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Bracketing lifeworlds: Husserlian phenomenology as geographical method

LOUISE JOHNSON

Phenomenology in geography is part of what Ley and Samuels (1978,7-9) have described as a ‘humanistic’ response to the dominance of positivism in the discipline. Against the ‘scientistic’ glorification of technique and the separation of people from the world, they saw humanists putting people back into the centre of our concerns, people intensely experiencing their world. Phenomenology joined existentialism and marxism as part of this critique of scientism and as one alternative to it in geography.

The utility of the phenomenological alternative deserves elaboration. Spawning more critics than practitioners, (Baker, 1979; Billinge, 1977; Eliot-Hurst, 1978; Entrikin, 1966; Gregory, 1978ab; Mercer and Powell, 1972; Walmsley, 1974), phenomenology has attracted such geographers as Annette Buttimer (1974), Edward Relph (1976), Yi-Fu Tuan (1971), Graham Rowles (1978) and David Seamon (1977).

Subjects have varied from Buttimer’s (1974) personal and disciplinary reflections to Rowles’s (1978) participant study of elderly people in a North American city. These studies share a focus on the ‘lifeworld’ but have a philosophical base which is either overly brief or uncritically eclectic. An explicit discussion of philosophy is all but absent from most published work by Yi- Fu Tuan (1974, 1975, 1977) or Graham Rowles (1978) while Annette Buttimer (1974,27) sees no contradiction in drawing concepts freely from both phenomenological and existential philosophers. This lack of philosophical rigour glosses over many differences between individual philosophers and undervalues the sophistication and insights possible from a close examination of one writer.

Emphasis on the ‘lifeworld’, or the taken-for-granted world of everyday experience, rather than other concepts from within the phenomenological-existential tradition, while based on geography’s pragmatic focus, must also be related to this lack of philosophical rigour. A re- examination of one phenomenologist-Edmund Husserl-reveals that for him isolating the lifeworld was a preliminary stage to a deeper analysis of the world we experience. The ‘epoche’ is a reflective act whereby crucial dimensions of that experience-intentionality and

Ms L. Johnson is Senior Tutor in Australian Studies, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria. Australian Geographical Srudies 2 1, April 1983.

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intersubjectivity-are revealed. Husserlian Phenomenology can thereby bring into focus both unselfconscious experience and systematic reflection upon it.

While Husserl’s method goes further to the levels of ‘transcendental reflection’, the geographer need not. Many of the problems of the method can thereby be avoided, while an insightful technique along with philosophical rigour can be added to the discipline.

Within a discussion of Husserl’s phenomenology, then, useful concepts are drawn out and research approaches highlighted which go beyond a concern with the lifeworld to Systematic reflection on intentional experience. Herein, could be a phenomenological method useful to geographers.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF EDMUND HUSSERL A N D ITS RESEARCH IMPLICATIONS Coming from a background in pure mathematics and logic, Edmund Husserl confronted the

developments in science and politics in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s with concern. In Vienna, Husserl (1970, 5-6) wrote of the:

. . . exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern man . . . let itself be determined by the positive sciences . . . meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. . . questions on the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this human existence.

To counter this dominance of science Husserl wrote of phenomenology as an alternative, as a new basis for knowledge. This call was echoed in the 1970s by some geographers. For Husserl, instead of beginning studies with empirical observations he began with experience-as it is without reflection-and then as it is discerned by a series of reflections.

Husserl’s starting point within the ‘natural attitude’ was our taken-for-granted everyday world. He wrote:

[When I sit alone] I am aware of the world, spread out in space endlessly, and in time becoming and become, without end. I am aware of it, that means, first of all, I discover i t immediately, intuitively, I experience it . . . [This knowing] has nothing of [deliberate] conceptual thinking in it. . . . It is then to this world, the world in which 1 find myself and which is also the world-about-me, that the complex forms of my manifold and shifting spontaneities of consciousness stand related (Kockelmans, 1967, 69, 71).

