Abstract
Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses. In doing this, they articulated the following considerations: is renewed criticality targeting the phenomenological method itself, does it expand its subject matter to marginalized experiences, does it retool key phenomenological concepts? One aspect of this debate that has been left under-interrogated, however, is the word “phenomenology” itself. There is after all another question to ask in this context: what is phenomenological about critical phenomenology? Many avenues of response are of course possible. Phenomenology could most broadly be meant as an approach that concerns itself with what is given in experience in order to describe the structures of that givenness. From a Husserlian perspective, pure phenomenology is the science which concerns itself with phenomena in the full and diverse sense of the word—not as understood by specific natural or human sciences. What is distinctive of phenomenology is thus not what subset or type of phenomena it is interested in but how it relates to them, which, as Husserl introduces Ideas I, happens “in a completely different attitude.”
Highlights
Since Gayle Salamon’s 2018 article “What is Critical about Critical Phenomenology?”, phenomenologists and critical theorists have offered various responses to the question this title poses
Fanon does not adhere to a clear single philosophical method, and Al-Saji (2019a) suggests that no practical program or hopes of “changing the world” should guide critical phenomenology (2)
Turning to Husserl’s account of attitude reveals how critical phenomenology can be understood as employing a plurality of “methods” through what turns out to be a plurality of attitudes
Summary
While there is only one pure theoretical attitude, Husserl uses a multitude of other terms to describe the theoretical, practical, and aesthetic attitudes. The practical attitude, closely related to the personalist attitude in Ideas II, centers on acts of willing, desiring, or wishing instead of on acts of valuing For this reason, it is sometimes identified with the natural attitude itself, as it refers to the manner in which a person habitually posits and strives to realize various ends in her personal world of praxis, or in the lifeworld. For Husserl, value motives and posited ends are reflected on but not doxically neutralized—their accompanying doxic theses are not suspended—since the practical goal is precisely to figure out what to do given those specific circumstances, and not to determine what are the a priori structures of valuing and willing in general This would be the task of pure axiology and praxis, not of personalist ethics. When Husserlian phenomenology refrains from bracketing all acts of valuing and willing in order to access the field of pure lived experience, and instead continues to have practical and affective interests, new attitudes emerge
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