Ethical Experience

A Phenomenology

Nicolle Zapien, Susi Ferrarello

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350008182
• eBook ISBN: 9781350008199
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Ethical Experience provides a unique phenomenological dialogue between psychology and philosophy. This novel approach focuses on lived experiences that belong to daily practical life, such self-identity and ethical decision-making. This practical focus enables the reader to explore how ethics relates to psychology and how the ethical agent determines herself within her surrounding community and world. Using Husserl's ethics the authors present a phenomenological approach moral psychology that offers an alternative to cognitive and neuroscientific theories. This is a practical and theoretically rigorous textbook that will be of use to those researching and studying ethics, morality, psychology and religion.

PART ONE

I.1

The phenomenological method, a theoretical ‘application’^*

What is phenomenology?

Phenomenology can be defined as a disciplinary field in philosophy or as a philosophical movement initiated by the philosopher and mathematician Edmund Husserl. Before him, the term was used in different ways. Coined by the physicist Johann Heinrich Lambert (1728–1777), phenomenology initially indicated the doctrine of appearance of living phenomena; then with Kant,¹ Hegel and Peirce² it took the shape of a philosophical method. It was in the early twentieth century, with Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and others (Spiegelberg, 1960), that phenomenology became popular in philosophy. Typical phenomenological themes like intentionality, consciousness, qualia and first-person perspective influence different fields of research today such as neuroscience, philosophy of mind and cognitive science.

The study we will pursue in this book is based on Husserl’s phenomenological theory and in particular his ethical theory as an approach to investigate the psychological contents of lived experiences.

How many phenomenological methods in psychology?

As we know from Spiegelberg (1960), Husserl’s phenomenology inspired multiple psychological theories and schools.³ Yet, as Cairns remarked, ‘it is an historical fact that Husserl’s investigations of subjectivity always had a philosophical goal. Their primary goal was never psychological. The results of his investigations can nevertheless be interpreted psychologically, as he himself indicated’ (Cairns, 2010, 1–2). The union of Husserl’s philosophy with psychology is a difficult one because, as Cairns remarks, ‘a psychological interpretation of Husserl’s results is a simplification. The most abstruse of his methodological theories, the theory of transcendental-phenomenological reduction, is disregarded when his results are interpreted psychologically’ (Cairns, 2010, 2). Despite this, Cairns maintained, this should not stop ‘the psychologist who wants to discover in Husserl’s writings whatever is relevant to psychology as a natural science’ (Cairns, 2010, 2).

For this reason, several methods in psychology drew upon the tools offered by Husserl’s phenomenological epistemology. Generally, textbooks (i.e. Creswell, 2007) mention the methods of Giorgi,⁴ Moustakas, Van Manen, Smith and Colaizzi⁵ as the most popular ones; the common denominator of these being the use of Husserl’s phenomenology as a guidance to read psychological data regarding a collective number of people. The goal is to grasp the essence of living phenomena as they are experienced by different participants (e.g. resilience as it is universally experienced) As van Manen wrote, the goal is to ‘grasp the very nature of the thing’ (van Manen, 1990, 177). According to Moustakas a phenomenological investigation describes how participants lived different experiences in relation to the same phenomenon (1994). The inquirer is in fact to collect data from participants that can relate to that phenomenon and unfold the description of what makes that experience as such for all of them. The actual description consists of ‘what’ they experienced and ‘how’ they experienced it (Moustakas, 1994). The same goal prevails in Giorgi’s and Colaizzi’s methods; what counts in the application of the phenomenological method is the description of the meaningful essence that qualifies the phenomenon chosen as the object of the inquirer’s study.

