Phenomenology 2010, Volume 5 : Selected Essays from North America, Part 2 : Phenomenology beyond Philosophy 9789731997766, 9789731997759

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PHENOMENOLOGY 2010 Volume 5

Selected Essays from North America Part 2

Phenomenology beyond Philosophy

Series post scriptum — OPO Editors: Lester EMBREE (USA), Ion COPOERU (Romania) Editorial Board: CHEUNG Chan-Fai (Hong Kong); Ivan CHVATIK (Czech Republic); LEE Nam-In (Republic of Korea); Zeljko LOPARIC (Brazil); Victor MOLCHANOV (Russia); Thomas NENON (USA); Rosemary R. P. LERNER (Peru); Hans Rainer SEPP (Germany); TANI Toru (Japan); Roberto WALTON (Argentina); YU Chung-chi (Taiwan)

PHENOMENOLOGY 2010

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SELECTED ESSAYS FROM NORTH AMERICA Part 2 Phenomenology beyond Philosophy Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON

Zeta Books, Bucharest Arghos-Diffusion, Paris 2010

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Zeta Books, Bucharest

www.zetabooks.com

© 2010 Zeta Books for the present edition. © 2010 The copyrights to the essays in this volume belong to the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronical or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. ISBN GENERAL: 978-973-1997-81-0 (paperback, 5 volumes) 978-973-1997-82-7 (ebook, 5 volumes) ISBN volume 5 part 2: ISBN: 978-973-1997-75-9 (paperback) ISBN:978-973-1997-76-6 (ebook)

Table of Contents

Introduction to Volume 5 (continued): Phenomenology beyond Philosophy Lester Embree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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20. Bioregionalism: Identification and Orientation as a Problem of Scale Gary Backhaus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 21. Athens: Plato, the Phadrus, and the Possibility of “Dialogue” with Nature W. S. K. Cameron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 22. Digital Image and Cinema

Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canán and May Zindel . . . . 67

23. “Second Person” Perspectivity in Observing and Understanding Emotional Expression Scott D. Churchill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 24. Constructing a Curriculum of Place: Embedding Meaningful Movement in Mundane Activities for Children and Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) Maureen Connolly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 25. How to Make a Photograph within the In/Visible World of Autism Thomas D. Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 26. Psychology and the Eclipse of Forgiveness Steen Halling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 27. Walt Whitman, Nursing, and Phenomenology

Mark A. Hector and Judith E. Hector . . . . . . . 163

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Table of contents

28. Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics Hwa Yol Jung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 29. Exposure, Absorption, Subjection—Being-in-Media Chris Nagel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 197 30. Local Workers, Global Workplace, and the Experience of Place Lori K. Schneider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 31. Gaston Bachelard’s Topoanalysis in the 21st Century: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield David Seamon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 32. The Fragile Phenomenology of Juhani Pallismaa M. Reza Shirazi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 33. Keynesin Phenomenology and the Meltdown Dennis E. Skocz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 34. Portkeys, Ressurrective Ideology, and the Phenomenology of Collective Trauma Robert D. Stolorow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 273 35. Merleau-Ponty and James Agee: Guides to the Novice Phenomenologist Sandra P. Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 36. The Concept of Pathology and Psychiatry’s Need for a Philosophy of Life

Osborne P. Wiggins and Michael Alan Schwartz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 311

37. Living with Multiple Psychologies Akihiro Yoshida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 38. Clinical Listening, Narrative Writing Richard M. Zaner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379

Introduction to Volume 5 (Continued) Phenomenology beyond Philosophy by

Lester Embree

Florida Atlantic University Organization of Phenomenological Organizations [email protected] When the essays selected for this volume by local North American phenomenological organizations stopped coming in there were 38 of them and the need to separate this volume into two parts was clear. Reviewing the essays, the volume editors found that half were fairly traditional interpretations and critiques of thought from giants of the past of our phenomenological philosophical tradition with some attempts at original phenomenologizing and that an equal number of these essays were focused on phenomena arising beyond the usual framework of philosophical phenomenology. I. The Genre This difference is not new. It was already distinctly recognized in the introduction of the North America volume of Phenomenology 2005 and the history of this sort of research in our tradition going back to phenomenological psychiatry done before World War I was reported in the Editors’s Introduction to the Northern Europe volume of Phenomenology 2005 under the title “Phenomenology in Europe: The Promise of Interdisciplinarity or Philosophy and Beyond.” The only difference this time PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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is quantitative: now half of the 38 essays from North America pertain to what can be called “Phenomenology beyond Philosophy.” This development may mark a new and fruitful stage of our tradition, at least in North America, and something can be said about the genre before some comments are offered on how the 19 essays in this part belong to it. In terms of the difference just adumbrated, some essays are less different than others. It is not a difference between essays written by philosophers and essays written by colleagues trained in other disciplines because five of the essays here in Part II are by philosophers. (It has been becoming increasingly clear of late that phenomenology is not exclusively a philosophical school of thought but instead a multidiscipline also including phenomenological communicology, phenomenological sociology, phenomenological psychology, and many other disciplinary forms of phenomenology. In other words, philosophical phenomenology is only one discipline among others even though it is arguably the most advanced and influential in this time of ever greater interdisciplinary communication. Where the sorting of the essays in this volume into the two parts is concerned, some may think that gender, for example, is not a traditional philosophical problem—after all, the title “Feminist Phenomenology” was not coined until 2000—and thus that essays focused on gender belong in this rather than in the first part of this volume. But this is to forget not just the work by Simone de Beauvoir in the 1940s but also that of Edith Stein on gender in the 1920s. The case is similar with phenomenology of the body and technology, which begin in the work of Max Scheler before the first World War. In contrast, however, “eco-phenomenology,” which first had a volume devoted to it in 2003, does not have such deep roots and does belong in this second part. Phenomenology beyond philosophy approaches relatively new problems in our multidisciplinary tradition. In it there is

Introduction to Volume V (Continued)

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much less scholarship on texts and much more investigation of things themselves. The methods of phenomenology relied on can appear different when not related to the usual philosophical problems. Many concepts are imported, so to speak, from philosophical phenomenology and adapted in new contexts and this would seem the most conspicuous feature of phenomenology beyond philosophy, i.e., originally philosophical concepts used in contexts beyond the traditional scope of philosophy in our tradition. As intimated, more investigation in rather than scholarship on phenomenology is done in this expanding area and hence the beneficial influence back upon philosophers who resolve “to walk the walk” rather than merely “to talk the talk” of interdisciplinarity should increasingly occur as time goes by. But of course benefits of this sort are also not new in our tradition, Gurwitsch and Merleau-Ponty, for example, having learned much from Gestalt Psychology and the psychiatric thought of Kurt Goldstein in the 1930s and the tendency of Hermeneutical Phenomenology having learned much from Greek philology beginning before then. Non-philosophical phenomenology can help advance philosophical phenomenology. II. The Essays Here It did not prove possible to arrange the essays in this part in just a few groups as was possible in Part I, so they are arranged alphabetically by author. Nevertheless, some essays can be commented upon together in pairs and triplets, which leave three that need commentary alone and they can be commented on briefly first. Alfred Schutz reflected on marginal-utility or “Austrian” economics since the 1930s and there has been a continuation of that economic tendency in the USA that sometimes characterizes its work as hermeneutical and even phenomenological. How

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these “Austrians” will find Dennis Skocz’s contention that John Maynard Keynes was, unknowingly, a phenomenologist will be interesting to see. Husserl’s “problematic possibilities” and Schutz’s “biographically determined situation” seem in effect recognized by Keynes, who was also appreciative of the subjective meaning of affectivity. Richard Zaner has pioneered a novel phenomenological philosophy of medicine in which patients are carefully listened to and then penetrating narratives composed. Pertinent concepts are regularly imported by him from Aron Gurwitsch, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz. Despite work going back to the first half of the last century, especially including Jan Patočka and Hannah Arendt, “political phenomenology” has yet to be established as a named specialty within phenomenology either within or beyond philosophy. The essay here by political scientist Hwa Yol Jung recognizes sources in Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Emmanuel Levinas for the “responsible politics” of Patočka’s fellow traveler and widely influential political leader in Eastern Europe Václav Havel. The essays of Gary Backhaus and Scot Cameron can be said to contribute to eco-phenomenology. Backhaus draws on Martin Heidegger’s “poetic dwelling” in an effort to disclose networks of places within bioregions. Cameron refers at first to Plato but ultimately to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of linguistic constitution in order to understand how nature can dialogue with humans. The Society for Phenomenology and Media is represented by Chris Nagel as well as Alberto Carrillo Canán and May Zindel from Mexico (essays belong to the North America volume if the local organization, which may be international, is headquartered there). The latter focus on the spectacularity of the new digital cinema and the former develops a phenomenological interpretation of media based on Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The emotional component in life has been recognized but not extensively within the phenomenological tradition. Scott

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Churchill draws on over a dozen phenomenological philosophers in clarifying how emotional expressions can be understood. Steen Halling draws on three such figures in reflecting on how anger and resentment are let go of in forgiveness. And Robert Stolorow draws on Martin Heidegger to clarify collective emotional trauma. Phenomenologists concerned with how Others are encountered need to consider people with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Maureen Connolly draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty in sensitively investigating how movement is meaningful for such Others. Thomas Craig draws on Paul Ricoeur as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore what photography can subtly disclose about autistic people. Essays by Mark A. and Judith E. Hector and by Sandra P. Thomas are concerned with nursing, draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and refer to works of literature, the former to a poem by Walt Whitman, who served as a nurse in the Civil War, and the latter to James Agee, whose Let us Now Praise Famous Men shows much about understanding Others in dialogue. Three essays pertain to the relationship between places and those who live and work in them. Reza Shirazi examines Juhani Pallasmaa’s Husserl-derived and fragile, multi-sensory architecture, David Seamon considers Gaston Bachelard a phenomenologist and uses his thought to clarify the “lived reciprocity” between houses and inhabitants, and Lori Schneider draws on Martin Heidegger concerning the local places of “remote workers” in this era of globalization. Finally, Osborne Wiggins and Michael Schwarz draw on Aron Gurwitsch, Edmund Husserl, and Alfred Schutz in clarifying the organism-environment relationship in George Conguilhem and Hans Jonas, which is relevant for phenomenological psychiatry, and Akihiro Yoshida draws on the early William James and Alfred Schutz in describing the various psychologies he has subscribed to on his way to phenomenological psychology.

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In sum, while phenomenologists interestingly investigate things in areas beyond the traditional scope of philosophy and do so often in the perspectives of other disciplines, it is easy to believe that philosophical phenomenologists can find much to ponder in the results. III. New Phenomenological Organizations in North America Since Phenomenology 2005, 12 new phenomenological organizations have been recognized. This is in addition to the 32 recognized then. Not all are dues-paying formal members of the Organization of Phenomenological Organizations, but are listed in the hope that those that they become such members: 1. The Alfred Schutz Research Center at St. Louis University Michael Barber: [email protected] 2. Applied Phenomenology Colloquy of the University of Tennessee Sandra Thomas [email protected] 3. Front Range Phenomenological Society Robert Jordan: [email protected] 4. Hannah Arendt Circle Dianna Taylor: [email protected] 5. The Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists: www.icnap.org Lester Embree: [email protected] 6. International Association for Environmental Philosophy (IAEP): http://www.environmentalphilosophy.org/ Kenn Maly: [email protected] 7. International Human Science Research Conference Steen Halling - [email protected]

Introduction to Volume V (Continued) 8. Sartre Circle Constance Mui: [email protected] Adrian Mirvish: [email protected] Ronald Santoni: [email protected] 9. Seminar on Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: www.sem-phen.org Pol Vandevelde: [email protected] Kevin Hermberg: [email protected] 10. Society for Interdisciplinary Feminist Phenomenology Bonnie Mann: [email protected] Beata Stawarska: [email protected] 11. Society for Phenomenology and Hermeneutic Study Gloria L. Cordova: [email protected] 12. Southwest Seminar in Continental Philosophy Robert Stolorow: [email protected]

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20 Bioregionalism: Identification and Orientation as a Problem of Scale by Gary Backhaus

Philosophy, Independent Scholar Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences [email protected] ABSTRACT: The thesis of this article maintains that iden­ tification and orientation are necessary existential modalities for the concretization of Heidegger’s notion of poetic dwelling. An equivocation of “place” and “region” foils bioregional polity due to differences in scale and human limits for place-presence. The solution advocated in this article is the creation of a form of life to be taken up by a bioregional advisory board. The goal of these bioregionalists would be to achieve identification and orientation in a variety of places within a region so that the networking required for bioregional polity would gain an experiential basis.

Introduction In this article I maintain that the existential modalities of identification and orientation are necessary, integral components for the successful implementation of any bioregional program. However, I argue that the experiential achievement of identification and orientation at the scalar level of region, necessary for establishing bioregional polity, entails problematic epistemological difficulties. The root of these difficulties needs first to be exposed—the fallacy of equivocating place and region— and then needs to be addressed—the problem of establishing PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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experiential presence at the scalar level of region. I explicate the notion of bioregionalism followed by an explanation of the importance of existential identification and orientation in the grounding of bioregional implementation. Identification and orientation establish the human being’s existential foothold concretizing the fundamental relation to place (Norberg-Schulz 1984). These are two modes of what Martin Heidegger calls dwelling—the basic world-gathering process that “takes place.” Dwelling is concretized through achieving identification and orientation. I end the article by providing a suggestion that overcomes the scalar difficulties: an advisory board of multi-rooted bioregional experts, who, on the basis of the establishment of a particular form of life, are capable of achieving bioregional identification and orientation, i.e., establishing an existential foothold on the scale of region, allowing for the successful implementation of bioregional polity. I. Articulating the Problem In LifePlace: Bioregional Thought and Practice, Robert L. Thayer, Jr. begins his Introduction by recognizing three fundamental existential questions: “Who am I?” “Where am I?” and “What am I supposed to do?” (2003, 1). Concretized in dwelling, the first two questions obviously entail identification and orientation respectively and the third question is interpreted by Thayer as entailing the praxis of living in harmony with the natural world—a moral and evaluative turn that has been labeled as bioregionalism. What Thayer calls the “homeless condition” signifies what others have called the condition of unrootedness, which also entails socio-geographical conditions for uprootings and displacements. The homeless condition occurs when the three fundamental existential questions are neither reflectively interpreted in a genuine understanding of human life nor lived dialectically (noesis and praxis). A most egregious problem is

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that the genius loci or the unique character of place has been ignored, disrespected, and destroyed in our megamachine (Mumford’s term) interpretive hegemony, which disturbs the fundamental structures and processes of dwelling—identification and orientation. And as egregious to this loss of place and the loss of the sense of place that the mega-machine entails is the construction of ersatz places, a postmodern masquerade of globalization. Two obstructive agencies complement one another—the destruction of place in the name of liberal economic development and then reconstruction of place-simulacra in the name of neoliberal economic development. Or, the one destroys our traditional forms of life by which we related to the natural world and the other substitutes for these relations an ersatz feeling of home. The alarming concern is that postmodern place-commodities have placated us—we have strayed so far from our embeddedness in organically contextualized places that the neo-liberal economically-driven construction of ersatz places seems good enough to replace the homelessness that we have felt. Bioregionalism promises an ecological therapeutic as a response to this bi-generated situation of homelessness. Bioregionalism reintegrates the three existential questions by promoting imperatives that support the need to re-inhabit the earth in a way that requires political, social, and economic paradigm shifts that attune with and enrich localized natural conditions. Borrowing the term, “life-place” from Peter Berg, Thayer equates the terms life-place and bioregion. I maintain, however, that the word, “place” in the term, “life-place,” if it is taken to be synonymous with the word “region,” does not carry the same meaning as does the word, “place,” when used alone. I maintain that Thayer unwittingly has committed the fallacy of equivocation that leads to far-reaching problematic consequences. Thayer states, “Most importantly, the bioregion is emerging as the most logical locus and scale for a sustainable, regenerative community to take root and to take place” (2003, 3). This logical and con-

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ceptual mistake of equivocal meanings allows for the covering over of crucial ontological and epistemological problems concerning scale that must be addressed if bioregionalism is meant to develop into a viable paradigm. There are qualitative differences that occur concerning human experience in its interrelations with different scales of earthly expanse. And it is my contention that just about where the dimensionality (or scalar level) of place is surpassed is where the dimensionality of region begins. The fact is that the modern nation-state developed bureaucratically in order to organize life at the macro scale similar to or greater than region. The geo-politics of the modern-state is different from the bioregional vision in that its borders were created on the basis of conquest with its opportunistic and abstractive economics and without the same natural considerations used by small groups that orient their forms of life to particular places. The political geography of the nation-state constructs an organization-dimension that does take the experiential level as its foundation. Its transcending unity is justified on the basis of providing greater protection from outsiders and security within for insuring internal peace and economic development. By its very nature (size and bureaucratic organization) the nation-state transcends the experiential home-place yet creates an abstract homeland that broadens the sense of identification and orientation on a non-experiential symbolic foundation. But this is all it can do on the basis of the limits of human experience and the form of organization that it must take to concretize its nature as a transcending bureaucratic unity. The fundamental obstacle for bioregional implementation, which is based on establishing local experiential encounter/interrelation with the natural environs, arises through the error of equivocation that promotes the uncritical and unchallenged assumption that the existential rootedness based in place-presence, which entails the achievements of identification and orientation, is possible at the scalar level of region. And this is because for the

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most part bioregionalists have allowed themselves to uncritically accept the alleged synonymous use of the terms—place and region—without taking into account the differences in our embodied experiences concerning these different scales. It cannot be assumed that these two fundamental modalities of dwelling, identification and orientation, can be concretized at the regional level. Without these vital existential modalities being operable at the regional scale, it fails in its political goals in that we inevitably fall back into the unrooted paradigm of non-experientialbased bureaucratic organization, unless some other measures can be taken. And, at the same time, it is an unreasonable alternative to expect that humankind can go back to earlier historical forms of organization of sparsely scattered small bands of humans— the single factor of world population disallows such. On the other hand, if identification and orientation is to be in some way possible at the regional level, which entails overcoming the obstacle of scale that stands in the way of achieving a bioregional existential foothold, then the achievement must take a guise other than through place-presence. Related to this problematic of glossing over scalar differences is bioregional argumentation that comes dangerously close to committing a naturalistic fallacy. And to keep on the right track we must avoid this argumentative pitfall. An example of the naturalistic implication is in the following remarks by Kirkpatrick Sale: The animals and plants of course aren’t conscious of being part of a niche of related organisms and don’t sit around figuring out ways to adjust their communal harmony now that summer’s here, or if the zucchini aren’t blossoming. But their interaction, their connectedness, their communal interdependence is none­ theless as real as if it were indelibly codified and enforced. It is after all how they live, no more, no less. Humans, too, live by community and always have, both that community joined to the surrounding species with which they interact for the necessities of life, and the purely human

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community with which they have evolved their unique social forms (1991, 63).

Sale then claims that humans had lived successfully in small groups for an extremely long time. This kind of reasoning implies that there exists a more natural way to live that humans have mistakenly abandoned. I maintain that this kind of reasoning, which indeed supports bioregional organization on a scale compatible with place-presence is wrongheaded. It allows for another argument that commits a naturalistic fallacy: namely that by creating communicative networks between small groups that we are living in a more natural fashion, i.e., emulating the manner that other species of life interact ecologically in forming communal interdependence. Thus the bioregional polity formed through communicational networking is thus interpreted to be in harmony with natural ecology because its political structure is the natural form of life. But the truth is that no living species has any such scale (the whole natural ecology) as its natural umwelt. And no other living entity, besides the human, is capable of organizing on the basis of a transcending cognition of the ecological whole. Thus, in the end, the thesis that we are living more naturally on the basis of creating a political organization that emulates regional networking is a suspect interpretation; it commits a naturalistic fallacy. This fallacy relates to our problematic in that the communicative networking is promoted as establishing the basis for bioregional polity, but without an experiential basis of region; I argue that such a network is insufficient. Interestingly at the bioregional scale biologists are at an epistemological and ontological deadlock as to whether there is community (interrelational networks) or continuum (conservation of assemblages) (Thayer 2003, 34-36). Thayer speculates, “‘Bioregion’ may depend more on human perception, use, and conservation of particular assemblages of vegetation” (35). And it is human perception that perceives the groupings, the boundaries. There is a clue in what I see here as the unmasking of a

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veiled anthropocentrism in Sale’s naturalistic arguments. But if the “bioregional shift” is not one based within a more natural way of life, in what is it based? This leads to my second point concerning the naturalistic fallacy, which is that bioregional arguments miss the existential structure that truly reroots us to place—the human achievement of embodied presence and the existential decision to construct and to cultivate a lived attunement to the natural environmental context based within the existential structures and processes of life. And this is nothing other than a creative possibility and a moral/axiological decision of humankind. We need not justify it on the basis of naturalizing region and naturalizing traditional human forms of organization. The existential key concept here is embodied presence, which is limited to human embodied experientiality. And this is why we cannot take for granted the scale of the regional, which transcends human experiential presence, for the project of reinhabitation (rerooting forms of enactive geography). II. Region, Bioregion, Bioregional, Bioregionalism Bioregionalists have favored the radical proposal of restructuring our political boundaries on the basis of the spatiality of the natural—the biosphere. What is meant to be accomplished through the implementation of a doctrine of biospheric/political spatial correlation? It is germane to consider that the entry for “region” in the OED exhibits etymological sources that encompass both natural and political significances. “A large tract of land; a country; a more or less defined portion of the earth’s surface … as distinguished by certain natural features, climatic conditions, a special fauna or flora…. The rule or government of a kingdom…. An administrative division” (1971, 2471). The “bio” portion of “bioregion” appears to be redundant, if indeed the significance of “region” already entails the natural/biospheric. But it is necessary to use the term, “bioregion,” for historical

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reasons. The term, “bioregion,” is apropos because it symbolizes putting life first such that political, economic, social forms, as well as all human forms of organization must be subservient to the whole context of life. Gary Snyder informs us: The little nations of the past lived within territories that conformed to some set of natural criteria…. The older human experience of a fluid, indistinct, but genuine home region was gradually replaced—across Eurasia—by the arbitrary and often violently imposed boundaries of emerging national states. These imposed borders sometimes cut across biotic areas and ethnic zones alike. Inhabitants lost ecological knowledge and community solidarity. In the old ways, the flora and fauna and landforms are part of culture (Snyder, 449).

Because of our modern uprootedness from the natural context of life, the word, “bioregion,” emphasizes the rerooting of the political to once again allow human organization to conform more closely to natural criteria. This is an important significance in that the term region in our socio-historical development has grown alienated from the natural/biospheric and has overly emphasized the political significance of region as an organization of dominance over the natural. Bioregionalism entails reestablishing existential identification and orientation in attunement with the natural order and to accomplish this, a political strategy is advocated. In the glossary to her book, Reading the Environment, Melissa Walker defines bioregion: One of the many natural divisions of the planet, defined by flora, fauna, water, climate, soil, and land formations, as well as by human additions such as farms, buildings, and even golf courses. Boundaries of bioregions are determined by natural phenomena rather than political dominance (1994, 573).

Walker continues by defining bioregionalism as “a movement to decentralize large societies and to develop ecologically defined regions in which people cooperate and live in ways consistent

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with the resources of their region” (1994, 573). Decentralization allows for the development of identification and orientation to the natural world without a transcending political organization that disrupts those modalities by averting decision making away from an experiential basis. Decentralization, which is a key to removing a political obstacle to bioregionalism, involves establishing a politico-geographical modality that allows for identification and orientation to occur on the basis of a correlation of the natural and the political. Nevertheless, due to the scale of region, does not then the problem of a transcending political governing body still remain, even if sensitive to the goal of being attuned to the earth? If region is a indeed to be a political unity, even if decentralized, how is identification and orientation possible and how do we resist a non-experiential basis to achieve unity at such a macro scale? III. Possiblism In consideration of the word, “bioregion,” we can consider a family of related significances—regionalized life, life as pertaining to region, life as a type of region, life as region, that is, a spatializing/spatialized ecological nexus. Yet the idea of living in harmony with the natural world can involve questionable assumptions concerning the society-milieu relation. In the tradition of human science an important polemic arose between the thought of Friedrich Ratzel and the thought of Emile Durkheim concerning this fundamental relation of society and milieu. For heuristic simplicity, the view of Ratzel is one of geographical rootedness and the view of Durkheim is that society is an autonomous system with the physical world as merely a stage. Historian Troy R. E. Paddock states, “For Ratzel, how a people and state developed have been determined by their relationship to the land” (2005, 85). But as Paddock warns, we should not view this as a straightforward determinism, for Ratzel emphasizes that

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it is the genius of the German people in relationship to the richness of their geography, the link of land and character, that exhibits the superiority of German civilization (2005, 84). The crucial point in Ratzel’s position is that the nation-state perfects the society-milieu relationship, which is a position incompatible with bioregionalist polity, yet in several ways it is sensitive to tenets of the bioregional program, e.g., organicism. Yet, the nation-state supersedes that organicism to produce human perfection in culture. The Durkheimian position sees the social relationship to the land as quite arbitrary. So whether a bioregional turn is made or not, it is purely one of human choice. This basis can not allow for strains of argument of philosophical anthropology that consider the relationship to the earth based on the existential claim made at the beginning of this article—that who and where are fundamentally interrelated. La tradition vidalienne, through its progenitor, Vidal de la Blache, provides great insight into the interrelationship of society and milieu. La géographie humaine is translated as human geography, but in terms of content, it is better labeled social geography (Buttimer 1971, 1-7). “Scientific thought had long been attracted by the influences of the physical world upon human society…. Wise men began by seeking in physical environment the explanation of whatever was particularly striking in the character of the inhabitants” (5). In taking historians and sociologists to task in forgetting the geographical component, Vidal writes, “One pictures the earth as ‘the stage upon which man’s activities take place,’ without reflecting that the stage itself is alive” (1926, 6). Here is a reference to the Gaean tradition so important to the development of the bioregional value-system. Indicating his indebtedness to Ernst Haeckel who coined the term “ecology,” Vidal cites, “[ecology involves] the correlations between all organisms living together in one and the same locality and their adaptation to their surroundings” (9). He summarily states: “These researches result in an essentially geographical

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concept: that of environment as composite, capable of grouping and of holding together heterogeneous beings in mutual vital interrelationships. This idea seems to be the law governing the geography of living creatures. Every region is a domain where dissimilar beings, artificially brought together, have subsequently adapted themselves to a common existence” (10). Human societies parallel this description of non-human environments. Vidal provides a foundation for the bioregional value of diversity, which is vital to its political and social organizations. “Human societies, like those of the vegetable and animal world, are composed of different elements subject to the influence of environment. No one knows what winds brought them together, nor whence, nor when; but they are living side by side in a region which has gradually put its stamp upon them” (17). This living side by side in a shaping context provides the foundation for the bioregional value of community. Two most important concepts of the Vidalian school are possibilism and genre de vie, and for purposes here, these concepts establish the significance of why contemporary bioregionalism entails ethical prescription. Possibilism entails the idea that humanity is free but not autonomous. Genre de vie concerns humanity’s initiative and creative adaptation to the environment. Determinism is to be replaced by the notion of contingency. Nevertheless Durkheimian organizational autonomy is a false alternative. Human organization is environmentally influenced, yet it transcends determination in such a way that it can harmonize with the natural world or turn against it and dominate it; it never however is autonomous. But even with the bioregional project of harmonization with the natural world, there is still much room for creative adaptation. This creative adaptation will exhibit itself in political organization as one facet of its adaptation. But because culture does shape the dialectical interrelation between the natural world and human organization, the question of preserving and developing identification and orientation

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is a delicate on-going process. Possibilism seems to cut through the dichotomy of anthropocentrism and ecocentrism by preserving the creative rift between human and natural worlds that is to be negotiated on the basis of accommodating both the human and the natural in a process of open interpretation. No matter what values assist humankind it always involves creative adaptation. Whether we agree with Ratzel or not, and the bioregional paradigm does not, this understanding allows us to have insight into his position of interpreting the nation-state as the perfection of this human/natural process. The nation-state in his view provides for a transcending extension that perfects human capabilities. IV. The Spatiality of the Bioregion If we employ the imprecise distinctions for spatial scale—micro, meso, and macro—I argue that “region” scales at the meso to macro level, the global as well as nation at the macro level, “place” at the meso to micro level, with “niche” at the micro to manipulative level. Crucial to the purpose of this article is the relation of these scalar levels to human experience. Embodied presence only reaches as far as our perceptions. Our sense of place is fundamentally based on this limitation. Since humans engage in locomotion, embodied presence covers a range of places in the habitual experience of the everyday. “Settlement” consists of the interrelation of places. An attuned consciousness to the environs depends on embodied presence for its grounding and rooting, but this is not limited to one place, but rather a system of places as our inhabitation of a settlement, that would constitute the enactive geography through which identity and orientation is achieved. Region seems to entail too large of an expanse; its size transcends the spatiality of the everyday. Already in Ptolemy’s Geography the scalar distinction between world and region is made. Ptolemy’s chorography is equivalent to

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the regional. “Regional cartography, as an independent discipline, sets out the individual localities, each one independently and by itself, registering practically everything down to the least thing therein (for example, harbors, towns, districts, branches of principle rivers, and so on), while the essence of world cartography is to show the known world as a single and continuous entity, its nature and how it is situated, [taking into account] only the things that are associated with it in its broader general outlines” (2000, 57). Ptolemy’s term, “individual localities,” is roughly what I mean by places or system of places and this is the micro/meso scalar level that affords the possibility for human identification and orientation. “Regional cartography deals above with the qualities rather than the quantities of the things that it sets down; it attends everywhere to likeness” (2000, 58). As we pass onto contemporary globalization as an organizing possibility one sees how the independence of these two approaches breaks down. This is because globalization organizes at the macro level what was limited to the meso level by extending likenesses globally through neo-liberal, unrooted and abstractive consumerist economics. Bioregional thinking reacts to such economic unifying forces that achieve an arbitrary diversity by slinging things together for every- and any- where in postmodern simulacra. By contrast, bioregionalism promises to achieve unity-in-difference by preserving the specificity of place and adapting human life to that specificity. Edward Relph has written on preserving the uniqueness of individual localities or places, through articulating the concept of genius loci. “It is a defining characteristic of any worthwhile place that is have its own spirit—its own genius loci” (1993, 26). If we take this spirit seriously, we either stand in awe and do nothing, or assume that we can build gods. However, there is a third route advocated by Strabo: “Divine providence, the gods, had filled the earth with an animating presence and had endowed many locations with attributes or virtues, such as an attractive site or an abundance of resources. Human beings, to

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take advantage of these positive qualities, must exercise their foresight and their ability to perceive the virtues of places” (27). It is on the basis of respecting the genius loci of specific places that the existential structures of identity and orientation can be in harmony with natural surroundings. And it is at the scale of place (meso-micro), which is not region (macro), that human rootedness is developed. We have been living through the increasing appropriation and commodification of landscapes that in praxis ignores and scoffs at such environmental piety. The current phenomenon of going green emerges as a value in the current worldview for two reasons: we are beginning to take seriously the consequences of environmental degradation and secondly, because of the environmental fears and concerns, going green can be marketed and turned into profit. But this is certainly a ruse that only farcically resembles honoring the virtues of place. It is farcical because as a marketing device it is pitched through a worldview that still advocates economic domination (economic in the broad sense of “household” management and in the modern narrow sense of money and finance) and the hegemony of cultural patterns of life that disregard environmental contextualization. Relph articulates an attitudinal response, environmental humility, which is compatible with bioregional strategies. “Environmental humility suggests a way out of the vicious circle of using ever more rational practices of management and planning to correct the destructive consequences of rationalistic management and too much planning. It does this, first by emphasizing the individuality of places, communities and landscapes, for individuality is not susceptible to analysis and manipulation” (1981, 209). Politically the bureaucratic state (nation-state) is not compatible with the implementation of environmental humility. “By this return of responsibility to individuals and communities is unlikely to happen except in the context of the minimal state in which the rights and obligations of autonomous individuals are

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accepted as paramount. In the minimal state geographical humility could prevail” (209).

