4 - Geographical phenomenology: a critique of its foundations

Summary

The metaphysics of geographical phenomenology

It cannot be denied that the founding and guiding intuitions of a phenomenological approach in geography as it exists at the moment are in the main sound and well intentioned. Such a claim is justified alone in terms of the re-thinking of the positivist emphasis in geographical science it has occasioned, a point already made by Gregory (1978a). Yet, as the previous chapter sought to show, there must be a question as to whether this enterprise is at all phenomenological in the ways it claims to be. Furthermore it should be fairly apparent by now that while these intuitions may have been sound and the results significant, we cannot claim that ‘geographical phenomenology’ has in any way moved towards a resolution of how human science is to reconstitute its scientific conceptions away from positivism and towards some positive scientific perspective on man's world. The waters have been stirred, but visibility – as a result – remains poor. In one crucial way the situation has not improved at all; the radical critique of objectivism and naturalism occasioned by ‘geographical phenomenology’ in its denial of the tenets of positivism and logical empiricism has been transcended in the direction of an equally radical and naive subjectivism, accepting multiple worldviews, unable to develop rigorous methods or intersubjectively acceptable criteria for evaluation, and in which the taken-for-granted world of the subject is to be examined, but not that of the researcher:

It is the very essence of the failure of humanistic geography: […]