Many humanities refer to the nature and properties of human consciousness: psychology, sociology, linguistics. But there is also a discipline entirely devoted to this subject.
Phenomenology
At the beginning of the 20th century, the French philosopher Edmund Husserl created phenomenology, a discipline aimed at studying the nature and properties of consciousness. Phenomenology means "the study of phenomena," that is, phenomena given to a person in sensory contemplation. Phenomenology is aimed at an unprepared description of the experience of cognitive consciousness that exists in the world of phenomena, and the isolation of its essential features.
Refusing to build deductive systems and criticizing naturalism and psychologism in mastering consciousness, phenomenology focuses on turning to the primary experience of cognizing consciousness.
Thus, direct contemplation and phenomenological reduction, which are associated with the liberation of consciousness from the naturalistic attitude, become the basic methods of phenomenology.
Phenomenological science helps to comprehend the essence of things, not facts. Thus, the phenomenologist is not interested in this or that moral norm, he is interested in why it is the norm.
Intentionality
Making a reduction, phenomenology comes to the central property of consciousness - intentionality. Intentionality is a property of the focus of consciousness on an object. Human consciousness is always directed towards something, that is, it is intentional.
Intentional analysis presupposes the disclosure of actualities in which objects are constructed as semantic unities. Husserl comes to the conclusion that the very existence of an object depends on its significance for consciousness. Thus, phenomenology sets itself the task of systematically studying the types of intentional experiences, as well as reducing their structures to primary intentions.
Principles of Phenomenology
The essence of the phenomenological attitude is that the "I" reaches the last point of view conceivable for experience. Here the "I" becomes an uninterested contemplator of itself, of its natural-worldly part of the transcendental "I". In other words, phenomenology comes to the concept of "pure consciousness".
So, the main provisions of phenomenology can be formulated as follows:
- pure consciousness, free from psychophysical experiences, is a transcendental area in which the objectivity of the world is constituted;
- any object exists for pure consciousness as a phenomenon constituted by it;
- all experiences of pure consciousness have a reflective component;
- pure consciousness is transparent, clear and obvious for one's own reflection.
