therefore, it must be eliminated, which is achieved by using the method epoch 1- "bracketing" all the naive-realistic ideas of natural science, philosophy and "common sense" regarding the external world and man.

The phenomenological era consists in refraining from judgments about the real objective world (which in most philosophical teachings was the main object of knowledge) and in refusing to consider states of consciousness as “defective subjectivity”. Thanks to the epoch, the entire space-time world, as well as one’s own “I”, appear as phenomena of consciousness, as “meaningful” objects that he judges, thinks, evaluates, perceives, etc. Thus, for Husserl, the boundaries of the world turn out to coincide with the boundaries of consciousness (meaning).

In later works, the epoch plays the role of a preparatory stage phenomenological reduction. As a result, there is a change in the naive cognitive attitude to phenomenological: a person switches his attention from the objects of the external world to the life of his consciousness.

And as a result, access to pure phenomena of consciousness, meaningful or conscious objects is opened. Phenomenology explores not the physical, but the intentional structure of the world; its subject matter is not the objective laws of reality, but the meanings of being.

"Intentionality" Husserl understands it as "orientation towards" 2 . Our consciousness is intentional, as it is always directed towards

1 From the Greek "stopping, stopping, abstaining from judgment."

2 Husserl borrowed the concept of “intentionality” from F. Brentano. In turn, Brentano relied on the medieval concept of "intentio", which meant "different from oneself."

an object. We are always thinking about something, evaluating something, imagining something, and so on. Thus, two moments can be distinguished in intentionality: the objective (the object of orientation) and the orientation itself. Intentionality turns out to be a necessary, a priori ideal structure of consciousness 1 . Analyzing the intentional act of cognition, Husserl singles out two main points in it: noemu and noesis. The noema characterizes the act of consciousness, considered from the side of the object, it corresponds to the "what" of the act. Noesis is a characteristic of the direction itself, it corresponds to the “how” of the act.

Scheme 175. Intentional act

For example, consider three acts of consciousness expressed in sentences: 1) "The door is closed."; 2) "The door is closed!"; 3) Is the door closed? In all these three cases, we are dealing with a single "matter", the acts of consciousness are aimed at a single "what": some phenomena of consciousness "door" and "closed". But when we turn to how the consciousness is directed towards this "what", then here a difference is revealed: in the first case we are dealing with a statement, in the second - with an exclamation, in the third - with a question 2 .

Scheme 176. Noema and noesis

1 Singling out a priori structures of consciousness, Husserl follows Kant, but at the same time, intentionality is fundamentally different from those a priori forms that Kant saw in human consciousness.

2 Differences in directivity are not limited to the three above, they are taken as an example as the most simple and understandable.

In Logical Investigations, Husserl proposed an original conception of meaning, linking it to the ideal content of acts of consciousness. At the same time, meaning is understood as that identical thing that is preserved in all acts co-directed to this “what”. The concept of meaning (essence) has become one of the central concepts in phenomenology. Subsequently, Husserl paid great attention to the question of the correlation of different meanings and the identity of the meanings included in the conceptual schemes (“trees of meanings”) of various subjects, which allowed him to explain the problem of understanding each other by different subjects, etc.

The problem of the objectivity of scientific knowledge. But how does the phenomenological approach help us to solve the original problem of the relationship between the objectivity of the ideal content of scientific knowledge (meaning) and the subjective consciousness in which this meaning is experienced? To do this, Husserl shifts the focus of research from the individual consciousness of subjects (and their communication) to universal consciousness, to the consciousness of a certain universal subject (community of people or humanity), for which the objective world appears as a world of common intention. The objective world is now understood as an intersubjective sphere (common to all subjects). In this case, the individual "I" becomes intersubjective.

