Home 9 Passage 9 Theoretic

Phenomenology differs from almost every other social and human science in that it attempts to gain insightful descriptions of the way we experience the world prereflectively and pre-predicately, largely without taxonomizing, classifying, codifying, or abstracting it. So, phenomenology does not offer us the possibility of effective theory with which we can now explain and/or control the world; rather, it offers us the possibility of plausible insights that bring us in more direct contact with the world. It is the experience that is the ultimate bearer of meaning, not some theory, linguistic formulation, or abstractive construction. Therefore, van den Berg can say, “the phenomenologist is obsessed by the concrete [and] distrusts theoretical and objective observations” (1972, p. 76). This is not to say that theorizing cannot be a fascinating and even an obsessively compelling activity. But, the difference is that a theorist observes and interprets the world through the optics and the vitreous vocabularies of the theoretical frame by means of which he or she thinks and within which he or she has been “captured,” so to speak.