Phenomenology via Kupers per Merleau Ponty

With Merleau Ponty, per Kupers in the paper listed below, phenomenology undergoes a radical return to the body and to embodiment as the basic nexus of human living, where we always already are situated in meaningful inter-relationship.

Merleau-Ponty’s overall ambition was to disclose the roots of rationality and Being, through extending Husserl’s account of the ‘lived body’ to include a body that experiences and is experienced, thus overcoming Cartesian dualism. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is already lived, meaningful, relational and intentional.  He not only rejects referentialist-representationalism, following Heidegger, he builds an anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist, non-reductive ‘open media’ account of embodiment, rearticulating the relationship between subject and object.

Returning to the life-world and things themselves, for Merleau-Ponty, is going back to the way we experience before we begin to theorise. We are embodied as subjects into an inter-subjective and inter-objective continuum, an embedded existence. Interestingly, Kupers proposes that as unruly and unpredictable realities, per Merleau-Ponty, bodies themselves are de-centering, providing a less-than-perfect means of boundary building, for subjectivity.

We learn to move our bodies pre-reflectively, and thus there is a level of intentionality below our explicit acts, manifesting itself in bodily engagement that is our primary rapport with the world.

‘A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated itself into its world, and to move one’s body is to aim at things through it, it is to allow oneself to respond to their call’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1962)

An operative intentionality establishes and utilises secret bonds of correspondence and interdependency, which constitute our reciprocal involvements. The interaction thus inferred within an ever-present world frame opens up an orientation to a post-dualistic ontology in Merleau-Ponty’s late works. Seeing the pre-personal, the personal and the interpersonal as chiasmic, intertwined and reversible, we are allowed the possibility of understanding phenomena with greater profundity. The patterns of meaningful being and action exist neither in the mind nor in the external world, they are ‘in-between’, an inter-relationality of individual, social and trans-subjective practices.

‘Within this fleshly being the in-between is as ‘fullness of void’ understood as a creative and fulfilling emptiness.’

It is via this in-between, which is the birth place of intertwined individual identity, that we encounter social and inter-objective knowledge, realities and creative relationships. With this kind of relational ontology, a proto-integral interpretation becomes available, of phenomenology as precipitating a birth into an awareness easily identified as 'Integral'.

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research: Or Why Phenomenology Is More and Different than an ‘Upper Left’ or Zone #1 Affair. Integral Review, 5(1), 51 – 95. 

The Aim of Attention

'The goal of attention, or shamatha, practice is to become aware of awareness. Awareness is the basis, or what you might call the “support,” of the mind. It is steady and unchanging, like the pole to which the flag of ordinary consciousness is attached. When we recognize and become grounded in awareness of awareness, the “wind” of emotion may still blow. But instead of being carried away by the wind, we turn our attention inward, watching the shifts and changes with the intention of becoming familiar with that aspect of consciousness that recognizes Oh, this is what I’m feeling, this is what I’m thinking. As we do so, a bit of space opens up within us. With practice, that space—which is the mind’s natural clarity—begins to expand and settle. We can begin to watch our thoughts and emotions without necessarily being affected by them quite as powerfully or vividly as we’re used to. We can still feel our feelings, think our thoughts, but slowly our identity shifts from a person who defines him- or herself as lonely, ashamed, frightened, or hobbled by low self-esteem to a person who can look at loneliness, shame, and low self-esteem as movements of the mind.'

-Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Aim of Attention (Summer 2009)

http://www.tricycle.com/dharma-talk/the-aim-attention

The whole article was really worth it's easy reading....

Psychological Stepping Stones - Knowledge Through Appreciation Empowerment

This empowerment aims at assisting the student to feelingly envision, and envision feelingly, the dynamics of Being as the masculine-feminine ‘polarity’, as occuring in their rapturous lovemaking. She is given to understand the varying degrees of delight as they are blended within the body, as a multi-levelled system. The vision occurs between between rapture in ecstatic intensity, and the everyday-'I', and the idea is to give a tangible sensuous form through the vision, where the masculine and feminine address and disclose to each other their embodied sexuality:

‘Being’s coming to presence and being interpreted as world is the reification of it’s being in a supramundane world, where bliss reigns supreme, and in it

Being’s amorously frolicking pristine awareness triumphs as bliss supreme.