In his last, unfinished work, The Beginning of Geometry, Husserl points out one very important characteristic of a community - to be a bearer of a language, a "corporeal design of meaning." Language as a carrier of meaning, being a material object, turns out to be woven into the very fabric of the common for various subjects and therefore objective (from the standpoint of individual consciousness) world (the world of intentional, meaningful objects). The belonging of a linguistic sign to the general objective world turns out to be a guarantor and condition for the objectivity of the ideal meaning and makes understanding and communication possible. Thus, the objective meanings that make up the content of scientific knowledge receive their substantiation in the experience of the subject (mankind), who is a native speaker.

The crisis of European science and its overcoming. Husserl connects the crisis of European science with the alienation of objective scientific knowledge (the semantic content of knowledge) from the subject. And in the analysis of this crisis, one of the central concepts is the concept "life world" those. world to which man himself belongs. The introduction of the concept of "life world" can be considered a return to the

1 Undoubtedly, the “return” from the heights of “pure thinking” to the world in which a person lives was also influenced by the blows that Husserl himself received from this world, in particular, persecution by the fascist regime.

natural setting of consciousness, recognition of the self-evidence of the independent existence of the external world. But it is necessary to take into account the fact that the "objective" world is restored in its rights within the already phenomenologically reduced consciousness, thereby receiving a phenomenological justification.

Based on his main position that the world of people (humanity) is the world of consciousness, Husserl emphasizes that any activity (including science) is subjective in this sense. Husserl connects overcoming the crisis of European science and spiritual culture as a whole with the recognition of its fundamental subjectivity. He hopes that, having overcome the alienation from the subject, philosophy will lead humanity out of the crisis, transforming it into a humanity "capable of absolute responsibility to itself on the basis of absolute theoretical insights."

Scheme 177. Husserl: origins and influence

Phenomenology - the study of phenomena; direction in philosophy of the 20th century, founded by E. Husserl.

I. Phenomenology as a philosophical concept was first used in the work of I. Lambert "New Organon", where it denotes one of the parts of the general science of science, the theory of appearances (Theorie des Scheinens). Then this concept is adopted by Herder, applying it to aesthetics, and Kant. Kant had an idea, which he reported to Lambert: to develop a phaenomenologie generalis, i.e. general phenomenology as a propaedeutic discipline that would precede metaphysics and fulfill the critical task of establishing the boundaries of sensibility and asserting the independence of the judgments of pure reason. In the Metaphysical Primary Foundations of Natural Science, Kant already defines the meaning and goals of phenomenology in a somewhat different sense. It is inscribed in the pure doctrine of movement as that part of it which analyzes movement in the light of the categories of modality, i.e. opportunity, chance, necessity. Phenomenology now acquires in Kant not only a critical, but also a positive meaning: it serves to transform the phenomenon and the manifested (manifested movement) into experience. In the early philosophy of Hegel, phenomenology (spirit) is understood as the first part of philosophy, which should serve as the foundation for other philosophical disciplines - logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit (see "Phenomenology of Spirit"). In the mature philosophy of Hegel, phenomenology refers to that part of the philosophy of the spirit, which, in the section on the subjective spirit, is located between anthropology and psychology and explores consciousness, self-consciousness, reason (Hegel G.W.F. Soch., vol. III. M., 1956, p. 201-229). In the 20th century the concept and concept of phenomenology acquired new life and new meaning thanks to Husserl.

Husserl's phenomenology is a wide, potentially endless field of methodological, as well as epistemological, ontological, ethical, aesthetic, socio-philosophical studies of any topic of philosophy through a return to the phenomena of consciousness and their analysis.

