Why Are Philosophers Hard to Understand? (Part V)

On Phenomenology

Last week, I offered some some hypotheses about why philosophers are hard to understand. Today, I’m going to take a short passage that’s difficult, and try to explain it. The meta-question is whether you think the point could have been made more simply or needs to be expressed opaquely. This continues a series in which I paraphrase challenging paragraphs from difficult thinkers.

Here is the opening of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dense magnum opus, The Phenomenology of Perception, written in 1945:

What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for example. But phenomenology is also a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’. It is a transcendental philosophy which places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, the better to understand them; but it is also a philosophy for which the world is always ‘already there’ before reflection begins—as ‘an inalienable presence’; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status.

Here’s my paraphrase:

1. Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, established the field 50 years ago, so it seems weird that we should still not have a consensus definition about what it is.

2. The reason why there isn’t consensus is because phenomenology has two different goals and/or approaches that are in tension with each other:

3. a) Phenomenology is about trying to bracket our prejudices to see the world at a philosophical remove. It’s about looking at ourselves looking at the world, rather than just taking things for granted. b) But phenomenology (at least as it was developed after Husserl by Heidegger) isn’t so naive that it thinks we can simply bracket the world and step into some abstract, bodiless, view from nowhere. On the contrary, it’s a worldly activity that accepts worldliness as a precondition for human understanding and perception.

4. Phenomenology isn’t a form of specialized knowledge or some elitist exercise of intelligence, but is a way of returning to a naive, primal point of view while also being philosophical.

5. The core tension in the field of phenomenology is between the attempt to be naive (pre-reflective) and the attempt to be philosophical (reflective), even though we believe it is possible to be both.

I don’t think Merleau-Ponty’s work would suffer from being expressed more clearly. But I also think—on a meta-level—that it’s difficulty offers us an opportunity to reflect on the experience of reading and interpreting difficult texts, which is itself what phenomenology is all about—not just interpreting the world, but examining how it is that we live as beings who interpret the world.

Besides the question of style, what do you think about Merleau-Ponty’s aspiration for phenomenology—is it possible to be philosophical without giving up on common-sense? What is gained by elevating commonsense to the level of philosophy?

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