Page 115 - Contribution To Phenomenology

108 MAXINE SHEETS-JOHNSTONE

juncture to raise some critical questions. Do we really experience rays, as
Husserl says? Do we really experience the Ego, and as a center which
emits and receives rays? If we do not, then we may ask, why use this
language? or perhaps better, why are we drawn to using this language?
I would answer precisely in terms of the fundamental but unelucidated
relationship of eyes to Ught and to consciousness. The archetypal power
of eyes to shed light, to lead us to self- and other-understandings, is not
the power of receptor organs. It is in fact a power realized in bracketing,
for it is a power to see into the constitutive form or essence of a thing.
Precisely insofar as it is structured in light, the relationship Husserl
describes between Ego and Object is akin to seeing into the dark, to
grasping the quintessential nature of things, to grasping "inwardness."
Husserl's descriptive languaging of the experience of understanding
another individual further exemplifies the correspondence. Of com-
prehending another, he writes, for example, "[I] look into his depths"; "I
see deeply into his motivations."^^ What Husserl is doing in his phenome-
nological analyses of the Ego and the Object is elucidating the light, that
is, elucidating the archetypal power of eyes to illuminate the dark. In
broader terms, the quest of phenomenology is to throw light on the
Ught—to know knowing, to understand understanding. What this suggests
is not only that the very idea of phenomenology is grounded in the
experience of inwardness, in the experience of illuminating the dark, but
that the original of that experience has not yet been brought to light and
described. In other words, while the aim of phenomenology has been to
arrive at and elucidate inwardness, it has done so without elucidating that
original archetypal experience by which experiences of oneself and of the
world are structured in images of light. In still other words, phenomenol-
ogy itself is grounded in bodily experience. Though genetically un-
illuminated, inwardness is the eidos of the whole of Husserl's phenomeno-
logical undertaking.
Together with phenomenology itself, Husserl's languaging both of the
relationship of Ego and Object and of the Ego itself as a center of
light—a center of "conscious life"—sheds considerable light on why a
mandala is a basically circular spatial form that cross-culturally symbolizes

^3 Ibid., 310, 341.