Springer
2020
Hardback 103,99 €
VIII, 318
Reviewed by: Hillel D. Braude (The Mifne Center for Treatment of Infants with Autism, Rosh Pina, Israel)
Saying What We Mean [SWWM] provides a collection of selected philosophical writings by Eugene Gendlin (1926-2017) edited by editors Edward S. Casey and Donata M. Schoeller. As Schoeller notes this volume is intended to “excite an appetite for the extraordinary thinking of Eugene Gendlin and for the effects of his concepts as well as his practices that, in paraphrasing Adorno, ‘open up’ the phenomena they make thinkable.” [xv] SWWM is the first collection of Gendlin’s specifically philosophical writings, and is Gendlin’s final publication, appearing several months after his passing. It presents a final explication of Gendlin’s personal philosophy of experience, in which he explored the contours of the relation between implicit and explicit knowing, and the generation of language and conceptual meaning from the ground of our embodied senses. At the same time this “farewell letter” invites the reader to carry forward this exploration in her own personal way. The publication of SWWM reminds us that, as Gendlin himself insisted, his professional identity was first and foremost that of a philosopher. Gendlin’s intellectual roots extend deeply into Continental, Analytic philosophy as well as American pragmatism. His intellectual influences include among others: Dilthey, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and McKeon – the latter with whom Gendlin studied at the University of Chicago, and had a great influence on shaping Gendlin’s philosophical outlook. Gendlin was a prolific author, and his philosophical writings have been published in numerous essays and several books.[1]
Despite Gendlin’s prolific philosophical output, the publication of SWWM serves as a needful reminder of Gendlin’s philosophical ideas. Other than as a philosopher, Gendlin is most popularly remembered as the founder of the practical experiential method called Focusing, which provides a structured methodology to bring open, non-judging attention to embodied, experiential internal knowing – often referred to as the “felt sense” – prior to its conceptualization in language.[2] Focusing is most widely used as an aid for psychotherapy, although it is accessible to everyone interested in a practical methodology for personal transformation. Focusing developed out of Gendlin’s research at the University of Chicago with humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers into the phenomenological-process-oriented theory of experience and its transformation. Gendlin’s original research revealed that the way in which a client related to his or her personal experience during psychotherapy sessions, irrespective of the particular psychotherapeutic approach, provided a single significant predictor of the therapy’s success. As a process oriented methodology with deep roots in phenomenological philosophy, Focusing can be applied to enhance any particular psychotherapeutic approach, or can occur as a stand-alone methodology to enhance human potential. The essays in SWWM attest that Gendlin’s practical method of Focusing would be unthinkable without its underlying philosophical foundation. At the same time, the practical and the theoretical aspects of Gendlin’s lifework cannot and should not be artificially separated. The practice of Focusing provided Gendlin with material for philosophical reflection, as much as philosophical reflection provided the conceptual apparatus for the development of Focusing’s methodology. The core insight animating all of the essays in SWWM is the unceasing bidirectional relation between experience and rational conceptualization.
Gendlin’s focus on process means that he is not limited to espousing a particular philosophical school; but rather provides a process model approach that can ground different forms of philosophical conceptualization. Gendlin’s emphasis on the processes of thinking rather than on the final forms themselves is no doubt inspired in large part by Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological critique of psychology and the natural sciences. Gendlin’s philosophical feat has been to radically personalize philosophy, countering the age-old tendency towards universalization in philosophical reflection, while at the same time respecting structures of explicit rationality and cognition. This personalized perspective – both in terms of personal philosophical meaning, as well as in terms of self-healing– has deep roots in Gendlin’s personal history. In a German language interview with Lore Kolbei (1994), Gendlin described how his childhood experience fleeing Nazi occupied Vienna with his family, shaped his future life and single-minded intellectual focus. In determining how to escape the clutches of the Nazis together with his family, Gendlin’s father relied on following his internal feelings in deciding which individuals they encountered could be trusted in their escape. Gendlin’s later life was dedicated to deciphering the meaning of these internal feelings, both through psychotherapeutic processes and philosophical reflection. I feel it important to mention this biographical history, since it is of central importance in shaping Gendlin’s personalized philosophy. It is of interest that Gendlin does not refer to such cultural and biographical influences in his philosophical writings, as if wanting to emphasize the universal nature of pre-conceptual sensations in giving rise to language and explicit cognition.
SWWM provides in single volume some of Gendlin’s most influential essays. As such, this volume makes Gendlin’s philosophical reflections accessible to a wider audience in a concentrated form, and may be important in bringing Gendlin’s intellectual work to the attention of philosophers who have not yet come across his work, or have glossed over its importance providing a structured methodology to analyze pre-conceptual cognition in relation to explicit forms of knowing. (It is also worth mentioning the collection of critical studies on Gendlin’s work in the philosophy of language entitled Language beyond Postmodernism [LBM] (1997), published more than two decades ago and which like SWWM served as a kind of introductory volume for Gendlin’s philosophical ideas.) The essays in SWWM are primarily philosophical, though they speak equally to Gendlin’s practice of Focusing, and the later application of Focusing to analyze professional knowing called Thinking at the Edge (TAE). TAE is a practical methodology for applying the “intricate precision” immanent in our experiential knowing to professional, scientific and private contexts. [xix] For example, a clinician reflecting on aspects of a clinical case, could apply TAE to investigate the boundaries of intuition and explicit knowing. Perhaps the most important function of SWWM is to provide a general framework for Gendlin’s conceptual evolution. Unfortunately, chronological details of each essay are not provided, which would give information about the progressive development of Gendlin’s thinking.
The edited volume is divided into four parts:
Part 1. Phenomenology of the Implicit;
Part 2. A Process Model;
Part 3. On the Edges of Plato, Heidegger, Kant, and Wittgenstein, and
Part 4. Thinking with the Implicit.
Part 1 provides different approaches of Gendlin towards developing a conceptual methodology and language to differentiate different layers of implicit experience. Phenomenology provides the major philosophical ground for this engagement with implicit experience; though Gendlin uses his phenomenological approach to interrogate different philosophical schools and methodologies, especially linguistic analysis and philosophy of language. Phenomenology too, is not spared Gendlin’s critical gaze, as depicted in his brilliant essay, “Two Phenomenologists Do Not Disagree,” in which he analyzes the situation whereby two committed phenomenologists disagree over a single observed phenomenon. As opposed to following a particular phenomenological school or individual philosopher, Gendlin proposes to ‘study the formulating process itself,’ as well as the ‘roles of experience in it’ in order to determine how experience can ‘ground different formulations differently,’ including different phenomenological statements or perspectives. [8] Even though a particular statement may be differentiated as phenomenological from a non-phenomenological statement by following a well demarcated phenomenological methodology or “noticeable signposts,, for example Husserl’s proposed methodology of bracketing, in order to enable a primordial experience of a particular object of inquiry, Gendlin observes that phenomenological statements may possess many unintended logical implications.[8] These hidden intentions or meanings are amenable to being uncovered or elicited through further processes of concentrated focusing or introspection.
Gendlin’s essays depict his intellectual debt to the tradition of phenomenology; and at the same time develops his own philosophy of the implicit in new directions, navigating between age-old dichotomies, such as reductionism and idealism. An important aspect of the collection of philosophical essays in SWWM lies in providing a means of tracing and analyzing the influence of various phenomenological traditions on Gendlin’s thinking, including that of Husserl, Heideger, and Merleau-Ponty, and how Gendlin carries this tradition forward in his personalized philosophical way.