V. Modern and Postmodern Degenerations of Place Historian Alex Zukas provides a historical case study of the Ruhr Valley of Germany during the years of industrial capitalism. Capitalist transformation occurred on the regional scale due to the coal seams that the region had to offer. Market forces, new technologies, and the geography of coal combined to produce the changing spatial patterns of the region. The drive for a secure and lucrative energy source transformed this region from an agrarian to an industrial ecoscape where company towns supplanted peasant cottages and the green rolling terrain became “the black district” By the first decades of the twentieth century the Ruhr district was notorious in Germany as a region of enormous factories, polluted air, foul water, slag heaps, huge slums, and wealthy, hard-bitten industrialists. Its landscape bore the imprint of heavy industry with its blast furnaces, winding towers, and sprawling cities (2006, 139).

The industrio-scientific paradigm with its competitive economy and domination of the earth is shown to function on the regional level, for a region provides the material basis for human organizational patterns that are formed on the basis of economic abstraction, appropriation. To do this, the genius loci of place must be abandoned in order to reduce landscapes to resource sites. Commenting on the shift concerning societal-milieu relation­ ship, Zukas writes: [After 1845] a new spatiality and way of managing the ecoscape based on capitalist industrial social relations would reinscribe the Ruhr’s topography for a set of economic purposes that were not compatible in the long run with the small-scale agricultural

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production and pastoralism that had marked the human management of the Ruhr’s landscape for a thousand years (2006, 148).

Pastoral organization is spatially expressed as small rural communities and as small medieval cities. Industrial capitalism did not, however, organize on the bioregional level. It appropriated the earth at the level of place, after exhausting one place industrial capital moved onto other places for further extractions—bringing about more natural deterioration and human uprootings and displacements. The reorganization destroyed the scale of the medieval cities through industrial urbanizations and it created instant housing tenements for workers who lived in deplorable conditions. The appropriation was highly uneven and allowed liberal economics to dictate the appropriation of human, non-human life, and material landscape on the basis of its functional agency. This economic driven landscape alienated the relation to place, instigating a loss of identity and disorientation. Regional appropriation in this fashion of reducing place to sites of capital development engenders the homeless condition of placelessness. Edward Relph discusses the power base for the growing expansion in the commodification of landscapes through the mobilization of interlinked financial and material resources. Building on Lewis Mumford’s term, “mega-machine,” Relph labels the ability to create ersatz environments/worlds overnight as the “instant environment machine” (1993, 28). The move from an industrial to a service economy does not change the voracious speed by which landscapes are appropriated and commodified. But this new incursion of postmodern site appropriation involves the creation of ersatz places. Once again Alex Zukas provides a case study describing an extreme example. A “city,” Indian Wells, which is built in the California desert in Coachella Valley, provides an extreme case of negating the genius loci of place in the construction of a hu-

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man world that is utterly at odds with the natural environs. In the middle of the desert is a man-made lake, countless golf courses as well as fountains that can only survive by greatly taxing the Colorado River and causing a sauna-like atmosphere in air that naturally carries zero percent humidity. Hotels and pleasure palaces with air conditioning are kept at 65 degrees F with the outside temperature between 105-125 degrees F. Yet, it is a place that does not suffer from the modern sprawl-like development that leads to disorientation. Such a place also involves identification and orientation. And thus, it would be incorrect to argue that unrootedness destroys identification and orientation to place. This is exactly why our unrooted postmodern world is so dangerous—we can achieve an artificial, yet satisfying, identification and orientation. Yet what happens with our fundamental questions—Who am I? Where am I? What am I to do?—is that we interpret them in an abstractive decontextualized manner. We can be anything we want anywhere we want just by making that geo-cultural organization submit to postmodern manipulations so that our subsequent doings then exhibit our own “freed-up” choices. But we did not allow the unique genius loci to inform us and we did not interpret our identity on the basis of being a member within the living context of a where; we “autonomously” constructed them. We interpreted what we are to do on the basis of a commodified sense of place whereby anything we want to do is construct-able. We are freed up to play at identity and orientation. Embodied presence and conscious attunement can also then take place in a world thoroughly constructed at the expense of the life-context of the natural surroundings. And thus one postmodern answer to the homeless condition is the Disneyfication of place and this is in some ways a far greater obstacle to a bioregional platform than globalization, for it can be argued that it preempts the “homeless” argument by supplying us with places free from the limits of natural restraints.

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VI. Identification and Orientation: Norberg-Schulz’s Articulation By linking identification with orientation as presuppositions to dwelling, Christian Norberg-Schulz frames (unwittingly) an aspect of the problematic of this article. It is evidently possible to orient oneself without true iden­ tification; one gets along without feeling “at home.” And it is possible to feel at home without the spatial structure of the place, that is, the place is only experienced as a gratifying ge­ neral character. True belonging however presupposes that both … functions are full developed (1980, 20).

The primary aspects of humankind’s concretization of dwelling are identification and orientation. “[In order to] gain an existential foothold man has to be able to orientate himself; he has to know where he is. But he also has to identify himself with the environment, that is, he has to know how he is a certain place.” Humans develop perceptual schemata comprising universal structures that are inter-human as well as localizing and culturally informed schemata. The parameters constitutive of the identity of a person are the schemata, for these structures determine the gathering of our existential foothold in a world. The objects of identification are concrete environmental properties and things. Heidegger states that we are be-thinged, meaning that human identity is a function of the gathering of world by things and places, which involves identification and orientation. The everyday life-world is gathered when it has become habitual (2122). Yet, the evaluative moment that leads to moral prescription finds its foundation in Heidegger as well. “Man’s merits do not count much if he is unable to dwell poetically” (23). Poiesis can be related to scale. Heidegger states, “Poetry does not fly above and surmount the earth in order to escape it and hover over it. Poetry is what first brings man into earth, making him belong to it, and thus brings him into dwelling” (1971,

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218). Heidegger does not specifically address scale here but it is implicated: transcending organizations of human life that unroot human beings from place disallows for poetic dwelling. This is existential language for what bioregionalists mean by reinhabitation. Throughout his writings Norberg-Schulz includes critical evaluations of modern-humankind’s loss of identity and its disorientation in our relationships to built milieux. For purposes here, we note that modern urban humankind’s interrelationship with the “natural environment is reduced to fragmentary relation. Instead, urban humankind has to identify with man-made things, such as streets and houses” (21). Thus, as schemata are genetically developed, crucially so during childhood development, identification with the natural environment as a requirement for the bioregional program has not been formed. Urban and suburban built spaces prevent us from properly establishing an identification and orientation with the natural world, for the schemata developed are informed by built space and the hegemony of human domination over the natural landscape. However, recent trends in globalization and its postmodern culture has indeed promoted the simulacra of place and this very well can substitute in a way that meets our existential needs for meaning—for identification and orientation. From this standpoint bioregionalism in the sense of emphasizing the scale of region seems to be abstractive in such a way that its “enemies” in fact are in a better position to meet the needs for the lived-experience of place that bioregion espouses. It is vital to the project to eliminate this inconsistency in bioregionalism. In his now classic book, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision, Kirpatrick Sale discusses four basic determinants of any organized society: scale, economy, polity, and society, through which he contrasts the bioregional paradigm with the industrioscientific paradigm (1991, 50). Incompatibilities within these bioregional determinants are exhibited when considering the

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importance of identification and orientation for rootedness. Within the determinant “scale,” region and community pose a fundamental difficulty. Community can only be concretized at the level of place through place-presence; the macro scalar level of region can only entertain a symbolic notion of community. This difficulty within scale poses ramifications for the determinant of society concerning the bioregional principle of division. Nature divides rather than unites in order to achieve salubrity and balance, according to Sale (127). Division makes things more manageable (eco-nomically viable). However, his examples concern population increase to which the notion of division is applied. This seems to solve the problem of bioregional unity simply by constructing a new unity on the basis of growth factors. This does not seem in keeping with the notion that a bioregion is based on ecological principles that promote it as a unity such that a single factor may not disrupt that unity—the construction of divisions is problematic because it can be a political maneuver based on principles other than commitment to the region as a whole. Certainly the principle under polity, decentralization, is problematic for identification and orientation if indeed these are meant to embrace the region. All of these problems pertain to scale, and unless identification and orientation are grounded there is no basis for decisions that will uphold a bioregional perspective. Sale divides bioregional scale into three sizes. The ecoregion is “the widest natural region, taking its character from the broadest distribution of native vegetation and soil types” (1991, 56). As much as several hundred thousand square miles can make up an ecoregion. Nested within ecoregions are georegions, “identified most often by clear physiographic features such as river basins, valleys, and mountain ranges, and often some special floral and faunal traits as well” (57). The example given within a Northern California georegion is twenty thousand square miles. Morphoregions are scaled at approximately several thousand

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square miles. Morphoregions “are identifiable by distinctive life forms on the surface—towns and cities, mines and factories, fields and farms—and special land forms that gave rise to those particular features in the first place” (58). Several thousand square miles is still too large to be considered place. Yet the morphoregion may be best considered as comprising a scalar organization such that the inter-independence of place might be experienced (in certain forms of life). The scale of human community favors between 500 and 1,000 people for the size of a village, and 5,000-10,000 for a larger tribal association (64). The resulting bioregional mosaic that such organization entails would have to rely “an efficient and sensitive communications network between all communities” (66). Thus we see that region is a unity only on the basis of a communications network. But a network is a whole and unless some kind of grasp of the whole is undertaken, no one is capable of understanding the plight of the region, per se. How can there be bioregionalism if indeed there is no way to establish an existential foothold for experiencing the significance of the region itself? In Bioregionalism and Civil Society: Democratic Challenges to Corporate Globalism, Mike Carr identifies five core concepts of bioregional thought, upon which rests the bioregional paradigm: place, reinhabitation, bioregion, home, and community (2004, 73). Bioregionalism “links the local to the regional and ultimately to the planetary. It is comprehensive, broad, and inclusionary rather than parochial, narrow, and exclusionary” (76). “The concept of bioregion transcends a strictly local definition of place…. Reinhabitation involves developing a bioregional identity. This wider bio-region scale identity means that the terrain of consciousness extends beyond the local ecosystem scale” (77). The problem though is: how are we actually capable of achieving a bioregional identity and orientation?

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VII. Solution in the Bioregional Polity The experiences of those who would live within bioregional implementation involve bodily presence and conscious attunement to the immediate natural environs. Their intimate connection to the landscape entails for the most part the contiguity of places within a couple dozen miles of a personal living space and perhaps several places at some distance (on the basis of the satellite geography of automobility). Embodied presence and conscious attunement grounds the existential modalities of identification and orientation. Identification and orientation are limited by the capacities of human perception. But this does not limit us to a single place; we are able to achieve these modalities in a number of places. The exact number can not be determined but limits involve time for inhabitation. Bioregional identity and orientation requires practices beyond the average everyday activities of life for most people. Unless there is a strategy that takes this into account, bioregionalism either fails to constitute the political organizational unity of the region, or, if it achieves unity, in many ways it will function not much differently than the modern nation-state. The experience of the connection of places important for the implementation of bioregionalism involves more than a network of communication. The connection of places can only be informed through embodied presence and conscious attunement to the places that make up the region in a way that achieves bioregional identification and orientation. These types of experiences are not impossible and indeed could be achieved by some people. The problem is that the vast majority of people will not have such experiences, unless a kind of nomadic culture is to be created. The communicative networking advocated by many bioregionalists is meant to be a system between regions as well as within regions. But, because a communicative networking is insufficient for bioregional identification and orientation, I argue that it is necessary to create a body of transdisciplinary experts

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trained in the bioregional paradigm whose very job it is to travel to live in constituent places within a bioregion. These experts gain embodied presence and conscious attunement to the specific genius loci of each place within a myriad of places throughout the bioregion. These bioregionalists would provide an advisory role on the basis of first-hand ecological knowledge and experience concerning the relation/interrelation of places constitutive of region. Certain members of this expert class would also travel to other bioregions in order to gain insights into viable forms of interconnections between bioregions. These bioregionalist voices do not take precedence over the non-expert voices that are wellgrounded in a particular system of places—a settlement. But they do achieve a transplacial vision, a holistic vision based on embodied experience and conscious attunement that has allowed for the broadened sense of bioregional identification and orientation that others would not have. Without this body of experientially informed body of experts, knowledge of the whole remains abstract, and abstraction keeps polity locked into an unrooted sense of the whole, even if we have grounded ourselves in the multifarious placeworlds that are constituents of a bioregion. This body of bioregional experts is not then grounded in a bureaucracy that is by nature abstracted from place-roots. Their experiences, though, are multi-rooted in order to recognize and mediate the interrelations of places constitutive of a region— unity-in-diversity. This body will take an advisory role and is not to serve a top-down function of power. Their role function is to ground the communicative network through their interrelating experiences within the practice of environmental humility. This can only be accomplished by having these bioregional advisors take up different places of residences and being locally involved in the implementation of the bioregional program. The implementation of such an advisory board overcomes the insufficiency of the communicative network that has no basis in experience of interrelations.

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Conclusion The scalar level of region poses a problem to the bioregional program on the basis of equivocating the notions of place and region. Experiences necessary to unify the macro scale of region in a way compatible with the tenets of bioregionalism is possible only through creating a way of life that indeed will allow for bioregional identification and orientation. This can be accomplished by creating a bioregional advisory board whose very profession consists of a multi-rooted form of life such that interconnection of “systems of places” comprising the bioregion can be grounded in experience. Thus in terms of Sale’s four determinants for any organized society we see that the root of the problem, which concerns bioregional scale, requires a special bioregional society (an advisory board) whose form of life overcomes problems associated with scale. This society’s function is to provide the necessary experiential basis at the regional level for the grounding of a truly bioregional polity. Bioregional economy (management of the household at the level of region) avoids falling back into the abstraction of liberalism by providing an experiential monitor of place-based exchanges meant to bolster decentralized organic economies. References de la Blache, P. Vidal. 1926. Principles of human geography. Ed. Emmanuel de Martonne. Trans. Millicent Todd Bingham. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Buttimer, Anne. 1971. Society and milieu in the French tradition. Chicago: Rand McNally and Company. Carr, Mike. 2004. Bioregionalism and civil society: Democratic challenges to corporate globalism. Vancouver: UBC Press. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. 1980. Genius loci: Towards a phenomenology of architecture. New York: Rizzoli International Publications. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. 1984. The concept of dwelling: On the way to figurative architecture. New York: Electa/Rizoli.

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The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, Vol. II. 1971. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Paddock, Troy R. E. 2005. Land makes the man: Topography and national character in German schoolbooks. In Lived topographies and their mediational forces. Eds. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Ptolemy. 2000. Ptolemy’s geography: An annotated translation of the theoretical chapters. Trans. J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Relph, Edward. 1993. Modernity and the reclamation of place. In Dwelling, seeing, and designing: Toward a phenomenological ecology. Ed. David Seamon, 25-40. Albany: State University of New York Press. _____. 1981. Rational landscapes and humanistic geography. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books. Sale, Kirkpatrick. 1991. Dwellers in the land: The bioregional vision. Athens: The University of Georgia Press. Snyder, Gary. 1998. The place, the region, and the commons. In Environmental philosophy: From animal rights to radical ecology. Ed. Michael E. Zimmerman et al., 441-56. Uppre Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Thayer, Robert L., Jr. 2003. LifePlace: Bioregional thought and practice. Berkeley: University of California Press. Walker, Melissa, ed. 1994. Reading the environment. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. Zukas, Alex. 2006. From farmsteads to slag heaps: The restless ecoscape of thr Ruhr Valley of Germany, 1830-1930. In Ecoscapes: Geographical patternings of relations. Eds. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi, 139-64. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Zukas, Alex. 2008. The road to Indian Wells: Symbolic landscapes in the California desert. In Symbolic landscapes. Eds. Gary Backhaus and John Murungi. Springer.

21 Socrates outside Athens: Plato, the Phaedrus and the Possibility of “Dialogue” with Nature1 by W. S. K. Cameron

Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University International Association for Environmental Philosophy [email protected] ABSTRACT: Environmental ethics has long struggled with a dilemma: many mistrust as “anthropocentric” our judgments about the values of non-human nature, but it is unclear how we could make, let alone justify, “biocentric” judgments; and recent worries that the world is linguistically constituted only exacerbate the threat of skepticism. Happily, Plato’s Phaedrus gives some indication of how a “dialogue” with nature might proceed. But since Plato’s confidence in the forms is likely irrecoverable, I turn to Gadamer for an account of the language-world relation that allows us to concede the world’s linguistic constitution while still acknowledging the possibility of nature’s dialogue with us.

Introduction Contemporary environmental ethics faces a fundamental tension between the traditional anthropocentric impulse to regard non-humans as having no compelling interests, no goods “of their own,” and hence no intrinsic value, and the competing extensionist, biocentrist, or ecocentrist impulse to recognize interests, goods, and values independent of us—an impulse that PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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appears praiseworthy insofar as it de-centers us and sensitizes us to others’ needs, but that raises the corresponding worry that any interest or intrinsic value-attribution claims we make are either subjective to the point of flakiness or, worse, involve an arbitrary ventriloquizing of the nonhuman world, an unselfconscious projection of our own hopes, wishes, and fantasies. Since I worry that even the best contemporary strategies for resolving this tension are hamstrung by problematic presuppositions,2 I’ll argue for another way forward—one that begins by going back. In my view, modern philosophy rejected its classical heritage entirely too quickly, and thereby lost rich resources for characterizing our relation to nature. I am heading—reader beware—into the belly of the beast, the very navel of the Western worldview from whence the dread monster of ontotheology sprung. I’m going to suggest that we return for guidance … to Plato. Naturally, I hope to find more than what moderns thought themselves happily rid of. As I will argue, Plato’s Phaedrus reveals another version of our predicament, and while it allows no easy resolution of our concerns, it does confirm that we are struggling with a real problem that has emerged before in other contexts. Progress will demand not just cleverness, but genuine wisdom—though Plato assures us that growth in wisdom is possible, even if it will demand our cultivating that decidedly un-modern virtue, intellectual humility. Is it possible, as I suggest in the title, to dialogue not only under, but with trees? Maybe not literally—or at least not literally and sanely. Though apostrophes to nature abound throughout literature, in our post-animist culture only unstable characters expect a verbal response. But there is an expanded, perhaps metaphorical but not hopelessly vague sense in which we can dialogue with the natural world; and following Plato, I will argue that this dialogue is not merely possible, but unavoidable and potentially fruitful. As we will see, however, finding our problem and hints of a solution in Plato is insufficient, for that alone would amount to

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a mere reprise of romanticism. To get any further, as I will argue in closing, we must hop over modernity in another direction first pointed out by that great 20th century student of Plato, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s magnum opus, Truth and Method, accepts and articulates one version of the linguistic turn, and thus he concedes the postmodern position that we do not see the world naked, that our concepts productively determine how the world appears. But rather than straying into the anti-realism that this position is usually taken to entail, Gadamer argues phenomenologically that the world itself does appear—through language. While he explores this especially in relation to art, I will argue that the same is true in relation to nature. We exist in a living dialogue with nature, and through that dialogue truths about us, about nature, and about our relation to the non-human world can and do appear. Our journey will thus involve four stages. Having recalled the presuppositions that render the contemporary discussion of inherent value so sterile, I will offer several reasons to adopt Plato as our guide. The Phaedrus in particular—despite one famously offputting comment—offers several insights into the role that the natural world can and should play in helping us grow in wisdom; and even better, its account of the weakness of the written word suggests ways we might understand a natural world that cannot speak for itself. In the third stage of this essay, we will consider a potential objection: that we have made no progress, but merely recapitulated our contemporary conundrum with, at best, romantic hand-waving toward a solution. The fourth section will close the essay with the argument that hermeneutics offers a way to articulate the metaphor that we really do “dialogue” with nature. I. The Value Debate in Contemporary Environment Ethics One of the longest running debates in the short history of environmental philosophy has turned on the question whether

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the natural world has inherent value and, if so, how we might recognize and defend that claim. Many philosophers are familiar with the prehistory. While major modern thinkers like Kant recognize our direct obligation to respect other human beings as ends in themselves, our duties to animals are at best indirect: we must respect other people’s property interest in their animals; and we must refrain from cruel behavior lest it appear to license similarly vicious treatment of humans—but we do not have any direct obligations to animals themselves. Reacting against this tradition, extensionists like Peter Singer and Tom Regan defend direct moral obligations to animals, either as fellow sufferers whose utility is morally relevant, or as fellow respect-deserving and rights-holding subjects-of-a-life. Some push this argument still further, agreeing with Kenneth Goodpaster that all living beings (including plants) are “morally considerable,” while others, like Aldo Leopold, attribute value not just to individual living beings but to the mutually beneficial exchanges characteristic of healthy biotic communities considered as wholes. Ecocentrists, finally, take Leopold’s view still further, arguing not merely that humans are “plain members” of a wider community, but that our value as individuals or even as a species is a function of that ultimately valuable ecological whole. The debate about inherent value does thus helpfully focus three fundamental questions: a) Assuming that we have some morally-relevant value, may non-humans have it? b) If some do, in virtue of what feature do they have (or even share) this value? c) And whatever we may conclude in response to the first two questions, how might we legitimate our answers given that nonhumans cannot explicitly express, let alone defend their claims? Periodic protestations of postmodernism from some quarters notwithstanding, the dominant answers to these questions over the last three decades have assumed the founding insight of

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modern philosophy: that we legitimately claim to know only what we can show that we know.3 Since early liberals were skeptical that they could justify any but the most basic values of life, liberty, and property, they protected those with fundamental political rights while leaving individuals the freedom to live out their own conceptions of the good. This strategy allowed people wide latitude to act in their own interests while insisting that they acknowledge a small set of common values—a “thin” theory of the good—and thus liberal theory could be developed in a more environmentally friendly direction by interpreting “harm” or the class of morally considerable beings more broadly. Traditional communitarians could generate even richer obligations (albeit at a corresponding cost in universality) by supplementing the liberal’s thin theory of the good with obligations to nourish thicker, more demanding communal goals; and this tradition too could be environmentally extended by acknowledging a more broadly identified biotic community. Yet both liberal and communitarian traditions quickly run into difficulties when environmentally extended in these ways, for the new respect for non-human others’ interests and values traditionally presumes that they can express, debate, or at least contribute to the joint support of those values. When—as with non-human beings— this appears impossible, these traditions bog down. In the face of such difficulties, four broad responses have emerged: a) Some claim, more or less plausibly, that we can read the needs, interests, and hence the values of non-human creatures through scientific—or at any rate very close and disciplined—observation.4 b) Others contend that while the needs, interests, and values of non-human beings do not and cannot exist—much less be known—independently of human valuers, those needs have become explicit and can be recognized and protected now that humans have arrived on the scene.5

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c) Some adopt strong versions of a social constructivist thesis, arguing not only that our values but the very concepts by which we constitute our experience of the natural world are human and historical. This defuses the worry—inescapable under (a) and (b) above—that we are unselfconsciously presuming the correctness of our own current conceptions by conceding from the start that they are socially constructed. Yet insofar as it apparently denies any possibility of getting the natural world “right,” this strategy dramatically exacerbates worries about the moral dangers of anthropocentrism. d) Finally, various hybrid versions appear possible. Heidegger, for instance, argues that our current technological mindset “enframes” the world as object of the human will to power (a version of (c)), but he also holds out an (admittedly faint) hope that if we pursue emerging forms of waiting/thinking/thanking, the world may yet speak to us anew. Unfortunately, these modern accounts of the value of the natural world appear to face two major problems. First, the appearance of four separate options is superficial. The Heideggerian hybrid (d), for example, collapses into either (c) or (a) depending on how sanguine one’s hope to escape the enframing mindset, for if a “really” less toxic view is possible it must presumably be judged so by trans-cultural standards such as those identified in (a); and depending on how firmly one claims to recognize evidence for the values that emerge under (b), it too will collapse into a version of (a) or (c). Second, the social constructivist option (c), as we have noted, dramatically exacerbates worries about anthropocentrism by suggesting that we have no access to—and merely fool ourselves in attempting to protect— the interests of the natural world. Thus unless we’re frankly willing to abandon any obligation to recognize, much less protect, the needs and interests of non-human beings, everything de-

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pends on the plausibility with which we can justify our judgments about non-human interests and value. But this is extremely difficult under modern assumptions. To be sure, modern value theorists have some resources to cope with the needs and interests of those who cannot speak. To the three obvious critiques of the predominant liberal social contract tradition—that the contract negotiation never actually happened; that some (e.g., because they were not yet born or were still too young) would have lacked the opportunity to participate in negotiations even if they had happened; and that even if they were later granted the opportunity to participate, some (e.g., due to a mental disability) might always lack the capacity to participate—liberals have historically responded by producing the hypothetical contract people would rationally accept if they had had the ability and opportunity to negotiate under constraints that forced them to recognize the legitimate interests of others. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice is of course a preeminent example of this tradition. Yet this strategy has obvious limits. As Jürgen Habermas forcefully argues against Rawls,6 any monologically-produced hypothetical contract is suspect even if its author believes himself to be working from the original position: for too many accounts of what a “rational man” would desire have in fact presumed parochial and problematic gender, racial, or cultural blinders.7 Habermas’s social contract theory has the virtue of requiring actual dialogue both when justifying the original decision procedure and when adjudicating particular norms; but the objection he makes against Rawls can surely be raised even more powerfully if the social contract is to include obligations to non-human beings. Surely if we are liable to be ignorant of other humans’ real interests, we are even more likely to be tone deaf when considering those nonhumans whose claims we can never hear, especially when their bodily, emotional, and mental experiences may be so different that we cannot naively trust our sympathetic imagination.8 Again,

