Edmund Husserl concerned about the uncertainty of assumptions of the natural sciences – such as the existence of the external world or the constancy of nature – develops a philosophical system which he calls phenomenology: the philosophy of experience. In this method, one studies experience while suspending any pre-existing beliefs by a process he calls ‘bracketing.’ Given subject matter is converted from external object to lived experience leading to his slogan, “Back to the things themselves.” For instance a tree is not seen as an object separate from experience but as the perception we experience. Proximate reality then is the experience of an object rather than the object itself.2
Phenomenology is picked up by many philosophers and some psychologists in the 20th century. We already alluded to Martin Heidegger who uses phenomenology to investigate internal and external reality in his challenging book, Being and Time. While his initial intention is to understand the concept of ‘being’ in general, he decides the most effective way to investigate it is to use phenomenology to understand his individual being, in German, dasein. Early in his investigation, he notes that dasein perceives at once ‘being-in-the-world.’ From this starting point he determines that the world is a region of human concern, shared with others, and man’s involvement in the world is constitutive of man’s being.3
From these sources, we learn that proximate reality is assembled from sensory perceptions by the organizing process of the mind, and while not absolutely reliable, can be trusted when based on sufficient evidence and confirmatory experience. By suspending judgment on the context of things, we can live the experience of things at hand, and the world we experience becomes integral to our own being.
As always, many philosophers do not agree with all or even any of these assessments of proximate reality, but each of these concepts was derived from deep thinking about the problem. Fidelity to philosophy means giving them substantial thought before discarding them.
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1 Santayana, George, The Life of Reason. Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1953. Pages 17-25.
2 Magill, Frank. Masterpieces of World Philosophy. HarperCollins Publsihers. 1990. ISBN 0-06-270051-0. Pages 502-509.
3Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Harper Perennial Modern Thought. 2008.ISBN 978-0-06-157599-4. Part 1.
