Bitbol’s Phenomenological Ontology

Philosopher of science Michel Bitbol suggests that a radical view of neurophenomenology amplifies “the available range of interpretations of altered states of consciousness, from OBEs and NDEs to meditation and psychedelics, and which may suggest a new ontological category.” There are generally three such interpretations, he says: “two objectivist-realist and one non-committal (mild) phenomenological interpretation.” According to the objectivist-realist approaches, he says, “these states refer to worldly or other-worldly objective processes. They refer either to an alteration of the brain's biochemical balance, thus giving rise to hallucinations, or to a backstage supernatural (but ‘real’) world which discloses itself to (say) dying people.”

Beyond Naturalism and Supernaturalism

In contrast, Bitbol says that “according to the non-committal phenomenological approach, instead, these states are relevant by themselves, as transformative experiences for those who live through them.” This latter approach, advocated by Evan Thompson as well as by Bitbol, takes “a decisive step beyond the sterile conflict between naturalism and super-naturalism. It shows that despite their superficial disagreement, both positions share the same crucial but disputable strategy: escaping one's own lived embodied situation and striving towards some (natural or super-natural) transcendent realm of being” (Bitbol, 2015; Thompson, 2014).

Radical Phenomenology as Ontology

Bitbol sees a big vision here. “But the clarifying role of phenomenology is not bound to stop at this point. One can take further advantage of a truly radical phenomenological approach, and thereby endow the transformative experiences with additional significance.”

According to Merleau-Ponty (who partly agreed with Heidegger and Sartre on this point), phenomenology, in its mature state, becomes a new form of ontology: not a straightforward ontology of things facing an observer, however, but an ‘oblique ontology’ of intertwining with what there is (Saint Aubert, 2006); not an ontology of manifest beings, but an ontology of self-manifesting being. As Merleau-Ponty writes, radical phenomenology does not yield a standard ‘exo-ontology,’ but rather an unexplored ‘endo-ontology.’ Merleau-Ponty here unambiguously alludes to an ontology expressed from the innermost recesses of the process of being, rather than to an ontology of the external contemplation of beings” (Bitbol, 2015).

This granted, Bitbol argues that “some altered states of consciousness can be understood neither dismissively as illusions, nor neutrally as enthralling experiences, but positively as revealing a state of being which happens to be hidden by intellectual fabrications and by the impulse of intentional directedness.” Here, to avoid misunderstandings, Bitbol clarifies that “unlike in super-naturalism, there is no question here of reaching some remote domain of transcendent being, but only of self-disclosing an exquisitely proximate mode of being, which is permanently present but usually neglected: perhaps what Tibetan Dzogchen practitioners call ‘the nature of mind,’ which, in this nondualist context, is likely to be simultaneously the (self-experienced) nature of being” (Bitbol, 2015).