Engaging Buddhism by Garfield Jay L.;

Author:Garfield, Jay L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2014-07-27T16:00:00+00:00

1. Surface versus Deep Phenomenology

There is fiction in the space between you and reality.

You would do and say anything

To make your everyday life seem less mundane.

—Tracy Chapman

We need to begin with a distinction between two kinds of phenomenology, which I call “surface” and “deep” phenomenology reflecting the similar distinction that commentators such as Zahavi [2008] draw between phenomenology as introspection and phenomenology as transcendental analysis. Phenomenological reflection, even careful, illuminating reflection, and observation by sophisticated, trained observers, is directed in the first instance, almost by definition, at those cognitive states and processes that are accessible to introspection. Indeed, this is often what some philosophers and psychologists mean by “phenomenology”—the inner world of which we have, at least in psychological principle, conscious awareness, and which we can describe. (See Dennett 1978b, 182–186 and Metzinger 2003, 36.) It is not always easy to introspect in a revealing way, of course, and reasonable people disagree about what one finds when one does look within and especially what it is to look within, but we have a pre-theoretic fix on this inner world and our access to it. The sophisticated articulation of its contours is what I call “surface phenomenology.”

The term “surface” here is meant not to disparage the sophistication of such reflection, or of the theories of mental life arising therefrom, but to emphasize that phenomenology in this sense—as sophisticated introspection—penetrates no further than the surface of our cognitive lives, necessarily only to that which can in principle be observed, not to the non-introspectible processes and events that underlie and generate it. This point will be clearer once we contrast surface with deep phenomenology.

Deep phenomenology is the inquiry into the fundamental cognitive, affective and perceptual processes that underlie and which are causally or constitutively—biologically or metaphysically—responsible for those we find in introspection. This is necessarily an experimental and theoretical enterprise, not an introspective one. It is the enterprise undertaken in the West not only by such philosophers as Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and de Beauvoir as well as their contemporary heirs, but also by such psychologists as Simons (2000a, 2000b); Rensink (2000b); Lutz, Dunne and Davidson (2007); Lutz and Thompson (2003); Brefcynski-Lewis et al. (2007); Farb et al. (2007); Khalsa et al. (2008); McLean et al. (2010); Moore and Maliniowski (2009); Shear (2004); Shear and Jevning (1999); Raffone, Tagini and Srinivasan (2010); Varela (1996, 1999); Varela and Shear (1999); and in the Buddhist tradition first in the development of the Abhidharma, later by such philosophers as Asaṅga, Vasubandhu, Śāntarakṣita and Kamalaśila, and elaborated at length in various Chinese and Tibetan traditions.

To get a feel for the difference, consider your visual field. Right now. Is it colored or black and white? Uniform or gappy? Simultaneously or successively apprehended? Precedent or subsequent to the fixation of attention? These are questions about the phenomenology of perception. In each case, the answer is not simple: shallow and deep reflection yield very different answers, although each is accurate at its respective level, and each must be taken seriously in a complete phenomenological analysis of human perception.

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