In my understanding of Husserl is that he is saying that all conscious acts start and end with the subjective experience of the experience of those conscious moments of time. Narratives which define our collective understanding of objective categories such as physics, mathematics, politics, engineering, etc, are tools with which an individual can understand something which they didn't understand before.

However, what they understand is not an object in the objective world. It is an eidetic object in the reader's mind which they identify with a world of objects, this one known to some specific degree of feeling of familiarity or not, which lowers or raises the parameter of probability of being right about this thing.

Nowhere in that experience of the world, and the experience of learning about the world through narrative, can the reader actually experience the objective world as such. The objective world, the world that is "real" and "right" and "one thing for all people" is always only an idea that a subjective individual has.

This is the difference between considering the world as an objective world, specifically, we see ourselves as an object "in" a physical space and time world, and the importance of ordering the world around me, is to see myself as an object, in a world of objects. This is what Husserl refers to as the "Natural Attitude".

The subjective experience of consciousness is enacted by acts of consciousness (Noesis, or Noetic Acts) which are intended to (directed) towards the mental images of objects, which Husserl referred to as Eidetic (known through inner sight is how I think of that) objects. These are the Noema. The object as meant, as intended, in several senses of intention.

In a subjective world, we are not first an object, but first an agent, in a field of agency. We have a local model of the world, but we are corporeal, so when we act, we are acting on a corporeal world. When I see what I have done, I understand what it means to me, what it is I have changed in the world, and remember it subjectively, understand it subjectively.

And it is critical for the subjective to understand it is ontologically defined at only one point, through the corporeal unquestionableness of Here and Now. The corporeal is necessarily distinct but required for the Subjective to have ontological actuality, and the Objective can only be ontological through the imagination of the Subjective, Here and Now (The ontological moment).

I was confused until I discovered Husserl's Phenomenology in grad school, 1982. I spent years mostly writing in my notebook working out ways to explain how the primacy of subjectivity must guide the construction of each person's limited understanding of what the objective world is. Husserl's lifeworld inspired my view of three worlds, insisting that the corporeal world, the physical world which our senses can detect, and the experimentally accessible world which our instruments can measure. It is NOT the "objective world" as such, which only actually includes the intersubjective record of individual experiences rendered into text, which in itself must be read, sentence by sentence.

This article makes broad connections between the three worlds and why subjectivity is the container for any of it. All of it. The objective world is at best only ontological as seen from the vantage of a subjective being, Here and Now from a corporeal body. Awareness cannot be doubted, it is even necessary for the doubt, and with the primal impression (the now), retention (the just-passed), and protention (the upcoming) creating the experienced conscious flow of life.

What you may not be aware of and which should surely interest as a member of r/phenomenology is the fact that Gödel threw himself into the study of Husserl's phenomenology deeply, prepared a lecture that he never delivered, and write volumes of notebooks full of his own struggle to use symbols to describe the limit of what symbolic reasoning can deliver regarding mathematical intuition (what Husserl had called "Categorical Intuition"). A list of references on Gödel at the end of the article would be useful to look up work that did not even begin to be published until 1994. Here's just that list:

• Kurt Gödel, “The modern development of the foundations of mathematics in the light of philosophy” (written c. 1961, undelivered; first published in Collected Works, Vol. III, ed. Feferman et al., Oxford University Press, 1995)
• Kurt Gödel, “What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?”, 1964 supplement (in Collected Works, Vol. II) — mathematical intuition as a kind of perception
• Kurt Gödel, Max Phil notebooks — private philosophical remarks in Gabelsberger shorthand, in the Nachlass; transcription ongoing
• Hao Wang, A Logical Journey: From Gödel to Philosophy (MIT Press, 1996) — the Leibnizian monadology made exact via phenomenology
• Mark van Atten & Juliette Kennedy, “On the Philosophical Development of Kurt Gödel,” Bulletin of Symbolic Logic 9, no. 4 (2003): 425–476
• Richard Tieszen, After Gödel: Platonism and Rationalism in Mathematics and Logic(Oxford, 2011)
• Kurt Gödel and Gödel’s Turn to Phenomenology, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — accessible starting points

I just wanted to say how grateful I am for this community. It has been a remarkably kind and welcoming place to study and discuss phenomenology, and many of our conversations have enriched my work more than you probably realize.

