The text (text 1) that follows expressed an attempt to find a universal characterization of phenomenology which can be applied both to antiquity and modernity, to the west and the east (there is of course already a substantial literature comparing for instance, German idealism or Husserlian phenomenology with Buddhism philosophy or with Advaita Vedanta).
The description given here is of course very crude (and to some it might recall both Hume and the Abhidhamma). This kind of phenomenology (of 'inner sense elements') is lost in the realm of shadows and in fact deals with artificial abstractions. The basic impetus if of course correct, but the ordinary shadow-immersed and shadow-watching mind does not have the force to free itself from this realm in order to be able to know the shadow realm from a point of view beyond this lowest realm. This is discussed in (text 2). The required force is given by Platonic dialectics and this reveals the truth that the stream of ordinary consciousness is actually first and foremost a stream of (immanent) concepts.
(text 1)
The most basic idea is that of a methodology based on a pure, calm, detached awareness and observation of consciousness as it is in itself, as it presents itself to itself without being colored or altered by any presuppositions or modifications.
Instead of perceiving consciousness as a part of the world, the world is perceived as a part of consciousness, as immanent in consciousness. And it seems that what is involved in hindering this shift of perspective is forgetfulness and non-awareness of certain fundamental constitutive elements of consciousness (and the world): temporality and the active subjective nature of recollection and imagination which dominates ordinary experience. The world with its persons and objects that we are normally so completely entangled with and engaged with reveals itself to be upon careful analysis a temporal flux of subjectively constituted structures based on combinations of imagined and recollected inner sense elements. And we have the tendency to perceive and make use of 'wholes' forgetting that they are wholes and not perceiving the parthood of their parts or the way these parts are brought or bring themselves together. It would be interesting to develop a theory of forgetfulness and remembrance and of the different degrees and modes in which things can be brought to mind and be persistently present (not immediate but yet ‘at hand’, a kind of threshold awareness) in connection to the study of the terms sati and sampajañña in Pali buddhism. We can adduce evidence that this methodology is clearly set out in ancient eastern and western texts as well as in modern times (specially the tradition the runs through Descartes, Hume, Kant and Brentano). Of special importance is the concept of sâksin in Advaita Vedanta (see the book by Bina Gupta on this subject). Also buried within the Pali suttas we find injunctions to develop a special type of neutral awareness and analytic attention to experience. We encounter expressions such as diṭṭhe diṭṭhamattaṃ bhavissati, sute sutamattaṃ bhavissati, mute mutamattaṃ bhavissati, viññāte viññātamattaṃ bhavissati, Samyutta Nikâya 35.95 (and in the Bāhiyasuttaṃ of the Udâna), 'in the seen there will be merely what is seen, in the heard merely what is heard, in the sensed there will be merely what is sensed, in the cognized there will be only what is cognized'. This same sutta also contains passages involving past, present and future modes of presentation of the contents of consciousness.
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The text that follows can be considered as a preliminary motivation for the necessity of the Platonic dialectics for anything resembling the goals of this 'phenomenology'. The Platonic dialectic furnishes also a crucial distinction between immanent concept (which is more than just the 'psychological component' which was the object of a certain scorn by both Husserl and Frege) and a pure and transcendent 'concept' which is not readily available to ordinary consciousness.
(text 2)
Many would object that ordinary consciousness can only effect this self-transparency and self-reflection imperfectly and to a very limited extent – and by this we do not mean only a Kantian-type postulation of epistemic limitations but also the difficulty of first-person self-transparency in a more ordinary psychological sense (further ahead it will become clear why we consider the kind of limitation postulated by neuroreductionism to be invalid). And hence a kind of cultivation of consciousness is required in which, so to speak, consciousness goes out beyond itself without abolishing its ordinary processes so that these processes can be seen in the most perfectly objective way. The guiding idea is the possibility of consciousness stepping outside itself and becoming integrally and clearly aware of itself: transcendental self-transparency. There is a connection to deeper significance of the arguments of 19th century anti-psychologism (such as Frege's) although we note that the basis of the aforementioned anti-psychologism can already be found in Kant.
One aspect of this transcendental self-transparency is a state of consciousness in which we are directly and primarily aware of the stream or current of our thoughts seen as thoughts (i.e. the totality of the world and experience is seen as derived, dependent, constituted and immanent in the current of our thoughts). But the most fundamental aspect is understanding the whole of consciousness as a process which unfolds (from a unified to a more fragmentary state like the growth of a tree) directed by root causal forces; transcendental self-transparency hinges on the ability to obtain contact and seize control of the above root causal forces and thereby obtain the ability to freely invert, revert and reintegrate the whole out-folding process of consciousness. Phenomenology is not mere detached gazing at the shadows on the wall, it must have an anagogic dialectical component.