In his critical essay response to Gendlin’s philosophy entitled, “Experience and Meaning,” J.N. Mohanty (1997) provides key insights regarding Gendlin’s relation to Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, which are still relevant in relation to Gendlin’s collection of philosophical essays in SWWM. In his analysis of the relation between experience and meaning in Gendlin’s philosophical theory, Mohanty discerns four levels of meaning:
1. Experiencing with implicit, incomplete felt meanings;
2. Explicit, felt but prelinguistic (though still symbolized) meanings, inwardly attended to;
3. Experiential concepts (arising out of the interaction of felt meanings with language);
4. Logical concepts. [184]
The core tension animating each of the essays in SWWM is the inherent relation between each of these four levels of meaning. While not participating in logical inference, the “most basic level,” i.e., the implicit background has its own precise kind of order, which functions in the formation of new and ever more precise scientific concepts. Thus, Gendlin posits a pre-conceptual rational order, that is not the same as explicit logic, but which grounds the possibility for explicit rationality. In Part 2. “A Process Model,” which refers to Gendlin’s magnum opus of the same name, Gendlin articulates further this pre-conceptual rational order, or what he now refers to as the ‘conditions of possibility’ for the ‘implicit precision of experience.’ [xvii] Implicit precision refers to the embodied process generated through interaction between the conscious organism and its environment. While logical precision is explicitly rational and depends on defined units, the process of implied precision ‘generates and regenerates the background objects and their relationships, including logical scientific units.’ [111] Implicit precision articulates Gendlin’s basic insight that there is a direct reference between preconceptual and explicit cognition. Moreover, as the name implicit precision implies, this level of organismic consciousness possesses a rational structure, even if it is not ordered according to explicit logical principles. Movement between these two forms of precision can occur in either direction. Indeed, scientific logic is unthinkable without this foundational level of embodied knowing.
Mohanty claims that Gendlin requires a mediating concept, a “Zwischenglied” between implicit experience and logical concept. Gendlin’s concept of direct reference provides this Zwischenglied. In SWWM Gendlin refers to this direct relationality between felt sense and logical concept using the terminology of ‘direct experience’ and ‘direct referent.’ In my own imagination, this Zwischenglied of direct reference is analogous to the sensation in holding two opposing poles of a magnet in close proximity. One feels the invisible magnetic force between the two poles of experience and logic. However, maintaining this force is a slippery undertaking that gives rise to a perplexing sensation. Trying to elicit the connection and opposition between these different levels is key to getting a sense of Gendlin’s philosophical task. As Gendlin writes, saying exactly how ‘direct experience can function as a ground in each step of formulating’ ‘opens up a whole new field of enquiry.’ [7]
Names such as “implicit precision” and “carrying forward,” referring to the infinite possibility for bodily implying beyond explicit concepts, are terms that Gendlin provides in the Process Model for conceptual structures arising from and referring to his process methodology. This process of naming felt-sensations as they emerge into language is an integral part of the Focusing process. Gendlin would undoubtedly invite readers of his philosophical writings to extend his philosophical practice by developing their own names for universal processes of meaning-making. One can debate the precise relation between Husserl’s use of act and intentionality in relation to Gendlin’s process model. For example, Mohanty notes that Gendlin did not regard Husserl’s conception of act and intentionality as including data of awareness, but rather as principles presupposed by such data. [183] Similarly, Gendlin held that Husserl did not include felt experiencing as part of the datum given in meaningful awareness. [ECM, p. 276] However, Gendlin’s views on Husserl appear to have shifted, since he notes in his essay, “Two Phenomenologists Do Not Disagree,” that Husserl did not begin his phenomenological explorations with analyzing the relations between feelings, situations, and language. Yet, through his contact with direct experience, he encountered these interrelations in that experience. [54] However, even if felt experiencing can be traced back to Husserl’s conception of act and intentionality, Gendlin’s expansion and delineation of the methodology to track the relation between experience and meaning moves beyond its phenomenological foundations. Moreover, the process of giving provisional name to conceptual structures emerging from reflection on one’s felt experience, such as “implicit precision” and “carrying forward,” blending personal experience with rational conceptualization is a unique philosophical contribution of Gendlin’s.
Any reader of SWWM must necessarily be divided into two groups. Those with a first-hand familiarity of the process of Focusing, and those who approach the text as a purely philosophical text to be understood conceptually. In a sense, it is not possible to approach these texts purely intellectually, since Gendlin’s method explicitly aims to bridge the mind-body dichotomy. In her introduction, Schoeller writes that, ‘Gendlin’s thinking and practices move across the body-mind split, expanding the field of experience and thinking beyond so-called subjective or objective approaches in order to cultivate an awareness of the preciseness of what he calls a “responsive order.”’ [xiv] Gendlin peppers his essays with practical examples, exhortations to his readers to engage practically with his methodology. For example, in his essay “The New Phenomenology of Carrying Forward,” Gendlin notes how in writing a poem one’s body has a precise sense of what needs to be said. [84] The process of Focusing is similar in many ways to the poet’s attending to her felt sensations in the process of writing a poem. Grappling with Gendlin’s conceptual ideas necessitates an induction into the process of Focusing. Yet, Gendlin would argue that any meaning-making process incorporates this kind of embodied sense-making, formalized in a structured process, or not. Readers who do not concretely explore Gendlin’s practical examples through deep introspection, and who merely try to understand his conceptual arguments from a disembodied perspective, must necessarily fail to comprehend the tenor of his argument.
The “Process Model” emphasizes the embodied nature of Gendlin’s philosophical project. (As a Feldenkrais Method Somatic Education Practitioner I am particularly receptive to the centrality of the body in Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit. The Feldenkrais Method is similiar to Focusing in providing a practical methodology to explore the relation between one’s felt sense and cognition; however, the Feldenkrais Method introduces the added dimension of movement exploration.) In his essay “The Derivation of Space,” Gendlin notes that, ‘… the clarity which an analytic layout brings lies not only in the layout before us. It has an effect in the body. It brings an implicit whole bodied understanding. “Aha!” we say.’ [156] Following Stuart, in the essay on “Implicit Precision,” Gendlin refers to a perceptual concept called enkinaesthesia, i.e., ‘the sentient half of a behavior sequence and the sentience of patterned interactions which is the sequence of bodily shifts I call versioning.’ [121] Taking the cue from Gendlin’s terminology, an embodied adaptation of Focusing, called Whole-Bodied Focusing, developed by Kevin McEvenue [2015], integrates Focusing with somatic experiential techniques from the Alexander Method. Nonetheless, even though Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit does provide a means of overcoming mind-body dualism, the body is emphasized only tangentially, in the sense that real attention to the body requires an embodied practice, as in Whole Body Focusing, other somatic education practices, such as Feldenkrais Method. The complete intellectual grasping of Gendlin’s ideas requires an embodied practice in conjunction with attention to the embodied basis of our logical conceptualization.