By engaging n the passionate desire between ‘activity’ and ‘appreciation’ emancipation is won; therefore you too

Engage and participate in this ceaseless amorous frolicking!

Therein lies bliss supreme.’

Both Being’s coming-to-presence and interpretation as an environing world and it’s organismic life forms in it’s totality, since time before time, are understood to have endured in what is it’s linear transformation of deiform energies, that presences itself in men and women. Their bonding in ‘activity' and 'appreciation’ expresses itself in bliss. By this bliss do we come to know the superthought-intentionality of the Victorious One (one’s own ecstatic intensity, identifiable as bliss supreme).

There is a symmetry break that marks Being’s open state coming-to-presence and actual radiant closed state, the envelope into which Being wraps itself as itself, it’s ‘ownmostness’. Because of it’s dynamics inherited from the virtual state, a further bifurcation takes place, into the realm of gods and goddesses. Any symmetry break implies an increase in complexity that carries with it the challenge to ‘get to the source or origin of it’. The feminine here plays a vital role (and here I had been trying to steer clear of feminist discourse, huh).

In her capacity of expressing and Being the expression of Being’s openness/nothingness, a spaciousness and a mystery, she is able to open up the unformed with it’s immense wealth of open possibilities or to offer value perception or appreciative awareness that is active as an inspiration and is revered in its role as ‘heroine’. The rousing of masculine activity in response, that is made to express itself in the four dynamic regimes of psychic energy interchange results in self-transcendence, in bliss supreme. Bliss supreme goes beyond the four postulates of existence and nonexistence, eternalism and nihilism, and thus is known as four delights (I love this!)

Through this empowerment the student is made to move not simply from one aspect ‘appreciative’ to another one ‘pristine awareness’ as if one was higher, but they learn to live, harmoniously, with both at the same time.

Perhaps showing either his own stripes or the stripes of the tradition he describes, Gunther here has identified ‘women’ (actually – I’ve interposed the term 'feminine' and stripped out the comment that is sort of chauvinistic) approximately as sex objects. In some way this is meant to be reconciled by a quote that he gives from the Klong-gsal (a Dzogchen text) which, is actually a quote I need to apply to my own self, objectified:

Despising a woman is tantamount to denigrating Being’s spaciousness,  and

Withdrawing yourself from pleasure you court the deepest hell.

With what value, and how deep goes, a commitment, to the self?

Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

Being's Holomovement

(Being having risen in it’s wholeness as a presence out of Being)

Because of it’s thereness as if it were some resonance
samsara and nirvana are an unbroken whole;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were light frequencies

everything that is going to come-to-presence is an inner lucency;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were some gestalt

the cognitive capacity does not lose itself in the extraneous;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were a pristine awareness everything

that is coming-to-presence is of an insubstantial-dissipative nature;

Because of it’s thereness as if it were non-dual

one’s cognitive capacity abides in it’s focusedness.

Because of it’s thereness as if it were free from perimeters

 it does not abide in any of the confines;

Because of it’s thereness as an impure gate
the emergence of an interpreted world never stops.

Because of it’s thereness as a pure pristine awareness gate, Being’s possibilising dynamics

expresses itself in the connectedness of a mother with her child.

Rin-chen spungs-pa - from 'The Sun's Life Giving Force' - Padma Legs-grub, 1608

Full title: 'The sun's life giving force or the explanation of the intrinsic meaning of the indestructible light that is the sublime and most mysterious and unsurpassable message of all spiritual pursuits.'

Who could walk past that tome on a bookshelf? :)

Psychological Stepping Stones - The Mystery Empowerment

For anyone reading this who might be familiar with Integral discourse on masculine and feminine ‘types’, I actually propose that the association between the masculine and feminine and emptiness and form identified in this empowerment, is orthogonal to the relationship as formed in Integral parlance.  It’s been mind-bending and beneficial, for me to spend time with this ‘upside-down’ version of the masculine feminine relationship – it feels similar to comparing the Hindu masculine passive feminine active divinities with the Western mythology’s masculine agency and feminine’s communion, for my money.

