Phenomenology of Art: Approach or Method?

This article aims at introducing phenomenology, based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account, as less “method” than a commitment to the careful description of things as they show themselves in our experience of them. It also argues that although the direct influence of phenomenology on art history has been limited, both phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics, conceived more nearly as a movement than method, have played a considerable role in preparing the ground for many of the tendencies that are frequently (loosely) assimilated under the rubric of “new art history”. In this sense, phenomenology is more nearly a highly general and consequential way of understanding what kind of thing an object is, and its outcome, at this level of generality, is essentially anti-methodological, if not anti-theoretical. Hence, phenomenological interpretation returns to, and perhaps is only finally justified as, description. This is, in a sense, its continuing orientation to formalism, and this may suggest that such a reception of phenomenology understands it as having a relation to judgment rather than to method.