Matters of Interpretation

Phenomenology seeks to explore that which is given to consciousness and in so doing to suspend judgements about subjective existence or non-existence of the objects of consciousness, or more specifically, to suspend judgement about the solutions to this problem posed in the history of philosophy.This suspension of judgement is the phenomenological reduction or “bracketing out” (epoché) of questions of objective truth. … The primary enterprise of phenomenology for Husserl is therefore the description of the totality of meanings in the stream of consciousness; a mapping of their structure. There is a deeper level than this, the genetic phenomenology which seeks for the foundations of these mapped structures, for example in terms of teleology and the ego’s motives, but it is this first, descriptive level which is important for the phenomenology of religions.¹

¹ Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 1999) 94-95.