Using a skull filled with the ‘elixir of immortality’, this ritual uses the same four dynamic regimes of the body as the first, and aims at making the student experience the mystery of the creative forces that shape both her biological existence plus the existence of the universe.

Overflowing bliss supreme, self-existent, this skull is

Brimful  with the mutual passion rinsed of the pseudoconcrete.

My dear child of the highest life form, empowered by it

May you come to possess the power over these same forces as they organise themselves into their breeze like movement in a coherent web of chreods.

The bliss supreme is given to arise in the downward flow of creative fluids that are purer than pure in the masculine and feminine aspects of Being’s self existent pristine awareness.  The description by Gunther includes a sense that the power that ‘organises itself’ is genetic material, and it is a component of the lucency of Being’s ownmostness. This has an enduring vibration that represents a paradox - colourlessness versus the full-colour spectrum, one virtual, the other actual. Thus Being becomes, through vibrations. Becoming is directionless, having no endpoint beyond it's own expression. This spectrum is felt in the heart, the ‘tsitta’ palace.

The projective character of Being’s ownmostness sets up a boundary of vibrationary patterns which may be understood as a kind of spatialisation. It is referred to as the self-informing, self organising dynamics of Being’s ownmostness as pure light. Immense and rare beauty radiates from here.

While space-and-time binding here are non-linear, the phase is referred to as the self-organising dynamics of Being’s luminescence into the complementarity and inseparability of masculine and feminine. It is intensely felt as a cognitive dynamic in the immediacy of experience, as a complementarity/inseparability of Being’s openness/nothingness with it’s lighting up/coming to presence. Lighting up is seen as a masculine intensity, and openness-nothingness is the feminine intensity. Precisely because the feminine is spacious like the sky, openness-nothingness is the very possibilising dynamic of Being. The masculine lighting up in all it’s bright brilliance adorns the possibilising dynamic (the feminine) which would literally otherwise be nothing.

The mutualising passion in the intimate embrace antedates any materialisation in any other phase of the system’s dynamics. In Dzogchen it is so clear, here, there is no rigid separation between the psychic and the physical, and there is no Western battle, between them – rather they give themselves to each other, in imaginative, total, playful abandonment.

The masculine and feminine creative dynamics may be conceived of as an instability phase, where the system is about to undergo a symmetry ‘break’ that becomes the way of self-actualisation. This way composes of two information carriers, called:

‘information carrier in the service of building up one’s commonly accepted physical reality’ and 

‘information carrier in the service of maintaining one’s spiritual heritage’.

The latter resides in the light chreods, as an effulgence that by virtue of it’s own motility evolves into a web of pristine awareness modes fed by ‘the sea of bliss supreme’ as the ultimate organising principle.

Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

Psychological Stepping Stones - The Flask Empowerment

Five flasks are used to symbolise the washing away of dross that has accumulated to make an individual blind to her own potential.  There is the evolution of the mandala, or a spiral movement involved in the empowerment process, where the starting point is identical with the ending result – each flask illustrates the interdependence or correspondence with the structure and function of the flask.

To start, the flask in the center is lifted above the initiate’s head and a drop of water serves to cleanse the dynamic regime. The first utterance is pronounced at the same time:

This flask of Being’s possibilising dynamics in it’s field-like expanse

Is filled with the natural water of Being’s openness/nothingness radiance

My dear child, being empowered by it

May you understand the abidingness of the field-like expanse.

The field-like expanse is the source of all meanings.

The next, eastern-point flask is raised to the initiate’s heart, representing the mental/spiritual dimension, with the words:

This flask of Being’s vitalising core intensity that is something not born, thus that will not die

It is filled with the natural substance of it’s incessantness.

My dear child, being empowered by it

May you understand Being’s reality in not posing any danger.

This is the dynamic of the mirror-like pristine awareness mode.  The vibrant dimension of pure experience that is without birth and open like the sky, an ecstatic intensity that does never cease, this is the presencing of Being’s pure actuality. This complementarity and indivisibility of the field and it’s excitation as experience is what is meant and is illustrated by the flask and the water in it. Gunther highlights that via the establishing of a relationship between subjective, inner reality and objective, outer reality, access to a holistic and self-consistent reality is gained.

