2024 Joint Meeting of SPHS and ICNAP “Phenomenology at the Borders”
Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, May 20th – 23rd, 2024
Panel: Phenomenology at the Border of Rationality: J. Leavitt Pearl, “Synchronicity as Method: A Phenomenological Study of Aleatoric Meaning Constitution,” and Randolph Dible, “Phenomenology in the Flotation Tank: Renewing John C. Lilly’s Phenomenology Experimental Research Center (PERC) with Thinking the Float Tank”
Phenomenology in the Flotation Tank: Renewing John C. Lilly’s Phenomenology Experimental Research Center (PERC) with Thinking the Float Tank
Abstract: In an effort to create an environment conducive to a first-person science of consciousness, neuroscientist John C. Lilly invented the sensory deprivation chamber, or flotation tank. Lilly’s research paradigm, which included a central place for phenomenology, led to the development of his float tank laboratories in Big Sur, California, called the Phenomenology Experimental Research Center (PERC). The phenomenological reduction, whether transcendental or eidetic or otherwise, is a meditative performance that brings about the state of cognition necessary for rigorous scientific philosophy. While it is unclear how much Lilly relied upon Husserl’s methods, it is evident that the anaesthetic environment of the float tank provides a tool for phenomenological experimentation. In the early days of PERC, Lilly was experimenting with the use of a mathematical text called Laws of Form as an approach to inner space. Lilly’s move from experimental psychology to a cosmology of inner space relied on that text’s central mathematical operation called the first distinction. This primordial act of distinction is, for Lilly, the crossing of the boundary common to all phenomena. As Dermot Moran has recently suggested, this “primary distinction” is perhaps closest to Husserl’s mature (1907 onwards) concept of the transcendental ego’s ability to take a stance on itself, which Husserl calls ego-splitting[1]. In 1973 Lilly and Alan Watts invited the book’s author, the mathematician George Spencer-Brown, to lead a week-long seminar called the American University of Masters (AUM) conference. Since the days of PERC and the AUM conference, the scientific and philosophical landscape has changed significantly. This presentation reviews the past, initiates updates in certain areas of the science and philosophy relevant to Lilly’s program, and finally proposes a new framework based on Lilly’s work. At the contemporary art museum West Den Haag in The Hague in the summer of 2023, the interdisciplinary conference Thinking the Float Tank marked the fiftieth anniversary of the AUM conference. Thinking the Float Tank aimed at bringing the attention of Husserlian phenomenologists, psychologists, and psychical researchers to Lilly’s “void method” of inner space travel through “Spencer-Brown’s doorway”—novel ways through the mind to essential structures. Such practices call for synthesis with phenomenological psychology, eidetic and ontological phenomenology, and new approaches to the field of immanence. Thinking the Float Tank reconstructed Lilly’s phenomenological research and also focused on bringing that work into conversation with contemporary work in Husserlian phenomenology. In this presentation, the tour through flotation science will culminate in a new ontology and phenomenology based on Laws of Form and specially designed for the float tank experience.
[1] Dermot Moran, “The Nature of Self-Experience, Husserl’s Sphere of Ownness and the Experience of the Flotation Tank,” at Thinking the Float Tank: https://randolphdible.com/dermot-moran/
North American Society for Early Phenomenology (NASEP)
2024 NASEP Conference, “Phenomenology, Pragmatism, and Mysticism”
University of New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, June 7th – 8th, 2024
The Philosophical Mysticism of Hedwig Conrad-Martius
Abstract: There is more to Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ ontological phenomenology than meets the eye. With her regular citations of such German theosophists and mystics as Jakob Böhme (1575-1624) and Franz Xavier von Baader (1765-1841), it is easy to identify Conrad-Martius as a mystic. I would like to illustrate evidence for this identification, but also provide a way of seeing her core philosophy, including her central method of the real-ontological reduction, as a kind of philosophical mysticism. There is abundant evidence for her Christian mysticism, theosophy, and embrace of religious diversity in the expression of not only her theological investigations but also in all areas of her ontological investigation of nature, from her 1912 doctoral work to her books published in the 1960s. This is because the eidetic phenomenological innovation of essence intuition, the seeing of essences (Wesensshau), conducted under proper conditions could be an explicitly spiritual investigatory method in much the same sense as other German Romantic spiritual sciences, such as anthroposophy. In this presentation I aim to illustrate a number of examples of this mystical output along the route to illuminating her central invariant philosophical methodology.
