Phenomenology

PHENOMENOLOGY. - A term used, it seems, for the first time by J. H. Lambert (1764) and then by Kant, to indicate that particular philosophical science whose task would be to separate the true and the real from the phenomenon and from what is merely apparent. A rather ambiguous meaning that did not disappear even in Hegel's first great systematic work, the Phenomenologie des Geistes (1807), where it gave "the exposition of consciousness in its advance from the first and immediate opposition of itself and the object up to absolute knowledge."

Phenomenology was therefore to be the atrium and the obligatory introduction to the great temple of the system, of which it anticipated, genetically, objects, analyses and problems. With the consolidation of the system, however, phenomenology, if it was not outright abolished by Hegel, in deference to the requirement of the absolute beginning of philosophizing, was nonetheless greatly reduced in importance, so as to be incorporated into the system as a section of the "philosophy of spirit" (Encyclopedia, § 413 ff.). An uncertainty that constituted one of the sorest points of later idealism, on which it was never possible to reach agreement: in Italy, for example, while Spaventa defended with warmth and acumen the necessity of phenomenology (cf. Scritti filosofici, ed. G. Gentile, Naples 1900, p. 235 ff.), his best disciples abandoned it because it was in contrast with the very principle of philosophizing according to which thought can only be "pure act" (Gentile).

E. Husserl, starting from the Scholastic concept of intentionality, received from Brentano (v.), conceived phenomenology as a pure a priori science whose task it is to carry out the ἐποχή, that is, the "placing in brackets" of existential concreteness, in order to be able to fix in eidetic intuition the pure essences (... color, sound, life, willing in general) as forms of the self-actualization of consciousness in general. In substantial agreement with his master Husserl, M. Heidegger specifies that the task of phenomenology concerns not so much the object as such, the "what" that is to be dealt with, as rather the "how" it is to be dealt with. For him, since philosophy has as its object the truth of the existent hidden in reality, it falls to phenomenology to unveil it and articulate it in its categories. Thus phenomenology becomes once again the obligatory path of access to the very object of fundamental ontology, with which indeed, in Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism, it ends up identifying itself.

It would be advisable to avoid the term phenomenology to indicate without distinction descriptive investigations in the sphere of psychological facts, of ethics, of the history of religions and of ethnology, reserving it for that moment of philosophical reflection in which the concrete content of thought presents itself in its most stable and universal forms. In which sense there is no reason why it should not also be accepted by traditional philosophy.

Cornelio Fabro