Environmental & Architectural
Phenomenology Newsletter
Trials of a Nascent Phenomenologist
Micah L. Issitt
Issitt is a biology major at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. He is interested in phenomenological approaches to nature and environmental issues, particularly Goethean science. In the future, we will be publishing some of his field essays dealing with real-world experiences and understandings of the natural world [see EAP, winter 2003]. To suggest the perceptive power of the kind of observation he argues for here, we include at the end of his essay a description he wrote of a swarm of locust in a cornfield. © 2002, 2003 Micah Issitt.
Every time I read an EAP newsletter, one thing that always strikes me is the way in which each article represents the peculiar way that phenomenology has influenced the thoughts of the author. These articles are nodes on a chain of influence that flow across the pages of this publication because we all share a common bond of ideas and experiences. When I read them, I feel connected to the author through the activity of these shared ideas. At this point in my life, my own experience with phenomenology can be characterized as an illustration of incompleteness.
I am a senior biology major at the University of Missouri, in Saint Louis. Ever since I was a young child, I wanted to be out among the animals, to experience the wild life. As I got older, I felt that the best path would be to obtain an education in biology and to pursue a career as a field biologist.
At most universities, a college education in biology means learning a kind of scientific gospel, and then regurgitating it like so much half-digested pulp in the form of papers, research projects, and standardized testing. I have learned to quantify, reduce, intellectualize, and separate the world around me into sets of principles. I have learned that everything is a macroscopic product of infinitesimal calculations performed at the physical level. Nature is taught as wholly intelligible, and quantifiable, and also as wholly un-whole.
I have often felt an inchoate dissatisfaction with my scientific education and with much scientific thought in general. Somehow, the more I studied scientific principles, the further I felt from my goal of experiencing animal life. All of this changed when I was introduced to the active idea of phenomenology.
A few years ago, while doing some recreational reading in philosophy, I came across a short introduction to Husserl in one of my metaphysics books. Being curious, I decided to get a book about phenomenology. There began the chain of influence that has led me to my current state of being, and eventually to the words that I am writing now.
In phenomenology I have found a satisfying resolution to my educational dissonance. Much of my dissatisfaction with formal education stems from the science community’s expository style, and from largely unstated assumptions about the nature of the interaction between the scientist and the subject.
I have come to understand that my formal education in science has been skewed toward one particular way of looking at nature. The reductive and quantitative measurements of modern science suddenly seemed to be remarkably impoverished. Just like a physical object is never wholly disclosed to the senses, the body of science cannot be fully described by any one perspective.
Ever since I became acquainted with phenomenology, my educational experience has been transformed. When I am listening to my professors’ lectures or reading class material, I am now acutely aware of its incompleteness. I have learned to see how the vision of science is limited and why there is an unsatisfying aspect to “objective” claims about the universe.
As I said earlier, I have always wanted to be out among the animals and experience their world. Phenomenology has given me a way to study nature from inside of its indeterminate boundaries, rather than as an outsider, impossibly removed from its dynamic behaviors.
Young scientists are taught to doubt their senses, to dismiss their own entrance into the world. In sum, we are told that we must remove ourselves from nature to understand it. Most students accept this—after all, the arguments seem strong, and we spend our careers attempting to control and quantify the world.
I have found that this path will not satisfy my experience. When I look at nature in this way, through the eye of the microscope, I feel alienated from its richness. The piece that is missing is nothing less than myself.
These days my teachers often have no idea what I am talking about, and many have dismissed my ideas as mere “subjectivism,” but I feel a much more satisfying attachment to my future. Phenomenology has become a portal for my passage, from the cold scriptoria of my university back to the fields and forests where I first felt the desire to experience and understand.
A MOMENTARY FLASH OF WINGSLast semester while studying animal behavior, I was watching some locust fly away from me in a cornfield. As a swarm took to the air, I was shocked to see that the underside of their wings was colored a brilliant yellow. Again and again as I walked slowly into the cornfield I would see the momentary flash of their wings. My first thought was to ask one of my teachers why they possessed these colors or perhaps to look it up in my textbook. Then it occurred to me—why not take this opportunity to use the methods I had learned from reading Goethean phenomenology? I attempted to suspend thought about evolutionary mechanisms and possible adaptive significance and to simply experience the phenomenon as many times as I could. I proceeded to walk slowly around the cornfield dipping into it at various places to startle the locust. After trying this about fifty times, I went home and sat for awhile trying to picture what I had seen in my mind. Over the course of the next two weeks I repeated the experiment at least five times, each time followed by periods of meditative imagination. After a time I could picture the little aviators alighting from the stalks of the corn and flashing their golden wings, and then swiftly landing on a corn leaf. It was in my imagination that I noticed a crucial detail of their pattern; each time one of the locust landed on a leaf it would immediately close its wings and turn sideways with respect to its line of flight. In my imagination I could picture the whole procedure, first the flashing fervent wings and then the cryptically colored insect motionless on a leaf.
Trusting my imagination and the communication of the insects’ actions, I
began to see a message in the pattern. The pattern was a lie. The beating
fervent wings of the insect were a costume, shouting at me in movement and
position and color, “This is what I look like!” This energetic signal was
followed always by the silent whisper of its body on the leaf, colored as
the leaf was, and turned so that its body shape fit along the contour of the
plant’s body.
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