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 Class Forums - Fall 2008
 PHIL 300-005 - Existential Phenomenology
 A Phenomenological Look at Hallucinations		  Forum Locked
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Mark Brinkman
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1 Posts
Posted - Nov 10 2008 :  9:38:35 PM  Show Profile
OK, now this question may dip into psychology a bit much, but I'd like to look at this phenomenologically.

How would we explain something that "shows up" to one as a hallucination, and is quite real to him or to her, but does not, and cannot "show up" to others?

I could say: "I see the minotaur playing chess with himself in the corner." But the minotaur does not "show up" to anyone else. No one else has any consciousness of the minotaur. How is it that we can intend something that is essentially not there, while the minotaur seems like a genuine experience to the hallucinator?

Could this hallucination have some kind of transcendent qualities, and if so, what is the reason it is not to be "experienced" by all?

What is everybody's take on this idea?

[Lightly edited to enhance readability -TT]

Tom Trelogan
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1374 Posts
Posted - Dec 12 2008 :  12:35:34 PM  Show Profile
Mark, my very first reaction is to say: phenomenology isn't in the explaining business. It's really only in the analysis business. Phenomenology should be able to help us to understand what hallucinations are, but as for why they occur? I think that is a question for psychology.

But my second reaction is to say what I said to you on the day of our final class meeting after class: that it really isn't any more puzzling that hallucinations aren't -- at least typically -- shared than that fantasies aren't typically shared or that dreams are really rarely if ever shared. In all these cases, we're in the realm of the imagination, it seems to me, though with dream and hallucinations, we're not talking about the realm of free imagination: those who have hallucinations are beset by them, and dreams -- well dreams typically just occur.

And yet I'd say that things hallucinated, things dreamt, and things imagined all have to be seen as transcendent objects of the relevant kinds of consciousness. This all this shows is that transcendence and what we usually think of as "existence outside the mind" are two very different things.
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