NOEMAYA

The old question of which came first—the egg or the hen—has its answer in evolutionary biology, but the metaphor remains useful when we turn to the deeper mystery of the relationship between consciousness and the material universe. Unlike the hen-and-egg, however, this question resists any notion of temporal precedence.

Phenomenology makes this clear. It does not seek to decide whether matter exists before consciousness or the reverse. It brackets such claims, focusing instead on the structures of experience itself. And yet, the impulse to ask persists: what is the “hen” and what is the “egg” in this analogy?

In the natural attitude, the order seems simple. We find ourselves conscious of a world, and that world appears to encompass us. The world feels like the container, the framework within which consciousness resides. But on reflection we see the paradox: this very world, which seems to contain consciousness, is itself known only through consciousness. Whether refined and articulated in the mind of a physicist or vaguely sensed by a layman, the world always shows up as something experienced. There is the fact of consciousness and the content of consciousness, and their relationship is unlike anything temporal.

This is where science often goes astray. Modern science assumes matter—the content—must come first, and that consciousness is a late product. But such reasoning collapses under scrutiny, for consciousness is not something that can be placed within space and time. It is the very stage for the appearance of space and time. To say that matter came first is itself already a statement within consciousness. Thus, the hen-and-egg analogy fails us: consciousness and the world are not two things that can be ordered one before the other. They are the knower and the known, inseparable in their very essence.

Edmund Husserl, the founder of Phenomenology, suggested that true transcendental insights often arise when thought breaks down at its limits, when the natural attitude reaches “extreme situations.” One such extreme is the naïve presupposition that the world contains consciousness. To paraphrase Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant: the world that we suppose encompasses our thinking is itself being presented as such in thinking. In other words, the world that appears to hold consciousness is itself held within consciousness.

This realization forces us back to the radical fact: everything we know—religious, scientific, or philosophical—is always already within experience. To deny this is itself another act of experience. Even the idea of matter is inseparable from experience: solidity, roughness, extension—these are not independent things but experiential qualities. To speak of solidity apart from experience is meaningless, for the very word derives its sense only within experience.

Here we meet the root of many philosophical and scientific confusions: language. As Wittgenstein pointed out, the misuse of words—forgetting their origin in experience—creates illusory philosophical problems and mental states of affairs. We take experiential qualities and reify them into independent entities, speaking as if color, solidity, or even “the outside” could exist apart from the consciousness in which they are constituted and simultaneously apprehended.

This is not an attack on science but a defense of its proper role. Science excels at analyzing the coordination of appearances and building practical models based on provisional abstractions. What it cannot do is explain being itself, the world-phenomenon, because it presupposes the very world whose being is in question. Science can describe, but it cannot provide a worldview. The meaning of reality lies outside its scope. Science is invaluable within its bounds, but the problem of consciousness—and the phenomenon of the world—belongs to phenomenology. To expect natural science to solve these problems, i.e. explain consciousness and the world-phenomenon, is to expect ears to see. The world of sight is completely shut off and inaccessible to the instruments of auditory perception.

Still, many minds stumble here, bound by pictorial thinking. They believe that if something cannot be pictured, it cannot be real. Yet reality cannot be reduced to a picture, for every picture is already immanent to the mind. The whole cannot be contained in a part. A good example of a similar breakdown of pictorial thinking can be taken from the domain of natural science itself: Quantum physics has already shattered the determinist’s demand for a comfortable image of the world, refusing to conform to their expectations or providing any image of the microscopic world. Imagination which, in its forms of representation, is governed by the categories of space and time, cannot accommodate the reality of the quantum world, for the lack of a better word. In the same way, any pictorial thinking regarding the relationship between the world and consciousness, between the content and the container, is doomed to fail simply because the concepts limited to a specific domain (the natural, scientific world) cannot be applied to the container domain, that is, the consciousness in which the natural, scientific world is experienced and known.

Scientism, unlike science itself, fails to recognize that its materialist worldview is itself a picture held in consciousness. Consciousness is not reducible to an image; it is the very experience of meaning. It transcends itself in reflection but never escapes its essence as consciousness. To try to define it too rigidly only feeds our bad habits of pictorial thinking.

To say that matter preceded consciousness is already to speak from within consciousness. The claim itself is not matter, not solidity or extension, but a thought—an event of awareness. Thus, the very gesture of asserting matter’s primacy undermines itself, for what appears as primary is already secondary to the condition that allows it to appear at all. Consciousness is not a thing among things; it is the openness in which “thingness” itself becomes possible. It is not contained by the world, but rather the world is contained in it as appearance, as meaning.

Here lies the limit of science, not as failure but as necessity. Science is the grand elaboration of appearances, the refinement of the given into structures of prediction and control. Yet what it presupposes—the being of the world as such—cannot be placed under a microscope, because it is the very condition for microscopes to exist. Science begins in wonder at the given, but it cannot turn back to ground the givenness of the given. That task belongs to philosophy, which does not add another theory of the world but asks what makes the world possible as world.

And here the egg-and-hen analogy collapses. For in the relation of world and consciousness there is no succession, no temporal order. The world is not born of consciousness, nor is consciousness hatched from the world. Rather, they stand as two inseparable poles of the same fact: the appearing of meaning. To try to force them into a chain of causation is like trying to ask what light looks like in the absence of vision.

We are haunted by images, chained to the need for form and shape, but reality resists this reduction. That resistance is philosophy’s challenge and its wonder: to think beyond the hen and the egg, beyond temporal precedence, and to recognize consciousness as the condition for any world at all.

To be continued…