NOEMAYA

In the first article about the Phenomenological Reduction, we laid out the idea that it is a species of self-meditation of the most radical type in which even the human, reflecting subject is stripped of its familiar meaning. We wish to continue elaborating on this idea and incorporate some analogies that hopefully illuminate the nature of such movement back toward the spirit.

As Fink says in the article cited earlier, the accomplishment of Reduction exposes the spirit to the primordial Ground Experience that precedes all human experiences and attitudes. This ground experience is always already in flux but in full anonymity, and it must be so for there to be a human experience at all. In fact, when, and upon the performance of the Reduction, the Ground Experience becomes thematic and comes out of its primordial anonymity, the human experience ceases to be what it’s always taken to be: as an objective reality. It’s realized and seen as a mere projection and an abstraction. Whereas prior to Reduction, the world is seen as concrete and spirit as abstract, after the Reduction, the world is seen as an abstraction upon the concrete reality of the spirit.

To reiterate: consciousness lives in a self-understanding of itself as an entity, i.e. the human person, among other entities enclosed in a universe of beings that appear with a sense of independence existence from consciousness. The forceful obviousness of this self-understanding which man simply accepts as being the case, this obviousness and mundane self-familiarity is what is to be overcome in the radical self-meditation that Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction. The world is experienced by us as always already there before us; it presents itself in the stream of consciousness with the sense “has been”, a sense that furnishes also the apparently indisputable obviousness of this sense.

It is the most obvious fact that the world was before I am conscious of it and will be after I cease to hold it in my consciousness. But this obviousness itself is something experienced by us in the course of experiencing the world. In other words, the world is always experienced as being-obviously-there. It is precisely this obviousness that is to become the theme in our attempt to practice and perform the phenomenological reduction. Our goal is not to doubt or deny the existence of the world. Phenomenology is not about taking a position with regard to being or non-being of the world; it’s rather to see and stare at the experience of the world as something that claims obvious existence, and we try to do so without either affirming or denying this claim. It is to see it as it is and as it presents itself in experience. In fact, what sabotages all attempts at the performance of the phenomenological reduction, is the slip into position-taking, a slip into the natural attitude in which one either accepts or denies the world’s claim to existence.

The stream of conscious experience doesn’t just give us things, objects that are apprehended as a this or a that; it gives us things as being-there, as existing independently of the apprehending consciousness. It is in this very stream that independent existence, or being-there, has it sense, a sense inseparable from its unquestionable obviousness, that is, the obviousness is part of the sense of being-there; it’s something experienced as a unity. It is absurd and ridiculous to think that we first perceive things and somehow through some extra-conscious faculty become aware, as if stepping outside the stream of consciousness, that the things experienced also exist apart from our experiencing of them. That things exist and exist as if separately from consciousness is itself a conscious experience. In attempting the phenomenological reduction, one makes this givenness of things and the pregivenness of the world encompassing them, along with the obviousness that shines through them, the theme of the radical self-meditation.

As Eugen Fink elaborates in the article mentioned in our previous post, this obviousness and familiarity that pervades all phenomena constituted in the stream of consciousness is often un-noticed for what it is; and it is un-noticed precisely because of its pervasiveness; we simply accept it, and this naive acceptance is itself a component of the stream of consciousness. In other words, the world as it appears to us in mundane familiarity, is nothing but a unity of acceptances. It is not so much that we, as human beings, choose to consciously accept it at some point in our life; we always already live in that acceptance; to be human is to live in the acceptedness of the world.

What Fink is talking about is the spirit’s natural attitude the outlines of which sketched in another post here. Natural attitude is the attitude of naive acceptance and position-taking with regard to what’s constituted in the stream of experience. Phenomenological reduction, then, amounts to the suspension of this natural attitude. Therefore, to initiate an effective progress toward the reduction, we must first gain some preliminary clarity about the meanings of natural attitude, the subject of this attitude, the meaning of suspension, and the agency involved in such suspension.

