*A paper presented on April 24, 1984 at the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Washington, D.C.
ABSTRACT
Phenomenology studies phenomena as experienced by humankind and is a
method for changing one's relationship with the world by becoming more
acutely aware of it. By utilizing the techniques of group phenomenology
and phenomenology through vicarious experience, the phenomenological reduction
may allow extension beyond the analysis of the individual's lifeworld to
reveal deeper levels of its multi-layered structure. Illustrations from
the non-visual lifeworld have been included.
Phenomenology studies phenomena as experienced by humankind and is a method for changing one's relationship with the world by becoming more acutely aware of it. It aims to reveal the essential nature of phenomena and experience by divorcing the natural attitude, the prephilosophic dimension of consciousness which conceals the world and prevents close scrutiny. The lifeworld is the taken-for-granted world of the common experience of human existence and is the focus of much phenomenological literature. Emphasis on the lifeworld may stress its pre-reflective experiences of space, place, and landscape and build towards a holistic understanding of the interconnectedness of humankind with its environment. By examining the taken-for-granted dimensions, insight into the essential core of people's involvement with the everyday world should be gained to foster improved adjustment and a more satisfying existence. Such knowledge may aid in the development of better techniques of environmental education and guide planners and designers in producing the kinds of places which promote human interaction and pleasant experiences.
To do phenomenology, one must eliminate all presuppositions and search for the essential and the unquestionable. Traditionally, the focus has been upon self-examination, descriptions of what the investigator perceived and experienced; however, techniques for adapting the rigors of reduction and analysis for use with the accounts and experiences of another person or group are also available. These include the cooperative encounter, the imaginative self-transposal, and group phenomenology or group inquiry. For the cooperative encounter, the participant communicates his or her experiences to the investigator allowing him or her to develop an empathetic understanding of the participant's being. This may then be coupled with the imaginative self- transposal in which the investigator imagines himself or herself to be in the place of the other person so as to critically analyze his or her being. Additional insights for both techniques may be supplied through observations of the other person in new encounters or through imagined experiences.1 For the third technique, group phenomenology or group encounter, several people meet together to thoroughly share their experiences and explore the depths of these to clarify their nature.2 By utilizing a combination of all of these methods, an enlarged perspective on the nature of human existence becomes possible. This perspective may include experiences which would otherwise be impossible for the investigator to experience, for example, knowing the world without ever having seen it. It permits the investigator to analyze both the perspective which he or she experiences as well as an alternate.3
Fundamental to phenomenology is the bracketing or phenomenological reduction, a setting aside of the judgement concerning the reality or nonreality of the existence of the world,4 so that it can be studied in detail.
In no way, however, is this meant to deny what is naturally believed or postulated by the natural consciousness.5 A residue, such as human consciousness which can not be bracketed, will remain.6 Phenomenological reduction is like tearing a complex problem into its basic elements by narrowing the attention to the essential aspects and disregarding or ignoring the surplus and accidental. The goal is the illumination of the rational principles which are necessary for an understanding of that which is being investigated. The suspension of presuppositions is made until they are more firmly established.7
Analysis of the lifeworld through phenomenological reduction reveals a many-layered structure.8 One hierarchy of differentiation within the lifeworld is that of meaning. Everything has meaning and this same structure of being underlies all relationships. Examination can reach the unique core of existential meaning associated with the variety of possible perspectives which life offers.9 To attain such multiple levels of understanding, repeated bracketing must be undertaken. Such reduction leads through three levels of analysis and beyond. To begin, the natural attitude, the impediment to conscious awareness, must be eliminated so as to reveal the phenomenon themselves. From this point, a phenomenological analysis provides a thorough description aimed at the fundamental essence of the subject. Furthermore, exhaustive description should indicate the significance and inherent meanings. Continuation of this analysis procedure with greater reduction may reach a level of understanding beyond the descriptive and simple taken-for-granted. In the second level reduction, simple commonalities and universals become illuminated. Comprehensions are broadened to a more general nature. Additional reduction will eventually yield to a third, more intricate, level in which complex universals and commonalities are disclosed. A clarification of relations and increased holism result. The analysis, however, need not stop at this point because the disclosed itself may be subjected to the rigors of the reduction process starting first with the awareness of it as phenomena and progressing through the various levels of reduction in a repetitive cycle.
