Phenomenology and Me

Phenomenology and Me

What Phenomenology Has Me Thinking About

I recently came across the word phenomenology again while exploring philosophy.

The word sounds complicated. Philosophy often has a way of giving long names to things that human beings have been doing all along.

Phenomenology, in simple terms, is concerned with lived experience—what it is actually like to experience something from the inside.

That idea immediately made me think about my own life.

I have always been an observer.

I didn't necessarily know that about myself when I was young. I simply knew that I was curious. I noticed things. I wondered about people, places, conversations, family stories and the world around me.

Growing up in Parchester Village in Richmond, California, I was surrounded by people living their everyday lives. My father worked as a cement mason during the tremendous building of track homes in the Santa Clara Valley. My mother was involved in the PTA and community life. There was food, gardening, family, neighbors, churchgoing, work and children growing up together.

At the time, I wasn't thinking about any of this as philosophy. I was simply living it.

But when I look back now, I realize that experience was teaching me long before I had words for what I was learning.

Before there was an explanation, there was an experience

This is what interests me about phenomenology.

We often begin with explanations.

We want to know what something means, what caused it, what category it belongs to, or what somebody else has already said about it.

But phenomenology asks us to slow down and look at the experience itself.

What did I actually see?

What did I hear?

What did I feel?

What did I notice?

What did I remember?

What assumptions did I bring with me?

Those questions remind me of the way I have approached so many things throughout my life.

I often don't begin with a conclusion.

I begin with a question.

Then I follow the question.

I think I have always been a little outside the hierarchy.

I sometimes describe myself as the fourth child—the explorer who came from outside the family hierarchy.

That position taught me something.

I watched.

I listened.

Older people already had their relationships and their histories. I could observe them. I didn't always have to be at the center of what was happening.

Perhaps that helped develop my habit of wondering.

I learned that there was often more happening beneath the surface of an ordinary moment.

A conversation could contain a family history.

A meal could contain geography.

A neighborhood could contain migration, labor and race history.

A photograph could contain an entire story that nobody had written down.

Years later, I would discover that this way of looking at the world would become very important to my work with Wikipedia.

The world is full of unwritten knowledge

One of the things that continues to fascinate me about Wikipedia is the question:

Who gets remembered?

We often imagine that history is simply sitting somewhere waiting for us to find it.

But much of history was never recorded.

People lived.

They worked.

They farmed.

They raised children.

They built neighborhoods.

They created organizations.

They passed knowledge from one generation to another.

Then they died.

Sometimes the records disappeared with them.

Sometimes the records existed but nobody knew where to look.

Sometimes the history was considered too ordinary to preserve.

That is where oral history becomes important to me.

A person remembering an experience isn't simply providing a fact.

They are giving us access to a world as it was experienced.

The smell of a kitchen.

The sound of a particular street.

The people who gathered on a porch.

The way children moved through a neighborhood.

The work people did with their hands.

The food their parents prepared.

The things they were taught.

The things they were never told.

These are all parts of human knowledge.

This is why I keep returning to "slow"

I have become increasingly interested in slow learning.

That may seem strange in the age of artificial intelligence.

Everything is becoming faster.

Ask a question.

Get an answer.

Ask another question.

Get a summary.

Generate an article.

Generate an image.

Generate ten more ideas.

We can move through information incredibly quickly.

But sometimes I wonder:

What happens to the experience of learning when we move too quickly?

I have been using ChatGPT and other AI systems for several years. I find them fascinating. They can help me discover connections, organize thoughts and locate questions I might not have thought to ask.

But I don't want the machine to do all of the wondering for me

I still want to read the book.

I still want to examine the photograph.

I still want to find the original source.

I still want to talk to somebody who remembers.

I still want to sit with an idea.

That is where phenomenology becomes interesting to me.

AI can give me information. Experience gives me something else.

An AI system can tell me about Parchester Village.

But it cannot give me my childhood experience of Parchester Village.

It can describe my father's occupation.

But it cannot give me the experience of being his daughter.

It can explain food traditions.

But it cannot replace the memory of food being prepared in my family.

It can summarize an oral history.

But the actual encounter between two human beings—the questions, pauses, memories, emotions and unexpected associations—is something different.

There is knowledge in that encounter.

And sometimes the pauses are where the knowledge lives.

Stillness

This brings me back to my own interest in stillness.

I don't think stillness means having no thoughts.

My mind is rarely empty.

Stillness, for me, is more like creating enough space to notice what is happening.

A thought appears.

I notice it.

A memory comes.

I let it come.

A question arises.

I follow it.

I don't have to immediately turn everything into an answer.

That is becoming increasingly valuable to me.

The world constantly tells us to produce.

Produce more.

Consume more.

Move faster.

Respond immediately.

But there is another way of being.

Observe.

Listen.

Think.

Wonder.

Remember.

Maybe curiosity is a form of independence

The older I become, the more I appreciate the ability to look at something and say:

I don't know. Let me find out.

That simple statement keeps the mind open.

It also protects us from becoming completely dependent on somebody else's interpretation.

That matters to me in Wikipedia.

It matters in history.

It matters in science.

It matters in family history.

And it certainly matters in the age of AI.

I don't want to surrender my curiosity to a machine.

I want the machine to help me become more curious.

From Parchester Village to Wikipedia

When I think about the path from my childhood to where I am today, it doesn't look like a straight line.

Parchester Village.

Family stories.

Books.

Travel.

Agriculture.

Community.

African history.

Wikipedia.

Oral history.

Artificial intelligence.

And now phenomenology.

But perhaps there is a thread connecting all of them.

Pay attention.

Pay attention to people.

Pay attention to places.

Pay attention to what has been forgotten.

Pay attention to what is being remembered.

Pay attention to what you are experiencing yourself.

And don't assume that the first explanation is the whole story.

The Wiki Auntie keeps wondering

Maybe this is part of what being a Wiki Auntie means to me.

It isn't simply teaching people how to edit Wikipedia.

It is encouraging people to notice that their world contains knowledge.

Your grandmother's story matters.

Your community's history matters.

The photograph sitting in your family album matters.

The book on your shelf may contain information that somebody else needs.

The person you interviewed may know something that never made it into the archive.

And your own experience can lead you toward questions worth investigating.

The technology may change.

The platforms may change.

The search engines may change.

But the human impulse to ask "Why?", "How?", "What happened here?", and "Who remembers?" remains.

What I am wondering now

Phenomenology has given me another way to think about something I have been doing for a long time.

Maybe knowledge doesn't begin with an answer.

Maybe it begins with attention.

We notice.

Then we wonder.

Then we investigate.

Then we compare what we experienced with what others experienced.

Then we look for evidence.

Then we revise what we thought we knew.

And sometimes, after all of that, we discover that the question is still bigger than the answer.

I'm comfortable with that.

At this stage of my life, I don't feel compelled to have an answer for everything.

I would rather remain curious.

I would rather keep looking.

I would rather keep wondering.

Perhaps that is why wonder feels right to me.

I write to remember.

I write to investigate.

I write to connect pieces of knowledge that at first appear unrelated.

And I wonder because the world continues to surprise me.

Stillness gives me room to notice.

Experience gives me something to notice.

Curiosity gives me somewhere to go.

And perhaps that is where philosophy begins—not in having all the answers, but in becoming quiet enough to recognize that we have another question.