New Blog 1: Published Poems

Wednesday 24 October 2012

Published Poems

For phenomenology the reply to this question seems straightforward. As a phenomenologist I practice a kind of fidelity to experience. This fidelity or hospitality makes no initial judgment about whether an experience is true or false, right or wrong, more or less real or valuable than some other experience. Phenomenology is not about comparisons. It is about the appreciation of differences. Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is an experience of the cosmos which has as much validity as the vision of the heavens through a telescope does. That one is an image and the other a fact does not matter. The phenomenologist is a witness and not a critic of experiences (Romanyshyn, 2000 a), and for a phenomenologist what appears matters first before one asks what it might mean. Presence, for a phenomenologist, precedes meaning.