[Neurons] FW: 2025 Neurons #25 NLP AS PHENOMENOLOGY

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2025 Neurons #23

June 23, 2025

Phenomenology Series #1

 

NLP NLP AS PHENOMENOLOGY

 

Here's a secret that has been hidden from most people who study NLP, a
secret that most people simply do not know.  It is a secret that helps us
define NLP.  The secret?  NLP is a phenomenology.  We actually acknowledge
this every time we describe it as "the study of the structure of subjective
experience," (subtitle of NLP: Volume I). That phrase precisely describes
phenomenology- the phenomena that we experience within ourselves as subjects
of any and every experience.  This phenomena is not the territory, it is our
map of the territory as we subjectively map it in our neurology.  This
article begins a series on this subject.

 

Over the years I've been asked about this repeatedly, "Is NLP
Phenomenology?"  "Is NLP connected to the history of Phenomenology?"  The
answer to both question is no.  NLP arose completely independent of
Phenomenology as a movement, and yet it is a phenomenology.

 

When Phenomenology began as a philosophical movement in the 20th century its
primary objective was to directly investigate and describe human phenomena
as a person consciously experienced it.  Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger
were the first developers.  Their design was to encounter experience as such
apart from theories about it.  The early phenomologists wanted to do so
without causal explanations, theories about origins or even meaning.  They
wanted to freely examine experience apart from preconceptions and
presuppositions. 

 

Husserl viewed empathy as something done as a sort of apperception built
upon the experiences of one's own lived body.  The "lived body" is your body
as you experience it by yourself from within. Your body manifests itself
mainly as how you act in the world.   For example, your body is what enables
you reach out and grab something.  From your body, you have your point of
view. Noticing this, you can begin to differentiate things as you move a
thing around and see new aspects of it.  Here you make the absent present
and the present absent.  You experience your body as a duality-as object
(e.g., you can touch your own hand) and as your subjectivity (the sense of
being touched).

 

Key concepts in Phenomenology focus on Self, on Others (inter-subjectivity),
on the World (the constitution of your life-world),  on Intentionality,
Time, Experience (state, emotions), Language, Perception, etc.  if that
sounds similar to the Matrix Model, it is.  Inter-subjectivity constitutes
objectivity (i.e., what you experience also as objective is experienced as
being inter-subjectively available).  Yet this does not imply that
objectivity is reduced to subjectivity.  In the experience of
inter-subjectivity, you experience yourself as being a subject among other
subjects, and you experience yourself as existing objectively for these
Others.  

 

The life-world (German, Lebenswelt) is the World we live in.  It's the
background or horizon of our experience.  It is that on which each object
stands out as itself (as different) and with the meaning it can only hold
for us.  This also led Phenomenology to be recognized as an embodied
constructivism.

 

At the core of Jean Merleau-Ponty's philosophy is a sustained argument for
the foundational role that perception plays in the human experience of the
world.  Merleau-Ponty understands perception to be an ongoing dialogue
between one's lived body and the world which it perceives, in which
perceivers passively and actively strive to express the perceived world in
concert with others. His writings became influential in the project of
naturalizing phenomenology so that phenomenologists used the results of
psychology and cognitive science.

 

Husserl's phenomenology highlighted that "all consciousness is consciousness
of something." This implies a distinction between "acts of thought" (the
noesis) and "intentional objects of thought" (the noema).  Thus, the
correlation between noesis (thinking) and noema (what you're thinking)
becomes the first step in the constitution of analyses of consciousness. 

 

Taking perception as his point of departure, Merleau-Ponty recognized that
the body is not only a thing or object for study, but also a permanent
condition of experience.  The body is a constituent of the perceptual
openness to the world.  The primacy of perception signifies a primacy of
experience as perception is an active and constitutive dimension.

 

Merleau-Ponty demonstrates a corporeity of consciousness (embodiment) is an
intentionality of the body, and contrasts with the dualist ontology of mind
and body.  "Insofar as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain around me
intentions which are not dependent on my decisions and which affect my
surroundings in a way that I do not choose" (1962, p. 440).

 

If all of that sounds a lot like NLP, it is.  Bot h disciplines study
subjectivity-the inner world.  Both attempt to deal with and map the inner
world as cleanly and clearly as possible by eliminating bias and distortion.
Both recognize that the key 'structures' (or more accurately, the
structuring) on the inside goes to many of the same categories- meaning,
intention, state, self, power, others, time, world, etc.  Accordingly, when
both disciplines understand each other, they can enrich each other.  More to
come.




 

 



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

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