Favorite Philosophers?

[Edwardo Piet]

I have to just come out and say I don't know dick about Husserl or phenomenology according to him. I am similarly unfamiliar with Heidegger or anyone who elaborated on Husserl's thought. I remember one of my profs saying something like consciousness is not a thing itself but rather the object of consciousness is the thing. That barely intelligible sentence is literally all I know about it. Why don't you summarize it/ tell me why you like it and save me a trip to plato.stanford? ...if you're feeling fruity that is.

Phenomenology is the study of phenomena: Or sense objects in other words. The only things we are able to detect are things that are our own interpretations/experiences of reality, rather than reality itself. Reality itself cannot be reached.

And indeed, consciousness cannot be a thing in itself because things in themselves are noumenons which are the opposite of phenomenons. And consciousness deals with experience/phenomena.

Think of it like this: If we're studying chess theory then we're studying how to play the game of chess, what's a good strategy in chess, etc. If we were to study the phenomenology of chess however... we'd be studying what it's like to experience a game of chess. What it feels like, what the pieces look like, and what it feels like subjectively to consciously analyse and play the game.

Berkley suggested that all that exists is conscious experience, which many philosophers rightly thought was absurd. Aristotle suggested that there is just one world experienced in two different ways, Schopenhauer had similar thoughts. But even if it's all really just one world experienced in two different ways those two different ways that Kant spoke of are still very valid ideas: Either something is a thing we can experience or it isn't. And there may indeed be things beyond our experience. In fact, surely there are. We've already discovered that dogs can hear dog whistles and we can't, for example, bats have eccolocation and we don't, but we can sense things other animals can't.

This takes it a step further... and suggests that there are some things that are not detectable even by extensions of our senses. Because, after all, that's all science is. We still have to use our senses to look in a microscope or a telescope, or even do mathematics. And the maths are based on empirical findings. We literally by definition have never been able to experience studying anything outside of our experience.

So many philosophers spent time debating stuff like: If we see and feel and touch a wooden table..... is that us experiencing the true reality of a table, or is it just us experiencing our own experience of the table?

Husserl pointed out that we should just acknowledge that all these things at least exist as objects of consciousness so whether it really has an external reality apart from that simply does not matter. The important world is the world we live in: The world of experience. Which he named the Lebenswelt or "Lifeworld".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifeworld

So when we talk about someone "Living in the real world", we're actually talking about practical reality, the world we experience. And ironically, it may not be truly objective reality at all, we may never be able to experience that (and in fact I'm saying: we definitely won't be able to). But it simply does not matter because to experience objective reality apart from subjective reality is literally impossible anyway.

But because everything we experience is our experience of the world, rather than the world itself, then this means when we have a good feeling, all the things we think are causing our good feeling is in fact just another part of our sensation and conscious experience. It's not that positive experiences cause happiness. They are happiness. Serotonin and brain chemistry is just as much "out there" as "in here"... because there is no out there. It's all in here. I mean, surely there is an out there but we can't experience that apart from our own internal experience of it. We're literally interacting with our own brain's interpretations of what is out there. We can never truly touch external reality.

This solved the paradox of hedonism for me and stopped me chasing happiness. I no longer worry about finding happiness itself... because there is no happiness itself (just like as you mention that there is no consciousness itself, because, after all, happiness is a kind of conscious experience).

When I am listening to amazing music and enjoying it... then that music to me is an experience of happiness and not something that causes me to experience happiness.

Hope this helped