[Neurons] 2025 Neurons #27 GETTING TO THE HEART OF EXPERIENCE

[Michael Hall]

From: L. Michael Hall

2025 Neurons #27

July 7, 2025

Phenomenology Series #3

 

  GETTING TO THE HEART OF EXPERIENCE

 

If you ask, “What is Phenomenology?” Widipedia gives you this answer: 

Phenomenology (Greek phainómenon "that which appears" and lógos "study") is
the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness.
As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 1900s
by Edmund Husserl, then expanded by his followers at various universities in
Germany, then France, United States, etc. Philosophically, phenomenology
lacks a thematic focus and is primarily a style of thought, a method, an
open and ever-renewed experience.

As an ontology (study of reality), Phenomenology is primarily concerned with
the systematic reflection on and study of the structures of consciousness
and the phenomena that appear in acts of consciousness.  Husserl's
conception of phenomenology has been developed by Edith Stein (a student),
Martin Heidegger (a hermeneutic philosopher), Nicolai Hartmann, Gabriel
Marcel, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, etc. (existentialists),
etc. 

 

Studying Subjective Experience

Phenomenology creates conditions for the objective study of topics usually
regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious
experiences—judgments, perceptions, and emotions.  Phenomenology seeks to be
scientific not from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology, but
through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and
structures of experience.

 

Phenomenology begins by rejecting the concept of objective research and
grouping assumptions through a process called phenomenological epoche.  This
focuses on analyzing daily human behavior to gain a greater understanding.
Persons are understood through the unique ways they reflect the societies
they live in.  Phenomenologists gather conscious experience as data using
methods that are far less restricting than in other sciences.

 

Central to phenomenology is intentionality ("aboutness") and the idea that
consciousness is always consciousness of something.  The object of
consciousness is called the intentional object, and this object is
constituted for consciousness in many different ways, i.e., through
perception, memory, retention and protention, signification, etc.
Throughout these different intentionalities, though they have different
structures and different ways of being "about" the object, an object is
still constituted as the identical object.  Consciousness is directed at the
same intentional object in direct perception as it is in the immediately
following retention of this object and the eventual remembering of it.

 

Non-Reductionist

Though many phenomenological methods involve reductions, phenomenology is
anti-reductionistic; the reductions are mere tools to better understand and
describe the workings of consciousness, not to reduce any phenomenon to a
description.  When a reference is made to a thing's essence or idea, or when
one details the constitution of an identical coherent thing by describing
what one "really" sees as being only these sides and aspects, it does not
mean that the thing is only and exclusively what is described.  The ultimate
goal of these reductions is to understand how these different aspects are
constituted into the actual thing as experienced by the experiencing person.

 

Husserl envisioned phenomenology as a method of philosophical inquiry that
rejects the rationalist bias of Western thought in favor of a method of
reflective attentiveness that discloses the individual’s “lived experience.”
Husserl’s method entails the suspension of judgment while relying on the
intuitive grasp of knowledge, free of presuppositions and intellectualizing
similar to NLP’s emphasis on denominalizing and sensory acuity. 

 

Intentionality represents an alternative to the representational theory of
consciousness, which holds that reality cannot be grasped directly because
it is available only through perceptions of reality.  The map is not the
territory.  Husserl countered that consciousness is not “in” the mind but
rather conscious of something other than itself (the intentional object),
whether the object is a substance or a figment of imagination (i.e., the
real processes associated with and underlying the figment).  The
phenomenological method relies on the description of phenomena as they are
given to consciousness, in their immediacy.

 

Back to Experience

In practice, it entails an unusual combination: discipline and detachment to
suspend or bracket, theoretical explanations and second-hand information
while determining one's “naive” experience of the matter.  The
phenomenological method serves to momentarily erase the world of speculation
by returning the subject to her primordial experience—to a feeling, idea, or
perception or as we would say to sensory awareness.

 

Martin Heidegger modified Husserl’s subjectivist tendencies.  Whereas
Husserl conceived humans as having been constituted by states of
consciousness, Heidegger countered that consciousness is peripheral to the
primacy of existence (i.e., the mode of being or Dasein), which cannot be
reduced to consciousness.  One’s state of mind is an “effect” rather than
what determines existence, including those aspects that are unconscious.  By
shifting the center of gravity from consciousness (psychology) to existence
(ontology), Heidegger altered the subsequent direction of phenomenology.
Consequently phenomenology became increasingly relevant to psychoanalysis.
Similarly NLP shifted more and more to the unconscious whereas
Neuro-Semantics has stayed with the focus on consciousness.

 

 

Neuro-Semantics News

·       Soon we will be doing the Brand New version of Meta-NLP in Cairo
Egypt 
 this will also be available as a Zoom Meeting Training.  To find out
about this contact Mohamed Tarek Mohamed at lucidtraining.net 

 

·       See the website--- 

o   Meta-NLP  <https://meta-nlp.site/> – Meta-NLP By Dr. Michael Hall in
Egypt


 

 

 



L. Michael Hall, Ph.D.

Executive Director, ISNS

738 Beaver Lodge

Grand Jct., CO. 81505 USA

meta at acsol.net

 

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