68 Nick Atlas
adequate job of presenting this objective approach by way of the Big Four.
I am not proposing that those sections be omitted from future chapters on
consciousness—they are indeed valuable. However, the larger issue of
what is missing—namely, the subjective approach, including anecdotal
evidence, marginalized viewpoints and experiential exercise, all of which
might be inserted alongside the Big Four or even in a separate chapter—is
worth further consideration.
Phenomenological Psychology
One area deserving of inclusion and employment is phenomenology.
Phenomenology is a human science methodology that focuses on the study
of consciousness and the objects of direct experience. The roots of
phenomenology are often traced to German philosopher Edmund Husserl
(1859-1938), who “argued for a new approach to human knowledge in
which both the traditional concerns of philosophy (such as metaphysics
and epistemology) and the modern concern with scientific causation would
be set aside in favor of a careful attention to the nature of immediate
conscious experience” (Phenomenology, 2007). Though Husserl was not a
psychologist by trade, his first-person approach to studying consciousness,
which he called “transcendental phenomenology” (Husserl, 1970), shared
much in common with Wundt’s introspection, yielded insight similar to
James’s notion of the stream of consciousness, and even influenced
Freud’s psychoanalytic theory (Wertz et al., 2011). According to Husserl,
the underlying tenet of phenomenological inquiry is that it attempts to
return to “the things themselves” (Husserl, 1901, p. 7). In other words,
phenomenological inquiry requires the investigator to identify his-or-her
presuppositions so as to avoid pandering to the data.
To practice phenomenology as a method, a phenomenologist must
assume an “attitude of consciousness that transcends the orientation toward
the human mode of being conscious and that is also free from worldly and
empirical assumptions” (Husserl, 1913/1962; Giorgi, 2006, p. 92). The key
features of this attitude are the performance of the epoché—or,