Excerpt: This paper is concerned with the method of phenomenological reduction understood as a disciplined embodied practice. However before we embark in the discussion that gives this paper its title, it is essential to provide the context from which these questions sprang at the turn of the century, when phenomenology was founded.

Context: In earlier joint work with Varela and Vermersch, we began the elaboration of a methodological and epistemological framework for a practical experiential phenomenology. Problem: I here wish to update and further develop that earlier work. Method: I present the framework of a practical, as distinct from a conceptual-theoretical, phenomenology. I update that framework, arguing for a shift in emphasis from consciousness to vigilant attention. I offer a still preliminary investigation of the important phenomenon of surprise. I link these results with ongoing scientific research conducted by myself and others. Results: Attention-as-vigilance is a key operator of experience. Attention has an antinomic dynamic with surprise. Implications: Attention and surprise are key participants in the generative process of the experience of novelty. Elaboration of this thesis enables the further development of practical, first-person methodologies. Constructivist content: This paper outlines certain key features of first-person, lived experience, and elaborates a method for linking these results directly to ongoing scientific research.

Key words: Practical phenomenology, attention, vigilance, surprise, experience, novelty

This chapter weaves together surprise and non-sense in order to reveal how they reciprocally enlighten and extend each other anew. It is shown first that they share a core minimal structural common point, namely a broken time-dynamics, that is, the experience of a rupture in the timeembedded flowing continuity. Building such a common ground then allows us to situate the peculiar emotional component in both surprise and non-sense, guided by the hypothesis that emotion does not cover the same scope and intensity in each case, being more radical and negatively polarized in non-sense, more daily and irreducible to valence in surprise. As a third and final step, the cognitive aspect inherent in both phenomena is explored, both its commonality as opened indeterminacy, and also their contrasted cognitive dynamics, which will finally lead us to offer some insights about the crossed relationship between enaction and phenomenology.

Open peer commentary on the article “Meeting You for the First Time: Descriptive Categories of an Intersubjective Experience” by Magali Ollagnier-Beldame & Christophe Coupé. Abstract: I argue that when focusing on first encounters (as the target article does), the unique pristine character of such encounters should be dealt with. In particular, it would be necessary to include as main components surprise, emotions and passivity. Another issue addresses intersubjectivity: While the article considers shared reciprocity as a main invariant feature of intersubjectivity, many phenomenologists have stressed the structural asymmetry of the relation between oneself and the other: am I not the only one who is able to experience (perceive, know) the other? Finally, since the very technique of micro-phenomenological explicitation interviews is based on a clear asymmetry between the interviewer and the interviewee, one may ask to what extent the model of intersubjectivity presented in the article can be representative of first encounters.

Context: The use of first-person micro-phenomenological interviews and their productive interaction with third-person physiological data is a challenging and pressing issue in order to offer an effective and fruitful application of Varela’s neurophenomenological hypothesis. Problem: We aim at offering a generative method of analysis of first-person micro-phenomenological interviews using third-person physiological data. Our challenge is to describe this generative first-person analysis with the third-person physiological framework rather than put Varela’s hypothesis into practice in a generative way (as we did in another paper. Method: The present contribution is a first pioneering study as far as the exposition of such an interactive generative methodology is concerned. It is also a new issue insofar as it deals with a case study, surprise in depression, that has not been thoroughly dealt with so far, either in philosophy or in psychopathology. Results: We show that the analysis of first-person data is an intrinsic generative one, insofar as new refined categories and multifarious circular micro- and macro-processes were discovered in the very process of analyzing. They provide the initial structural generic third-person description of surprise inherited both from philosophical phenomenological a priori categories and from the experimental startle setting with a refined micro-segmentation of the dynamic of the experience. Implications: Our article could be of interest to neurophenomenologists looking for an effective application and to researchers in quest of a method of analysis of first-person data. The present limitations are due to the still preliminary data-results we need to complete. Constructivist content: The article is directly linked to Varela’s neurophenomenological program and aims at extending and reforming it with a cardio-phenomenological approach. Keywords: First-person micro-phenomenological interviews, surprise, generative analysis of first-person data, depression, cardio-phenomenology, generative categories.

Upshot: Thanks to the commentaries we have been able to further clarify the situation of generative first-person analysis in the general framework of neurophenomenology and more specifically of cardio-phenomenology as its extension and reformulation. We have also provided more detailed information about the way phenomenology as transcendental philosophy is genuinely operating as a practice in cardio-phenomenology and has a central function regarding the creation of categories and their suspensive questioning thanks to the epoché method. We have also drawn great benefits from the questions about how micro-phenomenology allows a refinement of descriptive categories and the way new categories are generated, and we have been able to provide some answers about different scales of newness in the generative process.

This article proposes a description of the structural dynamics of the act of becoming aware based on the phenomenological method of épochè (or reduction), but also incorporating observations from psychological and contemplative sources. We propose as the core of this specific act an initial phase of suspension of habitual thought and judgement, followed by a phase of conversion of attention from “the exterior” to “the interior,” ending with a phase of letting-go or of receptivity towards the experience.

Our purpose in this essay is to let imagination be a guiding thread in a journey of exploration of its inextricably nondual quality, making it possible to travel from its material-brain basis to its experiential quality without discontinuity. That is, we are not going to propose a “bridge” between a scientific view of imagination and its place in the Buddhist discipline of human transformation. Our purpose is to embrace the entire phenomenon in all its complexity and weave it as a unity with its many dimensions, which need and constrain each other without residue – in the body and brain, in its direct phenomenological examination, and in its pragmatic mobilization for human change. Only such weaving can be called a meeting of Buddhism and neuroscience on a new phenomenological ground.

Excerpt: This paper represents a step in the analysis of the key, but much-neglected role of affect and emotions as the originary source of the living present, as a foundational dimension of the moment-to-moment emergence of consciousness. In a more general sense, we may express the question in the following terms: there seems to be a growing consensus from various sources – philosophical, empirical and clinical – that emotions cannot be seen as a mere ‘coloration’ of the cognitive agent, understood as a formal or un-affected self, but are immanent and inextricable from every mental act. How can this be borne out, beyond just announcing it? Specifically, what is the role of affect-emotion in the self-movement of the flow, of the temporal stream of consciousness?