What the fuck is phenomenology

Looking at shit. And I mean REALLY looking at it.

Not really an expert, but I think the idea is that the way things appear is a clue to the way they really are. (Phainesthai=Greek; to appear.) So instead of a strict distinction between the appearance of a thing and the truth of a thing, careful attention to how things seem to us actually can give us a clue as to how those things really are.

The study of UFOs.

>>9770980
disengaging the ego

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ego locks, disengaged. looking at things REAL hard sensors, activated.

Ta phainomena are literally "appearances," and phenomenology is the study of appearances. Kant almost called his transcendental philosophy phenomenology in the 1770s I think, because we only have access to the "phenomenal side" of reality (we will never know the things in themselves). Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was a similar (or the exact same) move. Because Spirit only has knowledge of itself studying the "shapes of Spirit" (the transcendental configurations of the world as we experience or can experience it) is a study of phenomena, of the phenomenal. Because Spirit is historical, changes over time and has different configurations, we need an historical and (maybe) narrative description of it.

Husserlian phenomenology if a refinement of Kant's project, and a much more sophisticated attempt to study appearances as appearances, to study EVERY aspect of just how the mind intuits and interacts with the world as it appears for it, without "forcing" anything to fit into a naively simplistic transcendental scheme.

Heidegger was a student of Husserl and combined transcendental phenomenology with Diltheyan hermeneutics and Nietzsche, basically inaugurating hermeneutic phenomenology. Very much like Hegel's move away from Kant, Heidegger wants to stress the historical "givenness" of the phenomenal world, how it is "for us" (and what that means for us), rather than how it is in its necessary or permanent transcendental essence.

Husserl wanted to turn the mind into a laser-scanning science-robot and probe the deepest shimmering recesses of how consciousness works, Heidegger wanted to talk about how we're all confined to a lifeworld without necessary meaning and eventually we gotta die. Existentialists liked Heidegger because finitude of human existence, mystics liked Husserl because infinity of Spirit's potential.

>>9771062
I'm not sure Hegel's move in the Phenomenology was the exact same move. Hegel seems to think that it's possible for the human intellect to know things about the world partly because matter is spirit in another form ("spirit is a bone.") So he seems less pessimistic than Kant on that account, at least because matter is somehow teleologically geared to end up at intellect. He, at least, has a one liner dissing Kant about how Kant's like a man who constantly polishes his glasses, worried that he won't be able to see through them, without ever putting them on and seeing what he can see, anyway.

>>9770980
It's the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness.

>>9770980
It's the most exciting human intellectual endeavor of modernity. Read Husserl's Ideas.

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Study or description of appearance.

To the phenomenologist, things like you perceiving time flowing faster when you aren't bored

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>>9771216
OR that the first thing we experience is that the statue appears to be walking over the car, when the next moment we think it isn't.

>>9771004
Kek