Part 3. “On the Edges of Plato, Heidegger, Kant and Wittgenstein presents” Gendlin’s philosophical thinking in relation to major philosophers in the Western tradition. Gendlin’s philosophy does indeed present a methodology to reengage and reinvigorate the Western philosophical canon. His philosophical ambitions are simultaneously grand and modest, in the sense that Gendlin has enough confidence in his insights to re-read ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle; yet does this, not by contesting their philosophical claims and arguments, but by “lifting out” the most basic experiential sensations elicited through engaging with the textual ideas. In other words, through his process model, Gendlin finds a means of re-engaging with ancient philosophical texts and ideas, to provide fresh insights and meanings, without attempting to disprove any particular philosophical approach.
This process of “lifting out” also has relation to phenomenology, though not Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, but Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being, and particularly his concept of Befindlichkeit. As Francesca Brencio (2019) notes in her recent review of Befindlichkeit in relation to psychopathology:
Befindlichkeit stresses the basic state of Dasein in its being situated: finding ourselves already in situatedness, means finding ourselves gathered to a “there” (being-there, in German Dasein). The situatedness is strictly related to the existence’s facticity and it becomes manifest to us through our own moods and affectivity. [344]
Our moods and affective states provide the grounds of our pre-conceptual experience, and the means of becoming attuned to the external world. There is, therefore, a strong affinity between Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit and Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit. In his essay, “Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology,” Gendlin observes that, ‘Heidegger’s concept denotes how we sense ourselves in situations. Whereas feeling is usually thought of as something inward, Heidegger’s concept refers to something both inward and outward, but before a split between inside and outside has been made.’ [195]
In referring to psychological affective states and moods, Befindlichkeit has obvious clinical importance for clinical psychology and theories of psychopathology, and resonates strongly with Gendlin’s philosophical project and practical methodology of Focusing. However it is in providing the phenomenological possibility of original disclosing that provides the strongest link between Gendlin and Heidegger. Gendlin quotes the following paragraph from Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time:
Befindlichkeit is a basic existential way in which Dasein (being-here) is its here. It not only characterizes Dasein ontologically, but because of its disclosing, it is at the same time of basic methodological significance for the existential analytic. Like any ontological interpretation whatsoever this analytic can only, so to speak, “listen in” to the previously disclosed being of something that is… Phenomenological interpretation must give Dasein the possibility of original disclosing, to raise the phenomenal content of this disclosing into concepts. [178-79]
For Heidegger it is the disclosing of Befindlichkeit which renders a statement phenomenological, from a state of free-floatingness. [216] Gendlin claims to extend Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit in his own practical philosophy through adding the bodily dimension; which Gendlin claims is missing in Heidegger’s philosophy. Additionally, Befindlichkeit provides a means of explaining Gendlin’s process methodology in Focusing, through getting in touch with and “lifting out” implicit felt meanings for conceptualization. As mentioned, for Gendlin, this lifting out process, while phenomenological, is not limited to any particular philosophical formulation, including that of Heidegger’s analysis of Being. The deep relation between Befindlichkeit and Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit means that even though Gendlin’s philosophy is greatly indebted to the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, in his heart of hearts Gendlin appears more aligned with Heidegger’s philosophy of Being-in-the-world, though this relationship is not without its personal ambivalence. In his sole biographical observation in all of the essays in SWWM, Gendlin notes his indirect indebtedness to Heidegger, who he only came to read later in life once he overcame his personal antipathy to Heidegger:
My own work for many years preceded my reading Heidegger. I came to him quite late. Both the personality change mentioned above, and the philosophical work I will now mention, were written before I read Heidegger. But I had read those philosophers that most influenced Heidegger, and so I emerged from the same sources, at least to some extent. I had also read Sartre, Buber, and Merleau-Ponty, who were greatly and crucially following Heidegger. Hence my own work continues from Heidegger, and stands under his influence, although I did not recognize that until later…. [223]
Gendlin’s attraction towards Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit can also be explained because of its inherent potential for developing a psychological or psychopathological theory. Since moods and affective feelings ground our experience of reality, psychopathological conditions such as anxiety are characterized by a breakdown or collapse of our affective experiential foundations.[3] It is not by chance that the practice of Focusing tends to emphasize uncomfortable physical and mental felt sensations, as the core of its therapeutic work.[4] Gendlin is attracted to and reworks Heidegger’s concept of Befindlichkeit because of his own deep therapeutic concern that informs both the practice of Focusing and his philosophical theorizing about the implicit. In “Befindlichkeit: Heidegger and the Philosophy of Psychology,” Gendlin observes that the essence of psychotherapy is phenomenological in the therapeutic process through the Heideggerian concept of lifting out. Thus, Gendlin notes that ‘any statements and interprerations are effective only when they lift something from the directly senses and preverbally “understood” felt complexity. Even very sophisticated statements by patients and therapists alter nothing in the patient’s living, unless there is the distinct effect of lifting something out.’ [218] This sentence encapsulates Gendlin’s life-work in interweaving philosophical conceptualization with lived experience in general, and psychotherapy in particular.
The final section of SWWM, Part 4. “Thinking with the Implicit,” presents an introduction to the practice of Thinking at the Edge (TAE), the extension of the practice of focusing to scientific and professional contexts. In Gendlin’s words, ‘TAE is a systematic way to articulate in new terms something which needs to be said but is at first only an inchoate “bodily sense.”’ [282] It seems to me (without having personally experienced its practice) that TAE applies the Focusing methodology in a specific structured context, as opposed for example, simply trying to assess one’s felt bodily sense, in order to elicit new logical analytical formulations and creative theorization. In other words, TAE is concerned with developing explicit logical concepts relating to specific spheres of interest or expertize out of the grounds of implicit knowing. Gendlin has an explicit political awareness around TAE, considering that it provides a tool for people from all social strata and intellectual backgrounds to articulate their experiences, and to develop new patterns of thought. Through TAE, Gendlin claims, the capacity to develop novel philosophical ideas and logical and scientific concepts is no longer limited to an intellectual elite, but is open to all.
TAE is of especial personal interest to me in terms of its potential applications to medicine and clinical reasoning. I have an abiding interest in the philosophy of the implicit, having conducted analogous research into the tacit foundations of clinical reasoning.[5] This work was not fundamentally informed by Gendlin’s writings, but rather was influenced by other phenomenologists, such as Edmund Husserl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas, as well Michael Polanyi’s philosophy of tacit knowing. Similar to Gendlin, my focus on the role of intuition in clinical reasoning has also brought me to conceptualize a kind of rationality in clinical reasoning that is not modelled on explicit knowing; but rather envisages clinical reasoning as a kind of embodied practical wisdom modelled on the Aristotelian conception of phronesis. Reading SWWM with this background context in mind, suggests that Gendlin’s delineation of a responsive order to pre-conceptual reflection does provide an important intellectual resource for re-conceptualizing the role of practical wisdom in clinical reasoning, especially through the application of practical techniques from Focusing and TAE. Theoretically, TAE might be of real value in expanding understanding of the tacit foundations of various forms of clinical reasoning, including the intuitive component of clinical judgement, and developing ideas from bench to bedside in translational medicine. Arguably, applying TAE to the clinical context could re-invigorate contemporary epistemology of medical knowledge.[6] As of yet, the application of TAE to the medical clinical context does not yet appear to have been formally developed. The collection of Gendlin’s selected philosophical essays in SWWM invites the reader to continue engaging with Gendlin’s philosophical ideas, and to continue the path that he forged finding one’s own personalized meanings as a means of individual and intellectual renewal.
References:
Brencio, Francesca. 2019. “Befindlichkeit: Disposition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, edited by Giovanni Stanghellini, et al. Oxford. Oxford University Press: 345-353.
Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. London: SCM.
Mohanty, Jitendra Nath. 1997. “Experience and Meaning.” In Language beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin’s Philosophy, edited by David Michael Levin. Evanston, IL. Northwestern University Press: 176-190.
Levin, David Michael (Ed.). 1997. Language beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin’s Philosophy. Evanston, IL. Northwestern University Press.
Korbei, L. 1994. Eugen(e) Gend(e)lin. In O. Frischenschlager (Hg.), Wien, wo sonst! Die Entstehung der Psychoanalyse und ihrer Schulen. Wien/Köln/Weimar: Böhlau: 174-181. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2181.html
McEvenue, Kevin. 2015. Wholebody Focusing: Life Lived in the Moment. Copyright Whole Body Focusing.
[1] See most notably, Gendlin, Eugene. 1962. Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (ECM). Glencoe, IL. Free Press, Evanston; 2017. A Process Model. Evanston, IL. Northwestern University Press.
[2] See, for example, Cornell, Ann Weiser and McGavin, Barbara. 2002. The Focusing Student’s and Companion’s Manual. 1. Berkeley, CA. Calluna Press.
[3] See, Brencio, Francesca. 2019. “Befindlichkeit: Disposition.” In The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, edited by Giovanni Stanghellini, et al. Oxford. Oxford University Press: 345-353.
[4] See, for example, Gendlin, Eugene. 1984. “The Client’s Client: The Edge of Awareness.” In Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach: New Directions in Theory, Research and Practice, edited by Ronald Levant & John Shlien. New York. Praeger: 76-107.
[5] See, Braude, Hillel. 2012. Intuition in Medicine: A Philosophical Defense of Clinical Reasoning. Chicago. The University of Chicago Press; 2016. “Clinical Reasoning and Knowing.” In Companion to Contemporary Philosophy of Medicine, edited by James Marcum, Bloomsbury Press: 323-342; 2013. “Human All Too Human Reasoning: Comparing Clinical and Phenomenological Intuition,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy. 38(2): 173-189; 2016. “Skilled Know-How, Virtuosity and Expertise in Clinical Practice.” In Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine, edited by Thomas Schramme and Steven Edwards, Springer Press: 699-716.
[6] See, Braude, Hillel. 2016. “Review of Miriam Solomon’s Making Medical Knowledge.” Theoretical Medicine & Bioethics, 37(5): 433-436.
Reviewed by: Andrew Bevan (Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London)
What is it to define an emotion? Or to categorise an experience as an emotion? This is the aim of this collection of essays, the result of a conference of 2013 with the same name that discussed ‘surprise’ and attempted to categorise it as emotion, feeling, affect or otherwise. The editors identify two main theoretical frameworks with which to approach the question: psychology and philosophy. They argue that, whereas psychology treats surprise as a primary emotion, philosophy relates surprise to passions which are then opposed to reason. With this split in place, they seek to question these frameworks: is surprise not also cognitive? Is it not embedded in language? And how is it to be related to personhood and the interpersonal and moral emotions? Already we see that the exercise of defining an experience as an emotion takes place within the traditional binaries of philosophical psychology: passion/reason, emotion/cognition, etc. Yet throughout this volume, perhaps the most surprising aspect of surprise is just how inadequate these traditional categories are and how the phenomenon under discussion will exceed and trouble these traditional binaries.
One immediate difficulty the volume is faced with is what to call that which is to be defined or categorized: what is this realm of undefined or uncategorised? What most general word can refer to it: ‘surprise’? At some level, all authors can speak to this uncategorised experience called ‘surprise’; there is some binding of word and experience such that all authors can write on its vagaries and varieties. Yet how is this to be disambiguated from similar terms like wonder, startle, glance, etc. as well as the translation of these terms from other languages, most notably that of wonder (thaumaston) which, as Plato argued in Theaetetus, ‘is the only beginning of philosophy’ (155d). This is the very problem the volume engages with and thus, in so doing can be read as continuing this long tradition of surprise as the beginning of philosophy.
Three main themes occur in all the authors’ discussions. The most commonly invoked criteria for surprise that all authors mention in some form or another is the frustration of expectations. For example, Steinbock delineates surprise not only as ‘an experience of unexpected givenness’ but as ‘the accommodation of us to the situation by being the acceptance of what I cannot accept’ (10). These expectations can be implicit or explicit and not merely cognitive: they are discussed through concepts like habit or bodily adaptation to an environment. It is then in the frustration of expectations, or the difference between expectation and actuality, that surprise arises. Authors use many concepts to characterise these expectations (dispositions, integrations, entanglements and habit) and their frustration (startle, rupture, punctuation, anxiety, novelty and reconfigurations). But there is also room for concepts that convey a lack of surprise when expectations meet actuality (affinity, affordance).
The second commonality is the question of temporality: while most agree surprise involves a spontaneous, sudden, ‘rupture’ this is merely the first part of a temporal dynamic. Desmidt, for example argues ‘surprise is the structure of the temporal dynamic of emotional emergence’ (62).
The third point of agreement between most authors is that surprise is ambiguously valenced: surprise can be positive or negative and so appears to transcend any simple division into positive/negative valence.
But, whereas the authors tend to agree on these three main points, there is then much divergence in their characterisation of surprise. The main problem in comparing positions to agree any consensus and the possibility of answering the question of the volume is that the difference between the authors’ positions in part stems from different understandings of the terms being used to categorize ‘surprise’. For instance, if surprise is to be an emotion, there is little discussion or agreement of what an emotion is, nor its difference or identity to affect, passion, feeling etc. is. Some treat affect and emotion as synonymous, others as strictly different but few reflect on what they might mean nor what categorising surprise as one or the other would entail.
The authors who give most attention to this question are the two editors of the volume, Steinbock and Depraz and both invoke Kant to define emotions. Steinbock foregrounds Kant’s use of temporality to differentiate affect and passion: affect is sudden and rash in contrast to the duration of passions (12-13). Steinbock then, despite the suddenness of surprise, argues surprise is part of a process of much longer duration. But he concludes not that surprise is a passion but that surprise ‘belongs to the sphere of emotions (and is not a mere affect)’ (13). Steinbock thus seems to equate passion with emotion. Furthermore, whereas affects are ‘feeling-states and pertain to who we are as psychophysical beings, where we would find experiences like pleasure or pain, being ill at ease, tickling and arousal,’ emotions – such as ‘regret, remorse, fear, longing and surprise’ (14-15) – are emotions because ‘they can occur without any essential relation to personal ‘otherness’ in that experience’. But ‘genuine’ emotions are those which ‘presuppose an “order” or even “disorder” of the heart – to use a phrase from Pascal – and are lived in some way toward some other as bearer of value in a ‘creative’ or personal manner’ (15). Here we see that the divisions of psycho-physical to ‘personhood’ are played out to differentiate affect from emotion.
Meanwhile, Depraz argues that in psychology, surprise is treated as an emotion. She again cites Kant but, unlike Steinbock, identifies emotion with affect (‘emotion, here as Affekt’, 26). This identification of emotion with the German Affekt has a psychological precedence perhaps beginning with William James in his Principles of Psychology. For Depraz, surprise ‘is not an emotion in the sense of a basic feeling like fear, anger, disgust, jor or sadness.’ Her main argument is that ‘surprise involves an emotional and cognitive component but results in a more encompassing and integrative circular (time, bodily, expressive-descriptive) phenomena’ (39). Depraz then invokes the concept of valence to undermine the idea that surprise is an emotion: valence characterizes more precisely the ‘affective dynamic of the surprise rather than emotion as such, which always remains a partial and static state’ (40). Although surprise is linked to emotional valence when associated with these emotions, it may also appear as ‘a neutral, mixed or epistemic emotion, i.e. as a violated expectation that affects both action and cognitive processing.’ (39).