Wishing you all the very best. Thank you for your generosity and thoughtful discussions. 💝💝💝

If anyone is interested in the phenomenology of psychedelic ego dissolution see here for a critique of the recent paper by Dan Zahavi and Jason Day https://open.substack.com/pub/dannytheforde/p/phenomenology-of-psychedelic-ego?r=1dut79&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

I'm pretty much in agreement with them but think phenomenological realism offers a fuller and more coherent explanation with all the ontological costs up front and accounted for.

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Moran is more expansive but has more pages, not sure if that means anything though?

In Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit, Blankenburg describes psychosis as a loss of the natural evidence underlying all experience of the world. The patient ceases to inhabit the tacit familiarity of the Lebenswelt, the prereflective ground that normally sustains intentional life and worldly orientation.

With that in mind, I wonder whether psychosis introduces a problem for transcendental phenomenology itself.

In the late Husserl of the Krisis, the reduction seems to become less a suspension of the world and more a thematization of the Lebenswelt as the forgotten ground of meaning (if I understand it correctly). But what happens when that ground is itself disrupted? If the familiar world loses its self-evidence, can we still speak of the transcendental subject constituting experience in the usual sense? Or does Blankenburg’s analysis suggest that the constituting subjectivity presupposes a certain degree of worldly familiarity that is itself fragile and not transcendentally guaranteed?

In other words: does the transcendental subject of Ideas I depend more deeply on an intact Lebenswelt than phenomenology initially assumes?

This would point toward a necessary shift from static phenomenology toward genetic and generative understanding.

The phenomenological tradition has a precise vocabulary for the layers of knowing that lie underneath propositional report. Merleau-Ponty on the body schema and the perceived world; Heidegger on the equipmental whole and being-in-the-world; Thompson and Di Paolo on enactive cognition; Gallagher on the body in social interaction. All of them converge on the claim that knowing is constituted by an agent's relation to a world they bodily inhabit. The current AI moment is a stress test for that tradition. LLMs produce text that imitates the outputs of participatory knowers without engaging any of the structures that make participatory knowing possible. The question is whether the imitation can ever amount to the real thing, or whether the gap is constitutive.

I recently gave a talk at the 6th International Conference on Philosophy of Mind in Porto applying the phenomenological frame to the LLM debate. You can watch it here.

The reading goes through four levels of knowing: propositional, procedural, perspectival, participatory. Propositional is what the table is. Procedural is how to ride a bicycle, with the live know-how the riding requires. Perspectival is the first-person take from inside a situation, with its solicitations and affordances. Participatory is the agent-environment coupling itself, the optimal grip the agent finds in moving through the world, the way one's existence is at stake in what one does. LLMs occupy the propositional layer, with statistically conditioned access to records of agents who knew in all four. The system has a map of our map, without the world the maps depict. This is the constitutive reading: meaning is grounded in the stakes of being embedded in the world, and a system with no stakes can produce fluent reference to meaning without instantiating any.

If the constitutive reading is right, the productive question is which thinkers in the tradition have done the most rigorous work on the irreducibility of participatory knowing to its propositional residue. Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are the obvious starts; Thompson and Di Paolo extend it into enactivism; Sheets-Johnstone has done work on the kinaesthetic ground of meaning. Where in the literature do you think the strongest argument for the irreducibility lives?

Why acknowledging the mind's co-authorship over objects isn't mysticism, but clear-eyed naturalism - just stripped of any forced dichotomy between mind and world.

Far from being ‘abstract’ philosophy with no real-world stakes, our intuitions about objects are load-bearing. Why? Because what strikes us as obvious at this crucial juncture cascades upwards to all of our other convictions about Reality. And not just through deliberate reasoning - those ideas and beliefs we can trace out, put a name to - but through what’s self-evident before thought even enters the picture.

