NOEMAYA

I have written several posts on the topic of phenomenological reduction, each aiming at emphasizing one or another aspect of this obscure meditation method within Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy. It is the single, most fascinating obsession of my life and a method hardly understood let alone carried out by many philosophers. Though developed and introduced by Husserl himself, it is in the works of his assistant Eugene Fink that we see a relatively adequate description of this method and its significance for genuine philosophical groundwork. So, this post is mostly a commentary on Fink’s various attempts at showing to the world what phenomenological reduction really is.

In short, phenomenological reduction, which is said to be made up of two logical moments of phenomenological epoche and reduction proper, is a method by which the philosopher is able to suspend the thesis of natural attitude as outlined in a previous post. It is a matter of suspending all beliefs in and commitments to what Fink calls “the mundane-ontological self-understanding of the spirit.” The result is pure seeing.

Phenomenological reduction is unfortunately not grasped in its radicalness. I have spoken with students and even professors of phenomenology about my personal experience with the reduction, and they look at me simply baffled and dismissive. This is of course not due to any lack of intelligence or willingness on their part but rather due to the extremely radical nature of the reduction and its ineffable nature for those who have not performed it yet.

Eugene Fink himself in the article “What Does the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl Want to Accomplish” says that even decades after Husserl’s death, there is no real understanding of his phenomenology. He adds, “The contemporary judgment of the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl fails, without exception, to recognize its true meaning…. The authentic and central meaning of Edmund Husserl’s philosophy is today still unknown.”

As Fink elaborates in the same article, a true understanding of phenomenology can only be achieved after the performance of the phenomenological reduction. One who has not performed this liberating suspension of all beliefs, may engage in critiques and move on the sidelines of what phenomenology can offer, but they can never truly be a philosopher, for to philosophize is it access the ground-experience which results from a successful performance of the reduction.

Fink compares the world prior to the performance of the reduction to Plato’s allegory of the cave: all our pre-scientific and scientific, philosophical endeavors prior to the reduction is akin to the attempts of a man in the cave who sees and believes nothing but the shadows cast on the walls of the cave, oblivion to the real things and the light that’s animating the shadows from behind him. He’s chained and shackled in such a way that he can’t even fathom the possibility of realities apart from the shadows on the wall.

The central idea here is that the things that we experience, including our own human self, its history and its fundamental situatedness within a context, i.e. the world, are nothing but shadows compared to what’s truly real: they derive their sense of Being and reality from something else outside of the cave, from what Fink calls the Light-World. However, being chained to our mundane self-understanding, we falsely attribute reality and existence to these shadow-appearances. We are fundamentally oblivious to the possibility of the true dimension of Being. That’s why Fink argues that insofar as we see and interpret ourselves as humans in the world, we cannot break free from this beginingless imprisonment. Rather, we must turn away from the shadows and step outside the cave, a movement accomplished by the performance of the reduction, and this reduction which is a persistent abstention from belief needs to be performed from a deeper level of self than our human self which itself is nothing but a shadow.

To emphasize this point, Fink re-introduces the phenomenological reduction as a species of radical self-meditation, a radicalness that forces itself upon the spirit to transcend it’s mundane-ontological self-understanding as human. The result is direct, experiential access to the ground-experience in which the spirit sees itself precisely as such. Therefore, it becomes apparent that the phenomenological reduction cannot be an intellectual act of the human person or a mere mental exercise; it’s rather performed, as Husserl puts it, with man’s entire Being. According to Fink, “the phenomenological epoche is anything but a non-committal, merely theoretical, intellectual act; it is rather a spiritual movement of one’s self encompassing the entire man and, as an attack upon the state of motionlessness supporting us in our depths, the pain of a fundamental transformation down to our roots.”

However, the self-meditation in the phenomenological reduction is quite different from ordinary versions of self-meditation in much of philosophical thinking and spiritual practices. The self-meditation of reduction does not have the human person as its agent and ground. This self-meditation is a ground upon which the human self-apperception of the spirit is played out; it is not an occurrence in the world (in space and time) and situated among other existent things and events; it is instead a freeing of the gaze of the spirit after all ontological commitments and beliefs, those even about meditation, are dropped and faded out of view. Fink describes it as following:

“The seriousness demanded here wants nothing less than to expose the spirit to a ground-experience which will bring it back into the power of the essence that is purely proper to it. In the self-meditation radicalized into phenomenological reduction, the spirit should accomplish a movement toward itself, should come unto itself.”