Other authors tend to reflect less on the problem, focusing their attention purely on emotion (Desmidt, Brizard) or tending to identify emotion with affect (Livet mentions ‘affective attitudes’ (109), ‘affects or affective bursts (111), ‘emotional or affective attitude’ (112)). Although Brizard does state that startle, that can be used to assess emotional reactivity which can be ‘modulated by affective states’ (78). Sheets-Johnstone in insisting the body is not ahistorical or living, speaks of ‘affective dynamics that move through bodies and move them to move’ (83). Yet, quoting Jung, she seems to elide any difference between affect and emotion (85). Emotions/affects are then qualitatively different: they have their own ‘distinctive qualitative kinetic dynamics’ (85).
At least three different approaches can be identified then: affect equals emotions; emotion is a type of affect; or affects and emotions are different. A fourth approach, however, is to avoid the whole problem by mentioning neither affect nor emotion – such is Casey’s singular approach: he instead likens surprise to glance, something that is perhaps less contentious and more familiar.
This difference in understanding and use of terms then makes the guiding question ‘Surprise: An Emotion?’ difficult to answer: it of course depends on what an emotion is. So when Steinbock argues surprise is an emotion, and Depraz that it is not, they are working with slightly different understandings of what emotion is. For Depraz, emotion is an affect, for Steinbock it is not. Yet both agree that the aspect that differentiates surprise as one or the other is temporality: surprise is not sudden but part of a more involved process.
Perhaps some attention to the terms being used (affect, passion, feeling, emotion) might yield a more productive discussion. The terms affect and passion in particular have a long and rich philosophical heritage and perhaps most significantly enter the philosophical discourse through its use by Cicero, Augustine and others to translate the Greek pathos. Now, whilst passiones is a transliteration of the Greek pathos with similar meanings, affectio already existed in Latin and is comprised of the prefix ad- + facio. Ad- usually adds a movement to or against something whilst facio has a very broad signification including to make, build, construct or produce. Passiones is also the root of our passive and thus this choice of translation would foreground an essential passivity to this realm of experience. Whereas, with the choice of affect, which can be active or passive voiced (‘to affect or be affected’ will become central to interpretations of Spinoza), it is the binary of active/passive that is paramount in discussions of Greek pathos.
However, Cicero, in Tusculan Disputations, chooses neither affect nor passion but uses perturbatio to translate πάθος. He prefers this to morbus, meaning ‘diseases’ because the Greeks also used πάθος for exaltation and joy which we cannot consider disease. Thus, already we see the problem of valence when it comes to choosing a term to characterize these experiences – the term itself cannot be valenced. Furthermore, by choosing pertubatio, Cicero makes a philosophical intervention in the reception of Greek philosophy by replacing medical metaphors with metaphors of movement and reintroducing into Latin a model of mind in Plato and Pythagoras who divided the soul into two: one of peacefulness that shares in reason and another that doesn’t, the seat of stormy emotions, motus turbidos. Perturbatio captures this metaphorical domain as it is comprised of the prefix per- meaning ‘thoroughly, to completion’ and turbāre from turbo ‘to disturb’ and implicitly contains a sense of a passive initiation of something that must run its course which means that, for Cicero, it becomes imperative to avoid perturbations in the first place as once initiated they cannot be stopped but must flow to completion.
On a purely etymological level, this understanding of perturbation resembles that of emotion which derives from the Latin ēmovēre to move out, drive away or banish, for example, pain. In this choice of concepts it is an implicit negatively valenced motion (as turbo or moveo) that is foregrounded . However, from a wider perspective than mere etymology, Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions claims that by 1850, the category of emotion had subsumed ‘passions,’ ‘affections’ and ‘sentiments’ in most English-language psychological theorists such as Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40). The increase in popularity of emotion arose from the 17th century consolidation of philosophies of individualism as well as a secularisation that sought to avoid the associations of passion and affection with the biblical and theological preferring emotion for its alternative network of relations to psychology, law, observation, evolution, etc. This resulted in differing causal explanations for the phenomena: whilst Christian philosophers assumed passions were the soul acting on the body, emotions then became the brain acting on the body. The scientific brain replaces the theological soul as agent.
This analysis of concepts reveals at root two alternative approaches adequately described by affect/passion and emotion. Whether separated or identified, however, they nevertheless share an implicit foundation in activity and passivity and in the metaphorical domains of theology, medicine and physics. The question as to whether surprise is an emotion, affect or other is therefore not philosophically, historically or politically neutral. And this question continues to haunt the pages of this volume: for the question of valence appears regularly as well as the question of active/passive. And the metaphorical domain continues to oscillate between a philosophical approach (mainly that of phenomenology) and a more scientific one of psychology and linguistics. Indeed, the sheer diversity of disciplines included in this volume (without any one dominating) – medical (depression), philosophy (phenomenology), science (psychology), theological (in the discussion of Paul) or language and literature – continues the question over which metaphorical domain to place the concepts in. Such a complex and multi-faceted problem does indeed touch on everything from language, linguistics, phenomenology, science and theology and it is therefore refreshing that this volume features accounts from all these differing approaches.
Moreover, the volume is enhanced through combinations of these disciplines: the introduction states the multidisciplinary approaches as ‘philosophy, psychophysiology, psychiatry and linguistics’ (vi) and mention early attempts at the interface of philosophy and linguistics, phenomenology and psycho-neuro-physiology or philosophy-phenomenology. Phenomenology, neuroscience, physiology, is an interesting and productive binding.
If this short history of the concepts used to describe this realm of experience reveals anything, it is perhaps how implicated in past metaphysics this whole discourse is. Thus, it might be productive to uncover how implicitly the authors depend on such a past metaphysics (notably that of a past metaphysics of coupled opposites derived from Greek philosophy) in approaching the central question posed by the book. Furthermore, perhaps the value of this book lies in its manifestation of a tension relating to how surprise appears to depend on and yet transcend these categories and conceptual histories of philosophy.
Sheets-Johnstone speaks directly to this question of past metaphysics when she complains of a ‘metaphysics of absence’ that leads to an ‘absence of the body below the neck’ (84). The traditional body/mind division is that which leads to this critique. But the influence of a past metaphysics of coupled opposites is felt most concretely with the numerous oppositions that continue to structure the problem field: positive/negative, approach/avoidance, and sympathetic/parasympathetic nervous systems not to mention emotion/cognition and emotion/volition. Such a metaphysics enables the very analysis Livet proposes in his concluding paragraph where he walks through eight possible combinations based on oppositional pairings of explicit/implicit, emotion/volition and the transition between the two. This then requires also that emotion be opposed to cognition and the whole realm of complexity is perhaps reduced to slotting aspects into a neat, three dimensional grid of implicit/explicit, emotion/volition, affect/cognition.
