Draft:Critical phenomenology

Critical phenomenology is an approach that combines the methods and insights of phenomenology with a critical perspective.

As a philosophical approach, phenomenology studies objectivity and reality (more generally) as subjectively lived and experienced. It seeks to investigate the universal features of consciousness while avoiding assumptions about the external world, aiming to describe phenomena as they appear to the subject, and to explore the meaning and significance of the lived experiences. In addition to this, critical phenomenology seeks to uncover and challenge power structures, social injustices, and cultural norms that shape these experiences.

Methodology

As a methodology, phenomenology aims to find the "essence" of a phenomenon.

The phenomenological method is composed of four basic steps: the époche, the phenomenological reduction, the eidetic variation, and intersubjective corroboration.

1. The époche is Edmund Husserl's term for the procedure by which the phenomenologist endeavors to suspend commonsense and theoretical assumptions about reality (what he terms the natural attitude) to attend only to what is directly given in experience. This is not a skeptical move; reality is never in doubt. The purpose is to see it more closely as it truly is. The underlying insight is that objects are "experienced and disclosed in the ways they are, thanks to the way consciousness is structured."
2. The phenomenological reduction is closely linked to the époche. The aim of the reduction is to analyze the correlations between what is given in experience and specific structures of subjectivity shaping and enabling this givenness. This "leads back" (Latin: re-ducere) to the world.
3. Eidetic variation is the process of imaginatively stripping away the properties of things to determine what is essential to them, that is, what are the characteristics without which a thing would not be the thing that it is (Eidos is Plato's Greek word for the essence of a thing). Significantly for the phenomenological researcher, eidetic variation can be practiced on acts of consciousness themselves to help clarify, for instance, the structure of perception or memory. Husserl openly acknowledges that the essences uncovered by this method include various degrees of vagueness and also that such analyses are defeasible. He contends, however, that this does not undermine the value of the method.
4. Intersubjective corroboration is simply the sharing of one's results with the larger research community. This allows for comparisons that help to sort out what is idiosyncratic to the individual from what might be essential to the structure of experience as such.

Further reading

• Weiss, Gail; Salamon, Gayle; Murphy, Ann V., eds. (2019). 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press. ISBN 978-0-810-14115-5.
• Magrì, Elisa; McQueen, Paddy (2022). Critical Phenomenology: An Introduction. Polity. ISBN 978-1-509-54113-3.