NLP as Phenomenology

Here’s a secret that has been hidden from most people who study NLP, a secret that most people simply do not know. It is a secret that helps us define NLP. The secret? NLP is a phenomenology. We actually acknowledge this every time we describe it as “the study of the structure of subjective experience,” (subtitle of NLP: Volume I). That phrase precisely describes phenomenology— the phenomena that we experience within ourselves as subjects of any and every experience. This phenomena is not the territory, it is our map of the territory as we subjectively map it in our neurology. This article begins a series on this subject.

Over the years I’ve been asked about this repeatedly, “Is NLP Phenomenology?” “Is NLP connected to the history of Phenomenology?” The answer to both question is no. NLP arose completely independent of Phenomenology as a movement, and yet it is a phenomenology.

When Phenomenology began as a philosophical movement in the 20th century its primary objective was to directly investigate and describe human phenomena as a person consciously experienced it. Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger were the first developers. Their design was to encounter experience as such apart from theories about it. The early phenomologists wanted to do so without causal explanations, theories about origins or even meaning. They wanted to freely examine experience apart from preconceptions and presuppositions.

Husserl viewed empathy as something done as a sort of apperception built upon the experiences of one's own lived body. The “lived body” is your body as you experience it by yourself from within. Your body manifests itself mainly as how you act in the world. For example, your body is what enables you reach out and grab something. From your body, you have your point of view. Noticing this, you can begin to differentiate things as you move a thing around and see new aspects of it. Here you make the absent present and the present absent. You experience your body as a duality—as object (e.g., you can touch your own hand) and as your subjectivity (the sense of being touched).

Key concepts in Phenomenology focus on Self, on Others (inter-subjectivity), on the World (the constitution of your life-world), on Intentionality, Time, Experience (state, emotions), Language, Perception, etc. if that sounds similar to the Matrix Model, it is. Inter-subjectivity constitutes objectivity (i.e., what you experience also as objective is experienced as being inter-subjectively available). Yet this does not imply that objectivity is reduced to subjectivity. In the experience of inter-subjectivity, you experience yourself as being a subject among other subjects, and you experience yourself as existing objectively for these Others.

The life-world (German, Lebenswelt) is the World we live in. It’s the background or horizon of our experience. It is that on which each object stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning it can only hold for us. This also led Phenomenology to be recognized as an embodied constructivism.

At the core of Jean Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the world. Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in concert with others. His writings became influential in the project of naturalizing phenomenology so that phenomenologists used the results of psychology and cognitive science.

Husserl's phenomenology highlighted that "all consciousness is consciousness of something." This implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (the noema). Thus, the correlation between noesis (thinking) and noema (what you’re thinking) becomes the first step in the constitution of analyses of consciousness.

Taking perception as his point of departure, Merleau-Ponty recognized that the body is not only a thing or object for study, but also a permanent condition of experience. The body is a constituent of the perceptual openness to the world. The primacy of perception signifies a primacy of experience as perception is an active and constitutive dimension.

Merleau-Ponty demonstrates a corporeity of consciousness (embodiment) is an intentionality of the body, and contrasts with the dualist ontology of mind and body. "Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a way that I do not choose" (1962, p. 440).

If all of that sounds a lot like NLP, it is. Both disciplines study subjectivity—the inner world. Both attempt to deal with and map the inner world as cleanly and clearly as possible by eliminating bias and distortion. Both recognize that the key ‘structures’ (or more accurately, the structuring) on the inside goes to many of the same categories— meaning, intention, state, self, power, others, time, world, etc. Accordingly, when both disciplines understand each other, they can enrich each other. More to come.