Threads

There are many thus far and several in more view. It is time to take stock of the preliminary threads, and to take a position, at least a tentative one, in view of doing phenomenology, if that is depicting phenomena, which involves lots of ideas, often in the form of words. We need to manage in the sense of control these threads so that as they are the primary ones to be developed into a fabric of an answer to that first, central question: Is a writing--any/all "texts"--a product of phenomenological methods and "a direct description of our experience as it is"?

We have claimed that a piece of writing put forth for a reader is in effect a likeness of what was in the writer's consciousness, a thing or complex of things communicated as carefully and precisely as possible to be experienced and re-experienced as the thing itself.

A working reality for this claim, virtually a truism, is that whatever the perspective or type of writing, a piece of writing/text is a partial understanding of what-it-is-like in the fullest sense that language can convey. To underline the point, writing is about understandings.

Could it be that the meticulous procedures of carrying out phenomenology's enterprise in its accepted incarnation since its articulation by Husserl is as simple or complex as what writers intend to do, do, produce, and accomplish? Can we say that all writers are in some senses phenomenologists? And their readers co-producers of phenomena understood?

That which appears to be both a description of an object and an object itself of our intentional gaze has a quality. That quality, noematic, the next thread, is seen as a nexus of perceptible objects, phenomena that we can with some tools and effort comprehend as the thing itself, or multiple things themselves. The tools and effort may or may not be the same as interpretation.

The view that a writing as/is phenomenology has proponents. But what this may mean has at least one provocative thread, the subversiveness of writer and the written.

Adequate understanding of the primary question should include how much of a claim can phenomenology as/is writing be made? Are texts that
claim to be

descriptions of what-it-is-like, or how something is held in consciousness, or that they are the essence of a phenomenon
and
any/all writing-as-phenomenology

the same? If different, in what ways?

Rationales for the course we are one have been claims by this teacher and others. One articulation is that education and research and conversations about stuff are still worth doing because salvation lies in the we. To the benefit of one is not the only objective.

If writing is doing phenomenology, what is that process in terms of what phenomenologists say they do? Does the characterization or more precisely the steps of phenomenological reduction map to writing, and reading, processes? How well?

Reading has to be brought into the consideration in that the written is for reading. The intentionality of the writer includes this dimension. The matching points of writer-writing and reader-reading his/her text represent the same experiences of the words-images that comprise the story, or consciousness, of the creator. And if they match entirely, both teller and listener have had the same experience that the words create (evoke?).

Is this the fundamental phenomenology of writing--the intentionality--to create in your experience that which I intend and had when I wrote what I did?

So much work left to be done seemingly in endless words to work it all out, if possible.