What is awareness? How is dreaming different from ordinary awareness? What does mathematics have to do with awareness? Are different kinds of awareness related?
“Awareness” is commonly spoken of as “mind, soul, spirit, consciousness, the unconscious, psyche, imagination, self, and other.” The Phenomena of Awareness is a study of awareness as it is directly experienced. From the start, Cecile T. Tougas engages the reader in reflective notice of awareness as it appears from moment to moment in a variety of ways. The book draws us in and asks us to focus on the flow of phenomena in living experience, not as a theoretical construct, nor an image, nor a biochemical product, but instead as phases, moments, or parts that cannot exist without one another. Tougas shows how these parts exist in mutual dependence as a continuum of awareness, as the flow of lived time, and how noticing time deepens psychological self-understanding and understanding of another.
The Phenomena of Awareness is divided into four parts:
• Seeking and Noticing Awareness
• Observing and Understanding the Flow of Phenomena
• Distinguishing Intentional Acts
• Work in Progress
Drawing on the work of E. Husserl, G. Cantor and C.G. Jung, this book is an original synthesis of phenomenology, mathematics and psychology that explores awareness and the concept of ‘transfinite number’. This book will be of interest to analytical psychologists, philosophers, mathematicians, feminist scholars, humanities teachers and students.
Cecile T. Tougas teaches Latin at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham. She taught philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
Introduction. Part I: Seeking and Noticing Awareness. Medieval Metaphysics. The Equal. Jung’s "Images" and Husserl’s "Phenomena". Edith Stein and Husserl in Göttingen. Seeing the World as Husserl Did. World without Soul. Husserl, Jung, and the "Unconscious". Part II: Observing and Understanding the Flow of Phenomena. Transfinite Whole. Transfinite Number as Limit and Essence . Subjectivity Diagram. Double Intentionality in Time-Consciousness. Part III: Distinguishing Intentional Acts. Memory and Feeling. Expectation and its Double Intentionality. Double Intentionality in Dreaming. Intentional Activity as the Work of Spirit. Nebulous Knowing. The Other in Us. Part IV: Work in Progress. Analytical Psychology. Animus in a Woman. Child Analysis and the Dark Mother.
Biography
Cecile T. Tougas teaches Latin at the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, Durham. She taught philosophy at the University of Southern Maine and the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
"‘Jung would have appreciated clarification from Husserl’, says Tougas, a judgement that is justified by this short masterful book... It is written in the best new scientific style, which seamlessly melds both the subjective, that is, the experiences of Tougas as she writes the book, and the objective, the ideas of Husserl couched in his engendering experiences... Phenomena is an avowed labour of love and Tougas’s love illuminates everyone she writes about. As it is with us humans, the more we look, the more we see, and so we never tire of looking if the intent is exercised with thoughtfulness and agape-like goodwill, the attitude that the Kabbalah calls kavannah. To take this book in is once more to make such a journey oneself." - David Tresan, The Journal of Analytical Psychology
