Principles of structural phenomenology

Abstract

Structural phenomenology is both a general theory of experience and a scientific method, whose contours and potentially considerable explanatory power have been fundamentally obscured by its complex historical genesis. Barring a few partial or indirect attempts (Holenstein 1976, Piana 1996, Coquet 2007, Groupe µ 2015), no explicit analysis and certainly no synthetic account of its core tenets have been provided. Indeed, structural phenomenology has generally not been framed as a coherent tradition, theory or model in its own right. At best, the term seems to refer only to the indefinite conceptual space where structuralism and phenomenology have on occasion intersected. Because the works of Edmund Husserl, the Gestalt psychologists, Roman Jakobson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Jacques Derrida all provide, to varying extents, strong examples of productive convergences or intersections between these two traditions, it is nonetheless quite clear that explorations of structural-phenomenological ideas constituted not a fleeting episode, but a persistent undercurrent in 20th Century European intellectual history. As we hope to clarify here, moreover, it is possible not only to isolate a number of defining ideas in this existing nexus of exchanges between phenomenological and structuralist approaches, but also to distill these ideas into a set of consistent principles that can provide a first outline of the theoretical scope of structural phenomenology.