The next, southern-point flask is lifted to the throat, symbolising the dynamic regime of the linguistic, symbolic:

This flask of Being’s self-existing pristine awareness in action

Is filled with the natural substances of objects and sensuous pleasures.

My dear child empowered by it

May you come to possess the power of your thoughts, becoming spontaneously realised.

This empowerment consists in exploring the wealth of qualities the world holds, a venturing into what has always been there, but has been un-noticed, in being there. From this vantage point, all that we ever need is available to us, and everything that comes into existence must be consistent with itself and everything else.

Gunther notes here the sheer ecstasy that intensifies, with each level of the initiation.

At which point I must admit - I’m so easily carried, on words.  :-)

The next western-point flask is raised to the navel – for the dynamic regime of the person’s physical/physiological dimension, which has been set acourse by the sexual act in excitement, plateau, climax and resolution, the whole of which has a physical and a spiritual dimension.

This flask, of Being’s impassibility, that is not something that has been born,

Is filled with the streaming profusion of bliss supreme

My dear child, being empowered by this

May you come to possess the power of a passion that is not subjectively appropriated.

This empowerment takes us to bliss supreme, which is the impassibility of pure experience that is without birth but has been so since time before time.  The fundmental forces moving through the hierarchically organised dynamic regimes shifts energy, from descending into details, to ascending into enriched meaningfulness, as well as damming up the psychospiritual potential, which is the bliss supreme.

The process ends in pure creativity at the northern-most point, extending over all levels and establishing it’s own dynamic dimension, with the words:

This flask symbolising Being’s pristine awareness in its insubstantiality

Is filled with the substances of the five kinds of motility that never stop.

My dear child being empowered by it

May you come to possess the power of Being’s superb creativity, in all it’s completeness.

What is meant here is illustrated in the complementarity/indivisibility of the flask and the water, the vibrant dimension of the in-substantiability of Being’s pristine awareness as a function of it’s ecstatic intensity, that acts in ultimate emancipation, since time before time.

There is a subtle distinction, threaded through here, between understanding and possessing. The possibilising dynamics of the whole mirrors itself in us, and we are now called upon to act out the possibilities of what we see, so that they become our assets in the true sense of the word. The power which is our attention is drawn by the empowerments, and roused into self-realisation we possess and then understand, in, and of, ourselves.

Outwardly, by having acquired and possessing the power of experiencing, this enables us to symbolically recreate the presencing of the condition of dissolving into supramundane reals;

Inwardly, by having acquired and possessing the power of experiencing the ‘phantasmal’ body, the material concretisation of beliefs about one’s body dissolve into sheer lucency;

Arcanely, by having acquired and possessing the power of oneself as Being’s vastness and ecstatic intensity, the trend of being divided against oneself and slipping into mistaken identifications stops by itself.

The empowerment seeks to effect a transition from the narrowly circumscribed, nonimaginative discursive mind to a place of lowering of conceptual restraints, releasing into emancipatory dynamics. Imagination is indispensible for coming to an understanding of the self, in the perception of a gestalt structure, embodying a meaningfully organised experience. The cognitive principle is immanent, not in a solid spatial structure, but in the way the system organises, renews and resolves. The meaning rich gestalt, in own-space, ends us where we started.

In Being’s core intensity that is Being’s superdiaphaneity that has no name

There is neither possession nor non-possession.

Non-understanding gives rise to duality.

Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

Psychological Stepping Stones - Introduction

There are a series of subtle-body noticings that come with working through the four Dzogchen empowerments, as translated here by Herbert Gunther in Chapter 5 of 'Meditation Differently'.

I have no claim, whatsoever, on any Dzogchen lineage. I have this book, a reverence, and some attention that I'm training my will upon. This book has helped deepen my appreciation for exactly what initiation, or empowerment, can liberate. I do not claim in any way that there is a spiritual athleticism, to be practiced, in working through these four stages of empowerment, simply by reading these words, strengthening visualisation processes, and spacing out the stages, across time. I only have the record of what went on, for me, when I worked through this material.

Gunther highlights the empowerment journey as progressing from the external to the internal, and from the arcane to the super-arcane. Linearity, however, definitely doesn't apply, in this work.