The main principles and approaches of Husserlian phenomenology, which basically retain their significance at all stages of its evolution and, with all reservations, are recognized in various (although not in all) modifications of phenomenology as a direction:

• 1) the principle according to which "every original (original) given contemplation is the true source of knowledge", Husserl calls the "principle of all principles" of philosophy (Husserliana, further: Hua, Bd. III, 1976, S. 25). The policy document of early phenomenology (Introduction to the first issue of the "Yearbook of Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research") stated that "only through a return to the original sources of contemplation and to the insights of essences gleaned from them (Wesenseinsichten) can the great traditions of philosophy be preserved and renewed";
• 2) by carrying out a phenomenological analysis, philosophy must become an eidetic science (i.e., the science of essences), about the perception of the essence (Wesensschau), in order to move towards which, first of all, it is required to form a specific attitude, motivation (Einstellung) of research interest, opposite to the naive "natural installation", which is typical both for everyday life and for the "factual sciences" of the natural science cycle (Hua, III, S. 6, 46, 52). If the world in the natural setting appears as "the world of things, goods, values, as a practical world," as a directly given, present reality, then in the edeic phenomenological setting, the "givenness" of the world is precisely called into question, requiring a specific analysis;
• 3) liberation from the natural attitude requires the use of special methodological procedures of a "cleansing" nature. This method is a phenomenological reduction. "Belonging to the natural attitude, we deprive the general thesis of effectiveness, one time bracketing everything and everyone that it embraces in the optical - therefore, we deprive the significance of this entire" natural world "" (Hua, III, S. 67). The result of the implementation of the phenomenological reduction is the transfer to the research ground of "pure consciousness";
• 4) "pure consciousness" is a complex unity of structural elements and essential interconnections of consciousness modeled by phenomenology. This is not only the subject of analysis of phenomenology, but also the ground on which Husserlian transcendentalism demands to transfer any philosophical problematic. The originality and theoretical significance of phenomenology lies in the construction of a complexly mediated, multi-layered model of consciousness (capturing the real features of consciousness, analytically exploring each of them and their intersection with the help of a number of specific procedures of the phenomenological method), as well as in a special epistemological, ontological, metaphysical interpretation of this model ;
• 5) the main modeling features of pure consciousness and, accordingly, the methodological procedures used in their analysis: (1) attention is focused on the fact that consciousness is an irreversible flow that is not localized in space; the task is to methodologically grasp precisely the stream of consciousness in order to describe, somehow hold it (mentally "swim along with the stream"), despite its irreversibility, at the same time taking into account its relative orderliness, structuredness, which makes it possible to single out its integral units for analysis, phenomena; (2) phenomenology consistently moves from the complete, directly given in the experience of the phenomenon to the "reduced" phenomenon. "To every psychic experience on the path of phenomenological reduction there corresponds a pure phenomenon that demonstrates its immanent essence (taken separately) as an absolute given" (Hua, Bd. II, 1973, S. 45). To reduce a phenomenon, all empirically concrete features are mentally, methodically "cut off" from it; then there is a movement from the linguistic expression to its meaning, from meaning to meanings, i.e. to supposed, intentional objectivity (the path of Volume II of "Logical Investigations"); (3) in the process of phenomenological intentional analysis, a combination of essential-analytic, eidetic, in the language of Husserl, i.e. and a priori, and at the same time descriptive, procedures, meaning movement towards the intuitive self-givenness of consciousness, the ability to perceive essences through them (following the example of pure logic and pure mathematics, for example, geometry, which teaches to see through a drawn geometric figure the corresponding general mathematical essence and, together with it, the problem, task, solution); there is a reliance on “pure experiences” correlative to entities, i.e. ideas, thoughts, imaginations, memories; (4) intentionality as an essential feature of phenomenology is intentional analysis as a concrete study, separately and in their intersection, of three aspects: intentional objectivity (noema, plural: noemata), acts (noesis) and the "pole of the Self", from which and intentional procedures result; (5) in his later works, Husserl widely introduces into phenomenology the theme of constitution (constituting) as a recreation through pure consciousness and its reduced phenomena of the structures of things, thingness, body and corporality, spirit and spirituality, the world as a whole; (6) similarly, on the basis of a multilateral analysis of the "pure Self" (unfolding into a whole phenomenological subdiscipline, egology), phenomenology constitutes the time of the world through temporality (Zeitlichkeit) as a property of consciousness, constitutes intersubjectivity, i.e. other selves, their worlds, their interaction; (7) late phenomenology also introduces profiling themes of the "lifeworld", communities, the telos of history as such (in the book "The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology").

