PHENOMENOLOGY. – A term apparently first used by J. H. Lambert (1764) and subsequently by Kant to designate 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, which did not disappear even in Hegel’s first great systematic work, the Phenomenologie des Geistes (1807), where there was given “the exposition of consciousness in its advance from the first and immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowledge.”
Phenomenology was therefore to be the vestibule and obligatory introduction to the great edifice of the system, whose objects, analyses, and problems it anticipated genetically. With the affirmation of the system, however, if phenomenology was not simply abolished by Hegel, in deference to the requirement of an absolute beginning of philosophizing, it was nevertheless greatly reduced in importance, so as to be incorporated into the system as a section of the “philosophy of spirit” (Encyclopedia, § 413 add.). This uncertainty constituted one of the most painful points of later idealism, concerning which it was never possible to reach agreement: in Italy, for example, while Spaventa defended the necessity of phenomenology with warmth and acuity (cf. Scritti filosofici, ed. G. Gentile, Napoli 1900, p. 235 ff.), his best disciples abandoned it because it conflicted with the very principle of philosophizing, according to which thought can be nothing other than “pure act” (Gentile).
E. Husserl, proceeding from the scholastic concept of intentionality, BRENTANO, FRANZ (v.), conceived phenomenology as a pure a priori science whose task is to carry out the ἐποχή, that is, to “place in parentheses” existential concreteness, so as to fix in eidetic intuition the pure essences (... color, sound, life, willing in general) as forms of the actualization of consciousness in general. In substantial agreement with his teacher 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” in which it is to be treated. For him, since philosophy has as its object the truth of what exists, hidden in reality, it is the task of phenomenology to disclose it and articulate it in its categories. Thus phenomenology once again becomes the obligatory path of access to the very object of fundamental ontology, with which, indeed, in Heidegger’s phenomenological existentialism, it ultimately comes to be identified.
It would be advisable to avoid the term phenomenology when referring indiscriminately to descriptive inquiries within the fields of psychological facts, ethics, the history of religions, and 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 this sense, there seems to be no reason why it should not also be accepted by traditional philosophy.