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under the modern assumption that we must legitimate our beliefs methodologically and preferably empirically, we must choose among three unattractive options: a) We may concede with empiricist value-skeptics and social constructivists that the natural world has no real independent interests, subsuming it under our values—which is to say with Heidegger, under the human will to power; or b) we may argue (if somewhat implausibly in the modern context) that there is a firm empirical basis for interest and value attributions; or c) we may romantically claim insight into the non-human world through a kind of fellow-feeling for its interests and value. Absent any convincing argument for (b), this strategy alone appears to hold any promise of escaping the anthropocentrism that the first strategy frankly concedes. Yet does not a problem of evidence—and perhaps even a performative contradiction—remain when humans are the ones unilaterally determining and defending the “natural world’s” interests and “independent” value? If these are our only options, we appear to be stuck. In the next section of this essay, however, I will explore a long-abandoned pre-modern path through Plato’s reflections on the value of the natural world. II. Plato’s Socrates in the Park To be sure, this might appear counterintuitive. Even if modern and post-modern approaches have proven sterile, why turn to one of the original sources of Western dualism, indeed to the philosopher whom Nietzsche holds most responsible for the betrayal of the earth?9 What could one who rejects the sensible world for the ideal have to tell us about nature? There is no denying that the charges against Plato appear damning. Throughout his corpus generally, and in the Phaedrus in particular, Plato

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clearly regards the physical world as a lower level of reality. Worse yet, it functions as a perpetual temptation: i.e., it is not only different from the ideal world to which we should direct our attention, but continually distracts us from that world. Many of Plato’s myths—including those of the Phaedo, the Republic, and the Phaedrus, as well as the Republic’s late condemnation of most forms of art—emphasize the dangers of attachment to the physical world, an attachment we can only break, if at all, by the process of conversion and spiritual cultivation that Plato thematizes in the Republic’s image of the cave. Finally in the Phaedrus, the dialogue on which we will focus, Plato appears to dismiss nature explicitly and entirely. Socrates observes that he has hardly ever left the city; worse still, he regards this as no misfortune, for he is “a lover of learning, and trees and open country will not teach [him] anything, whereas men in the town do.”10 That he should embark on a stroll in the country, and that its beauty should enchant him, seems entirely out of character. How could Plato possibly help us appreciate the value of the natural world? Nevertheless, our recourse to Plato may not be entirely mad.11 Among the most remarkable features of the Phaedrus is its natural setting. In this, the only Socratic dialogue that takes place outside the walls of Athens,12 Plato lingers on the beauty of the setting by a river, under the shade of a plane tree in full flower and lulled by singing cicadas who, through the myth told about them, almost become characters in as well as witnesses to the dialogue. Socrates is clearly entranced, even (as he says) bewitched by the location, and thus it is no surprise that the discussion moves from the themes of love and beauty to the discernment of truth through dialectic. Moreover, we must temper our sense of Plato’s wariness about physical beauty with the recognition that his view certainly changed over time. Between the Phaedo and the Republic, for instance, Socrates realizes that the moral battle takes place not between body and soul but rather within the soul;13 and in

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the Republic, music, poetry, and the beauty of all hand-crafted work in the kallipolis play an important preparatory role in early education, attuning children to beauty and goodness so that they will recognize it as familiar and desirable later on.14 Again, the ascent to truth so movingly described in the Symposium begins from physical beauty, and in that dialogue Alcibiades—the initially eager, wildly gifted but too sorely tempted Wunderkind—speaks partly with irritation, but more with a mystified and wistful admiration of the algamata or divine images that lay hidden within the semi-grotesque Silenus-statue of Socrates’ body. No subsequent high or low ever silenced Socrates’ witness to a deeper, richer, near-divine glory that was clearly authoritative for Alcibiades. Socrates was a kind of ikon for him, a physical being through whom shone transcendent goodness, truth, and beauty.15 Finally, despite the early quip that trees and open country have nothing to teach him—a quip, moreover, that we should take with a grain of salt16—Plato turns repeatedly to the nonhuman world throughout the Phaedrus. What can we learn there about its nature and value? Of course we must start with the obvious. No plausible reading of Plato can deny that the world is hierarchical, that the really real, the really valuable, involves a richness and perfection that supersedes materiality and that can only be accessed, if accessed at all, by turning “upwards” and “inwards” through thought. But must this represent, as Nietzsche thinks, a betrayal of the earth? That consequence may seem more plausible once the really real has been further grounded in the will of a creating God before whom we prostrate ourselves and for the sake of whom we abandon all else.17 But for the Greeks, to whom the world was eternal, the physical—and thus the non-human— world has its own original order and value, an order and value we can appreciate only through an intellectual and moral selfdiscipline that demands not abandonment, much less domina-

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tion, but rather service: we are to be, as Heidegger suggests in a poignant image, the shepherds of Being.18 This is evident in a number of features of Plato’s middle and later dialogues: First and foremost, we study the physical world because it has a clear intellectual and moral value for us. What Alcibiades appreciated in part, Plato eventually grasped more clearly and consistently: that we appreciate the forms first and most easily by means of their reflection in beautiful things and people. In Socrates’ palinode on love—the repentant praise of Eros he offers after having betrayed love in his first speech in the Phaedrus—Plato alludes to the ascent from beauty that he develops more fully in the Symposium. There can thus be no surprise that Socrates is inspired—even transported—by the beauty of the setting, for physical beauty awakens a memory of a higher world before which we rightly feel an impulse to bow and by means of which our souls are quickened with the desire and the growing ability to fly higher and closer to their true home and proper fulfillment.19 To be sure, our fascination can lead us astray: beauty tempts us to concupiscence by offering immediate and apparently adequate satisfactions to eye, ear, and mind. Yet if the physical world is a temptation, that is precisely because it does give us a real, though limited, communion with the forms. And thus it is no more accidental that Plato discusses both inspired and disordered loves in the Phaedrus than that the stern warnings of the Republic’s Book X are paired with the educational use of beauty in Books II to IV: again, beautiful things tempt us with immediate pleasures just because they so powerfully suggest richer and more adequate satisfactions. Indeed the moral power of physical beauty integral to the classical vision is what we miss in enlightenment-inspired discussions of nature. Natural beauty challenges us to de-center ourselves in the presence of an ontological value entirely independent of us humans either individually or collectively. On the classical view, the natural world is not only

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good for us, it is so precisely because it demands that we recognize something good in itself. So far, we have only moved up to, and not beyond, one version of the modern predicament, since Plato affirms the real independent value of the natural world but does not tell us precisely how it may be apprehended—much less comprehended and intellectually secured. Given the muteness of the natural world, how can we grasp its interests or value? For Plato is of course well aware that the nonhuman world can be misapprehended—as it is by those whose loves are disordered, and as it is even by Socrates, whose first speech, though inspired by the spirit of the place,20 was so unreflective and indeed offensive that his divine sign forces him to stay until he has made recompense by the palinode on love.21 If Socrates himself can go so far astray, can we hope for anything better? What prevents us from projecting our own interests and wishes on the physical world? Here again, the Phaedrus is helpful, for Plato specifically addresses the problem of non-responsiveness in connection with the vulnerability of writing. To recall the myth: the Egyptian god Theuth praises the invention of writing as improving human memory, but King Thamus rightly realizes, in Plato’s view, that writing is liable to weaken our memory by serving as a crutch. How many of us, after all, remember phone numbers once they have been captured in our cell phones? Worse yet, books can neither answer questions nor defend themselves against misinterpretation—a problem exacerbated by the fact that they can be and are read not only by the right but also by the wrong people. The only solution to this problem, as Plato suggests, is both to write and to read with great caution, for written words seem intelligible but in fact frequently mislead, and they are helpless to correct any of our misapprehensions. Our only protection: to recall that the written word is at best a reminder of truths that we can access in our own experience through careful reflection conducted among others, or what Socrates calls more specifically

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dialectic. Standing on their own or in the wrong context, words are temptations; but read by those with practical wisdom and insight they function as ikons, i.e., as physical reminders to and through which we pass to the richer experience of a truth that stands beyond us. And this in turn suggests to me some safeguards in approaching that other eminently suggestive but hopelessly mute ikon, the world of non-human nature. As we have seen, the physical world generally and eminently beautiful things in particular draw us to and through them to a fuller sense of ourselves and our world. Yet the natural world can no more explain or defend itself than a written text can: it must be interpreted through the living experience of dialectic. To be sure, interpreting our place in response to the mute witness of the nonhuman world remains immensely difficult, since we lack a Rosetta Stone to accomplish any but the most rudimentary translation; and even if we had one, the resulting interpretation would read like a prose rendering of poetry—at once flattened, literalized, bowdlerized, and in other places over sharp. But we need not remain stuck in inadequate interpretations. Since the natural world, like a written text, is mute, our appreciation of its significance must await the living speech of dialectic. Yet that need not mean that its significance has just been invented or projected by us. The test—as always in philosophy—is whether our current understanding holds up well against the insights and experiences of others, where those experiences also include our sense of how the world is responding to us. But the word “test” makes this process sound far too easy, when in fact the order that the beauty of nature calls us to acknowledge can only be plumbed by those of great practical and theoretical wisdom. We must relinquish our modern aspiration to determine and justify truth claims algorithmically, yet we need not collapse into the postmodern or constructivist conviction that the only order discernable is the one we have ourselves

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projected. We can “dialogue” with nature by spending time with her, listening to her, interacting with her, and by reflecting on what this suggests about the beauty, order, needs, and interests of the non-human world. III. A Worry: Is this not just Romanticism Warmed-Over? Or can we? Does this not just amount to animism or, at best, a dangerously subjective romanticism? Are we not back to one of the three sterile options with which we started? I think not, but the charge is a serious one, for the parallels are clear: a) Socrates does, like the romantics, believe in a reality that transcends us: its independent value is just what calls us out of ourselves. b) On Socrates’ account as I have reconstructed it, the insights we may glean about the significance of the natural world cannot be fixed in writing and may not be entirely within reach of the human intellect. Socrates is, to be sure, far less likely to revel in obscurity than some romantics were, but his analogy between philosophical insight and the divine madness of lover and prophet suggests at least that we are dealing with a natural world that, like Narnia’s Lion Lord Aslan, may be good but is emphatically not tame;22 and Plato’s use of myth along with his presentation of Socrates as modeling ideals that the dialogues themselves never satisfactorily define—temperance, practical wisdom, and courage, for instance—indicate what may be beyond the reach of argument, foreshadowing romantic worries about the limits of language and reason. c) And given those parallels, the most pressing danger is the same. Our interpretations cannot be tied down in tidy formulae, and so may be muddled, insensitive, ineffective, or even perverse. Hubris is an ever-present danger, especially where, as here, the muteness and vulnerability of nature

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opens it up, like written texts, to the ever-ready echochambers of our own ego-, ethno-, and anthropo-centrisms. Just as the “prudent” lover of Lysias’ speech thinks first and foremost of his own interests, so also we can never ignore Heidegger’s worry that talk of our highest values merely masks our will to power. So far, the parallels with romanticism are clear, but with them comes a significant difference. Plato is both less and more confident than the Romantics. He lacks their readiness to claim a momentary flash of insight that illuminates the whole: dialectic must be much more patient than that. At the same time, Plato is more confident than the Romantics that dialectic enables us to articulate the truth. If Plato sometimes worries that we cannot apprehend the truth directly,23 dialectic at least allows us to pursue “the second best mode of enquiring into the cause,” beginning with clear and fundamental assumptions and working out what is and is not consistent with them. But this means we can, pace modern and postmodern worries, legitimately aspire to transcend the will to dominate, de-centering ourselves and our expectations in the light of what nature can and does quietly reveal about itself and about ourselves. Unfortunately this difference is not yet sufficient to prevent our falling back into romanticism. Plato is epistemically confident—at least on the standard story—because the forms really exist and are accessible through reason. But if the modern critique of essentialism renders that view irretrievable, are we not cast back on the unhappy choice between modern or postmodern skepticisms and a vague romantic faith? Perhaps. But I think we can make headway by articulating a real and legitimate sense in which we live in dialogue with the natural world. Gadamer’s hermeneutics points the way.

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IV. Back to the Future: Gadamer’s Phenomenological Recovery of the Appearance of Truth through Language Before considering how Gadamer can help us, I want to present the problem in its sharpest form. A number of years ago, Tim Hayward argued that concerns about “anthropocentrism” in environmental ethics had been misunderstood. He distinguishes two forms of anthropocentrism: epistemic and ethical. On his view, anthropocentrism of the latter form—either as blatant speciesism or more subtle human chauvinism—is morally blameworthy, but fortunately it is also avoidable at least in principle. Epistemic anthropocentrism, however, is not only unavoidable, but “unobjectionable, or even desirable.” We cannot and should not deny that our perspective is inevitably a human one: As long as the valuer is a human, the very selection of criteria of value will be limited by this fact. It is this fact which precludes the possibility of a radically nonanthropocentric value scheme, ... [i.e.,] a set of values which are supposed to be completely unrelated to any existing human values. Any attempt to construct a radically non-anthropocentric value scheme is liable not only to be arbitrary—because founded on no certain knowledge—but also to be more insidiously anthropocentric in projecting certain values, which as a matter of fact are selected by a human, onto nonhuman beings without certain warrant for doing so.24

On this view, the biocentrist’s aspiration to escape the ambit of human values is impossible in principle. Steven Vogel makes a parallel point by means of a rhetorical question: “in the evocations of nature’s speech, who is it who is really speaking?”25 As Hayward and Vogel would agree, there can be only one answer: “we are.” Does this mean, however, that nature is entirely silent, that we cannot hope to hear it speak of itself? Not necessarily: it depends on how we understand the role of language, and on this point Gadamer has several helpful things to say.26 This might seem counterintuitive, insofar as Gadamer not only concedes, but defends a strong form of the “linguistic turn,”

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arguing that we can only ever understand and articulate the nature of the world through language. Moreover since every understanding always already presupposes an interpretation of the world, it appears clear that we can never see the world “naked.” Does this mean that we cannot see the world as it is? Surprisingly, Gadamer argues against the skepticism that linguistic idealism appears to entail. As it turns out, the skeptical consequences fall away if we think through the nature of language more concretely. We will begin with an argument Gadamer could, but does not in fact make, because he begins from the problem of experiencing truth in art rather than in non-human nature. Had he started from the latter problem, however, he could assert that in a trivial sense every human view of the world is “natural” insofar as it represents nature coming to consciousness in one form or another. We are, after all, ourselves part of nature. Yet is this nearly enough? After all, nature has been conceived in many very different ways, e.g., by animists, by Jews, Christians, and Muslims who conceive it as creation, and by modern materialists. If every human view is “natural,” does that not mean that they are all equally right—and equally wrong? Have we no way to secure or at least to improve our perspective on the natural world? In Truth and Method, Gadamer explicitly responds to the skepticism that seems to follow from linguistic idealism by arguing that the skeptic’s question is ill-formed, since “the world” exists only in and through language. Language is not just one of man’s possessions in the world, rather, on it depends the fact that man has a world at all. The world as world exists for man as for no other creature that is in the world. But this world is verbal in nature…. [L]anguage has no independent life apart from the world that comes to language within it. Not only is the world world only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it. Thus, ... man’s being-in-the-world is primordially linguistic.27

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Animals clearly exist in and are aware of their immediate environment, yet they are, as Heidegger argued, “poor in world”:28 i.e., their awareness of their circumstances does not extend far beyond their immediate experience in space or time. Try explaining to a dog where Asia is, or suggesting what fun a dog park visit will be “the day after tomorrow.” Humans can understand these ideas easily, but they do so through, and only through, their linguistically-constituted concept of “the world.” Even this might seem disappointing, however, since on a critical reading all it really establishes is that other creatures cannot grasp the world in itself any better than we can: animals because they cannot conceive it at all, and we because we must conceive the world through language. But Gadamer insists that we think about language yet more closely: [W]hatever language we use, we never succeed in seeing anything but an ever more extended aspect, a “view” of the world. Those views of the world are not relative in the sense that one could oppose them to the “world in itself” as if the right view ... could discover it [the world] in its being-in-itself. No one doubts that the world can exist without man and perhaps will do so. This is part of the meaning in which every human, linguistically constituted view of the world lives. In every worldview the world-in-itself is intended29

The world “in itself ” is precisely what we bring into view— through language. As Gadamer argues, language has a speculative structure: like a mirror, its very function is to disappear so that the world can emerge among us. A dirty or poorly polished mirror fails just to the extent that it, rather than our reflection, becomes thematic. But most of the time language does not draw attention to itself at all; it reveals not itself, but the world we intend. Gadamer’s general claim about the power of language to reveal the world appears reassuring, but we are not out of the woods yet. For the skeptical challenge seems to follow immediately if we think a little more concretely. After all, if the world

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does come into view in language, why do different cultures conceive it in such different ways? Gadamer’s answer is threefold: First, language is speculative not only in its disappearance, but also in intending a whole that it cannot express all at once. Just because every attempt to grasp the world takes place using finite means, every language involves an interpretation of the world: as it brings some things into view, other things recede. Over-resonance is likely, and if we fail to recognize that we can quickly fall into error. Moreover because language only functions if the meaning of most individual concepts remains consistent over time, the over-resonance embodied in a particular language is relatively persistent. But Gadamer’s second point brings us closer to his meaning: if we reflect on experience closely, he argues, we discover that the most important experiences are negative ones—the ones that overturn our expectations—and in the light of such new experiences we can gradually rework old concepts and develop new ones that more adequately capture the world of our experience.30 In this sense, we are continually in dialogue with the natural world. As with the written texts Plato discusses, the natural world is vulnerable to misapprehension, but eventually nature— like a misunderstood text we are still puzzling over—will pull us up short. We understand nature through language, intending to see it as it is “in itself ”—and precisely the flexibility of language allows us to recognize when the world violates, and thus demands that we modify, our linguistically-constituted expectations. Thus if we always begin with a particular view of the world, we are never trapped in it. For language not only inclines us toward a particular set of expectations, but gives us the capacity to recognize and modify our view when those expectations have not been met.31 It is his third point, however, that captures Gadamer’s intent most clearly. He rejects the notion of language as never quite grasping the world, but he does not claim that it offers a perfect

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representation either. Rather, Gadamer repudiates the assumption common to both these notions, that human beings can meaningfully talk about the world as if it exists apart from our representation of it in language. Language is not an imperfect tool, but it is not a perfect tool either; rather, language is not a tool at all, but is itself the ground of the relation which always already exists between us and the world. In sum, language is both the record and the continual renewal of a dialogue with nature that we not only have, but are. References Callicott, J. Baird. “Can a Theory of Moral Sentiments Support a Genuinely Normative Environmental Ethic?” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 35 (1992) 183-198. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology, Corrected Edition. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, [1976] 1997. Descartes, René. Discourse on Method 3rd Ed. Trans. Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998. Friedländer, Paul. Plato, Vol. 1: An Introduction, 2nd Ed. Trans. Hans Meyerhoff. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Rev. 2nd Ed.. Trans. W. Glen-Doepel. Ed. J. Cumming and G. Barden. Rev. J. Weinsheimer and D. G. Marshall. New York: Crossroads, 1991. Habermas, Jürgen. Justification and Application. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1993. Hayward, Tim. “Anthropocentrism: A Misunderstood Problem.” Environmental Values 6 (1997) 49-63. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics. Trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1991. _____. “Letter on Humanism.” In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrel Krell. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993, 217-265. Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of Pure Reason, Rev. 2nd Ed. Trans. Norman Kemp Smith. New York: [Macmillan, 1929; Rev. 1933] St. Martin’s, 1965. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books,

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1990. Lewis, C. S. The Chronicles of Narnia. New York: Harper Collins, 1991. Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica. New York: Dover Publications, 2004. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. In The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Penguin Classics, 1994. Plato. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns. New York: Random House, 1961. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice, Rev. Ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. Los Angles: University of California Press, 2004. Rolston III, Holmes. “Naturalizing Values: Organisms and Species.” In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application 5th Ed., ed. Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman. New York: Wadsworth, 2007. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation: A new Ethic for our Treatment of Animals. London: Cape, 1976. Vogel, Steven. “Nature as Origin and Difference.” Philosophy Today 42 (SPEP Supplement) (1998) 169-181. _____. “The Silence of Nature,” 149. Environmental Values, 15(2) (2006) 145-171. Warren, Mary Anne. “A Critique of Regan’s Animal Rights Theory.” In Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application 5th Ed., ed. Louis P. Pojman and Paul Pojman. New York: Wadsworth, 2007.

Endnotes 1. This essay develops ideas first presented at the International Association for Environmental Philosophy’s conference “Thinking Through Nature: Philosophy for an Endangered World” in Eugene, OR, June 2008. My thanks to participants for feedback then and since. 2. I am partial, e.g., to the efforts of Holmes Rolston III to recognize the independent value of the non-human world, but as will appear below I am persuaded by Tim Hayward’s argument that a degree of epistemic anthropocentrism is ineradicable whenever humans attempt

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to discern non-human values. Any contending non-human value must look plausible as a value to us. 3. This is, of course, the revolutionary claim of René Descartes, a claim pursued in different versions throughout the modern period, and in mitigated versions even now. See the four rules he first publishes in his Discourse on the Method, Part 2. 4. Here again, I am thinking primarily of Holmes Rolston III, though Peter Singer, Tom Regan, Aldo Leopold, and some ecofeminists must all be committed to some version of this thesis. The deep commitment to a separation between facts and values that emerged with Hume, was made canonical in the early critical Kant, and eventually became the dogmatic basis of G. E. Moore’s attack on the “naturalistic fallacy” is what makes this strategy appear so problematic in the modern context. 5. J. Baird Callicott takes this line. 6. E.g., in Jürgen Habermas, Justification and Application, 198. 7. One quick example of the pattern: Rawls presumes that those in the original position will be risk-minimizers, preferring to avoid a system that allowed great harm even if it might also allow some great benefit. This assumption makes it easy to rule out slavery, and it may in fact be true that many people would adopt that assumption for just that reason. But while a low tolerance for risk may characterize many people, it is far from obvious that it is universal and thus that this assumption can be adopted without reservation. My claim is not that we should be prepared to accept greater risks; I just offer it as an example of the way that apparently “rational” preferences may be parochial. 8. Though I make this objection against the social contract tradition in particular, I take it to hold against many modern attempts to discern the interests of nonhuman beings. Singer’s utilitarianism suggests that we take into account non-human suffering. Of course weighing utility across different individuals’ experiences and expectations is already extremely difficult to do within the human community; how much more so when we’re faced with different sorts of psyches and bodies and no possible way of confirming our guesses through discussion? And while Tom Regan is rightly wary of the social contract tradition’s use of rationality or language to restrict our moral obligations to those who can participate in negotiations (with some, like children and the mentally handicapped, arbitrarily included), his account of animals as “subjects of a life” is, as Mary Anne Warren has persuasively argued, vague not just at the border but virtually all the way down.

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9. Nietzsche makes this charge most colorfully in Thus Spake Zara­ thustra, though he develops the theme in a different way in Twilight of the Idols and other works. 10. Plato, Phaedrus, 230e. 11. Beginning here, I will offer a reading of Plato that differs somewhat from the dominant modern, and even more from the dominant English language interpretations. It is not, however, original; and so while my conclusions should not be blamed on, I must acknowledge their inspiration in the work of two 20th century German readers: Paul Friedländer and Hans-Georg Gadamer. From Friedländer I draw the conviction that the dramatic, symbolic, and mythological aspects of Plato’s work are neither mere window dressing nor holdovers from a pre-rational age, but are rather essential to communicating an intention that could not be completely expressed in the mode of dialectic. Gadamer buttresses this conviction through his emphasis on the dialogical nature of our path to truth and through the philosophical faith—there is no more apt word—that he draws from Plato: i.e., that the logos that comes to presence among us can be apprehended through human logoi even though no one formulation can possibly exhaust its richness. Together, these interpreters de-emphasize the proto-Aristotelian essentialism of Plato in favor of an artistic and dramatic, but also essentially rational, approach to the truth. Since this interpretive approach may burst less literary, more linear and argument-centered expectations, it may seem that I have stretched the text—a danger of any interpretation, as the Phaedrus itself acknowledges. But given the close analogy Socrates draws between the madness of lovers, prophets, and philosophers, I hope my readers will postpone judgment long enough to determine whether this reading bears fruit in richer, more suggestive metaphors for our relationship to the natural world. For better metaphors are at least part of what we need. Modern philosophy has been focused (not to say fixated) on discovering a method for distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate beliefs by way of rational or empirical proofs. While that approach has generated a tremendously powerful empirical science, it discards the traditional Western metaphor for the order of nature—organism—and invokes a new founding metaphor of nature as machine. Machines always take their value from the ends intended by their creators or discovered by subsequent users, so absent a Creator, the mechanical metaphor generates the value problem that concerns us here: viz., that

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the world of nature only has the value we attribute to it. Heidegger’s argument that the will to enframe is at least as old as Plato is contentious, but he is certainly right that modern philosophy—which, after all, promised to make us “lords and masters of nature” (Descartes, Discourse on the Method, Part 6), and proceeded by “forcing nature to answer questions of reason’s own devising” (Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason B xiii)—culminates as the will to power. And that, in turn, means modern philosophy is essentially anthropocentric. Without either God or God-substitutes to de-center us, the world appears only in the light of our concerns, and thus as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra aptly observes, “in the end, one experiences only oneself ” (“The Wanderer,” in Thus Spake Zarathustra, Part III, section 45). 12. Excepting the Laws, which takes place among three people walking along a road in Crete. There, however, the main character is not explicitly identified as Socrates, but rather more ambiguously as “the Athenian.” 13. This is the main point of the well-known argument for the tripartite nature of the soul (Republic 439b-41b). Note the consequence: pace standard forms of dualism (and in this respect like St. Paul, who takes the spiritual vices of “jealousy, anger, [and] selfishness” as chief among the “sins of the flesh”—e.g. Gal 5:19-21), Plato regards the goal not as the mastery of the physical body understood as the enemy of spiritual growth, but rather as the proper integration and ordering of the different “parts” or aspects of our souls. 14. Plato, Republic 401d. 15. Plato, Symposium, 216e-17b. 16. As Joe Lawrence pointed out to me after I presented the first version of this essay, Socrates appears to know this place better than he lets on: thus, having appeared to follow Phaedrus to a place of his choosing, it turns out to be Socrates who knows that “Boreas seized Orithyia from the river” not right there but “about a quarter of a mile lower down, where you cross to the sanctuary of Agra; there is, I believe, an altar dedicated to Boreas close by” (Phaedrus 229c). Socrates, in other words, knows this beautiful area outside town well. And surely I am not the only one who hears a touch of irony in Socrates’ comment that he is “a lover of learning, and trees and open country will not teach [him] anything, whereas men in the town do” (230e). If the men in the town teach mostly by misdirection—by claiming to know what they

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do not—we must at least wonder whether, on the other hand, trees and open country teach more than initially appears. 17. This, on one common view, is the origin of “ontotheology.” Yet even here, I would protest that postmodern worries are both unfair and amazingly unselfconscious. There are of course obvious ways in which the marriage of ontology with theology has failed by extending positive theology much further than the biblical tradition, at least, with its messy collection of books, histories, genealogies, poetry and parables, might have legitimately licensed. But to suggest that either Jewish or Christian traditions were bound to “betray the earth” in favor of heaven simply misreads the biblical record, which begins with creation and the affirmation of the material world as “very good” and hence eminently worthy of protection and stewardship. The point of the Torah’s frequent references to “the inheritance” of the promised land was to remind the Israelis that the land was not theirs to do with as they would, but theirs to protect and pass on as a trust from God. It has thus its own inherent and inviolable value. Moreover these considerations only briefly suggest grounds for a reply; the full account would require exploring Augustine’s adaptation of Plato’s argument— one even more necessary where the natural world has the dignity of divine creation—that we properly love the world only when we love it in the right degree. The parent with a “favorite” child as also the spouse who ignores his partner’s needs “for the sake of the children” both love poorly in part because their love is disordered. And postmodern worries about the betrayal of the earth by ontotheology are not only unfair but amazingly unselfconscious. The biblical tradition holds humans to account for their treatment of the earth because it was created and called “good” by God before humans arrived on the scene. Such a responsibility is inconceivable on the postmodern paradigm, as Derrida, by contrast and to his credit, frankly admits. Absent any divine ground, we must concede the violence of the word by which humanity determines the meaning and value of nature: “To name, to give names […] such is the originary violence of language which consists in inscribing within a difference.” To this writer at least, it is far from clear which tradition is most in danger of betraying the earth. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 112. 18. Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 245. 19. Plato, Phaedrus, 249d-51c.

