NOEMAYA

If philosophy is an inquiry into the nature of reality, an attempt at seeing things as they are, it must have a beginning, a ground. That’s the condition for the possibility of any inquiry as such. Inquiry, to seek into, is an intentional setting in motion of an undifferentiated state of things where the inquirer stands in opposition to the object of inquiry. Thus, it presupposes a split, or differentiation, between the ground of inquiry and that which is gazed upon. For an inquiry to constitute a genuine philosophy, the seer, the inquirer, must be as purified as possible and not mixed up with the seen, i.e. the object of inquiry. In other words, it cannot take anything for granted, even the most obvious things, until it stands on the ground of absolute self-evidence.

Philosophy is love of sophia, love of wisdom. Philosopher is the lover of wisdom. But what is it to love? We’re not here seeking to provide a conceptual understanding of love. We all know what it is when we experience being loved. To be loved is to be seen as we are without any judgment; it is to be attended to without being dissected or analyzed or reconstructed. To love is more than a feeling; it is rather a comportment toward a thing or a person; it is to give attention without expectation. It is to let them show themselves precisely in the manner that they show themselves. It is an attentive gaze free of prejudice and preconception, free of the need to iron out wrinkles and contradictions. It is an active, flowing comportment. In that sense, a philosopher is one who is in philosophizing and to the extend that he/she lives in the activity of philosophizing, to the extend that he is always at the beginning. He or she is in the business of seeing and attending to rather than explaining and reconstructing. In removing his/her prejudices in a radical sense, the philosopher lets things show themselves as they are.

The philosopher must begin from the ground of not knowing anything at all, of sheer emptiness, to the extent that even natural knowing and experience is wholly alien, and new, to him. He must abstain from accepting, i.e. taking in, what seeing whispers in his ear. So, a philosopher is not a man or woman in being who philosophizes. The activity of philosophizing must at all times, and not just occasionally, remain antecedent to all self-apperceptions of the philosopher, including his=her being, so that it can see the very phenomenon of self-apperception for the first time, the phenomenon that’s always taken for granted as an absolute. 

The philosopher is a person who vigorously insists on seeing for himself, even if it costs him his life. He accepts absolutely nothing, not even himself and his own being as taken for granted. He’s not in a business of skepticism either, for even that would imply being a skeptic. He neither accepts nor denies nor rejects. He confronts what is without letting meanings get to him.   

Thus, the philosopher himself is the ground of philosophizing. The initial problem with this is that of infinite regress. Whatever atomic entity that might volunteer itself as such as absolute ground, insofar as it is a volunteer, a cognized phenomenon of some sort, cannot be that absolute ground, for its cognition itself requires a ground of its own. Thus, the ground cannot be a thing, a phenomenon in the ordinary sense, a static unity that in any way can be an object of cognition in the same way that any worldly object is. 

The ground, thus, must have an entirely different nature: it must be in a sense other-worldly or else worldliness could not be the theme of its contemplation; it must have a transcendental structure, an essentially dynamic whole irreducible to static components.  

In finding the proper ground of philosophy, the absolute self-evident ground, the only thing that cannot escape our doubts and neither does it lend itself to infinite regress is self-evidentness itself. What is to be looked upon is not the phenomenon of the world or anything that is given along with it, but rather its unbroken self-evidentness which also lightens up the content of consciousness, a self-evidentness that is always there wherever the “I” is. Here, it is not the self-evidentness of the world that we are referring to. It is not such that the world is a self-evident ground at all; the world is given with self-evidentness, but the ground is the fact of self-evidentness itself which we falsely attribute to the world. 

If we are to seek into self-evidentness itself, to see it for what it is and recognize its reality as something encompassing the givenness of things and the world, we must then separate the two, to strip away from phenomenon their claims to self-evidentness and instead look at self-evidentness as it is in itself and not as a mysterious addition to phenomena or a mental condition we somehow impose on certain experiences. We must encounter self-evidentness on its own, which is not a phenomenon but that which all phenomena are always already encompassed by and bathed in it. Does the self-evidentness of the being of the world disappear when I shut my eyes? Does it diminish in anyway when I turn away from the world in reflection? No; it simply carries over to my own being, to the self-evidentness of reflection, ad infinitum. The self-evidentness of infinite regress, which is curiously apparent to us without actually regressing indefinitely, is the same self-evidentness that we experience in our mundane encounter with the world.

