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Concept
Existential phenomenology
Summary
Existential phenomenology encompasses a wide range of thinkers who take up the view that philosophy must begin from experience like phenomenology, but argues for the temporality of personal existence as the framework for analysis of the human condition.
In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger reframes Edmund Husserl's phenomenological project into what he terms fundamental ontology. This is based on an observation and analysis of Dasein ("being-there"), human being, investigating the fundamental structure of the Lebenswelt (lifeworld, Husserl's term) underlying all so-called regional ontologies of the special sciences. In Heidegger's philosophy, people are thrown into the world in a given situation, but they are also a project towards the future, possibility, freedom, wait, hope, anguish. In contrast with the philosopher Kierkegaard, Heidegger wanted to explore the problem of Dasein existentially (existenzial), rather than existentielly (existenziell) because Heidegger argued that Kierkegaard had already described the latter in "penetrating fashion". Most existentialist phenomenologists were concerned with how we are constituted by our experiences and yet how we are also free in some respect to modify both ourselves and the greater world in which we live.
Building on Heidegger's language that we are "thrown into the world", Jean-Paul Sartre says that "man is a being whose existence precedes his essence". Both point out that any individual's identity is a matter of the social, historical, political, and economic situation into which he or she is born. This frees phenomenology from needing to find a universal ground to all experience, since it will always be partial and influenced by the philosopher's own situation. Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that the lesson of Husserl's reduction is that "there is no complete reduction" because even phenomenologists cannot resist how they have been shaped by their history, culture, society, and language. In her work The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir explored how greatly norms of gender shape the very sense of self that women have, in distinction from men.
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