Ejection and projection

I have written that fiction that includes passage into an instance of unreality highlights the perspective of the passenger, thus emphasizing an element that makes the travel metaphor seem particularly apt. There are exceptions, such as the shifted passage technique, which has the function of verifying that passage has actually happened in the world of a fiction (in our examples, these fictions were all movies). But on the whole, the perspective of the character who makes the trip is closely attended to.

A further characteristic that is sometimes in line with the travel metaphor and sometimes not is this: the character who does the trip sometimes fully departs from his world, vanishes physically, and at other times remains there, albeit oblivious of, and incapable to interact with his surroundings for the duration of the trip. In order to have some labels, let's say that a character sometimes leaves his world in the mode of ejection, and at other times in the mode of projection.

Thus in the clip from Die Einsteiger we have a clear case of ejection: the two travelers vanish from their own world for the duration of their trip. Shifted passage is used to demonstrate this to the audience; but the fact is also often referred to in the course of the movie, when the trips get more and more extensive and some characters even decide never to return from the fictional worlds they have entered. In contrast, in Dreamscape we have seen a typical example of projection (the word 'project' is actually used in the film itself as a term for the act of entering dreams of other people).

Entering dreams or memories seems to suggest projection mode more than ejection mode, perhaps because it allows closer modeling on the (real) dream state, which is very similar to projection: you're asleep, you physically remain in your room, though oblivious to your environment, and the only sense in which you're 'there' in the dream world is mentally, even though it may not look and feel that way to you while you're immersed. On the other hand of the spectrum, trips into fictional worlds and time travel seem to suggest ejection more strongly. (In particular time travel stories would struggle to use projection mode: it's rather counterintuitive to suggest that a character can be a two different times at once, whatever 'at once' can mean in this context. Remember that all passage stories, time travel not excluded, have to keep up the metaphor of traveling, and that requires a sequential personal time for the traveler, even as she jumps from one spacetime-location to the other.)

There can be hybrids: in the extract from Sherlock Jr. the protagonist doesn't simply enter the world of a movie, he dreams that he enters a movie. So we have a more complicated setup: there is the world of the Buster Keaton movie itself, then nested inside it the world of the dream, which allows passage into movies, and then again nested inside that dream world the world into which he steps when Buster walks into the movie screen. The latter is a clear case of ejection, for the in-dream-Buster vanishes from the world surrounding the movie screen when he walks in. But then there is also the dream itself, which is a case of projection. (The sleeping body of the projectionist remains visible for us, the audience, unresponsive to the surrounding world, but not physically away.) Probably the motivation for this complicated setup was a hesitation to make the movie too phantastic. It's one thing to create a fiction in which people dream (not unusual in the real world, too), but another to create one in which people walk into fictional worlds through a movie screen. (To wrap the more extravagant elements of a fiction into a dream is a time-worn device, just think of the epilogue of A Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Note that there is no difference in the experience of the passenger between ejection mode and projection mode. The passenger is immersed in what happens at the destination location. The only difference is what an additional observer would see at the origin location during the time of passage.

Yet shifted passage neither implies ejection nor projection. We have seen ejection in the clips that included shifted passage, but as I have noted, there could easily have been shifted passage in Dreamscape, where we're clearly in projection mode. Likewise, in The Dutch Master, there's no shifted passage, which I argued is by design; yet both ejection and projection might be in play here — the movie leaves it open, thus allowing both interpretations, but this very fact shows that there might be both cases in which we have no shifted passage and projection and cases in which we have no shifted passage and ejection. So the distinction between use of shifted passage or not on the one hand and projection mode vs. ejection mode on the other are completely orthogonal.

Shifted transfer

In the extracts from passage scenes in movies that I have given in my recent postings, I have identified a technique which I called shifted transfer. The idea is that when a character makes a trip into an unreal world, such as the world of a movie-within-the-movie, or the world of a painting, there may be a difference between the perspective of the character himself and the perspective of the audience. The audience can remain at the origin location while the character already has been transferred to the destination location. (The audience is transferred later than the traveler, hence 'shifted' transfer.) Thus in Die Einsteiger, we're still there, in the now empty room, while the two travelers are already inside the video film; in Sherlock Jr. we can see the large movie screen into which the protagonist has stepped even when the character himself is already inside, and thus no longer in the room which contains that screen. We have seen, though, that not every film that includes passage into some instance of unreality uses the technique of shifted transfer. In The Dutch Master, the perspective of the audience and the perspective of the protagonist who steps into an old painting remain closely tied to each other. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the protagonist is drawn into a memory which is dramatized as if in a holographic 3D-film, and the point of view is strictly that of the character, there is no lingering of any kind for the audience when the character moves.

