Hey, so this is going to be a post that I’ll probably update now and then but I wanted to take a first stab at it today. We’re going to give some background and then books that I recommend.

What is phenomenology?

Edmund Husserl, in the early 20th century, helped found an entire movement of philosophy that doesn’t fit neatly into the continental/analytic divide: phenomenology. To talk about Husserl’s influence is kind of like the old joke about The Velvet Underground—only a hundred philosophers really studied him but each of them started an entire system.

These days I’ve found you mostly get a game of telephone on what Husserl’s phenomenology was: that it’s like a Berkelian idealism or platonism, that it involves introspection to learn about the universe, that it involves mystical acts of intuition, or that it was supplanted by Heidegger’s much formulation superior phenomenology. The latter is a belief I see repeated a lot and that, in my opinion, is almost completely attributable to Hubert Dreyfus’s strange love of that most infamous Nazi.

So let’s set a little bit of the stage: phenomenology is more of a meta-philosophy, a kind of foundation for doing philosophy. It is, as the name might imply, about “the phenomenon” as aan object. But before we talk about what Husserl means by “phenomena”, let’s talk about the kind of problem that was bothering him. Husserl was a mathematician first and foremost. I can’t stress enough how important that is to everything and if you keep in mind how mathematicians approach problems and abstraction there’s a lot that makes more sense about his formulation. Husserl was working at a time when set theory was still new and exciting and a lot of people were wondering about what on earth the foundations of mathematics could be. He started a lot of his work even before Russell found his paradox! His habilitation was on the foundations of arithmetic, particularly trying to understand if it was possible to analyze human thought and understanding of numbers and come away with some lessons about what numbers must be from a logical standpoint.

Even before Frege called his habilitation a disease to philosophy and logic (no, really), Husserl had come to the conclusion that he was bordering on “pyschologism” in his previous work. Psychologism is a word you’ll get used to hearing in phenomenology. It is the great enemy of early Husserl, the dragon he attempts to slay in The Logical Investigations. Psychologism is the idea that things like logic are merely artifacts of human thinking, an outgrowth of how our minds work. Their basis is to be found in the mind and the mind alone. Logical reasoning is thus identical with the process of coming to a belief in the mind of a person. Not related, not correlated, but the same thing. Part of Husserl’s attack on this is that there’s no a priori reason to believe all our minds operate exactly the same way and have the exact same representations of logical ideas. In fact, it almost certainly couldn’t be so because we rather obviously are capable of thinking differently than each other. And yet! We are capable of communicating logical ideas to each other, of explaining our reasoning, of holding it seperate from the individual in a form that can be checked and discussed. Surely those traits imply that there are rules here that are not entirely arbitrary.

Now, is the conclusion then that we’re dealing with entities fixed by the gods? Things that have an absolute necessity and must be said to exist in the exact same way that the very surface you’re reading this sentence on must exist? No! We can eschew the dichotomy between naive platonism and psychologism. Things like logical systems, like mathematical objects, have the interesting property in that they “exist” in the sense of being things we can communicate about and have rules & properties. They are just as much phenomena as anything else you can experience and direct your consciousness towards. I use the phrase “direct your consciousness” because that’s one of the key points here: “all consciousness is consciousness of something” is the general idea here. Anything you think, you’re thinking about something.

It’d be reasonable to say “uhh, so?” at that observation because the point isn’t entirely obvious in really anyone’s writing on this topic: the fact that thinking is a two-pole activity of me thinking about another thing means that if we want to understand the rules of how something like logic works, to investigate a meta-logic of how logics work and are constructed, we need to consider the subjective aspect of them. The fact that all experiences—even of abstract things like mathematical objects—are experienced by a person about a thing actually has a lot of implications for the philosophy of math and science. As an example, it leads to the insight of Herman Weyl that I always reference: that the subjective is the absolute and that objective descriptions are a kind of abstraction that always removes detail. Maybe that doesn’t seem profound at first but it turns a lot of the implicit philosophy of science we instill in STEM education completely on its head. All of my posts on the book Feelings of Being are about putting the subjective-pole back into our study of psychology and how it changes our understanding of what even is a mental illness. Although that’s all I want to say on that, here, because I don’t want to distract from the central point: the foundations of the sciences in general.