This stepping outside oneself has applications to psychotherapy and self-development. This is tragically lacking in modern western philosophy: a 'practical reason' acting not on the world but on consciousness itself and specially on certain aspects which are not afforded an adequate role in most modern theorizing. Ancient philosophy involved psychotherapy. A further topic to be explored would be that of the philosophy of lucid dreaming and the role of dreams in many historical philosophers. Also we mention that meditation has always been a deeply appealing and yet rather elusive endeavor. The reason for lack of solid progress seems to be unawareness that meditation is not an activity or study like others for which a scheduled time is set aside for, thereby hoping that progress will be directly related to the intensity and time of practice. Rather the precondition for progress involves a total reformation and overhaul of one's everyday life habits and mental patterns. Once this global reform has become established and solid, which can likened to diffuse light, meditation can then take place as a kind of focus or diffraction of this energy. But this local active engagement in meditation can also in turn serve as a tool for such a global reform. There is another problem: if meditation can be likened to the escape from the Cave, then what is the role of phenomenology here ? It is certainly not focusing on the shadows qua shadows. Rather it is a vertical phenomenology that pertains to effecting a fundamental insight leading to conversion and an impetus to escape.
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The following text is not really interesting except as pointing out some important facts about certain forms of meditation and the body. The kind of atomism found in Hume and the abhidhamma is radically false.
(text 3)
We can attach great phenomenological importance to the body, feeling and the senses. But this in a way distinct from mainstream body-centered phenomenology which involves naturalist assumptions. Indeed the ultimate goal is the very opposite: we study and acknowledge the embodiment of consciousness in order, so to speak, to ultimately disembody and denaturalize phenomenology. And by 'body' we mean the internal first-person experience of the body including the analysis of elements of consciousness according to the different sense-fields and their associated neurological systems. It will be seen that the inner experience and concept of the body is related to the constitution of personal identity and the self-in-the-world. Also that the body can play a central feedback role in the previous methodology of transcendental self-transparency. There is also much that could be said about the methodological value of the more general contemplation of the composite structure and processes of the natural world.
We could compare physical (Democritus, etc.) and psychological atomism (abhidhamma, Hume). Atomism fails to give an account of space and time both in its subjective and allegedly objective modes and of why these two aspects could coexist. It gives no account of gravity or electromagnetic fields, of the nature of 'atoms' themselves, why and how they causally influence each other from any distance, how they can be substances bearing properties and relations, how they can exist 'in' space, how they can change and yet be indivisible, have individual identity, why they should follow a priori mathematical laws, etc. Atomism offers no account of mathematics or intentionality or meaning. It cannot account for the body of experimental evidence supporting the claim that fundamental physics is essentially a theory of fields rather than particles (which are abstractions and epiphenomena without fixed identities). The relations between the atoms is just as important if not more than the atoms themselves. It is anthropomorphic to think of atoms as free independent individuals. The equations that determine the relations show that atoms are just nodes inseparable and existing only as a part of holistic structure (like a tapestry). Atomism does not explain space, time or change and that it is plausible that timeless space-time is what actually exists (and hence atoms are space-time tubes or curves each one determining and determined by every other one) and that instantaneous present time exists relative only to a particular consciousness. However atomism remains (once it discards its absolutist claims) an important paradigm of rationality.
The following text is a study of the relationship between phenomenology, ancient skepticism and Hegel. These consideration are just preliminary and far from being correct. It is important to study in depth the relationship between Platonic dialectics and ancient skepticism and Hegel. Our previous note on Analyticity and the A Priori is relevant from skepticism. Hegelian dialectics can only become a part of Platonic dialectics through a careful study of the logical and mathematical core present therein. The goal of Hegelian dialectics (just as the goal of phenomenology) is quite illusory outside the central theory and practice of Platonic dialectics and specially its mathematical component.
(text 4)
Following phenomenological methodology we hope that we can obtain direct global insight into higher primordial constitutive structures and processes of consciousness, notably with regards to the complex domains commonly labeled under the terms 'self', 'agent', 'knower', personal identity and specially the domain of concepts and the process of reason itself. Key formal aspects are self-reference, self-modification, self-positing, self-othering, return-to-self, self-transcendence. We also propose to elucidate the subtleties of the doctrine of non-self (anattâ) in the oldest most authentic subtrate of the Pali canon, the part concerned with purely philosophical, moral and yogic elements. See C.I. Beckwith's Greek Buddha for argumentation for a purely philosophical and yogic (in the sense at aiming at the liberation of the mind) form of original Buddhism virtually identical in content to Pyrrhonism - a thesis which is strengthened by Hegel's interpretation of Sextus in his Lessons on the History of Philosophy. Bina Gupta has shown that the Vedanta and the other main darshanas can be approached from a purely philosophical point of view.
