Phenomenology: a path forward

In every time there will always be those who are old fashioned, and long for a return to the “good old days”; conversely, there will always be pioneers of new thought and progressive culture.  Healthy progression and growth is necessary for any culture; progression is nothing to reject simply for the sake of remaining blindly faithful to the “old way”.  Modernity however, far from a healthy progression of though presents a radical shift from the classical philosophy, one that cannot be reconciled without a true progression and development.  Such progression is offered by Husserl in Phenomenology.

The most important precept in classical philosophy is that things have a nature and an end, a form and a telos.  Forms and telos deals with the respective truth and goodness of an object, providing knowledge of what an object is and how it correctly exists and performs in context of the world.  Understanding forms and ends stabilizes language, gives meaning to the sounds we utter not as ideas themselves but as form communicating the idea in the speaker.  Without form and telos, the Christian moral doctrine championed by Aquinas makes no sense, and there is no room for grace.

The major innovation in modernity is the assertion things don’t have a nature, that we give things significance either as individuals or a community.  Modernity denies both telos and ends, replacing them with context and purpose. Epistemology shifted from a study of how we know things to how we give things their meanings, and understanding of ends became only the purposes to which we put things.  For modernity we only know things by the context we experience them and by what we want of them.  The problems which modernity causes are not normal problems, raising questions that are bizarre but difficult to refute, changin reason from contemplative and receptive to imposing meaning and ruling reality.  One might be forgiven for attempting an absolute return to Aquinas in response to these problems.

Solely turning back to Aquinas is historicism however, both unnecessary and impossible.   Phenomenology, introduced by Husserl gives us a way to go beyond the split, allowing the individual to get to perennial philosophy and introduces the theory of realism without the failings of modernity.  Husserl asserts that the world is public not private, that mistakes are not made in the recesses of the mind but within the boundaries of the public world.  The mind remains intent on the object of its perception, encountering the appearance of the object and abstracting from the appearance itself.  Phenomenology presupposes there is an actual object to encounter, not simply a projection of the individual.   

The problem modernity raises is appearances are deceiving, that we can’t know or trust experiences.  Phenomenology sidesteps this by beholding an object’s appearance as how that object manifests itself to the human subject.  The focus is the item and the experience, the cognition and manifestation.  Phenomenology proffers a resolution to modernity, avoiding both historicism and relativism and restoring a sense of comprehension to human experience.