In our everyday lifeworlds we d o not question the existence of the world and its objects. I accept that I live from day t o day without doubting whether the sun will rise tomorrow, that my home will not have vanished, that I will not be a cockroach. I believe these things without having mastered and invoked laws of anatomy, physics and biology. This lebenswelr, for Husserl, was the unacknowledged foundation of science and hence also of life. There was a need to reground knowledge on this lifeworld. To study the lifeworld Husserl suggested two approaches. One involved unselfconscious immersion, the other reflection. He wrote of the first:

. . . one can put forward by itself the problem of the manner of being of the life-world; one can place oneself completely upon the ground of this straight forwardly intuited world (Husserl, 1970, 123).

. . . we do set ourselves the task of continuing the pure description [of the natural attitude] and raising it to a systematically inclusive and exhaustive characterisation of the data . . . discoverable from the natural standpoint . . . A task such as this can and must . . . be undertaken. . . Here it is not ours to attempt.

However, Husserl(1931, 106) argued elsewhere that:

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Husserl was therefore against concentrating phenomenological investigation on the lifeworld as it is unselfconsciously experienced. In his quest for absolute truth, Husserl went from the lifeworld into systematic reflection upon it. Geographers have not been as quick to follow this course, some finding in the study of the taken-for-granted world an important and neglected aspect of the geographical experience. Graham Rowles (1 978,182) in sharing the lifeworld of five elderly inhabitants of a North-East United States city revealed the importance of experiential values and fantasy in their geographical worlds.

The participants’ geographical experience expressed a subtle meshing of space and time, embracing not only physical and cognitive involvement within a contemporary setting but also vicarious participation in temporally and/or spatially displaced environments. A synthesis of four overlapping modalities-action, orientation, feeling and fantasy- seemed to provide a useful lexicon for describing geographical dimensions of the participants’ being within their lifeworld.

Other geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan (1975, 1977), Edward Relph (1976), David Seamon (1977), Annette Buttimer (1974, 1976) and David Ley (1977) have also concentrated on the lifeworld, its various dimensions and the ways it can be studied. This focus is still a valuable one for geographers, but is not the end point of a phenomenological study.

Husserl’s purpose in isolating the lifeworld was t o move beyond it-to become aware of it by reflecting upon it. Whereas everyday living is pre-reflective, Husserl suggests that for a phenomenological understanding of the nature of our experience, we must reflect on it. We must be self-directed, we must reflect on our own consciousness of experience. This change of attitude, this bracketing of the lifeworld, Husserl(l975, 14-5) calls the epoche:

Before the epoche, I was a man with the natural attitude and lived naively immersed in the world. I accepted this experience as such . . . All this, however, took place in me without being aware of it. I was indeed interested in my experiences, . . . but I did not focus on the experiencing of my life, on the act of being interested. . . (in) my subjectivity. . . to become aware of (this I ) needed to execute the phenomenological epoche.

Within the phenomenological reduction-the epoche-the concern is not with the reality of the world but with the subjective givenness of that world-with consciousness itself. As Husserl (1975, 8, 15) emphasised:

[The epoche is] the methodology through which I come t o understand myself as that ego and life of consciousness in which and through which the entire objective world exists for me . . . In it I become the disinterested spectator of my natural attitude and worldly ego and its life.

In pursuing Husserlian phenomenology, therefore, one brackets out everything but the immediate experience, including assumptions about that experience. Thus, in research, the ideal is t o isolate, expose but then bracket out our own assumptions and background knowledge, to thereby engage in presuppositionless enquiry. This act can become an end in itself and, as Annette Buttimer (1974) revealed in ‘Values in Geography’, an important and insightful exercise for any geographer.