An important goal is to obtain not merely a theoretical understanding but direct intuition of the radically different nature of what was previously apprehended and taken to be our ordinary 'self' and personal identity. Also to show how cognition of objects is tied to self-consciousness (as Dennis Schulting argues in Kant's Radical Subjectivism).
It is interesting to present the following passages from Hegel. In the Encyclopedia Logic:
In other words, every man, when he thinks and considers his thoughts, will discover by the experience of his consciousness that they possess the character of universality as well as the other aspects of thought to be afterwards enumerated. We assume of course that his powers of attention and abstraction have undergone a previous training, enabling him to observe correctly the evidence of his consciousness and his conceptions.
And in the Lessons in the History of Philosophy:
The two formal moments in this sceptical culture are firstly the power of consciousness to go back from itself, and to take as its object the whole that is present, itself and its operation included. The second moment is to grasp the form in which a proposition, with whose content our consciousness is in any way occupied, exists. An undeveloped consciousness, on the other hand, usually knows nothing of what is present in addition to the content.
Phenomenology can contribute to a philosophical corrective reconciliation and synthesis between disparate philosophical views, both ancient and modern, eastern and western (but without implying any teleological progress). One key to this endeavor will attaching importance to a radical new interpretations and evaluations of the influence and significance of Pyrrhonism, Stoicism and the phenomenism of David Hume. Also to show that Plotinus has much to offer in the form of rigorous philosophy. Porphyry in his Life of Plotinus states that both the Stoic and Peripatetic doctrines are sunk in the work of his teacher. Preliminary work towards this goal will involve bringing to light neglected agreements and correspondences between different philosophical schools. For example: the dialectics of the middle Platonic dialogues is quite close to the argument structure of Sextus. So too is later neoplatonism's preoccupation with the ineffability of the Good. The connection of Pyrrhonism to the Sophists needs to be explored. Aristotle's De Anima has a striking agreement with eastern systems such as Yoga and Samkhya and the ideal sage of the Nichomachean Ethics (as well as the ethics of Democritus) differs little from the Stoic sage or eastern Yogi.
Plotinus indirectly engages with the sceptical later Academy through Saint Augustine's Contra Academicos (in this work we find the remarkable definition: I call world whatever appears to me.) but such an engagement is already found in middle Platonism, for instance in Nummenius as well as among the Stoics (as reported by Cicero's Academica). It is illuminating to compare the psychology and epistemology found in the Stoics and Academics to their counterparts in the Pali suttas. There are some surprising Plotinean anticipations of Kant, some of which seem to correspond even in the very phrasing (see our paper Aristotle’s Analysis of Consciousness). Hume's system (which has close affinities to the scepticism of the later Academy) is very illuminating despite its errors and shortcomings: a careful unveiling of these last that leads directly towards progress in phenomenology. Also Hegel's reading of Sextus (in the Lessons in the History of Philosophy) provides a powerful corroboration to the thesis defended in C.I. Beckwith's book Greek Buddha.
In Sextus the transcendental subject abstains (epikhein) from positing finite determinations either sensuous or rational as the truth - while at the same time considering how consciounsess 'goes back from itself', considering its very operation in addition to the content.
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The following text is more interesting and can be reinterpreted as a justification for Platonic dialectics (as a vertical phenomenology although the use of this term is perhaps not at all appropriate) - although of course there is much that needs to be corrected and clarified. Indeed the problems raised at there end can be solved by Platonic dialectics. The text very correctly points out the essential role of pure reason, specially pure mathematical reason for the feasibility of the attainment of the goals of phenomenology.
(text 5) Let us make the distinction between horizontal and vertical phenomenology more clear. The distinction is based foremost on the nature of the goal that is to be achieved, something what is in turn reflected in the methodology. Horizontal phenomenology’s goal is to reach back to the grounds of consciousness itself in order to explain and find the ultimate foundations of the world and ordinary consciousness. The goal is not to transcend the world or even to overcome ordinary consciousness (as if this could be a goal in itself) but rather to find an ultimate justification and source of meaning for the world. It is as if the prisoners in Plato’s Cave were interested in the objects behind them only for the sake of guaranteeing that the shadowy spectacle in from of them could be given a certain consistency and meaning, and thus their whole life as prisoners be in some sense consolidated and less rather more likely to be questioned. The prisoner-philosophers would be very interested in and focused on the shadows as shadows and study all their forms and variations and attempt to reconstruct the source-object as a kind of invariant. Vertical phenomenology on the other hand is concerned primarily with the escape from the Cave. The awareness of the shadows qua shadows is inseparable from the awareness of the chains and knowledge of the light-source. Its methodology is all about chain-breaking, light-seeking and truth-seeing and the shadows are studied both in their unreality and as factors of limitation and conditioning (horizontal phenomenology is incorporated but never as an end in itself). Vertical phenomenology is at once epistemic, ontological and ethical. It can be found most clearly in the systems of Yoga, Samkhya and Advaita Vedanta as well as in Plotinus.
