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More specifically, i use 'magick' to refer to that which changes one's perceptions of one's connections with oneself and the rest of reality
flexibeast, I wanted to reccommend some reading you might find interesting/helpful in regard to this particular idea, and I would have just emailed you, but I could not locate your contact info :)
You might be interested in this artcile by John Dewey, or really his philosophy in general, especially his later stuff:
The Postulate of Immediate Empiricism
In this article he argues that questions of "knowledge" are not the same as questions of "reality." The "reality" of an experience has nothing to do with questions of knowledge, let alone truth. Things are what they are experienced as being. It's easy to take a statement like that and read it as a kind of brain-in-a-jar subjectivism, but the point he is trying to make is that "reality" is immediate. Someone with schizophrenia, for example, thinks their illusions are real, but from the outside they are obviously not. BUT the experience of those illusions is no less real than the experience of those who are able to dismiss them AS MERE ILLUSIONS. Dewey uses the example of a startling sounds. You hear it and look to see what it is; maybe it's the wind blowing the blinds. When you first hear the sound, you don't know what it is and it startles you---it makes you slightly afraid. But THAT experience is no less real just because you don't know the truth about what has startled you. IN FACT, the truth about what has startled you could not be determined through further investigation if that initial experince was "unreal!"
Anyway, I thought you might be interested in this article since you mentioned Husserl and phenomenology, which overlap considerably with Dewey (with important differences too!). Dewey speaks often of magic and myth and how they have contributed to the ongoing development of civilization. Typically they are written off as "unrealities" or "untruths," but in the context of experience, their function and effect is undeniable.
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