Phenomenology

Phenomenology begins with a discipline rather than a doctrine, and that discipline is what Edmund Husserl called the epoche, or bracketing. Rather than asking whether the tree in front of you really exists outside your mind, the phenomenologist sets that question aside on purpose and asks instead how the tree is actually given to consciousness, in what Husserl called its intentional structure, consciousness always being consciousness of something. Practiced carefully, the method describes far more than trees. It can describe how time itself is experienced as a flowing present trailing a retained past and an anticipated future, how another person is experienced as a subject rather than an object, and how a religious experience of the sacred presents itself to the one who has it, independent of whether that presentation is later judged true.

That last application carried phenomenology into religious thought directly. Martin Heidegger redirected the method from consciousness toward the structure of existence itself, asking what it means for a being to exist at all rather than merely to be an object among others, and that redirection is the direct bridge into existentialism. Separately, twentieth century Catholic philosophy adopted phenomenological description as a way to talk about the human person and moral experience with precision, without first settling every metaphysical question a scholastic argument would have opened. Karol Wojtyla, later Pope John Paul II, wrote his major philosophical work in exactly this vein, describing the acting person phenomenologically before asking what that description implies theologically. Bracketing the question of God turned out to be one of the more effective ways yet found of eventually returning to it.

Emmanuel Levinas trained under both Husserl and Heidegger and then turned phenomenology's own method against an assumption both men shared, that philosophy properly begins with a solitary consciousness making sense of its world. Levinas argued that the most basic human experience is not a self encountering objects but a self encountering another person, and that this encounter, given phenomenological attention rather than assumed away, does not present the other person as one more object for consciousness to constitute at all. The face of another person, in Levinas's technical use of the term, resists being reduced to a concept or a category; it makes a demand, do not kill me, before any reasoning about rights or duties gets underway to justify that demand, and Levinas concluded from this that ethics, not epistemology or ontology, is first philosophy, prior to any question about what exists or how we know it. He read this structure as carrying a trace of the divine that formal theology could not capture directly, an infinity glimpsed in the finite face of another person, a transcendence that shows up in ethical obligation rather than in mystical experience or philosophical proof. Levinas, a Jewish philosopher who lost family in the Holocaust and spent the war in a German prisoner of war camp, developed this account specifically against systems, Heidegger's included, that he judged capable of subordinating the individual other person to a larger totality, a history, a nation or a system of Being.