Some very rough thoughts about Process Philosophy, Phenomenology, and how one might arrive at the former via the latter.
Core Principles
- Intentionality: Consciousness is fundamentally relational given that it is always conscious of, directed towards, a phenomenal object. The intentional act always has present in it the Noesis, the act of perception, and a Noema: the content or object of that perceptual act.
- Epoché and Phenomenal Reduction: It is necessary to suspend preexisting judgements about reality, and come to understand reality first through a detailed understanding of the structures and faculty through which we perceive reality.
- The Phenomenal Field: Phenomena are not experienced in isolation from one another, but are encountered in the context of a phenomenal field which is then observed through the intentional act.
- Each phenomena within the phenomenal field has present within it a Phenomenal Horizon, which include the wider background context of associations, Historicity, and potential future interactions with said phenomena.
- The phenomenal field is intrinsically temporally constituted. We cannot grasp and hold a static instantiation of a given phenomena through the intentional capacity, as each moment of phenomenal apprehension has implicated within it the contextual historicity of each preceding moment of apprehension and future anticipations, as well its wider phenomenal field.
- Because of this, by adhering to the principle of Epoché and Phenomenal Reduction and committing to a principle of phenomenal parsimony, we must related to phenomena as processes of constant becoming rather than static entities.
- In attempting a phenomenologically continuitous ontology we cannot posit an ontological substance beyond or other than that which composes our phenomenal experience. Similarly, I argue that we cannot with any logical integrity posit other ontological modalities beyond those we can directly apprehend. Therefore, to begin speculating about the ontological content of phenomenon, it would be most appropriate to suppose that reality is processional and relational in character.
- Because we can apprehend relational consequences emerging from continuities outside of horizon of our phenomenal field, we can reasonably assume the ontological validity of processes beyond our phenomenal horizon.
- It would be most appropriate and parsimonious to assume such entities to be of the same process relational character we can and have validated through our own phenomenal encounters.
- Then, arguing from our most immediately verifiable phenomenal experience, the most appropriate ontology would be to a process relational framework of relationally composed entities intentionally prehending historicities (actual occasions) and proximal potentialities (eternal objects), which the ontological process of concrescence being analogous to the phenomenological stream of consciousness.