What is Phenomenology?

Today we're going to talk about a concept you might already be fairly familiar with, even if you haven't had time for much critical thought on the subject before now. Phenomenology literally "the study of that which is apparent", is the study of experience established by Edmond Husserl in the early 20th century. Phenomena (that which appears or is apparent) was defined by Immanuel Kant in his 1781 "Critique of Pure Reason" by its contrast with noumena, a "thing-in-itself".

The History (Opaque & Dry... and skippable)

Husserl found his way to phenomenology amidst his analysis of the consciousness around the turn of the century. Husserl was investigating the intention of consciousness and mental acts as they had been presented to him by his professors Franz Brentano & Carl Stumpf: specifically, "intentionality," which specified that consciousness is always "consciousness of."

Consciousness or awareness always has a target or an object which we are "conscious of" or "aware of." It's a principle conceit of the Buddhist practice that ideal meditation should allow the practitioner to secede from his active role in consciousness; the quintessential struggle for a Buddhist student is then to overcome his consciousness of his own thoughts and that desire to secede from "consciousness of." Husserl studied the relationship between the subject and object here: what exactly do we do when we "are aware of" an object?

The Phenomenology

This classic example has availed itself to many of us in our youth when we're given too much time to think: do I see the same colors you do? Sure, this apple can be empirically confirmed to reflect light in the 620-740nm band, absorbing most other wavelengths, and we can confirm that cones of the same design and function are excited by that radiation in each of our eyes. We can even confirm that the same regions of the brain will be accessed to process this data, passing from one region to the next in a similar order. What we can't confirm is whether or not our experiential brains render the same image given this processed data: if my image processors were given to you to "look" through, would the world appear wildly distorted?

The example is a decidedly moot point, of course, but it begins to illustrate the difference between the noumenon "red" (radiation largely composed of the 620-740nm band) and the phenomenon "red," which we experience.

Of course, the sensory information we gather about our environment is hardly the most interesting data  we have to inform our experience of reality. At any given moment our analytic faculties complete our perception of the world: memory tells us that the apple might be cool to the touch, anticipation of geometry tells us how far we might throw the apple should we need to, and a pang of hunger might drive an emotional yearning for the apple. The phenomenological apple is composed of a great many more properties than the noumenological apple, properties which are significant only because the apple is being experienced.

Reaching back to the question Husserl reached studying the function of consciousness, we must consider that it's not, in fact, the noumenological apple which we experience. Although that apple noumenon (if it exists, but that's another discussion) provides visual, tactile, and other sensory stimulus to prompt the neurological processes which generate the full extent of the apple phenomenon, what we experience and are conscious of is the product of all that processing, the phenomenon.

Why do I care?

If we can accept this line of logic it allows us to begin to examine a broad range of phenomena and asses their origins as context evaluated by the psyche rather than dogging after the noumena. The music phenomenon, for example, is generated as even the most subtle implications of beat and chord progression pass through the mind's processing (we talked about one possible way the mind might have evolved to generate the music phenomenon earlier); narrative, even more fundamentally, is a phenomenon generated as a subject gathers just enough context to attempt to draw lines in the structure of events provided.

It behooves anyone whose employment hinges on human response phenomena (which should be everyone at some point) to understand that their work derives its meaning entirely from the context provided and the context at the point of delivery.

Any value we attribute to our work as noumenon, separate from its intended implementation, is strictly statistical; an "artist," likewise, has only statistical evidence to prove that his grasp of context is sufficient to reliably exact phenomena in a target audience.

So study up! I know for my part that I am always searching for context to inform the decisions I make in composition and lighting (how my department's work can affect the audience's sense of the narrative at large); luckily, the more I learn about context to inform my conscious decision making, the more accurate and effective my on-the-fly improvisations will be.

Know more!