When Edmund Husserl first established phenomenology as a philosophic school, he defined it as the science of the essence of things. He didn’t mean by this an investigation of some ideal dimension, as one might presume. Rather, to use Merleau-Ponty’s formulation, phenomenology is “a philosophy which puts essences back into existence, and does not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the world from any starting point other than that of their ‘facticity’.” [1] Or, as he put it elsewhere, phenomenology takes as its baseline the assertion that “there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”[2] The phenomenology of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty rode a line between the mediated ‘ultimate’ truth of science and the abstract truth of idealist philosophy. To them it was the content of our experience that was true. When looking down a microscope at some bacteria, for instance, the student of natural science will describe the bacteria while a student of phenomenology would describe what looking down a microscope at bacteria is like. As Christian Norberg-Schulz has pointed out, to our everyday experience it actually appears as if “the world is flat and that the sky is a dome, spangled with stars.”[3] While the scientific description is different, neither description is ultimately more ‘true’. They just serve different purposes.
Phenomenology assumes that the process of ontogenesis, becoming, is a constant fact of life. We are always engaged in making ourselves, giving ourselves definition, whether inter-subjectively, in communication with others, or on our own, in reflection or engaged in a task. The implication for architecture here is that as part of the ‘world’ in which we know ourselves, architecture is involved in this becoming, a territory of engagement that I have elsewhere characterized as the ‘poetics of architecture’.
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