Problems in Defining Phenomenology

I am going through John Davenport's massive Will as Commitment and Resolve. It’s a pretty crazy book, in an exciting but also intimidating way. Davenport’s express purpose is to update Existentialism as a viable competitor in today’s philosophical marketplace by bringing it to bear critically on contemporary ethics, action theory, and philosophy of mind, among other things. That’s the exciting part. Here’s the intimidating and slightly monstrous part: the book is 550 pages or so, plus another 100 pages of notes, of very small print, and covers theories of motivation from Plato to Frankfurt and beyond. Additionally, Davenport goes out of his way to stress that this gigantic tome is merely a preface to much grander things: accounts of normativity, liberal political theory, mind, and theology, to name just a few. I’m sure I’ll be commenting on it more in the near future. For now, I just want to take up a brief note from the preface.

Davenport points out that, while much of what he writes will be in a style familiar to Anglophone philosophers, his method will be “broadly speaking phenomenological.” Here's his explanation:

In general, by a phenomenological approach I mean one that distinguishes between the primary phenomena to be explained in some area of philosophy and the rival theoretical explanations that construe these phenomena in different ways. The phenomenological approach presumes that we usually can discern, however imperfectly, some important phenomena that serve as paradigm cases or fixed points of reference for analyzing a particular problem or concept. This evidence or experience functions as an initial clue or proleptic outline of the concept at issue. The task of theoretical explanation is then to provide as convincing an account of these phenomena and their grounds of possibility as can be given, where what counts as “convincing” is itself guided by the shape of the phenomena that present themselves more or less clearly in common human experience. Thus the first aim of theoretical explanation is to follow where the phenomena lead rather than to make them fit the mold of a metaphysics to which one is antecedently committed. This principle, which corresponds both to Husserlian eidetic science and to the Habermasian communicative ideal of reaching conclusions based solely on the force of the better argument alone, is important in my case for deciphering how we can even begin to analyze concepts such as the will, volitional identification, and freedom. (xxii)

Aside from a very quick defense of this approach against three typical criticisms, this is pretty much the whole explanation of what the phenomenological method comes to. My initial reaction to it, I confess, was one of mild disappointment. Given that Davenport’s express purpose is to provide a theory that can enter into dialogue with Anglo-American philosophy, one might hope for an explanation of the method that would make sense to practitioners of that philosophy. And by make sense, I mean not just that readers from outside phenomenology would be able to understand the words in that particular order, but that they would see this method as, well, a distinct method. I am not sure that this description does that. The crucial notion that phenomena are normative guides for theory is there, of course, but whatever is unique about the phenomenological attempt to satisfy this normative constraint seems to get lost. Here are two initial concerns.

(1) Try the following exercise: read that paragraph again, substituting “intuitions” for every occurrence of “phenomena.” If you do so, it seems to me, what you have is a fairly reasonable—though somewhat unfamiliar—account of how Anglo-American philosophy is largely practiced; it sounds much like what the x-phi people have been arguing against, in fact. Thought experiments, after all, are generally aimed at using intuitions as evidence for a particular theory. A common concern about thought experiments—one that I share—is that they are raised from within specific theoretical commitments and are often designed not so much to get at our intuitions, as to distort those intuitions; they seem to guide us into accepting a theory instead of guiding us into coming to a theory by first correctly and painstakingly assessing our intuitions. And in this sense, of course, the thought-experiment-dropping brand of philosophy is quite different from phenomenology as described here. So Davenport’s description does correctly distinguish the phenomenological use of evidence from this use of it, one that takes our intuitions as evidence for a theory rather than as a starting point for theorizing.

But what about more honest thought experiments, the sort that try to bring out our intuitions in order to explain them rather than manipulating them? Certainly there is quite a bit of that going around as well. Is that approach phenomenological? What are phenomena in the first place? Are they different from intuitions? Are intuitions just the ways in which phenomena “pre-theoretically” manifest themselves? (In a note on p. 547, Davenport, without mentioning intuitions, suggests that “folk-psychology” serves to demarcate the phenomena that need explaining.) Without an explanation of what phenomena are and how they relate to intuitions, there is not much more of a distinction to be made, though the point about uses of evidence is an important one.

(2) Perhaps because I've never been supremely confident, especially with my Gadamerian bent, about what the phenomena/theory distinction is really supposed to establish, this account seems too vague to distinguish phenomenology from much of philosophy; indeed, from norm-governed human thought as such. After all, doesn't pretty much every decent philosopher claim to be trying to develop theoretical approaches that are true to the phenomena rather than the reverse? Not in that language, to be sure, and maybe there are different conceptions of what this means, but certainly most philosophers are more likely to describe their task as “developing a theory that is close to the phenomena” than as “interpreting phenomena in such a way as to fit pre-existing theoretical commitments” (the concordance between Husserl and Habermas on this point seems to reinforce the impression that the account is overly general). Consider: gathering evidence in order to support a theory, a theory not itself grounded in evidence, is the sort of thing that gets defendants off in murder trials. The need to fit theory to evidence before searching for new evidence to support the theory seems to me to be a constitutive requirement of human rationality. No doubt one can fail to meet these norms, but someone who entirely disregards them (as, for example, when ID proponents display material “evidence” that humans and dinosaurs co-existed) is in the business of con-artistry rather than theoretical thought. But phenomenology, one might think, is not methodologically identical to correct thinking.

There are certainly many cases where it might seem like philosophers disregard the evidence of phenomena for the sake of a theory: physicalists, for example, might seem to be disregarding the evidence of conscious phenomena; relativists might likewise seem to overlook deep underlying agreements. But I doubt these examples really suggest cases where phenomena are overlooked for the sake of a theory; rather, what seems to me to be central here is the issue of what phenomena one takes most seriously. The physicalist mindset arises out of certain phenomena, such as the longstanding history of success in predicting and manipulating the works of nature. The relativistic mindset, in turn, owes much to the phenomena involved in widespread cultural difference. Faced with seemingly conflicting phenomena, rational subjects might well build their theory on the phenomena that strike them as the most compelling, attempting to explain the less compelling phenomena away. Again, then, I worry that an overly broad account of phenomenology seems to extend its methodology to all, or almost all rational theoretical thought; only the outliers—ones that clearly violate or disregard the norms of thought—seem to be excluded.