Eli5: what exactly is phenomenology
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The meaning of life is the individual experiences that make up life. So life is pointless by definition but because things happen there is a reason to live.
Put simply phenomenology is an approach to understanding reality that focuses on simply directly investigating things as they occur (phenomena), as free as possible from any preconceptions or explanatory theories. So for example I was introduced to phenomenology through an approach to religious studies. A phenomenological approach to understanding a religious ritual would involve simply observing it and noting what is happening and what is being experienced. Not what the things mean, what they represent, what they relate to, or why they are happening, but simply what is happening and what it is like to experience them.
Of course it gets much more complicated than that but this is the core idea which defined the movement in the 20th century: forget about what stuff means for now, just try to understand what stuff is like
Phenomenology is the area of philosophy where we think in more detail about what it means if we say we’ve experienced something. It discusses the ways we think about our lived experiences, and connect those experiences to the broader world.
For example, we often talk about truth as something that is objectively real. But phenomenology points out that in our actual day to day experiences, what we perceive as objective reality can be just the same thing as whatever we perceive as intersubjectively true, i.e., when multiple people subjectively agree on a certain idea.
This helps explain why it can be so hard for us to separate opinions from facts. When lots of people all agree with a certain opinion, this intersubjective consensus can seem like objective truth. It seems this way, even if the opinion isn’t true; the intersubjective consensus creates an appearance of objective reality.
(Phenomenology doesn’t have to deny the reality of objective reality; it’s just a philosophical area that deals with lived experience on its own terms.)
The BBC radio program ‘In Our Time’ did a very good episode on this. It’s a few years old by now I believe
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