The Natural Attitude

To begin with: natural attitude is not some human attitude that’s arbitrarily adopted at some point in our human development; it’s not an explicit belief system that we hold as human beings and can freely alter or abandon as human beings. Rather, we are born into the natural attitude, and we know nothing but the natural attitude. More precisely, consciousness’s first encounter with itself is as the natural attitude, an attitude of un-recognition or self-forgetfulness if you will. All our pre-scientific, scientific, philosophical, ethical, spiritual or religious activities and reflections, along with the empirical human subject attached to them, are things that happen within the natural attitude and are in fact grounded in the natural attitude. To be human is to be in the natural attitude; hence, the natural attitude is not some human disposition; it’s the spirit’s (pure consciousness works too here) attitude.

In natural attitude, the spirit is conscious of itself as an embodied entity self-interpreted as the human person living among other entities in a spatiotemporal manifold that seems to contain the spirit. All this, a manner of spirit’s being conscious of itself, is the natural attitude. The emphasis on the distinction between pure consciousness and the human agency, and that the natural attitude belongs to the former, is crucial in making any progress toward a successful performance of the reduction. If being human is itself a product of natural attitude, then the suspension of this attitude cannot possibly be a human effort; in fact, any human mental or intellectual effort to suspend the natural attitude will make one even more entrenched in the natural attitude, for to the extent that we’re identified with our humanity we’re also entangled in the natural attitude. Man cannot suspend the natural attitude, for he himself is the product of this attitude. So, the suspension involved in the phenomenological reduction must be an achievement on the part of the pure consciousness, i.e. transcendental subjectivity. Fink says in the Sixth Cartesian Medications that it’s the transcendental onlooker that performs the reduction, a clearing in which man is swept away along with the natural attitude in which he’s constituted.

An implicit belief constantly operative in the natural attitude is the belief in the independent existence of phenomena of consciousness. This is not a mental construct or some intellectual position we take up at some point in our lives; it’s rather always already there; it’s not a mental belief but rather a spiritual attitude; it is the core of spirit’s natural attitude. Even when in our minds we deny the existence of all things, we are still positing existence, the existence of the denying which is itself a mental state or position regarding what’s experienced. Natural attitude includes all of our positings regarding the experienced world, and that includes all things from sciences, philosophies, and other theoretical or empirical findings. These are all formations and constructs that are experienced and made sensible within the stream of consciousness, and hence they cannot have any explanatory or descriptive value when it comes to understanding the streaming itself. No amount of empirical data regarding brains and neurons, atoms and light, biology, etc., can say anything about consciousness. In fact, the phenomenologists in attempting to perform the reduction, cannot think or allow himself to think of himself as an embodied being living in a world posited by physics or psychology or any of the empirical or spiritual sciences. All such sciences have their ground and validity in consciousness, in the natural attitude, and they shouldn’t be made use of throughout the reduction practice.

To highlight what we’ve said earlier, the phenomenologist doesn’t deny existence or the findings of the natural sciences; he doesn’t question theories of physics or psychology. Instead, he refuses the take any position with regard to anything except what’s directly given in experience; he doesn’t interpret or read into this stream of consciousness but rather receives it as it affords itself and precisely in the manner in which it affords itself, using a familiar Husserlian phrasing. In other words, the phenomenologist knows nothing about theories or sciences, perhaps in a state similar to that of a child that neither accepts nor denies a material, brain-based science of consciousness simply because he/she doesn’t know anything about it. But it goes even further than that state, for even though a child is already free of position-taking with regard to all these theories, he/she is still in the natural attitude and simultaneously oblivious to being in it, for the child still comports itself to the world with the implicit belief that things are there. So, the phenomenologist not only needs to suspend all sciences and cultures and all such human products, he must go even deeper and suspend the existence thesis of the natural attitude. Our next step is to look at what such suspension entails.

Suspension of Natural Attitude: a practice of persistent abstention

Suspension of the natural attitude which amounts to the performance of the phenomenological reduction, begins with a practice of rigorous and persistent abstention from a straightforward acceptance of implicit beliefs (or impulses) within the natural attitude and ultimately the natural attitude itself. As we said earlier, the act of suspension is not originated in the human person; it’s rather an act, or even better an activity, intrinsic to consciousness itself; it is consciousness, in its pure essence, that performs the suspension. We’ll show that the suspending acts of consciousness are the most familiar and primordial acts, perhaps the first set of acts pre-existing the development of self-consciousness. These are the intrinsic habitualities of consciousness and have the form of focus or attention. When an infant turns toward the mother, a sound, or in fact toward anything, it’s consciousness shifting and rearranging the play of what Husserl calls its intentionalities. It’s not the infant’s head that initiates movement; it’s consciousness, and along with it the body and the embodied glance, that is moved, all in such a harmonious way so that new intentionalities are formed, a new object coming into the focus of consciousness as apprehended. In shifting focus to a new intentional object, the previous object of attention must drop out of focus even though still apprehended as belonging to a streaming background. This dropping and letting go of the object of attention is a species of suspending activities of consciousness.

