PHENOMENOLOGY’S FOCUS ON EXPERIENCE

I actually began reading in the field of Phenomenology prior to becoming aware of NLP. Later I more formally studied it as I prepared to write my dissertation. But Phenomenology did not capture y attention as NLP did. While both focused on “lived experience” of the subjective inner world, Phenomenology’s approach was philosophical while NLP’s approach was practical with immediate applications.

What does Phenomenology have in common with NLP? Ask any typical NLP practitioner about the relationship between Phenomenology and NLP and you’ll probably induce a deep speechless trance. Not only will the he not know, he will not be familiar with Phenomenology, or if he is, he will not be very conversant about it. Yet both NLP and Phenemenology have a lot in common. In fact, they have so much in common.

Focused on The Structure of Experience Let’s then begin with Phenemenology and compare it to NLP. In the beginning, Edmund Husserl created Phenomenology “to study the mystery of subjectivity.” He thought of it as a bold and radically new way of doing philosophy. His focus was to study and understand subjective experience on its own terms. He sought to get back to the thing itself—to concrete living experience. So he began studying consciousness which resulted in his investigations of our awareness of time, history, and the life-world. Husserl wanted to grasp “the very essence of subjectivity as the source of all meaning and being.” (Dermot, 2000, p. 187).

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It should. That’s because NLP is “the study of the structure of subjective experience,” the subtitle of NLP, Volume I (Dilts, et. al, 1980). The founders of NLP also wanted to get back to the essential structure of experience in order to understand how it worked.

Definition of Phenomenology Derived from the term phenomenon, Phenomenology focuses on returning to the phenomena of experience. It is the study of human experience, a study of the way things present themselves to us. In NLP we seek to get back to the sensory description apart from all evaluations, which is why we “meta-model” language to bring unspecified terms and phrases back to sensory terms.

Furthermore, because as we think about the things given to us, we also understand ourselves as those who think about the things given. So Phenomenology entails this reflexive understanding. Robert Sokolowski in Introduction to Phenomenology (2008) says that “phenomenology is reason’s self-discovery in the presence of intelligible objects.” In NLP we have this reflexivity

minimally in “the meta move” in the Strategy Model and we have it fully in the Meta-States Model which models the structure of self-reflexive consciousness. Since we cannot directly observe our mental acts while occupying them, we grasp them reflexively.

As a Human Science Husserl launched Phenomenology to create the foundation for “the human sciences”— psychology, sociology, anthropology, ethics, politics, etc. Intentionality, as Husserl’s theory of consciousness, was designed to be the “science of experience.”

“The aim of science is so to objectify experience that it no longer contains any historical element. Scientific experiment does this by its methodical procedure. The historico-critical method does something similar in the human sciences. Through the objectivity of their approach, both methods are concerned to guarantee that these basic experiences can be repeated by anyone. Just as in the natural sciences experiments must be verifiable, so also must the whole process be capable of being checked in the human sciences. There can be no place for the historicity of experience in science.” (Gadmer, 342)

Similar to NLP, Phenomenology does not focus on causal explanations about things (the why q question), but a description of lived experience of the life-world (Lebanswelt). The aim is to create a science of pure description. Husserl said he wanted to describe “the contours of the phenomenon.” He made it his aim to understand the life of the living human subject, to understand it in the manner in which it is given to the person as meaningful life, to the person as meaningfully lived. His reason? So we live more authentically.

Now because we cannot observe our mental acts while occupying them, we have to reflectively grasp them. In Phenemenology we do that by bracketing them off from our assumptions (this is the epoche, a cessation, suspension). The NLP approach to this is to “stop the world” and follow the Gestalt principle, “Lose your mind and come to your senses.” We can then carefully describe the phenomena. In Phenomenology we go to the person (Self) being in the world and the acts of consciousness (Meaning) and to its intending objects (Intention) in a particular moment of time (Time).

The epoche in phenomenology is simply the neutralizing of natural intentions. Bracketing the world and all the things in the world means we put the world “into brackets” or “into parentheses” (Soko, p. 49) so that the experience can be explored more deeply.

Husserl took Brentano’s account of intentionality as the key concept of consciousness. To reflectively grasp your inner mental states— you have to catch them reflectively. In Meta-States we step back from an experience to observe as cleanly as possible. In NLP we step out of first perceptual position and into second and third perceptual positions to gain a larger, system-wide perspective.

Like NLP, Phenomenology focuses on subjective experience and arrives at many of the same concepts—only they are coded in different terminology.