On the Phenomenological Method

Originally Written: February 14th 2020

The phenomenologists method of discovering the in itself of an object within consciousness (any phenomena) isn’t properly explained through an empirical or rational methodology, but rather through using an eidetic (internal intuition) reduction to reveal the essential nature of an object. This is done through taking the known characteristics of a phenomena as they are understood by consciousness (science, philosophy, psychology aides us in discovering the attributes relating to an “object”), and discarding any attributes or perceptions or judgments which do not constitute the nature of the object so as to not alter its form. This means any characteristic that is able to be removed from or altered within the object, while the object is able to retain its structure and “Being” after the reduction, is removed, and the essential characteristics are what remains. By removing the transient, we can gain intuition into the concrete essence of a phenomena. We, in part, are able to do this through applied knowledge of the phenomenological method, in concordance with our developed logical and rational capacities, the data called into question acquired through our perceptive system selecting content through a value hierarchy structure. We must have knowledge of, and consciously employ a phenomenological method to properly carry out the eidetic reduction, and this, if carried out sufficiently, can provide us with foundational features which we can verify subjectively through experience. The ability to linguistically describe a process, and its accuracy in being a symbolic representation of that content, relies on our conceptual vocabulary and our ability to articulate the abstract essence into a relatable and meaningful content. Through the positing of a questionable concrete phenomena within the realm of consciousness, we are able to cognitively model the content and imaginatively vary its attributes until a limitation found within the object of desire is reached so that any further reduction or alteration would fundamentally not apply to the object, revealing the invariable, or essential necessary form or shape or pure essence of the content in question.

We must not mistake the Being of our own consciousness employed in the act of cognition with the content within consciousness, both are separate phenomena in which the phenomenologist is able to scrutinize. The mode of Being which is able to employ an eidetic reductionist method is itself an object which can be analyze by the phenomenologist, as is any other content that is able to be imagined by us. The conceptualization of objects allows us to properly bracket the content and organize it into our mental framework, allowing a ready-to-hand language in which to work with in our efforts. As we become aware of a content arising within consciousness (can even be the awareness of awareness in a meta sense) we can run that object through the eidetic reduction to be able to apply a description to the content in a fashion that reveals its essential nature in a way that is clear and objective, albeit, if experientially intuited then the content uncovered in the reduction is true to its nature, an symbolic representation is necessarily related to this true nature by degrees of precision according to our ability to articulate and preciseness of concepts in denoting their represented phenomena. This defining, or application of a description which relates the essence of a phenomena, isn’t a material or empirical fact, as science can discover, but more of a hypothesis into the nature of an “object”. This hypothesis can in turn be objectively validated in its externalizing through applying logic and reason, as well as philosophical argumentation, to prove its usefulness and beneficiality. This explanation of a phenomena produced through the eidetic reduction, due to its abstract nature, is discoverable solely by the philosopher in his ability to clarify an abstract phenomenon. It is the job of the philosopher to transmit a clear and articulate description, and must not, in my opinion, ever claim the depiction as being more than a hypothesis. While certain hypotheses properly discovered using this methodology are surely to be miscalculated, varied by biases and judgments, or wrongly concluded upon based on the limited perceptibility and the mental substratum’s natural limitations, we can conversely discover descriptions of essences which prove to be logically non-contradictory, as well as useful or beneficial within the philosophical realm of comprehension.

Thus the discoveries of phenomenology can be used to inform our belief and value structures, and reveal aspects of reality not able to be unveiled through a strictly empirical, deductionistic, inductionistic, or scientific methodology. This standard methodology, science of psychology, deals with facts and truth seeking of phenomena in their perception to us in the external world (also material phenomena constituting the foundations for our internal world – consciousness), what phenomenology allows us to do is take a lower resolution image of the Being which is engaged in scientific endeavors, analyze the theoretical explanations of scientific discoveries, methodologies, and allows us to conceptualize the makeup of scientific findings so that the content is more accurately represented to our human perspective, from the human perspective, to the human perspective. The perceptible system is the foundation for which datum arises in consciousness, the essence of which is discovered in phenomenology. This consciousness, therefore, is necessarily presupposed in any scientific endeavor, and always modifies the endeavor and interprets it through biological lens. The facts of science are truly external facts, while our conceptual representations of them are merely models. Phenomenology allows us to parse the data discovered in science while simultaneously analyzing the description which we apply to such data through the use of our language, or mathematical logic, in order to not only give a more truthful representation of it, but also to differentiate and isolate specific components in a way that gives insight into the specific nature of each separable piece, or as the whole (the totality of aspects which makeup the essentially of a concept if it has constituent parts).