The type of suspension and directionality that can model the universal suspension of natural attitude is the one our consciousness performs when moving in between acts, thematically leaving one act in order to live in another act. For example, as I am sitting behind my desk and looking at the scenery through the window, I am living in the act of visual perception. I am looking at things perceptually. However, I can freely withdraw from this act and start thinking about an idea or just day dream without closing my eyes or changing the direction of my perceptual gaze. I doing so, I have thematically left perception, that is, even though things are still streaming in my perceptual field, none of them is an individual theme for my consciousness; the stream of seeing is still flowing and I am still aware of it but I am not really looking at things anymore; in a sense, I have left my perceptual looking momentarily un-attended and I am instead looking, with the gaze of consciousness, at the objects of my thinking or my day dream, a thinking looking. What consciousness has done in dropping one act and picking up another is a suspension of what the stream of visual perception means when we’re consciously directed at it, looking into it or living in it. In the words of Husserl, the intentionalities at play in making perception the perception of a worldly object are no more at play when I fully live in another, parallel act. In fact, if this was not the case, consciousness wouldn’t be able to constitute the world in its fullness; whenever I needed to think, the perceptual field had to go blank. But consciousness can leave an act without cancelling the streaming that made up the so-called hyletic data of the act.

Focusing on a new thing or act is possible only because attention has the intrinsic possibility and absolute freedom to disengage from a previous act or object without being bothered by the ongoing stream of consciousness. We can easily and without even thinking about it take our attention off the perceptual field and pay attention to the sounds around us; in doing so, the perceptual field is still streaming; we are passively seeing the objects but our conscious attention is elsewhere, in the auditory field. This is not something we do as a human persons; we do it as consciousness; we never picked it up from the environment or from seeing others do it.

Another example that may bring us closer to the type of disengagement involved in the phenomenological reduction is the following: consider when you’re listening to someone and for some reason, often lack of interest, you lose them, the expression itself saying so much about consciousness. You may drift toward the things of the environment or your own thoughts; the stream of auditory perception is still flowing and certainly something is being heard from the speaker, however muffled and without meaning. You have not really abandoned the act of listening altogether but you no longer live in it. The stream of consciousness that delivers audible sensory data to you is entirely intact but your conscious attention is directed elsewhere.

So far we viewed disengagements, or suspensions, when moving between acts, say, from active seeing to active thinking or hearing, etc.. In all such cases, we disengaged from one aspect of the stream of experience in order to make another aspect the theme; from the visually perceptible aspect of the stream to the auditory aspect of the stream, or from perceiving to thinking or imagining or theorizing, etc.. Getting even closer to the type of suspension involved in the reduction, we’d like to explore examples in which we can, if we wish, shift attention not in between various aspects of the streaming, all of which entailed a straightforward apprehension of objectivities constituted in that aspect, but rather from acts to the streaming itself.

In the example of losing the speaker, when I am shifting focus from listening to looking at the objects of the visual field, I no more touch the meanings that are to be transmitted to me through the now muffled voice of the speaker; instead, I am looking at other things and in so looking I posit them as things that are there in my environment, as valid objectivities. Their ground level meaning is their being; in attending to them, I am attending to their being there whereas the being-there of sensory stream of the muffled voices of the speaker is currently un-thematic or in the background for me; I’m not directed at their being-there; they are, for me and in virtue of their being-there, suspended.