There are a number of different criteria we might have in mind when we approach the question of mysticism in the thought of Hedwig Conrad-Martius. There is her religious context of the Schobdacher Kreis, and there is her 1920s spiritual activity in Bad Bergzabern, including an important part of her close relationship with Edith Stein, who later became a Catholic saint. As a woman of early phenomenology, Conrad-Martius is in league with Stein as well as Gerda Walther, whose preeminence as a phenomenologist mystic has been fixed by the publication of Phänomenologie der Mystik. A comparison of the mystical aspects of these three women phenomenologists should be made. There is also the trail of Conrad-Martius’ references to anthroposophical philosophers and spiritual scientists (anthroposophische geisteswissenschaft, especially in her essay “Jenseits des Todes”) such as Herbert Fritsche, Edgar Dacqué, Hermann Poppelbaum, Otto Julius Hartmann, as well as her abundant use of mystical concepts from the founder of theosophy Jakob Böhme and the Romantic philosopher Franz Xavier von Baader. But looking at Conrad-Martius’ central philosophical method will turn out to be the key to understanding her “existential mysticism” (existentieller Mystiker, “Wissenschaft, Mythos und Neues Testament”; existenziellen Mystik, “Zur Philosophie des hl. Thomas von Aquino”). The use of essence intuition as a kind of spiritual seeing, and the spiritual fruits brought by the real-ontological reduction and corresponding domain of ontic research, are what we will look at today from a spiritual and mystical perspective. For our precise frame of reference we will proceed directly to the door (Tor) or gate (Tür, Pforte) provided by Conrad-Martius as a clue to her philosophical mysticism.
In her 1923 Realontologie, Conrad-Martius illustrates her central thesis with the imagery of a door, the “door of reality” (dem Tor der Realität, Realontologie, 173). This is the same architectural metaphor that Conrad-Martius invokes in her critique of Heidegger’s central philosophical doctrine, and recalls in later writings. This door or gate is a “border crossing” (Grenzüberschreitung, “Heideggers ‘Sein und Zeit’”; Grenzübergang der Transzendenz, “Über existenzielle Tiefe und Untiefe von Dasein und Ich”), a crossing of the threshold of transcendence, that disappears in the attempt to grasp it. What is at stake in her critique and correction of Heidegger’s position is a deeply founded mysticism and a proof of God and of an existential eternity. Convinced of Conrad-Martius’ mysticism at the cutting edge of her ontology, we will return to her invitation to open the door and cross the threshold.
Laws of Form 2024 Conference (LoF24)
University of Liverpool, August 7th – 10th, 2024
TBD
Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP)
The 62nd Meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy
Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York, September 26th – 28th, 2024
A Phenomenology of Immersion in Hedwig Conrad-Martius and Theodor Conrad
Recent work (Geniusas 2020, 2022) on the phenomenology of immersion—or absorption (Versunkenheit)-–draws upon contributions to phenomenological psychology made by Edmund Husserl, Eugen Fink, and Theodor Conrad. Recent attention to the theme of immersion in psychology and related disciplines is for the most part motivated by the emergence of new technologies such as video games and virtual reality, but that does not mean that we will only find the phenomenon of immersion in such technologies. One might say we are immersed in the real reality before we are immersed in a virtual reality. What is this primary immersion, this real immersion in real reality, and what are its consequences? The answer to this question can be found throughout the philosophy of Hedwig Conrad-Martius, and especially in her ultimate project called universal ontology. While Conrad-Martius did not thematize a phenomenology of immersion the way her husband did, her contributions to phenomenology were more voluminous and more all-embracing. Since she made extensive and innovative use of the concept of immersion throughout her dynamic ontology of nature, the dynamism of immersion can be collected, clarified, and recast in the same direction as her husband’s phenomenological psychology of immersion.
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