GETTING TO THE HEART OF EXPERIENCE

If you ask, “What is Phenomenology?” Widipedia gives you this answer: Phenomenology (Greek phainómenon "that which appears" and lógos "study") is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 1900s by Edmund Husserl, then expanded by his followers at various universities in Germany, then France, United States, etc. Philosophically, phenomenology lacks a thematic focus and is primarily a style of thought, a method, an open and ever-renewed experience. As an ontology (study of reality), Phenomenology is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness. Husserl's conception of phenomenology has been developed by Edith Stein (a student), Martin Heidegger (a hermeneutic philosopher), Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc. (existentialists), etc.

Studying Subjective Experience Phenomenology creates conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences—judgments, perceptions, and emotions. Phenomenology seeks to be scientific not from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology, but through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.

Phenomenology begins by rejecting the concept of objective research and grouping assumptions through a process called phenomenological epoche. This focuses on analyzing daily human behavior to gain a greater understanding. Persons are understood through the unique ways they reflect the societies they live in. Phenomenologists gather conscious experience as data using methods that are far less restricting than in other sciences.

Central to phenomenology is intentionality ("aboutness") and the idea that consciousness is always consciousness of something. The object of consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is constituted for consciousness in many different ways, i.e., through perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc. Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is still constituted as the identical object. Consciousness is directed at the same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it.

Non-Reductionist Though many phenomenological methods involve reductions, phenomenology is anti- reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to a description. When a reference is made to a

thing's essence or idea, or when one details the constitution of an identical coherent thing by describing what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, it does not mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described. The ultimate goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the experiencing person.

Husserl envisioned phenomenology as a method of philosophical inquiry that rejects the rationalist bias of Western thought in favor of a method of reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience.” Husserl’s method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing similar to NLP’s emphasis on denominalizing and sensory acuity.

Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because it is available only through perceptions of reality. The map is not the territory. Husserl countered that consciousness is not “in” the mind but rather conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object), whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the real processes associated with and underlying the figment). The phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are given to consciousness, in their immediacy.

Back to Experience In practice, it entails an unusual combination: discipline and detachment to suspend or bracket, theoretical explanations and second-hand information while determining one's “naive” experience of the matter. The phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation by returning the subject to her primordial experience—to a feeling, idea, or perception or as we would say to sensory awareness.

Martin Heidegger modified Husserl’s subjectivist tendencies. Whereas Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the primacy of existence (i.e., the mode of being or Dasein), which cannot be reduced to consciousness. One’s state of mind is an “effect” rather than what determines existence, including those aspects that are unconscious. By shifting the center of gravity from consciousness (psychology) to existence (ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology. Consequently phenomenology became increasingly relevant to psychoanalysis. Similarly NLP shifted more and more to the unconscious whereas Neuro-Semantics has stayed with the focus on consciousness.