Giorgi’s descriptive phenomenological method (1970, 2009), whose school is represented today by Churchill (2001), Wertz (2011), Englander (2012), Applebaum (2011) and others, articulates a method that is named ‘descriptive’, because it aims at a description of the phenomenon which is as free as possible from interpretation. Giorgi’s method relies on the idea that description as such is possible and he (Giorgi, 1992) argues that interpretation, defined as the ‘clarification of the meaning of experienced objects in terms of a plausible but contingently adopted theoretical perspective, assumption, hypothesis, and so on’, ought not to be viewed as the exclusive possibility for qualitative research (1992, 122). According to Giorgi, ‘“Objective” methods do not remove the presence of the researcher, they simply make him present in another way’ (p. 166); in fact ‘If the biases cannot be eliminated, they should be included’ (p. 169). His method, analogous to van Manen’s and Moustakas’s, aims at understanding the essence⁶ of the phenomenon and commits to reach this goal through the following steps: first, the inquirer gathers data through interviews; these data are divided into units of meanings; then, it is after an ongoing act of epoche that the inquirer analyses these data applying what Husserl called imaginative variation.⁷ Each datum is transformed into its most essential unit. When it is not possible to proceed any further with the transformations, the inquirer makes himself available to the arising of the eidetic seeing, which normally would lead her to see the common essence among the data belonging to that phenomenon.

As Stewart and Mickunas (1990) emphasized there are four main philosophical tools in common between these different phenomenological methods.

•A reaction to scientism perceived as a limit of the empirical method and the consequent need to return to the wisdom of traditional philosophy before it became enamoured with empirical science.

•The need for a presuppositionless science that is capable of suspending all judgements about what is real – the ‘natural attitude’ – until they are founded on a more certain basis. This can be achieved through what Husserl called ‘epoche’.

•The analysis of intentionality of consciousness. This is the point on which the theoretical method I am going to use will be mostly focused. Husserl’s Logical Investigations (2001) described consciousness – which should not be meant as one’s individual consciousness – as always directed towards an object. From this point of view the reality of an object is inextricably related to the matter of the intentionality of consciousness. Any psychological analysis should take as a starting point the lived experience.

•Consistent with the point above is ‘the refusal of the subject-object dichotomy. This theme flows naturally from the intentionality of consciousness. The reality of an object is only perceived within the meaning of the experience of an individual’.

Besides the commonalities, the above-mentioned methods emphasize a specific aspect of Husserl’s phenomenology; while Moustakas’s phenomenological method is described as a psychological approach, van Manen’s phenomenology is defined as hermeneutic, Smith’s as interpretative and Giorgi’s and Colaizzi’s as descriptive.

Moustakas considers his phenomenology psychological because he focuses less on the interpretations of the researcher and more on a description of the experiences of participants. In addition, Moustakas’s transcendental goal is to use epoche (or bracketing) in order to set aside investigators’ experiences as much as possible and to achieve a wider perspective of what the phenomenon is, such that this perspective transcends the limits of the observer. Hence, for Moustakas ‘‘transcendental’ means ‘what is perceived freshly, as if for the first time’⁸ (Moustakas, 1994, 34). Methodologically speaking, the procedures of his work can be laid out in the following steps:

1Bracketing out one’s experiences, and collecting data from several persons who have experienced the phenomenon.⁹

2The researcher analyses the data by breaking down the information into significant statements or quotes and combining the statements into themes.

3Finally, the researcher unfolds participants’ description following what Moustakas calls a textural and structural order. First, he gives an account of what participants experienced; second, he explains how they experienced it in terms of the conditions, situations or context; third, he combines these two perspectives together with the goal to convey an overall essence of the experience.¹⁰

On the other hand, van Manen’s phenomenology is considered hermeneutic because, according to his point of view, there is no strict distinction between facts and meanings; facts are explained to us through a narrative that continuously explicates itself before us. In his work on hermeneutical phenomenology, van Manen describes the phenomenological research as oriented towards lived experience; in this sense it is phenomenological, but with an interpretative goal whose scope is for the inquirer to read the ‘texts’ of life (van Manen, 1990, 4). He engages in a self-consciously interpretative discussion with the participants – there is no idea of gathering natural-attitude descriptions, everything must be self-consciously interpreted by the participants in concert with the researcher. In contrast to Moustakas and Giorgi, van Manen does not approach phenomenology with a set of rules or methods, but he discusses phenomenological research as a dynamic interplay among different research activities. Smith’s¹¹ interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) aims at exploring how participants makes sense of their lived experiences and for this reason it involves a detailed investigation of the lifeworld of the participant. IPA combines an empathic hermeneutics with a questioning hermeneutics which means that the critical questions that will be addressed to the participants will be the following: What is the person trying to achieve here? Is something leaking out here that wasn’t intended? Do I have a sense of something going on here that maybe the participants themselves are less aware of?