In later works, Husserl introduces a genetic aspect into phenomenology. All syntheses carried out by consciousness, he divides into active and passive. Active Syntheses the results of the activities of the I, unified [structural] formations (Einheitsstiftungen), which acquire an objective, ideal character. Thanks to them, there is a unity of experience in relation to the world and in relation to the I as self (Ich-selbst). Passive syntheses are: 1) kinesthetic consciousness, i.e. consciousness associated with the movements of the body: with their help sensory fields and space of the life world are constituted; 2) associations, with the help of which the first structures of the "sensory field" are formed. In this new aspect, phenomenology outlines a deep and interesting program for the study of general and universal objectivity (active synthesis) and "lower", ambivalent forms, objectivity of consciousness, previously called sensibility (passive synthesis). Phenomenology more and more includes in the orbit of its research such topics as "kinesthesia" (mobility) of the human body, the constituting by consciousness of "physical" things and thingness as such. Accordingly, Husserl and his followers are increasingly interested in such "original" acts of consciousness as direct sensory perception. Until now, we have been talking about phenomenology in its own (narrow) sense, how E. Husserl created and modified it, and how it was (selectively and critically) perceived by his most faithful followers.

II. Phenomenology has never been a single and homogeneous phenomenological trend. But one can speak of it as a "phenomenological movement" (G. Spiegelberg), as a phenomenology in the broadest sense of the word. Early phenomenology in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. arose in parallel with Husserl's phenomenology, and then experienced its impact. Thus, representatives of the Munich circle of phenomenologists (A. Pfender, M. Geiger) began developments related to Husserl's, under the influence of K. Stumpf, H. Lipps; then - in temporary collaboration with Husserl - they took up some phenomenological topics, primarily the method of "seeing essences." In Husserl's phenomenology, they were most attracted by such moments as a return to the intuitive, contemplative "self-givenness" of consciousness and the possibility through them to come to an intuitively obvious verification of meanings. Göttingen's students and followers of Husserl, led by A. Reinach (X. Konrad-Martius, D. von Hildebrand, A. Koyre, and others) accepted and understood phenomenology as a strictly scientific method of direct observation of essences and rejected Husserl's phenomenological idealism as transcendentalist, fraught with subjectivism and solipsism view of the world, man and knowledge. They extended phenomenology to existential, ontological, ethical, historical-scientific and other studies.

In the teachings of M. Scheler, who was influenced by Husserl, as well as by the Munich and Göttingen phenomenologists, but who embarked on an independent path of development early, phenomenology is neither a special science nor a strictly developed method, but only a designation of the setting of spiritual vision in which one looks ( er-schauen) or experience (er-leben) something that without this attitude remains hidden: "facts" of a certain kind. Derivatives of phenomenological facts are "natural" (self-data) and "scientific" (artificially constructed) facts. Scheler applied his understanding of phenomenology as "reduction to contemplation", discovery and disclosure of phenomenological facts to the development of the phenomenology of feelings of sympathy and love, values ​​and ethical volition, sociologically interpreted forms of knowledge and cognition. In the center, therefore, was the phenomenology of man, human personality, "eternal in man".

