Page 36 - Contribution To Phenomenology

REFLECTION ON THE CULTURAL DISCIPLINES 29

When the obhque strategy is adopted, it is becomes clear that the
cultural presents itself in specifically and particularly different ways in
relation to the different specific and particular perspectives of the various
disciplines and this raises questions about the common subject matter the
different aspects of which are thus thematized. Some efforts toward
answering these questions are offered above. There is additional variation
with respect to the school of thought or orientation out of which any
reflective efforts proceed. There have been Hermeneutical, Logical
Empiricist, and NeoKantian, as well as Phenomenological orientations
employed with regard to individuals and groups of the cultural sciences
and other discipUnes during the 20th Century. Since polemics against
other schools are always possible but seldom do more than reinforce
attitudes, a broad notion of phenomenological philosophy and how and
why it ought to relate to the cultural disciplines will instead be sketched
here. At least phenomenologists of good will interested in the cultural
disciplines will centainly consider it seriously.
Phenomenology began at the turn of the 20th Century, it exists in
non-philosophical as well as philosophical forms, and several tendencies
have developed within it as a broad movement. Without dwelling on
differences between the Constitutive, Existential, Hermeneutical, and
Realistic tendencies, which can be seen as chiefly different in emphasis,
an attempt at a generic statement must still solve the problem of the
diversity of terminologies that stems from the variety of major figures and
texts. Three solutions are possible: One can begin from one of these
terminologies and make adjustments as needed, which would seem to
favor the tendency begun from, one can attempt a balanced mixture of
the different terminologies and spread the irritation equally, which would
have benefits not worth the difficulty, or one can venture a new and
hopefully neutral generic terminology, which is the tactic used here.
The present thesis is that an endeavor is phenomenological when it is
(a) descriptive and (b) reflective. An effort is descriptive in a broad
signification when it avoids positing unobservable but presumably still
thinkable entities, something which, as will be seen presently, can be
taken too narrowly and thus phenomenalistically exclude representationalfy
observable objects in, say, archaeology.^ In a different but not unrelated

^ Lester Embree, "Phenomenology of a Change in Archaeological Observa-
tion," in Lester Embree, ed., Metaarchaeology: Reflections by Archaeologists and
Philosophers (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992).