The Phenomenological Reduction: The Vertical or Inward Suspension

The type of suspension involved in the phenomenological reduction moves along a vertical, or inward, rather than a horizontal dimension. Instead of moving between the acts each of which animates a certain aspect of the stream of consciousness, one moves out of an act without moving toward and into another act. Given that consciousness never fully lives in just one act but in a multitude of acts at once, the practice of reduction requires a pulling out of (suspending) all acts as such and all at once. In doing so one refuses to live in any of the acts as inviting and irresistible their pull may be on consciousness. To live in any act is to direct oneself at a corresponding aspect of the stream of consciousness which entails being directed at the being-there of that aspect’s meaning formations. Instead of living in any act focused on a certain aspect of the stream of consciousness, we bring the attention and persistently keep it on the streaming itself. Instead of letting the streaming pull us into itself toward and captivating us (the consciousness and not the man) with the being-there of its meaning-formations, we refuse to look into the stream and instead look at it by pulling inwardly toward the pure I of the experiencing consciousness. The pure I plays the role of an effective anchor point, the polar opposite of acts’ natural movement, indicating how and in what direction to pull out of acts. To bring the attention to the streaming itself, and here we’re talking about the stream as a whole and not certain aspects of it, is not the big difficulty here; it’s holding one’s gaze at the streaming without falling into it, i.e., into the story and the natural attitude constituted through the stream, that’s the main difficulty and requires rigorous practice.

I’d like to give one last analogy that best represents the above-mentioned situation: consider watching a movie on your television, perhaps a Netflix show (they’re not sponsoring this post btw!) being streamed on the screen. Certainly there cannot be a streaming without the screen or without looking toward the screen. In order to live the experience of watching the film, you must not only look at the screen but rather look past it. As you attentively watch the film and follow the story, responding emotionally and psychologically to the events, the screen that’s sensorily registered by you has to stay en-thematic for your attention, i.e. suspended in virtue of its being there, or else you wouldn’t be able to really watch the film. Now, you can freely lift your attentive focus from the film and instead stare at the screen itself, at its glass, paying attention to the streaming itself rather than what’s presented and meant in it. In so doing, you’re no more meaningfully (attentively) directed at the streamed film or registering the story; you’re not living in the experience of watching the film but rather in the experiencing of the streaming of the film. If you can successfully keep your focus on the streaming itself throughout which the film is out of focus and nothing but a field of meaningless sensory data, and do so for even a minute, then if someone asked you what happened in the film in that minute, you wouldn’t know; in a sense, you were not there; you lost the streamed movie when you directed yourself at the very streaming of the movie. This practice of shifting focus between a digital content and the streaming screen is actually a great starting point for grasping what suspension means in the practice of phenomenological reduction.

So, suspending or putting acts out of play is not something strange to us; as we said, it’s the most primitive acts of consciousness that we as humans manifest. However, what makes the phenomenological reduction unique, is that it’s not a suspension of an act or cluster of acts in favor of living in some other acts; it’s rather a total and complete suspension or putting out of play of all acts or all manners of being directed toward meanings through the stream of consciousness. It is unique both in its universality and its peculiar directionality: everything is suspended by an abrupt move toward the center of consciousness, the pure I, which will bring to view the total streaming consciousness. The phenomenological reduction is, as Fink has said, a persistent abstention from any participation in the stream of consciousness by making the streaming itself the theme, a streaming that throughout human history has always remained un-thematic and un-discovered for necessary reasons. To perform the reduction is to see the streaming, the Heraclitean flux, for the first time.

Misunderstandings and Dead-ends

The streaming we’re talking about, the one it is our aim to free ourselves from by abstaining from looking into it and instead looking at it, is not identical with the stream of perception. We used perception as an example and analogy to get a sense of what the act of suspending looks or feels like on the part of the suspending consciousness. Perceiving, thinking, imagining, abstracting, rationalizing, theorizing, reflecting, mathematizing, etc., all these are various acts or ways of being directed at the Streaming. In the practice of phenomenological reduction, we suspend all these acts at once and in one blow, to use a Husserlian term, or else we’d inevitably be thrown into another act, i.e. into the natural attitude. This obviously means that all meaning formations coming from the stream, all empirical data along with its sciences and attitudes, are suspended as well, for they belong in the stream. If in attempting to practice the suspension, the practitioner is still concerned with or thinking in terms of atoms and brains and biophysics of perception and all such mundane theories of consciousness, then they haven’t even remotely understood what phenomenology is about, let alone being ready to practice the reduction. Any ideas or conceptions that have their origin in the natural attitude cannot have a place in the phenomenological attitude, especially prior to the first performance of the reduction. For example, if the practitioner’s mind can’t help but think about the streaming (instead of just seeing it), and even worse, think about its whereabouts and its spatiotemporal structure or relation to the world or brain or a human being, then he/she hasn’t even stepped into the launchpad of the phenomenological reduction and attitude.

