The what or the how?

Here's the context from Dermot Moran's _Introduction to Phenomenology_ (2000).

Phenomenology is usually characterised as a way of seeing rather than a set of doctrines. In a typical formulation, the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), in his late work _Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology_ [1936], presents phenomenology as approaching 'whatever appears as such', including everything meant or thought, in the manner of its appearing, in the 'how' (Wie) of its manifestation. Similarly, Husserl's colleague and protégé Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) could proclaim in his methodological discussion of phenomenology at the beginning of his _Being and Time_ (1927), section 7: "The expression 'phenomenology' signifies primarily a methodological conception. This expression does not characterize the what of the objects of philosophical research as subject-matter, but rather the how of that research" (SZ § 7, 27; 50). This approach involves the practice of taking a fresh unprejudiced look – i.e. untainted by scientific, metaphysical, religious or cultural presuppositions or attitudes – at the fundamental and essential features of human experience in and of the world. 

According to Husserl's own slogan, phenomenology aimed to return to 'the things themselves', avoiding constructivist system-building so prevalent in traditional philosophy, or reasoning on the basis of some preconceived and uninterrogated starting point (as traditional rationalisms and empiricisms were wont to do). Instead, fundamental philosophical issues are examined through attention to the manner in which things and meanings show themselves, come to self-evidence, or come to be 'constituted' for us, as Husserl put it, invoking a concept from the Kantian tradition. The phenomenological approach is primarily descriptive, seeking to illuminate issues in a radical, unprejudiced manner, paying close attention to the evidence that presents itself to our grasp or intuition. Husserl frequently speaks of phenomenological description (Beschreibung, Deskription) as clarification (Klärung), illumination.

All well and good except which is it, the thing or the experience of the thing? the what or the how?

It must be both. A what without a how is not possible just as a how without a what is likewise vapor. So it is a dance back and forth and forth and back until such a point as is satisfactory to say this phenomenon is as it is, and mind you, it, the phenomenon is built of the stuff of a binomial constructing, a dance.

One can, thus, focus on the dance (their relating) or its partners each as if separate. Writing about a subject is the thing and its treatment (perspective), and the written, in re-experiencing through following the words, phrases, sentences up through the whole is an-other dance. The reader experiencing a thing in a way, in some way related to what the writer must have experienced before or as he wrote (a contention still to be demonstrated or proved more convincingly).