Read Online At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell - Free Book Online

world accurately. For similar reasons, phenomenology helps physicians. It makes it possible to consider medical symptoms as they are experienced by the patient rather than exclusively as physical processes. A patient can describe a diffuse or stabbing pain, or a sensation of heaviness or sluggishness, or the vague unease in a disturbed stomach. Amputees often suffer from ‘phantom’ sensations in the area of the lost limb; phenomenology allows these sensations to be analysed. The neurologist OliverSacks discussed such experiences in his 1984 book A Leg to Stand On , about his recovery from a severe leg injury. Long after the physical damage had healed, his leg felt separate from him, like a wax model: he could move it, but it did not feel like his from within. After much physiotherapy it returned to normal, but, had he not been able to convince his doctors that the feeling was phenomenologically important and that it belonged to the condition rather than being some personal oddity, he might not havereceived that therapy and might never have regained full control of his leg.
    In all these cases, the Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous.
    The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena . A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience. One might never finish adequately describing a cup of coffee. Yet it is a liberating task: it gives us back the world we live in. It works most effectively on the things we may not usually think of as material for philosophy: a drink, a melancholy song, a drive, a sunset, an ill-at-ease mood, a box of photographs, a moment of boredom. It restores this personal world in its richness, arranged around our own perspective yet usually no more noticed than the air.
    There is another side effect: it ought in theory to free us from ideologies, political and otherwise. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it, from scientism to religious fundamentalism to Marxism to fascism. All are to be set aside in the epoché — they have no business intruding on the things themselves. This gives phenomenology a surprisingly revolutionary edge, if done correctly.
    No wonder phenomenology could be exciting. It could also be perplexing, and often it was a bit of both. A mixture of excitement and puzzlement was evident in the response of one young German who discovered phenomenology in its early days: Karl Jaspers. In 1913, hewas working as a researcher at the Heidelberg Clinic of Psychiatry, having chosen psychology over philosophy because he liked its concrete, applied approach. Philosophy seemed to him to have lost its way, whereas psychology produced definite results with its experimental methods. But then he found that psychology was too workmanlike: it lacked philosophy’s grand ambition.Jaspers was not satisfied by either. Then he heard about phenomenology, which offered the best from both: an applied method, combined with the soaring philosophical aim of understanding the whole of life and experience. He wrote a fan letter to Husserl, but in it admitted that he was not yet quite sure what phenomenology