What use is phenomenology?
It is obviously useful for staving off reductionism, but if it cannot deliver essences to us, then what is its real promise? It seems most useful as a tool or a bridge to some other mode or method philosophy, but it cannot be philosophy itself because it remains now and forever about human experience. The discipline of philosophy is about so much more than human experience that phenomenology can be, at best, one sliver of the discipline. It gets us provisional results, kind of like clues toward actual answers to philosophical problems. So, what if it is admitted that phenomenology is a method or a ’style’ (Merleau-Ponty) of doing philosophy? This is not much better because, in so far as method determines subject matter, the phenomenological method begins its endeavor by restricting the given to what is given to us qua human. This is all I’ll say on this front because it is clear that my objection to phenomenology is its humanist attachments. Its commitments have ethical and political i