But perhaps the main oppositional pair that governs all these other pairs is the active/passive which features prominently in many authors’ discussions and may stem from the translation of the Greek pathos into a discourse of passivity. For example, Steinbock asks whether surprise is active or passive given that startle must be passive (10). For Livet, the active/passive is applied to the difference between emotions (passive) and volitions (active) and Livet argues both can actually be active either in an explicit, conscious or implicit way. But ultimately, Livet and Steinbock both demonstrate just how futile and inadequate conceiving something like emotions as passive or active is. Steinbock notes that the active/passive cannot adequately be applied to surprise for it cannot be purely passive but indicates transition from a more passive to a more active awakening (12). Often what is passive is said to be also active leading to them being active and passive at the same time and the whole point of the distinction to disappear.
The centrality of the active/passive together with the alternate history of mostly disturbing movements gives rise to a conception of affects as quantitative flows and is evidenced in the repeated mentions of intensity and valence. For example, in Depraz’s brief history of the concept of valence that began with Kurt Lewin in 1935. He proposed valence as a double-opposed movement of attraction and repulsion in reference to his force-field analysis of social situations. It defines the intrinsic attractiveness of an event, object or situation and, by extension, also the attractiveness of the emotion itself. This concept then became ‘an operative concept to define the very structural dynamics of emotions in psychology’ (41). Perhaps we could say more generally it is a metaphysics of coupled opposites that defines the structural dynamics of emotion implicit to psychology?
Given the privileging of their disturbing character, passions, affects or emotions are then treated as (or have to be differentiated from) external impositions disrupting purely self-present subjects that produces philosophies of defence that privilege sameness over difference. This approach would then consider surprise as negative or, at least, somewhat out of our control.
Furthermore, if surprise is based very much on this difference between world and self, the question of what is surprising – prominent mostly in the linguistics section – is problematised as it will vary from individual to individual. Philosophies might then seek to ‘master’ affects: because one could not know in advance whether a surprise would be negative or positive, it is better to resist them all together. This question of individuality presents a challenge to those papers that try to elicit surprise in experimental settings. Can surprise be identified in the absence of the experiencer and their expectations that are often implicit? This is perhaps why Steinbock differentiates surprise from startle – one could agree we could all be startled by a loud interruption but whether one is surprised by some of the examples might depend on one’s experience in the world, particularly in the case of police interactions (9). Perhaps this question underlies the difficulty inherent to the project of deciding whether surprise is an emotion.
Bloechl is perhaps most explicit in addressing this question. He writes that, if surprise depends on some difference between a subject’s expectation and actuality, ‘the intelligibility of the experience depends in some important measure on the condition of the subject and its relation to the world in which it lives’. He thus argues we can differentiate among surprises by attending to the context in which they occur (historical, cultural, personal-psychological, etc.). But, he adds, ‘without surrendering the possibility of grasping their inner unity in some irreducible essence (eidos)’ (119). What is it that remains the same across all differences in surprise, different expectations, different subjectivities? The experience of difference?
An important point to mention on this question of individuality and whether emotions like surprise can be said to be universal is the focus Ekman’s paradigm of ‘basic emotions’ based on facial expressions receives in Depraz, Brizard, Goutéraux, Celle et al. Although Ekman receives criticism in Sheets-Johnstone for ‘“the absence of the body below the neck”’ (84), his paradigm as a whole continues to pervade the psychological discourse of emotions despite major methodological criticisms coming from within and without psychology. Ekman’s paradigm has been coherently critiqued, particularly over its claims to cross-cultural comparison, most notably by Ruth Leys in her The Ascent of Affect.
So is there an alternative to this approach to affects and to surprise? Could we uncover such an alternative, manifest them in the same way surprise acts to manifest a difference between implicit expectations and actuality? Can a focus on surprise yield the very surprises needed to reveal implicit foundations? Perhaps surprise best offers such a path with its ambiguous valence problematizes any neat ascription to either positive or negative. Furthermore, whilst we may know surprise in itself, the details of its surprise is unique to each occurrence. And, in the surprise, we can learn the difference between our habitual, implicit being as it becomes manifested in the difference to the actual. Thus, affects here become a potential for individual growth and becoming rather than something to be defended against whilst retaining some universality for comparison and intersubjective understanding.
One such alternative is being drawn out by the work of Depraz for instance in her rejection of opposites for circularity (39). She argues, refreshingly, that ‘integrated emotions [like love, submission, etc.] show that we have to deal here with a three-dimensional dynamic model and not with a linear list of emotions opposed one to the other’ (29). She notes how phenomenology is uniquely positioned to enable such a synthetic integration of of cognitive, physiological, evolutionary and other aspects and her proposal is for a cardiophenomenology that places the emphasis not on the brain but on the heart partly because the heart-system is an integrative system and better recognizes the ‘unique dynamic circular living rythmic of such a system’ (48). The heart self-organizes ‘as soon as the embryo develops spontaneous contractions independently of the brain’ and integrates the nervous and brain system as well as performing a control function (48-49). The heart is both physio-organic and uniquely lived. You can’t feel your neurons but you can feel your heart and thus is ‘self-feelable’, an auto-affection. Thus the heart becomes, ‘the matrix of the person as both lived (affection) and organic (muscle), or again, the core of the weaving between the first- and the third-person experience of the subject’ (48).
Such an approach allows for physiological measures to get third-person perspectives on surprise as startle yet also allows for comparison with first-person perspectives on the feeling of those physiological measures. It also allows the experiential aspect not just a theoretical-textual approach so that individual differences in singular surprising events can be acknowledged. Surprise is thus the core-experience of a heart-centred, cardiophenomenology for Depraz.
This focus on the heart and its rhythmicity gives a more interactive circular dynamic than the perhaps active/passive transmissions of the brain from input to muscular output. Instead of causal, sequential flows of neuronal pathways, of flowing out of movements that must be expended, which always eventually leads to the active and passive (the brain as active sending out of passive sensations or movements), Depraz enables a focus on integration and circularity.
Desmidt also mentions cardiac psychology as ‘an integrative dynamic that includes the systems of the context, the body (and the heart and brain within the body), and the lived experience that dynamically interact according to the three phases to produce an emotional experience’ (64). He quotes Craig’s model of emotion in which an emotional experience ‘is produced by the sequential integration in the insular cortex of five types of information according to a spatial gradient’ (66).
Yet is this a move that repeats the debate between Galen and Aristotle – Aristotle seeing the heart as the centre, Galen the brain? For the nervous system is also seen as integrative. Perhaps the ultimate issue here is not whether it is the brain or the heart that is central but the challenge to the dominance of the active/passive ‘sending out’ for one that is more about circular dynamics.
Livet also acknowledges there should be a focus on ‘the entanglements between the different aspects of motivation experience […] without taking for granted restrictive definitions that overestimate their oppositions and underestimate their intimate relations. He urges a study of the ‘entanglements between different aspects of motivational experience without taking for granted restrictive definitions that overestimate their oppositions and underestimate their intimate relations’ (114). As to the active/passive, Livet recognizes that emotions are usually considered passive whilst volitions active but proposes they be considered as two kinds ‘that belong to a more inclusive category, namely the category of motivational dynamics’ (105).
It is then a question, not of oppositions but of entanglements, bindings, integrations that cannot be reduced to couplings of opposites or mechanical linear flows of active and passive but instead opens to the question of what bindings might enable and sustain our flourishing. Bloechl can perhaps be read as providing how an affect such as surprise could lead to our becoming and not be something to be defended against, mastered or known in advance through the example of Paul. Notably, Bloechl attends both to Paul’s state such that he experienced the surprise of a conversion (which depended on Paul’s ‘disposition’) as well as how he then integrated the experience. He looks for evidence for the former by attending to Paul’s Judaism prior to the experience and the latter through the Christianity in Paul’s letters.