A simple illustration of the many-layered bracketing cycle could help clarify the distinctive levels through which the phenomenological reduction procedes. Removal of oneself from the natural attitude places oneself in a world of the physical presence of objects set apart from one's being. The existence of these objects itself is a taken-for-granted rarely examined in our everyday routine while little attention is directed to their nature. Nonetheless, these objects are part of the environment which surrounds us and thus plays a significant role in the interrelationships. Recognition of this reality is the beginning step as it places one within the lifeworld ready for examination. The second level of reduction is a thorough description of the object, in this instance, the geographical lifeworld. Such a description is intricate in itself and multidimensional. One such comprehensive examination was that performed by David Seamon and published as The Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter.10 In this, he reproduced the descriptions derived from phenomenological group encounters. From the thorough description which reveals basic meaning, more reduction exposes the ground works. A case in point was the description of the non-visual perspective of everyday environmental experiences described by ten persons who did not recall having vision. Just as Seamon and his participants recognized major recurrent themes of a second level nature, these descriptions also revealed simple commonalities and universals. A notable example was that way-finding is not dependent upon vision alone; man does possess faculties which these persons may utilize to successfully negotiate their surroundings and which connect them intimately to it. Further analysis of these connections discloses a third level phenomenological awareness, that the environmental perception is a synthesis of the body abilities and results in phenomenon such as object perception which is like an invisible net of awareness which reaches out and senses the thing there. Turning to look at such a capability, this phenomena of the geographical lifeworld shows that all persons have the capacity, however, generally fail to use it. The analysis could next progress to the commonalities and universals of this particular bodily ability as it relates to any human population.
The examples given exhibit that the lifeworld is common to all, however, differing perspectives allow some world views more than others to better see particular varying dimensions. Generally, a person who is visually handicapped is more acutely aware of those elements in his or her environment which are non-visual than a person not so physically handicapped. Yet, the world is not the same to everyone. Differing meanings and perspectives contribute to the lived experience and reveal hierarchies of meaning within it. A prime example would be sound which can either be important or simply noise. It may go noticed or unnoticed. For illustration, the tick of a clock can serve as a locational aid, a distraction, or be entirely ignored by a person who happens to be blind.
Within the many-layered structure, an individual possesses his or her own lifeworld; however, it contains universals, portions which make the comprehension of it significant to the whole which the parts reveal. Most individuals generally will substantiate that the ease and familiarity of the home environment frequently results in happy and pleasant associations. Some of the universals would apply only to a particular group of people, such as the totally visually handicapped in the midwestern United States while others relate to a larger number of people such as all persons of that cultural region. For example, while weather plays an important role in most of our lives, the alteration of our activities in response to its fluctuations vary. For the visually handicapped, wind is most detrimental to travel and piles of snow impede activities beyond the familiar environment. To the non-visually handicapped, these characteristics, which might be noted, are much less critical. All persons are affected by the weather as most persons do not live entirely in totally man-controlled environments. The technology used to control the environment, both natural and artificial, would be somewhat culturally determined but reflect the general intellectual development of mankind. Thus, some of the universals would be applicable to all of the country's population and beyond to all humans. Further extension, moreover, would conceivably admit some combination of universals that would be found between the human lifeworld in its broadest sense and that of other mammals, and at the greatest extreme, between that and all other living forms on earth. Even animals adapt the environment and find their way through it. The relationship between these organisms is often a taken-for-granted. This similarity is the foundation for Tolman's study of the "cognitive maps" of rats.11 Yet even plants are actively interacting with the world as their stems grow differentially to follow the arc of the sun across the sky.
A hierarchy of lifeworlds is apparent and phenomenological investigation
of this hierarchy and its many-layered structure must be expected to lay
bare many 'obvious' and 'taken-for-granted' phenomena and their implicit
meanings. Not only are the universals on these various levels informative,
but also are the differences for these relate to hidden meanings and essences
which merit additional exposure as well. Much yet needs to be considered.
As specialists, though, on spatial and environmental relations, greater
understanding and heightened awareness of these levels will aid us in the
work which we undertake.
NOTES
1See Herbert Spiegelberg, "Phenomenology through Vicarious Experience," in Herbert Spiegelberg, Doing Phenomenology: Essays on and in Phenomenology (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 46-53.
2See David Seamon, A Geography of the Lifeworld: Movement, Rest and Encounter (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1979).
3See Spiegelberg.
4David Stewart and Algis Mickunas, Exploring Phenomenology: A Guide to the Field and Its Literature (Chicago: American Library Association, 1974), p. 48.
5Richard M. Zaner, "On the Sense of Method in Phenomenology," in Phenomenology and Philosophical Understanding, ed., Edo Pivcevíc, (Cambridge, Massachussetts: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 126.
6See Stewart and Mickunas, pp. 35-36 and p. 92.
7See ibid., p. 26. For a more detailed discussion see Zaner, p. 137.
8This term was used in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, Phenomenology and Science in Contemporary European Thought (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1962), p. 20.
9Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans., Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. xix.
10Seamon.
Presentations List
Vita
Vita Subdivision Page
Condensed Vita