22 theories
Phenomenology: theories of consciousness
Consciousness should first be described as it is lived, from the first-person point of view, before any theory of what causes it. The task is to map the structures every experience shares.
Open Phenomenology on the mapAll theories A–Z
Phenomenology studies experience as it shows up for the one having it. Edmund Husserl founded it around 1900 as a rigorous science of consciousness. His key method, the epoché, brackets the everyday assumption that the world exists independently of us. The point is to describe how things come to appear without first deciding what they are made of.
The method looks for invariant structures. Every experience is directed at something, the intentionality that Franz Brentano put at the center of the mind. Experience flows in time, each moment holding on to the one just past and anticipating the next. It is lived through a body, shared with others, and carries a quiet, pre-reflective awareness of itself, which Dan Zahavi calls ‘for-me-ness’.
Husserl’s successors took the method in new directions. Martin Heidegger replaced the isolated mind with being-in-the-world. Jean-Paul Sartre described consciousness as a ‘for-itself’ with no contents of its own. Maurice Merleau-Ponty placed subjectivity in the moving, perceiving body, anticipating today’s embodied cognitive science. Francisco Varela’s neurophenomenology and Evan Thompson’s work pair disciplined first-person reports with brain science, each constraining the other.
Phenomenology stands apart from the materialism-to-idealism debate. It sets aside the question of what consciousness is made of and describes what any answer has to explain. The main challenge concerns the reliability of first-person description. Jacques Derrida attacked the idea that experience is ever fully present to itself, and Daniel Dennett’s heterophenomenology treats people’s reports as data about what they believe, leaving open whether their experiences are as described.
Good places to start
- Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology Consciousness as Intentional, World-Constituting Lived Experience
- Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Perception and the Lived Body Consciousness as the Lived Body’s Engagement With a World
- Sartre’s Pre-reflective Consciousness as For-Itself Consciousness as Self-Aware Nothingness Directed at the World
- Varela’s Neurophenomenology Consciousness as Mutual Constraint of Experience and Brain
- Zahavi’s Pre-Reflective For-Me-Ness Consciousness as Pre-Reflective, First-Personal Self-Givenness
All 22 theories
- Peirce’s Phaneroscopic Semiotics Consciousness as Firstness, the Pure Quality of Feeling
- James’s Stream of Thought/Consciousness Consciousness as a Continuous, Selective Stream
- Brentano’s Intentionality and Self-Awareness Consciousness as Self-Aware Intentional Acts
- Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology Consciousness as Intentional, World-Constituting Lived Experience
- Meinong's Self-Presenting Experience Consciousness as Self-Presenting Directedness Toward Any Object
- Gurwitsch’s Structured Field of Experience Consciousness as a Field of Theme, Context, and Margin
- Heidegger’s Dasein (Being-In-The-World) Without Qualia Consciousness Derived From Being-in-the-World
- Sartre’s Pre-reflective Consciousness as For-Itself Consciousness as Self-Aware Nothingness Directed at the World
- Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Perception and the Lived Body Consciousness as the Lived Body’s Engagement With a World
- Henry’s Auto-Affective Self-Revelation of Life Consciousness as Life’s Invisible Self-Feeling
- Zahavi’s Pre-Reflective For-Me-Ness Consciousness as Pre-Reflective, First-Personal Self-Givenness
- D.W. Smith’s Three-Facet Ontological Phenomenology Consciousness as Form, Appearance, and Substrate
- Varela’s Neurophenomenology Consciousness as Mutual Constraint of Experience and Brain
- Thompson's Phenomenology: Waking, Dreaming, Sleeping, Pure Awareness Consciousness as Lived Experience Across Waking, Dreaming, Sleep
- Krishnamurti's Consciousness Is Its Content Consciousness as Its Conditioned Content; the Observer Is the Observed
- Winkelman's Integrative Mode of Neurognostic Structures Consciousness as an Organism’s Model Built From Innate Knowing Structures
- Bitbol's Radical Neurophenomenology Effective Primacy of Lived Experience
- Gallagher’s Embodied Self and Interactive Consciousness Consciousness as Embodied Agency Coupled With World and Others
- Petitmengin’s Micro-Phenomenology Consciousness as Describable Micro-Dynamics of Lived Experience
- Shanon's Cartography and Structured Spectrum Consciousness as a Mapped Spectrum of Experiential Types
- Derrida’s Deconstruction of Self-Presence Self-Presence as an Effect of Différance
- Dennett’s Heterophenomenology Consciousness Studied as Reports and Beliefs About Experience