In my blog on Why I Walk (link here) I referenced Rebecca Solnit who, in her book Wanderlust, writes of phenomenologist Edmund Husserl who described walking as the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world in a 1931 essay. My tutor picked up on this and suggested that I tease out the reference as he felt that phenomenology is where my work might be coming from. Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) was a German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology. The essay that the reference refers to is from 1931 and is entitled 'The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism'.
My online dictionary defines phenomenology rather succinctly as the study of phenomena and my Pocket Oxford Dictionary defines a phenomenon as an object of perception, an observed or apparent object, or fact or occurrence. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy refers to it as: The discipline of phenomenology may be defined initially as the study of structures of experience, or consciousness. Literally phenomenology is the study of "phenomena", appearance of things, or things as they appear in our experience, or the ways we experience things, thus the meaning things have in our experience. Phenomenology studies conscious experience as experienced from the subjective or first person point of view.
When writing of Nan Shepherd author of 'The Living Mountain' Robert MacFarlane in Landmarks comments '..but her philosophical conclusions concerning colour-perception, touch and embodied knowledge are arrestingly similar to those of Merleau-Ponty'. MacFarlane reminds us that in the same years that Nan Shepherd was walking in and writing about the Cairngorm Mountains, Merleau-Ponty was developing his influential theories of the body-subject, as laid out in his 'Phenomenology of Perception' in 1945 MacFarlane says that 'Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined. (MacFarlane, 2016 P.73)
I have to say that I found Husserl's essay challenging to say the least. Perhaps the overriding thing that I derived from it is that phenomenology describes how we experience the world. Because we are all different we experience the world in different ways; unique to us. Husserl says that 'The entire present world which appears as actual is rather a totality of perspectives for me.' By that I take him to mean that the world appears as a uniformity, but to each one of us it is different, has different perspectives. He also maintains that our experience of things alters with distance, as we move closer or further away. He asserts that our perspective of the world changes with time 'The cities, countries and mountains with which I became acquainted long ago while travelling, still exist even though I am here now, at home. I can of course visit them again, I can see the places of my childhood again - but how can I say that? How is it that I experience what is seen again as the same. How can it be experienced as the same?' And again 'The world familiar to us from our experiences, our world, is in every present...........Thanks to recoverable pasts given through memory and also to expectations which predelineate the living future for us it is a thoroughly typified world.' Of walking Husserl says that it is about engaging with the world through all of our senses or, as Rebecca Solnit interpreted:' walking as the experience by which we understand our body in relationship to the world.' When walking Husserl argues that the appearance of distant objects are perspectively transformed into the appearance of close objects when walking towards them, in other words distance alters the way we experience the world and again we experience it individually, uniquely.
My tutor felt that phenomenology plays a part when I describe my feelings: 'I lost myself in the changing pattern in the clouds above and, like Shepherd, my body became part of the land beneath me and my mind wandered among the clouds above.' I must remember, though, that I am studying for a photography degree and not a creative writing one. Having said that I think that phenomenology does, perhaps, play a part when I walk and how I experience the world around me determines what I observe and what I choose to photograph and this will be different to what other people select.
Husserl, E. (1931) The World of the Living Present and the Constitution of the Surrounding World External to the Organism, Translated by Frederick A. Elliston and Lenore Langsdorf
MacFarlane, R. (2016) Landmarks, London, Penguin
Solnit, R, (2014) Wanderlust, A History of Walking, London, Granta
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013) Phenomenology [online] Stanford University. Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/phenomenology/ [accessed 24.08.16]
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