People undergoing near-death, psychedelic, or mystical experiences often report encountering a reality that feels more real than ordinary reality—a hyperreality. This article uses philosophical phenomenology and theories of sense of reality to analyze such accounts. It critiques and extends Martin Fortier's plural taxonomy of sense of reality, proposing a triadic model of reality experience. According to this model, one dimension is merely heightened reality, while the other two are either self-evident immersion in reality or the irruptive suspension of ordinary experience.
Illusionism claims that phenomenal consciousness only seems to exist, thereby sidestepping the hard problem of consciousness. But the view is self-refuting: the phenomenal illusions it posits are themselves indistinguishable from genuine phenomenality, so illusionism merely reintroduces the same phenomenon it aims to deny. This absurdity alone justifies rejecting illusionism. The paper examines whether any reasonable justification can salvage illusionism in the face of the experientially undeniable reality of phenomenal consciousness.
The article examines how Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion expand the boundaries of phenomenology beyond Edmund Husserl's framework. Contrary to critics who see a problematic "theological turn" in their work, the author argues that both thinkers remain grounded in ordinary, accessible experience rather than mystical or special experience. By decentering the experiencing subject, Levinas and Marion force a rethinking of what can appear to consciousness and where the limits of phenomenality lie. The article does not treat this development as a distortion of phenomenological method but as a legitimate focus on aspects of experience that Husserlian phenomenology overlooked.