“It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests — that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.” ~ Nietzsche
Michel Foucault studied tranches of history to report shifts in “epistemes,” unconscious assumptions that determine what counts as knowledge in a given epoch. For me, there was a paradigm shift in Western civilization in the beginning of the 20th century that can be seen in physics, painting, music, literature, psychology, and philosophy. What that shift exposed was exactly what Nietzsche had already identified: that our faith in the possible objectivity of “science” was tantamount to our faith in religion.
Look what happened in a single generation:
- Heisenberg demonstrated that the act of observing a particle changes the particle.
- Schrödinger proposed his famous thought experiment wherein a cat sealed in a box is simultaneously alive and dead until a consciousness opens the lid.
- Picasso and Braque painted guitars, bottles and faces from multiple angles simultaneously.
- Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase portrayed motion itself as a subject.
- Proust demonstrated in In Search of Lost Time that memory is not retrieval but reconstruction — the past is not stored somewhere waiting to be accessed, it is created by whomever is doing the remembering.
- Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring caused audiences to stampede — patrons were enraged that Stravinsky had abolished the tonal center, the fixed harmonic home that Western music had organized itself around for 300 years.
- Schoenberg did similarly with twelve-tone scale, building a system in which no note is more important than any other — no objective center, just a democracy of equals.
- Freud demonstrated that what we consciously think we know about ourselves is the smallest fraction of what is actually running the show — and Freud did not stumble onto the unconscious like an anthropologist digging up a buried hieroglyph , he built it along with its repressions, drives, and his interpretations of dreams.
In this tranche of history, we can see the shift away from the episteme of objectivity.
Enter Edmund Husserl, the founding father of the discipline, as we know it today, called “Phenomenology.” Husserl correctly stated that we cannot subtract the observer from the observation and still call what remains “knowledge.” In contrast to the belief that the empirical method of the Enlightenment was the only legitimate path to truth and that science would allow us to understand the world as it exists, Husserl reminded us that we had forgotten the perceiver — something that Picasso, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and every musician who ever trusted the riffs resounding inside their heads already knew.
Husserl’s method was rigorous: to “bracket” our assumptions and describe exactly what shows up in consciousness before theory colonizes it, trying to take into consideration the structure of our own perceiving. But that is not how the word “phenomenological” is used today. The word has been detached from the method that gave it meaning and is now doing little but virtue-signaling an epistemological humility that the user isn’t actually demonstrating. Philosophy anointed an insight into a word—a word that would imply, by its very existence, that another option is also available.
But what would a non-phenomenological analysis resemble, an analysis without a human observer? Every account of reality is already and always an account by a percipient, a human being who cannot step outside the categories they arrived with — categories that are not neutral or found “out there” in the world. My cat Evelyn — no matter how much I anthropomorphize her — does not (to the best of my knowledge) divide a tree into trunk, bark, leaves, and root. And as Derrida reminds us, when we look up “trunk” or “leaf” in the dictionary, all we find is more words. Language points to more language, infinitely. It’s turtles all the way down.
So when academics announce they are offering “a phenomenological analysis,” their use of this twenty-dollar word undermines whatever argument they are making. They may as well say they are offering “a human analysis” — as if there could be anything else. Every scientist who ever measured anything, every physicist who ever collapsed a probability wave, every painter who ever chose where to stand, every composer who ever trusted a riff in their head — they were all doing phenomenology. Which means none of them were. If everything is phenomenological, then nothing is phenomenological. So maybe it is time to declare a moratorium on that word? Not because it indicates something false, but because it indicates nothing at all, and its use betrays a lack of the critical thinking that its users mistakenly believe they are demonstrating.
