a vulgar mythical creature

The brain being considered as the proper organ of the mind, is not to be understood as a single viscus, but in reality a congeries of organs, each of them the seat of a particular mental power, one being appropriated to wonder, another to veneration, others to form, colour, &c., through the whole series thus forming the seat of consciousness, and the centre to which all impressions made upon the nerves distributed over the body are conveyed, and from which the commands of the will are transmitted to put the various parts in motion. “The mind sees through the medium of the eye, just as it thinks or feels through the medium of the brain, and as changes in the condition of the eye deteriorate or destroy the power of vision, without affecting the principle of mind, the obvious inference follows; in like manner may changes in the condition of the brain, destroy the power of feeling or of thinking, and yet, the mind or soul itself remain essentially the same”.

But there is a something that braves destruction, whose elements do not grow old nor die. The fire may destroy organic form, and the winds of heaven scatter the residuum, but that inscrutable element whose mysterious agency is life, can never be destroyed, till nature's doom is fixed, and all her forms are stamped with the impress of eternity.

Why "phenomenology"? The term signifies a study of "phenomena," that is to say, of that which appears to consciousness, that which is "given." It seeks to explore this given "the thing itself" which one perceives, of which one thinks and speaks without constructing hypotheses concerning either the relationship which binds this phenomena to the being of which it is phenomena, or the relationship which unites it with the I for which it is phenomena. One must not go beyond the piece of wax in doing a philosophy of extended substance, nor in doing a philosophy of the a priori spatial forms of sensibility; one must remain with the piece of wax itself, describe only what is given, without presuppositions. Thus a critical moment takes form at the heart of the phenomenological meditation, a "denial of science" (Merleau-Ponty) which consists in a refusal to proceed to explanation. For to explain the red of this lampshade is precisely to abandon it as this red spread out on this lampshade, under whose circle I am thinking of red; it is to set it up as a vibration of a given frequency and intensity, to set in its place "something," the object for the physicist which is not, above all, "the thing itself" for me. There is always a preflective, an unreflective, a prepredicative upon which reflection and science are based, and which these latter always conjur away when explaining themselves.

The phobic has no other object than the abject. But that word, “fear” –a fluid haze an elusive clamminess– no sooner has it cropped up than it shades off like a mirage and permeates all words of the language with nonexistence, with a hallucinatory, ghostly glimmer. Thus, fear having been bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject.