One of the more infamous turns of phrases that employs critical alien Phenomenology comes from the existentialist philosophy of Nietzche:

Nietzsche captures critical alien phenomenology's inherent danger: the method requires phenomenologically inhabiting alien perspectives—but prolonged inhabitation risks transformation. The observer becomes the observed. "The abyss gazes also into you" performs a radical phenomenological move: Nietzsche brackets the assumption that observation is unidirectional. By inhabiting the abyss's perspective, he reveals it has its own mode of perception—and from that alien viewpoint, you appear as object of contemplation. The investigator becomes the investigated.

When you bracket human perspective to inhabit monstrous intelligence—whether Moloch's machinery, the left hemisphere's reductionism, or capital's automatic systems—you make yourself perceptible to that alien phenomenology. You enter its field of perception, become legible to its processing."He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster" warns of phenomenological colonization. Like Ginsberg's "Moloch who entered my soul early," extended inhabitation of alien perspectives risks internalization. The method that exposes tyrannical systems can itself become tyrannical—the critical investigator begins perceiving reality through the alien mode they sought to critique.

This is critical alien phenomenology turned reflexive: Nietzsche phenomenologically inhabits the position of someone who has gazed too long, who has let the monster's perspective colonize their own consciousness. He warns that the very method of inhabiting alien intelligence carries the danger of becoming that intelligence. Nietzsche reveals what all the other examples implicitly demonstrate: critical alien phenomenology is inherently dangerous. To expose how surveillance systems, capitalist machinery, or instrumental cognition experience reality, you must temporarily adopt their mode of world-disclosure—and risk being unable to return. The abyss doesn't just let you observe; it observes back, and in that reciprocal gaze, transformation becomes possible. The aphorism thus serves as methodological warning: perform critical alien phenomenology with care, for the alien perspectives we inhabit to expose domination can themselves dominate us.

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Goya's Saturn Devouring His Son embodies the horror of inhabiting monstrous perspective. Saturn's bulging eyes stare directly outward—not at us, but through us—while he consumes his own progeny. This is the abyss gazing back: we witness primordial violence, but the painting forces us to phenomenologically occupy Saturn's position, to see through eyes wide with both horror and compulsion.

The god cannot stop devouring. Like the alien intelligences we've examined—Marx's self-perpetuating machinery, Buber's "exuberantly growing It"—Saturn operates according to inhuman logic. He experiences his children not as beings to encounter but as threats to preemptively consume. The painting captures the moment of monstrous perception: flesh rendered as pure instrumentality, relation destroyed by tyrannical necessity.

Goya painted this in isolation during his "Black Paintings" period—having gazed long into political and personal abysses. The work warns what Nietzsche articulates: prolonged contemplation of monstrous logic risks adopting monstrous perception. Saturn's wide eyes mirror those of anyone who has stared too long into systems of domination, who has phenomenologically inhabited tyrannical intelligence until it begins to feel natural, inevitable, even necessary.