This is a breath: in and out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I experience it without noticing it. Then I decide to think about it. Given my cultural milieu, my first thoughts sound scientific: my lungs must be absorbing oxygen from the air. My nervous system responds positively to that sensation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I realize that I am not sure whether these statements are well-founded or what their underlying concepts (such as causality and consciousness) mean. I resolve to focus on what I actually experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The phenomenon of my breath has certain features. It is a breath for me. I feel it and feel grateful for it. It belongs to the sequence of events that unfold in my inner time, occupying a short but not instantaneous period. It is located in my body, which occupies a specific place. It is an intentional act, yet it could have happened without my conscious attention. It has a purpose that I can know. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can imagine a breath that lasts twice as long or sounds twice as loud, but a breath that is ceaseless is no longer a breath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Soon that breath is gone. But another one comes; and even while I was experiencing the earlier breath, I implicitly knew that it was one in a series. Future breaths were phenomena that I could anticipate and even count on. Past breaths were phenomena that I could recollect if I chose to, or could imagine if I had forgotten them. All these breaths have a temporal rhythm that I can know in any one moment, meaning that they coexist in my present, albeit as different kinds of phenomena–memories, hopes, unnoticed experiences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I form a thought about my breathing, I know that I may return to that thought at will.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I can envision my body breathing one of the breaths of my own past. I can experience myself as then<\/em> and there<\/em> instead of now<\/em> and here<\/em>. This is very much like envisioning you and your experience, for you are there just as I am here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n My experience of you is mine; it belongs to the flow of my inner life. But my experience of you is not like my experience of myself, or my breath, or my past, or a number. It has peculiar features, such as the possibility of empathy. Once I know you, I know that you are real rather than imaginary and that we inhabit a shared world, because these are features of my own experience, which is an experience of you by and for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In truth, I may not know you, the reader of these words, but I can know what it’s like to breathe while one reads these words and imagines my experience. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My breath unfolds in the time of the world, which is jointly constituted by you and me and all other sentient beings. I cannot be a self that experiences this world without being in communion with others like me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Each self is its own whole world. Everything that it experiences is its own experience. Yet every self is also a potential phenomenon for the other selves and needs the others to constitute and inhabit a world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Each of my breaths reveals elaborate complexity when I examine it closely. One of the things I learn is that your breath is the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n See also:<\/em> a Hegelian meditation<\/a>; Philosophy as a Way of Life (on Pierre Hadot)<\/a>; freedom of the will or freedom from the will?<\/a> etc. I have benefitted from and recommend: Li, Jingjing. Same Road, Different Tracks a Comparative Study of Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology and Chinese Yogacara Philosophy<\/em>. McGill University (Canada), 2019; and an article derived from that dissertation: Li, Jingjing. “Buddhist phenomenology and the problem of essence.” Comparative Philosophy<\/em> 7.1 (2016): 7. Most of my own recent and direct knowledge of Husserl comes from his Cartesian Meditations<\/em> (1929) as translated by Dorian Cairns.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This is a breath: in and out. I experience it without noticing it. Then I decide to think about it. Given my cultural milieu, my first thoughts sound scientific: my lungs must be absorbing oxygen from the air. My nervous system responds positively to that sensation. Then I realize that I am not sure whether […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-continental-philosophy","category-philosophy"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26864"}],"version-history":[{"count":38,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26903,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26864\/revisions\/26903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}