While a particle can be scientifically and mathematically theorized to exist, and can be found in a laboratory to exist, the perception of such an object is always altered by the observer, not only in the conscious content arisen in experience, but in the very ability to perceive, and the necessary value structure through which it is filtered. The significance, or sense, that we don’t seek out, but for which we find to constitute the intentionality of our being towards the data, is posited in the revelation of the data, and we become aware of content through the system which selects for it. Aside from conceptualizing content discovered in the phenomenological lens, in the natural mode of being we also come across difficulty in parsing data and affecting it based upon the mode of being which we inhabit in our directedness towards it.The microscope used, the light interference upon the particle and upon the instrumentation used to record it, our own eye sight and mental reflection of it, our mental state of recognizing such data and symbolizing them consciously, is all variants in interpreting the particle. From every perspective, from every moment, the content of such depictions is altered, yet theoretically, the object exists objectively. To describe it as it truly is, being that we are humans located in time at which both us (our conscious mode of Being) and the object in its essential nature are constantly in a state of flux and impermanence, requires philosophical and grammatical cohesion with the application of logic to really nail down the underpinnings of what makes something what it is, the in-itself of an object thus can only be articulated, or the sense of it experienced, only in partial relation to the fullness of its actuality. The natural way of interpreting data, and thinking of scientific discovery, is by just taking the data as they are discovered at face value, without analyzing the aspect of human intervention which always is a variable in the perception of any content, being that we are limited to our human state. Recognizing the indeterminateness of our experience and how it relates to the analysis of scientific discovery, leaves us open to the normal way of viewing and describing phenomena, without taking into account the human experiential aspect which is side-by-side to the present moment awareness and creation of the object of inquiry. We ignore the essence of the content in our naturally progressing and transient conscious experience, and therefore lose our own possibility of deeper insight into the nature of the content of consciousness and the mode of Being which coincides with the awareness of such content. In science, this can amount to the improper conceptualization of phenomena, creating an obfuscated description (inarticulate, not properly described or defined concept or group of concepts) which misses out on the possibility of a more accurate representation, which would be, for us, possible through a phenomenological investigation. 

The phenomenological conclusion, taken to its limit (the limit of an investigation with itself as object) produces a result that was discovered through a much less vigorous method – without our current understanding of logic and reduction (as well as a lack of science) – over two thousand years ago. The concluding remark upon the essential aspects of phenomena themselves prove to be unsatisfactory, as is the natural state of our conscious experience, by the very absence of integral essence to phenomena. All phenomena, outside of the bounds of our conceptualization, are at their core essence less, as they are interdependent with every other conceptually described phenomena. All phenomena are impermanent, transient, timeless, and lacking a core structure in their facticity. All phenomena as we discover them in our conscious experience are constantly in a state of change, and exist due to a causal structure predicated upon a conditioned nature. They appear as they do now because of factors which preceded them, and they are being altered within the present moment, and will be different in the future in regard to how they appear to us, as they are themselves not concrete entities. What can become a concrete entity, for us, in our experience, isn’t a truth about the content of reality (a phenomenon) but rather a truth about our mode of being as it represents phenomenon to itself, even if that intentioned content is itself. This is only stable in an abstract manner, about metaphysical concepts, such absolute truths appear foreign to the natural mode of Being, yet are discoverable through introspection and philosophical analysis – namely phenomenology. Such absolute metaphysical and representational truths are such as the statements “all phenomena are conditioned” “all conditioned phenomena are impermanent and subject to change” “all phenomena is absent of an essential nature” etc.