The purpose of the empowerments is to mobilise the individual's inner potential and have it mature into what is best described as that individual's autonomy as an expression and a measure of their relations with their environment. There is a liberation, in the growth of cognitive capacity in emancipation from organismic and representational restrictions. It's highest expression would then be what has been termed the ec-static intensity as it becomes experienced in it's pristine awareness modes [italics mine].

'the river of the empowering force that is nothing else but
    the beingness of Being;
the river of the empowering force that is
     self existing resonance;
the river of the empowering force that is
      the five pristine awareness modes;
the river of the empowering force that is the five gnosemes
      the dominant figures in the prototypes of conscious life.' p 50.

These rivers are associated with developmental lines that constitute the dynamic body image, ranging from the affective-organismic to the spiritual and ecstatic.

An individual finds themselves always already in a social context. In this place, interaction and communication are constitutive of the individual, and evoke corresponding processes, when shared. Ritual is a kind of social language that serves to symbolise social communication.

In the first of the the initiatory processes, a flask of water is used, to symbolise purification, a restoration and recognition of an individual's highest potential. The Dzogchen thinker's realm is Being's abidingness. This endogenous pristine awareness has central dynamics that are already 'on the move' - a mandala or spiral movement that starts from the whole, of Being's spontaneity. In it's movement it forms a socio-human reality that is itself a process of uncovering a universe in which the human individual is being disclosed to an understanding of her being.

'The outer is but inner, raised to a state of mystery' - Novalis

The formative outer phase is the activity configurational setting, that is a reflection as the way [italics mine]. The empowerments are imaged as occurring in the mandala of the process structure that is the self presentation of Being to itself, by way of symbolic re-creation, in the uniquely singled out cognitive space of the experiencer's whole multi-levelled body awareness. This self sensing process reflexively instantiates itself via:

1) Sense-perceptions - iterative feedback between outer and inner world where we continously re-cast and re-mold our experience of reality;
2) intensification of the sense-perception process.

Before initiation it is vital that the student learn to see themselves fresh, with new eyes. To see things as meanings. Transformative vision applies equally to household utensils as it does to the conch, a mirror, a lute, fruits and a scarf (symbols of sensuous pleasures). Transformative vision applies also to fellow household members. Five flasks with five scarves symbolising the complementarity of male/female aspects of the protopatterns of synergetic consciousness are arranged at the five expected points. Learning to see household members on the energetic level sees these scarves become vital identifiers, the territory of gods and goddesses.

The gate opens, the sweat begins. :)


Ref:

Gunther, H. (2005). Meditation Differently. India: Shri Jainendra Press.

'Monks, one thing, if practiced and made much of, conduces to great thrill, great profit, great security after the toil, to mindfulness and self-possession, to the winning of knowledge and insight, to pleasant living in this very life, to the realization of the fruit of release by knowledge. What is that one thing? It is mindfulness centered on the body.'

The Buddha, Anguttara Nikaya

Phenomenology - a Mahamudra followup

I'm listening my way through some old Integral Naked/Integral Life recordings at the moment. One of these recordings is of Ken Wilber and Patrick Sweeney, discussing the Fourth Turning of the Dharma Wheel.


Patrick Sweeney is the lineage holder of the Karma Kagyü lineage, given by the Vidyadhara, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche. He is also the head of Satdharma—meaning "genuine dharma"—a Buddhist organization created with the purpose of propagating Chögyam Trungpa's unique transmission.

What does this have to do with phenomenology? I hear you, my beloved reader, mutter.

Patrick describes the Trikaya (three bodies) of Mahamudra in a way that I find a little more convincing than the parallel to the Christian Trinity that Wilber constructed in this conversation. (This is likely to be completely my own contraction - I have trouble identifying the Christian Father, an active creator principle, with, or as, the Ground of Being, which is the way that Wilber frames the Dharmakaya, here).

Patrick gives a different version of the essences of the trikaya. He describes that in the buddhadharma our human condition is fundamentally sane, and fundamentally, always already, pristine. Consciousness is always already open, spacious in dharmakaya, it is luminous and clear in cognitive lucidity as the sambhogakaya,  and is endlessly responsive and contactable in the nirmanakaya. 

