This a how-to-guide for my fellow Daseins (simply, human consciousnesses). Do you want to suck at analyzing your first-person experience? Do you want to make lots of terrible inferences about Being based on your limited encounters with certain qualia? Do you want to use language to confuse yourself and everyone around you? Look no further! You’re in the right place.
This guide will teach you everything you need to know to leap into all the common pitfalls in phenomenology. You’ll learn how to use the worst concepts available. You’ll find out how to spin word-traps to bewitch your intelligence and end up stuck in the dead ends of verbal debate. You’ll figure out how to find your blind spots—and then erase them from memory and ignore them forever! You’ll be able to mobilize vagueness, metaphysical speculation, and unnecessary complexity to obfuscate everything you experience! You’ll discover the secrets to complete failure in understanding and describing consciousness! Have no fear. In just a few minutes, you’ll be well on your way to being atrocious at phenomenology – just like me!
What is phenomenology?
My favorite definition of phenomenology, based on a literal translation of the original Greek word Φαινομενολογία (phainómenologos), is “the study of that which appears to the mind.” But this word was first used by German philosophers in the early 19th century, and later the field of phenomenology was established and expanded by Edmund Husserl, Franz Brentano, and their students. Semi-famous phenomenologists include Heidegger, Sartre, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, and more.
Also, qualia can be understood as units of subjective experience. They are the element of “what it is like,” the introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of an experience. For instance, ‘biting into a red apple,’ or ‘staring at a patterned turquoise wall,’ or ‘feeling confused about the world’ are all qualia, with escalating levels of complexity. The American pragmatist C.S. Peirce introduced the term ‘quale’ into philosophy in 1866. A synonym for quale is “phenomenal character.”
Fundamentally, phenomenology is a method. It is a way of thinking about the world where we focus on our first-person experience. Instead of emphasizing the focus areas of traditional philosophy— abstractions, logical structures, knowledge, ethics, etc— phenomenology looks at something closer to home: what does your consciousness feel like, from your perspective? Husserl also called this descriptive psychology. Now, “what the best methods of phenomenology are” is pretty hotly debated amongst philosophers, but I’m gonna ignore most of that here of course.
In modern analytic philosophy of mind and many other mainstream contexts, “phenomenology” is used simply to refer to the art of analyzing and describing your personal experience. (See this paper on applied phenomenology). So, for example, ‘psychedelic phenomenology’ is the art and science of understanding the effects of psychoactive drugs from a first-person experience, and then communicating those effects to others in clear, crisp ways.
1. Never bracket out metaphysics.
In Husserl’s phenomenological method (called the epoché), all of metaphysics and ontology are “bracketed out.” What does that mean?Well, questions about the nature of reality, like “but is this apple real,” “does God exist,” “are we in a simulation,” “what is the correct approach to ethics,” and more, are all put aside for a moment. We don’t take a position on them. We don’t say Yes or No to these questions, and we don’t affirm or negate them. Rather, we just leave these questions to rest in their quotation marks. Instead, the phenomenologist focuses on what is accessible to them from the immediacy of their own experience: what does it feel like to crunch into the apple? What am I feeling right now? How do I encounter the apple, and how does it ‘apprehend itself’ to me? As Husserl wrote:
“Every intellectual experience, indeed every experience ever, can be made into an object of pure seeing and apprehension while it is occurring.”
Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Lecture II
Through the epoché, we escape what Husserl called the captivation-in-an-acceptedness. We no longer passively accept all of our beliefs, meaning-structures, and metaphysical-frameworks, but neither do we actively negate them. We instead put them aside temporarily, and try to focus on the raw experience as we experience it.
A bad phenomenologist is like a person at a theatre who keeps yelling at the actors, asking them questions about reality: “do you really think you’re representing the figures you’re acting out?” “What’s your real name?” “Is this plot good for our children?” This person isn’t content with bracketing those questions until after the play and just experiencing the drama, watching the plot, the stage elements, the lighting intently and with focus. Instead, they wanna figure out the metaphysics of it all. This obnoxious character is exactly who you should emulate.
So, toss all that Husserl bullshit out the window. Defenestrate it; we don’t need it. From now on, whenever you experience something, just ignore what it feels like. Focus instead on speculating about the metaphysics of that experience. When you bite into an apple, don’t even pause for a second to taste it. Just immediately leap into wondering what it’s made out of – is it atoms? Quarks? Monads? Fire and ice? Start posing a flurry of ethical quandaries – it ethical to eat apples when the food industry is a monopoly? Wonder about the social implications of your experience – “what would Tammi think of me eating this apple right now?”
Always pass judgement on the experience before it’s even run its course. Put everything in neat and tidy categories before giving the experience a chance to unfold. By the time you’re done, you’ll be so lost in abstractions and in-your-head that what the experience is like – the qualia – will be completely out of the picture. Perfect. You’re doing great so far.
2. Always assume that your personal experience reflects the limits of possible experience.
Our motto: if you haven’t experienced it, it can’t exist.
That means that anytime you hear someone discussing “rare qualia varieties,” you can ignore whatever they’re saying. The limits of your experience are the limits of the possible universe.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet said “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” He’s dead wrong. If you haven’t sensed it, dreamt it, or felt it at some point, no one can experience it, and it can’t possibly be real. If you feel time moves forward, then there’s not a chance time can move backward. If you always apprehend the world with your own identity at the center, that’s the reality: your closed individual identity is real, and you’re just the center of the world. If you’ve only ever seen a given range of colors and smells, there isn’t anything beyond that range. Maybe animals or other types of sentient beings have a wealth of qualia with which the human world may have nothing to compare? Not a chance. Your experience is the World.
