Phenomenology begins with a promise that has fascinated Western philosophy for more than a century: back to the things themselves. Not to what theories assert about things, not to what ideologies make of them, but to what shows itself when an alert consciousness turns toward a phenomenon. Edmund Husserl formulated this programme in his Logical Investigations (1900/01) as an answer to a philosophy that had lost itself in systems and deductions. The call was justified. The question is whether it reaches far enough.
#Describing Without Explaining
The core of the phenomenological method lies in what Husserl called the epoche: the bracketing of all presuppositions about what the world “really” is. One suspends the question of existence and examines what remains: the appearance, as it is given to consciousness. A colour is considered not as a wavelength but as the experience of colour. A pain is considered not as a neural signal but as lived sensation. Consciousness is understood as “consciousness of something” — as intentionality, always directed at an object.
Martin Heidegger radicalised the approach by shifting phenomenology from consciousness to Being. In Being and Time (1927), the concern was no longer the structures of experience but the fundamental constitution of Dasein: thrownness, care, Being-toward-death. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in turn, brought the body back into the equation. The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) showed that perception does not take place in the head but in the living body — the body that touches the world and is touched by it.
Three thinkers, three variants, one shared strength: they take experience seriously. What shows itself is not immediately reduced to something else, not explained, not explained away. In an age that routinely reduces experience to neurobiology or socialisation, this is no small thing.
#Where Description Ends
Jochen Kirchhoff marked the limit of the phenomenological method in a single sentence: “One can practise phenomenology by simply cataloguing, observing, describing phenomena as they are. But the interpretation of what this phenomenon means and is within a larger context does not stand in luminous letters above the phenomenon; it must be interpreted” (Kirchhoff, J., 2019, What Is Knowledge? Scientific Method and Philosophy, 41:01).
Phenomenology describes what shows itself. But it does not ask with ultimate seriousness what the shown is. Husserl’s epoche brackets the question of Being deliberately, and therein lies a philosophical abstinence that becomes problematic. If you describe a colour as a colour-experience and stop there, you have avoided the reduction of natural science, but you have also said nothing about the nature of the colour itself. The phenomenological description produces an ontological limbo: the appearance is neither mere illusion nor affirmed as reality.
Schopenhauer had already seen this tension before Husserl. “This can never be entirely torn away from the appearance and, as an ens extramundanum, considered for itself” (Schopenhauer, 1844, The World as Will and Representation II). The thing-in-itself cannot be separated from its appearance. But neither is it exhausted by it. The world of appearances is, in the formulation of the natural-philosophical tradition, “half-real”: real, but not fully real. What is genuinely real works through the appearance: “The thrust of actual reality within the world of appearances comes from the infinite, which, so to speak, works into it” (Kirchhoff, J., 2021, What Did Schopenhauer Want?).
#From Appearance to Reality
Natural philosophy, as Schelling founded it in 1797, shares with phenomenology the respect for what shows itself. But it does not stop at description. It asserts: what appears to consciousness is real — not as a mere phenomenon but as the expression of a living reality that shines through the appearance.
Schelling’s formula runs: “Nature is to be the visible spirit, spirit the invisible nature” (Schelling, 1797, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature). Underlying the appearance is not dead matter that consciousness then “interprets” but a spiritual reality that speaks itself in the appearance. Cognition is then not the interpretation of a semblance but the participation of the knower in the known. “So long as I am myself identical with nature, I understand what living nature is as well as I understand my own being” (Schelling, 1797, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature).
Goethe translated this thought into concrete research practice. His doctrine of the Urphanomen — that foundational phenomenon behind which observation cannot go — is phenomenological in the best sense: “We call them Urphanomene because nothing in appearance stands above them” (Goethe, 1810, On the Theory of Colours). But Goethe goes further than Husserl because he grants the Urphanomen an ontological dignity that reaches beyond mere description. The natural researcher should “let the Urphanomene stand in their eternal tranquillity and splendour” — not because there is nothing behind them, but because in them everything worth knowing is already given.
#Thinking Empathy: Beyond Description
Where phenomenology remains at the description of experience, thinking empathy takes a step further. It does not merely describe what shows itself but feels its way thinkingly into what shows itself. Schelling had laid the foundation: “Every genuine thought is feeling.” Thinking and feeling are not separate faculties but aspects of the same cognitive activity.
In philosophical work, this means: whoever listens to a person does not catalogue their statements but traces what is at work behind and beneath the words. “It all begins with my question about the concern. While the person speaks, I receive an felt impression of what it might be about. I sense where I feel something energetically, where I sense an emotional charge” (Gwendolin Kirchhoff, Interview 2026). This is phenomenological attentiveness, but it does not issue in description — it issues in knowledge.
The mind-body problem, on which academic phenomenology has worked since Husserl, dissolves in the natural-philosophical tradition in a different way. Not through the bracketing of the question of Being but through its answer: body and soul are not separate substances between which a bridge must be built. They are forms of expression of the same spiritual reality. The Raumorgan, the inner perceptual organ that receives the order coded in space, is neither purely bodily nor purely spiritual. It is both at once, because the separation that generates the problem itself rests on a false premise.
#What Remains of Phenomenology
Phenomenology has rendered philosophy an inestimable service: it restored the respect for experience that rationalism and positivism had systematically destroyed. Whoever is trained in phenomenology does not reduce prematurely. Merleau-Ponty’s insight that the body is not an object among objects but the place from which world is experienced belongs among the lasting achievements of the twentieth century. In the philosophy of consciousness, it constitutes a necessary corrective against the neuroscientific reductionism that shrinks subjective experience to neural correlates.
The limit becomes visible where the question of the being of the appearance itself is posed. Phenomenology opens the door to experience but does not step through it. Natural philosophy in the tradition of Schelling, Goethe, and Kirchhoff takes up the phenomenological legacy and surpasses it: what shows itself to consciousness is not merely an appearance calling for description but living reality that can be known — if the knower grasps themselves as part of this reality.
#Sources
Goethe, J.W. (1810). Zur Farbenlehre. Cotta.
Heidegger, M. (1927). Sein und Zeit. Niemeyer.
Husserl, E. (1900/01). Logische Untersuchungen. Niemeyer.
Kirchhoff, J. (2019). “Was ist Erkenntnis? Wissenschaftliche Methode & Philosophie” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube. https://youtube.com/watch?v=msqlr1nZLuA.
Kirchhoff, J. (2021). “Was wollte Schopenhauer?” [Video]. Jochen Kirchhoff — In Memoriam, YouTube.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenologie de la perception. Gallimard.
Schelling, F.W.J. (1797). Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. Breitkopf und Hartel.
Schelling, F.W.J. (1800). System des transcendentalen Idealismus. Cotta.
Schopenhauer, A. (1844). Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Second Volume. Brockhaus.