The Stream of which we’re talking about is purely transcendental (and yes more real than anything else.) The categories of space, time, matter, and causality are categories that are constituted within the natural attitude and apply only to the meaning constructs formed within the stream; they cannot possibly apply to the streaming itself. If a practitioner is still at the unfortunate grip of fallen habits of thinking, i.e. confusing true being with real being, thinking, for example, that a physical chair is more real than the Pythagorean theorem, or unable to apprehend realities without thinking in terms of their spatial or temporal positioning, then he/she is so entrenched in the natural attitude that he’s not even aware of being in an attitude; he’s not aware that what he naively takes as the most obvious truths, are products of a disposition of consciousness rather than absolute truths of a mythical world construed by the increasingly abstract formations of empirical sciences. For such a practitioner there’s still hope, but they must start from a basic introduction to phenomenology so to be able to realize they have eyes before learning how to open them. One must first awaken to and recognize all the hidden prejudices that have distorted our perception of reality.

The Practice vs. the Performance of the Reduction

Everything we said so far, along with examples and analogies, make up the practice of the phenomenological reduction. The event or happening that results from this practice, something that cannot be anticipated in terms of its form or timing, is really what makes up the actual performance of the phenomenological reduction, a breakthrough that opens one to the transcendental dimension of pure consciousness. And this is what separates true from false phenomenologists. There are in fact too many renowned phenomenologists and scholars, not to name them here, that have practiced but have not performed the reduction, and that’s something one can detect from their talk of phenomenology in a matter of seconds. They are baffled by and react with a dismissiveness to what the founders of phenomenology, both Husserl and Fink, have said painstakingly about what reduction is and especially what it is not, that it is not a mental or intellectual exercise, it is to be performed with one’s entire being, that in it both man and the world are transcended, and that it is a radical self-meditation with the promise of a deepest transformation ever possible for mankind.

What these naive or so-called outsider, pseudo-phenomenologists have attempted is only the practice of the reduction; they’ve taken the practice for the actual performance, and hence they’ve stopped pushing the practice to the point of the happening of the performance. No doubt, the practice of PR can, on its own, lead to extremely valuable philosophical insights, but it’s clear from their work that they have no clue of even the existence of the true world of which both Husserl and Fink spoken of. And this is not a matter of unwillingness on their part, as Fink has also noted. Their misfortune lies in the the extreme radicality and difficulty of the method of reduction itself, the difficulty of staying with the practice of reduction long enough until it happens, until the breakthrough comes through and one sees for the first time, seeing of what’s always already been before us but also has managed to stay the most hidden since eternity.

The practice of the suspension involved in the phenomenological reduction is akin to chipping away from the thick layer of ice on which one is standing; one must keep at it and chip away until the layer becomes weak enough to break so that we fall through, or fall within. It’s that breakthrough that makes up the entry portal to the true phenomenological attitude, something that one can’t know when and how it happens until it actually does. So, one must, if one is enthusiastic enough about all this, keep up the practice of returning back to the Stream by suspending the natural attitude, and as a result of this the breakthrough will someday happen. It’s a matter of rigorous and persistent abstention.

Now, if a practitioner does all this and wonders if it has or has not already happened, then the answer is clear: it hasn’t. If and when the breakthrough happens, one knows. In fact, one knows it with such an absolute self-evidence and clear seeing in comparison to which human sight is sheer blindness. The certainty experienced in such encounter is the highest possible certainty; it is in fact the very essence of all certainty so that one can say all degrees of certainty possible in the human plane are pale reflections of the absolute certainty of the breakthrough to the transcendental experience. So, if you still wonder if this is it or not, then this ain’t it. You’ll know when it’s there, and that’ll make you wanna run to the streets and yell it out to all who are blindly roaming the world taking it as something that really is.

The first public experience of a man or woman who has actually performed the reduction is best depicted in the scene from the movie Matrix where Neo steps back into the matrix for the first time after leaving it. He wears a mysterious smile and composure of transcendence among the seemingly awake others; he has truly awakened. He knows.