JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

3 PhenomenologyThe ‘existential phenomenology’ of Being and Nothingness is a synthesisof existentialism and phenomenology. To understand it, we need a grasp ofphenomenology before Sartre.Although the term ‘phenomenology’ was given currency by the Germanmathematician and philosopher J. H. Lambert (1728–77), and althoughphenomenological themes are salient in Psychology From an EmpiricalStandpoint (1874) by the Austrian philosopher and psychologist FranzBrentano (1838–1917), it is Brentano’s pupil Edmund Husserl who isaccepted as the ‘father’ of phenomenology. It is controversial whether Hegel’sPhenomenology of Spirit (1807) contains much phenomenology in theHusserlian sense and whether Kant engaged in phenomenology in hisCritique of Pure Reason (1781/87), although Husserl thought he did.Husserl’s phenomenology is often thought to exist in three not whollydistinct phases: the distinguishing of phenomenology from both psychologyand logic in Logical Investigations (1900–1), ‘transcendentalphenomenonology’ in Ideas I (1913) and an emphasis on the ‘lifeworld’(Lebenswelt) in The Crisis of the European Sciences (1936).Husserl’s project is partly the Cartesian one of placing all knowledge onindubitable epistemological foundations, partly the Kantian one of explaininghow all knowledge is possible. In Ideas I, he uses the methodologicaldevice of epoché, or phenomenological reduction, to suspend or ‘put inabeyance’ all claims about the reality of the world outside consciousness.This reduction of what is to the appearance of what is facilitatesphenomenological description. Husserl hopes to discover the essence ofconsciousness, the essence of perception, the essence of a physical objectand so on. Objects are shown to be transcendentally constituted by