Chapter 1 - Phenomenology and Objective Thought

Summary

I provide an explication of the content and method of Husserl’s phenomenology, explicating the ideas of bracketing and reduction and of descriptive, eidetic and transcendental phenomenology. In the process I set out his ideas of act intentionality, of co-intending and horizons and of active and passive constitution. I then give an account of how Merleau-Ponty adopts and adapts Husserl’s ideas and methodology, recasting phenomenology as an existential and genetic but nonetheless transcendental enterprise. I go on to outline his account of the scientistic and physicalistic picture of the world presented by what he calls objective thought, his major target from the outset. Against this backdrop, I show that he opposes objective thought because it either reduces consciousness to a physical body in a determined world (as empiricism) or takes it as something that acts from above on a physical and agency-neutral body in a similarly determined world (as intellectualism).