Rooms within the Soul

"The soul is undiscovered, though explored forever to a depth beyond report." [Heraclitus, Fragments: The Collected Wisdom of Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton (New York: Penguin Group, 2001) 45.]

In general, phenomenology is the description of lived-experience. Phenomenology is mainly a method, just like science is a method of inquiry and not a thing. Both science and phenomenology are tactically different in their respective approach and ends. Phenomenology is neither a science of objects nor a science of the subject (psychology); it is a method of inquiry into the intentionality of experience. The objective of the phenomenological method is "the direct investigation and description of phenomena as consciously experienced without theories about their causal explanation and as free as possible from unexamined preconceptions and presuppositions," [Encyclopedia Britannica, 1995]. Thus phenomenology seeks to describe how things appear in consciousness, as participating in the fullness of human life, and without any pre-judgment to flatten potentially rich phenomena. As Edmund Husserl maintained, "To the things themselves."

Phenomenology was not founded; it grew. Though presupposed by thinkers like Franz Brentano, its fountainhead was Edmund Husserl, the Moravian born Austrian philosopher. In an effort to express what it is to which this method gives access, Husserl wrote, "In all pure psychic experiences (in perceiving something, judging about something, willing something, enjoying something, hoping for something, etc.) there is found inherently a being-directed-toward . . . . Experiences are intentional." [Edmund Husserl, "Phenomenology," from his 1927 article for the Encyclopedia Britannica, republished in Husserl: Shorter Works, edited by Peter McCormick and Frederick A. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).]

So, the thing sensed participates in the mind that senses. In some ways, thought is a continuation of sensing without the matter sensed readily at hand. Physical things, when no longer present, persist as active phenomena in the mulling of mind. There is an inherent vacillation between the thing perceived and its mental presence. In order to sense, something must be sensed . . . in order to wish, something must be wished . . . to love, there must be the thing loved.

Thing and thought are linked via lived-experience. All phenomena we induct shares in an intentional relationship with consciousness. If we can describe the mental brails by which we intuit a given thing, then we might better understand the thing we behold for what it really is.

The significance of the phenomenological method, if fixed upon architecture, is its emphasis on lived-experience. Architecture serves to relate us to the world through the multivalent nature of buildings. For me, phenomenological inquiry relates the making of architecture to our inner lives. The potential is there to describe the built for what it is, a sharpener of human live and place. When focused on the built, phenomenology allows us to describe the conjunction between the human soul and its external counterpart as expressed in building.

The practice of building is a primal impulse. Place-making is one of the earliest acts of human consciousness (along with language and fashioning tools). Since the dawn of humanity, the psyche has required a symbol to have physical presence and thus become an outward, visible complex of the unconscious. Architecture is the largest manifestation of symbol we humans construct. Buildings are artifacts within which meaningful impulses from the unconscious express their presence.

I suppose that there is a connection between the psychical and the physical, in the manner similar to C. G. Jung's later psychological investigations. Many authors overlook Jung's central phenomenological insight: there exists a meaningful relation (an acausal connection) between the activity of the psyche and causality as found in natural science. According to Jung, psychical and physical reality form a cooperative and syncopated whole; a synchronicity exists between the inner actions of the psyche and the outer actions of matter, constituting a manifest sympathy between all things. As a room suffused with a searching awareness, we reside in the cosmic immensity of the soul—a microcosm within a broad macrocosm.

Jung described the psyche as the totality of all psychic processes structured within two complementary states: consciousness and the unconscious. Consciousness constitutes the state of awareness we associate with lucidity and the waking mind; whereas the unconscious constitutes an unfathomable inner-depth. The unconscious is the flip side of consciousness, the part of the self of which we are unaware.

The unconscious is a state of the psyche where primordial images reside as the most ancient, universal, and timeless thought-forms of humanity. Though always at work, the unconscious remains hidden and sublimated. The unconscious can be analogized to a fathomless treasury of principal forms constituting the timeless content of the psyche.

When the unconscious is revealed, it dissolves partially into awareness in the creation of prophecies, myth, and symbols. Citing Martin Buber, "The assumption that the unconscious is body or soul is unfounded. The unconscious is a state out of which two phenomena have not yet evolved and in which the two cannot be at all distinguished from each other." [Martin Buber, "The Unconscious" from A Believing Humanism, translated by Maurice Friedman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967) 155-156.]

The psyche is not an object but continuity in time. Buber amended Jung by adding that that unconscious was a liminal state, a temporally present and active flux between the timeless and humanity. A threshold (or horizon) exists between the soul and the world. What does matter think, if not through us?

In various postings I will meditate on the relation between architecture and its mental presence . . . a search of inner and outer. Buildings are incarnations of the soul to which we only vaguely conscious—or, as it were, also the reverse: buildings are inspirations we fashion into material form.