2.83
Let me put forward something I’ll call the Principle of Phenomenological Charity. Its cousin is the Principle of Charity, where we try to be as charitable as possible to a position by giving it the benefit of the doubt. The Principle of Phenomenological Charity is an attempt to see things in the way that they were proposed phenomenologically; it is to give a position the benefit of the doubt not just by giving the position the strongest reasons or interpretation you can conceive, but by rooting it in a phenomenological, experiential perspective: in other words, you see how things would look if things were the way it says they are/could be, and then, you see how—and if—things fit. This principle is needed because claims are rooted phenomenologically, in our lived experience of being in the truth (the clearing).
Let’s take Mill’s principle, which says that (most) every saying has some truth and some falsity,[1] out of context. We say that every response has some truth and some falsity (i.e., it responds well in some ways and poorly in others). Here, we arrive at a motivation for the Principle of Phenomenological Charity, for every gesture, saying, and response comes out of an adherence to things as they are.
This principle isn’t something to just think about but to embody. All views, in one way or another, (at least partly) respect phenomena. More: there are many views that respect most of the phenomena.
To begin to see this is, itself, to begin to respect the phenomena as they are; it’s to pay respect to the myriad ways of being that are.
[1] “But there is a commoner case than either of these; when the conflicting doctrines, instead of being one true and the other false, share the truth between them; and the nonconforming opinion is needed to supply the remainder of the truth, of which the received doctrine embodies only a part. Popular opinions, on subjects not palpable to sense, are often true, but seldom or never the whole truth.” John Stuart Mill, On Liberty: and Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 52. And: “though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth; and since the general or prevailing opinion on any subject is rarely or never the whole truth, it is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied” (p. 59).