In the latter cases, the subjective element is emphasized, while in the former cases we (the audience) are more in the mode of observers, objective onlookers. This makes shifted transfer a cinematic means to achieve a double-check on whether passage has actually happened. What would you do if you were the inventor of a device that lets you enter movie or dream worlds? You would probably set up an experiment that lets you verify, from some good, external vantage point, both that the traveler has arrived at the destination and that he has vanished from the origination location. That would convince you, as the inventor, that the device does enable such a trip. Shifted passage has exactly the function to convince the audience, in exactly the same way. Where the film wants to keep the question open (such as in the stepping into a painting in The Dutch Master), shifted passage is consequently not employed. Where the subjective experience of the passenger is to be emphasized (as in the passages into memories in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and into dreams in Dreamscape), it's also avoided.

Passage as travel

Let's begin to clarify some notions. I have introduced the idea of traveling into an instance of unreality, such as the fictional world of a movie, or a dream. The use of 'traveling' is highly metaphorical, of course: if you travel, that means a change in location, usually going from some origin location to a fairly distant destination location; and the act of traveling itself typically takes time. Obviously, in the normal use of 'traveling', both the origin and the destination locations are places in the real world, to be reached by some means of transport. Another element of the meaning of 'traveling' has to do with what one experiences: broadly speaking, you're widening your horizon, see new and unfamiliar places, strange customs (strange, that is, to you, not to the people in the places you visit).

The trips I have illustrated in my recent series of posts can be metaphorically described as 'traveling' into an unreal world, because some of these meaning elements still apply: there is an origin location and a destination location, which is removed and distant. The process of passage itself doesn't take much time, but the trip as a whole occupies a span of time during which the passenger cannot interact with the origin location any more. There are strange and unusual things going on at the destination location, making for a new and stimulating experience. (That's the point, after all, of using passage as a dramatic device in fiction. The movies from which I have extracted some excerpts for demonstration all rely on passage to get some central plot lines going.)

There's an important difference, too. The distance between the origin and the destination is not a spatial difference, as the distance between two places in the real world is. Rather, it's the gap between the real world and an unreal world — the difference (however it is conceived) between reality and fiction, or reality and dreams, reality and memories, and so on. I have used the term 'metaphysical apartness' before: just as the metaphorical use of 'passage' and 'trip', that term also suggests some kind of gap or distance — and the gap or distance is taken to be metaphysical, that is, to be described in terms of reality and unreality (metaphysics being the study of what, in general, makes up reality).

Describing something as a journey adds another important element: it suggests a continuous, linear structure. There is a departure (possibly some preparation before), then there are the events of the trip itself, including the actual travel, the arrival at the destination location, the events there, and then in reverse the trip back with its final arrival at the origin. All these events typically form a continuous process with an ordered structure. Even more important, this structure is tied to the experience of a traveler: it only makes sense to bring events in that order with reference to someone who undergoes the process. Without a traveler from whose point of view there is a time-ordered series of events, there is no such thing as a journey.

In all the illustrations I've given, the perspective of the passenger (one or more characters in the movie) is crucial. That is why the plot usually follows the perspective of the character who undertakes the journey very closely. The only deviation from this principle is the technique I have called 'shifted transfer'.

Creating fictional worlds

Every time we encounter a new fictional story we create a new world. The default assumption is that this world contains everything the real world contains. We then modify this representation based on several constraints [...].[1]

This talk of representation (and world creation) can easily mislead, and the formulations in Skolnick and Bloom's paper are a good example for this, so let's have a closer look.

