We will now gain a final perspective on phenomenology by looking at how it fits into the present philosophical scene. Toward the end of Chapter 13, we noted that both Descartes and Hobbes try to replace the natural attitude by the philosophical. They think that philosophy can not only clarify but also replace the knowledge proper to prephilosophical thinking. This belief in the power of philosophical reason, along with this suspicion about other forms of experience, is typical of modernity. Phenomenology understands philosophy very differently. It believes that prephilosophical intelligence ought to be left intact, that it has its own excellence and truth, and that philosophy contemplates the prephilosophical without replacing it. Thus, while phenomenology originates within modern philosophy, it also takes a distance from it. To show how it does so, let us begin with an interpretation of modernity.

MODERNITY AND POSTMODERNITY

Modern philosophy has two major components: political philosophy and epistemology. In both these components, modern philosophy defined itself, in its origins, as a revolution against ancient and medieval thought. Machiavelli, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, prided himself on initiating new modes and orders in political life, and Francis Bacon and Descartes, in the early seventeenth century, declared that they were introducing new ways of thinking about nature and the human mind, ways which require that we abandon our inherited and commonsense convictions and take up a new method of directing our minds in the search for knowledge.