One of the peculiar things about philosophy is how it taps into ordinary powers that lie hidden in everyday speech. The little word “as,” for example, is central to phenomenology because it is central to experience. Look at something. What do you see? Socks, a dog, another person. You don’t see some generic sensible thing; rather, you see what you see as something or another: as being socks, as being a dog, as being another person, and so on. Listen. What do you hear? A car passing, birds chirping, music playing. You don’t hear raw noise that you subsequently interpret; you hear sounds as sounds of things; a sound you cannot identify as something or another attracts notice and you wonder, What was that? You don’t know what to interpret it as. The as names the primary synthetic quality of experience that registers the identity of what is sensed and what is understood, of what is experienced and what can be said.
“It’s a muggy day.” Here we perceive the day as muggy; perhaps the humidity is high, the breeze nonexistent, and the temperature immoderate. We see all these things as together comprising the mugginess of a muggy day. Speech allows us to express the as of experience according to the is of speech. Taking the day as muggy enables us to express the fact that the day is muggy.
Typically, language and experience work in tandem. It’s hard for us to experience what has not already been put into words, and it is hard to express an experience for the first time. The poet is one practiced in the extraordinary art of expanding the circle of language and experience. Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, looks out at the same world we see but invites us to understand it anew, to see it as manifesting what he calls “pied beauty.” The first stanza of his poem by that name reads as follows:
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
Hopkins invites us to see the sky, a cow, trout, finches, landscapes, and tools as manifestations of a single phenomenon, piedness. Further, he wants us to see piedness as something beautiful. Hopkins calls attention to the beauty of complex contrasts, something that shows up naturally enough in our experience, but something that it nevertheless takes a poet to highlight and name. As a result of his poetry, the beauty of what is “counter, original, spare, strange” can now show up for us more readily and explicitly when we look at things. Thereafter we can look out an airplane window at a patchwork of fields down below and register them as being beautiful in their piedness. That is, thanks to Hopkins we can now better see things as instances of piedness and see piedness as something that is beautiful. Poets give us words to see something in a new way; they unlock a further as latent in the world of experience. In doing so they make available to the rest of us a richer way of understanding and speaking about experience.
Chad Engelland, Phenomenology
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