Schutzian Research. Volume 3

Description

Phenomenology as a research task is a point of arrival, a coalescence of consciousness in which the researcher with an inquiry encounters the explication of evidence in the very experience of embodied consciousness. “It is less a question of counting up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete form this phenomenology for ourselves which has given a number of present day readers the impression on reading Husserl or Heidegger, not so much of encountering a new philosophy as of recognizing what we have been waiting for”, says Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As both a philosopher and human scientist, Merleau-Ponty exemplifies his own goal of advancing phenomenology as “a ‘good ambiguity’ in the phenomenon of expression, a spontaneity which accomplishes what appeared to be impossible when we observed only the separate elements, a spontaneity which gathers together the plurality of monads, the past and the present, nature and culture into a single whole”. In both of these contexts, the individual research project and the disciplinary problematic under investigation, phenomenology is interdisciplinary.