From Experience to Appearance
FEST log
Entry #005
April 14, 2024
Primitive elements underlying experience
In entry #003 I introduced two working hypotheses. The first one was "WH 1: there are primitive elements underlying experience." We talked about the presence of an experiencer who is experiencing something that is experienced, suggesting at least three elements: the -er, -ing and -ed element. That said, we have no clear idea what those elements can be, apart from the linguistic names subject and object and something that connects them.
The second one was "WH 2: appearances are primitives for any form of experience." Our definition was simple: "appearance" means that something appears. Within a typical experience, a subject appears, an object appears and some form of interaction between the two. And in addition, there may well be atypical experiences, in which subject and/or objects are hardly or not at all empirically present. In a suddenly very dangerous situation all one's intention may be focused on survival, for example. But usually, one's awareness of being the subject of the experience is there, even if only tacitly in the background. But even in an atypical experience, there is something there, and in our example very vividly there, namely DANGER.
This is not the place to try to further define what appearance is. In science we start somewhere, play with some simple experiments, sketch some simple ideas for possible theories, and then the "rachet of science" as I called it in entry #001 starts doing its work, while clarifying and refining both theory and experiment in the process.
In the same entry #003, I sketched four different experiments to start with. The first one was called "experiment 1): the nature of matter as experience." We started exploring how matter and experience of matter are related at the end of entry #003. At the end of entry #004 we explored whether we could use our mind as a lab in which to deemphasize the notion of the presence of matter. The goal there was to exclusively focus on the way in which matter is given in experience, in a radically empirical way, pioneered in great detail by the philosopher Husserl. Let us now turn to the second experiment suggested in entry #003.
Entering a laboratory for exploring appearances
Let us start very gently, just dipping a toe into the waters of appearance, in a place that can play the role of a laboratory, isolated from disturbances. It is a good idea to try this at home at first, sitting on a chair or cushion, perhaps starting with an attention on your breathing in order to slow down a bit the inner dialogues that most of us are running in the background.
Experiment 2): the nature of experience as appearance
Even when you sit quietly, and your mind is relatively calm, every moment something appears: a distant sound, a fleeting thought, your breathing. Gently be aware of all those appearances appearing. You can just observe them, at first. If you feel like it, you can invite them, greet them in some way, and play with them. It is often said that scientists are like children, or equivalently, that children are like scientists, exploring the world. So if this is a novel experiment for you, the main instruction is simple: enjoy the relaxation and whatever aspects pop up. No need to distinguish between good and bad appearances, no need for any judgment at all. You can try to do this a few times for a few minutes, or longer, as you wish.
It would be good to have a log in which you enter the date and place of your experiment, and just a few lines of what you encountered, together with your reflections, if any, upon those encounters. You could again take a stone. Instead of switching between seeing the stone as a stone, or as an experience of a stone, try to find an even more minimal way of seeing stone as "something that appears", nothing more and nothing less.
In addition, the advice that I gave with the introduction of Experiment 1): the nature of matter as experience, in entry #003, holds here as well: performing these experiments together with friends will be a good idea. Apart from it being more fun, it will expose each of you to a larger variety of outcomes. Without a group of peers, science is not science.
A two-step experiment
Now that we have started to get some familiarity with the second experiment, let us combine the first and second one:
Experiment 1+2): matter as experience as appearance
In entry #004, we tried to "lift" ourselves from our normal sense of living in a material world in order to view, and really experience, the transition to finding ourselves in a world of experience. Having teleported ourselves, so to speak, from a matter world to an experience world, we can choose to not stop there, but in a continuous flow we can make another "lifting" move, into the world of appearance. Adding those two moves successively in a smooth movement may add yet another dimension to the separate moves.
Like riding a two-stage rocket, as soon as the first stage has done its job, without further ado we can jettison that one and continue our climb using the second stage. Can you feel the difference between those two stages?
Let us review again briefly the ride during the first stage. At a very young age we have learned to reify what we see around us. 'Reify' literally means 'making into a thing'. When we try to neutralize that move, and see the direct experience of a stone as an experience, we are counteracting a life-long habit of reifying. Just becoming aware of the moment in which we switch from seeing a stone, a material object outside us, to focusing on the actual act of experiencing may take some practice to get used to. The simplest trick to mark the difference is to briefly close your eyes: you then realize that the experience is gone, while of course you don't consider the stone as a material object to be gone.
For the second stage to set in, there is no such simple trick. It would be nice if we could close our "experiencing eyes" in order to reveal what appears, as a form of "pure appearing" while deemphasizing the need for a subject for whom this appearing appears. For this the lab recipe that Husserl provided us with, his epoché, may not go far enough. Leaving the "natural attitude" behind, he invites us to experience a remarkably different world, but still a world that could be experienced in some way.
Kitaro Nishida
For a description of what it feels like to make our second stage journey, we have to go beyond Husserl's already glowing report of the wonders of the first stage, which we encountered in entry #004. Around the same time that Husserl published his Ideas, describing the epoché, Kitaro Nishida, a Japanese philosopher roughly ten years younger than Husserl, published "An Inquiry into the Good", in 1911. A key point in this book was: we tend to say "I have an experience", but it is more accurate to say "Experience has me".
This one sentence has the power to open a whole new door, with a vista more far reaching than the door that Husserl provided to enter into his garden.
To begin to unpack that sentence, let us return to the description above, under the heading "Experiment 2): the nature of experience as appearance". That whole recipe was filled with advice to a "you" who was supposed to "do" the experiment. Implicit in the lab instructions was the expectation that "going from experience to appearance" meant that the experimenter was supposed to focus on the way "appearance" was experienced.
When we admire a brilliant rainbow, we tend to say that "the rainbow appears" without being real, and without even having a fixed place: it "appears" to happen in different places for different observers. But this use of the word "appearance" is not what is meant in our explorations. We are not talking about the "mere appearance" of a rainbow, as a kind of optical illusion. Rather we are pointing to Nishida's "sheer appearance", appearance as such, more stunning and in some way more "brilliant" than the way a rainbow can possibly appear in experience.
Nishida's expression for what is called "appearance" here is 純粋経験, junsui keiken, pure experience in usual translations, but in our vocabulary here it points to "pure appearance". That means appearance without there being a subject to whom an appearance appears. This notion of the absence of a subject, or put differently, the absence of a self in the case of pure appearance, was at least partly inspired by Nishida's familiarity with Zen Buddhism, in which "no self" is a central theme.
Looking back and looking ahead
In the first two entries I presented a very brief summary of what I consider to be central in the methodology of natural science, followed by a mention of some prescientific foundations in the form of experimental facts that were essential to get science going in the 17th century.
In entry #003 I suggested studying the nature of experience, as our first empirical investigation toward a science of mind. At the end of that entry I listed four experiments, to start with, two of which we have started to explore in entry #004 and the current entry, respectively.
The two remaining experiments are: "experiment 3): the nature of appearance as appearances" and "experiment 4): the presence of appearance".
Following those, I will introduce various diagrams to illustrate the relationships between what is generally classified to be objective reality, as opposed to subjective experience, in the light of what we will have covered by then in terms of investigations of appearance. The use of such illustrations will form one more parallel with the science of matter, in the way it was conceived in the 17th century.
Specifically, I will present several new diagrams as an attempt to map parallels between the analyses given by philosophers studying the mind, such as Husserl and Nishida, and natural scientists from Galileo to Newton, who in those days were called natural philosophers.
– Piet Hut