Introduction to Phenomenology.

Miller, J. Philip

SOKOLOWSKI, Robert. Introduction to Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ix + 238 pp. Hardcover, $49.99; paper, $18.95--Robert Sokolowski's concise and accessible new book introduces phenomenology not as a historical movement, but as an approach to philosophy that still has much to offer. It discusses central topics in Husserlian phenomenology, but without quoting Husserl and for the most part without mentioning him by name. Instead of examining the contributions of individual phenomenologists, the book extracts and synthesizes the insights of various figures, formulating them in new ways and showing why they are important in the context of contemporary intellectual life.

The book begins, not surprisingly, with the concept of intentionality, the fundamental phenomenological doctrine that all acts of consciousness are directed toward objects. Sokolowski discusses in some detail the way intentionality works in perception: how the perceived object appears as an identity in a manifold of appearances, as something distinct from but nonetheless given through a series of sides, aspects, and profiles. He goes on to explore the different intentional structures involved in memory and imagination and in our experience of words, pictures, and symbols. Subsequent chapters are devoted to such higher-order forms of intentionality as the "categorial" and the "eidetic," and to the distinctive understanding of truth and evidence that emerges in phenomenology. Other topics examined include the self, temporality, the life world, and intersubjectivity. The book concludes with an appendix that briefly surveys the historical development of phenomenology from Husserl and Heidegger through Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and later figures, including those associated with contemporary schools of phenomenology in the United States.

Sokolowski follows Husserl in distinguishing sharply between phenomenology's point of view and that of the "natural attitude." Like Husserl, he characterizes phenomenology by describing the "reduction," or change of perspectives, through which we suspend our straightforward involvement with the objects of prephilosophical life and adopt a more detached, philosophical stance. A clear understanding of this move is important, he contends, for otherwise we are apt to be confused about the nature of the phenomenological enterprise. One such confusion is discussed at some length in the book: the view that takes phenomenology to be a reflection on the senses or meanings of intentional acts. Reflection on meanings is a move that gets executed within the natural attitude; it takes place whenever we distance ourselves from a statement someone has made in order to assess its truth. The capacity for this kind of reflection--the ability to put quotation marks around what has been said and consider it as assertion rather than as fact--is an important element in our lives as reasoning beings, but phenomenological reflection, as Sokolowski understands it, is more radical, more encompassing, and fundamentally different in motivation. Phenomenology's aim is not to correct the errors of the natural attitude or to add to its store of truths, but rather to clarify what has been achieved already, to bring to light the intentional structures through which truth has been attained in prephilosophical life, to whatever extent it has been attained.

While Sokolowski agrees with Husserl on the importance of the reduction, his definition of phenomenology differs somewhat from Husserl's own. Husserl characterizes phenomenology as a thematization of the ego, a science of subjectivity, a form of idealism. Though he is quick to add that the ego as studied in phenomenology is not cut off from the world or from objects, that the sphere of subjectivity has a transcendental dimension, and that phenomenological idealism is quite different from other forms of idealism, Husserl nonetheless leaves the impression that the subjective side is somehow privileged. For Sokolowski, on the other hand, phenomenology is simply "the science that studies truth" (p. 185). Its central concern is the experience on which all truth is based, the event of disclosure through which something becomes evident or manifest to someone. In phenomenology, he writes, "we stand back and contemplate what it is to be truthful and to achieve evidence.... Instead of being simply concerned with objects and their features, we think about the correlation between the things being disclosed and the dative to whom they are manifested" (p. 186).

Underlying this difference in definition is a deeper disagreement about phenomenology's historical significance. Husserl uses language deliberately reminiscent of Descartes and other modern philosophers because he understands phenomenology as the culmination of the Cartesian tradition: by embracing the doctrine of intentionality, phenomenology is able to carry out the project that was initiated by earlier modern philosophers. Sokolowski, on the other hand, draws a sharp contrast between the goals of modern philosophy and those of phenomenology. Where Descartes and his followers sought to replace natural disclosure with something better, with a philosophically certified truth that would afford human beings a previously undreamt of mastery over things and human affairs, phenomenology is rooted in a fundamental respect for the achievements of the natural attitude. Phenomenology "believes that prephilosophical intelligence ought to be left intact, that it has its own excellence and truth, and that philosophy contemplates the prephilosophical without replacing it" (p. 198). Though phenomenology addresses issues raised by modern science and appropriates some of the insights of modern philosophy, Sokolowski argues that its central vision has more in common with ancient and medieval philosophy than with the tradition that stretches from Descartes through positivism and pragmatism. By embracing a moderate form of rationalism akin to that of Plato and Aristotle, it offers an alternative both to the hyper-rationalism of the modern philosophers and to the postmodern subversion of reason.

Since it addresses basic questions about the nature of phenomenology and clarifies specialized terms as they are introduced, the book would make an excellent text for an undergraduate course. Yet because it also offers a fresh and stimulating interpretation of phenomenology and an intriguing view of its importance for contemporary intellectual life it should be of much broader interest as well.--J. Philip Miller, Montclair, New Jersey.