Phenomenology is a radical and anti-traditional way of philosophizing. That phenomenology is a way of doing philosophy indicates that it is not a system, but a practice. It refuses systems and the traditional attempts at systemizing, and its ways of philosophizing evade being brought into a systemized whole.
Phenomenology is oriented toward phenomena, attempting to reveal their own truths by investigating how they reveal themselves in the world. It is directed at the self-appearing of entities to consciousness; that is, how entities reveal themselves from out of themselves to a human being already residing within this self-revealing and attempting to understand it.
Because phenomenology attempts to reveal the truths of entities themselves, it refuses the scientific, traditional, cultural, and religious interpretations of phenomena as merely foreignness imposed on, and misconstructions of, the phenomena themselves.
That is, instead of imposing on phenomena what is holding sway in, for example, science or religion, phenomenology lets phenomena reveal themselves from out of themselves so that an understanding proper to them could be formed.
Phenomenology lets phenomena unfold from out of themselves toward consciousness. It endeavors to overcome the traditional in philosophy by freeing philosophy from its own rigidities. It is thus a way of renewing philosophy in such a way that it refuses and suspends the externally imposed ways of inquiring, fixed accounts and theories of the nature of knowledge, traditional interpretations of the nature of consciousness, metaphysical grounds and premises, and dogmatisms.
By being turned only toward the things themselves and only toward the self-appearing of things, phenomenology immediately brings consciousness into close contact with the world and brings philosophy back into the life of the living human being.
Thus, renewing philosophy by leaving behind the traditional philosophical problems and academic questions belonging to, for example, the nineteenth-century thinking-philosophizing. Renewing in this sense means returning to the concrete in the lived experiences of the human being, to the richness of lived experiences.
Philosophy, by means of phenomenological inquires, expanded its horizons and questions to include the entirety of that which shows itself in the world to consciousness; that is, life as it offers itself up entirely for living, as it is concretely lived.
Sartre’s philosophizing of and about a wineglass makes apparent how phenomenology oriented philosophy toward the lived experience. For Sartre, phenomenology allows our emotional, affective, and imaginative experiences to find their own expressions and in doing so sets itself apart from the objective psychological studies, for such experiences are now thought and approached from out of their own meaningful self-unfolding into the world as concretely lived experiences.
Phenomenology also rejects the traditional accounts and theories of knowledge that do not take into account that in our experiences we are in direct contact with the world. This means that knowledge is not a mental copy of that which is outside the mind, but rather happens and changes in our direct contact with the world itself.
Phenomenology also puts into question the traditional views of the nature of consciousness in the sense that consciousness itself must be experienced and understood through itself in its own turning toward the world that shows itself and is experienced as such. Experiences and how experiencing occurs reveal something about the nature of consciousness.
Experience is not an opening through which a world, existing prior to all experience, shines into a room of consciousness; it is not a mere taking of something alien to consciousness into consciousness… Experience is the performance in which for me, the experiencer, experienced being “is there”, and is there as what it is, with the whole content and the mode of being that experience itself, by the performance going on in its intentionality, attributes to it.
Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic
Hence, by inquiring into how entities show themselves to consciousness, phenomenology also investigates this self-showing of entities. That is, not only what shows itself to consciousness, but also how self-showing occurs and shows itself: the self-showing of the self-shown’s self-showing.