Introduction to Phenomenology by Robert Sokolowski (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 159 Introduction to Phenomenology. By ROBERT SOKOLOWSKI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 Pp. 238. $49.95 (cloth), $18.95 (paper). ISBN 0-521-66099-8 (doth), 0-521-66792-5 (paper). This thoughtful and beautifully crafted book introduces the reader to the fundamental themes of phenomenology. It focuses principally on the work of Edmund Husserl but also discusses the subsequent phenomenological tradition and situates this tradition within a broader philosophical context. For many years, scholars and teachers have lamented the fact that there existed no readable and reliable introduction to phenomenology that one might recommend to students (both graduate and undergraduate) and to colleagues from other philosophical traditions. Some earlier attempts to provide such an introduction have either relied on excessively technical jargon or misinterpreted key aspects of Husserl's thought. By contrast, Sokolowski writes with admirable clarity and offers a coherent and convincing account of Husserl's philosophical method. In short, he gets it right and says it well. Indeed, he manages to communicate the basic insights of phenomenology much more dearly and forcefully than did Husserl himself. Husserl's principal contribution to philosophy was his retrieval and development of the concept of intentionality. He often described phenomenology as a response to the problems created by the modern account of mind. Modern philosophers interpreted the mind as an inner space set off from the rest of nature, a "cabinet" (Locke's metaphor) filled with impressions and concepts. Sokolowski calls attention to a phrase in Samuel Beckett's novel Murphy that perfectly captures the "egocentric predicament" of modern philosophy: "Murphy's mind pictured itself as a hollow sphere, hermetically closed to the universe without." Against this modern view Husserl reasserted and revitalized the pre-modern thesis that our cognitive acts are intentional, that is, that they reach out beyond sense data to things in the world. When we think or speak about things in their absence, and when we perceive them, we deal with those things and not with mental substitutes. The opening chapters describe the formal structures of phenomenology: presence and absence, parts and wholes, identity in manifolds. Commenting on the first of these themes, Sokolowski observes that many readers of Husserl are initially skeptical of his claim that we truly know what is absent, We are so accustomed to thinking of cognition in terms of the modern metaphor for mind that we feel obliged to require something present, such as an image or a concept, as the immediate target of our signitive intentions of absent things. But Husserl insists on our capacity to intend what is absent precisely because this is what constitutes us as rational beings who can name things as identities across presence and absence and thus communicate through words rather than through signals. He also deals effectively with the objection that we sometimes experience hallucinations and often make mistakes in our perceptual encounters with the world. Husserl's analysis of perception highlights its perspectival character. Our perceptions are always partial. The perceived thing is, "'",~p•~··~ 160 BOOK REVIEWS a mix of the present and the absent. This situation makes for the possibility of error but also permits correction of error. Sokolowski illustrates Husserl's account of how presence and absence function in manifold ways by developing several instructive examples: the perception ofa cube; the multiple presentations of the Normandy invasion as lived in first-hand experience, as later remembered, as depicted in films; a baseball game as first anticipated and then experienced; the same Mozart symphony interpreted by different orchestras; our selfawareness in the flow of interior time. There follows a discussion of Husserl's distinction between the "natural attitude," in which we are preoccupied by things in the world, and the "phenomenological attitude" in which we reflect on the intentions at work in the natural attitude and on the objective correlates of those intentions. We achieve the latter point of view by employing a method that Husserl calls "reduction" which is achieved by suspending or neutralizing our natural attitude of belief in the reality of things and the world. Nothing in Husserl's work has been more misunderstood than this philosophical method. The purpose of this procedure is not to call natural...