Phenomenology 1.2

It seems my post on phenomenology left some people in the dark.  This was not intentional, but what was purposeful was not going into a detailed analysis of this branch of thought.  In the context of the Theology of the Body it's enough to know that it was an influence.  You can understand and appreciate John Paul II's writing without knowing his influences, much like you can enjoy the Beatles and never know anything about Buddy Holly or Chuck Berry.  Like I wrote before, I don't want to get too caught up in the preliminaries and bore people with philosophy.

The other issue is time.  Things are beginning to heat up here in Elizabeth, and the spare time I use for this little project of mine is getting scarcer by the day.  I've been doing this TOB thing for over a month and still haven't gotten into the text with you all.  But I'll try, in brief, to sum up what phenomenology is.

Remember that beginning with Rene Descartes contemporary philosophy became more and more subjective in its vision of reality, meaning that the Western mind accepted that there is no universal truth that we can all agree on.  Truth either doesn't exist or we can't know it because of our limited human abilities. We also can't know what a thing is beyond it's outer physical attributes.  In contemporary thought what St. Thomas Aquinas called a thing's essence simply can't be known.  To put it in modern parlance, we really can't know what the definition of is is.  When Descartes says I think there for I am (his famous cogito ergo sum), he's placing the inner life of the mind as the only sure thing we can grasp on to.  Our vision of the outer world is tainted by our perceptions, which can be effected by any number of factors like past experiences, prejudices, or even physical defects.  There fore we can't trust our senses, and since it's through our sense that we learn, we can't really know things as they are, only as we perceive them.  (Are you still with me?  because I'm not sure even I am)   As the late Larry Azar, one of my professors from Iona, used to say Descartes put us in our minds and we've been trying to get out ever since.

Phenomenology was one of those attempts to get us out of our minds and into the real world again. It tried to analyze human actions by means of what is called bracketing; looking at an action or a thing as it is, putting aside all our preconceived notions.  This even includes any scientific knowledge we may have about a thing, in order to get to its essential meaning. 

The difficulty with phenomenology is that as a movement it quickly scattered into many different directions, so that you end up with someone like Jacques Derrida who believed that words have no inherent meaning beyond what we place on them (again, no such thing as universal truth).  Rather than taking us into the real world, you could argue he's gone full circle back into our mind.  Obviously John Paul II is taping into an earlier form of this philosophy when writing TOB, and is also at heart a follower of Thomas Aquinas and his Christian philosophy. 

It's tough, but I do have to get back to work, but I will return to an important point later;  why this all is important.  We often think of philosophy as being very detached from everyday life, especially when we start to to get into the details of these thinker's beliefs.  But the denial of objective truth had consequences and is a reality we are living with today.  What starts as a tiny, maybe even quirky movement is a university somewhere can spread into our common way of thinking, usually without us knowing it.