In conclusion, philosophy, and the phenomenological process, cannot produce a factual representation of the essence of a phenomena existing in reality or our experience, because by its very nature, it is a representation. That the representation works to provide a logically successful result, that is inherent within the structure, such as deductive truths, are rather abstract truths about logic, than being a phenomenon that exists in the world

What I refer to as the content that is unfindable as a fact in reality would be in reference to the essence or permanence of such phenomena such as the mode of Being which underlies the ability to produce the consciousness positing the logical truth aforementioned. The argument that a representation is factually in its alignment with reality is a perversion of the word fact, or truth, in the way I am using it here. While facts about the world do exist, their nature is purely abstract and general, and not existing in the conscious minds of humans. What this means is that phenomenology doesn’t produce facts, but logical descriptions in the correlation between conceptualized groupings of reality (into concepts, language, or mathematical formulations). These groupings or descriptions aren’t merely mental constructs, as their existence (such as mathematical numbering) isn’t merely a product of our mentality, but rather such things are merely to be taken as a mental construct arising in consciousness in the form of language and symbols which themselves (the symbols) are representative of an abstract way of perceiving reality. These symbols in their ordering and relation can produce a result that is logically true, but this isn’t the unfindable empty essence of a phenomena which phenomenological inquiry is aimed at discovering. Nevertheless, the inquiry isn’t fruitless, it can strip away the unnecessary and variable content to find an invariable shape of a concept which is representing a phenomenon, to better understand the phenomena, and how it relates to our picture of reality or how it relates to us in our lives, etc.

The mode of Being which is perceiving reality, must be understood as it is, as just that, a mode of our consciousness producing a perception using mentally constructed language (symbology) to represent a perceived phenomenon within the world. This is an accurate prediction. Now in the logical and seemingly objective venture of phenomenology to be able to produce conclusive statements as to the essence of a phenomena in its concrete invariable form, isn’t a fact, as all phenomena themselves are constantly changing, impermanent, and inherently “empty of an essence”, rather what phenomenology can profess to produce is the logical ordering and articulation of the symbology which is a mental representation as it relates to the phenomena as it appears to us in reality, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on its clarity and depth and scope of comprehension. This means that it can be beneficial and useful to us in our human endeavors, as we are a conceptualizing, experiencing, living, Being, with modes of consciousness that are able to use value systems and interpret reality in a more or less beneficial way to be better in line with its actuality. The phenomenological method aids us in progression along this path, and any deep inquirer can use it to better articulate the state of reality, but the point I wish to stress here is of the nature of its conclusion must not be posited as a fact, or as having concrete existence, but rather, its utility, or pragmatic usefulness, in aiding us in the human experience of understanding reality, which is great, considering were human.

If the contents herein seem to be contradictory, they are, as a progressive comprehension of the use of phenomenology itself is being presented. The contrast between our normal mode of intuiting (regular perception) and a phenomenological examination of a transcendent essence, necessarily refers to two different modes of Being, and consequently two different modes of Being, characterizes by different attributions. And thus different rules and conclusions support and follow from their exploration. The logical formulation of concepts which led to their conclusion is a building process, through which diametrically opposed beliefs are found in succession, and through a Hegelian dialectic, the contradicting truths are superseded to produce a picture which contains both truths within. This process occurs across the span of all conscious development, and this holds true for the process of phenomenological methodology and understanding, the discoveries found and understood through eidetic reduction might contradict the discoveries of other inquiries, and the summation of both contradictory “truths” may necessarily be transcended by a further conceptualization which in its formulation can include both aspects of reality. Thus in phenomenology we are absurdly (Camus’ definition) seeking the meaning to the essence of an object within a meaningless world, finding truths about aspects of reality in content which has no concrete immutable truths, without illogically being unreasonable in our discoveries. There is a place and a usage to these terms that is both deeper and more transcendental than immediately meets the eye. Phenomenology can find the essential structure to phenomena as to their representation in our consciousness, yet recognize the essence less of the actual phenomena themselves.

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