In all our moments, whether we are running simple errands or are engaged in philosophical thinking and scientific research, the background and obvious fact of each moment of experience is that we are human beings existing in the world of existent entities. Even when we make ourselves and our mind the theme of reflection, we are still taking as belonging to us our thoughts and reflections, taking them as processes in the world. According to Fink, this finding of ourselves as humans in the world, is the primordial self-understanding the spirit from which we are never free. It belongs to in the nature of the spirit to first find itself in the world as an entity among other entities. It always begins by interpreting itself as enclosed by the cosmos, “imbedded in the infinite manifold of things, together with them in one space and in the one time, delivered over to the superior powers of nature, impotent in the face of the governing destiny; and in so orienting itself, the spirit understands and addresses itself as ‘man.’ Phenomenological reduction, as a movement behind this mundane-ontological self-understanding of the spirit, exposes the spirit to the ground-experience which is a leading away from the obviousness of this self-understanding.”

All philosophy, along with all of our sciences and religious-spiritual frameworks are attempts at grounding man in only the natural, all-too-human idea of the spirit. According to Fink, no such grounding is possible through mere thinking and reflection; rather, one must first access the ground-experience before all else in order to have an authentic experience of the spirit. In other words, true philosopher is one who has performed the phenomenological reduction and uncovered the essence of spirit in a concrete, living transcendental experience. In such exposure, the philosopher doesn’t find anything other than itself as this true ground; instead, he/she realizes that the true self and essence of the philosopher is itself the very ground of existence.

Philosophical and scientific inquiries are in fact movements away from the spirit in the sense that they entrench man deeper and deeper into a world-construct that is nothing but an abstraction to and derivative of our daily human mode of being. In doing science, whether by performing experiments or theorizing, the scientist still operates within the natural attitude, that is, he carries himself out as a human person, touching and manipulating his instruments, reaching out for the paper, looking around, analyzing, thinking, projecting, etc.. He never ceases engagement or steps out of the human mode of the spirit. Phenomenological reduction, on the other hand, is a vigorous and consistent abandonment of such attitude in favor of untangling the philosopher from the fabric of habitual thinking and the familiar world-horizon in which it finds himself.

The abstention from belief that constitutes the essence of the phenomenological reduction is more than simply suspending our human beliefs about being and the world; it’s not a thinking process or a human action. Even when we’re sitting back and reflecting on our experience or ideas of the self and the world, we are still engaged in the world. Even the most disengaged moment of human experience is still an engagement of the spirit because the spirit is still captive to the mundane-ontological self-interpretation as man: I am still apprehending myself as a reflecting man in the world even when I’m reflecting on or suspecting the validity of this very idea. Thus, the suspension of belief is not the suspension of human beliefs by the human agent but rather it is the suspension of the very belief in the idea that I am a human-being and trying to suspend my beliefs. The disengagement taking effect in the phenomenological reduction is not a human disengagement; it is the spirit’s disengagement from the human experience.

Here’s the enigma to be resolved in the performance of the phenomenological reduction: the world that I believe is containing my thinking about it within it, is itself something thought and contained within my thinking! So, which is more real and original?

Fink and Husserl have both emphasized that the phenomenological reduction is not a turning away from the world; it is rather a an abandonment of our familiar, human engagement with it so that we can see the world truly as is: the world as nothing but a phenomena of consciousness. According to Fink, the world as a totality of all being is nothing “but a moment of the Absolute.” However, in the human state, affairs are set up in the exact opposite manner so that spirit interprets itself and its life as a moment within the totality of being, i.e. as human. Therefore, phenomenological reduction is the spirit’s movement to free itself from the cave of its human self-interpretation and to see that the world in which it finds itself is in fact nothing but a moment within the spirit itself.

We have said much about the phenomenological reduction, and still more can be said about it, for it is at once the most difficult and the easiest task before us: it is the most difficult because our vision is so obscured that we can’t even conceptualize its possibility and grasp the direction of its movement; and it is the easiest, for it is something of the nature of an spontaneous seeing and doesn’t really involve any human action. Our goal is to devote the next post to further introduce the structure of the phenomenological reduction and give some direction as to how it’s actually performed.