N. Hartmann's ontology also contains phenomenological elements. He identifies (for example, in the work Grundzuge einer Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. V., 1925, S. V) with such achievements of phenomenology as criticism of empiricism, psychologism, positivism, as a defense of objectivity, independence of the logical, as a return to "essential description" . "We have the methods of such an essential description in the procedures of phenomenology" (S. 37). But with approval of the methodological arsenal of phenomenology, Hartmann rejects Husserl's transcendentalism and interprets phenomenology in the spirit of his ontological philosophy of "critical realism": the object that we call intentional exists outside and independently of the intentional act. The cognition of an object is the cognition of being independent of the subject (S. 51). Therefore, the theory of knowledge is ultimately directed not towards the intentional, but towards the "in-itself" (S. 110). In the philosophy of Husserl's student, the Polish philosopher R. Ingarden, phenomenology was understood as a useful method (Ingarden himself applied it mainly to aesthetics, literary theory); however, Husserl's subjectivist-transcendentalist interpretation of the world, the Self, consciousness and its products was rejected.

Outside of Germany, Husserl was known for a long time ch.o. as the author of Logical Investigations. Their publication in Russia (Husserl E. Logical research, vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1909) is one of the relatively early foreign publications of this work. (True, only the first volume was translated and published, which for many years determined the "logicist" perception of phenomenology in Russia.) In the development and critical interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology, they participated already in the first decades of the 20th century. such significant Russian philosophers as G. Chelpanov (his review of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic was published in 1900); G. Lanz (who assessed Husserl's dispute with psychologists and independently developed the theory of objectivity); S. Frank (already in "The Subject of Knowledge", 1915, deeply and fully, by that time, dismantled Husserl's phenomenology), L. Shestov, B. Yakovenko (who presented to the Russian public not only the volume I of Logical Investigations, familiar to her from the translation, but also volume II, which demonstrated the specifics of phenomenology); G. Shpet (who gave a quick and vivid response to Husserl's "Ideas I" in the book "Appearance and Meaning", 1914) and others. Phenomenology became more widespread in Europe after the 1st World War thanks to such philosophers as the theologian Hering . Due to the popularity of early phenomenology in Russia, a special role in its spread in Europe was played by Russian and Polish scientists who studied in Germany for some time and then moved to France (A. Koyre, G. Gurvich, E. Minkovsky, A. Kozhev, A. Gurvich). L. Shestov and N. Berdyaev, although they were critical of phenomenology and less involved in its development, were also involved in the dissemination of its impulses (Spiegelberg H. The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction, v. II. The Hague, 1971, p 402). During the Freiburg period around Husserl, and then Heidegger, a brilliant international circle of scientists arose. At the same time, some phenomenologists (L. Landgrebe, O. Fink, E. Stein, later L. Van Breda, R. Boehm, W. Bimmel) made it their main task to publish the works and manuscripts of Husserl, their commentary and interpretation, in a number of aspects critical and independent. Other philosophers, having passed through the school of Husserl and Heidegger, having received powerful and favorable impulses from phenomenology, then embarked on the path of independent philosophizing.

Heidegger's own attitude towards phenomenology is contradictory. On the one hand, in "Being and Time" he outlined the path of combining phenomenology and ontology (with the intention of highlighting "self-revealing", i.e. related to phenomena, intuitively obvious structures of Dasein as being-consciousness, here-being). On the other hand, picking up Husserl's slogan "Back to the things themselves!", Heidegger interprets it more in the spirit of the new ontology and hermeneutics than in the traditions of transcendental phenomenology, which is more and more criticized just for "forgetting being". Subsequently, after "Being and Time", Heidegger, in characterizing the specifics of his philosophy, very rarely used the concept of phenomenology, rather giving it a concrete methodological meaning. Thus, in his lectures "Main Problems of Phenomenology" he called phenomenology one of the methods of ontology.

The most thorough and profound developments of the problems of modern phenomenology belong to the French phenomenologists of the existentialist trend J.-P. Sartre (in his early works - the development of the concept of "intentionality", in "Being and Nothing" - the phenomena of being and being-in-the-world), M. Merleau-Ponty (phenomenological perception - in connection with the themes of the life world, being-in-the-world ), P. Ricoeur (transformation, following Heidegger, of transcendentally oriented phenomenology into ontological phenomenology, and then into "hermeneutic" phenomenology), E. Levinas (phenomenological construction of the Other), M. Dufresne (phenomenological aesthetics).

