Bill Meacham on Consciousness and Human Excellence – Part One

INACS June 2010 Event

The study of consciousness can be approached from a first-person point of view that is analagous to objective scientific study in its rigor and methodology. Phenomenology is the attempt to examine one’s own experience exactly as it is experienced, without bias or presupposition, and to report one’s findings to a community of practitioners. Phenomenological investigation reveals structures of experience that are corroborated by neuroscience and that have a certain unassailable impact on the investigator him- or herself. Having originary evidence of the workings of one’s own mind gives one great assurance — we might almost say certain knowledge — of the deep anatomy of one’s very being. Each of us is constituted as Being-in-the-World. We are ineluctably co-present with the objects of our experience and cannot help but participate in their formation as experienced. In doing so we constitute our own self as well. Knowledge of the nature of that self is the ultimate goal of the philosophical quest. Both the method and the findings of phenomenology yield important insights into the nature of human beings and how we can live a fulfilling life.