Common to different versions of social constructionism is the definition of discourse as taking place between persons. Experiences which take place in the absence of immediate others, such as thinking to oneself or reading a text, are treated as secondary phenomena, as introjected versions of social utterance-gestures. This article asserts that representative constructionist articulations of between-person relationality rest on abstractions masking a more primary locus of sociality. I offer an alternative formulation of the social as the embodiment of sensate experience, (...) borrowing from Merleau-Ponty's and Gendlin's accounts. Sensate experience is already radically relational before and beyond any notion of sociality as between-person voices-gestures, generating more intimate and mobile possibilities of interpersonal understanding than is offered via discursive readings of terms like social, language and embodiment. Note; Although this paper pertains to social constructionist positions, my central criticism of these approaches applies as well to Deleuze's bio-political notion of sociality. While constructionists restrict their focus to inter-personal communication, Deleuze broadens the notion of language to include the living and material world, which includes the body. This places the site of otherness and sociality within intentionality itself via its entanglement with affect. Nevertheless, Deleuze's treatment of affective-intentional dynamics, rather than dismantling social constructionism's between-person abstractions, manages to import them into bodily process. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Thinking at the Edge (TAE) method, developed by Eugene Gendlin with Mary Hendricks and Kye Nelson. In the context of the international research project and training initiative Embodied Critical Thinking (ECT), TAE is understood as a political and critical practice. Our objective is to move beyond a criticism of reductionism, into a practice of thinking that can complement empirical, conceptual and logical implications with what is implied by the vibrant complexity of one’s lived experience in one’s (...) place and time. The second person helps the first to explore, elaborate and clarify very carefully felt dimensions of thinking, which hold intricate structures, contexts, perplexities and intuitions that prove relevant for one’s research. The second person also supports the first to become sensitive to the effects of the language and concepts she uses. A non-imposing, tentative use of language that touches the intricate texture of lived experience is at the core of this method, allowing to widen one’s conceptual structure. In this paper, the cluster of TAE moves are characterized with examples of accounts of TAE processes. The description of the TAE phases includes concepts of Gendlin’s embodied theory of meaning that explain the efficacy of the moves (“direct reference,” “explication,” “crossing”). (shrink)

This paper focuses on the use of concretely felt experience in phenomenological methodology and theory construction. Using the example of a stepwise process of theory making called Thinking at the Edge, the author shows how experience functions in the creation of a new theory on the self-as-becoming. In the process, he attempts to demonstrate how the ongoing work relating to creating a new theory of self is germane to phenomenology.The paper draws on the major philosophical work of Eugene Gendlin in (...) his development of “The Philosophy of the Implicit”, and the two distinct practices, Focusing and Thinking at the Edge, which grew out of it. This philosophy forms the theoretical basis upon which the assertion is made that experience that is directly referred to can be utilized as the core of a method in the explication of theory. Two challenges facing phenomenological researchers and theorists who desire to utilize felt experience in their work are addressed, namely the fact that the intimately felt aspect underlying the creation of new ideas is basically hidden from the view of others and is thus not verifiable in the usual way, and the lack of a larger public language for articulating the process and progress that follows concretely from felt experience. It is argued that Thinking at the Edge provides scientists or specialists in any field, including phenomenologists, with a means whereby they can explicitly use felt experience in their work. It also opens the way for fresh theoretical language, of a kind characterized by reflexivity of felt experience, within the broader public language of the various fields, in the process specifically demonstrating how theory instances and exceeds itself. (shrink)

The poet speaks in a particular way that can “bring things to nearness”. This particular way of bringing things to nearness may have some useful implications for understanding human well-being. Sometimes I have noticed that, when I read a poem that really “speaks to me”, the poetic language puts me in touch with well-being in a very palpable way, and this has brought me to wonder about this question: What is it that is taking place in a much loved poem (...) that can bring me close to a felt sense of well-being? This paper will draw upon some philosophical insights from the writings of Heidegger and Gendlin to explore what poetry opens up and holds in order to speak of well-being. What is it about poetry that is adequate to hold the deepest roots of hearing with the fullness of what is speaking? Heidegger’s later ideas about the essence of language and its non-representational power held within the unity of “the fourfold” may be helpful here. And what is it about poetry that can open up worlds, open us to sensation, and carry us beyond the literal words into the experience of well-being? Gendlin’s ideas concerning “thinking beyond patterns” and “carrying forward” may illuminate how poetry holds open what other language cuts off for us. The paper will conclude by pointing to poetry as a crucial form of adequate human discourse that is up to the task of understanding well-being and is therefore highly relevant to health and social care. (shrink)