What Bloechl concludes is that in Paul’s experience, and perhaps the experience of surprise more generally, there is a passage from inward and personal experience to an outward and universal discourse. He adds, ‘unless there is an affinity […] between that which surprises and that which is interpreted as the surprise, the event itself is literally unintelligible’ (127-128). This ‘affinity’ could also be called a context and it is surprise which can alter the entirety of a context, it comes, he adds, with ‘its own horizon of meaning’. Yet ‘unless at least some of this new meaning can be fused with the meaning of what it may challenge and transform, it remains strictly alien. The nature and limits of that fusion are open to interpretation and call for concepts that do not obscure the experience in question’ (128). Surprise and affects not so individual as to be incomparable across individuals or cultures but not so universal as to preclude the first-person perspective. Somewhere between reductive binaries and trivializing infinities.
Such an individual/universal approach is demonstrated in the volume applied to depression which is conceptualized in terms of an inability to anticipate pleasure in a situation even when they do then feel pleasure in its actualisation. Yet, it is a pity this account did not take into account the individual histories of expectation/actuality that is so paramount to surprise – if someone is depressed and cannot anticipate pleasure in a situation perhaps it is because of so many failed expectations? Although the authors suggest ‘hyporeactivity in depression may be characterized by an imparied cardiac physiology, especially during the anticipation phase’ (67). Here the question of individual history and ahistorical biology rears its head and the benefit should surely be in their mutual cooperation.
Perhaps if there is one key theme emerging from all these discussions it is the question of difference; difference between emotion and cognition, a difference encountered in an organism’s interaction with itself and its world that leads to differentiations, splits, retreats or avoidance and it extending or protending itself into its past/future. This focus on difference also helps against one discipline dominating: where is the organism’s self-difference? In the neurons? The gap between neurons? Any criticism of a cognitive privilege could then be countered by the fact that these expectations are often implicit and, moreover, manifested in the difference experienced and thus prior to any split between mind and body, this split coming after the fact as an attempt to integrate the experience. Indeed, it could be through a historical series of surprises that we find ourselves in this problem of mind/body dualism split. Is the feeling of oneself then arising from a unity with oneself or difference to oneself?
There are several mentions of the entangled nature of emotions and surprise. Can these be best understood within a metaphysics of opposites such as of active/passive, of cause/effect any longer? Or is the domain emotions try to capture one more of contingency, of expectations meeting actuality where these are not opposites but in their unfolding produce each other. Just like Picasso’s quote ‘je ne cherche pas, je trouve’ cited in this volume: it is only in finding, in the difference between expectation and actuality, that one knows one was searching.
It is in the unfolding of the entanglement this collection of essays resides in rather than the entanglement itself where surprise and emotion surely lie. Otherwise, we cannot truly find the alternative to the dominance of cognitive and computational so many authors descry. It seems if universality is not acceptable, and definitions vary, the experience of defining affects is the very experience of individuating, growing and self-differentiation, this self-differentiation that is the universal. Is this not a more adequate account of the affect surprise? Such would be the performative and not merely textual effect of reading this volume. Today, perhaps it is not wonder but surprise that is the beginning of philosophy.
Reviewed by: Emanuela Carta (University of Cologne)
Susi Ferrarello and Nicolle Zapien’s book Ethical Experience: A Phenomenology is an ambitious and thought-provoking attempt to show how philosophy (and, especially, phenomenology) and psychology can collaborate concretely towards the achievement of shared aims.
The book, as a whole, has two core aims. On the one hand, it aims to offer a phenomenological analysis of the experience of decision-making, as it occurs in everyday life and as individuals recognize it in their personal narratives. The authors conceive this approach to moral psychology and the phenomenon of decision-making in open contrast to the approaches of cognitive science and contemporary analytic philosophy (2). On the other hand, the book aims to argue that the understanding of the multiple ways in which individuals approach time and intimacy contributes to shaping our ethical choices and can even improve our well-being (10).
The book is conveniently divided into two parts: Part One is written by Ferrarello and is philosophical in nature; Part Two is written by Zapien, instead, and is (mostly) psychological.
Part One clarifies fundamental methodological and theoretical points, which are mainly taken from Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. In particular, in Part One, Ferrarello illustrates the distinction between different layers of reality, of time, and of identity and thematizes individual approaches to time and intimacy. Crucially, these distinctions and themes will be employed in the philosophical interpretation of the empirical findings of Part Two.
Part Two presents qualitative studies concerning three kinds of ethical decisions (unexpected leadership decisions, parental decisions, and those of individuals who face the choice of engaging in extramarital affairs), as well as offering philosophical interpretations of their findings. The general approach of Part Two involves the application of Amedeo Giorgi’s phenomenological research method for psychology.
Chapter I.1 of Part One opens with an intriguing explanation of the method employed throughout the book – that is, the phenomenological method. More precisely, the phenomenological method is understood as a method that aims towards the reactivation of sedimented meanings or the production of new meanings. It consists of two parts, which should not be considered as chronologically separated moments, but, rather, as complementary halves of one process operating simultaneously: one is the pars destruens and the other is the pars construens. They correspond to Husserl’s static and genetic methods, respectively. The goal of the pars destruens, which is the expression of the static method, consists in grasping the essential traits of the phenomenon whose meaning the phenomenologist aims to question and reactivate. This operation can be accomplished only if the phenomenologist is able to free himself or herself from prejudices and hasty associative habits he or she might have, and to “challenge any previous authority and the meanings that have been accepted in previous investigation” or “by the intersubjective community” (21). The goal of the pars construens, which is the expression of the genetic method, is to relate the new meaning produced (or awakened) with the passive layers of sense. With this goal in mind, the phenomenologist establishes whether the newer meaning can appropriately substitute the older.
Importantly, Ferrarello stresses that the attempt to attribute new meaning to phenomena is not just embedded in a general epistemological goal, but also in a specifically ethical one. According to Ferrarello, there is, indeed, a strong connection between ethics and the project of the amelioration of meanings.
After the clarification of the general methodology employed in the book, Ferrarello moves on to distinguish between three different layers of reality, of time, and identity in Chapter I.2 and Chapter I.3. Such descriptions constitute the theoretical core of the book.
Ferrarello explains that our life features three layers to which correspond three forms of temporality and three forms of identity (or ego). One of these is the layer of the passive, ego-less life, which Ferrarello also describes as the natural or psychological life. This level is characterized by a linear sense of time. Another layer consists of the practical and ethical life of the “just-awoken ego”. This ego, embodied in a “volitional body”, lives and acts in the time of the here-and-now. Lastly, a third level is identified with the layer of the philosophical life; the life lived from an absolute standpoint and from an absolute, timeless time.
The layer of the practical ego or volitional body is particularly important, since without this level it would be “neither ethical awareness nor an actual effort to become responsibly self-reflectively aware of our deeds” (37). However, Ferrarello also claims that these layers are all present in the life of an individual and that, typically, individuals continuously shift from one level to another. Ferrarello’s idea is that the balance that we find between these three layers of reality, time and identity, “is what shapes our sense of goodness, normal behavior and knowledge” (47).
