Phenomenology in a nutshell - Who are you?

 Self-reflection and inner exploration is extremely important. Do you ever really sit quietly and take a few minutes just to reflect on your life and who you are? This is something that certain groups of people rarely have time for – people working long hours in tiring and demanding jobs or people with large families, always seeking to meet the demands of others. The constant noise and bustle of everyday life continuously disrupts and discourages what should be a natural thing to do - inner seeking.   

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The late Raymond Carver (1938-1988) needed time to reflect and write, but he also desperately needed peace and quiet. Being unable to find this for many years, it drove him to alcoholism. Only after getting divorced, his children all grown up and being much older, he was able to find a sense of peace. He remarried and this ‘saved’ him from self-destructive behavior and alcoholism. Reaching early middle age, he wrote a collection of poems named “Fires” and he believed that everything would work out some way or another.  

One day, while doing his laundry at a laundromat, this inner peace died when he saw a vision of his life fading away. He saw himself in a sea of endless chaos of small-time jobs and parental responsibilities and suddenly felt that his life was never really going to get better. The dreams of him and his wife began to go 'bust' as he felt that dreaming big and working hard was an empty American philosophy, leaving them with a feeling that their entire lives were just confusion and darkness.

 “The time came and went when everything my wife and I held sacred, or considered worthy of respect, every spiritual value, crumbled away.” (Raymond Carver, Fires [1985] page 34)   

Because we are complicated and society is complicated, Phenomenology believes that if we are to be real, then we need to have relationships with at least one other person, but not to let them rule us and drive us away from what we are and who we are.  It claims that humans and the world constantly interacts with one another and that we need to ask ourselves “who am I, who is my community and what is our place in the world?” For Raymond Carver, his need was to write and find inner peace in order not to let desperation consume him.  

What then, makes us who we are?  

Phenomenology helps us to find who we are and who we want to be. 

“We dull our lives by the way we imagine them. We have stopped imagining them with any sort of romance, any sort of story…[what about]beauty, mystery and myth? There is an essential mystery at the heart of each human life. (James Hillman, The Soul’s Code, 1996) 

James Hillman wrote in his book (The Soul’s Code) about the lives of people who did not accept society’s demands and said:

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Probably the hardest question one can ask is “Who am I?”  Not many people are able to answer this as it deserves a deeper answer that just the obvious. Describing yourself, your characteristics, where you come from and where you are going is not the question here.  Do we really know who we are? Can we for sure say that we have taken the time to reflect on this topic? 

Phenomenology can probably not help us to solve such problems, or any other problem for that matter, but it sure can help us to closely examine our own lives and to lead less stressful lives.  If we were to ignore Phenomenology, we would probably run the risk of lacking the capacity to feel and might never be able to experience pain or joy.  The same can be said for Existentialism.  If society were to ignore both Phenomenology and Existentialism, what a devastating risk wouldn’t that be? 

Do you know who you are?  

I don't!