- seCtIon sIx: seLF AnD otHeR
for the natural sciences. What is at issue is the phenomenon of the apple, as it
is constituted in your experience. He called this bracketing process the epoché
(from the Greek for ‘suspension’ – the use of the acute or the grave accent is incon-
sistent). By starting with this procedure, he claimed to be able to study experi-
ences openly, directly, and without tracing them back to what they refer to in the
world. In other words, to describe without theorising.
This method of suspending judgement has much in common with traditional meth-
ods of meditation and contemplative training, and also with shifts in awareness that
can happen spontaneously. Astrophysicist Piet Hut (1999) likens it to an experience
with his first camera. After intensively taking photographs in his familiar home town,
he seemed to have landed in a different world and to be seeing things ‘in a new light’.
Indeed, he seemed to see the world as light. Anyone who has learned to paint or
draw will recognise this experience. The learning seems to be less about how to use
the pen, ink, or paint, and more about new ways of seeing, or how to look at things
directly without being distracted by how you think they ought to be. In the same
way, the phenomenological ‘gesture of awareness’ is about seeing the world anew.
Husserl’s aim was what he called an eidetic reduction (eidetic from the Greek
eidos, ‘form’): a way of finding the essential features, or invariants, of people’s
experience. He wanted to get ‘back to the things themselves!’, to the way things
are actually given in experience, claiming that by providing precise and system-
atic descriptions of experience, we can discover the structure of consciousness.
The phenomenologist is helped, says Shaun Gallagher, ‘by the realization that con-
sciousness is intentional. This is the first thing that we come to understand through
the phenomenological reduction’ (2007, p. 687). In other words, all experience is
experience of something or about something. Husserl calls this the ‘noematic’
aspect of experience, and the ‘noema’ is the object as it is experienced, which is
part of the structure of intentionality. Note, however, that there are many spiritual
traditions which would reject this fundamental assertion, claiming to find ‘pure
consciousness’, or awareness without any object or any intentionality (Chapter 18).
Husserl’s project ran into many difficulties, and his theories have been long and
hotly debated. His essential method of epoché has not been widely adopted, nor
led to a science of experience on an equal footing with the natural sciences, as he
hoped. Nevertheless, it has been used in various contexts to explore emotional
states, or to describe what it is like to undergo certain experiences and so discover
their ‘essence’ (Stevens, 2000). The typical method involves several stages of ana-
lysing interviews or written accounts of experiences. First comes the epoché, then
a summary or narrative digest, then significant themes are extracted to find the
fundamental constituents of that kind of experience in general.
Arguably this use of phenomenology is not a first-person method at all but a
third- or a second-person one. Although the original intention was to explore
lived experience by seeing through preconceptions, the actual method used
depends on analysing what other people say. In this sense, it is no different from
many kinds of psychology which use questionnaires, interviews, role-playing, and
the analysis of written texts. The original intention of throwing oneself into a new
way of being in the world seems to have been lost.‘consciousness is
intentional. That is the
first thing that we come
to understand through
the phenomenological
reduction’
(Gallagher, 2007, p. 687)
Perhaps this is not surprising, for it is hardly easy
to undertake a personal transformation by throw-
ing off one’s preconceptions and going beyond
conceptualisation back to the things themselves.
It is much easier to talk about it. As Piet Hut notes,
‘Reading about the epoché typically leads a student
to contemplate the concept of the epoché, rather
than really performing the epoché (a danger Husserl
kept warning about)’ (1999, p. 242). In other words,
the first-person method slips all too easily away.
A related problem is that much of the language
of phenomenology is incomprehensible to those
not steeped in it, and difficult language can make
people give up on a different field before they even
begin, which is always a shame. Phenomenology
sometimes gives the impression of relishing lin-
guistic complexity for its own sake. For example,
this is how the French philosopher Natalie Depraz
explains her use of the phenomenological reduc-
tion as an embodied practice.
I am proposing to bring to light a renewed
reductive method, whereby the spectator is
given a specific embodiment, and where the
operation inherent in the reductive gesture
is taken up again through the logic of its own
reflexivity. By thus aggravating the oxymoron
of the practical and the theoretical, internal
to the reduction in its Husserlian heritage, my
point is that, in fact, reflection and incarnation,
contemplation and action are not opposed
until each begins to fertilize the other, thereby
intensifying each other to the point of becoming
virtually indistinguishable from each other.
(Depraz, 1999, p. 97)
Depraz is using the standard vocabulary of her field; we are not suggesting she is
an especially bad writer. But the vocabulary she uses risks taking simple ideas and
making them very hard to understand. Perhaps she means that when you look
deeply into the distinction between subject and object, or between thought and
action, the difference seems to disappear. If so, this is something found in many
traditions, and it is not entirely clear how phenomenology helps.NEUROPHENOMENOLOGY
Neurophenomenology is the name given by Chilean neuroscientist Francisco
Varela to a ‘quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach
to human experience’ (1996, p. 330). He agrees with Searle that first-person‘Reading about the
epoché typically leads a
student to contemplate
the concept of the
epoché, rather than
really performing the
epoché’
(Hut, 1999, p. 242)