So while over the course of Husserl’s life his massive amount of writing on phenomenology it grew into a large system that underwent many revisions, the central aim was always the same: to understand the rules by which epistemology and reasoning are even possible, using the most sure and absolute data that we have—our own experiences of actions of observation and reasoning. This is not a naive idealism but a recognition that “the objective view” is already a step too far removed from the actions we undertake in science. Another way of putting it, I think, is that to know whether one is abstracting out the right parts of subjective experience one needs to first understand the subjective experience in its fullness.

Why learn phenomenology?

Okay, so all of that preface out of the way: what’s the point of studying this largely out of fashion 20th century philosophic movement? A few reasons

• it provides a framework for tying disparate ideas together, like understanding the ways reasoning about proofs in mathematics and interpreting sense data are similar
• we still don’t have a good accounting for the subjective aspects of things like science and mathematics as scientism has replace psychologism as the problem of the day, the pendulum swinging clear the other direction in the past hundred years
• it’s interesting and there’s room to breathe! I think it’s fair to just say that it’s worth learning about something because its different. The existing work in phenomenology is incomplete, ambitious, and often difficult to understand. There’s a lot of fertile ground to pick up where other philosophers have left off. An example of someone who did this really well is Richard Tieszen, whose name will come up again in the reading list who did a lot of really interesting work in the philosophy of mathematics.

Where to start?

Now we’re at the point that was the original reason why I even wrote this post in the first place: where do you even start? I’ll share books I think are good for getting into this morass in a rough order of accessibility

• The Logical Investigations: Husserl’s giant first work of phenomenology and probably his best writing. Years before Ideas I through III he was a slightly less technically careful but more engaging writer. My personal guess is that his mid-period suffers from a lot of self-conscious over-editing that makes it feel a lot more challenging than it needs to be. The Logical Investigations on the other hand is one of the more accessible things to start with. If you want the fastest path to the boarding station, you can just read the introduction the “prolegomena” which is his long rant against psychologism and explaining why, in occasionally snarky detail, they’re deeply wrong. I should re-read this.
• Dermot Moran’s Introduction to Phenomenology, which takes you on a historically ordered trip through every major figure in this movement and how their thought evolved. It’s well-written, acessible, and gives a lot of good historical context. He makes a lot of these philosophers feel more fleshed out as people and yet still is very rigorous in his presentation. …I should re-read this too.
• The Theory and Practice of Husserl’s Phenomenology by Harry Reeder. This is a fantastic text that clears up a lot of common misconceptions and explains concepts like “phenomenologic reduction” that frequently get misrepresented as a kind of navel-gazing. It’s well-written, plain-spoken, and even has diagrams!
• Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, by Maurice Natanson. This is a slightly qualified recomendation as I think his conversational tone and examples trend a little casually sexist in that “I’m a man assuming I’m always talking to other men” way. It does, however, actually give examples of a lot of concepts in a field that’s infamous for not having any.
• Ideas I: This is one Husserl’s big texts and the first that really gets into phenomenology-as-practice and I’d love to put it earlier in this list but I think it’s not very readable, at least not without having enough context to even know why he’s talking about the things he’s talking about. He gives really no examples of very abstract ideas and just sort of presumes you’re already familiar with the motivation and material. In my opinion, this is the kind of book that still feels like “I’m writing notes to myself so I understand them” rather than something persuasive
• Honorable Mention: Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception. This is probably my favorite book on philosophy. It extends Husserl’s ideas and combines it with some of the observations of gestalt psychology to create an incredible work that fixes a big problem of Husserl’s early to mid-period work: where does the body fit into how the world is experienced? The Husserl of Ideas I still treats consciousness like a physicist treats a point particle: it is a thing without shape or extent. But that’s not how our subjectivity is constituted, is it? Maurice Merleau-Ponty tackles this omission brilliantly. Can’t recommend this enough. The one pro-tip I have for reading it: he has a tendency to introduce positions he’s going to disagree with without telling you he’s going to disagree with them so his writing can feel convoluted and contradictory at first. Read the wiki page for gestalt psychology first for some extra context. …yeah I’m adding this to the re-read list too.
• Honorable Mention: Richard Tieszen’s Phenomenology, Logic, and the Philosophy of Mathematics. This book is a fantastic collection of papers connecting phenomenology back into the philosophy of mathematics, with really good treatments on the difference between constructive & non-constructive mathematics and the philosophic content of proofs. I loved it and, yes, I should re-read it.

Well what started as a quick thing I was going to write before starting some other work for the day has now ballooned into nearly 2k words. Well, in any case I hope this is a helpful guide if you’ve ever found any of the stuff I’ve talked about interesting. I’d love to talk more about any of these things with someone!