Noematics 101, an inquiry into writing as phenomenology

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...

In an unsent letter to a correspondent, I didn't tell him: "You pinned it nicely. 'appearing and being are not exactly the same thing'." But I say yes they are. What appears to you is what is. There is nothing outside of you which tells you, or me, that IT, whatever "it" is, IS. Consider first these selected quotes from the book Mysticism by Ruth Underhill (pages 5-6, 1961, E. P. Dutton, New York, first published 1911). I note not in passing that at the same time (1913), Husserl was preparing his seminal work on phenomenology, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology). Like minds, different words, slightly different takes. Let us then begin at the beginning: and remind ourselves of a few of the trite and primary facts which all practical persons agree to ignore. That beginning, for human thought, is of ...

I wrote a dialog a few years ago with the thesis that if one were to read just one book, a novel, from that book, upon close and global analyses, you would find enough material to think about and concern you for the rest of your life. I used one book as my example, a somewhat controversial book. The name of the book doesn't matter, or shouldn't, and the first line wouldn't matter either. Consider a most famous line from an American novel, "Call me Ishmael." Isn't there a world in a grain of sand in such a short sentence? Not long enough? Try this one: "'To be born again,' sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, 'first you have to die." Of course, it would be nice to consider more, such as "'Hoji! Hoji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly.'" More than meets the eye, as the saying goes. But I contend the length and more sentences around the first one not necessary. The one, the part refl...

Immerse thyself again in words most apt that stand and are for what it is you would have me see and thoroughly be precisely not exactly as you have put them. Nay, before you put them, before it was you said them, or whispered in tentative strokes intending to paint what it is you saw or sensed and decided to wield them about for goodness sake (Oh, that I would and that I could not as I have done here.) even before real wording if and whether you would get it true than a drift better than a cloud that pierced effortlessly to its destination and took you back to thyself and me: Writing is that you me be, and we know that is not possible as we compelled ourselves to make it so. Sad there is no other salvation, no sufficient redemption, no reckoning. Yet we have this conversation or illusion that it is so.

The written and the writing, noema and noesis. Not either/or but both. And then some, for each has its what and its how. The experience of the written is wedded to how it is written. The act of writing has its duality too--"I am writing and I experience I am writing in this way." The written is the evidence of having had a duality consciousness of, which makes the doing, the act of writing, phenomenology. The artifact is then what? Not phenomenology but a report of same, or a portrait or snapshot. Here is a new object of consciousness ready-at-hand to constitute approximately the act of doing a like-thing again through an act, an -ing act, that of reading. Reading is then beyond and different from the consciousness of the perpetrator and the perpetrator's, and never a one-for-one correspondence of his or her image-in-mind with that subsequently experienced by an other. The change of emphasis from the written product to writing as a process manifests another important ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ33gAyhg2c The magic and mystery of writing, as well as reading and "getting what was intended" are more than what I have suggested thus far. I have asserted that what I experience I want you to experience also--in the same way with the sameness that I can be assured of with my careful scribblings. It doesn't work exactly this way, and because of this writing is not a description of what it is like for me that you can have but a description of what something akin to what I experience is like for you. These are not the same. Douglas Hofstadter in his essay "Analogy as the Core of Cognition" ( http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/hofstadter/analogy.html ) succinctly summarizes this magic and mystery when he talks about "just adding water." The usual goal of communication is, of course, to set up “the same thought” in the receiver's brain as is currently taking place in the sender's brain. The mode by wh...

 I have perhaps implicitly focused my attention on mimesis, the text as an imitation of reality, a representation such that the reader "gets" the same experience as that of the writer before or as s/he writes. Perhaps I am in error.  Susan Sontag in her essay, "Against Interpretation" writes that Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first. The content may have changed. It may now be less figurative, less lucidly realistic. But it is still assumed that a work of art is its content. Or, as it's usually put today, that a work of art by definition says something. ("What X is saying is . . ...