Fictional worlds are a product of the imagination; for example, when we read a story, we imagine a fictional world in which the characters of that story live, and in which the events that make up the plot of the story happen. There are, however, different senses of 'imagining' a fictional world. When you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you imagine an early-20th-century London with a certain famous detective and his sidekick investigating complicated cases there. Of course, in some sense you are creating that world in your imagination — perhaps you visualize some of the settings or characters when you read passages in which they are described; perhaps you even imagine the coldness of a certain evening or the dusty smell of a train compartment; perhaps you feel sympathy or disgust for some of the people in the story. But then there is a second, different sense of imagining the Sherlock Holmes world: the sense in which its creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, has fixed the recipe for your imaginative processes by writing those descriptions, playing to those emotions. The world of the story is the product of the author's imagination in a different sense from that in which it is the product of a reader's imagination. The imaginative processes of writing a story and so constituting that world are different from those of reading it and constituting the world — although they probably overlap in some significant portion.

Let's first note, then, that the sense in which Skolnick and Bloom talk of creating a fictional world must be the first sense, the sense in which a reader imagines the world of the story she reads. Clarifying this, and keeping these senses apart would do away with a confused statement they make about the use of the term 'story':

Our theory states that we create a new world every time we encounter a new story. But this is a little misleading, since it hinges on how we define 'story'. Surely it is not the case that every novel or movie is its own story, since that would involve creating new worlds for sequels. [...] A story must thus be broader than a single work of fiction."[2]

If this were correct, then we would be wrong to say that there are 56 short stories and four novels featuring the famous detective, which each have a plot and tell a story. What we would have to say instead is that there is a single story that is spread over these 60 literary works, and presumably over many others which include guest appearances of Sherlock Holmes, plus films and television series', all of which belong to the same single story. The story wouldn't even be complete: if someone writes another novel as a sequel of Conan Doyle's works, that would be part of it, and there might potentially infinitely many such sequels. But we don't really think that 'the Sherlock Holmes story' is incomplete and open-ended in principle, do we?

The reason for this bizarre new way of talking would be that whenever we read one of the different texts, we create a new world, one distinct from all other worlds created so far. Not making the distinction introduced above, between different senses in which we create a fictional world when we imagine one while reading fiction vs. writing ficton, this makes it seem as if we'd 'create' a new world in the sense in which Conan Doyle thinks up the Sherlock Holmes world whenever we merely read one of the novels or short stories. And since that obviously can't be right, we seem to need a revised use of 'story', a use in which all the texts belonged only to a single story (one that was produced by the author).

But there is nothing wrong with multiple stories being set in the same fictional world, and still be different stories. The fictional world of the Sherlock Holmes literature is not created afresh every time some reader encounters one of the stories. It has been created once, by the author, when writing those pieces, and it's been one and the same since then. Of course, whenever some reader encounters the stories, she would have to imagine that world afresh, and so in a different sense 'create' it. But in that sense, this causes no problem whatsoever, and therefore no need to revise the usage of the term 'story'. (What Skolnick and Bloom must have had in mind when they say that new worlds aren't created by sequels is the first sense: of course the author doesn't think up a new world when he writes a sequel.)

Compare: every time someone draws the rabbit-duck picture on a sheet of paper, he 'creates' the drawing; but that doesn't mean that there are infinitely many inventors of that particular image. There is only one inventor, the person who created it in the first place. And the sense of 'create' in which that person did create it is a different sense from the one we use when we say that you create it by drawing it on a piece of paper.

[1] Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom, "The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds", in The Architecture of the Imagination, edited by Shaun Nichols, Oxford: Clarendon 2009, 73–86, 77.

I think I will refer some more often to this paper; although I start here with some criticism of its terminology, it contains some interesting results and ideas. But that's for a later post.

[2] Ibd., 81.

Sedimentation of unreality

Dreams sometimes come true. So do prophecies (sometimes). Jealous fantasies can become so destructive that they actually create what they were about (albeit wrongly) in the first place. Visionary leaders know that they first have to draw a picture before people can start acting towards making it a reality.

A while ago I wrote about some even more complex examples in Hitchcock's movies (Vertigo and North by Northwest), where an elaborate deception creates a dynamic in the world (the world of the movie, that is) which in effect makes it seem as if the deception has become reality.

Even in the real world there are some rare cases of an instance of unreality causing far-reaching developments. The first airing of Orson Welles' radio show War of the worlds (based on H.G. Wells' novel) was so convincing that it caused confusion and panic with some in the show's audience who mistook it for a real report.