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20. Plato, Phaedrus, 238d. 21. Plato, Phaedrus, 242b-d. 22. C. S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, 194. 23. E.g., Phaedo, 97d ff. 24. Tim Hayward, “Anthropocentrism: a Misunderstood Pro­ blem,” 56 25. Steven Vogel, “The Silence of Nature,” 149. 26. Steven Vogel’s article on the “silence of nature” is primarily directed against those who attempt to derive moral consequences directly from our putative dialogue with nature. While I do not here go that far, I do think we can retrieve the metaphor of dialogue—and do so by extending a point Vogel makes in another excellent essay. In “Nature as Origin and Difference,” Vogel suggests that we conceive “nature as practice”—i.e., that we abandon any falsely hypostatized opposition between humanity and nature in favor of beginning from our labor-mediated interaction with the natural world, an interaction that offers real insight into both human and non-human nature. I cannot take time to detail Vogel’s arguments, but will simply note that I take our linguistic constitution of nature to be one of the most fundamental ways in which we “work” on the world. As we will see below, Gadamer’s emphasis on language does not preclude non-linguistic experiences of the world, but language plays a special role in that only through language can these non-linguistic experiences can be grasped and understood. 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 443. 28. Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, 192-94. 29. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 447. 30. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 341-62. 31. As always, a concrete example helps. The materialistic view of the non-human world we have been exploring so extensively through modern science over the last three centuries has revealed much, but we are now coming to recognize the shortcomings of that metaphor. Language has been essential not only to articulating nature as machine, but also to showing its limits.

22 Digital Image and Cinema by Alberto J. L. Carrillo Canán

Philosophy, University BUAP Puebla Society for Phenomenology and Media [email protected]

May Zindel

Philosophy, University BUAP Puebla Society for Phenomenology and Media [email protected] ABSTRACT: The new Hollywood digital cinema centered in spectacularity on the basis of computer graphics, has driven the filmmakers to work with tecnoscientific teams concentrating in the total control of the image and it is just the predominance of the image that tends to simplify the cinematographic plots. This simplification seems to reject the old idea that cinema is “about telling stories through images,” instead it emancipates the image from the narrative. This goes hand in hand with a new sensibility that disregards the narrative and is centered in entertainment, regardless of the complaints made by intellectuals. With this, the new digital spectacular cinema reopens under new conditions a fundamental poetological polemic that had already a background in the debate about abstract painting and figurative painting: what are the specific possibilities of each media.

Introduction The dominant view about cinema is that it is about telling stories by means of images. The role of script in cinema seems to confirm such view, and the poetics of cinema has been strongly oriented according to literary criteria. Nevertheless, digital PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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technologies seem to question the accustomed concept of cinema. Such technologies, extensively exploited by the American film industry, seem to reduce cinema to spectacular and arresting visual effects, so that the plot increasingly loses importance. Typical Hollywood productions have plots, which seem to be irrelevant, and such films consist of spectacular sequences. In those sequences time loses importance as the dimension of a meaningful event and it becomes the dimension of a spectacular one. Digital image processing in cinema strongly fosters this shift from the meaningful to the mere spectacular, but with this shift imagery turns out to be the real nature of cinema. Imagery as such, as Lessing noted in his Laokoon, lies in the simultaneous or synchronic and is out of the temporal sequence. In other words, in discarding meaningful sequences, the increasingly spectacular character of cinematic images tends to flatten cinematic time. We could call this phenomenon the digital compression of cinematic time, a compression fostering expressive pla­ narity in cinema. Could we now say that cinematic time is essentially flat and any attempt to tell stories through or in cinema is a mistake concerning the nature of the medium as an imaginal one? Does this imply that cinema is basically spectacular? The aim of this presentation is to briefly address such questions. I. The Mosaic or Flat Character of Cinema in General The most obvious difference of film as compared with photography is the so-called “moving-image.” In remembering Lessing’s distinction in his Laokoon between painting and literature on the basis that the elements of painting are juxtaposed, whereas the elements of narrative are successive, cinema looks indeed as seemingly hybrid. That appears quite clear in expressions like “motion pictures” or “time based medium.” No wonder then that most cinema theories focus on time. But time or succession, as Lessing states, is the medium of literature, so, theories

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of cinema stressing time, tend to strongly rely on literary criteria. Nevertheless, the rise of computer animated graphics and, in general, the digital processing of images seems to create a quite new situation, practically and, thus, theoretically. Nowadays there is a new film genre, a major one, to which these movies belong: War of the Worlds (2005), The Island (2005), Mission: Impossible III (2006), Spiderman 3 (2007), 300 (2007), Die Hard (2007) and Transformers (2007). Arresting, impressive visual effects and mostly overall sustained spectacularity characterize movies of this kind. In fact such a genre is becoming the indisputable majority of the so-called blockbusters and constitute the big-budget Hollywood product. They are the most important part of the cinematic entertainment industry. Such movies do really have a plot, but it is either quite simple or it is completely irrelevant in the end. Still images, even the spectacular ones, are literally flat. Lessing’s criterion is true of them: their elements are merely juxtaposed; they contain absolutely no narrative. The spectacular movie sequences, on the other hand are, to be sure, sequences, but their narrative content plays almost no role. They are a kind of “cultural content” (Lash, 68), which, as Scott Lash points out, “... leaves no time for reflection ...” Lash, 18). This must be stressed when assessing the nature of the new spectacular movie genre. Spectacular movie sequences are so arresting that the plot becomes irrelevant, no matter how intricate it may be. Let us suppose that the plot of the film is a complicated and subtle one. At any rate, the complexity of cinematic plot fades as compared to literary narrative in general. Furthermore, the complexity of literary narrative demands a special kind of public, a public that under the fast changing conditions of the industrial and urban life vanishes. Poetry, literary narrative and scientific treatises demand, as Scott Lash states, “... conditions of reflection necessary for engaging with ...” (Lash, 74) them. Yet, already Benjamin thematized the changed “receptiveness” (Benjamin, 185) for

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poetry by the middle of the 19th Century. He blamed the new industrial and urban life for weakening “willpower” (Benjamin, 185), “capacity of concentration” (Benjamin, 185) and “interest” (Benjamin, 185) necessary for engagement with “lyrical poetry” (Benjamin, 185). According to Benjamin, “... art demands concentration [Sammlung] from the beholder.” (Benjamin, 166). But just the rapid new urban life (Benjamin, 198) generated the need for “mass dissipation” (Benjamin, 166), the business of the so-called entertainment industry. Entertainment substitutes for reflection and concentration. Echoing Benjamin, Lash says that “[a] certain pace of movement ... is conducive to ... narratives .... Just about the right time for reflection” (Lash, 18). But new “[t]echnological forms of life” (Lash, 18) starting with industrialization “... are too fast for reflection and too fast for linearity ...” (Lash, 18) proper to narrative. Following the tread of Benjamin’s argumentation, the new social life generates a kind of “experience modified in its structure” (Benjamin, 186). The change can be exemplified by the newspaper. It rapidly displaced books to become the most widespread reading material, but the “principles of newspaper information” (Benjamin, 188) are, Benjamin points out, “newness, brevity, understandability, and, above all, disconnectedness of the individual news of each other” (Benjamin, 188).1 Interesting here is that McLuhan considers the newspaper as having a “mosaic” structure; such a structure is “discontinuous, abrupt, and multileveled” (McLuhan, Laws, 55). McLuhan stresses the “two–dimensional” (McLuhan, Laws, 55) character of the “mosaic form” (McLuhan, Understanding, 334). But, remember Lessing, two-dimensionality or flatness is proper to images and just the contrary to narrative. In other words, the incoherence and disconnectedness of news make of the newspaper something more like an image than a discourse or narrative. The predominance of newspaper over books is in this sense a regress to imaginal, or as McLuhan calls them, “pre-literate” (McLuhan,

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Global, 11) conditions of communication. But the newspaper is by no means an isolated phenomenon. As is generally known, Benjamin takes cinema as the paradigmatic medium evincing the modified structure of experience in the new, fast urban life. Benjamin compares the canvas with the cinematic screen, and says that the canvas “... invites the beholder to contemplation; he can abandon himself to the flow of his own associations. In front of the cinematic image he cannot do that. As soon as he looks at it, it has already changed. It cannot be locked into its position.” (Benjamin, 164) Obviously, the flow of cinematic images beats by far the “brevity” (Benjamin, 188) proper to news. A little bit later Benjamin quotes Duhamel, who says: “I cannot anymore think what I want. The moving images take the place of my thoughts ...” (Benjamin, 164), and Benjamin goes on noticing that “... indeed, the change of images breaks at once the beholder’s flow of associations” (Benjamin, 164). The point is not only the fast changing images, but also their relationship with each other. The image created by the painter is, says Benjamin, “... a whole image, whereas the cameraman’s image is manifoldly fragmented ...” (Benjamin, 158). This is a kind of fragmentation that compared with the total character of a painting reminds us of the “mosaic form” of newspaper (McLuhan) or of the “disconnectedness” of the individual news. In this sense, and comparing now with theatrical performance, Benjamin says, that “[c]ompetent observers have already noted that in cinematographic performance ‘the best impression is mostly achieved when acting is reduced to a minimum ...’” (Benjamin, 152). In fact, “[the theatrical actor on stage puts himself in a role. That is forbidden for the cinematographic actor. His achievement is definitely not a unitary one, but it is composed by many isolated achievements” (Benjamin, 153). In other words, as compared with the theatrical performance, the cinematographic one is affected by “disconnectedness” (Benjamin, 188) as news

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items are disconnected from each other as compared with the content of a book. Indeed, cinematographic montage shows in principle the traits of that what McLuhan calls “mosaic form,” namely, out of necessity it is “discontinuous, abrupt, and multileveled.” Due to montage, cinematographic performance is in principle nothing but a mere juxtaposition (remember Lessing again) of more or less heterogeneous elements. Cinema itself is, from this point of view, flat in spite of its obvious temporal dimension, that is, the degree of complexity shown by its narrative elements does not matter. II. The Mosaic Character of Cinema under Digital Conditions Benjamin as well as McLuhan keenly thematized the effects of fast technological forms on perception and consciousness, but both certainly never faced the deep changes brought about by digitalization. If under industrial and urban conditions, proper to that what McLuhan called the “mechanical age” (McLuhan, Global, 9), the “pace of movement” (Lash, 19) was already “too fast for reflection” (Lash, 19) substituting entertainment for reflection, under digital conditions the situation becomes much more apparent. Following Benjamin and McLuhan, Scott Lash stresses the speeding-up of communication and life due to radio, telegraph, telephone, television, and, above all, the computer (Lash, 68). Lash focuses on the “duration” (Lash, 68) of their “cultural contents” (Lash, 69). It is in principle “ephemeral” (Lash, 72), and the mark of such “ephemerality” (Lash, 72) is just that it is accessed mainly “in real time” (Lash, 69). This idea can be reformulated in McLuhanian terms. The “message” of such media is not their “cultural content”—what is seen, said, heard, written or read by means of them—but their “... power ... to reshape any lives that they touch” (McLuhan, Understanding, 52). The reshaping power of such media is determined by their real time

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nature. Real time speeds up communication and in such a “... speed[ing]-up, culture becomes ephemeral. The monument lasts for centuries, if not millennia, the novel for generations; a scholarly book a decade. The newspaper article has value for just a day. The pyramids took centuries to build; the scholarly discourse of a treatise—entailing reflection—takes, say, four years. The newspaper report on the latest soccer match must be written and wired within 90 minutes after the match. This leaves no time for reflection ...” (Lash, 18). But the “ephemerality” in point correlates with a reshaped structure of experience. As Lash puts it, “[p]reviously the media content was narrative or lyric and surely a ‘deep meaning’… The question is whether this new content [the cultural content accessed ‘in real time’] , ... can yield existential meaning, as once did epic poem or novel ... clearly it cannot” (Lash, 70). Communication “in real time” is the most salient side of the “... short duration culture [but it] started of course with the newspaper. Its printed news.2 ... Newspapers are connected with time, with instantaneity of a sort” (Lash, 73). Real time is the radical expression of a cultural content, which “... not only does not endure, but is constantly new. Indeed the content is so new that there is no time for re-presentation ...” (Lash, 73), that is, for “reflection” (Lash, 19). But real time is the extreme case of that “ephemerality” already addressed by Benjamin in the case of newspaper as a medium weakening “concentration.” In general, technology such as “television, newspaper, and digital media— ... works not through discourse. It has no time for discoursing” (Lash, 74). Referring to such media Lash says that “[y]ou read them, just woken up, in the morning paper at the breakfast table; hear them while attending to the baby, on the six o’clock evening new; or listen to them struggling through a traffic jam on the way to work, on the car radio. You receive them under conditions of distraction and not under the conditions of reflection necessary for engaging with discursive argument.” (Lash, 74)

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Those media are just not “[d]iscursive media, like the academic article or book, [which] work through reflection and argument” (Lash, 74). The exposure to such media necessarily effects what McLuhan calls a “psychic training” (McLuhan, Understanding, 84) against “concentration” (Benjamin) and, especially, against “propositions, statements, organized in frameworks of concepts supported by legitimating argument” (Lash, 74). That is training against “narrative” and “discourse” (Lash). Like newspaper, cinema does not work “in real time”—neither much of TV content, nor recorded radio talks—but decisive here is the fast movement of disconnected image sequences. The result: “A movie like Lethal Weapon 4 … is viewable not through the concentrated ‘gaze’ [remember Benjamin about weakened concentration], but through the ‘glance’ under conditions of distraction” (Lash, 69). Both the “glance” as form of perception, and “distraction” (Lash, 69) as structure of consciousness are, certainly, the contrary to discursive reception through concentration and “legitimating argument” (Lash, 74). Furthermore, “[i]t is indeed the content of the information media that is ephemeral—whether in newspapers, on television, the Internet, telephony, or the branded products of fast-moving consumer goods.” (Lash, 72) Of course, even if the content is not accessed “in real time,” Hollywood’s blockbusters are paradigmatic of “branded ... fast-moving consumer goods” (Lash, 72) of the entertainment industry. Now we come back to the hypothesis that a particular movie can have a subtle and intricate narrative content. If that is the case, montage implies discontinuities and abrupt changes of many kinds, and, specially, different levels; film accuses thus the “mosaic form” thematized by McLuhan. Furthermore, the pace of images is always “... too fast for reflection and too fast for linearity ...” (Lash, 18) proper to narrative. But if that is already the case with film traditionally considered as narrative, the situation is much more clearer in the case of the latest, digital

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processed blockbusters. As John Belton stated it already in 2002, “c]omputer animated graphics have enabled filmmakers to realize fantasy in a way that was only dreamed of a few years ago” (Belton, 902). That was true already in 2002; it is clear that the newest blockbusters are more than ever before a mixture of “special effects and fantasy” (Belton, 906) based on computer-animated graphics. So, today it seems reasonable to think of a qualitative change in the status of montage: it is to a great extent—in some films completely—digital animation. Those montages constitute the arresting and spectacular short sequences enthralling millions of spectators all over the world, and it must be noticed that after a few days most people cannot narrate those films, but nevertheless they still remember many impressive images. A clear logic underlies such a situation. Digital filmmakers take the greatest care about images leading to the spectacular sequences. Their main task lies in totally controlling the image and this just means that the story loses importance as never before. In the age of digital imaging the story of a film is nothing more than an excuse for generating impressive computer graphics. We have already seen that according to Benjamin the image created by the painter is, “... a whole image, whereas the cameraman’s image is manifoldly fragmented ...” and Benjamin immediately goes on by saying that “... its fragments are put together in concordance with a new lawfulness [as compared with the elements of a painting]“ (Benjamin, 158). Under digital imaging the “new lawfulness” (Benjamin, 158) for composing the disconnected elements of montage is almost nothing more than newness and spectacularity. The very law for composing the cinematic “mosaic” under digital conditions is spectacularity and impressiveness, and in the extreme case this means presenting images of impossible content from an impossible point of view. That is both pure spectacularity and the most ambitious goal the digital filmmaker can have: the task of total image control. Narrative

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becomes a mere ghost. But that means that new digital cinema is essentially flat. Time as narrative dimension has no real role to play in it, but this flies in the face of most theories of cinema and raises again the problem of the poetics of cinema and brings us back to Lessing. Conclusion. Lessing and the Poetics of Digital Cinema In his Laokoon Lessing pointed out the radical difference between painting and literature on account of their temporal structures: painting implies synchrony or simultaneity of their elements, whereas literature relies on diachrony or temporal suc­ces­sion.3 Lessing’s trailblazing remark wiped out the traditional thesis ut pictura poiesis and the related idea of literature as “painting through words.” For the first time it became clear that there is no general poetics but that the poetics of an art depends on that art’s medium. On the other hand, the temporal element in cinema has lead to consider it a kind of narrative. Cinema has mainly been thought of as “telling stories through images.” But, if compared with narrative, proper cinema has never left “time for reflection” (Lash) modern cinema relies on impressive and spectacular computer graphics. Movies are not shorter than before, but new digital based cinema is not telling stories using images; it is mainly about imaging. Digital imaging compresses the temporal dimension of cinema and reduces it to spectacularity and newness, and, thus, to a quasi-flat or non-narrative medium. It could be that with help of computer graphics Hollywood has understood the real poetics of cinema. If this is true, McLuhan is right in saying that intellectuals, that is, literary trained people, strongly tend to misunderstand the nature of new media. They cannot understand their “mosaic form,” they cannot understand the structural flatness of new media. In particular they have misunderstood the flat nature of cinema. If intellectuals are not looking for entertainment but for “deep meaning,”

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they should not look at movies but they should read books and engage with sentences and arguments. They should not try to fight against the flat, superficial character of movies. They should take it easy and enjoy the superficial. The only refuge against the flat character of new media lies in writing and reading novels, treatises, and academic papers. References Belton, John, “Digital Cinema. A False Revolution,” in: Braudy, Leo and Cohen, Marshall, Film, Theory and Critcism, (1974), Oxford University Press, New York, 2004. Benjamin, Walter, Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften, (1955), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt, 1977. Lash, Scott, Critique of Information, Sage Publications, Ltd., London, 2002. Lessing, G.-E., Laokoon, Schriften zur Antiken Kunstgeschichte, in: Werke in Sechs Bänden, Band 5, Stauffacher- Publishers Ltd. Zurich, Regensburg, 1965. McLuhan, Marshall, and Powers, R. Bruce, The Global Village. Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989. McLuhan, Marshall, and McLuhan, Eric, Laws of Media. The New Science, (1988), University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1999. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media. The Extrensions of Man, (1964), MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1998.

Endnotes 1. Cursives inside a quotation are ours, when not otherwise stated. 2. Emphasis from Lash. 3. Lessing, G.-E., Laokoon, section XVII and section XX.

23 “Second Person” Perspectivity in Observing and Understanding Emotional Expression1 Scott D. Churchill

Department of Psychology, University of Dallas The Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry [email protected] ABSTRACT: This paper explores the “intentional layering” within an emotional experience that was examined in a qualitative research class devoted to “depth phenomenology.” The idea was to approach qualitative data as a starting point for delving more deeply into an experience than a research participant might originally have been able to go. We begin by examining the method of access by means of which the discovery of this “layering” was made. In remaining faithful to Husserl, we shall talk about doing phenomenology from within the intersubjective relation and shall reflect upon what, precisely, are the “affairs” to which Husserl invites us to return. A face is a center of human expression, the transparent envelope of the attitudes and desires of others, the place of manifestation, the barely material support for a multitude of intentions. —Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963, p. 167

Introduction It was Breuer and Freud (1895/2000) who taught us to look at emotional expressions as “symptoms” of deeper layers of experience, in their Studies on Hysteria. Husserl, who like Freud was PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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a student of Franz Brentano (1874/1973), was very much interested in grasping intentionality by means of a “coupling” [die Paarung] whereby we are able to experience the other’s positings through “a kind of reflection” [eine Art der Reflexion]. But to what sort of “reflection” was he referring? Merleau-Ponty (1964/1968) would be the one who would eventually clarify this process by referring to the “reversibilities of the flesh,” in which the other and I participate in the same structures of experience, allowing the other’s gestures to furnish my own intentions with a visible realization. Could it be that the “kind of reflection” Husserl was referring to might be something along the lines of an intercorporeal reflexivity? In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty would later talk about our capacity to perceive the body as the “surface of an inexhaustible depth” (1964/1968, p. 143)—after having earlier characterized perception itself as a “violent act” (1945/1962, p. 361), namely, “the act which makes us know existences” (1942/1963, p. 224). I. Zu den Sachen selbst! The battle cry of phenomenology was dramatically stated by Husserl (1900/1970) in his Logical Investigations (p.252): “We must get back zu den Sachen selbst—to the affairs of consciousness!” Here I am avoiding the common mistranslation of Sachen as “things”—if Husserl had wanted to say “things” he would certainly have cried out: Zu den Dingen selbst! But Husserl had no interest in things per se, insofar as things reside in the transcendent world, and the Sachen of which he spoke were the affairs of our lives—what matters to us as human beings. Among those “things” that matter to us the most are our emotions, and it is to our emotional lives that we will turn in the current paper. In a recent qualitative research seminar with graduate students in psychology, I asked the students to write descriptions of a recent emotional experience, and then we selected

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one of the descriptions for class analysis. Being ethically mindful, I asked the students not to write about anything that they would not feel comfortable sharing in class, in the event their protocol were selected for study. Furthermore, I gave them the option to change their mind if theirs were selected. In selecting a protocol that we would analyze in class over a period of weeks, I was looking for one that was articulate, written in simple, naïve language. I also wanted to select a description that would lend itself to deeper reflection, though not go so deep as to disturb or otherwise upset the student. In the case of the protocol selected, the student had been an undergraduate of mine with who I felt I had a comfortable relationship, and who I felt would trust me to be gentle. At the same time, I knew in advance that I would not take the analysis in class to its deepest underlying levels, as those dimensions would most likely reveal the participant at her most vulnerable; hence, I needed a description that would be likely to generate emotional undertones that would be instructive to the class in conducting research interviews, without having to bare the student to a breaking point. In thus selecting the protocol to be analyzed, I let myself be guided by previous experiences of class analyses, in which I had to be careful not to take the class all the way to the deepest possible levels, in order to protect the student. Likewise, in conducting the research interviews, I tried to follow the example of Freud in his wonderfully written case of “Katharina,” included in his Studies on Hysteria, in which he only hinted at the dimensions of Katharina’s experience that might have caused her too much shame or embarrassment. II. The Natural Attitude 2 As psychologists, and especially as researchers and clinicians, we function within what Husserl called “the natural attitude,” which amounts to a belief that the world “actually is” the way that

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it appears to me. As phenomenologists, we must rely upon the “evidence” of what is given to us in our own initial experience of the data within the natural attitude, to determine our assessment of the reality status (or lack thereof ) of what our patients or research participants tell us. In our employment of the phenomenological reduction, it is the other’s “believing” in the “actuality” of what they experience that we place into relief as a “production” of their own constitutive stance in the world: We remain in our own natural attitude as empirical researchers (as Alfred Schutz would remind us), “believing” (even if tempered with critical self-scrutiny) in the phenomenological “reality” of our participant’s experience—and furthermore, believing in the fidelity of our descriptions to the phenomena observed. It is from within this “natural standpoint” toward our own experience that we then engage in the phenomenological attitude with respect to the other’s experience. Hence it is what Giorgi (2009) has called a “partial reduction” when we take up Husserl (1925/1977)’s “psychological” phenomenological reduction, insofar as the researcher continues to “believe in” the “transcendent” psychological life of the other, even while subjecting it to reflective analysis. Thus it would be proper to say that, as empirical psychologists, we are engaging in a phenomenology from within the natural attitude; and yet, at the same time, we are conducting a phenomenology of the natural attitude,3 insofar as what is placed into critical perspective within the “intersubjective reduction” is the other’s believing in the production of their own consciousness. As Sartre observed in The Transcendence of the Ego, “the ego is “compromised” by what it produces.”4 Within the natural attitude, then, there is no critical self-reflection on the part of the other with regard to the other’s involvement in the world, and there is the belief that the world looks to everybody else in the same way that it looks to the other. It is precisely this believing (on their part) that we aim to suspend or take out of play in the

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conduct of phenomenological research when we are inquiring into others’ experiences. Elsewhere (Churchill, 1998, 2006; Churchill & Richer, 2000) I have discussed the meaning of intentionality as well as what an “intentional analysis” would represent. To put it most simply, we are looking for the way in which a particular content of consciousness is related to a particular stance or attitude of consciousness. “What” we see is always a function of “how” we are looking. To perform an intentional analysis requires that one focus upon the “content” of a moment of consciousness and then, having made this moment “one’s own” through empathy, to turn one’s attention back upon this vicariously experienced “presence” in such as way as to be able to thematize how it is that I am standing (even if only in my imaginative uptake of the subject’s experiential description) such that I see what I see? Husserl (1913/1982, 1925/1977, 1948/1973), for whom the expression “intentional analysis” meant the same thing as “phenomenological analysis,” saw this as an “analysis which pays systematic attention to the parallel aspects of intending act (noesis) and intended content (noema)” (Spiegelberg, 1982, p. 692). In the study of emotional experiences, we must place into relief the person’s believing in his or her interpretations of events in order to avoid making the the error of simply taking those descriptions at face value.5 For Husserl this meant taking the stance of “non-participating onlookers” (1928/1997, p. 222), and this is what we meant earlier by referring to a phenomenology of the natural attitude: a reflective analysis of emotional life teaches us that all emotions are sustained on the basis of one’s belief that the world (the other, the situation, the event, or the emotional context) really is the way one experiences it. The person experiencing anger, fear, or joy really believes in the hatefulness of the other that justifies one’s anger, the dangerousness of the situation that makes one afraid, or the perfection of the moment that makes one joyful.

