To your points about phenomenology, I think it would be great if we could better teach the method of phenomenological reduction as Husserl described it. There’s a crappy thing people do these days they call “phenomenological reduction” in academic literature that’s more like some narrative-conforming version of “examine your assumptions”.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any great resource to walk people through the method, and Husserl seemed to just intuitively know how to do it such that he couldn’t or at least didn’t communicate clear, detailed instructions. In particular people tend to get stuck on the second motion of reduction, the reduction proper, or perform the first motion, epoche, in a linguistic-only way that doesn’t get to the heart of the experience being bracketed.
This gives me a hypothesis that phenomenological methods aren’t more popular among rationalists because there not currently something like “legible” and that makes it hard to evaluate if they do something or not. Sure, we can point to people who used phenomenological or proto-phenomenological methods and tell a story that it was causally important that they used those methods, but I think we also lack stronger legible evidence that those methods mattered and were not superfluous. Cf. the academic mathematician cultural norm of publishing just the proofs with little to not explanation of intuitions.
I think one of my central original seeing exercises does walk people through (a version of?) phenomenological reduction, and I wonder if you’d agree. It goes like this.
Find an object. Doesn’t matter what it is, but this will probably be easier if it’s a concrete, physical object you can hold, such as a pen or a box of tissues.
Write a sentence about what the object is and how you’re relating it.
Set a timer for two minutes. During that minute, snap your fingers whenever you notice something new about the object, something you haven’t already snapped your fingers for. If you’re not sure whether something “counts” as worthy of a finger snap, err on the side of inclusion.
After the two minutes are up, list the strategies and tactics you used to get finger snaps.
Then extend the list, including strategies and tactics you didn’t use, but perhaps could have, to get even more finger snaps.
Set the timer for another minute, and continue snapping your fingers every time you notice something new about the object.
Notice if any of your snaps felt like they were borderline, especially the ones that felt that way because it wasn’t clear that your object is quite what you were snapping about. In the next round, plan to count those sorts of borderline cases as straightforwardly worthy of finger snaps.
Set one more one minute timer, and keep snapping when you notice something new.
When the time is up, write a new sentence about what the object is and how you’re relating to it.
(Once you’ve done this a few times, you can do the whole thing very quickly in one smooth motion, no finger snaps required.)
Edit: A cautionary note may be appropriate here. A couple people who have done this exercise reported “feeling like they’re going crazy”, or variations on that. I don’t think there’s actually much danger, but if things start to feel frightening or terribly uncomfortable in the middle of this, I recommend that you stop, do something normal like making dinner, and then evaluate what happened and whether you want to try again.
To your points about phenomenology, I think it would be great if we could better teach the method of phenomenological reduction as Husserl described it. There’s a crappy thing people do these days they call “phenomenological reduction” in academic literature that’s more like some narrative-conforming version of “examine your assumptions”.
Unfortunately I don’t know of any great resource to walk people through the method, and Husserl seemed to just intuitively know how to do it such that he couldn’t or at least didn’t communicate clear, detailed instructions. In particular people tend to get stuck on the second motion of reduction, the reduction proper, or perform the first motion, epoche, in a linguistic-only way that doesn’t get to the heart of the experience being bracketed.
This gives me a hypothesis that phenomenological methods aren’t more popular among rationalists because there not currently something like “legible” and that makes it hard to evaluate if they do something or not. Sure, we can point to people who used phenomenological or proto-phenomenological methods and tell a story that it was causally important that they used those methods, but I think we also lack stronger legible evidence that those methods mattered and were not superfluous. Cf. the academic mathematician cultural norm of publishing just the proofs with little to not explanation of intuitions.
This is a good point.
I think one of my central original seeing exercises does walk people through (a version of?) phenomenological reduction, and I wonder if you’d agree. It goes like this.
Find an object. Doesn’t matter what it is, but this will probably be easier if it’s a concrete, physical object you can hold, such as a pen or a box of tissues.
Write a sentence about what the object is and how you’re relating it.
Set a timer for two minutes. During that minute, snap your fingers whenever you notice something new about the object, something you haven’t already snapped your fingers for. If you’re not sure whether something “counts” as worthy of a finger snap, err on the side of inclusion.
After the two minutes are up, list the strategies and tactics you used to get finger snaps.
Then extend the list, including strategies and tactics you didn’t use, but perhaps could have, to get even more finger snaps.
Set the timer for another minute, and continue snapping your fingers every time you notice something new about the object.
Notice if any of your snaps felt like they were borderline, especially the ones that felt that way because it wasn’t clear that your object is quite what you were snapping about. In the next round, plan to count those sorts of borderline cases as straightforwardly worthy of finger snaps.
Set one more one minute timer, and keep snapping when you notice something new.
When the time is up, write a new sentence about what the object is and how you’re relating to it.
(Once you’ve done this a few times, you can do the whole thing very quickly in one smooth motion, no finger snaps required.)
Edit: A cautionary note may be appropriate here. A couple people who have done this exercise reported “feeling like they’re going crazy”, or variations on that. I don’t think there’s actually much danger, but if things start to feel frightening or terribly uncomfortable in the middle of this, I recommend that you stop, do something normal like making dinner, and then evaluate what happened and whether you want to try again.