Assume that you experience reality directly. You have unique, privileged, and transcendental access to the Real.™ This metaphysical Truth is disclosed to you, directly, unambiguously, and without misrepresentation or nuance, through your experience. That’s just the way it is. 🤷♂️ When you speak about your experience, never use the word “I.” That’s too subjective. You should always use the royal We or generalize your experience to all human beings. Speak objectively.
3. Ignore all socialization and Being-in-the-World.
You are the Transcendental Subject, a detached mind that confronts Reality™ as it truly is. There’s not a chance that your social context has influenced the way in which you apprehend the world. You are a God. Searle was so tragically, hopelessly wrong when he said:
“God could not see screwdrivers, cars, bathtubs, etc., because intrinsically speaking there are no such things. Rather, God would see us treating certain objects as screwdrivers, cars, bathtubs, etc. But . . . our standpoint [is] the standpoint of beings who are not gods but are inside the world.”
Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, 12,
Likewise, Heidegger was playing a fool when he argued that things in the world are already meaningful, with meanings defined by Das Man (The They). He was an idiot when he said that The They influence and constrain the scope of possibilities, limiting our access to the state-space of consciousness. He said that from the start, we are socialized into a world in which we cope with equipment. Don’t pay any attention to this garbage analysis:
“The domination of the public way in which things have been interpreted has already decided upon even the possibilities of being attuned, that is, about the basic way in which Dasein lets itself be affected by the world. The They prescribes that attunement, it determines what and how one sees.”
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time
Rather, you are the one who assigns meanings to everything. Before you, meaning did not exist! Thus, there’s not a chance that contingent social and structural conditions (your facticity) could affect your first-person experience of the world. Take your concepts for granted, and assume that they are untainted, true, and ideal.
Note: I admit that my phenomenological analysis of love is riddled with rookie mistakes – after all, I mentioned social conditions. What garbage! I should’ve focused on the transcendental Truth.
4. Use the most vague, obscurantist language you can get your hands on.
Look at this passage:
“He had stayed so close that the old man was afraid he would cut the line with his tail which was sharp as a scythe and almost of that size and shape. When the old man had gaffed her and clubbed her, holding the rapier bill with its sandpaper edge and clubbing her across the top of her head until her colour turned to a colour almost like the backing of mirrors, and then, with the boy’s aid, hoisted her aboard, the male fish had stayed by the side of the boat. Then, while the old man was clearing the lines and preparing the harpoon, the male fish jumped high into the air beside the boat to see where the female was and then went down deep, his lavender wings, that were his pectoral fins, spread wide and all his wide lavender stripes showing. He was beautiful, the old man remembered, and he had stayed.”
Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea
This is an example of what you should not do. Look how few abstractions he makes! Look how he keeps his sentences short, clear, descriptive, and focused on the experience. If you want to be a bad phenomenologist, you need to learn to use longer words, more difficult-to-understand sentences, and infinitely convoluted abstractions. Never be content with a simple description of “what it was like”! Always go a layer deeper. Use a thesaurus, and translate your words into their most complex alternatives! And never define your terms! That might give the reader a chance of understanding your experience.
By the end, when someone else reads your writing about a subjective experience, they should say something like this:
“A colossal piece of mystification, which will yet provide posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and…most stupefying verbiage.”
Schopenhauer, Arthur (1965). On the Basis of Morality, trans. E.F.J. Payne. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, pp.15–16. Speaking of Hegel.
That’s the type of response you should aim for. Make sure to muddy the waters to make them seem deep!
5. Reject all newfangled methods of exploring consciousness.
Today, some researchers in phenomenology use neural correlates of consciousness to try and understand our experience from a neuroscientific perspective. For example, they might ask subjects to go into an fMRI scanner to watch a scary movie, and then track the person’s neural activity. Using our understanding of neural structure and function, these researchers then explain phenomena from a new perspective. They combine pure phenomenological description with a technical description.
Others, like the heretics at the Qualia Research Institute, venture to figure out the properties of the mathematical object isomorphic to our conscious experience. Could symmetry in this mathematical object be related to the “goodness” or “badness” (valence) of a quale? Could psychedelic experiences reveal substantial insights about consciousness, or broaden the scope of our possible experience?
Some even argue that phenomenology should move beyond language itself! They say that the best representations of experience should be varied and multi-modal, using every means of expression available — from poetry to philosophical prose to painting and drawing to animation and music and film and virtual reality and beyond. The tyranny of linguistic expression may prevent us from understanding consciousness and may limit the expression of people who have talents outside writing. Perhaps we should even develop entirely new and unforeseen ways of expressing!
Stay away from these innovations. As the best thinkers have always said, adherence to tradition is the key to progress and Truth. Here, it’s important that you listen to The They. Let the Man tell you how to think. Don’t stray from the beaten path.
Go forth and obscure!
That’s enough for now. If you want to learn more about how to be a shit phenomenologist, I’d recommend reading as much obscurantist writing as you can find and copying the technique. Above all, remember, don’t focus on your own experience in the present moment — constantly engage in rampant metaphysical conjecture & abstraction. Make sure to stay away from the things-in-themselves!