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III. The “Second Person” Perspective In remaining faithful to Husserl, we shall talk about doing phenomenology from within the intersubjective relation. Although we cannot claim to gain direct access to the consciousness of the research participant, we can acknowledge our aptitude for actively engaging the experience of the other person so as to come to an understanding of the meanings of their experience. In recent reflections, I have considered this to be a “second person awareness” (Churchill 2006a, 2007).6 One of the things that the “second person” perspective affords us in qualitative research is the capacity to see beyond the moment being described by the research participant, to the broader Zusammenhang (or psychological nexus) of which this moment may represent just the surface. In cultivating such a sensitivity to meaning, the phenomenologist brings himself or herself to the encounter with the phenomenon in the mode of patiently “listening to” and “staying with” the self-disclosure revealed in the expressions of others. In slowing down and dwelling one becomes ever more open to what is being communicated. Heidegger writes: “Listening to … is Dasein’s existential way of Being-open as Being-with for Others. Indeed, hearing constitutes the primary and authentic way in which Dasein is open for its ownmost potentiality-for-Being” (1927/1962, p. 206, ellipsis in original). Heidegger informs us that through this listening a felt disposition gets shared—which is to say that, in listening, one finds oneself resonating with the Other.7 Husserl wrote in the second volume of his Ideas: “In order to establish a mutual relationship between myself and an other, in order to communicate something to him, a Bodily relation … must be instituted. … Body and soul form a genuine experiential unity …” (Husserl, 1952/1989, p. 176). (It is, in fact, this personal and bodily relation that is the very foundation for the trust between researcher and participant.) The ideal bodily relation here would be the face-to-face encounter, but in principle one can institute a bodily relation to the other even if this relation remains

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one-sided, as in the case of reading a self-report or listening to a recorded interview or watching a movie. What is essential is that the researcher be capable of “co-performing” the subject’s intentional acts, their lived bodily acts.8 Dilthey (1927/1977) called this process of understanding other people’s expressions of life Nacherleben, which means “re-experiencing,” “co-performing,” or “re-enacting” the other’s expressions in order to understand them.9 Husserl preferred the term Einfühlen: He writes, “in empathy I participate in the other’s positing” (1952/1989, p. 177). Husserl also described this as a “trading places.” This empathic “re-positioning” of oneself in someone else’s experience can of course be prone to certain kinds of potentially distorting influences: fusion or over-identification, projection, and sympathy. A heightened sense of critical awareness must therefore accompany this act so as to avoid any jumping to conclusions regarding the other’s experience. Ultimately, the intuitive talent of the phenomenological researcher is being able to move beyond what the participant says of their experience to what is revealed in the telling.10 One of our modes of access to this realm is found in the body language of the person who is speaking to us, which is one reason I prefer to conduct face-to-face research interviews with participants so that I can observe them while they are elaborating their original descriptions. Body language such as facial blushing, or flushing of the neck, tearing in the eyes, frowning, and so on, can indicate that there is something else that is not being stated at the moment.11 And thus one remains on the lookout for hints regarding deeper levels of experiencing that might at first not be accessible to the participant’s conscious self-disclosure. Thus we might find that a moment of anger may turn out to be a way of coping with an experience of betrayal, or hurt, or frustration; and this particular mode of the other’s being affected in one way or another may be just the tip of the iceberg of a whole host of affective experiences, which in turn point back to a fundamental vulnerability. It is this working one’s way reflectively from

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the surface to the depths that has led me to think of this particular variety of reflective analysis as a “depth phenomenology.” What we call the “meaning” of the anger thus may be its relationship to an underlying frustration or hurt that the anger might serve to mask. The exploration of meaning takes us precisely into these “depths” or underlying “layers” of the psyche. It is indeed what inspired Freud to invent his depth psychology, which sought out the meaning or “intent” of the symptom over and above its material cause (see especially his discussion in Dora, pp. 56-61). The question is whether we can as phenomenologists engage in similar exploration without resorting to speculation, but rather staying at the level of description? One of the questions that the reader might want to be asking as we turn here to the lived experience being reflected upon, is whether the unfolding of the layers of emotional experience are arrived at here by means of simple description, or whether there is a turn toward something that would more properly be called interpretation?12 There is often talk of a move toward interpretation in phenomenology—one which I embrace, when it comes to informally applying Heidegger’s notion of “retrieval” (Wiederholung) to the understanding of psychological narratives.13 And yet, I believe it possible to stay at the level of description in order to thematize intentionality. That is, description does not have to be limited to superficial statements of fact; rather, it can also embrace the “depths” of experience—without having to resort to the interpretive leaps one finds in the depth psychologies of Freud and Jung, or to the more formal philosophical “retrievals” of the sort Heidegger engages in when re-thinking the philosophies of Aristotle, Kant, or Nietzsche. Describing what we see appearing in the experience of the other—in the face of the other, in the bodily expression of the other—is something we are empowered to do as living subjects ourselves.14 Husserl’s notions of Ineinander and Verflechtung (intertwining, interlacing, entanglement—similar to “coupling”)

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make possible a kind of reflection (eine Art der Reflexion) that is accessible to us as witnesses of behavior, through a “second person” perspectivity. Again, what I mean by this is that when we are being addressed by the other—when we engage in face to face dialogue—we are able to both hear the words that are spoken, and see (and hear) the rest of the story on their face (and in their voice). So I suppose the real question is whether “the rest of the story” is something that we are “reading between the lines” (which would be interpretation) or something given to me more directly. IV. An Experience of Anger In order to present both the experience and the analysis here, I will offer a summary of the data while commenting on it along the way: A Reflective Analysis of Being-Angry15 Mary16 became angry when a co-worker, in the presence of other co-workers, described her as coy, and then another coworker interrupted and said that he felt she was insecure. He stated, “She lacks a lot of self-confidence and that makes her insecure.” Mary found herself smiling inwardly, agreeing with him “in the sense that what he said of me is how I in fact think others perceive me.” When questioned, Mary revealed that she thought this (about others probably perceiving her as insecure) not because anyone else had ever told her that before, “but because it’s how I experience myself.” So at first the second coworker’s description of Mary struck a chord in her because it was familiar—we see that the deeper resonance was not simply that others have said it before, but that at bottom, Mary also thought of herself as insecure. Thus, we might say that a deeper personal truth was being awakened by her co-worker’s off-hand remark. On her way home, Mary became “livid” as she replayed the event in her memory. When interviewed, Mary confessed that she had been initially “intrigued by him and thought he was semi-at-

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tractive” and described herself as “slightly interested” in him romantically. (Note the self-protective playing down of her own perceptions and feelings with the qualifying words “semi” and “slightly” which may have been chosen in light of the fact that she was giving this testimony in class to her peers. There was flushing of her face and a palpable blotching on her neck that occurred at times during her elaborations, and which signaled to me that there might have been some embarrassment for her in having felt initially attracted to this guy. We will return to this in a moment.) However, as things turned out, “there had been no interaction between us, other than work-related questions.” On the occasion when he blurted out her being insecure, Mary recalled, “he never looked me in the eye; and spoke of me as if I were not even in the room.” She stated, “I found myself feeling judged by someone I believed had no foundation or right to judge me.” Her description continues: I ended up calling my mom and yelling about how ridiculous this guy was and how I was enraged that he had the nerve to not only act as though he was some sort of authority on me and what it means to be me, but that he had even “treaded on my turf ” and brought up psychoanalysis! This was thus a violation on two levels: Not only did this guy not know me or anything about me beyond cursory observation, he even went so far as to justify his case with something that I take very seriously and have more than two semesters worth of experience in (in graduate school). The lack of consideration this guy had, and the assertions he was so willing to make based on cursory education, is so much what I think we students of psychology come to dislike about being in the field—[having to deal with] those who think they know everything after a couple of semesters. I think such people degrade the field much the way “ambulance chasers” do law, and only make our struggle for reliability all the more difficult…and yet all the more necessary.

What is interesting here is Mary’s continuing to “deflect” her co-worker’s poignant (if rude) criticism—and its revelation of a

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displeasing truth about Mary herself—by instead focusing on his general behavior as an illustration of how people “degrade the field of psychology,” and by implicitly co-opting her classmates into also becoming irritated with the guy for his insult to their shared interest in the field of psychology. Beneath this layer of Mary’s experience will be found precisely the degradation of herself that turned out to be the “deeper truth” of this experience. At this point one of her classmates asked her if his behavior was not just a violation but also possibly a revelation. She answered “Yes, I realized that someone else knew how I see and experience myself.” At this point I was thinking that it was possible Mary was staying focused on this “lesser evil” in order not to be made aware of the deeper offense: It was not only his dabbling in psychology that offended her (and about which she complained bitterly to her mom); but it was also, more profoundly and importantly, the deeper truth of his insensitive comment that really must have hurt her, deep down. We never drew attention to this in our questioning, and in fact always skirted around the issue as it was the one thing that none of the co-researchers felt comfortable to approach. Mary would later write in her own research report, “My body is my experienced reason for my insecurity.” Though this was never brought up during our class interviews, and remained the one unspoken dimension of her experience of this situation, it was nonetheless something which had become apparent to most in the room including Mary, who would later write that she was grateful for the compassionate stance taken by her interviewers (which included her classmates and the author). In her final paper, she revealed: “While I cannot hide my body, however, I do try to hide my insecurity. The new guy’s comment not only exposed my truth to others, but exposed the truth to me of my inability to hide what is so fundamentally a part of who I am and how I direct myself within my world.”

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Summary What we have so far revealed can be summarized thusly: 1. Mary feels insulted by a co-worker’s remark about her. 2. Mary focuses on whether the accusation is fair (given his little knowledge of her and his lack of background in psychology), even though she admits it striking a chord in her as being true. 3. The more she thinks about his lack of knowledge in psychology and the inappropriateness of his remark (given the social context), the more incensed she becomes. 4. The focus of her anger is upon the way such comments “degrade” the field of psychology. 5. Beneath this, Mary feels embarrassed simply to have been made the focus of attention at work. (“Nobody wants to be the center of attention.”) First the anger (at his poor representation of psychological insight and technique), and now the embarrassment, both serve to distract Mary form the underlying truth. In fact, these two “surface” emotions serve to mask her deeper hurt as a result of his remark, and the even deeper and more private shame regarding her body. 6. Mary’s concern for the degradation of the field of psychology both disguises and substitutes for her concern about being degraded herself by a significant other (significant here because of his original romantic appeal, even if later she would turn him into a “sour grape,” by her own admission in a follow-up interview). So beneath the surface concern regarding misrepresentation of the field of psychology lays the deeper one of shame and humiliation. 7. Mary’s sensitivity to having been degraded cannot be assuaged by re-assurances from her mother because the degradation resonates with Mary’s own self-perception: she admits finally, outside of the context of the research class seminars, in her final paper, “my body is my experienced reason for my insecurity. While I cannot hide my body, however, I do try to hide my insecurity.”

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Discussion In her own discussion of the experience of this situation, Mary had this to say: In describing the violation I felt in the face of the revealing of a truth about my being I referred to the violation as twofold. The primary offense is taken as the exposure I felt myself subjected to, and the secondary offense was that his justification for his assessment of my being insecure was based by him on the premise of psychoanalysis. Having been myself immersed in the field of psychology for several years, I grabbed hold of its use in this experience as justification for my exposure so as to forgo facing the truth of what was revealed. There is an implicit attempt made to resolve the personal violation by suggesting that the feelings involved could hold some general validity—that others would agree with the legitimacy of the feelings of having a personal element of one’s being exposed in a public environment.

Ironically, this was a “deflection”17 of the violation at both levels (pertaining to the field of psychology and to her bodily being) by means of a substitution of embarrassment for the deeper lived experience of hurt and shame. She went on to say this: In my experience, anger genuinely was a way to actively counter the passive feeling of totalization I felt in the face of the other. In the sense that my insecurity is something that I recognize as part of who I am, but not something I want revealed to others, the situation in which I found myself at work had in fact become too difficult to manage…. When I reflect on the experience now, I realize that my shouting at my mom about the violation I had just experienced was actually a reflection of the bursting forth of my body.

This, I believe, is significant because it represented an awareness now, on the part of Mary, that her body was more than an object of embarrassment; it was finally understood by her to be the vehicle of her subjectivity.

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In an epilogue to her research report, Mary wrote: As I think the described experience revealed, I do not do well with feeling exposed. I have a hard time allowing myself to be vulnerable to other people. I am always willing to listen and help others but only trust a very few people with my own troubles. I genuinely had no idea what direction the analysis of my experience would take, but in a way I knew that the issue of my insecurity, as the main trigger of my experience of anger, would be something I would need to be open to recognizing. … There are moments when I genuinely feel intelligent and competent and confident, and those are the impressions I want people to have of me. Those are the aspects of my self that I want to dominate over my insecurity. Having the truth of my being revealed to the people I work with was hard enough; having to admit that truth to my classmates was bound to be harder. What I eventually realized was that if I wanted to accomplish anything during the course, I would have to be honest. I would have to be willing to be vulnerable before my classmates and try to trust them with my self-understanding. … That brings me to what I believe are the therapeutic implications of this study. What I came to realize is that in order to understand ourselves we need to allow ourselves to be vulnerable. To foster this, we need to engage in analysis with someone we trust…. I think that it takes a special type of personal cultivation that theory alone cannot generate to be able to engage in the experience of another person such that you not only understand them, but they come to understand themselves.

As a 25 year old graduate student, Mary beautifully expressed something I had first read in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception thirty-five years earlier (in my first seminar with Amedeo Giorgi): Within my own situation, that of the [other] whom I am questioning makes its appearance and, in this bipolar pheno­ menon, I learn to know both myself and others (p. 338).18

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Concluding Remarks We have attempted to show here how a sensitivity to meaning, cultivated through an apprenticeship to phenomenology and an attunement to “second person perspectivity,” can enable us to plumb the depths of human experiencing while remaining faithful to the task of description. The deeper “layers of meaning” that were revealed in our class analysis of Mary’s experience of anger were made evident not so much in her written description of the incident, or even in her words during our interview clarifications, but rather in our attunement to emotional manifestations during her face-to-face communication with the various co-researchers. Sometimes the class would be able to observe, from a third person perspective, Mary’s pre-verbal emo­tional responses (visible in her face and countenance) as evoked while answering questions from one or another (“second person”) co-researchers. These embodied communications – as understood from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/1962) chapter on “The Body as Expression and Speech”—revealed to us through direct intuition19 an emotional layering of experience that unfolded one beneath the other. In attempting to talk about this phenomenon of “peeling back” the emotional layers of Mary’s experience, we appealed to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body—as well as to Heidegger’s notions of “bodying forth” [leiben] (1987/2001) and “shared foundedness” [Mitbefindlichkeit] (1927/1962) and Dilthey’s (1927/1977) Nacherleben (which I simply think of as resonating with the other, in place of the more awkward “re-experiencing”). We saw in the discussions of these phenomenologists a foundation for conducting research interviews in such a way as to tap into the wisdom of the body in both the other’s communication and our own perception of “latent” meanings. In the experience of dialogue, our bodies are alive to each other; we comport ourselves both physically and thoughtfully toward each other. Our speech refers us back always to the body, which we see “secreting in itself a

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‘significance’ which comes to it from nowhere, projecting that significance upon its material surroundings, and communicating it to other embodied subjects” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 197). The words refer back to the intentions of the person who is speaking, and these intentions are lived by the person in his world situation through his body. They are perceived and understood through my body (see Churchill, 2001, pp 41-43): The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others…. It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his….There is mutual confirmation between myself and others. (Merleau-Ponty, 2945/1962, p. 185)

Dialogue occurs between two beings who each have a body and language, “each drawing the other by invisible threads like those who hold the marionettes—making the other speak, think, and become what he is but never would have been by himself ” (Merleau-Ponty, 1960/1964, p. 19). Genuine phenomenology is indeed a practice—and never just an intellectual pursuit—by which one discovers and articulates one’s own immersion in a flux of experience that is the true source of all that we come to know and believe regarding the world. It consists in the realization that it is precisely one’s own presence to the world that is the illuminating source and matrix of all that we come to understand about life. It draws us back to the ways in which the world resonates within our experiencing (or at the very least, it points us in this direction). And it is this resonance with the world that we learn to trust as informing our reflections on what it is that surrounds us, and on how it is that we are challenged to comport ourselves vis a vis our surroundings. As phenomenological researchers, in bringing ourselves to the encounter with the other, we bring our bodies with us—and in doing so we are able to resonate not only intellectually but also empathically with our research participants” expressions,

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both verbal and nonverbal. In reflecting back upon our class exercise, we realize once more that what are important are not only our insights, but how we arrive at them. Hopefully the reader can participate in this appreciation of both the “what” and the “how” of our research endeavour—and, like Mary, come to a better understanding of not only her own experience, but also the experience of conducting research. References Austin, M. (2006). An encounter with myself: A phenomenological investigation of my experience of anger. Unpublished paper, University of Dallas. Breuer, J. & Freud, S. (2000). Studies on hysteria (J. Strachey, Trans.). New York: Basic Books. (Original work published 1893-1895) Brentano, F. (1973). Psychology from an empirical standpoint (A.C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, & L. L. McAlister, Trans.). New York: Humanities Press. (Original work published 1874) Churchill, S. D. (1998). The intentionality of psychodiagnostic seeing: A phenomenological investigation of clinical impression formation. In Ron Valle (Ed.) Phenomenological inquiry: Existential and transpersonal dimensions (pp. 175-207), New York: Plenum. Churchill, S. D. (2000a). Phenomenological psychology. In A. Kazdin (ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology: Volume 6 (pp 162-168), Oxford: American Psychological Association and the Oxford University Press Churchill, S. D. (2000b). Seeing through “self-deception” in narrative reports: Finding psychological truth in problematic data. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 31, 1, 44-62. Churchill, S.D. (2001). Intercorporeality, gestural communication, and the voices of silence: Towards a phenomenological ethology – Part Two. Somatics XIII, 2, 40-45. Churchill, S.D. (2006a). Encountering the animal other: Reflections on moments of empathic seeing. The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology: Special Issue on Methodology, Volume 6, August 2006, pp 1-13. http://www.ipjp.org/index.php?option=com_jdownloads&Itemid­ =25&task=view.download&cid=60

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Churchill, S.D. (2006b). Phenomenological analysis: Impression formation during a clinical assessment interview. In C.T. Fischer (Ed.) Qualitative Research Methods for Psychologists: Case Demonstrations (pp. 79-110). New York: Academic Press. Churchill, S.D. (2007). Experiencing the other within the we: Phenomenology with a bonobo. Chapter 5 in L. Embree and T. Nenon (Eds.), Phenomenology 2005 Vol. IV, Selected Essays from North America (pp. 147-170), Bucharest: Zeta Books. Churchill, S.D., Lowery, J.E., McNally, O., & Rao, A. (1998). The question of reliability in interpretive psychological research: A comparison of three phenomenologically-based protocol analyses. In R. Valle (Ed.), Phenomenological inquiry in psychology: Existential and transpersonal approaches (pp. 63-85), New York: Plenum. Churchill, S.D. & Richer, P. (2000). Phenomenology. In A. Kazdin (ed.), Encyclopedia of psychology Vol. 6 (pp. 168-173), Oxford: American Psychological Association and the Oxford University Press. Colaizzi, P. F. (1973). Reflection and research in psychology. Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt. Colaizzi, P. F. (1978). Psychological research as the phenomenologist views it. In R. S. Valle and M. King (Eds.), Existential-phenomenological alternatives for psychology (pp. 48-71), New York: Oxford University Press. Colaizzi, P.F. (2001). A note on “fundamental structures” thirty years later. Methods: A Journal for Human Science, 2001 Annual Edition, 7-10. Colaizzi, P.F. (2002). Kant and the problem of “intuition”. Methods: A Journal for Human Science, 2002 Annual Edition, 7-47. Dilthey, W. (1977). Ideas concerning a descriptive and analytical psychology (1894) (R. M. Zaner, Trans.). In W. Dilthey, Descriptive psychology and historical understanding. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published, 1924). Dilthey, W. (1977). The understanding of other persons and their expression of life. (K. L. Heiges, Trans.). In W. Dilthey, Descriptive psychology and historical understanding. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1927) Embree, L. (2006). Reflective analysis: A first introduction into phenomenological investigation. Bucharezt: Zeta Books. Fischer, W. F. (1974). On the phenomenological mode of researching “being anxious.” Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 4, 405-423.

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Fischer, W. F. (1978). An empirical-phenomenological investigation of being-anxious: An example of the meanings of being-emotional. In R. S. Valle and M. King (Eds.), Existential-phenomenological alternatives for psychology (pp. 166-181). New York: Oxford University Press. Fischer, W. F. (1985). Self-deception: An existential-phenomenological investigation into its essential meanings. In A. Giorgi (Ed.), Phenomenology and psychological research (pp. 118-154), Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Freud, S. (1963). Dora: A fragment of an analysis (P. Rieff, Ed.). New York: Collier. (Original work published 1905) Giorgi, A. (1985). Sketch of a psychological phenomenological method. In A. Giorgi (Ed.), Phenomenology and psychological research (pp 8-22), Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Giorgi, A. (1992). Description versus interpretation: Competing alternative strategies for qualitative research. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 23, 2, 119-135. Giorgi, A. (2000). The similarities and differences between descriptive and interpretative methods in scientific phenomenological psychology. In B. Gupta (Ed.), The empirical and the transcendental: A fusion of horizons (pp 61-75). New York: Rowan & Littlefield. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. MacQuarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927) Heidegger, M. (1972). Sein und Zeit (12th ed.). Tuebingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. (Original edition published 1927) Heidegger, M. (2001). Zollikon seminar: Protocols—conversations—letters (M. Boss, Ed. with F.Mayr & R. Askay, Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1987) Husserl, E. (1962). Ideas: General introduction to pure phenomenology (W. R. B. Gibson, Trans.). New York: Collier Books. (Original work published 1913) Husserl, E. (1965). Philosophy as rigorous science (Q. Lauer, Trans.). In E. Husserl, Phenomenology and the crisis of philosophy (pp. 71147), New York: Harper Torchbooks. (Original work published 1911) Husserl, E. (1970), Logical investigations (J.N. Findlay, Trans.). New York: Humanities Press. (Original work published 1900)

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Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1939) Husserl, E. (1973). Experience and judgment (J. S. Chur­chill and I. Ameriks, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern Universi­ty Press. (Original work published 1948) Husserl, E. (1977). Phenomenological psychology: Lectures, summer semester, 1925 (J. Scanlon, Trans.). Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. (Original work published 1962) Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the phenomenology of constitution (R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer, Trans.). Boston: Kluwer. (Original work written 1928 and published posthumously in 1952) Husserl, E. (1997). The Amsterdam lectures on phenomenological psychology (Palmer, R.E. Trans.). In Psychological and transcendental phenomenology and the confrontation with Heidegger (19271931) (Sheehan, T. & Palmer, R.E., Trans.). Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (Original lectures delivered in 1928) Husserl, E. (2006). The basic problems of phenomenology: From the lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911 (I. Farin & J.G.Hart, Trans.). Dordrecht: Springer. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1945) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The structure of behavior (A. Fisher, Trans.). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. (Original work written 1938 and published 1942) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Eye and mind (C. Dallery, Trans.). In M. Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of perception (pp 159-190, J. Edie, Ed.), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published, 1961) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The film and the new psychology (H.L. Dreyfus & P.A. Dreyfus, Trans.). In M. Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (pp. 48-59), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original lecture given 1945) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Signs (R. C. McCleary, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published 1960)

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Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The child’s relations with others (W. Cobb, Trans.). In M. Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of perception (pp. 96-155, J. Edie, Ed.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published, 1961) Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original work published, 1964) Natanson, M. (1973), Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of infinite tasks. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Sartre, J.-P. (1948). The emotions: Outline for a theory (B. Frechtman, Trans.). New York: Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1939) Sartre, J.-P. (1956). Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (H. Barnes, Trans.). New York: Washington Square Press. (Original work published 1943) Sartre, J.-P. (1970). “Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology” (J. P. Fell, Trans.). Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1, 4-5. (Original work published 1947) Sartre, J.-P. (1974). Faces (R. McCleary, Trans.). In M. Contat & M. Rydalka (Eds.), The writings of Jean-Paul Sartre (Volume 2): Selected prose (pp. 67-71), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. (Original essay published 1939). Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Spiegelberg, H. (1972) Phenomenology in psychology and psychiatry. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Spiegelberg, H. (1975). Doing phenomenology. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Spiegelberg, H. (1983), The phenomenological movement: A historical introduction (3rd Ed.), Boston: Martinus Nijhoff. Thompson, E. (Ed.). (2001). Between ourselves: Second-person issues in the study of consciousness. Charlottesville: Imprint Academic.

Endnotes 1. Paper presented at the 28th International Human Science Research Conference, Molde University College, Norway (June 17-20, 2009). Original title: Reflective Analysis of the “Layering” of Intentions within

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Emotional Experiences: Towards a “Depth Phenomenology”. The author wishes to thank his graduate assistant, Inge Saenz, for her careful reading of the almost final draft of this article, to which she made many excellent suggestions. 2. Here and in the next section, I take the liberty of expanding upon the more streamlined presentation of my original conference paper by means of some rather lengthy footnotes that create an imbalance between the first and second parts of my exposition, namely, the presentation of method and the presentation of findings. I’ve decided to use footnotes to elaborate methodological issues, so that the original flow of the paper can be preserved in the text itself. 3. Any apparent ambiguity here might be cleared up through reference to Husserl’s distinctions, made in his early work The Idea of Phenomenology (1907), according to which there are three reductions: the phenomenological, the eidetic, and the transcendental. When we say that our work is undertaken within the natural attitude, we mean simply that we are not employing the transcendental attitude toward our own experience as psychologists. When we go on to say that we are engaging in a phenomenology of the natural attitude, we mean that we are performing an intentional analysis of the other’s experience by means of the phenomenological and eidetic reductions in which we perform the epochē (bracketing the naturalistic prejudice as well as any potentially distorting presuppositions regarding the phenomenon) and then engage in an eidetic intuition of the other’s experience by attending to its intentional structure. 4. In his book on The Emotions, Sartre wrote: “consciousness does not limit itself to projecting affective signification upon the world around it. It lives the new world which it has just established. … it endures the qualities which behavior has set up” (p. 75). The full passage from The Transcendence of the Ego cited above in the text reads thusly: “This is why man is always a sorcerer for man. Indeed, this poetic connection of two passivities in which one creates the other spontaneously is the very foundation of … ‘participation.’ The ego which produces undergoes the reverberation of what it produces. The ego is ‘compromised’ by what it produces. Here a relation reverses itself. … The ego is in some way spellbound by this action, it ‘participates’ with it. Thus everything that the ego produces affects it. We must add: and only what it produces.” (1936/1957, p. 82)

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5. See Churchill (2000b) for a discussion of how self-deceptions become a part of qualitative data and how we might reckon with this contingency. 6. I am indebted to Evan Thompson’s (2001) book Between Ourselves: Second-Person Issues in the Study of Consciousness—a thought provoking collection of essays which first introduced the idea to me of using the expression “second person” in my own writings. I also wish to express gratitude to my friend the late Michael Mahoney for first bringing Thompson’s work to my attention. 7. In an ontological relationship that Heidegger (1927/1972) termed “Miteinandersein,” there is the possibility of “sharing” an affective attunement with the Other, leading to a deeper understanding of what is being revealed in our bodily being together—with an emphasis, we might add, on what is being revealed bodily: “Sie vollzieht die ‘Teilung’ der Mitbefindlichkeit und das Verständnisses des Mitseins.” (p. 162). 8. Even before his Ideen II, Husserl had much earlier opened the field of interpersonal experience to investigation. In his 1910-1911 Winter Lecture Course, Husserl introduced his ideas on empathy and intersubjectivity long before much of his writing on these topics began to appear in print in the mid-1920s. This shows that Husserl was concerned very early on with these themes; indeed, the appendices indicate that he referred to these lectures in subsequent years as his “lectures on empathy” or his “intersubjectivity lectures”. While he does not deliver as much as one might like in these directions, he at least sets the stage for the direction that others have taken with his work (most notably, Merleau-Ponty). His discussion here of a “double reduction”—and of the givenness of the experience of the other within one’s own reduced sphere of consciousness—contributes greatly to an English-speaking readership’s understanding of a thinker who is often associated exclusively with his Cartesian-friendly “egological reduction”. This text opens up the possibility for psychologists who would seek a foundation for a phenomenological inquiry into the experience of others. 9. Merleau-Ponty claimed that this reflective re-enacting could bring into visibility the opacity of the Other’s consciousness—that which remains embedded in the Other’s gesture. “It is thus necessary,” he writes in The Primacy of Perception, “that, in the perception of another, I find myself in relation to another ‘myself’, who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am, in relation to the same being that I am” (p. 17).

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10. Here I am drawing a hermeneutic principle from Heidegger’s Being and Time: the distinction between “what is said-in-the-talk” [das “Geredete”] and “what is talked about” [das Beredete] (1927/1962, p. 205). Heidegger writes: “What is talked about in talk is always ‘talked to’ in a definite regard and within certain limits” (p. 205). He continues: “Communication is never anything like a conveying of experiences … from the interior of one subject to the interior of another. Daseinwith is already essentially manifest in a co-state-of-mind and a counderstanding. … In talking, Dasein expresses itself … because as Being-in-the-world it is already ‘outside’ when it understands. What is expressed is precisely this Being-outside—that is to say the way in which one currently has a state of mind (mood)” (p. 205). 11. What I glean from this is that in “hearing” another’s speech one is also “reading” the other’s expressive body language (what Heidegger later would call “bodying forth” [leiben] in the seminars he conducted with Medard Boss for medical practitioners in the Swiss town of Zollikon—Heidegger, 1987/2001). We listen, then, to the body speak as well as to the words spoken. This is one of those places where I believe I may be willing to go “further” than others would in a “descriptive” phenomenology. However, I do not consider this move from what is literally “said in the talk” (the transcribed data itself ) to “what the talk is about” to necessarily bring us into the realm characterized by Giorgi (1992, 2000) as a more heavy handed or agenda-laden interpretation, such as a Freudian, or Jungian, or Laingian interpretation of someone’s experience. Having first learned phenomenology through Heidegger (1927/1962), it seems that I “always already” understand my own acts of “seeing” and “saying” as a taking up of the other’s words in such a way as to “move beyond” them towards a deeper “truth.” Thus it is a fact of our expressive life that we reveal our being-in-theworld—which is our very “transcendence” or comportment towards possibilities of meaning—in and through our bodies. Sartre writes: “The meaning of a face is to be visible transcendence. Everything else is of secondary importance…. There is no trait of the face which does not first receive its meaning from that primitive witchcraft we have called ‘transcendence.’” (Sartre, 1939/1074, p. 71) 12. See Giorgi (1992, 2000) for elaborate discussion of the distinction between descriptive versus hermeneutic methods.

