Robert Sokolowski once wrote: “phenomenology is reason’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects.”
This pointed definition hits the target of the celebrated Delphic injunction: Know thyself—which is itself the first principle of true philosophy.
This imperative is not merely an invitation to study one’s own psychology. Rather, there is a tacit correlation between knowing oneself and knowing the world. When we analyze and articulate properties, aspects, and structures of intentionality, we are at the very same time analyzing and articulating properties, aspects, and structures of objects intended. The appearances of things, in how they manifest ‘for us’, are bona fide attributes of things.
Therefore this should not be misconstrued as a Lockean exercise—the position of John Locke being that what we perceive is our own ‘ideas’. The intended object is positively not something ‘in our minds’. Philosophical reflexivity is parasitic upon perception—be the perceived object sensorial or intellective—and to take up the theoretic attitude is to see things in the ‘how’ of their natural givenness ‘for us’. One should note well that the original Greek term whence we get our word ‘phenomenon’ means ‘that which shows itself in itself’. In this respect, one might argue that phenomenology constitutes an exercise in logic, epistemology, and ontology—all in one and the same act.
There is, of course, a foundational precedent of great antiquity for the correlation between man and world: Man is a microcosm. “I am a little world made cunningly,” says Donne, “of elements and an angelic sprite.” Authentic cosmology and authentic anthropology are isomorphic.
is it right to say, “through phenomenology, you learn that “self” and “world” are not separate parts or pieces of a whole that includes them both, but rather moments or members of it? you can’t coherently separate a moment or member from its context without that moment or member ceasing to be what it was.