Such effects are normally short-lived in the real world — reflection kicks in, people communicate and cross-check, and closeness to reality is restored all the faster the higher the number of people who are affected directly. On the other hand, as long as the feasibility of reality checks is kept low and the subject remains fascinating enough to hold a grip on the imagination, even foggy rumors can be sustained for quite some time. In his 1993 Norton Lectures, Umberto Eco cites the case of the Superb, a British submarine which was rumored to be deployed during the build-up of the Falklands crisis. It wasn't, but a combination of public imagination, media speculation and official secrecy quickly made it into a quasi-fact. "[T]he whole story grew out of vague gossip, through the collaboration of all parties. Everybody cooperated in the creation of the Yellow Submarine because it was a fascinating fictional character and its story was narratively exciting."[1]

What all these examples have in common is that some instance of unreality brings about changes in the real world, gets people to act in a different way than they'd have acted without that instance of unreality. Unreality (sometimes) settles into reality: though unreality is unreality, and reality is reality, part of reality consists of sedimented unreality.

Let's look closer at this. When we say that a dream comes true, it's not that literally the dream events come to have happened. It's still only a dream. What does happen is that I start acting in a way that makes some future situation resemble the situation from the dream. (This future situation can be a desirable state, if the dream expresses some wishes or goals I have; it could be an undesirable state, if it is a nightmare and expresses some of my fears. In either case, the way I act towards the situation I experienced in the dream can be conscious, or unconscious, or both.) If that happens and my actions are successful in bringing that situation about, we have now two different situations: an unreal dream situation and a real situation, which I made happen partly because of my dream experience.

When unreality sediments into reality, that instance of unreality remains what it is (it's not, so to speak, transformed into something real). In the example, there's still that dream, and that is an instance of unreality. It becomes, however, the cause (at least, a partial cause) and reason (possibly one reason among others) why some further, real situation, happens the way it does.

To conclude, here are some random reflections about sedimentation. First, in the case of dreams or visions what the unreal situation (the one that's dreamt or envisioned) and the real situation have in common is some experience you have in it, or a description that applies to it. It's an experience or description that was originally a 'what-if' experience or description. In other cases, such as the panic following a fictional invasion from Mars, there's no experience in common, but rather the real situation contains an 'as-if' perception or even action. (People start evacuating as if there really was an invasion.) In the most intricate cases, a constellation might involve both a 'what-if' experience and an 'as-if' action, leading to a very potent confusion of reality and unreality: this is what Vertigo uses to great and disturbing effect.(Again: read more about it in my previous post about sedimentation of unreality in those Hitchcock movies.)

Second, people who act on the basis of some instance of unreality are sometimes aware of this (when they try to fulfill a dream or achieve a vision, or when they have deliberately assumed a scenario, e.g. as a working hypothesis); sometimes they're not (when they act under a deception or illusion). But since people invest by acting and forming views about the world that contains this sedimented unreality, it's unlikely to be reversed once it's found unreal. (There's only a limited possibility to revert your actions in the world anyway, in particular if they have caused more development already.) I've called this the irreversibility of sedimentation in the previous posts I've already linked.

And finally, not everything in reality is sedimented unreality. (Although many facts about the real world have some sedimented unreality somewhere in the chain of causes that lead up to them.) Neither does all unreality sediment into reality of some form. (Some instances of unreality will remain largely without effect in the real world.)[2]

[1] Umberto Eco, Six walks in the fictional woods. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1993, Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1994, 97–99, the quote is from 99.

[2] Technical side note: I'm using a sketchy notion of cause and effect here that leaves many unclarities and is not (yet) connected to the contemporary philosophical discussion of causation. But note that the idea of sedimented unreality as a cause is no more problematic than any notion of mental causation of events in the world. Sedimentation can unproblematically be analyzed in terms of people's views and actions. It singles out views and actions that are based on an exercise of the imagination, but that's a phenomenon that every account of human action has to deal with anyway.

The iridescent shimmer of nothingness (contd.)

(I continue from an earlier post to explore some similarities and differences in Sartre's talk of being and nothingness, on the one hand, and my notions of reality and unreality in this blog, on the other.)

A second parallel is that reality is primary, in metaphysical terms, before unreality: unreality can only be created from reality, but not the other way round. Every form of unreality relies on a background of reality which is much larger than itself. (For instance, take a fictional story, or a lie: we take in some description of the world in those, but most of that world is not explicitly described; so whenever there remains a gap in the description, we either fill it from what is implicit in it, or else we fill it in from what we assume to be the case in the real world.)