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13. “Repeating [das Wiederholen] is … going back into the possibilities of the Dasein that has-been-there [in this or that situation]” (1927/1962, p. 437). He further refers to this repetition [die Wiederholung], in a rather elusive way, as making a “reciprocative rejoinder” (p. 438) to the speaker’s speech. My own interpretation of this text is that in our Mitbefindlichkeit with the other we are able to “reciprocate” the other’s self-presentation in our “rejoinders” (spontaneous comments and requests for clarification) that we interject at carefully chosen moments during a research interview. This does not have to imply bringing a theoretical frame of reference to bear on the other’s experience, but simply being sensitive to the meanings revealed to us in the other’s self-presentation. 14. The aforementioned reciprocity (see footnote 11) between Self and Other is constituted by the nature of the body as seer/seen, visible/ invisible. The Other’s gaze provides me with a mirror in which to see the surface of my interiority: “The mirrors ghost lies outside my body, and by the same token my own body’s ‘invisibility’ can invest the other bodies I see. Hence my body can assume segments derived from the body of another, just as my substance passes into them; man is the mirror for man” (Merleau-Ponty, 1961/1964, p. 168). As a mirror (“a sort of reflection” or “reversibility”) I re-enact the Other’s existence by vesting in the Other’s stance, gesture, expression a lived understanding of human intentions which is my presence to the world. Thus my own “substance” passes into the Other, and at the same time, I can assume postures, attitudes, and intentions, which I derive from my investment in the Other. The Other is a mirror for me in so far as he is given in perception, prior to my thinking of him as such, as another subjectivity born in the midst of my world. It is through the Other’s behavior, which occurs in my perceptual field, that an existence other than my own is first revealed to me. “I know unquestionably that that man over there sees, that my sensible world is also his, because I am present at his seeing, it is visible in his eyes’ grasp of the scene” (MerleauPonty, 1960/1964, p. 169). One’s face thus belongs to the world: “My outside completes itself in and through the sensible. Everything I have that is most secret goes into this visage, this face” (MerleauPonty, 1961/1964, p. 167). And finally, “A face is a center of human expression, the transparent envelope of the attitudes and desires of others, the place of manifestation, the barely material support for a multitude of intentions” (Merleau-Ponty, 1942/1963, p. 167). This

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last statement is the very foundation for the analysis undertaken in this study! 15. The class procedure of data analysis was adapted from Giorgi (2009) but also informed by Colaizzi (1973, 1978, 2001) and Fischer (1974, 1978)—as well as, more recently, Embree (2006). The author’s own synthesis of these sources is articulated in Churchill (1998, 2006) and Churchill, Lowery, McNally & Rao (1998). 16. I wish to thank my student Marilyn Austin for being brave enough to enter into a relationship of deep vulnerability in the face of her co-researchers, and for having the depth of character to be able to grow from the experience. Using the pseudonym “Mary” made it easier for the author to tread upon delicate dimensions of the research participant’s experience. She was a “co-researcher” in every sense intended by von Eckartsberg (1971) in his original use of this expression to designate the “subjects” of psychological research (who have not always been regarded in their full humanity in the history of psychological research). Entering into a dialogal relationship with the persons opening themselves to you in qualitative research interviews sometimes means finding it difficult to not go into too much personal detail in writing up one’s findings. A pseudonym can soften the impact of one’s own discoveries during the descriptive phase of research (which follows the observation and analysis phases). See Spiegelberg (1975 and 1983 pp. 681-715) for illuminating elaborations of the phases (intuiting, analyzing, describing) encountered in doing phenomenology. 17. One might say, more simply, that there was a “moving away” from the violation at both levels; though, I do not use the term “deflec­ tion” in any formal way but merely with intent to describe a process whereby one hides something from oneself. 18. Merleau-Ponty continues: “I am sitting before my subject and chatting with him; he is trying to describe to me what he ‘sees’ and what he ‘hears’; it is not a question of either taking him at his word, or sticking to my own point of view, but of making explicit my experience, and also his experience as it is conveyed to me in my own … and to understand one through the other.” (1945/1962, p. 338) 19. See Colaizzi (2002) for an illuminating discussion of the meaning of the term intuition in recent German philosophy.

24 Constructing a Curriculum of Place: Embedding Meaningful Movement in Mundane Activities for Children and Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by Maureen Connolly

[email protected] Department of Physical Education and Kinesiology, Brock University International Communicology Institute ABSTRACT: Embedding meaningful movement into mundane activities is a scholarly project based in over a decade of focused, systematic observations of children and youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Laban Movement Analysis (LMA) and semiotic phenomenology have been used in the development of a movement curriculum which honors the lived experiences and stressed embodiments of the children and youth with ASD. The blended analysis strategies are described and discussed as are their applications to pedagogy and theorizing.

Introduction Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) presents as a beast: a chimera defying ablist logic, medicalized intentionalities, and technocentric rationality. Negotiations—indeed, presumptions— about causality, means and ends, and thoroughgoing concordance are off the table; yet, ASD remains fascinating and compelling for many in the human sciences—especially education, family PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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services and health care—not only because of its seductiveness as a parallel existence, but also because of its seemingly impenetrable codes and systems of discourse. This paper offers a modest hermeneutic: movement, posture and gesture. Martha Graham claimed that movement never lies. It is a barometer telling the state of the soul’s weather for all who can see it. I propose a strategy for such seeing and a responsible pedagogic application following hard upon the fruits of this focused observation, an enactment of a phenomenological sensibility suggested by Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s call for attentive wonder. I will provide a brief overview of ASD and of Movement Education and Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), the frameworks used to guide the focused observations and subsequent descriptions of patterns of movement, posture and gesture. I will then present these patterns and further organize them to demonstrate their useful application in activity contexts. I also hope to discuss how the embedding works as a respectful and meaningful pedagogic strategy for children and youth with ASD. Of course, I must attend to what makes this a hermeneutic phenomenological undertaking and neither can I ignore its powerful semiotic phenomenological character. I will, therefore, describe how my project is phenomenological, hermeneutic, and semiotic. I believe it will also be helpful for me to contextualize it as a curriculum of place in the Freireian sense; that is, it is a curriculum based in a culture, i.e., the culture of ASD, and developed through a process of problematizing the existential situation of that culture, i.e., interrogating the typical ablist depictions of persons with ASD, their behaviours—or comportment—and their potential—or motility. I plan to rely heavily upon Richard Lanigan’s analytical structure: — articulate the normative logics (the norms and inscriptions of a culture on bodies); — describe how the body functions as a sign (docile, transgressive, hybrid) relative to the normative logics;

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— interpret how the sign of the body discloses larger systems or codes of comportment and expression and how human sciences ( like education, family services and health care) function within / against these larger systems of codes. Indeed, Lanigan’s structure provides the means by which I might clarify my threefold characterization. Articulating the normative logics compels me to place my focused observations of children and youth with ASD against the culturally inscribes expectations of the typically developing child (or youth). In my field of physical education, motor development tracking is an obsessively empirical project of categorizing and progression. Hence, “typical” is quite well documented in the realms of the moving, thinking and feeling child. In terms of comparison with typical same age peers, the cohort I have been observing for over a decade show considerable deficits. However, these deficits are seen as such over against the somewhat over-determined, productivist agendas undergirding the typicalities. More on that later. For now, suffice it to say that I needed an observation system that was as—or more—descriptive as it was evaluative (or diagnostic!), hence my decision to use LMA as my tool for observation, description and analysis. This commitment to description while bracketing the assumed typical situates me in a phenomenological sensibility in that it acknowledges my unavoidable immersion in the natural attitude while doing my best to minimize its normative influences on what I can and cannot, ought and ought not notice (i.e., “see”). I observed children and youth with ASD over time and across contexts using LMA as my conceptual framework. I also availed myself of photographic and video images of these children and youth to provide more focused attention than my welltrained albeit humanly limited eyes could bring in the moment. This illustrates the hermeneutic character of my project in that it is my body which offers her interpretive lenses on and renditions of the bodies of the children and youth with ASD whose bodies

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bear the signs of their lived experience of ASD across body, space, time, and relation and of these lived experiences over against and inscribed with Western, ablist cultural normative logics. LMA as a framework is yet another layer of hermeneutic as is the grid of developmental typicality deployed in the service of comparison. These hermeneutics allow me to notice normative logics and how they influence me and they also allow me to describe bodies as signs—docile, transgressive, and hybrid. Finally, they allow me to describe patterns of movement, posture, and gesture particular to this cohort of children and youth with ASD. Larger systems and codes work to reproduce and inscribe a convenient and (largely) uncontested natural attitude at a cultural level. I would argue that this occurs for a culture of ASD in much the same ways as it occurs for ablist Western culture—at unconscious and pre-conscious levels—but always already undeniably embodied. I choose to work with bodily comportment— movement, posture, gesture—as a creative-subversive carnality expressing and interrupting embodied signs: meanings, messages, and codes. This illustrates the semiotic character of my pro­ ject and invokes Lanigan’s third analytical component. I. Movement Education Movement Education is an approach to the body which influences teaching, learning, and attitude in physical/bodilybased programs. It is based on the premises that there are overarching “themes” of the moving body—body, space, quality, (effort), and relationship—which are always present, regardless of the movers, the context, or the activity. These “existential” movement themes allow the teacher to plan activities that are inclusive, i.e., which operate at a conceptual planning level. Examples might be “sending” as an activity rather than perfecting the mature pattern of the overhand throw, or “stability” rather than learning a handstand balance. This is not to say that overhand

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throwing and handstands do not happen in movement education settings—they most certainly do; but the emphasis is on understanding, contextualizing, developing, and refining movement patterns which are relevant and meaningful to the learners at their own skill levels; the emphasis is not on everyone in the class doing the same thing, at the same time, in the same way. A thematic or conceptual approach to designing and presenting tasks allows for an array of “correct” responses and the opportunity to refine movement patterns and broaden the movement repertoire. Movement Education also has high efficacy as a therapeutic intervention. Persons who experience bodily stress as a result of crisis, trauma, chronic pain, depression, or anxiety can learn muscle relaxation and repatterning techniques which allow them a modest to significant degree of autonomous management of their stress. In addition to relaxation and repatterning, Movement Profiles (developed out of systemic and prolonged observation/analysis) can identify dominant, underdeveloped, and absent components in a functional and expressive movement repertoire, thereby allowing for individualized programming in under-developed and absent areas of neuro-physiological and expressive development. This kind of Movement Education-based approach is especially powerful for individuals with developmental delays and/or dramatically idiosyncratic movements and behaviour habits. There is room for the “unusual” or “unmanageable” body habits or behaviours, possibilities for expanding beyond the existing habits and behaviours, and opportunities for neuromuscular integrative activities to assist in the challenges posed by delayed, missed, or under-resourced motor—as well as other developmental—milestones. Movement Education, with its strong links to concept understanding at the bodily, as well as language level, makes it an ideal complement for programs whose focus is on interactive/ relational development. The blending of cognitive,

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social, emotional, and bodily-based activities provides an environment that holds great promise for adaptation, resourcefulness, adventure and meaning making. II. ASD and Approaches to Managing it. The current definition of ASD, although refined and broadened over the years, remains remarkably consistent with the features observed in Kanner’s (1943) original group of children. Three general categories of behavioural distinctiveness are common to all or most persons who have ASD and are further refined through consideration of delays or atypical functioning in at least one of the following areas, with onset prior to age three years: 1) social interaction; 2) language development/ language as used in social communication; or 3) symbolic or imaginative play (e.g., restricted, repetitive, and stereotyped patterns of behaviour, interests, and activities). In addition, persons with ASD commonly have unusual responses to sensory stimuli that can be exaggerated or diminished and positive and negative (depending on context) (Talay-Ongan and Wood, 2000; Bellini, 2004; Canavera, Evans, Kleinpeter, Maccubin and Taga, 2005). Theories abound as to possible explanations for this complex way of being in the world; among the most widely consulted are Hobson’s (1991) affective developmental theory, Baron-Cohen’s (1988, 1989) Cognitive Theory of Mind Approach, and Josef Perner’s (1991) distinction between the theory of mind and the capacity for meta-representation. Each of these theories serves to illuminate and interrogate the others, and the research—and research debates—continue. In addition, investigation is ongoing regarding less explored psychological and neurological bases for ASD, and their possible intersections. Notable among these include Burnette, Charak, Meyer, Mundy, Sutton and Vaughan’s (2005) inquiry into weak central coherence and its relation to theory of mind and anxiety in autism; Dykens and Hodapp’s

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(2000) work on genetic causes of developmental disability and Shasty’s (2003) molecular genetics of autism spectrum. Contemporary debates fueled by MRI technologies also acknowledge the complexity of brain adaptation—i.e., are the changes noted in the various sites causing or responding to ASD? (Note: Asperger’s Syndrome and Pervasive Development Delay (PDD) might also be seen as being on the autism continuum; however, these particular and distinct manifestations will not be taken up in this paper since the cohort of participants who have been observed over time have had the diagnosis of “classic” autism). My examination of the literature has allowed me to develop immense respect for the persistence, creativity, and findings of cognitive, affective, perceptual, psychological, and neurological frameworks. It has also allowed me to notice the relative absence of investigation grounded in embodied (i.e., somatic or “lived body”) or semiotic approaches and frameworks. III. Management, Programming, and Intervention While there have been accounts of “recovery” from ASD, it is more likely than not that most people living with the condition work with strategies of management rather than cure. Chronic illness types of management models are the most prevalent, emphasizing support to the child, youth, or adult and family, “treatment” of or interventions into problematic characteristics and complications when possible, and intensive and ongoing efforts to improve the overall functional status of the person with ASD. Evidence suggests that such approaches (based on current knowledge of what works with ASD) can lead to improved functioning and adaptation in many cases and to improved family coping abilities and quality of life in most. According to the prevailing wisdom, the most important aspect of management, both in the home and in the educational environment, is implementation of an effective behavioural

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training program. The details of such programming vary with individual cases, but the specific techniques are drawn from behavioural modification principles of behavioural psychology. The general goal is to use specific types of reinforcement to encourage desirable behaviours and reduce undesirable behaviours. It generally is agreed that positive reinforcement, as opposed to punitive approaches, is most often effective at promoting improvement in skills. Categories of enablers used in behavioural approaches include consistent routines and schedules, knowledge of expectations, desensitization processes, rehearsal strategies, stimulus cues, environmental adaptations, augmentative communication, peer advocates, and motivational procedures. The greatest success occurs when these efforts are started at an early age and used consistently both in the home and in the school or program site(s). For most children and youth with ASD, educational management typically emphasizes development of social skills and communicative language, the long-term goal being a functional and comfortable placement in a least restrictive environment. Children with ASD generally do best when daily routine and schedule are highly predictable, and when they are well prepared for any variations in routine. The educational plan will also include helping the child gradually learn to accept greater levels of variation and unpredictability. Many specialized programs for the treatment of children with ASD have attempted to incorporate these principles. Several widely known and well document examples include Dunlop and Fox’s (1996) work on early intervention strategies, Krantz and McClannahan’s (1999) strategies for integration and transition, Barbara and Mitchell Kvacy’s (1994) excellent articulation of positive behavioural support approaches, and a number of institutionally based programs, including Division TEACCH developed by Schopher, Mesebov, and associates at the University of North Carolina, The Indiana Resource Centre for Autism,

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and Lovaas and associates in California. Other approaches include pharmacological management—increasingly seen as limited, nutritional and vitamin interventions, and more unconventional therapies such as facilitated communication and auditory integration training. In any approach that is taken, family support and advocacy—including stress and conflict management, respite, and counseling—are critical components. Most of the programming and interventions developed for persons with ASD is based in behavioural models, largely because behaviour is the most visible and unnerving manifestation of ASD. Aversion techniques—sometimes quite extreme, positive reinforcement strategies, altering the physical environment, and varying task variables are among the approaches employed to control, address, or eliminate undesirable behaviours and/or repetitive nonfunctional behaviours (Ghezzi, Williams and Carr, 1999; Koegel, Koegel and Dunlap, 1996; Carr, Reeve and Magito-McLaughlin, 1996). Physical activity and exercise programs are among more recent approaches to addressing behaviours of ASD (Kaufman, 1994; Levinson and Reid, 1993; Reed, Collier and Cauchon, 1991; Reid, Collier and Morin, 1983; Miller and Miller, 1989). These studies point to the significance of physical activity for reducing negative behaviours and improving quality of life. Other studies within the same area of concern focus more on the intensity and vigorousness of the activity (Elliot, Dobbin, Rose and Soper, 1994; Todd and Reid, 2006), and on embodied strategies of meaning for the person with ASD (Carr and Owen DeSchryver, 2007; Pan and Frey, 2006; Connolly and Craig, 2001). The curriculum I have developed considers intensity, as well as type and quality of movement. IV. Exploring Alternative Theoretical Frameworks Before providing the necessary thumbnail sketches of the several non-behavioural frameworks I employ, I must emphasize

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that the bodily-based understandings and interventions I have developed are offered as parallel and not oppositional discourses. I employ many of the features already described in my own programs, but they are facilitated, and, I believe, enhanced through bodily-based movement education programming. I work within a complex blending of a number of theoretical frameworks. I primarily identify as a semiotic phenomenologist, heavily influenced by the theoretical work of Maurice MerleauPonty (1962) and Richard Lanigan (1988) and the more applied semiotic phenomenological work of Tom Craig (1997, 1998, 2000) and Jackie Martinez (1999). I would be remiss if I did not also acknowledge the edited collection Semiotics and Disability (Rogers and Swadener, 2001) and especially the essay on the Miller Method by Christine Cook. I should also disclose my own ideology critique and post-colonial biases as well as my years of training in Laban-based movement education, overlaid upon three decades of training and practice within physical education and adapted physical activity with the neurological, biomechanical, and motor control frameworks therein. In its most naively articulated form, phenomenology is the study of lived experiences or meaning structures as they reveal themselves to an (embodied) consciousness. Phenomenologists attempt to suspend the “natural attitude” or already assumed “truths” or “givens” about the everyday world. With this bracketing technique (i.e., the placing of one’s so-called certainties in brackets) phenomenologists try to experience phenomena as if they had not previously been encountered or accounted for. In this way the eidetic features or meaning structures of phenomena which might be missed because of presumption or assumption can be encountered and perceived. A common method used within this reductive aspect of phenomenological analysis is free imaginative variations, whereby the understanding of phenomena is pushed to its extreme limits of existential possibility. This allows phenomenologists to consider features and interpretations which

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might be dismissed as preposterous by the constraints of more traditional approaches. Further, since consciousness is necessarily embodied, the phenomenological body is constructed as subject/object. This serves to highlight the tension between having and being a body (Lyon and Barbalet, 1994). In his book, Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (1962) developed a conception of human embodiment which attempted to transcend mind-body dualism. He grounded perception in the experienced and experiencing body. The world as perceived through the body was, for Merleau-Ponty, the ground level of all knowledge, for it is through the body that people gain access to the world. Human perception of everyday reality depends upon a “lived body” (Bendelow and Williams, 1995), that is, a body which simultaneously experiences and creates the world. This expresses the essential ambiguity of human embodiment as personal and impersonal, objective and subjective, social/cultural and natural. In the process of inquiry, phenomenologists work though a recursive and embodied process of description, reduction, and interpretation all the while taking into account the “Leib”—animated living through the experiential body (body for itself ) and “Körper,”—the objective exterior institutionalized body (the body in itself ). Invoking the semiotic aspect of semiotic phenomenology means locating the lived body within the codes and signs of a given culture. The body is located at the nexus of lived experience and culture, a portal, a site, an experience. Lanigan’s (1988) semiotic phenomenological analysis adds a cultural dimension to the aforementioned phenomenological process of description, reduction, and interpretation. It considers the norms and inscriptions of a culture, the body as sign (of political discourse) and the sign systems which hold these together. This analysis necessitates a semiotic and phenomenological examination of the contexts—large and small—which constitute culture and

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which constrain choices. Lanigan encourages strategies of choice of context as opposed to working only within contexts of choice (i.e., where the choices or interpretations are already predetermined by the context). This is an especially helpful framework for studying disability, pain, and other forms of stressed embodiment which typically are studied within already established contexts. It is also a more culturally and contingency sensitive approach which acknowledges the complex ways in which ASD, as a “carnal property” (Paterson and Hughes, 1999), is culturally produced and productive. Semiotic phenomenological approaches are politically postcolonial in their ideology critique and also resonate with infusion and inclusion based and cultural/social minority perspective approaches (Sherrill and DePauw, 1997; Sherrill, 1994; Sherrill and Williams, 1996). In addition, they allow for an interrogation of tokenistic and/or ablist driven efforts at integration at all costs, approaches which are coming under critique from an increased presence of Disability Studies scholars and theorists. Lived experience accounts are also considered significant data/ capta for semiotic phenomenological approaches, hence I have included insider accounts of ASD from Temple Grandin (1986, 1995), Donna Williams (Venables) (1992, 1995) Raun Kaufman (1994), and Amanda Baggs and Michelle Dawson (cited in Wolman, 2008), among others, in the development of my analysis and appreciation of ASD, and in the development of an embedded curriculum based in habits of body generated or disclosed by stressed embodiment. I have also included conversations with the children, youth, and adults with ASD with whom I have worked, especially over the past 10 years, and conversations with parents, workers, and consultants. And, because I am a movement educator, I cannot neglect the observations and analyses of movement I have conducted, again, particularly with my cohort of the past 10 years. I have chosen to suspend cultural norms and inscriptions regarding

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appropriate behaviour—especially as they relate to embodied expressions of lived experience characteristic of people with ASD—and have chosen to accept these embodied expressions as serious sites of somatic exploration and understanding. Approaching ASD this way has allowed me to ask embodied questions. For example, Grandin’s and Williams’ autobiographical writing reveals the intensely stressful experience of sensation from the perspective of the experiencer. Auditory, visual, and tactile sensations can be particularly distressing by virtue of how intensely they manifest for the person with ASD. Further, sensory integration is often a problem for persons with ASD, so there is the constant stress of managing sensation as separate corridors of existence, with the potential for each one to interfere with any or all of the others. I propose that this management of the taken for granted is exhausting and anxiety producing, but it is also “normal” or “familiar” for persons with ASD. Because this way of being in the world calls for an ongoing state of readiness (or bracing against the world), it is not surprising that many persons with ASD manifest extreme muscle tension (and possibly concomitant pain) but since this is also “normal” or “familiar” it is seldom spoken of by those who are verbal, and difficult to access in those who are non-verbal. Touch is a powerful modality for muscle tension assessment and treatment, but focused observation is equally helpful in locating tension sites. Once located, a tension site can be considered both a doorway and a pathway. It is a way into understanding expressions of distress, and it is a journey into very unfamiliar, usually deep, embodied experience. Sensation may also be amplified for persons with ASD. As a person with an extremely broad auditory range, I can testify to the distress I feel when I hear (or sense) certain sounds or pitches of sounds. Often others around me do not hear what I hear. This is a frequent event for persons with ASD. They “receive” across a remarkably broad sound and sight spectrum. When they cover their ears or pull at their ears, scream, or exhibit other signs

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of distress, I choose to believe it might be in response to an experience of intense and uncontrollable sensory stimulation. When one sensation becomes the focus of attention, it is also possible that it is also serving as filter for or respite from the chaos of non-integration of sensation. According to Grandin, Williams, Kaufmann, Vanden-Abeele (2001), and others, many persons with ASD have an over aroused or “wild” nervous system. When this is coupled with “high stim” environments (motion, smells, patterns, sounds, to name a few), one can almost predict levels of embodied overload that have to find an outlet (i.e., that will be processed for an embodied response appropriate to the internal “logic”). Working semiotically and phenomenologically has allowed me to ask questions such as: If I cannot feel my skin as a boundary between me and the world, what might I do to create some awareness of that boundary? What if this were a fluctuating experience? If I discovered strategies to make myself present to myself… might I repeat them? Or… The converse, if my skin feels everything, what might I do to protect myself? What surfaces or textures might be more soothing? Or… How do I process my body’s physiological responses to emotion? Or… How might I manage one activity when so much is happening simultaneously? How do I know what separates one experience from another? If I am working from the premise that the lived body is the site of meaning making, then many behaviours associated with ASD can be seen as embodied solutions to existential—neurological—sensory—motor trauma or crisis rather than outbursts of deliberate deviance. For example, if I do not know where my body ends and the world begins, one solution might be to use nudity against definite textures or in intense temperatures; another solution might

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be craving pressure, another might be self-biting. Furthermore, some sites of the body may be highly sensitized to stimulation in some persons with ASD (such as the mouth or fingertips, or head, or nose), so these sites may emerge as “first responses” to a “loss” of self. Highly sensitized skin feels even the slightest stimulation, so definite or soothing surfaces, textures, or contrasting types of pressure might provide relief. Fixations can be strategies for stillness; when a whole world is in motion, achieving some form of stillness is helpful for self-locating. Structure and ritual can contain or “rein in” an indeterminate, messy blending of space, time, and tasks. I have found it helpful to create singular events which distinct beginnings and endings so that an eventual sequence of events can unfold without undue anxiety associated with trying to prevent or discern overlap. V. Methodology for Developing an Embedded Curriculum A few comments are called for on the strategy of embedded curriculum. The overall structure and content are based in the findings observed over time (10 years) and across contexts (a highly heterogeneous group and a variety of activity settings) and consistent with the neuro-physiological literature. Nevertheless, what I have developed is also necessarily customized to the idiosyncrasies of each person participating in the various movement programs. The behavioural and attention challenges are immense and require creative teaching and facilitation. One of the tendencies that has been noted as prevalent is the relative absence of midline crossing in the children and youth. Typically, children begin midline crossing as infants (e.g., two hands grabbing one foot) and continue on with thousands of repetitions over the years. Developmentally, I cannot expect to make up for the loss of these repetitions; however, I can set an environment where midline crossing happens regardless of the activity that is

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scheduled. Likewise, I cannot expect children to engage in high repetition of midline crossing on demand or command. Instead, I must make it inevitable and unavoidable within the activity they are doing. Examples include pulling with two hands on a rope, pushing with two hands on a stick, deliberate cross body reaching for objects; in this way midline crossing is embedded and does not have to be requested. Embedding the movement patterns that need attention allows me to work from a lived body perspective within a cultural system of signs and to honour the insider’s stories and experiences as expressed through autobiographies, biographies, anecdotes, observation and analysis, and, increasingly, blogs and other digital media. The curriculum content and processes have developed over time and are adaptable to each participant’s needs. There are, however, habits of body that have consistency across heterogeneity and these form the core of the embedded curriculum. These habits of body are the findings of years of observation and analysis based in Laban movement principles and employing a process of movement profiling for each participant involved in a movement program. The profiles are based in the movement education template (Appendix A) which considers a variety of subcategories within the existential movement themes of body, space, effort/quality, and relation—i.e., in lived (perceptual) as well as experienced (sensory) contexts. Movement profiling allows a teacher, coach or therapist to observe a mover over time and across contexts using the features and components of each theme to develop a “movement fingerprint,” such that not only dominant patterns become apparent, but also missing features become apparent. Here, one can plan interventions, use the dominant patterns to facilitate the interventions, and then do a follow-up profile to assess the effect of the intervention on the movement repertoire. Since movement education language is conceptual and non-pejorative, it can be used in any situation with any mover of any movement capacity.

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The movement profile, developed out of Laban movement education analysis, can function as a pedagogic, evaluative, prepost comparative, training, and therapeutic tool. It complements other measurement modalities, and can be easily taught to coaches, parents, teachers, and other interested professionals. VI. Habits of Body (Dominances and Absences in the Movement Repertoire) The following represents a summary of the most consistent habits of body noted from the observations and analysis (i.e., movement profiling). Dominances in the movement repertoire: fine, sudden movement, limbs kept near the body, flexed spine, same side or no arm action; toe walking, uneven gait, balance and balance regain issues, pathway drifting; uneven skill development. Absences in the movement repertoire: midline crossing, firm movement; extension of spin and hip; running gait, landings with control; gradual deceleration; contralateral arm-leg movement; weight transfer variety; contrast. General or less specific habits of body include: consequences of seemingly absent or underdeveloped sensory integration and motor milestones (including anxiety, distractibility, need for structure, problematic problem solving and decision making); fixations—including “codes,” metaphors, objects; stemming; over-aroused nervous system; sensory hyper-sensitivities (especially in the “built” environment); vestibular and perceptual issues; absent, underdeveloped, or unevenly developed gross motor activity, especially involving intense exertion in a firm, sustained time/weight register; underdeveloped, hyper-developed or selectively developed body awareness.

