\u201cIt is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests\u200a\u2014\u200athat even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato\u2019s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.\u201d ~ Nietzsche<\/p>\n
Michel Foucault studied tranches of history to report shifts in \u201cepistemes,\u201d unconscious<\/a> assumptions that determine what counts as knowledge in a given epoch. For me, there was a paradigm shift in Western civilization in the beginning of the 20th century that can be seen in physics, painting, music, literature, psychology, and philosophy<\/a>. What that shift exposed was exactly what Nietzsche had already identified: that our faith in the possible objectivity of \u201cscience\u201d was tantamount to our faith in religion.<\/p>\n Look what happened in a single generation: <\/p>\n Heisenberg demonstrated that the act of observing a particle changes the particle. In this tranche of history, we can see the shift away from the episteme of objectivity.<\/p>\n Enter Edmund Husserl, the founding father of the discipline, as we know it today, called \u201cPhenomenology.\u201d Husserl correctly stated that we cannot subtract the observer from the observation and still call what remains \u201cknowledge.\u201d In contrast to the belief that the empirical method of the Enlightenment was the only legitimate path to truth and that science would allow us to understand the world as it exists, Husserl reminded us that we had forgotten the perceiver\u200a\u2014\u200asomething that Picasso, Duchamp, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and every musician who ever trusted the riffs resounding inside their heads already knew.<\/p>\n Husserl\u2019s method was rigorous: to \u201cbracket\u201d our assumptions and describe exactly what shows up in consciousness before theory colonizes it, trying to take into consideration the structure of our own perceiving. But that is not how the word \u201cphenomenological\u201d is used today. The word has been detached from the method that gave it meaning and is now doing little but virtue-signaling an epistemological humility that the user isn\u2019t actually demonstrating. Philosophy anointed an insight into a word\u2014a word that would imply, by its very existence, that another option is also available.<\/p>\n But what would a non-phenomenological analysis resemble, an analysis without a human observer? Every account of reality is already and always an account by a percipient, a human being who cannot step outside the categories they arrived with\u200a\u2014\u200acategories that are not neutral or found \u201cout there\u201d in the world. My cat Evelyn\u200a\u2014\u200ano matter how much I anthropomorphize<\/a> her\u200a\u2014\u200adoes not (to the best of my knowledge) divide a tree into trunk, bark, leaves, and root. And as Derrida reminds us, when we look up \u201ctrunk\u201d or \u201cleaf\u201d in the dictionary, all we find is more words. Language points to more language, infinitely. It\u2019s turtles all the way down.<\/p>\n So when academics announce they are offering \u201ca phenomenological analysis,\u201d their use of this twenty-dollar word undermines whatever argument they are making. They may as well say they are offering \u201ca human analysis\u201d\u200a\u2014\u200aas if there could be anything else. Every scientist who ever measured anything, every physicist who ever collapsed a probability wave, every painter who ever chose where to stand, every composer who ever trusted a riff in their head\u200a\u2014\u200athey were all doing phenomenology. Which means none of them were. If everything is phenomenological, then nothing is phenomenological. So maybe it is time to declare a moratorium on that word? Not because it indicates something false, but because it indicates nothing at all, and its use betrays a lack of the critical thinking that its users mistakenly believe they are demonstrating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cIt is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests\u200a\u2014\u200athat even we knowers of today,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656733,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-656732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656732","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656732"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656732\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656733"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656732"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656732"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656732"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nSchr\u00f6dinger proposed his famous thought experiment wherein a cat sealed in a box is simultaneously alive and dead until a consciousness opens the lid.
\nPicasso and Braque painted guitars, bottles and faces from multiple angles simultaneously.
\nDuchamp\u2019s Nude Descending a Staircase portrayed motion itself as a subject.
\nProust demonstrated in In Search of Lost Time that memory<\/a> is not retrieval but reconstruction\u200a\u2014\u200athe past is not stored somewhere waiting to be accessed, it is created by whomever is doing the remembering.
\nStravinsky\u2019s Rite of Spring caused audiences to stampede\u200a\u2014\u200apatrons were enraged that Stravinsky had abolished the tonal center, the fixed harmonic home that Western music had organized itself around for 300 years.
\nSchoenberg did similarly with twelve-tone scale, building a system in which no note is more important than any other\u200a\u2014\u200ano objective center, just a democracy of equals.
\nFreud<\/a> demonstrated that what we consciously think we know about ourselves is the smallest fraction of what is actually running the show\u200a\u2014\u200aand Freud did not stumble onto the unconscious like an anthropologist digging up a buried hieroglyph\u200a, \u200ahe built it along with its repressions, drives, and his interpretations of dreams<\/a>.<\/p>\n