What intrigued me about the interview was the 'veils' that he talks about, operating over the dharmakaya to create a subject, and the sambhogakaya to create an object, which then creates action, in the nirmanakaya. This is a contraction of our fundamental, open, spacious state, identified as a great tragedy in the Mahamudra tradition. We're considered to be stuck in a bad habit - continuously ignoring the lucidity, the pristine state, of our own minds, and we get caught thus in the 84,000 conflicting emotions.

I was struck by how antithetical this was to the use of the terms subject and object in my phenomenology readings of earlier today - how the subject and object in phenomenology actually operate as a clarifier at the level of second order reflexive experience, allowing the differentiation of this-that. Definitely not a veil.

Neither abject in spirituality, nor absorbed within transcendental philosophy, she moves in a forgotten soul.

Phenomenology via Kupers (Definitions)

Transcendental  - in the Kantian sense means an investigation concerned with the ways objects are experienced, as well as the a priori conditions for the possibility for such experience and knowledge. Transcendental phenomenology focuses on the way things are given. For Husserl this means focusing on phenomena and the meanings that they have for us, and asking how these meanings are constituted. Constituted does not mean fabricated – the mind does not fabricate the world. To constitute means to bring to awareness, to disclose. Transcendental phenomenology attempts to reconstruct the structures that are underlying and making possible these constitutive achievements.

Epoche – (literally astention) is borrowed from the Greek skeptics to refer to the questioning of assumptions in order to fully examine a phenomenon. By suspending our beliefs, we are open to new experiences, we allow the object of our experience to present itself to us in new form.

Bracketing –the differential setting aside of a portion of an inquiry, so as to look to the whole. Natural attitude is set aside so that the researcher may begin with the things themselves.

Phenomenological reduction – the consideration of the basic elements of an enquiry, without concern for what is accidental or trivial. The idea of ‘Ruckfuhrung’ –drawing back from what appears to how it shows itself re-flects the inquiry from a straightforward orientation, towards consciousness. The aim of reduction is to re-achieve a direct and primitive contact with the world rather than conceptualise it. What is left over is pure transcendental ego as opposed to the concrete empirical ego. The reduction to the sphere of immanence can then be followed in heuristic, hermeneutic reduction. Methodologically this is the movement from fact to essence via eidetic reduction.

Eidetic reduction – a shift to consider things not as realities but as instances of realities, as pure possibilities rather than actualities. It is proposed that in this way essences – universal and unchangeable structures- can be determined. For Husserl, this second reduction was necessary to meet the demands of empirical, rigorous, science.

Husserlian transcendental phenomenological reduction therefore follows the Kantian notion of transcendental consciousness, the creation of time awareness through protention and retention, insomuch as self-constitution. Only based on realisation of this process of sedimentation through time can a person make their comportment transparent.

Eidos – there is free variation or imagined variation of a reduced thing to a common eidos, or variation that changes. These variations can be put into the service of analysis – seeing aesthetic forms, manifesting empathy, improvisation through now-ness and so on. It is through these multiple variations that an ‘Aha!’ arises, a vision which connects the structures and that carries the force of conviction.

Lebenswelt (life world) – the world as it is lived and experienced by conscious subjects – the world where we share knowledge which is useful for our ‘daily practices’ and our ‘daily circumstantial truths’.

Ref:

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research, Integral Review, 5 (1), 51-95. 

Phenomenology via Kupers (1)

Because I’m but a novice in both phenomenology and Integral Theory, these series of posts will present more of a summary than a critical analysis of Wendlin Kupers’ paper (reference below).

 This post summarises the first part of the paper, up to reviewing Husserlian phenomenology.

In this paper Kupers distinguishes a role for phenomenology that is broader than the role typically ascribed to phenomenology in the AQAL (all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, all types) models developed by Ken Wilber. Typcially, in describing the ‘domains of knowing’ that are the ground of the AQAL approach  to human consciousness, Wilber presents subjective, objective, intersubjective and interobjective means of discourse as the four critical, and valid perspectives that must be considered in an all-encompassing framework of consciousness. Phenomenology is located in the subjective, or upper-left quadrant, in these models.