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VII. Ingredients in the Embedded Curriculum The embedded curriculum at work in my movement programs is made up of environmental, content, process, and instructional components. I shall describe each of these in the sections that follow. Environment. I aim to create an environment low in excess stimulation which also allows for maximal involvement of the body with the absences from the movement repertoire. Thick, absorptive surfaces compel sustained foot contact with the floor, reduce speed of movement, and force firm weight qualities in the large muscles. Unstable surfaces (i.e., inclines, declines, absence of perpendicularity and flatness) and obstacles compel ongoing balance loss and regain, controlled and cushioned falls, vestibular and kinesthetic adjustments, and dorsi-flexion at the foot (the heels forced into the surface by virtue of the surface itself assists in reducing toe-walking). Dim or subdued lighting and few or no patterns on walls or floors reduces distractions from extraneous visual stimuli. Contrast in height, task, function, and inside/outside and/or wet/dry allow for definite “felt” separations between one type of activity or task and another and allow for activity sequencing to be achieved with more distinctiveness in the attributions and identifiers/signifiers (i.e., the semiotics of each space). Heavy and non-bouncy objects require more gross motor activity for lifting, compel sustained time and firm weight qualities, and reduce noise. Many possible entries and exits for the movement equipment stations compel problem solving and the potential for avoidance, parallel and interactive play. Typical equipment includes thick and heavy mats, heavy props, medicine balls, non-bounce balls and other manipulables, trampolines (large and small), blankets, towels, ropes, scooters, games equipment, fine motor props and toys, containers for toys, equipment set-ups that can be gotten inside of, parachutes, mattresses, cushions, ladders, trestles and benches, stacking boxes.

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Content and Process. Movement programs, whether they are a once a week, daily or “summer camp” intensive format, are necessarily structured and predictable, with visual schedules, social stories, scripting and re-directing as significant processes. There is a high level of attunement for body signs of frustration, anxiety and tension and dignified intervention for calming (for example, deep pressure is helpful for many tactile stressors). Time based activities have distinctive tactile and visual markers for beginnings, middles, and endings. Typical activities include body awareness work on core-distal relationships, spinal flexion and extension and assisted flexibility; pushing, pulling, dragging, lifting, carrying; mid-line crossing via gripping, climbing, and various forms of reaching across the body to the opposite side; activities which compel intense gross motor activity and result in muscle fatigue; landings from a variety of heights; weight transfers and weight bearing on various combinations of body parts (other than hands and feet). Instructional Strategies. Participants with ASD typically do not initiate play or activity episodes and, once engaged in an activity, do not conclude or exit episodes well. For this reason— and others (e.g., lack of impulse control, self-injury) facilitation must be ongoing, vigilant, attentive with a neutral and calm demeanor, no sense of urgency and an even, somewhat emotionally flat and lower volume voice. When involving students in my movement programs, I work with direct instruction or as low a teacher-learner ratio as possible on concept learning which impacts across the dimensions of physical, cognitive, emotional, and social development. The outcome goals are relatively simple: a) Identify the strengths and weaknesses in a person’s developmental repertoire, and then use appropriate and dignified interventions to refine the strengths and address the weaknesses in ways which make it possible for the person to interact in meaningful ways with developmentally and/or age compatible peer groups.

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b) Continue to refine the program intervention so that continued development occurs across the developmental dimensions in ways which are consistent with the person’s profile. c) Involve a support team in the developmental process in ways which enhance the ongoing development of the members of the team. Concluding Comments It is the authentic engagement with the carnal, heterogeneous bodies of the children, youth, and adults with ASD with whom I have worked that forms the basis of the embedded curriculum. This engagement has been made viable as a scholarly praxis using semiotic phenomenology as both orientation and methodology. A few contemporary phenomenological theorists (most notably Maurice Merleau-Ponty) grant a legitimacy to the lived body, inextricably intertwined with intersubjective, communicative, expressive projects of lived relation. Indeed, in his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty critiques perceptual faith as a habitual unreflexivity based on a subject-object epistemology within a pre-established standpoint in which subjects perceive the world from a detached and distant perspective (1962, 13-14). To counter this naïve notion, Merleau-Ponty proposes a concrete subject as the existential “lived body” (corps propre) that must not be bracketed out but rather taken in as the starting point of all phenomenological analysis; however, in spite of what body-friendly educators (and researchers) see as the enlightened embrace of actual bodies in some phenomenological work, in the main, much phenomenological work is committed to (and premised on) the ontological self-givenness of the so-called “objective body”. Maurice Merleau-Ponty (in “The Cogito” of Phenomenology of Perception) critiques an ideology of rationality as being unable

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to go beyond itself, by virtue of its having to use its own internal criteria to continue to validate its own concordances (1962, 408). According to Merleau-Ponty, all that one has to do to get out of this loop is to “recognize these phenomena which are the ground of all our certainties. The belief in an absolute mind, or in a world in itself detached from us is no more than a rationalization of this primordial faith” (1962, 409). Moving away from the ground of all our certainties requires a human science approach which is both bodily based and culturally (and, often times, politically) sensitized. Lanigan’s (1988) semiotic phenomenology provides a helpful theoretical framework for exploring embodied contingency (e.g., the stressed embodiment of ASD) by combining phenomenological explication of the freedom of individual expression with semiotic analysis of the field of culturally sedimented perception. Here, I can work carefully with the expressive bodies of program participants as they disclose through words, codes, movement, habit and gesture how they live with and through Autism Spectrum Disorder. Here, I can honour their bodily expressions by creating and adapting curriculum that is responsive to them while at the same time building bridges to a shared community and culture. Ultimately, it is the body I must take seriously as my guide and my muse. In Merleau-Ponty’s (1962) words: If the subject is in a situation, even if he is no more than a possibility of situations, this is because he forces his ipseity into reality only by actually being a body, and entering the world through the body. In so far as, when I reflect on the essence of subjectivity, I find it bound up with that of the body and that of the world, this is because my existence as subjectivity is merely one with my existence as a body and with the existence of the world, and because the subject that I am, when taken concretely, is inseparable from this body and this world. The ontological world and body which we find at the core of the subject are not the world or body as idea, but on the one hand, the world itself, contracted into a comprehensive grasp, and on the other hand, the body itself as a knowing body (408).

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The embedded curriculum described in this paper is a project of seeing and reading movement and honouring bodies. Such a project is theoretically defensible through a semiotic phenomenology of the experience of the body coupled with a consciousness of choice, and it is experientially constituted by a phenomenological and semiotic sensibility grounded in the actual bodies we—all of us—live. CODA: This project has been and continues to be a labour of love … the culmination of years of research and reflection. Sections of this paper have appeared in various incarnations and progressive iterations in a number of the papers and presentations listed in the references. References Barbara, L.M., and Mitchell-Kvacy, A.A. (1994). Positive behavioural support for students with developmental disabilities: An emerging multi-component approach for addressing challenging behaviours. School Psychology Review, 23, 263-278. Baron-Cohen, S. (1989). The autistic child’s theory of mind: A case of specific developmental delay. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 30, 285-297. Baron-Cohen, S. (1988). Social and cognitive deficits in autism: Cognitive or affective? Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 18, 379-402. Bellini, S. (2004). Social skill deficits and anxiety in high functioning adolescents with autism spectrum disorders. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 19, 78-86. Bendelow, G., and Williams, S. (1995). Transcending the dualisms: Towards a sociology of pain, Sociology of Health and Illness, 17, pp. 139-155. Burnette, C., Charak, D., Meyer, J., Mundy, P., Sutton, S., and Vaughan, A. (2005). Weak central coherence and its relation to theory of mind and anxiety in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 35, 63-73. Canavera, K., Evans, D., Kleinpeter, F., Maccubin, E., and Taga, K. (2005). The fears, phobias and anxieties of children with autism

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spectrum disorders and down syndrome: comparisons with developmentally and chronologically age matched children. Child Psychology and Human Development, 36, 3-26. Carr, E.G., and Owen-DeSchryver, J.S. (2007). Physical illness, pain and problem behaviour in minimally verbal people with developmental disabilities. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 37(3), 413-424. Carr, E.G., Reeve, C.E., and Magito-McLaughlin, D. (1996). Contextual influences on problem behaviours in people with developmental disabilities. In Positive Behavioural Support. Edited by L.K. Koegel, R.L. Koegel, and G. Dunlap. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Comstock, D. (1982). A method for critical research. In Knowledge and Values in Social and Educational Research. Edited by E. Bredo, and W. Feinberg. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Connolly, M., and Lathrop, A., (1993) Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Rudolf Laban—historical, philosophical, and pedagogical connections. Proceedings. Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences annual meeting and conference. New Orleans, LA. October. Connolly, M.,(1993) Respecting children’s voices: shared sentiments in the work of Waksler, Lather, and Laban. Human Studies, 16: 457-567 Connolly, M. (1994 ) Practicum experiences and journal writing in adapted physical education: Implications for teacher education. Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly,11,3 306-328. Connolly,M.,(1995) Phenomenology, physical education and special populations. Human Studies,18. 25-40. Conolly,M., and Lathrop,A., (1997) Maurice Merleau –Ponty and Rudolf Laban—An interactive appropriation of parallels and resonances. Human Studies, 20. 27-45. Connolly, M. (1997) Bodily expressivity as a semiotic modality of expression. (abstract).Proceedings. Semiotics Society of America, Louisville, Kentucky. October. Connolly, M. (1997) Honouring bodies,seeking children—panel symposium on David Goode’s A world without words. Human Studies, 20. 359-363. Connolly,M. and Craig, T.( 1997) Doing phenomenology in the wild: Bodily contingency and the politics of sensory integration. In the panel Erwin Strauss, Phenomenological Psychology. Society for

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Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Conference and AGM. University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky.October. Connolly,M., and Craig, T. (1997) Movement education and phenomenology—descriptive /heuristic allies: an experiential workshop in the phenomenology of the body. Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences Conference and AGM. University of Kentucky, Lexington, Kentucky. October. Connolly, M. (1997) Phenomenology and physical education. In The encyclopedia of phenomenology. Lester Embree, Editor in chief. Kluwer Academic Publishers: Dordrecht, The Netherlands. 129-133. Connolly,M. and Craig, T. (1999) Implementing a least restrictive environment in a movement education camp for children and youth with ASD. Bridging the divide: disability in the new millennium. Disability Studies Quarterly,19,1.( published in Fall , 2000) Connolly, M., and Craig, T. (1999). Your body tells me stories: Living pain, flirting madness, transforming care, Narratives of Professional Helping, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Disability and Diversity) 16-26. Connolly, M. (2000), The remarkable logic of autism ( summary). Proceedings. North American Federation of Adapted Physical Activity ( NAFAPA). New Orleans, LA. November. Connolly,M. (2000) , Implementing an “invisible curriculum” in movement education programs for adults, youth and children with ASD. Proceedings. NAFAPA conference New Orleans, LA. November. Connolly,M. (2001) Negotiating the signs of hidden disabilities and the performance of pedagogic attunement. Semiotic Society of America. University of Toronto and Victoria College. Toronto . October. Connolly, M, and Johnston,K. (2002) When cliché’s are not enough— deconstructing cultural scripts in practitioner preparation. Proceedings. NAFAPA conference. Oregon State University. Corvallis, Oregon, September. Connolly, M., and Craig, T. (2002). Stressed embodiment: Doing phenomenology in the wild. Invited essay in the 25th Anniversary Issue of Human Studies, Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer. Connolly, M. (2003) Disability studies in physical education—the contested domain of stressed embodiment and transgressive bodies. Avante’, 9,3. 41-52.

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Connolly, M. (2004) Bridging the divide across cognitive and human sciences frameworks: implications and applications. NAFAPA conference. Lakehead University. Thunder Bay, Ontario .October. Connolly, M. (2004) Semiotic choreology –links to embodiment. International Communicology Institute Symposium, University of Bemidji, Bemidji, Minnesota. July. Connolly, M. (2008) The remarkable logic of autism: Developing and describing an embedded curriculum based in semiotic phenomenology. British Journal of Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2, 239-256. Craig, T. (1997). Disrupting the disembodied status quo: Communicology in chronic disabling conditions. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. Craig, T. (1998). Liminal bodies, medical codes; in Semiotics 1997. Proceedings of the twenty-second annual meeting of the Semiotics Society of America, New York: Peter Lang Publishing. Craig, T. (2000). A funny thing happened on the way to renown: On the concrete essence of chronic illness and the intercorpoeal weight of human suffering. Paper presented in the panel Articulating Phenomenologies of Embodied Speaking Subjects, at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences. Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 5-7 October. Dalrymple, N. (1992). Helpful responses to some of the behaviors of individuals with autism. Indiana Resource Center for Autism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. Dunlap, G., and Fox, L. (1996). Early intervention and serious problem behaviours: A comprehensive approach. In Positive Behavioural Support. Edited by L.K. Koegel, R.L. Koegel, and G. Dunlap. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Dykens, E.M., Hodapp, R.M. (2000). Applying the new genetics. In Genetics and Mental Retardation Syndromes. Edited by E.M. Dykens, R.M. Hodapp, and B.M. Finucane. Baltimore, MD: Brookes. Elliot, R.O., Dobbin, A.R., Rose, G.D., and Soper, H.V. (1994). Vigorous aerobic exercise versus general motor training activities: Effects on maladaptive and stereotypic behaviours of adults with both autism and mental retardation. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 24, (5), 565-576.

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Todd, T., and Reid, G. (2006). Increasing physical activity in individuals with autism. Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities, 21 (3), 167-176. Vanden-Abeele, J. (2001). Training, sport and dance for persons having a disability – person centered and action-oriented dynamic approach. Paper presented in conjunction with the Active Living Alliance for Canadians with a Disability, 12th Annual Forum, Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada, June 14-18. Williams, D. (1992). Nobody nowhere: The extra-ordinary autobiography of an autistic. New York, NY: Times Books/Random House. Williams-Venables, D. (1995). Non-firings, over-firings, and mis-firings: The confusing case of making sense of emotions, MAAP Newsletter, Vol. 1, pp. 3-5. Wolman, D. ( 2008) Yeah, I’m autistic. You got a problem with that? Wired. March, 2008. 154-159; 191.

25 How to Make a Photograph within the In/Visible World of Autism Thomas D. Craig

[email protected] Disability Studies, Brock University International Communicology Institute ABSTRACT: Framing the world with a camera is a phe­nome­ nological and semiotic challenge both for documentary photogra­ phy and research in lived experience. The skilled practice of photography itself can benefit from cross-fertilization with Com­ municology and its commitment to understanding the consti­ tutive relations of visual givens and expressive bodies as mediated by the perception of cultural signs and codes (Connolly, Lanigan, and Craig, 2005). Communicology also can help to negotiate the perpetual lure of perceptual faith and its offer of some clever aperture providing access to the things themselves. In this essay I will describe the experience of phenomenologically-based research photography within a two week summer camp for children and youth with autism. Taking a clue from artist-professor Victor Burgin (1982) on commonplace photographic practice as the magnification of the natural attitude “viewed through a lens,” I will discuss the assumptions and pitfalls of “smiling for the camera” in the extreme contexts of autism. As I will show, Com­ municology can help to navigate through the idealist temptation to treat individual consciousness as an abstract object of inquiry as well as the pretense of capturing neutral objects at a distance.

Introduction In the summer of 2005, I began photographing children and youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) during the two PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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weeks of the movement camp where I had volunteered for the previous eight years. My partner, Maureen Connolly, had been working closely with this special population for three decades throughout her professional life. Together we decided that it would be helpful to include a visual record of campers in this environment as an addition to our ongoing commitment to studying, understanding, describing, and narrating the lived experience of stressed embodiment. Since that first documentary foray, photography has become an integral part of our research on autism and continues to be grounded in semiotic phenomenological inquiry into particular expressive bodies “as mediated by the perception of cultural signs and codes” (Lanigan, Connolly, and Craig, 2005). Now entering its twelfth summer of operation, Autism Camp is based in the implementation of an embedded curriculum—developmentally and phenomenologically derived—of gross and fine motor activities in a highly structured spatiotemporal field.1 While this embedded structure provides much needed boundaries and consequences for non-social behaviors typical of ASD, camp interactions between children and staff still can be unpredictable and sometimes violent. My challenge as photographer and phenomenologist in this volatile context has been to remain an integral part of the ebb and flow of camp activities as much as possible in order to make candid photographs of unguarded experience rather than more typically contrived productions of posing for the camera. Indeed, hearing the words, “Smile for the camera,” from one of our more socially inactive campers in 2008 inspired this investigation into the problematic of photography in the wild environs of autism. As a photographer and phenomenologist, I take my task here in this essay to be that of providing readers with a variety of phenomenological expressions in the service of exploration of the relationship between stressed embodiment and social docu-

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mentary photography. To this end, you will see both image and poetic “recasts” placed strategically within the more traditional descriptive presentation. These deliberate pauses are intended as alternative ways to provoke thoughtful consideration of the normative logics and sign systems addressed in this essay. Poetic recasting has been developed out of concentrated work in the contrasting methodologies of phenomenologists Amedeo Giorgi (1986) and Max van Manen (1990). It employs the free imaginative variations encouraged by both authors as well as more arts-based educational research in expression known as artography (Springgay, Irwin, Leggo, & Gouzouaisis, 2008). In our work together on a recent analysis team, we discovered that poetic recasting can provide a means to extend the disciplined and thoughtful work of selection necessary for general and specific descriptions (Giorgi) and consolidating and synthesizing narratives (van Manen), as well as help to challenge ourselves as writers exploring alternative forms of interpretation and transparency.2 I present here a few of my own photos and poetic recasts of the experience of photography within the homeworld of stressed embodiment in the hope for a phenomenology that can be both rigorous and poetic, attuned to a variety of literary, poetic, and visual sources, as well as other expressive forms which support the disclosure of wild being beyond the typical, normal, scientific parameters of observation from a healthy distance. Immaculate Conception It is tempting to think of the camera as objectivity in a box exposing real things to light with no body in particular behind the lens prodding, guiding, clicking turning, moving, framing

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miraculously conceived images without echo of some active body within a very particular somewhere. I. Photography in the Midst: Smile for the Camera When I first brought cameras to document the activity program in our August summer camp, I quickly discovered that photographing moving bodies in varying locations with minimal and changing light was a difficult task in itself. In addition to the technical challenges of learning about shutter speeds, aperture, light, shadows, color, and composition, I also found myself in the precarious role of “blending” with camera gear in tow into a sensitive and often unpredictable social drama of resistance and acquiescence. At first, I was perplexed at the frequency of student instructors stopping to smile or point children in my direction to pose for a photo. As I learned over time, avoiding the natural temptation of artificial posturing and “cheesy” grins is an enduring problem in documentary photography. Once the photographer has “been made” (i.e., the camera perceived as a focal point for the gaze), the unguarded, documentary character of the visual engagement is altered. Ironically, we can see the ubiquitous photo op of a media-oriented culture inscribed even here in a disability population characterized by severe difficulties with social interaction. Though I have gained the trust of most of the children I have worked with for the past eleven years, I have found approaching them with camera gear in the midst of activities with their student instructors to be a curiously complex task. Unlike our campers whom I have known for many years, most of the student instructors are new to the camp every year and consciously aware of me (an older, unfamiliar male in the questionable role of photographer/researcher) in ways that make taking candid photos difficult.

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I often encounter sudden behaviors of straightening, adjusting, smirking, smiling, pointing, or directed posing that interrupts the flow of whatever other activity is going on at the time. With such evident interruption of subjects in action, my immediate goal has been to remove the camera as the center of attention and blend into another activity as inconspicuously as possible. In most cases, I have learned to avoid the direct gaze of selfconscious subjects. As a communicologist with an active interest in social documentary photography, I aim to create images with compelling visual interest in the service of describing and accurately presenting lived experience within the many activities and opportunities our summer camp makes possible. As I immerse myself with my research partner in the expressive contexts of autism, we work together in a critically reflective, reflexive, and recursive process with the goal of interpretation of the intertwining existential themes of lived body, space, time, and relation. Moving in between the reflective distanciation of photography and phenomenology, and the self-implicating practice of integration within the overlapping codes of autism and autism care, we continue to mediate between gesture, movement, expression, and vision. The temptation of perceptual faith—that magic window through which one presumes to see the things themselves as neutral objects at a distance—is inherent in the photographic endeavor. Artist-professor Victor Burgin (1982, 47) claims further that, “The ‘natural attitude’ is magnified when the world is viewed through a lens.” He goes on to clarify: Compressed against the viewing screen in to a single plane, chopped by the viewfinder into neat rectangles, the world is even more likely to be experienced as remote and inert. However, the naturalness of the world ostensibly open before the camera is a deceit. Objects present to the camera are already in use in the production of meanings, and photography has no choice but to operate upon such meanings. There is, then, a

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“pre-photographic” stage in the photographic production of meaning which must be accounted for.

Communicology can help to negotiate the perpetual lure of perceptual faith and its offer of some clever aperture providing access to the things themselves. The skilled practice of photography, on the other hand, can benefit from cross-fertilization with Communicology and its commitment to understanding the constitutive relations of “visual givens” and expressive bodies. They function together to problematize the typically pedestrian vision of perceptual faith (the things themselves within my grasp) and the professional ideal of framing the perfect “iconic” image for posterity. Chronic Pane You can see the world itself from the window of my sole – as long as you are me at this moment in time and don’t change. Communicology offers a blended methodology that focuses attention on the lived experience of persons in culture (more specifically here, persons with autism in chronically disabling conditions).3 Its locus in the dialectical process of person/culture, freedom/field that is intrinsic to human communication helps (1) to move phenomenology away from the idealist temptation to treat individual consciousness as an abstract object of inquiry (dissociated from communicological praxis) and, (2) to ground research methodology in the particularity of empirical phenomena taken as sign-systems. This semiotic and phenomenological focus on the relationship between signs, signifiers, and signified brings a (critical, postmodern) sensibility to research that aims to uncover the embodied dialectic of person and culture

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by asking whether there is “a semiotic system at work that expresses a social function of the persons [examined]” and “a phenomenological system at work that expresses their personal nature” (Lanigan 1988, 148). Such a research orientation on the lived experience of actual bodies in living contexts de-legitimizes any presumption of “normal” or “abnormal” subjects as the proper focus of analysis. Communicology leads, rather, to critical examination of “the experience of the body coupled with the consciousness of choice” (Lanigan 1988, 105)—my own as well as others. In the opening comments of his recent book, The Unguarded Moment, documentary photographer Steve McCurry (2009) suggests that: if you want to be a photographer, first leave home. This challenge to leave behind what is taken for granted and familiar is no less compelling for phenomenology. Phenomenologists and photographers, phenomenology and photography have much in common, not the least of which is how each dwells in tension with natural attitudes, normal subjects and constituted idealities of the body. When I left the familiar home of the stable, healthy body— in both the lived and reflective dimensions—I turned to phenomenology, and particularly Merleau-Ponty, to help make my way in this unexplored landscape of stressed embodiment. Phenomenological inquiry into the lived phenomena of rupture has been rich in disclosures regarding normalized subjects and synthetic concordance which benignly and conveniently ignore recalcitrant, troublesome, and disruptive bodies. It is not unexpected that photography falls prey to similar always already given norms, logics, and codes in its pre-photographic presumptions of bodies—particularly bodies which do not conform to cultural standards of appearance, beauty, and comportment. Non-discrete pathologies and messy or complex neuro-atypicalities (albeit diagnosed and labeled) resist being “pinned down” as discrete entities with definitive parameters. Such recalcitrance to synthetic unity makes them an outright affront to most versions of “capture,” be they eidetic or

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photographic. Autism, a so-called “spectrum disorder” with profound idiosyncracies and heterogeneity built into its profile, represents that type of strange entity that defies its own borders, that unfamiliar traveler on a long journey from “home,” that rupture of normality that questions the ground of our certainties. In these interstices between phenomenology and photography, stressed embodiment—specifically here, autism—refuses the stock approaches of business-as-usual, whether that business be documentary photography or continental philosophy. II. Stressed Embodiment and the Problematic of the “Normal Subject” The medical presumption of normality represents one of the underlying cultural and philosophical problematics of this essay. Merleau-Ponty (1962: 125-128) writes of the implicit analogical thinking that imposes an external meaning in “normal subjects” and the disruption of this habitual structure by a patient (Schneider) who exhibits a phenomenal success of expression in his freedom to “seize a specific identity in conceptual structures” and “catch the essential feature of the analogy” (128). MerleauPonty here makes it clear that he borrows the medical characterization of the normal subject not to support a pre-reflective ontic category but to undermine the insidious cultural code of health and illness. In other words, the “normal subject” represents the habitual, sedimented style of “apprehending simultaneous wholes” (i.e., “normal” thinking) and “surveying movement from above and projecting it outside himself ” (i.e., “normal,” unreflective/non-reflexive performance of the activities of daily living, see 126-27). The infamous patient Schneider, on the other hand, exhibits the enviable “freedom to choose … the living processes of thought” (126, emphasis added). Merleau-Ponty (1960, 11 [1964c, 89], italics added) writes of the rigorous awareness of the “corporeal intentionality” of my

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body which is curiously dependent “on the condition that I do not reflect expressly upon my consciousness of my body” However, as we will see, to presuppose the body/self as both stable and productive (in relation with the world) and expressly unreflective (in relation with the self ) represents a rationalist perspective that trivializes, represses, or otherwise attempts to subjugate the concrete lived experience of stressed embodiment. MerleauPonty equates the taking of such a position with the capitalistic (consumer) orientation of Western scientific rationality. In “Eye and Mind,” the summary thematic of the proposed second half of his posthumously published work, Merleau-Ponty (1964b, 159) writes of the pervasive temptations “to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general—as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use.” While phenomenology is known—at least theoretically—for its rigorous description and reduction of experience as it is lived, and its determined enterprise of “liberation” from acquired meanings and prejudiced ways of speaking about the world, first-person, phenomenological descriptions focused on actual bodies4 implicated in autobiographical contexts often remain highly suspect for their apparent strident self-advocacy and analytical naiveté.5 Such perception of the failure of commonsense presumptions, of course, lies at the heart of the well-known phenomenological problematic of the “natural attitude” (“naive consciousness” or “perceptual faith”), which allows the “automatic acceptance of all types of objects, including the self, and ultimately the world as a whole” (Steinbock 1997, 127, 128). While we must acknowledge the onerous “dangers” of constructing naive descriptions of our own direct experience of consciousness, however, we must also recognize the equally formidable temptation of transcendental models of rationality that focus only on the synthetic unity (or constructed ideal) of experience6 and, thus, fail to address the heterogeneous contradictions of the actual body lived here and now. .

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There are significant consequences for committing ourselves as researchers to the analysis of concrete human experience and resistance to the symbolic code of “normal subjects” in capitalproducing contexts (a code that most of us take for granted— both existentially and academically—most of the time). In sum, observing the tearing apart of normal expectations of embodiment can lead to the shattering of a transcendental code of unified consciousness. By working through a reflexive, recursive, and curiously subversive practice of discovery and description of ontological contingency,7 I continue to negotiate the political repercussions of “hermeneutical self-implicature” (Schrag 1997) within the risky (and often unforgiving) contexts that threaten to rupture the unified subject8 of consummate productivity. In sum, embracing a semiotic phenomenology of expressive bodies helps to recognize the social codes of human existence without subjugating the person to a symbolic unity that dominates, censors, or forecloses the experience of the other.9 By resisting the culturally sanctioned idolatry of the conscious and productive subject (who is aptly adapted to capitalistic structures),10 however, we may discover the sometimes radically disruptive heterogeneity of our own lived body (corps propre)11 in its contradictory habits and inextricably concrete contexts Working with/in the culture of Autism Spectrum Disorder certainly makes these discussions more likely. III. D  isrupting the Cultural Norms and Inscriptions of Picture Production Meet Teenage Camper, a thirteen-year-old boy with autism. He has severe difficulties with “social read,” does not choose any collaborative play or game encounters, demonstrates the typical disconnection with social conventions characteristic of persons with autism, and shows little or no concern with interpersonal interaction. Despite his notable lack of social engagement, he surprised me one day with his verbal response to the camera he

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saw me holding nearby. During one of our snack breaks this past summer, he noticed my camera a few feet away in a small, crowded locker room appropriated for snack times. As I looked for opportunities to take candid, unstaged photos, Teenage Camper unexpectedly spoke in a monotone voice, “Smile for the camera.” He never turned to look in my direction nor gave any apparent indication of interest in me or anyone else in the room. Rather, he continued to eat his snack as he recited the social mantra of smiling-subject-posing-for-camera—apparently impervious to the requisite behavioral responses. The enigma of this paradoxical interaction of picture-taking production became the impetus for this essay. Ironically, the snack room encounter with Teenage Camper articulates the problematic of commonplace photographic practice with its impersonal norms and inscriptions. Through his own echolalia and disinterest, he had acknowledged the camera, de-structured the social expectation, then carried on with the snack in hand. In one unforgettable encounter, Teenage Camper makes visible the temptation of photography—like science—“to treat everything as though it were an object-in-general … predestined for our own use” (Merleau-Ponty. 1964, 159). Teenage Camper’s passive (echolalic) repetition of “smile for the camera” offers a revelatory moment in a media-oriented world of visual norms and inscriptions, the body in the key light as objectified sign, and the sign system of a celebrity culture that holds them together.12 The rhetoric of compulsory camera-subject interaction represents a normative expectation that homogenizes people through the lens into happy, smiling subjects and forecloses the possibility of a limit-experience of rupture. The radical contingency of stressed embodiment within the lived experience of autism offers an opportunity for a different kind of being in the world that interrupts coerced performance and compliant subjects smiling for the camera.