For Husserl, the epoche revealed the essential nature of our involvement with the world- intenrionality and intersubjectivity. In the epoche one becomes aware that one cannot live, experience, think, value and act in a world which is not in some sense in oneself and derives meaning and truth from oneself. If one places oneself above that life by an act of bracketing out the ongoing world, one views one’s own life as exclusively consciousness of the world. One reveals oneself as an ego engaging with a world of intended objects. What is revealed by the

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epoche is the intentionality of one’s consciousness-the relation of oneself (or ego) to one’s conscious life within the world. Each element of the relationship defines the other: the world by one’s consciousness of it, the self by engagement with the world or with consciousness, and consciousness by the relation between the self and the world. Thus, to be conscious is to be conscious of something. Every act of consciousness necessarily has an object of consciousness. Further, if there is to be a consciousness of something, then there must be a subject which is conscious o f t h e object. This view of people engaging with the world, is quite different from the separation of people from the world which a scientistic paradigm implies.

Intentionality has specific research implications. AS Husserl(1970, 171) highlighted: . . . theego-pole.. . the subjective, as appearance tied together synthetically and the object poles. These are different directions our analyses can take, and to them correspond different aspects of the general notion of intentionality: direction toward something, appearance of something, and something, an objective something, us the unity in its appearances toward which the intention of the ego-pole, through these appearances, is directed. Although these headings are inseparable from one another, one must pursue them one at a time . . .

Reconsidering these as directions for geographical study, the researcher must isolate, reveal and then transcend lifeworld~. At one level, the researcher must become aware of his or her lifeworld, and expose but then suspend presuppositions about the research problem at hand. The engagement with this problem is thereby revealed as intentional-the researcher has an active ego, there is a process of engagement and there is the ‘object’ of interest, the research problem. Thus, reflection occurs before and during the research procedure.

At another level within the epoche a phenomenological geographer examines problems, documents or situations which, in their turn, are intentionally created. A document is about something, is created by an active ego and is now the ‘object’ of interest to the researcher. A contemporary situation, such as the experience of a place is the experience of something, by actively engaged people which can be revealed to a reflective, intentional researcher.

In both cases of reflection on oneself or a research problem or document, what is revealed by the reflective act is not idiosyncratic. There are commonalities in, for example, the way a place is constituted. What is apparent within the epoche is not only the intentional nature of experience, but its inrersubjectiviry. As Husserl(1931, 105) argued:

. . . I apprehend the world-about-[others] and the world-about-me objectively as one and the same world, which differs only through affecting consciousness differently . . . even that which is here intersubjectively in common is known in different ways, is differently apprehended. . . Despite all this, we come to understandings with our neighbours, and set up in common an objective spatio-temporal fact-world as the world about us that is there for all to which we ourselves none-the-less belong.

For example, when examining the historical record ofa past place within the epoche each piece of evidence is not so unique as to be incommensurate with another. The object-the past place- is made up of intersubjective elements. These elements may be the main streets, shops, politics, or resorts of a city and they will be recorded in intersubjective ways. One may apprehend not only commonalities in the object, then, but also their manners of appearance. Those who have recorded the place may also be subjectively assessed by oneself-the researcher-as having common aims or backgrounds. These parts along with one’s reflections on the process of research would together create a phenomenological geography of a past place. A similar procedure, using different ‘evidence’ would be followed for a contemporary study.

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But there is one further step in Husserl’s phenomenological method. In the epocht, experience as it is constituted in consciousness is the focus. The taken-for-granted is no longer accepted without reflection, but is examined. In his earlier writings Husserl urges a further step. This process of examination and reflection itself becomes a subject for reflection. One thus reflects on one’s own act of reflection in the transcendental reduction. As Husserl (1970.97-9) stressed:

It is the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif ofthe knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life in which all the scientific structures that are valid for him occur purposely, are stored up as

[the transcendental view] comes to its actual and true existence, to its actual and true beginning, only when the philosopher has penetrated to a clear understanding of himself as the subjectivity functioning as primal source. . .

In the course of such reflection on reflection the essences of phenomena are isolated-what a phenomena has to be in order to be apprehended as it is in consciousness. At this level, what is exposed is self validating. What is also revealed is the primary constituting element of consciousness-the transcendental ego.

