Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience likephenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condition.[1]
InBeing and Time,Martin Heidegger reframesEdmund Husserl's phenomenological project into what he termsfundamental ontology. This is based on an observation and analysis ofDasein ("being-there"), human being, investigating the fundamental structure of theLebenswelt (lifeworld, Husserl's term) underlying all so-called regional ontologies of thespecial sciences. In Heidegger's philosophy, people are thrown into the world in a given situation, but they are also a project towards the future, possibility, freedom, wait, hope, anguish.[2] In contrast with the philosopherKierkegaard, Heidegger wanted to explore the problem ofDasein existentially (existenzial), rather thanexistentielly (existenziell) because Heidegger argued that Kierkegaard had already described the latter in "penetrating fashion".[citation needed] Most existentialist phenomenologists were concerned with how people are constituted by their experiences and yet how they are also free in some respect to modify both themselves and the greater world in which they live.
Building on Heidegger's language that people are "thrown into the world", Jean-Paul Sartre says that "man is a being whose existence precedes his essence".[3] Both point out that any individual's identity is a matter of the social, historical, political, and economic situation into which he or she is born. This frees phenomenology from needing to find a universal ground to all experience, since it will always be partial and influenced by the philosopher's own situation.Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the lesson of Husserl's reduction is that "there is no complete reduction" because even phenomenologists cannot resist how they have been shaped by their history, culture, society, and language.[4] In her workThe Second Sex,Simone de Beauvoir explored how greatly norms of gender shape the very sense of self that women have, in distinction from men.Hannah Arendt discusses how totalitarian regimes in the 20th century presented entirely new regimes of terror that shaped how people understand political life in her workThe Human Condition.[5]Frantz Fanon explored the legacy of racism and colonialism on the psyches' of black men.[6][7] However, they all in different ways also stressed the freedom which humans have to alter their experiences through rebellion, political action, writing, thinking, and being. If people are constituted by the human social world, then it is only humans that created it and can create a new world if they take up this task.
Besides Heidegger, other existential phenomenologists wereMax Scheler,Wilhelmus Luijpen,Hannah Arendt,Karl Jaspers,Emmanuel Levinas,Gabriel Marcel,Jean-Paul Sartre,Simone de Beauvoir,Edith Stein,Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Enzo Paci [it] andSamuel Todes. Many of these phenomenologists' conceptions of the self and self-consciousness are built on criticisms of or response toEdmund Husserl's initial views.[8]
Sartre synthesized Husserl and Heidegger's ideas. His modifications include his replacement of Husserl's concept,epoche, with Heidegger's structure ofbeing-in-the -world.[9] His existential phenomenology, which is articulated in his works such asBeing and Nothingness (1943), is based on the distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself.[10] Beauvoir placed her discourse on existential phenomenology within her intertwining of literature and philosophy as a way to reflect concrete experience. In her works on women's lived experiences, she attempted to address the problems between the sexes as well as the reconciliation of related strands of continental philosophical traditions, which include the philosophy of Heidegger, the phenomenological methods of Husserl and Sartre, andGeorge Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophy of history.[11]
Arendt's existential phenomenology reflected a distrust of mass society and her preference for the preservation of social groups citing the persecution of Jews as an example of victimization by societies' atomizing processes.[11]
Existential phenomenology also extends to other disciplines. For example,Leo Steinberg's essay "The Philosophical Brothel" describes Picasso'sLes Demoiselles d'Avignon in a perspective that is existential-phenomenological. It has also impactedarchitectural theory, especially in the phenomenological and Heideggerian approaches to space, place, dwelling, technology, etc.[12] In literary theory and criticism,Robert Magliola'sPhenomenology and Literature: An Introduction (Purdue UP, 1977; rpt. 1978) was the first book[13] to explain to Anglophonic academics – systematically and comprehensively – the range of literary theories and practices identified with "phenomenological literary criticism" on the Continent. The practices of the FrancophoneGeneva School (-of literary criticism), those of the Swiss-German theorist and criticEmil Staiger, and those of several other theorists/critics, are explained in detail. The influences of the phenomenological theoristRoman Ingarden, the early-phase (existentialist)Martin Heidegger, and ofMikel Dufrenne receive a treatment over 100 pages long all-told. The polemics involving phenomenology and its opponents are addressed in separate chapters, entitled respectively "Phenomenology Confronts Parisian Structuralism," and "The Problem of Validity inE. D. Hirsch andHusserl. The 1978 rpt. of Magliola's book features on its back cover very strong endorsements fromRobert Scholes, Eugene Kaelin,Monroe Beardsley and Ralph Freedman.
The field ofpsychology includes an approach known asexistential-phenomenological psychology.[14]