We are particularly interested in how poetry and phenomenological research come together to increase understanding of human phenomena. We are further interested in how these more aesthetic possibilities of understanding can occur within a community context, that is the possibility of a process in which understanding is shared through an ongoing process of participation. In this way phenomenologically-oriented understandings may meaningfully speak of that which is common between us as well as that which may be uniquely lived for each of (...) us in terms of its individual context and nuance. In this paper we reflect on a process by which we engaged with participants to poetically re-present a description of an experiential phenomenon. As part of this process we offered an evocative description of a health care scenario, and facilitated collectively created ‘embodied responses’ inspired by the interactive form of Japanese Renga. We ask the question: “What kind of phenomenology is this?” Through so doing we attempt to address the theme of this special issue, namely, a focus on a wide embrace of the notion of evidence. We do this by drawing out the epistemological implications of a phenomenological approach that attends to the ‘awakening of presences’ in embodied and linguistic ways. In this pursuit we are assisted by the writings of Gendlin, Gadamer, Levinas and Shotter. Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology , Volume 12, Special Edition July 2012. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss Eugene Gendlin’s contribution to radically temporal discourse , situating it in relation to Husserl and Heidegger’s analyses of time, and contrasting it with a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that draw inspiration from, but fall short in their interpretation of the phenomenological work of Husserl and Heidegger. Gendlin reveals the shortcomings of these approaches with regard to the understanding of the relation between affect, motivation and intention, intersubjectivity, attention , reflective and pre-reflective (...) self-consciousness, the basis of mathematical naturalism and sensori-motor models of behavior. Gendlin traces the weaknesses of these approaches in the above areas to the way these perspectives construe time. (shrink)

Matthew Ratcliffe’s model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are (...) relative to the changing structural coherence of felt bodily and inter-socially shaped schemes of interaction. And yet, from the phenomenological vantages of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin and Heidegger, Ratcliffe’s approach retains the metaphysical presupposition of subject-object dualism as interacting bodies, with a separate causative glue necessary to provide for the means of their relation. Ratcliffe re-purposed Damasio‘s concept of background feeling and dressed it up in the garb of phenomenology , but it remains a reciprocal causal model of psychological function. What Heidegger’s Being-in-the -World, Merleau-Ponty’s figure-background structure of corporeal inter-subjectivity, Gendlin’s implicit intricacy and Husserl’s reduced transcendental ego have in common is a radicalized notion of temporality that overcomes the split between subject and object informing Ratcliffe’s understanding of being ‘immersed in’ and connected to a world, and thus abandons the need to posit bodily feeling as a ‘glue’ organizing and maintaining the meaningful structure of consciousness of a world. Temporality , not the empirically causal body, provides the basis of affect, cognition and the organizational glue for structures of meaning. (shrink)

Welcome to my philosophy page. My central research focus is the elucidation of what I call the radically temporal approach to philosophy. In the papers below I endeavor to articulate the varying ways that radical temporality manifests itself in the phenomenological perspectives of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin. I also discuss Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive project and George Kelly’s personal construct theory as examples of radically temporal thinking. With the aim of clarifying and further defining the nature of this (...) orientation , I have delineated the important ways in which it differs from a range of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology that includes hermeneutic and radical constructivisms, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) cognition, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of corporeal intersubjectivity, autopoietic self-organizing systems theory and American pragmatism. Among the authors whose work I have submitted to critique from the radically temporal perspective are: Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Thomas Fuchs (enactive, embodied ('4EA') cognition), John Protevi (Deleuzian biopolitics), Kym Maclaren ( critical phenomenology) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience). -/- I argue that these authors’ accounts of intersubjectivity and empathy, and their integration of affect, motivation, intentionality and will, remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal philosophies of Heidegger et al put into question. -/- . (shrink)

This research investigates the intersubjective aspects of communication design practice through a focus on the other, and the roles that the other takes in practice. It does so in order to better understand the practice of communication design as practiced on a day-to-day basis. Communication design, as a practice, and a field, extends out of graphic design. This extension is due to a change in priorities; from privileging the graphic and artefactual aspects of practice, to prioritising the consideration of the (...) broader agency of design within a specific context. This research has been accomplished through a practice-led methodology. Communication design projects form the methods of, and the foundation for, the investigation. Seven individual research projects have been designed and carried out. These projects have each incorporated members of the different participants of communication design practice; new and existing clients, student designers and established practicing designers. This has allowed the research to investigate its concerns from a range of roles and viewpoints, incorporating different perspectives into its observations and understandings. This research extends the work of Donald Schön and his investigation into The Reflective Practitioner. It achieves this through a consideration for the roles of the other in professional practice. In order to articulate this move extensive reference is made to the thinking of the twentieth century philosophers Martin Heidegger and Emmanuel Levinas. This research has found that the other plays critical roles in the practice of communication design. These roles are ones of providing provocative disjunction. Provocative disjunction, as understood by this research, contributes directly to the generative action communication design offers artefacts, clients and designers. The observations and understandings of this practice-led research have enabled extensive insights into the practice of communication design. These insights contribute significantly to the broader communication design discourse in professional practice, education and research. (shrink)

We contest two claims: that language, understood as the processing of abstract symbolic forms, is an instrument of cognition and rational thought, and that conventional notions of turn-taking, exchange structure, and move analysis, are satisfactory as a basis for theorizing communication between living, feeling agents. We offer an enkinaesthetic theory describing the reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and tensions of co- agential dialogical sense-making relations. This “enkinaesthetic dialogue” is characterised by a preconceptual experientially recursive temporal dynamics forming the deep extended (...) melodies of relationships in time. An understanding of how those relationships work, when we understand and are ourselves understood, when communication falters and conflict arises, will depend on a grasp of our enkinaesthetic intersubjectivity. (shrink)

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...) I show how Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin help us think from this more intimate process to transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. (shrink)

Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper (...) I show how thinking from this more intimate process may transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. (shrink)