Phenomenology

Beware: the book in your hands has a peculiar subject matter. It is not about this topic or that one but about everything at all, and that might seem to be too ambitious, especially for such a small book. But it is not about everything full stop but about everything as experienced. If biology is the study of life (bios), phenomenology would seem to be the study of appearance (phenomenon). What’s misleading about this analogy is that the study of appearance suggests that we are dealing with mere appearance as opposed to reality, with a mental image instead of the existent thing. But it is just this misunderstanding of appearance that makes phenomenology so urgently necessary. Phenomenology is the study of experience, of the way things appear to us together in their truth. Sometimes there can be mere appearance; it looks like the turtle is dead but it turns out it was just playing dead, or it looks like a turtle but really it’s just a curiously shaped stone. But we are able to have mere appearance because experience is fundamentally reliable; we know the turtle is in fact alive, because we now see it swimming away, or we pick up what we think is a turtle only to discover the lifeless solidity of rock. The unfolding of experience allows us to sort true appearances from mere appearances. Phenomenology does not study mere appearance; it studies the true appearance of things.