Kupers begins with an examination of Husserlian phenomenology, to move onto examining phenomenology via an inter-subjective lens.  The work of Merleau-Ponty is reviewed to assess the possibilities for remedy for not only limitations to earlier models of phenomenology, but also for remedy of limitations with respect to integral theory, itself. Finally, Kupers offers an approach called ‘pheno-practice’ which seeks to enhance integral research in an empirical way.

Phenomenology is introduced by Kupers as per Merleau-Ponty’s definition as a flexible and vivid way of inquiry, which consistently explores new ways of reasoning.  Phenomenology deals with the appearances of things, specifically ‘things that appear in human experience’.  This is not only a realism, it is a reasoned enquiry as to the appearances in consciousness that humans encounter. Phenomenon means ‘that which reveals itself’ – and as per Heidegger, phenomenologists typically seek to let a thing speak for itself.

Phenomenology therefore examines the content of our consciousness (it’s meaning) and also the way that we perceive things (how we know). Phenomena in this way are not located in a theoretical nexus, but an embedded personal and cultural context. As personal, a phenomenological account is also a subjective account.

Husserl introduced a process called ‘bracketing’ in an attempt to overcome the Cartesian divide between subject and object, and to set aside psychologism, historicism and scientism to explore the subjective  position. In this way the objective world is ‘proved’ through subjective account – ontology becomes epistemology.

Per Kupers, Husserl tried to investigate the formal qualities of reality which human beings become aware of in experience. He was searching for a way to uncover the experiencing of phenomena in their most primordial roots of pre-reflective consciousness to their exemplification in science. Correspondingly, a phenomenologist distinguishes between how phenomena are experienced (noesis) from how they appear in a subject’s awareness (noemata), distinguishing structures of consciousness from essences. Thus does phenomenology examine objects, and how we relate to these objects, as a content of consciousness.

Following Brentano, Husserl explored intentionality as the notion that consciousness is always oriented to things in the world – consciousness always being of or about something or someone. The mode of directing our consciousness to something is distinct from what is represented – consciousness reaches out beyond it’s own acts to the phenomena (otherwise known as the anti-representationalist stance).  In this way, objectivity of things is co-constituted by structures that have meaning value.

What we observe in phenomenology is not the object itself, but how it is given in intentional acts.

Transcendental phenomenology becomes the study of the basic components of the meanings that are made possible by intentionality – as accomplished by transcendental subjectivity. In phenomenology, we are not concerned with situating consciousness within a naturalistic framework – rather consciousness arises within an overarching transcendental dimension, with non-psychological reflection. There is no otherworldly homunculus – the empirical subject and the transcendental subject are but two ways of conceiving the same subjectivity. In the first one is aware of oneself as causally determined known object, in the other we are aware of ourselves as knowing subjects, at the limit of the world.

For phenomenology, to know essences, all assumptions about the existence of the external world must be suspended. We do this by bracketing – framing out the ubiquitous background of everyday life. A personally or socially significant phenomena is investigated as an experience, not as a conceptualisation.

Phenomenological methodology includes techniques of epoche, bracketing, reduction and free variation (see ‘Phenomenology Definitions’ post, to follow). These become the cornerstones of suspended judgement, necessary for phenomenological inquiry. For Husserl a methodological freeing from culturally prevalent habits of thought brought a ‘new universal direction for our interest’, which he compared to spiritual conversion.

‘By consciously investigating the phenomena of life that we habitually take for granted, the world changes before our eyes and reveals the mysterious lining of the all embracing world horizon and the entwining of each thing with universal being. The world then becomes the universal field into which all our experiencing, understanding and doing are directed. To investigate the relational structure of consciousness and meaning of this plenum of the world as they reveal themselves to reflective consciousness became the task of phenomenology ever since Husserl.’ (p. 58)

Naive unexamined experience is thus transformed into a reflexive or second-order one, a one made more vivid in highlighting consciousness to itself.

