Chelsea Swan

Since I spoke about Autoethnography I also wanted to talk about the other term that pops up in my thinking again and again. I also had a moment of clicking with something when I first came across it. I am not shy about my love of Simone de Beauvoir. There is a book called The Existentialist Cafe by Sarah Bakewell that centers around philosophers of Simones time and it speaks about phenomenology. It is a Philosophy of experience as the ultimate source of all meaning and value is lived.

Sarah Bakewell explains,

It is essentially a method rather than a set of theories, and its basic approach can be conveyed through a two-word command: DESCRIBE PHENOMENA.

Describe is a removal of interpretation or a rejection of distractions, habits, cliches, presumptions and received ideas to see the thing in itself. Phenomena to a phenomenologist denotes any objects or events as they presents themselves to our experience. The extra stuff. Like my inner and outer self ideas. Or like Plato and his representations. There is the thing, then there is our idea of the thing and all the stuff that goes with it. Its like how we don’t actually see all the people in the crowd, our mind fills in what it perceives as the blanks. The actuality of it is there and it is seperate from the additional information our mind registers. That extra stuff is an entity in itself.

Unlike past philosophers, the phenomenologist does not try to see the world from outside the world. They do not remove themselves from the world, because they consider such an act to be not only impossible but also useless. Instead, they do the opposite. Like Romantic poets, they throw themselves into the world. They live it, and taste it, and savour it. They experience it. Things acquire meaning only by our experience of them.