Finally, Colaizzi’s method¹² begins with an examination of approach. The end goals and the final aims of a research project colour the undertaking from the beginning and because of this it is necessary to clarify those objectives as a first preliminary step. This clarification centres on (a) which phenomenon will be studied and why and (b) what method will be used. Colaizzi’s (1978) procedural steps for phenomenological analysis involve, similar to Giorgi’s method, reduction in order to bracket popular theories, scientific hypotheses and other external explanations of the data. In addition to the setting aside of preconceived ideas, the researcher must also set aside their own limited perspective to some degree. Our own position of looking, that of the researcher, is best accounted for through an explicit ownership of one’s own perspective. Then, the researcher stays with the data and does not move from it with the exception of adopting a broadly psychological lens that focuses on the worldly experience of a single person. In this step, through the comparison between the knowledge withheld before the bracketing and what emerged after it, the research describes what is fully present to the participants’ description.

Science and reactivation of meanings in Husserl

For the purpose of this study I will emphasize two main characteristics of the meaning of science in phenomenology: presuppositionlessness and interconnectedness. I will start with the latter – Husserl’s holistic conception of science:

The essence of science [ … ] involves unity of foundational connections: not only isolated pieces of knowledge, but their grounded validation themselves [ … ] and together with these, the higher interweaving of such validations that we call theories, must achieve systematic unity. (Hua XVIII, 15; Eng. trans. 18)

The essence of any science consists in a theoretical interconnection of ‘pieces of knowledge’, because the quaestio juris of scientific analysis is the reflective attitude with which the scientist assembles data in a coherent system. Science as such entails systematic, coherent understanding that grounds the scientific community’s knowing. Accordingly, a theoretical investigation can be considered scientific whenever a researcher constitutes a systematic coherence around an essential core.

For Husserl this coherence lies upon the intrinsic interconnectedness of being, and it exists independently of our capacity to observe it rather than depending upon our subjective theoretical understanding of it. If the coherence depended on our capacity to observe it, we would fall into a form of psychologism for which knowledge is what the individual perceives as such. Husserl’s use of Frege’s famous example concerning the morning star makes the point. The fact that one understands or not that the morning star is the same as the evening star does not change anything of the nature of the star. Thinking that our psychological grasp of reality would change the structure of reality itself would impoverish the coherence of things themselves. Theoretical observation and normative definition have the task of discovering the (lawful) interconnection pre-existing between the parts and the whole and preserving the validity of the system through fixed norms. Therefore the goal of a theoretical analysis resides exactly in discovering this interconnectedness. That 2+2 equals 4 is a normative transliteration of my observing the recurring law of summing 2 pairs together in a 4-unit whole.

That is why ‘theoretical disciplines’, that is, those disciplines that, from the Greek ‘theorousi’, ‘observe’ phenomena, are in Husserl’s words ‘the foundation of normative disciplines’ (Hua XVIII, 30; Eng. trans. 28). They found normative and interconnected disciplines because they provide a ‘systematic coherence in the theoretical sense, which means a common ground for one’s knowing, and a suitable combination of the sequence of such grounding’ (Hua XVIII,15; Eng. trans. 18).

Yet, the theoretical and normative layers of a given science do not satisfy the entire structure of that science. Science – as Husserl writes – aims at the knowledge that can approximate, as much as possible, the form of the truth (Hua XVIII, 15; Eng. trans. 18). This leads to the second characteristic of science in Husserl’s view: its presuppositionlessness. ‘Science is not our invention’ (Hua XVIII, 15; Eng. trans. 18); rather, it ‘is dominated and unified by law’ (Hua XVIII, 15; Eng. trans. 18). Therefore, reaching towards the greater completeness of science means approximating as much as possible this highest truth as the aim of our practical acts, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Also available from bloomsbury
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page