Methodological relations among phenomenology, historiography and humanistic psychology

Abstract

For the historian, the phenomenological method is an instrumental resource to draw up the difficult art of narrating an action that actually occurred. For the humanist psychologist, the phenomenological method is a tool to recover the living experience, as phenomenalities given to understanding and elucidation. In neither case, the phenomenology presents itself as perspective or argument, but as search for the objective exploration of subjectivity, looking at intuitive cues mediated by qualitative logic. First, the article comments the methodological discussions occurred at the beginning of the phenomenological theory on the conciliation of the aesthetics of narrative and the needs for evidence. Second, it takes the history of humanist psychology as an example to the phenomenological challenge in discerning fact and value, the so-called ambiguity of conscious experience. The ambiguity is implicit in the discourse that presents itself as the rhetoric of assigning social value to the consciousness of the experience. It concludes by setting historians and phenomenologists as humanist whose task is to prepare narrative, mediated by an ethical rhetoric, in which the ambiguity of facts and values are conducive to documentary evidence, taking as a rule of interpretation of the historical time and social space.