Sartre claims something similar when he says that "[t]he use which we make of nothingness in its familiar form always supposes a prelimiary specification of being." And he continues with some examples:

We say, pointing to a particular collection of objects, "Touch nothing," which means, very precisely, nothing of that collection. Similarly, if we question someone on well-determined events in his private or public life, he may reply, "I know nothing." And this nothing includes the totality of the facts on which we questioned him. Even Socrates with his famous statement, "I know that I know nothing," designates by this nothing the totality of being considered as Truth.[1]

Even the nothingness of what was there before a world existed would be based on the world which is now, and from within we can ask such a question. Such a nothingness (the 'nothing' we mean when we answer the question: "What was there before our world?" with "Nothing.") emerged only on top of our reality. If we did analyze it and strip it from "its characteristic of being empty of this world and of every whole taking the form of a world" as well as from its "characteristic of before, which presupposes an after", then we would end up with "a total indetermination which it would be impossible to conceive, even and especially as a nothingness."[2]

"This means", Sartre concludes, "that being is prior to nothingness and establishes the ground for it. [...] nothingness can only have a borrowed existence [...], and the total disappearance of being would not be the advent of the reign of non-being, but on the contrary the concomitant disappearance of nothingness."[3] There can't be any nothingness without being (or before, or after it), just as there couldn't be any unreality without reality.

(As a side-note: the process I have labeled sedimentation of unreality into reality also relies on this grounding of unreality in reality. Sedimentation happens when on the basis of some instance of unreality action is taken, in reality. Real events happen in response to unreality just as well as they are caused by something within reality. But all this presupposes an underlying reality as basis on which that unreality was formed. There is a hint to a parallel to this also in Sartre when he remarks that "it is from being that nothingness concretely derives its efficacy."[4])

[1] Being and Nothingness, 48–49.
[2] Ibd., 48–49.
[3] Ibd.
[4] Ibd.

The iridescent shimmer of nothingness

When Sartre writes, in Being and Nothingness, that "we see nothingness making the world iridescent, casting a shimmer over things" (58)[1], his notion of nothingness is not quite the same as my notion of unreality, and his 'iridescent shimmer' not the same as my concept of beauty. But they're close enough to venture a comparison.

1) For one thing, both Sartre's nothingness and my unreality come into the world because of us human beings, who have consciousness and can take various attitudes towards what's going on around us. There wouldn't be nothingness (or unreality) if there were no human (or other conscious) beings, if the world consisted only of rivers and stones, trees and insects.[2] The key to these attitudes seems to be an ability to think of possibilities, of ways the world might be (in contrast to how it actually is, or at least seems to be). "[n]on-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation", and "negation[3] appears on the original basis of a relation of man to the world. The world does not disclose its non-beings to one who has not first posited them as possibilities." (38)

However, compared to unreality (in my sense), these possibilities may remain implied—and will remain so, in fact, in the majority of cases. They form a much more pervasive background in Sartres universe than instances of unreality (which must play out in the world) could produce. Whenever something is missing, absent, or lacking, there's nothingness; Sartre himself brings examples such as the notions of destruction (39–40) and distance (54–55); and eventually lists "absence, change, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction, etc. [...] which in their inner structure are inhabited by negation" (55). Thus his notion of nothingness is much more inflationary than my unreality, which implies the deliberate creation of what is at least in some respects a 'candidate reality'.

He also has (I think) a much heavier burden of argument to carry for his claim that these négatités, as he calls them, are a feature of objective reality. They're not subjective in the sense that we merely produce them in judgments, i.e. in our descriptions of the world, but there is something in objective reality that precedes them, and is in fact what such judgments are about: "non-being does not come to things by a negative judgment; it is the negative judgment, on the contrary, which is conditioned and supported by non-being." (42) Now, on my account, unreality does come into the world by mere mental activity (thinking, imagining, remembering, and so on), and so it has obviously no claim for belonging to objective reality. Of course, unreality it doesn't come into the world by simple negative judgments, but instead by a rather more complex human activity (for which I've used the broad term 'imagination'). Yet at the same time, the paradigm examples of forms of unreality (the various sorts of fiction, scenarios, lies, dreams, and the future as well as the past) seem to me more specific and concrete in their phenomenology than Sartre's négatités.

