henomenology was the creation of the German philosopher EDMUND HUSSERL (1859-1938), an older contemporary of Sartre whose ideas Jean-Paul studied in Germany.

But before we can deal with Husserl, we’ll have to go back even further in time to Husserl’s inspiration, the French philosopher RENE′ DESCARTES (1596-1650), who inaugurates modern philosophy with his pronouncement

ith that assertion, Descartes moved consciousness to center stage. Several implications follow from this move:

Consciousness is that which is most certain. It cannot be doubted. (Even wondering if you have a mind proves that you do have one.)

We know consciousness better than we know the physical world (because when we know material bodies, we know them through consciousness).

From the fact that you think, you can deduce with certainty that you exist.

escartes concluded, then, that all knowledge would have to be derivable from the certainty of consciousness, and all science would have to be built upon that certainty.

This was an auspicious beginning for consciousness. Unfortunately, however, by the beginning of the twentieth century, things had not gone so well for consciousness. Freud had demoted it,

Marx had trashed it;

social scientists were ignoring it,

and the new behavioristic psychology of John Watson (1878-1958), forerunner of B.F. Skinner, denied it existed at all. Indeed, even those psychologists who believed in it and looked for it (like Herman von Helmholtz [1821-1894]), had trouble finding it.

Try this experiment: Quiz seven people about what they see in their “mind’s eye” after hearing this sentence:

“THE SOLDIERS CHARGED DOWN THE HILL LIKE A HERD OF STAMPEDING BUFFALO.”

Yet all seven people understood the sentence. Therefore, say the critics of consciousness,

what goes on in “consciousness” obviously doesn’t matter to “understanding.”

ut Edmund Husserl disagreed. What was needed, he thought, was a METHOD that would display the subjective features of consciousness, as well as its objective structure. This, then, is what phenomenology is supposed to achieve.

There are two stages in its development. The first simply involves a careful and detailed description of the way that the world presents itself to consciousness in all of its textures, excesses, and subtleties.

Its goal is the establishment of a pre-theoretical description of the various acts of consciousness and their objects. It is pre-theoretical because it is meant to produce a DESCRIPTION of the various acts of consciousness, not a THEORY of consciousness. (Theories of consciousness always contain references to purely theoretical entities not actually present in consciousness, such as Freud’s “unconscious,” or the neurons and synapses in theories about how the brain causes consciousness.)

t is meant to be assumption-free, because assumptions are things presupposed by conscious states, but not in conscious states.

For example, as a college student goes to her class, she assumes but does not consciously think that everyone else in the class will be wearing clothes, that the professors and the students will face each other, and be speaking English rather than, say, Yiddish.

This goal of disposing with assumptions is achieved by what Husserl calls a “phenomenological suspension,” or “bracketing,” or using a Greek word related to “suspension”—an “epoché.”

(To see something as a pen is to see it for writing. To see gestures is to interpret them as friendly or menacing.)

he aim is to achieve something as close to an “innocent eye” as is possible, which is perhaps why children are more naturally “phenomenological” than adults.

(For example, kids often enjoy hanging their head out of the car window just to watch the broken line in the road appear to rush at them like blasts from a ray-gun.)

We can perform an epoché on any conscious experience, bracketing it, describing it in detail while trying to make as few judgments and have as few assumptions and expectations as possible.

If we bracket our consciousness of TIME, we discover, according to Husserl, that time is experienced at two levels—”clocked” time and “lived” time. The former is a cultural overlay that we must teach to our children, and into which we, as adults, become absorbed.

The latter is time as it is actually experienced prior to any acculturation or abstraction. We discover that at the level of “lived time” there is an eternal

Similarly, the phenomenological analysis of SPACE reveals that beneath “mapped space” there is “lived space”—a ubiquitous HERE relative to which everything else is THERE in various degrees of “thereness.” In fact, according to Husserl, the HERE/NOW experience is the phenomenological ground-zero of all consciousness. Husserl tried to derive a “pure ego,” an “absolute self,” from the phenomenological study of pure consciousness-very much as Descartes had deduced selfhood from consciousness three hundred years earlier with his “COGITO ERGO SUM.“