I know phenomenology is for most either unheard of or incomprehensible psuedo-science, but it's the one philosophical strand I wish was more present in Becker's synthesis. Here's the briefest of overviews:
Phenomenology is a way of thinking about thinking. It's about describing as opposed to explaining how the mind works, how our perception constructs and reconstructs reality.
Phenomenologists find that we are made up of connections to the world. We are always in a situation that we're responding to, so we're never the wholly self-contained creatures we rationalize ourselves to be.
In fact, what we are in essence is a process. Many Eastern religions and mystics hit on this. Buddhism calls it interdependent becoming: we are connected to everything and all of it is happening, is in flux.
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| I'm drunk on panda mystery. |
The essential process of our minds is composing the story of which we are part. To us, that story presents itself ready-made. The world already has meaning and we discover it there.
So this "situation" we are in is more than the objects around us, more than our senses, more than the weather. The situation includes our feelings about the situation. It includes placement in time as well as space, includes where we come from and points us forward to what we intend.
All the time the brain is explaining itself to itself, is carrying out this act of composition.
This hardly happens in a vacuum. We also find ourselves already inside pre-made stories, whole narrative threads that we have to write ourselves into or against.
Some enter into these cultural constructions more passively than others. How can they do otherwise, having never been taught to compose themselves?
But everyone interprets, and thus can warp, distort, mutate.
Becker still comes more or less to the conclusion that if the essence of what we are is an act of interpreting and making stories, we'd better get really goddamned good at interpreting and making stories.
Next: Theatre for Heroism
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