In Chapter I.4, she expands on this idea by reference to the examples of the schizophrenic and the mystic who display, each in their own way, a unique between the three layers of life, time, and identity. For example, people with schizophrenia are not able to float from one layer of reality to another, but they are rather mostly stuck in the layer of absolute, timeless time. Because of this, they lack intimacy with their passive selves and, this, in turn, prevents them from finding a fulfilling meaning for their lives. Ferrarello insists that the schizophrenics’ relation with reality and time should not be stigmatized, because this would intensify the schizophrenics’ struggle to become intimate with their passive selves. On the contrary, it is pivotal to acknowledge that there are a variety of perspectives and ways to relate to reality and time (as that of the person with schizophrenia) so one can develop empathy towards others and be able to build a sense of intimacy with others.
The first part of the book closes with stimulating and original analyses delving into the central issue outlined in Chapter I.2 – that is, the volitional body. More specifically, Chapter I.5 clarifies the notion of practical intentionality introduced in Chapter I.2. Practical intentionality refers to the intentionality displayed in the moment in which the ego awakes and enters into a responsible contact with its passive habits and instincts. Ferrarello clarifies practical intentionality in relation to love and intimacy.
Following Husserl’s phenomenology, Ferrarello claims that that love is the force guaranteeing the true awakening of the ego and putting our passive selves in contact with our active life. Love opens a space of intimacy through which the subject can regain touch with his or her passive self and his or her factual existence, while, at the same time, shaping his or her identity and values. Intimate love allows us to break old habits and, as a result, it finds new sensuous lower matter (90). As such, love is a meaning- and value-giving activity. Unfortunately, the possibility that things take the wrong turn in this regard is an ineliminable live possibility, as in the case of intimacy forced through violence. This issue is explored in Chapter I.6, together with the notion of existential sexuality.
Part Two, the second part of the book, revolves around the analyses of the qualitative psychological studies carried out by Nicolle Zapien. Her research focuses on three kinds of ethical experiences of decision-making: unexpected leadership decisions, parental decisions, and those of individuals who face the choice of engaging in extramarital affairs despite the promise of monogamy. Importantly, the first kind of experience concerns the sphere of external relationships, whereas the second and third kinds concern the private sphere of our life – that is, the first kind concerns a comparatively less intimate dimension of personal relationships with respect to the dimension of the second and third kinds.
In the introduction, Zapien illustrates Giorgi’s phenomenological research method for psychology and the reasons why she decided to carry out her research by employing this method rather than the phenomenological psychological methods of van Manen, Moustakas, and Colaizzi. Moreover, and notably, Zapien carefully reviews all the choices made in the process of collecting and interpreting the data.
Zapien selects and publishes in the book large excerpts of the interviews that she performed, for each kind of the experiences of decision-making that she discusses. As Zapien explains, the participants of the three groups involved in the case studies were interviewed (orally or in writing), and they were left free to choose and explain the experience of decision that they preferred, as it came to their minds.
After the presentation of these personal narratives, Zapien then arranges in the following order: first, her interpretation of the findings; second, the explication of the constituents of the experience(s) at stake; third and lastly, a short philosophical commentary of the relevant experience. Each of Zapien’s philosophical commentaries puts to use the theoretical points that Ferrarello presents and clarifies in Part One of the book.
For example, the unexpected decisions that the leader must face for his or her own good and for his or her employees’ good are interpreted as a transformative experience that helps him or her to come into deeper contact with his or her identity as a leader.
The second case study, which concerns parents’ decisions for their children, makes explicitly evident the relevance of the dimension of time that Ferrarello stresses in Part One of the book. The realization that there is some problem that can dangerously affect their children’s future leads parents to rekindle the meaning of parenting and their identity as parents. This is, once again, a transformative experience that breaks the natural organic relation that parents have with their children and the daily linear time that characterizes such an experience. When facing such problems, parents feel the need – and the pressure – to make choices on behalf of the volitional body of their children, so to protect them and their natural life. If they otherwise refrain from making such choices, they feel that they are bound to lose their identity of good parents (159).
Similar considerations seem to hold with respect to the third kind of experience examined by Zapien – that is, the decisions of individuals partaking in marital relations who decide to engage in extramarital affairs. As for the previously examined cases, Zapien identifies the essential structural elements connecting the narratives of individuals with similar experiences. Specifically, she notes that individuals starting an affair fail to have active access to their passive intentions. Indeed, the volitional body of the person who starts the affair decides to negate active access to his or her passive self, so as to maintain a view on reality that is ethically acceptable to the self (180). The affair is only later acknowledged as such, when it could not be lived passively anymore.
Moving on to the critical assessment of the book, one of its most remarkable elements consists of Ferrarello and Zapien’s intent to engage with the book’s core themes in an original manner and without being afraid to voice their own opinion on these matters. This is clear, among other reasons, from Ferrarello and Zapien’s attempt to rejuvenate Husserl’s analyses, to recover their current relevance, instead of presenting these as valuable for specialized scholarship only. The authors show to have internalized phenomenology’s core points well enough to succeed in this difficult task.
Further, the book is well organized, and the authors take notable care of its pedagogical aspects. For example, the reference apparatus placed at the end of the book is extremely detailed, and it contributes to give solid ground to the claims advanced in the main parts of the book. Moreover, each chapter ends with a summary, and both the introduction and the conclusion summarize both the entire book’s structure and the main theses defended.
Yet, the care that the authors devote to the structure of the book for the purpose of conveying their views in an intelligible way is sometimes counterbalanced by the book’s confusing formulations, which run the risk of hindering the general understanding of the authors’ theses. This risk is also embodied in the authors’ choice to resort to metaphors at crucial points in their analyses, and doing so without further clarification using comprehensible terminology. For example, at the conclusion of Chapter I.4, Ferrarello uses the metaphors of the “static eye” and of the “genetic eye” in relation to the schizophrenic’s experience.
On a related note, one may be puzzled by some of Ferrarello and Zapien’s terminological choices, as, for example, the use of the adjective ‘trinitarian’ in relation to Husserl’s philosophy in a number of parts of the book. This and other theoretical choices should have been better justified.
As far as the content of the book goes, my main concern lies with the authors’ attempt to describe a large variety of experiences related to decision-making, by resorting to only one theoretical device – that is, the multi-layered dimensions of time and intimacy. Surely, the authors demonstrate that their approach has a certain explanatory power, given that the three kinds of ethical decisions investigated by their book permit, indeed, interpretations grounded in the relations occurring between time and identity. One might, however, be left with the impression that more examples of analogous and dissimilar ethical experiences and more phenomenological descriptions relying on a broader variety of theoretical devices would have been necessary to clarify the meaning of the phenomenon in question fully. Ferrarello and Zapien themselves seem to acknowledge the need for further investigations in this regard and, in fact, they explicitly consider some of their analyses presented in Part Two of the book as open-ended and merely provisional in nature.
Overall, Ferrarello and Zapien’s book is a very-welcomed and much-needed attempt to show how phenomenology and psychology can collaborate concretely with each other towards the achievement of a shared aim and how theoretical and applied analyses can be meaningfully combined. The book constitutes Ferrarello and Zapien’s challenge for their contemporary peers – that is, the challenge to develop a comprehensive phenomenological understanding of ethical experiences, such as that of decision-making. Furthermore, it provides a first attempt to rise to this interesting challenge.