All of these categories belong to the natural attitude. Thus, when someone tells you a story you might normally consider historical, you admit that you have no way of knowing that this history is some objective thing that exists apart from your relationship in the moment. Maybe it is, and maybe it is not. We could proceed as if this history was being reciprocally revealed in the moment with, rather than in spite of, your being there. Still, with this in mind the pursuit of images should not terminate with description alone.
Images sometimes call for explanation.
Description should then help to formulate the basis for such explanation, making semantic connections among related meanings. We are not trying to avoid judgment or explanation per se, we are trying to avoid those preconceived judgments and explanations having nothing to do with the image itself. The problem then becomes one of how to know when one should leave the strictly descriptive mode for that of explanation. These four characteristics define the core of Phenomenology s methodological displacement of consciousness. One might refer to this as the phenomenological attitude, comparable to Jung s symbolic attitude .