The science of experience
I was recently reminded of the concept of Phenomenology as I was reading ‘The Spell of the Sensuous‘ by David Abram. The book explores the relationship between human beings and the natural world, focusing on how language and perception shape our experience of reality. Reading his interpretations and his presentations of Edmund Husserl’s original concept made me feel giddy in a way that I wasn’t expecting. I think its because it resonated with ideas deep inside of me that I had forgotten about. I wrote my dissertation nearly ten years ago essentially about how malleable our perception of time is, or in other words the shape of our experience of reality. I remember that around the time I wrote it there were several people I spoke to who kept mentioning Phenomenology, but I never really understood it, it felt very aloof and abstract. Yet when I came across it in this book it felt like reaching deep inside of myself and turning the key to open a door to another time, only now the edges of this time are clearer, brighter. Edmund Husserl said that phenomenology is the science of experience. “Phenomenology would seek not to explain the world but to describe as closely as possible to the way the world makes itself evident to awareness, the way things first arise in our direct, sensorial experience.”
Our perception is constantly shifting and changing, it has a different texture and feeling depending on what we are doing, and how and with whom. I imagine it somehow a bit like the bubble theory (I’ll explain this another day) and imagining a jelly membrane that surrounds me that shapes and morphs to my environment. The different curvatures, thickness and distance of the membrane warp the world in front of me. Makings things faster, slower, more focussed, more distorted. And it is always changing.
Keiken means experience, it was the first connection we made between ourselves on the first day we randomly decided to become a collective about ten years ago. Exploring consciousness, subconciousness, perception is at the core of all of what we do and somehow I never made sense that the word phenomenology means just that, the science of experience.