(Page 3 of 25) - A Phenomenology of World Affairs authored by Pettman, Ralph.

returns to the phenomenological approach to bracket off the rationalist notion of truth-as-
representation, to reinstate the phenomenological notion of truth-as-emergence, and to
attempt to intuit an outcome overall.

So: where phenomenology comes from is not discussed in detail here, nor is there

any discussion of the many phenomenologies that grew up in Husserl’s footsteps.
Spiegelberg says that Husserl’s approach was “not founded: it grew”.(Spiegelberg,1975,
3) In terms of this metaphor, what follows is a single seedling, stuck from the parent
stock. It makes little attempt to document that stock’s historical roots, for fear of being
diverted from its main purpose.(Spiegelberg,1975,22) For the same reason, it does not
analyse the rhizomatic influence of that stock on other philosophers and social scientists
– those in sociology, for example, or psychology.(Spiegelberg,1994; Sokolowski,2000) It
takes this seedling, and it sets it in the soil of world affairs, to see what results.

This said, Husserl’s phenomenology was part of the historic rise of rationalism,

and it was a reaction to that rise. Though earlier philosophers, like Hegel, employed the
concept in his work (Hegel,1977[1807]), and though the word can be traced to the middle
of the 18

century at least (Spiegelberg,1975,3), whatever prominence it enjoys today is

largely due to Husserl, whose ways of thinking did not emerge - and arguably could not
have emerged - before rationalism had become hegemonic. This was not until the latter
part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.(Husserl,1970[1900-1])

Rationalism is taken here to mean the prioritisation, as a whole cultural project,

of the human capacity for reason, that is, the use of reason as an end in itself, en masse.
This prioritisation is otherwise known as the modernist project, or modernity, or the
Enlightenment project.(Giddens,1990;Brown,1988) Though it is possible to posit
rationalism as a means to an end, rather than as an end in itself, the end that rationalists
pursue is that of a truth without preconceptions. However, since we find a truth without
preconceptions only in the process of looking for it, reason used to ascertain a truth
without preconceptions is, in practice, reason used as an end in itself.(1)

Rationalism has two main dimensions. One dimension is that of speculative

reflection. This denotes the kind of abstracted conjecturing and intellectual intuition that
can take years to verify. Einstein’s thinking re space-time provides a clear case in point.
The other dimension is empirical experimentation. This denotes the painstaking
accumulation of data, with reference to an externalised conception of reality. Darwin’s
careful investigation of what came to be called natural selection is a good example.

Rationalism today is a synthesis of both dimensions. This synthesis is the

hypothetico-deductive method.(Lakatos and Musgrave,1970;Cottingham,1984) It has
been extraordinarily successful as a way of knowing, particularly about the material
world, and it is the success of this method that has made rationalism so hegemonic.

This synthesis has come at a price, however. It has not been cost free.

Rationalism’s capacity to provide analytic perspective and analytic clarity is only
possible because people are prepared (wittingly or unwittingly) to become the detached
individuals that rationalism requires.