As a transcendental philosophy, Husserlian phenomenology is interested in possibility conditions and foundations for knowledge moreso than psychological process. It tries to uncover the invariant formal principles by which consciousness operates in order to be constitutive. After investigation, the intuited object is communicated beyond private ascertainment, usually via language or symbolic inscription. The description however is a constitutive part of the phenomenological approach and is accepted to shape experience as much as the experience shapes the distinction. We are not talking about an ‘encoding’, rather an ‘embodiment’ that incarnates precisely what we experience. For Husserl, the objective truths of science must be recognised as grounded in living acts of human consciousness in relation to worldly phenomena. Man and world are first and foremost in relation – only at the second level, the reflective level of logic do we divide subject and object into separate entities.

The life-world is the ground of established scientific activity, the place where common-sense phenomena become the object of investigation.  Modern science to an extent conceals the life world under scientific representations. Life-worldly phenomena has intersubjective and socio-cultural relationship, and in this way can be seen to extend outside of Wilber’s upper left quadrant in the AQAL framework.

Ref:

Kupers, W. (2009). The Status and Relevance of Phenomenology for Integral Research, Integral Review, 5 (1), 51-95.  

Re-thinking the Enlightenment - Susan Neiman

Listening to Philosophy Bites recently, I was intrigued by an interview with Susan Neiman, Director of the Einstein Forum, who proposes that we have yet to fully and deeply appreciate and reconcile the values introduced to our culture, apropos The Enlightenment.

She uses much 'we' language in the interview - I like this, in this context, because by virtue of it she hands us back the responsibility, as Westerners, to examine how, and why, Fundamentalism becomes attractive to some people in a liberal culture. She asks us to examine what we of progressive Western values have done to provoke conservative response - to consider is it possible that part of what is sought in Fundamental movements is an attempt retrieve something more than what materialistic late capitalism provides. By establishing that this is the case, we can start to review what might be sought in terms of values by those that orient to conservative modes of being and dialectic.

She then prods and pokes the Enlightenment, to reveal four robust values that may have self-transformative potential, and thus may have been undervalued, in our rush away from the perceived emphasis on reason, to the exclusion of all other modes of knowing, in unfortunate by-products of the aftermath (ha!) of the Age of Rationalism.

Firstly, Neiman proposes we re-visit happiness - to look at the relativism with which it might be considered, but to not capitulate to that relativism. By this means, we can know that 'money does not but happiness', and we can be prevented from projecting happiness into a Golden Age in the past or the Heavenly future. Self-criticism may ask that we intervene on behalf of others, to fully express our own happiness - happiness is not an end-state passive consumption, but an active principle of giving back to the world.

The second Enlightenment value she asks that we look at is reason - not the caricatured emotionless, passionless version of reason, rather the opposition to blind authority that reason can represent. The Enlightenment asks in the public sphere that we jsutify and argue about our reasons in a transparent way.

The third value is reverence - the Enlightenment may have been against institutionalised religion, but the demand to ethically think for yourself is at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, and Neiman leans on this to present a reverence through the principle of understanding - a seeking to engage, in awe of, and in gratitude extended to, that which we seek to know. Whatever the world is, we know that we did not make it, and Neiman proposes that this recognition may indeed be a reconciling factor between the secular and the religious.

The final value is hope. In necessary industrial progress, no century was more concerned with the existence of evil - they made fun of optimism (as per Voltaire's Candide) but they did believe that human beings could lend effort to improve the world. 300 years ago it was standard for people to be drawn and quartered in the centre of town, with tickets sold. Torture, in this form, was abolished, and intriguingly, we have it back now. The Enlightenment offered regression, at the same time as progress, and the existence of both of these principles, simultaneously, is something worthwhile to consider in light of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the power of certain individuals in power. She comes out as rejecting pessimism as cowardly, and proposes that in light of the chance for human action to make a difference, we become responsible for ourselves, and others.

The interview was more interesting to listen to than I seem to have made it sound here. I think, partly, I'm a little bit in love with the reactionary idea, that the Enlightenment has more crunchy goodness in it than we've extracted from our historical Caesar Salad, yet.

Intercept of Time and Timelessness

From TS Elliot's 'Dry Salvages':

'Men's curiosity searches past and future

And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend

The point of intersection of the timeless

With time, is an occupation for the saint--

No occupation either, but something given

And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,

Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time.'