What Is So Bad About Phenomenology?
Phenomenology has of course been subject to various forms of attack and discrediting. It is sometimes said that phenomenology is too passive and normalising. Even in its mode of genial, slightly stoned amazement, phenomenology has seemed to many to many to place far too much trust in our apparent intuitions about the way things unalterably are, for us or for others, and to be not nearly self-conscious enough about the constitutive role of language, representation and ideology in making things the way they are. As a result, phenomenology cannot lead us anywhere but back into our own warmly wallowing-in-the-world selves, and does not offer us any prospect of transcending or transforming that in-the-worldness, not to say the world itself. To the degree that phenomenology may appear merely to accommodate us to the way things appear necessarily to be, reestablishing the continuity between man and world that metaphysics and modernity between them have viciously severed, it can be said to be
