《On Phenomenology and Practice ( paper 1989)》.pdfVIP

;/()~ On Phenomenology and its Practices1 /U-V ~ Robert Burch University ofAlberta A concrete philosophy is not a happy philosophy. It must hold close to experience, and yet not limit itself to the empirical but re- store in each experience the ontological cipher that marks it in- ternally. (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a) It was the practice of a former colleague, a nostalgic admirer of 2 J .S. Mill, to begin the segment of her course in the philosophy of the social sciences to which she referred, rather tellingly, as The Non-Scientific Approaches with the following strategy. She would announce to her students that, instead of studying methodological treatises on the subject, they were to learn about phenomenology in a direct and practical way. To that end, she would say, each one was to choose some aspect of his or her everyday experience, something simple and straightforward, and, setting aside all interpretations and causal accounts, write a description of that experience, telling what it was like, per- sonally, as an event of his or her own consciousness. Happy for any respite from the demands of conceptual analysis, the stu- dents would typically warm to the task. Unbeknownst to them, however, their fledgling efforts were never read, though each one would be promptly returned bearing the same terse com- ment: too abstract, interpretive and theoretical, not concrete nor descriptive enough. Less enthusiastically, the students would set about rewriting; yet with each revision my colleague would take the same ta