I have been writing here at Wrestling with the Angel for about 10 years, often only intermittently. It’s changed names and focuses a few times. In the last year, my own interest has moved more and more towards a discussion of some particular topics, most notably phenomenology (broadly conceived) and related discipline like Vedanta and Neoplatonism.
So, I have started a Substack, Phenomenology, East & West. I will be posting there weekly. I will be linking those posts here as well (for a while), so if you are curious about that work, you can still check back here, and/or subscribe the Substack directly. I will likely also post some things only on this blog, especially if I want to write on something not really related to phenomenology itself.
(Note: I included links to the first few months’ worth of articles on the Substack here on my WordPress blog. I have since stopped doing so, since I figure anyone who wanted to follow me over there has done so. Rest assured, I have continued publishing over there. You can find all of those articles on my main substack page: https://phenomenologyeastandwest.substack.com/)
Without further ado, here’s the first, introductory post: Keeping Up Appearances: The Why, How, and Already of Phenomenology
Phenomenology is a ten-dollar word for something that you probably already do, at least some of the time. Phenomenon is the Greek word for “appearance”, and so phenomenology is just the study of, or focused ordering of, the appearances. But what, exactly, is an appearance?
The use of this word in its more-or-less post/modern philosophical sense can be traced back to Immanuel Kant, in at least two ways. For one thing, the word “phenomenology” seems to have first appeared in a letter written to Kant. Second, and more importantly, the basic frame of phenomenology was set by Kant himself in his (in)famous Critique of Pure Reason.
In the Critique, Kant introduces a fundamental metaphysical distinction between the appearances (phenomena) and things-themselves (noumena). Kant was pointing out something that is, for most people, pretty obvious, but which we often ignore and which has massive philosophical consequences: the way things appear to us is not the same as the way things actually are, in and of themselves.
Wrestling with the Angel 