MY CRITIQUE OF PHENOMENOLOGICAL THINKING

To the point that empirical evidence back every theory, every thought and every Philosophy is beyond doubt. We have read it in Kant's The critique of Pure reason, that the only use of "Pure reason" is to act as a background for empirical reason to act and form conceptions and judgements about the world. 

So, on the level of rationality vs Empiricism, I am always towards the empirical side. That is for sure. 

My Problem with this recently grown way of thinking called Phenomenology is the following. 

But, first, let's not jump the gun.

Let's start it from first Principles. 

Theorizing is the way humans acquire knowledge. Not only Theorists make theories but every human being. They have a worldview and to explain their worldview, they have collected a set of information, a set of examples, a set of anecdotes, etc. 

So, every person is a theorist. 

But Phenomenology is a kind of theorizing which deals with Experiences as exclusively. 

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of experience. It is a significant movement in twentieth-century philosophy and continues to be explored today. Broadly, phenomenology aims to understand existence through the way we experience the world.

[Sourced From Wikipedia]

Now, what is not written in this definition is the black box model. 

Black box model is the essence of all phenomenology. 

For example: Thermodynamics is a phenomenological science. So, we deal with thermodynamic systems Where we do macroscopic experiments without going deep into the microscopic properties and the molecular reason of why certain laws are true. See, any law of thermodynamics is a law derived from empirical evidence. No one asks in the realm of Thermodynamics why Entropy always increases of a system. Once you ask this question, you are no longer in the realm of phenomenology but in Statistical Physics, that is a theoretical science. 

And that is the biggest Problem of Phenomenology. It tries to constrain itself to empirical evidence and the laws derived out of it is mostly, how something works. It is positive in nature. But The goal of Philosophy should not be to form simplistic laws based on observations. It is sort of a pattern observation. It is not even Philosophical work. No originality. Just report what you have observed. What is the Thinker's contribution to it? What is the difference between a phenomenological thinker and an NDTV reporter? Nothing in my opinion. 

Second is, Phenomenology fools the thinker into thinking that he is approaching his experiences without biases or without any ideological frame. These self-acclaimed "Free thinkers" start thinking that they are the most objective thinkers. 

But I claim that any thinker who is not aware of his bias and does not include in his basic postulates, his biases as assumptions, is doing injustice to his theory. He is either himself blind sighted or he thinks his readers are. Because it is not as if, your eyes see whatever is present in the reality. They see through a lens of ideology. An ideology can be of two types. One is open and other is Latent. If a Marxist says that I am using a Marxist lens, it is still better. Now, it is easy to separate Marxism from his thesis or at least find where the Marxist biases are. 

The latent form of ideology is the worst because the thinker is not even aware of his biases. To say that the thinker is without biases would be worse. The thinker's biases stem from a number of places, his class conditioning, his caste conditioning, his gender conditioning, overall, the material conditioning and so on. 

These biases start creeping in not only in the thoughts of the thinker but also in the observation of the thinker. What it does is that shifts the thinker's Phenomenological thinking into re-verifications of his own biases. 

That's why read any Phenomenological thinker. Hannah Arendt for that matter. In all her writing, never does one observation of hers contradicts other thought. All her observations just keep justifying her own Biases about Totalitarian systems. 

Also, I do not agree with Hannah's arguments about Totalitarian systems. Totalitarian systems, in her opinion, has no shades of grey. They all behave in same ways. Be it Stalinist Russia, or Fascist Italy. 

So, all her work is not even considered proper journalism because the observations are done in the need and necessity to theorize and not just from the point of view of reporting. 

So, all in all, I think, any serious thinker should not indulge in thinking for the sake of thinking. Phenomenology is not the philosophy of experience. Rather, in my opinion, it is experiencing for the sake of thinking.