2) This may make the scope of these two notions look rather different, and yet there are also some more (and deep) points of agreement.

(Of which there'll be more later.)

[1] Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness. A phenomenological essay on ontology. Translated and with an introduction by Hazel Barnes. NY: Washington Square Press 1992. Quoted with page numbers in the text.
[2] Where exactly does the line run? Do animals count as conscious beings? In some sense, of course, but I think the way Sartre uses the term it would require more than (most) animals are capable of. At the very least, none of the forms of unreality in my sense are within reach for (most of) them. (I say 'most' because, again, we may have to qualify this a little since latest research seems to find rudimentary forms of self-consciousness in some primates. Some rudimentary forms of unreality, then, might be in play for these as well.)
[3] A judgment about some instance of nothingness is called a 'negation' in the context from which I'm quoting.

Borges' crevices of unreason

We (the undivided divinity operating within us) have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it as firm, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and durable in time; but in its architecture we have allowed tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason which tell us it is false.

Thus Borges has memorably summarized his brief discussion of the appearance in philosophy of paradoxes flowing from the idea of infinity. (A formulation suggestively posed just after another quote from Novalis to the same effect, but formulated in terms of magic instead of dreams, thus replacing one form of mystified unreality with another one.)

'Unrealities', as Borges uses the term (in the essay, though not in the passage I quoted), seem to be exclusively paradoxes, which are however assumed to reflect something in the nature of the universe. Mere fiction, say, or ordinary dreams would not count as unrealities in Borges' use of the term, as they would in mine. He finds examples for his unrealities in Zeno's paradoxes of motion and Kant's antinomies of reason. (The former he traces through a mostly arbitrary selection of philosophical works.) Given the "hallucinatory nature of the world", which remains in Borges' essay a mere claim rather than a motivated view, the function of such paradoxes (those "tenuous and eternal crevices of unreason") is to remind us of the falseness of the world. They are part of the original plan: the illusion might be perfect, so that we can't see through it; but anticipating that success, we have put some signposts for our dreaming selves into it which tell us that this dream world is false.

But it remains to be clarified in what relationship a 'false' world and a 'true' world would stand. (Note that the pair of terms, reality vs. unreality, is already used up for the reality of the dream world vs. the paradoxes built into it.) Would a world that didn't contain those 'unrealities', in Borges' sense of the term, be so perfect that it couldn't be distinguished from a 'true' world then? Would that mean that it were a 'true' world? Or would it still be 'false' because of its origin as dreamt? Moreover, is there yet another world, that of the dreamer who "has dreamt the world"? And if so, is that containing world now a 'true' world, or yet another dreamt one? And if the latter, how could we avoid the infinite regress that Borges himself has found in all those philosophical texts? Wouldn't he have to diagnose that regress first and foremost in the idealist philosophies to which he refers so admiringly?

For all its bibliographical interest, there isn't much to be gained from Borges' essay. What, then, remains to be drawn from it? At least, there is a memorable (and beautiful) quote: right at the end.

[1] Jorge Luis Borges, "Avatars of the Tortoise", in: Labyrinths. New York: New Directions 1964, 202–208, 208.

Phenomenologizing

A note on my use of the term 'phenomenology', in the title, and also throughout this blog. What I mean by doing phenomenology is looking at the forms of unreality, describing exemplars, showing their relationships with each other and their connection with the theory underlying this blog (what I sometimes refer to as the substance layer). Thus what I'm doing is in part applicative (applying concepts to instances of unreality), in part corrective (delineating the correct use of such concepts by considering border cases, false applications vs. correct applications and so on), and also in part generative (exploring constellations where concepts have to be formed in the first place).

There's a notable difference here to a much more strict, and differently defined, sense of the term in the 20th century philosophical movement, originating in the work of Husserl, which is itself called Phenomenology. The term has been used before, though, in the broader sense I have in mind here, most prominently in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit; and it's also been used so recently, even if influenced and informed by the ideas of the Phenomenologists. In line with a convention you'll occasionally see in the philosophical literature, I shall use 'phenomenology' in this broad sense, but spell it with a capital 'P' (i.e. 'Phenomenlogy') in the few cases I intend to refer to the movement of the same name, or when I want to employ the strict methodological sense attached to it by that movement.