This final step to expose the transcendental ego, truth and essence is highly contentious. In his later writing Husserl himself put greater emphasis on the epoche-the systematic study of the lifeworld in consciousness-than on transendental reflection. Others have pointed to the immobilising logical and methodological problems of isolating a ’transcendental ego’. In particular, Hindess (1977, 85) has noted that:

If the knowledge process of transcendental subjectivity is to be the object of investigation then the investigation itself requires reference to a higher subjectivity. Since the existence of its object requires that of a non-objectionable subject-correlate of the knowledge the transcendental movement can only be repeated . . . indefinitely if not to be brought to an entirely arbitrary halt.

Humanistic geographers should be concerned with the difficulty of affecting a transcendental reduction and the implicit contradiction of this with lifeworld investigation. While phenome- nological concepts, such as lebenswelt, intentionality and intersubjectivity relate people to the world, the end point of Husserl’s phenomenological method is idealism. Reflection becomes an end in itself and the world retreats into transcendental irrelevance in the quest for absolute truth and essences. As David Ley observed, ‘notions of pure consciousness are as much an abstraction from human experience as any isotropic plain’ (Ley and Samuels, 1978,451.

For Husserl, if the transcendental reduction is rejected, the transcendental ego and essence remain undiscovered. In practical research rather than abstract philosophy though, the quest is not for absolute truth or the transcendental ego. Hence, this concern and contradiction may be irrelevant for geography. Validity, however, remains important. Here. I would argue that self and intersubjective validation is possible within the epocht. Situating one’s research in one’s own biography will not isolate one’s transcendental ego or the essences of one’s consciousness, but this reflection has truth, not an absolute or transcendental truth, but still one which is valid because it is true to one’s own reflection. Reflection if true, is self-validating.

The epoche can, therefore, be a device for exposing assumptions and presuppositions held by a researcher and held by others; for revealing, but also examining, what is usually taken-for- granted. At another level, still within the epoche, a contemporary situation or the historical record can be examined. The examination, if conducted after systematic reflection, will be self- validating. ‘Objective’ validity is an irrelevant criterion here.

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TABLE I

T H E MEANING OF ‘EPOCHE’ FOR HUSSERL A N D T H E GEOGRAPHER

Husserl Epoche

The geographer Epoche level I Eooche level 2

Ego-subject pole Ego, I , autobiography-the isolation and presentation of assumptions.

Appearances tied together syn- thetically. Becoming aware of and record-

ing how the study situation or documents reveal themselves to me.

Object. The problem situation or his- torical material.

People involved in the study situation or those who write or in other ways produce historical ma- terial.

How people are intentionally enga- ged in their situation or write their accounts.

The object with which people are engaged, be i t a place, a problem or whatever,

For Husserl then the epoche reveals intentionality and intersubjectivity. We relate to the world in an intentional manner by the intimate interplay of the ego or subject pole, appearances tied together synthetically and the object. For the geographer engaged in research the epoche has two levels as shown in Table I.

CONCLUSION In seeking to counter the dominance of science, Husserl began with unselfconscious

experience of the world. By reflecting upon the world, its international and intersubjective elements were revealed. As Husserl reflected still further upon his own consciousness, he isolated the transcendental ego and essences. For geographers, concerned with the relation of people to their world, and in the light of the problems surrounding the transcendental reduction, focus can remain on the lifeworld and reflection upon it. This implies two interrelated levels of investigation within the epoche; one’s self and one’s relationship to the world. The research procedure is, therefore, first to become aware of one’s own lifeworld. Presenting assumptions and objectives is a necessary part of any phenomenological geography. However, the analysis should move beyond a concern with the lifeworld to systematic reflection upon it and the research problem at hand. In such a movement, the intentionality and intersubjectivity of one’s self and the human actors in the research problem will be isolated. The research problem itself becomes part of the researcher’s intentional self, while questions are posed of the research situation which reveal the intentional elements within it.

Husserlian Phenomenology provides a rigorous method whose philosophical base through notions such as intentionality and the epoche deny the fact-value and object-subject distinctions of science. Phenomenology is, thereby, an alternative as well as a critique of science. Geography can gain more from Husserlian Phenomenology than a critique of science and a focus on the taken-for-granted world.

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