Why phenomenology is needed
There are phenomenologies of perception,1 of attention, of mysticism.
Showing that perception barely exists as we thought, that indeterminacy hardly exists like we thought; coming up with new primitives for how to describe experience—these were the achievements of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.
Meanwhile, the Phenomenology of Mysticism shows us that mysticism is of a different character than regular perception; that there is no figure-ground as such, and it is received in a different way.
Other phenomenologies (to use the plural) might still show that the senses work differently than we do.
All these phenomenologies show us a different way to relate to our experiences.
These different, perhaps more accurate ways to relate to our experience might help us make more sense of it.
It’s tough to respond to what you don’t have a good model for.
You can barely perceive the thing, let alone form coherent models of what to do around it in some form of an OODA loop.
Put differently, what phenomenology does is give us a different, more accurate way to relate to our experience.
We’re already always relating to it. We make sense of what we perceive. We’re telling stories about the feeling in our stomach meaning we’re hungry, and so, we moved to the fridge.
Babies can’t do that. Babies just cry—they rely on the rest of the world to know what’s wrong. Sure, their bodies know on some level they’re hungry. Does their mind? Does the apparatus connected to crying know how to differentiatiably act based on hunger? Can a kid be confused about whether they are hungry? Can they not even be clear on what’s wrong, but have a vague bad feeling? ^cryingbaby
Surely, we’ve all just had a vague bad feeling without totally knowing why that is. In a way, this should be normal. So much is going on, in the world, in our subconscious.
Just locating the feeling of hunger as in our stomach—that is non-trivial. How did we do that? How do we know a feeling of pain belonged to our arm? Put aside the scientific question of nerves and brain development. How do we come to associate the visual of our arm with the feeling of muscles inside it, with the positionality, and acute pain inside it? How does it bind together in experience?
We are nothing but the stories we tell about ourselves. Our ways of relating to ourselves are in fact our conceptual receptions of our experience. There is a way of living that gives up those conceptualisations more easily, and lives more wildly, fluidly; we can approach it, but even the most unthinking Daoist master needs to tell stories of what is going on and orient their body with their thinking mind.
In the light of our conceptualising reality, we might as well tell better stories.
. . . which, as it turns out shows “perception” does not even exist as such. ↩︎