As already mentioned the Pali texts are complex, heterogenous and difficult to interpret though there are grounds for postulating on oldest purely philosophical, yogic and ethical substrate. What is curious is that a kind of horizontal phenomenology seems to play an important role in the form of the well-known practice of satipatthana, although there can be little doubt that this takes place in the context of the aims of vertical phenomenology. However satipatthana can taken out of context and appropriated in the form a horizontal phenomenological psychology or psychotherapy and we can ask if certain ‘mindfulness’ or ‘living in the present moment’ practices are not really hindering the prisoners’ propensities to break free and seek the Truth.
The concept we wish to put forth in this section is that horizontal phenomenology is a vital element of a valid vertical phenomenology. This is because ordinary consciousness has a dual nature consisting of those more properly conscious elements and those that form a kind of complex substrate acting “behind” our more conscious experience. Thus the awareness of ordinary awareness needs to increase its range, its rays need to shine upon all the hidden obscure corners and recesses of our habits, conditioning and buried memories. The cultivation of a horizontal phenomenology as outlined in the first sections of this note appears thus as an important even necessary step along the path to self-transparency. Without this preparation the prisoner cannot hope to escape from Cave, rather she will only meet with more shadows.
Language permeates consciousness and our representation of the world yet just as the primordial constituting factors we discussed above are normally forgotten so too do we usually lack the transcendental awareness of the manifestation of language qua language (in particular inner verbal discourse) in our conscious experience. We find the idea of the philosophy of language as phenomenology well worth exploring (and there appears to be some significant connection to Zen/Ch'an).
How can we apply logic and language to determine the relationship between logic and language themselves and something which is beyond logic or language ? The philosophy of logic and the philosophy of language can be seen as part of phenomenology for logic and language are key parts of the structure and dynamics of consciousness. While standard attempts to theorize a foundation of logic itself will evidently depend on logic, there is away out of the predicament once we move to consciousness.
How are we to understand the theory that logic and language are precisely aspects of the structure and dynamics of consciousness (but not ordinary consciousness in the sense of psychologism) when to understand any process we must presuppose logic and language ? Hegel offers this solution in his Introduction to the Science of Logic:
Die Logik dagegen kann keine dieser Formen der Reflexion oder Regeln und Gesetze des Denkens voraussetzen, denn sie machen einen Theil ihres Inhalts selbst aus und haben erst innerhalb ihrer begründet zu werden. Nicht nur aber die Angabe der wissenschaftlichen Methode, sondern auch der Begriff selbst der Wissenschaft überhaupt gehört zu ihrem Inhalte, und zwar macht er ihr letztes Resultat aus; was sie ist, kann sie daher nicht voraussagen, sondern ihre ganze Abhandlung bringt dieß Wissen von ihr selbst erst als ihr Letztes und als ihre Vollendung hervor.
Logic, on the contrary, cannot presuppose any of these forms of reflection, these rules and laws of thinking, for they are part of its content and they first have to be established within it. And it is not just the declaration of scientific method but the concept itself of science as such that belongs to its content and even makes up its final result. Logic, therefore, cannot say what it is in advance, rather does this knowledge of itself only emerge as the final result and completion of its whole treatment. (Di Giovanni tr.)
To understand this more fully we would need to understand more fully how the Phenomenology of Spirit is articulated with the Science of Logic.
But let us consider another point. What is the relationship between pure rational activity (such as pure mathematics) and phenomenology ? And how are we to understand the anagogic role of the Platonic dialectic (which was also accepted by Plotinus), if we take this dialectic in the sense of the anagogic use of pure reason (as in Gödel) ? Also, how does Hegel’s concept of Logic compare to that of the Plotinean self-knowledge of the nous or the lower form intellection of the soul’s logoi as conceived by Proclus ?
An alternative to the horizontal vs. vertical distinction might be simply that phenomenology itself represents an early less advanced stage of the anagogic path (concerned more with appearances, images, opinions and the relations of ordinary consciousness – a mere antechamber of Truth) which must ultimately give place to something else.
