Fenomenologi

Jag känner mig hemma i fenomenologin, särskilt den existentiella inriktningen av fenomenologi. Jag ids inte skriva någon längre text om fenomenologi här, men anför några punkter från The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology:

1. Phenomenologists tend to oppose the acceptance of unobservable matters and grand systems erected in speculative thinking;
2. Phenomenologists tend to oppose naturalism (also known as objectivism and positivism)^[1] which is the worldview growing from modern natural science and technology that has been spreading from Northern Europe since the Renaissance;
3. Phenomenologists tend to justify cognition with reference to what Edmund Husserl called Evidenz, which is awareness of a matter itself as disclosed in the most clear, distinct, and adequate way for something of its kind;
4. Phenomenologists tend to believe that not only objects in the natural and cultural worlds, but also ideal objects, such as numbers, and even conscious life itself can be made evident and thus known;
5. Phenomenologists tend to hold that inquiry ought to focus upon what might be called »encountering« as it is directed at objects and, correlatively, upon »objects as they are encountered« (this terminology is not widely shared, but the emphasis on a dual problematics and the reflective approach it requires is);
6. Phenomenologists tend to recognise the role of description in universal, a priori, or »eidetic« terms as prior to explanation by means of causes, purposes, or grounds; and
7. Phenomenologists tend to debate whether what Husserl calls the transcendental phenomenological epochê and reduction is useful or even possible.

Ett citat från Willig (2001) kan också vara passande:

… it is important to differentiate between phenomenological contemplation of an object or event as it presents itself to the researcher, and phenomenological analysis of an account of a particular experience as presented by a research participant. the former requires introspective attention to one’s own experience, whereas the altter involves an attempt to ›get inside‹ someone else’s experience on the basis of their description of it. In phenomenological psychological research, the research participant’s account becomes the phenomenon with which the researcher engages. (Willig, 2001, s. 53)

Referenser

Willig, C. (2001). Introducing qualitative research in psychology: Adventures in theory and method. Maidenhead, Berkshire, UK: Open University Press.

Ursprungligen publicerad som »Fenomenologi« på bloggen »Psykologidoktoranden«. Jag har sparat texten för att det var vid den här tiden jag började göra mig hemmastadd i fenomenologin – men det dröjde ytterligare fem år innan jag förstod den.

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1. I dag (2018) invänder jag att naturalism, objektivism och positivism inte alls är samma sak. De är inte begrepp på sammanivå. Såväl objektivism som positivism förutsätter naturalism. Men det är en annan diskussion. ↩︎