I was working, loading trucks with heavy equipment. Autopilot task, mind figured out how to get it done, then kinda waited for the doing to be done. I got a call, guy said production line one changing products. I felt my imagination make a blob, a shadow maybe? A fuzzy thing in my awareness it tried to point in that direction. Breaking down, which line is which, what do I remember from this morning, where does that product get staged, all sorts of stuff adding on. Then a feeling maybe, "fuck that, remember that, use it when you need it." The blob disappeared and the chatter went quiet again. A sense of ease, then feeling of a "WTF was that?" Is there a name for that sort of thing?

Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask this sort of stuff.

I'm reading the Poetics of Space and really enjoying it. I'm wondering if anyone with fluency in French might illuminate the distinction between 'image' and 'metaphor' - I'm not totally seeing it and wondering if there is something lost in translation for me.

I am basically functioning in a bubble, I have no academic background or clique to discuss ideas. I have no functional idea of what's appropriate in an academic space, yet I am looking to contribute to a broader conversation (for my own benefit of engaging ideas). I have a "paper" that exploded into seven, collapsed into three, and oscillates so. It is inter-disciplinary which *seems* like a complication for engagement and there is still much work to do. What I am wondering is, when is it really appropriate to share a preprint on a platform like philarchive?

I continually find more to improve; I am continually plagued with imposter syndrome (nothing new for me but impedes none-the-less); I am engaged in formalization while also trying to conquer producing productive phenomological accounts that don't read like personal diary entries.

This is my current abstract, for example (creatively extending Levinas with a universal exteriority):

This essay proposes a graded phenomenological framework in which the lived contradiction disclosed by outward-directed embodied gestures in the lived A-series “now” is the phenomenological access point to infinite exteriority. This contradiction does not merely point toward the infinite; it is the site at which infinite exteriority irrupts into the finite, analogous to the way Descartes’s finite thinker possesses an idea of the infinite that cannot originate from itself. Grade 1 primary traces are direct gestures that disclose irreducible dialetheia (true contradictions in Priest’s sense) satisfying three criteria: structural disclosure, logical irreducibility, and overlapping gestural demand. These differ from Grade 0 raw disclosure and Grade 2+ anticipatory simplifications, with the contradiction of existence at the center. The framework isolates violence of the Third as a distinct non-totalizable disclosure (mode b) forced structurally by plural exteriority within otherwise pure Grade 1 gestures. Ethics as first philosophy consists in perpetual return to Grade 1 gestural sufficiency.

I sometimes stumble on different sect/schools/threads of phenomology that makes it harder to distinguish and find a cohesive lens of phenomology. The phenomology thought in philosophy majors are entirely different, used differently and applied differently than those of psychology or other field. And yet they are all called phenomology. 🙄

Hey there!

I’ve been reading bits of Husserl over the years (I’ve read The Crisis, parts of Ideas I and reading Dan Zahavi’s book now), but I find myself still struggling with what phenomenology actually ‘does’. I can grasp the theoretical implications and ideas, but lack insight into what ‘doing phenomenology’ actually looks like, seeing phenomenology happening. So, my question is whether any of you could point me towards some of Husserl’s works where I can find examples of him of him doing phenomenology in practice? (What I am looking for is probably in his notebooks as well?)

Thank you in advance for any recommendations!

I’m working on a paper on Merleau-Ponty that requires all quotes to be in the original French. I don’t know French and have no French copies of his work. I figured this sub was my best bet— can anyone help me locate some of my quotes in the original French texts? I need help with The Visible and the Invisible, Nature, and The Possibility of Philosophy. Thanks so much!!!!

I’ve developed a speculative model in not claiming it as science or established fact. I’m trying to find out whether it is internally coherent and serious enough to refine further. Would you be willing to read a short statement of the model and tell me whether it stands up conceptually?

A is the primary awareness-anchor. B is a loved one’s high-affinity consciousness-viewpoint. High-affinity is the degree of relational and perceptual compatibility between A and B that renders B preferentially accessible to A as a consciousness-viewpoint. A can remain anchored in itself while perceiving through B without becoming B. When B has a visual on A, A observes A through B. Under this condition, A, when viewed through B as a high-affinity consciousness-viewpoint, appears only in higher-dimensional form. A therefore appears not as an ordinary body-image, but as light shadow or light projection, which is the appearance of A in higher-dimensional form within ordinary perception.