Thus, in outlining the ground of philosophy, we have come to a few inescapable truths: it consists in the very activity of philosophizing in the philosopher; its theme is self-evidentness; and that self-evidentness is always running along the attentive gaze of the “I.” In other words, to philosophize is the self-evidencing of the I for itself in the very activity of self-evidencing.       

Naturally, this philosophizing changes the entire landscape. It must change the philosopher who at first might enter this activity with the naive, taken-for-granted, self-appraception of a man being in the world. The one doing the philosophizing is not man anymore but that in whose activity of philosophizing, the phenomenon of man-in-the-world becomes the theme of reflection, becomes a phenomenon in the transcendental sense of the word. In the proper attitude, philosophizing is phenomenologizing.

The philosopher, at least during the activity of phenomenologizing, comes to the world without any theory. It encounters the world as if the stream of experience was just turned on for him and he’s seeing it for the first time, and he must strive to retain his fresh gaze upon experience without falling into the natural attitude and the natural habits of thinking, including interpreting this stream as the possession of a being in the world. Experience showing itself as “belonging to a human being-in-the-world” is precisely the claim that ought be bracketed, put out of play, not bought into. As phenomenologists, we see through this claim; we see past the self-evidentness that latches onto it; we don’t do anything with it. We see it precisely for what it is, a claim, a belief construct, a belief that in the naiveté of natural attitude we simply took for granted and accepted it to be our own.  

If man is not the one doing the phenomenologizing, then who is it? It is the transcendental subject, the transcendental onlooker, who is simply gazing at the constituted stream of experience, a stream that inherently has embedded in it the familiar being-sense of the world; the natural belief in the world is running along with this stream. It is part of the inherent meaning and structure of the stream of experience to furnish the being-sense and the belief in being-in-the-world and of the idea of this stream belonging to an immanent subject, i.e. man. Man’s self-experience as man and the natural belief in the validity of this self-experience is itself part of the being-sense of the stream of experience. 

A natural tendency of natural attitude that here leads to misunderstanding, and hence a slipping back into the traps of natural attitude, is to take an existential position with regard to this stream: the mind immediately wants to situate this stream of experience; it cannot help but to assign it a place, thinking of this stream as an occurrence in the world, thinking of this stream as something that must have a place, whether in the mind itself, in the world, or somewhere in the human psyche or the soul. But this is precisely that jeopardizing tendency of natural attitude that destabilizes the activity of philosophizng: it has bought back into the natural thesis of being-in-the-world, treating the stream of experience as a worldly occurrence, simply because the mind cannot conceptualize otherwise; the mind cannot understand unless in terms of things, things of an essentially worldly nature, that is, things as having to have a place in time and space. 

But to nullify these tendencies, we can ask ourselves these questions: is this very idea and tendency of trying to grasp the stream of experience as being an occurrence in the world and belonging to a subject, itself not an experienced idea, maintained within that very stream of experience! Is this not itself something essentially experienced? Is it not absurd to apply the ideas, concepts, logical and philosophical categories that are experienced and maintained in and through experience, and anything thought for the matter, to the stream of experience itself? Is it not absurd to apply the products of thought to the very process of thinking that brings about such products? It certainly is. It is as absurd as saying the the law of gravity must itself obey the law of gravity, that the law itself must be subject to the pull of gravity, as if the law were a material thing. 

Thus philosophy as phenomenology must begin by a persistent renunciation of all that is taken for granted, including the natural thesis of being-human-in-the-world. It does not deny such existence, or Being for that matter, for such denial (idealism) is itself a taking of a position, a tendency within the natural attitude. Instead, phenomenologizing refrains from any position with regard to reality or unreality, existence or non-existence, of contents of experience; it brackets all matters of existences and instead regards the world as mere phenomenon; it doesn’t buy into its claim of existence, neither does it reject that claim; it remains in the attitude of abstention.