Existential Musings, II

Our reading consisted of selections from Husserl's Phenomenology: Eternal Time Conscious, some of which is available on Google Books. I found myself arguing less with this selection than with the previous one.

“the duration of the sound apprehended in the now … constantly sinks back into the past and an ever new point of duration enters into the now or is now” Very nice, very zen. Recognition that this instant, this moment, is all we ever directly perceive.

“the further we withdraw from the now, however, the greater the blending and drawing together” The further we get from a particular moment, the more it blends into all the other moments surrounding it, blends in. For ordinary moments, perhaps, yet some moments can be brought to mind nearly as clearly as they were in the instant of experience. So there’s something missing in this formulation.

“the way in which we are conscious of it [the immanent Object] as actually present or as past” What about memory-objects that are so vivid that they almost seem to be present? What about hallucinations that occur in the present?

Interestingly, he hits on the idea of a time-cone, albeit from a different direction (and intention) than that of relativity (i.e. that our sphere of experience is limited by the speed of light, as is our sphere of influence: events can only radiate out from us at the speed of light): “every subsequent phase of running-off is itself a continuity, and one constantly expanding, a continuity of pasts.” Tangent: What is the speed of time? What do I even mean by that? Er, what determines how fast time passes? We know that gravity can slow time, as can any massive grouping of energy or mass. Yet in the near-absence of mass and energy, time doesn’t seem to speed up to infinitely fast: the opposite of it seeming to stop at the event-horizon of a black hole. Would it go to infinity in the complete absence of mass or energy or space? Would that mean nothing happening or everything happening all at once? Or something else entirely that I can’t begin to imagine?

“Since a new now is always presenting itself, each now is changed into a past, and thus the entire continuity of the running-off of the pasts of the preceding points movie uniformly ‘downward’ into the depths of the past.” Not to the Chinese. The Chinese language has the past “above” and the future “below.” So you descend through time, and the past rises behind you, as if going down a staircase. To be honest, I’ve tended to think of it more as flat, just moving straight along an axis in the t-direction. I wonder if the Chinese would want to orient the t-axis vertically, with the future down…

“It is not true that lengthwise along the flux each earlier retention is merely replaced by a new one, even though it is a continuous process. Each subsequent retention, rather, is not merely a continuous modification arising from the primal impression but a continuous modification of the same beginning point.” This is good. It is a good description of the way that memories can alter as they are maintained. At least, I’m assuming that “retention” is to be interpreted as “retention of a previous now”, i.e. “memory.”

Inquire Further

Relinquish

Phenomenology

There are things that I really like about phenomenology, things that I find strange, and things that make no sense to me. This post is mostly going to be me rambling about some of these.

The idea, as I understand it, is that the one thing 'I' can be certain of is that while I am experiencing X, I am experiencing X. Husserl seems to take it further, to say that I can be certain that I have experienced X if I can remember experiencing X. However, there is still the possibility of some sort of Last Thursdayism, and that my memories are false. This may be why Husserl spends a great deal of time discussing time, and the phenomenology thereof.

I also find it strange that language itself is "allowed" to be used. I mean, take a word, like "jar." What do I experience when I read that word? I see a series of shapes. Those shapes I experience as connected to a sound and to a meaning. Why? Why should those particular shapes connect to those particular sounds and that particular meaning? Ah... I just figured out what's been bugging me. There is no why in phenomenology. There is only the experience. There is only "what", and, possibly, "when" and "where". It provides no explanation.

That's not to say that it has no practical use. I can think of plenty of places where a phenomenological approach would probably improve things vastly (medicine comes to mind). But I don't like the tendency to treat it as a be-all and end-all in itself. It is very useful to recognize what you've actually experienced vs. what you have inferred/assumed/etc. about the experiences. It is not so useful, to my way of thinking, to assume that the experience you had is all that there really is. We were talking about experiencing the "stream of time" today in class, and a Zen quote kept coming to mind: "Jump into the river of time and swim, instead of standing on the banks and noting the currents!" (as best I remember the quote) Phenomenology seems to be a bit too enamored with watching the currents.

The funny thing is that there's a strong relationship between the phenomenological viewpoint (Husserl's Transcendental Subjectivity) and the eastern notion of detachment. Yet in the latter case, I feel no objection; it makes sense to me. The way it's been described thusfar, transcendental subjectivity seems too detached somehow, to the point that I just might understand why some people have trouble with the notion of detachment. It may just be that the language that Husserl uses makes his version seem colder. I'm not sure.

The other zen quote that kept coming to mind tonight (again, as best I remember it) was, "Before I gained enlightenment, mountains were mountains. While I was seeking enlightenment, mountains were not mountains. After I gained enlightenment, mountains were mountains again." Phenomenology seems to be in a "mountains may or may not be mountains" stage, of just reporting what the experience of some collection of sense-data labeled a "mountain" is like.

I think that's the last of my coherency on the subject for tonight.

Inquire Further

Relinquish