After World War II, phenomenology also spread to the American continent. The most prominent phenomenologists in the United States are M. Farber, who published the journal "Philosophy and Phenomenological Research" (and to this day a popular publication that has represented the logico-analytical direction in phenomenology in the last decade); D. Cairns (author of the very useful compendium "Guide for Translating Husserl". The Hague, 1973; this is a trilingual glossary of the most important phenomenological terms); A. Gurvich (who developed the problems of the phenomenology of consciousness, criticized Husserl's concept of the Ego and contributed to the development of a phenomenologically oriented philosophy and psychology of language); A. Schutz (Austrian philosopher, author of the famous book "Der sinnhafte Aufbau der sozialen Welt", 1932; emigrated to the USA and there gave impetus to the development of phenomenological sociology); J. Wilde (who developed "realistic phenomenology" with an emphasis on the phenomenological theory of the "body" and the theory of the life world); M. Natanzon (who applied the phenomenological method to the problems of aesthetics and sociology); V. Yorl (who developed the problems of the phenomenology of everyday life, "the phenomenology of the event"); J. Eady (who developed the phenomenology of language, defended the "realistic" version of phenomenology); R. Sokolovsky (interpretation of the phenomenology of consciousness and time); R. Zaner (phenomenology of the body), G. Spiegelberg (author of the two-volume study "Phenomenological Movement", which went through several editions); A.-T. Tymenetska (a student of R. Ingarden, director of the Institute of Phenomenological Research, publisher of "Analecta Husserliana", an existentialist phenomenologist who also deals with the problems of the phenomenology of literature and art, the phenomenology of psychology and psychiatry); phenomenologists of the analytical direction - X. Dreyfus (phenomenology and artificial intelligence), D. Smith and R. McIntyre (analytical phenomenology and the problem of intentionality).

In modern Germany, phenomenological research is concentrated primarily (though not exclusively) around the archives of Husserl and other centers of phenomenology - in Cologne (the most prominent phenomenologists are E. Ströcker, W. Claesges, L. Eli, P. Jansen; the current director of the archive is K. Duesing and others), in Freiburg-in-Breisgau, where phenomenology appears in the form of existential phenomenology, in Bochum (the school of B. Waldenfels), in Wupertal (K. Held), in Trier (E.W. Orth, publisher of the annual journal "Phanomenologische Forschungen"). German philosophers are also working on Husserl's manuscripts. But the main activities for the publication of manuscripts, works of Husserl (Husserlian), a series of phenomenological studies (Phaenomenologica) are carried out under the auspices of the Louvain archive. For some time (thanks to the work of R. Ingarden) Poland was one of the centers of phenomenological aesthetics, and in Czechoslovakia, thanks to the prominent phenomenologist J. Patochka, phenomenological traditions were preserved.

In the post-war years, researchers paid much attention to the topic "Phenomenology and Marxism" (the Vietnamese-French philosopher Tran-duc-tao, the Italian philosopher Enzo Paci, the Yugoslav philosopher Ante Pazhanin, and the German researcher B. Waldenfels contributed to its development). Since the 1960s, studies of phenomenology have been actively carried out in the USSR (the studies of V. Babushkin, K. Bakradze, A. Bogomolov, A. Bochorishvili, P. Gaidenko, A. Zotov, L. Ionina, Z. Kakabadze, M Kissel, M. Kule, M. Mamardashvili, Yu. At present, there is a Phenomenological Society in Russia, the journal "Logos" is published, research centers for phenomenology operate at the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Russian State Humanitarian University (See Analecta Husserliana, v. XXVII. Den Haag, 1989 - an extensive volume devoted to the development of phenomenology in the Central and Eastern Europe). Phenomenology (along with existentialism) has become widespread in Asian countries in recent years.