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Conclusion While the presumption of stable, healthy, compliant bodies can provide a convenient starting point for research into “normal” populations, such a distanciated orientation often intends a “refusal of deficiency” (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 81) that represses the ongoing liminality of our own human existence. Research and analysis that systematically refuses to recognize the fray of bodily contingency cannot account for the actual bodies we all live here and now. Fortunately, in the everyday experience of persons with autism, there is little room for the luxury of such habitual repression. Faced with the limit-experience of stressed embodiment, we can refuse to acknowledge the overwhelming evidence of wild being or open ourselves to the possibility of ontological contingency and the consequent self-reflexive appraisal that so many of our naturally occurring projects are designed to avoid. By recognizing the bodily expressions of persons with autism as their own authentic—albeit disruptive—way of being in the world, we come face to face with “the refusal of rationality in discourse” (Lanigan 1994, 6) that is characteristic of much of human experience and all wild being. A Very Particular Somewhere The world itself is not so simple to see there on its own without a someone looking somewhere. Framing the world with a camera is a phenomenological and semiotic challenge both for documentary photography and research in lived experience. Over the last four years of learning technical skills with the camera and cultural norms of photo performance—both in front of and behind the lens—my hope is that I can encourage others to join me in developing a vital

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sensibility to stressed embodiment across the entire spectrum of human experience. References Burgin, Victor. 1982. “Photographic Practice and Art Theory.” In Burgin, Victor, ed. Thinking Photography. The Macmillan Press Ltd./Humanities Press International. London and Basingstoke/ New Jersey, Craig, Thomas D. 1997. Disrupting the Disembodied Status Quo: Communicology and Chronic Disabling Conditions. Unpublished Dissertation. Southern Illinois University. Connolly, Maureen, Craig, Thomas D. 2002 “Stressed Embodiment: Doing Phenomenology in the Wild.” Human Studies, Volume 25, Number 4,, pp. 451-462(12). Connolly, Maureen; Parsons, Jon; Craig, Thomas D., and, Jamie Posavad. 2009. “Describing a collaborative team-based phenomenological analysis: narrative, pedagogic and methodological considerations.” Phenomenology & Practice. (Accepted for publication). Giorgi, Amadeo, (Ed.) 1986. Phenomenology and psychological research. Pittsburgh: Duquesne Husserl, Edmund. 1960 [1931]. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Dorion Cairns, trans. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.[1977 ] Kristeva, Julia. 1974. La Révolution du Langage Poétique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Kristeva, Julia. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Margaret Waller, trans. New York: Columbia University Press. Lanigan, Richard L. 1994. “The Postmodern Ground of Communicology: Subverting the Forgetfulness of Rationality in Language.” The American Journal of Semiotics. 11.1-2: 5-21. Lanigan, Richard L. 1992. The Human Science of Communicology. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Lanigan, Richard L. 1988. Phenomenology of Communication. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, Lanigan, Richard L., Connolly, Maureen, and Thomas D. Craig, “What is Communicology? Who is a Communicologist?” . 2005. http://communicology.org/content/what-communicology.

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McCurry, Steve. 2009 The Unguarded Moment. Phaidon Press Limited. London and New York. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1962. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. (Reprint, 1981, with corrections by Forrest Williams and David Guerrière). New Jersey: The Humanities Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1964.“Eye and Mind.” In Primacy of Perception. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1981 Phénoménologie de la Perception. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1945. (Page references in the present project are to the English trans. by Colin Smith, with corrections by Forrest Williams and David Guerrière. New Jersey: The Humanities Press,). Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vols. 2, 3. 1985, 1988. Trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et Récit. Tomes I, II, III. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983, 1984, 1985. Schrag, Calvin. 1992. The Resources of Rationality: A Response to the Postmodern Challenge. Indiana University Press, Steinbock, Anthony J. 1997. “Back to the Things Themselves: Introduction.” Human Studies 20:127-135. Springgay, Stephanie; Irwin, Rita L.; Leggo, Carl; Gouzouasis, Peter. 2008. Being with A/r/tography. Rotterdam, The Netherlands: Sense Publishing Van Manen, Max, 1990. Researching lived experience—human science for an action sensitive pedagogy. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Endnotes 1. See Connolly and Craig (2002) on the lived experience of autism and Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, and Connolly (essay in this volume) for an elaborated description of curricular interventions into autism she has developed over the last fifteen years. 2. See Connolly, Parsons, Craig, and Posavad 2009 on the collaborative implementation of poetic recasting in narratives of the “other adult” involved in the care of children with autism. 3. See Craig 1997. 4. As I continue to rediscover, sustained focus on actual bodies is

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often perceived as an insidious threat to symbolic and institutional structures designed to maintain a disembodied status quo of cognitive and emotional stability, physical health, and financial productivity. However, as Merleau-Ponty and Lanigan note, it is the corps actuel that provides the necessary “field,” or “context of choice,” for the corps habituel (See Merleau-Ponty 1945, 97-98 [1962, 82-83]; Lanigan 1988, chapter 4, “Freedom and Field: Merleau-Ponty’s Sinngebung as the Essence of a Semiotic Phenomenology of Human Communication,” especially, p. 61 on the dialectical relationship between choice/context, perception/expression, freedom/field . 5. Husserl (1960 [1931], 90, note 2), for example, warns of “the dangerous first person singular!” in a marginal note in his Cartesian Meditations. 6. Such an approach may be summarized succinctly as a focus on the “consciousness of experience” within a realization model that fails to account for the actuality and possibility of the “experience of consciousness” that is more accessible within an actualization model of human science (see Lanigan 1992, 8-9, and Appendix B, Nos. 10 and 11). 7. Kristeva (1974, 179c [1984, 203a]) refers to ontological contingency in her critique of Hegel’s notion of “negativity” and includes in this notion both the intra-subjective and inter-subjective shattering of transcendental codes of unified consciousness. 8. See Kristeva (1984, 113c) on the “productive dissolution” of the unified subject. 9. Such ongoing flights from negativity and resigned expectations of meaning are characteristic of transcendentally focused subjects who cut themselves off from both the heterogeneous “objectivity” of “the real” and the power of the maternal (See Kristeva 1974, 119-21, 475c) [1984, 130-31]) 10. See Kristeva (1984, 209a) on adaptation to family and social structures. 11.The French term, corps propre, is notoriously difficult to translate. It can mean “proper body,” “one’s own body,” “one’s own proper body,” “clean body,” or “one’s own clean and proper body,” and other combinations of proper, clean, one’s own, characteristic, etc. Corps propre, in other words, is contextually dependent for its meaning. Thanks to discussions with Professor Kathy Krause (French Department, University of Missouri-Kansas City) for this clarification.

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12. Lanigan (1988, 148) succinctly labels the project of Commu­ nicology as phenomenological and semiotic explication of “the experience of the body coupled with the consciousness of choice.” He summarizes that the intertwining methodology provides a critical theoretical orientation that can balance the logic, the phenomena of the lived-body as a sign (of political discourse), and the sign system that holds them together (See Lanigan 1988, 105, Craig 1997.)

26 Psychology and the Eclipse of Forgiveness1 Steen Halling

[email protected] Psychology, Seattle University International Human Science Research Conference ABSTRACT: This chapter, which is based upon empirical phe­ nomenological studies of the experience of forgiving a significant other, details the process people go through as they move from injury to forgiveness. Forgiveness is characterized not just by let­ ting go of anger and resentment but as a movement of compassion toward the injurer and an opening up of a new future in one’s own life. Thus phenomenology reveals that the experience of forgiveness highlights our capacity for transcendence and de­ mon­strates that forgiveness is a discovery rather an action requi­ ring a conscious decision. This portrait of forgiveness is contrasted with traditional psychological studies that eclipse these key features of this phenomenon.

Forgiveness is an important issue in human relations and psychotherapy. Most strikingly it points to the possibility of openness and transformation in human life. Yet, as is painfully obvious, the absence of forgiveness in ordinary human relations, in families, and among groups that have long standing conflicts with each other is the rule rather than the exception. We hear many more stories of revenge than of reconciliation and forgiveness. And yet however elusive this phenomenon is, it is nonetheless a reality, and certainly one that psychologists ought to study. In accordance with van den Berg’s definition of phenomenology as the science of examples, I am going to start with descriptions of two specific incidents.2 The following quote from a description PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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of an experience of forgiveness after the end of a love relationship shows the richness and ambiguity of this phenomenon: It was a summer evening, and I was agonizing over a romantic relationship that had reached a painful conclusion, leaving me feeling devalued, hurt, and angry. To relieve my distress, I decided to go for a walk in my neighborhood. The sun had not yet set and so the colors of the trees and flowers were still vivid; in spite of being upset, I enjoyed their beauty as well as the peacefulness of the evening and the balmy air. I walked with no particular agenda in mind and what happened next was completely unexpected…. My anger and hurt vanished as I was thinking about Heather, but this time as another human being who was struggling, and who basically did not mean me any harm. It is not accurate, I am realizing, to suggest that I just thought that; it was more like an image that emerged for me, an image that was not as much seen as felt. I felt healed; blame and anger vanished, and there was a larger dimension of this whole experience that I can only describe in religious language: a sense of transcendence, of the future opening up, of a sense of presence, not of a personal being, but of connecting to something larger than myself and yet still having an experience of myself as me.3

What follows next is a summary of a piece of a story told by a woman who was in her mid- forties. I interviewed Kit when we were doing research on what is rather misleadingly is called selfforgiveness.4 The dream of which she speaks occurred two years after her adolescent son committed suicide. After her son’s death, Kit was haunted by profound grief and guilt. She was also deeply troubled that she did not get to see the body of her son and in this way say goodbye to him. In the dream she was in a large house with some friends and her son, who left after lunch to go to the bathroom. Suddenly she heard a terrible scream from her son and found him sitting on the toilet with blood gushing out of him. She knew immediately that he was dying, as did he, and there was nothing she could do, so they held each other during his last moments. This dream marked a profound turning point in her healing; after it,

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“ life looked like itself again.” She was able to reconnect with the world and with others in an immediate and living way. Both of these stories are vivid and dramatic. Some of the other descriptions that we, and others have collected, describe the movement toward forgiveness as more subtle and gradual, but their basic features are very similar. In what follows, I will provide an overview of what my colleagues and I have learned about the nature of this process as we carried out several phenomenological studies of the phenomenon of forgiving another. I will conclude by discussing how phenomenological research has highlighted aspects of this phenomenon that have been missed by traditional psychological studies. In 1977 when I started to look at this topic there were fewer than twenty studies in psychology on forgiveness, leading me to conclude that “psychology has treated forgiveness with benign neglect.”5 The reasons for such neglect lie in the nature of the discipline of psychology itself, in its adherence to the experimental method, its preoccupation with its status as a science, and its commitment to the notion of determinism. Historically, psychology has sought to free itself from its connection to religion and philosophy and to establish itself as a scientific discipline. Until about the mid 1990s, psychology had been content to let theology and religion take care of the topic of forgiveness. Today, however, the PsycInfo data base yields more than 1600 items in English in response to the search term “forgiveness.” Paradoxically, very few of these studies pay attention to people’s actual experience of forgiveness. Or, to put it differently, psychologists are more interested in their own theories of and procedures for bringing about forgiveness than in what forgiveness involves in everyday life. The result is that there are numerous unsupported, untrue, or misleading assertions about the nature of forgiveness in the psychological literature In late 1984 my colleague Jan Rowe and I began a series of studies on forgiveness addressing the issue of forgiving a significant

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another and then self-forgiveness.6 In this paper I will focus primarily on our study of forgiving another. These studies were carried out by small collaborative groups which included four to six graduate students as researchers. We started by writing and discussing our own descriptions of moving toward forgiveness to gain an initial sense of some of the issues. Subsequently, we carried out in-depth interviews to get first-hand accounts of research participants’ struggles with injury and their journey toward forgiveness. The basic question that we asked of our interviewees (and of ourselves) was: “Can you tell us about the time during an important relationship when something happened such that forgiving the other became an issue for you.” In the self-forgiveness study, we asked “Can you describe a time in your life when self-forgiveness became an issue for you?” Doing this research gave us critical insights into the nature of forgiveness, helping us to see what makes it so difficult and what makes it possible. The issue of forgiveness arises in a wide variety of relationships and situations and yet we found that there are fundamental dimensions to the experience, no matter what the context.7 First, when people speak of forgiveness they begin with a detailed description of a profound injury (or injuries). The injury is such that the world as once known is dramatically disrupted—turned upside-down in some sense: there is a wrenching and tearing of the very fabric of one’s existence. The future as imagined or taken-for-granted is no longer possible and one’s assumptions about the other(s) are called into question. One’s assumptions about oneself are also called into question or undermined, and bring such thoughts as “Why me? What have I done?” One is uncomfortable in one’s own skin, ill at ease with oneself. The world, literally the very street one lives on, is experienced as somehow alien, untrustworthy, perhaps foreboding. Emotionally, one’s response involves intense rage, sadness and profound dis-ease. One’s energies are focussed on the injury

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and the person who has committed the wrong. Typically, rage and thoughts of revenge predominate at first, and grief only gradually becomes present. When one finds oneself momentarily distracted from the hurt, even a small reminder brings back deep distress. For example, waking up in the morning (if one has slept), one’s recollection puts one back in the midst of one’s anger, sadness, anxiety, and confusion. This occupation with the hurt, or “licking one’s wound,” has two dimensions: 1) the immediate obvious experience of the injury, and 2) a deeper and larger meaning for one’s life. The first level of injury is the centre of one’s attention at the time; the latter may become clear later. The second level is harder to articulate since research participants do not typically make this level of injury explicit. An example may help to clarify the distinction between these two levels. Let us suppose that a man is told by the woman to whom he is engaged that she has decided not to marry him because she loves someone else. This announcement is likely to be experienced as being very hurtful. It obviously means that his relationship with this woman is over and that they will not get married. He may also feel betrayed. At a deeper and more metaphorical level, he is likely to wonder whether there is something wrong with him and whether he will ever find anyone who will love him. That is, what he is told by his fiancée takes on implications that extend beyond his relationship to her. What she says to him shatters his image of who he is and what the world is like. In this type of situation one experiences one’s self as “injured,” “wronged,” “diminished,” and “vulnerable.” Attempts to cope with the powerlessness of the situation may involve fantasies of and desire for revenge, and fantasies and acts of self-destruction, such as excessive drinking, withdrawal, and in some cases thoughts of suicide. Yet however alone one may feel in one’s pain, the role of others is important. Having people who are supportive, who allow one to experience whatever is happening without judgment, and who, by their very presence, affirm

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the seriousness of what has occurred can be very useful as one tries to make sense of and cope with the situation. At some point, realizing the harm one is inflicting on oneself, one may want things to be different. Yet a way through to some other place is not clear. One may even attempt to make this happen, telling oneself. “I’ll just put this behind me,” “I need to get on with my life.” But these attempts are short-lived at best. One may feel relatively free of the hurt one day, only to find oneself enraged all over again the next day. However, these periodic breaks from the pain are significant in that while one may yet feel stuck they still offer a glimpse of a life beyond hurt and rage. Especially when the injury is in the context of an ongoing relationship, one may begin to reflect on one’s own part in the injury that led to the wounding. More generally, one may wonder about the other and who this person is beyond merely being a perpetrator, trying to imagine the situation from his or her point of view. However gradual or dramatic such a shift in perspective is, it involves a loosening of the rigidity of the grip of one’s distress. Even though one wants to move forward, there is also a resistance to the movement—a resistance to letting go, as if something precious would be given up. In some ways the resistance to forgiveness seems to involve a fear of what letting go would entail: the deep sadness and grief about what could have been had the injury not occurred, full acknowledgement that things will never be the same, relinquishing the hurt and rage that in some way have come to be part of one’s identity, and the facing of an unknown future. So there is a battle within oneself—a desire to move on and a fear of what that would mean. This struggle seems to be a necessary part of the movement toward forgiveness, even if it is a difficult process with which to be contending. When forgiveness occurs, it typically comes as a surprise. Forgiveness is experienced as something that has happened rather than something one has made happen, and the experience is profound and transformative. As defining as the injury and its

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impact were, so is the experience of forgiving. People report feeling lighter, fuller, and clearer; whereas before the future was foreboding, it is now full of possibilities. There is a sense of freedom to move into the future no longer burdened or limited by the hurt. While the injury is not forgotten, it no longer holds one so tenaciously. People describe feeling reconnected or connected in a new way to others. There is a fresh awareness of the humanness of all persons—including the wrongdoer, and it is this awareness of the profound humanity of oneself and others that brings the deeper meaning of forgiveness into focus. Finally, because forgiveness is not experienced as an act of will, it has a transcendent dimension. This is reflected in the words people use to describe it, such as “an act of grace,” “the opening of a door” or “a gift”—something more than the person’s doing—with unimaginable benefits. Finally, we have found that forgiveness is a movement of compassion. The other, whom one forgives, as John Patton writes, is someone like oneself. Compassion acquires significance or becomes real, Søren Kierkegaard suggests, only when the compassionate person identifies himself with the sufferer, when that person’s situation is directly related to one’s own.8 And Milburn, in his phenomenological study of forgiving another, concludes that empathic identification with the person who injured oneself is an essential aspect of forgiveness. By this he means “the finding of the Other in oneself and of the self in the Other, of a common, wounded, fallible yet valued humanity.”9 Without some awareness of one’s own fallibility, it would be impossible to connect compassionately with the other as someone like oneself. However, taking responsibility for oneself should not be understood in a moralistic sense, with a connotation of self-blame or accusation. It is best described as an owning or embracing all of who one is and has been, one’s life and one’s actions. The steps leading up to this shift may, nonetheless, be extremely difficult and fraught with pain as one agonizes over one’s own actions and limitations.

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In conclusion, let me highlight the distinctive contributions of phenomenology to the study of forgiveness. First, phenomenology shows that forgiveness involves an opening up to the future as possibility. Typically, psychological researchers define forgiveness through rating scales that measure reduction in depression, anger, resentment, and anxiety.10 Yet, as is evident in the story with which I began, forgiveness is much more than a reduction in anger and so on; it is a movement of transcendence. Second, we have seen that forgiveness is something that one comes to and thus it is neither an action nor an attitude; one might even say it involves grace. Much of the psychological literature treats it as a decision. For example, Robert Enright, a well-known researcher and his colleagues, drawing upon the work of the neo-Kantian philosopher Joanna North, define forgiveness as follows: People, upon rationally determining that they have been unfairly treated, forgive when they willfully abandon resentment and related responses (to which they have a right), and endeavor to respond to the wrongdoer based on the moral principle of beneficence, which may include compassion, unconditional worth, generosity, and moral love (to which the wrongdoer, by nature of the hurtful act or acts, has no right).11

Moreover, many psychologists take it for granted that forgiveness is an action. The authors of a recent study, on the “Subjective experience of forgiveness” ask their research participants to rate on a 1-9 point scale how difficult it was for them to forgive and in summarizing their findings listed forgiving another as an action or behavior.12 The findings that came out of our research do confirm Enright’s belief that to forgive is to move from resentment to compassion. But the language in his definition, especially the emphasis on rationality and will is puzzling. Those who forgive tell us that they have forgiven, and this discovery (as Patton calls it13) is not necessarily or even typically preceded by a conscious decision to do so. Of course, this does not mean that they forgave in

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spite of themselves, but it does suggests that forgiving is a matter of being willing rather than being willful. Even in those cases where the people decide that they would like to forgive, the decision does not by itself bring about forgiveness, anymore than a decision to quit smoking results in abstinence. Finally, it is noteworthy that many psychologists describe forgiveness as a technique and refer to evidence that certain procedures are effective for bringing about forgiveness. In so doing, they demonstrate how much reliance on and faith in techniques as a vehicle for progress and for reaching preconceived goals has become a feature not just of Western society but of the disciplines of psychology and psychiatry. What is meant by technique, in this context? William Barrett in The Illusion of Technique has defined a technique as a standard method that can be taught. Further, he specifies that it can be taught because its steps can be precisely specified.14 The steps could be the ones the psychologist uses to help a person move towards forgiveness or the ones that the subjects or clients are taught so that they can attain control over their emotions and behavior and help themselves toward the same goal. What careful studies of descriptions of forgiveness reveal, in contrast, is that this is an elusive and intricate phenomenon: there is always more to it than I or any other researcher can say about it. It is not something that can be adequately measured or readily manipulated. Rather, these descriptions point to the mystery that is inherent in human life, to the depth of persons, and to the way in which our existence unfolds in unexpected ways.15 They demonstrate that forgiveness is not an action resulting from a conscious decision, that it is not an action, but is a transformation that lies outside of the dichotomy between the active and the passive. In conclusion, let me return to the theme of the importance of forgiveness, with a quote from the political philosopher Hannah Arendt:

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Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act, would, as it were, be confined to a single deed from which we would never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.16

Endnotes 1. Based on a presentation given at the International Human Sci­ ence Research Conference, Molde University College, Molde, Norway. June, 2009. 2. J. H. van den Berg, A Different Existence: Principles of Pheno­ menological Psychopathology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1972). 3. Steen Halling, Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology: Closeness and Openess in Everyday Life (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 82. 4. Lin Bauer, Jack Duffy, Elizabeth Fountain, Steen Halling, Maria Holzer, Michael Leifer and Jan O. Rowe, “Exploring Self-Forgiveness,” Journal of Religion and Health, 1992, 31, No. 2, 149-160. 5. Steen Halling, “Eugene O’Neill’s Understanding of Forgiveness.” in Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. III, ed. Amedeo Giorgi, Richard Knowles, and David L. Smith (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1979), 194. 6. Jan O. Rowe, Steen Halling, Michael Leifer, Emily Davies, Diane Powers, and Jeanne van Bronkhorst, “The Psychology of Forgiving Another: A Dialogal Research Approach,”Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology , ed. Ronald S.Valle and Steen Halling (New York: Plenum, 1989); Linn Bauer et al. “Exploring Self-Forgiveness,” 7. Based on Rowe et al, The Psychology of Forgiving Another. 8. J. Preston Cole, The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1971), 89. 9. Milo C. Curtis, “Forgiving Another: An Existential-Phenome­ nological Investigation” (PhD diss., Duquesne University, 1992), 177. 10 Alex H. S. Harris, Frederic Luskin, Sonya B. Norman, Sam Standard, Jennifer Bruning, Stephanie Evans, and Carl. E. Thoresen. “Effect of a Group Forgiveness Intervention on Forgiveness, Perceived Stress, and Trait-Anger,” Journal of Clinical Psychology, 2008, 62, No. 6, 715-733.

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11. Robert D. Enright and Richard P. Fitzgibbons, Helping Clients Forgive: An Empirical Guide for Resolving Anger and Restoring Hope (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2000), 24. 12. Ian Williamson & Marti Hope Gonzales, “The Subjective Experience of Forgiveness: Positive Construals of the Forgiveness Experience.” Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 2007, 26, No. 4, 407-446. 13. John Patton, Is Human Forgiveness Possible? (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1985) 14. William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: A Search for Meaning in a Technological Civilization (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979). 15. Steen Halling, Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology: Closeness and Openness in Everyday Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 16. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, , 1958), 237

27 Walt Whitman, Nursing, and Phenomenology By Mark A. Hector, Psychology Judith E. Hector, Mathematics

[email protected] [email protected] The University of Tennessee Center for Applied Phenomenological Research ABSTRACT: Each age has its sick and wounded and those who provide them nursing care. This paper links together “The Wound Dresser,” a poem by the Civil War nurse Walt Whitman, a musical composition by John Adams that is based on the poem, and a book on nursing research and practice. The poem, the musical composition, and the book are described and related from the perspective of phenomenology.

I. Walt Whitman, Nursing, and Phenomenology In December of 1862, Walt Whitman was a 43-year old newspaper reporter living in New York City. When he was not being a reporter, he wrote poetry. His younger brother, George, was fighting on the side of the Union in the Civil War. Three days after the battle at Fredericksburg, Walt and his mother received notice that George had been a casualty in the battle. Not knowing the seriousness of George’s injury or whether he was still alive, Walt left immediately for the battlefield. Soon after Walt arrived at the military camp, he found that George had PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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suffered only a minor injury. Walt had been a frequent visitor to hospitals in New York City, so after he found that his brother was well, he participated in the evacuation of the wounded to Washington, D.C. There he found hospitals, some quite makeshift, overwhelmed and understaffed. He began to make regular visits to the war wounded and dying. These visits changed Walt Whitman’s life. He claimed that these visits saved his life. Roy Morris, Jr. (2000) writes: From December 1862 until well after the war was over, he personally visited tens of thousands of hurt, lonely, and scared young men in the hospitals in and around Washington, bringing them the ineffable but not inconsiderable gift of his magnetic, consoling presence. In the process, he lost forever his own good health, beginning a long decline that would leave him increasingly enfeebled for the rest of his life. To his credit, he never regretted his wartime service, or what it had cost him personally. “I only gave myself,” he told a friend. “I got the boys.” (p. 5)

When Whitman encountered the thousands of young men in the hospitals, he took action. Daily he sat by the soldiers, he listened to them, held them, loved them, wrote letters for them to parents and loved ones, gave them tobacco and other small gifts, dressed their wounds, and held vigils with them as they died. After they died, he often wrote comforting letters to the soldiers’ families about how their sons had died. Whitman was a powerful example to others in Civil War hospitals about how a nurse could be of aid to the sick and wounded. His nursing continued through the last two years of the Civil War and for another nine years until he suffered a paralytic stroke at age 54. Probably the greatest thing about Walt Whitman, the nurse, was that he had the talent and genius to write about his experiences. Both his prose and his poetry about the nursing experience are profound in terms of giving the reader a vivid description and insight into what it was like to be a caregiver at that time and in that place.

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II. Connecting “The Wound Dresser” and Phenomenology A main task of the phenomenological project is to describe experience. Knowledge and understanding of that which the experiencer was aware come through description (Merleau-Ponty, 1962). Through this description, the meaning of the experience emerges. Here is an excerpt from a poem describing Whitman’s experience as a wound dresser (Whitman, 2001). Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go, Where they lie on the ground after the battle brought in, Where their priceless blood reddens the grass the ground, Or to the rows of the hospital tent, or under the roof’d hospital, To the long rows of cots up and down each side I return, To each and all one after another I draw near, not one do I miss,

Whitman is aware of the need not to delay in the task of dressing wounds. He goes to the wounded, “Straight and swift.” There are so many wounded soldiers. In the field, they are brought in so quickly that they are just laid on the grass; and the grass turns red with their blood. As he makes his rounds in the hospital tents or buildings, he is aware of a multitude of wounded soldiers. There are “long rows of cots” and he feels a strong need to go to each soldier. Whitman expresses the desire to attend to each and every wounded young man. He must be “near” each one, overlooking none. Drew Gilpin Faust (2008) refers to Whitman’s focus on caring for each individual in the midst of multitudes in dire need of care. Though Whitman estimated that he had personally visited 80,000 to 100,000 sick or wounded, he “claimed each one as his own” (p. 262). Faust uses Whitman’s own words as she highlights Whitman’s focus on the individual. Every soldier was to Whitman “a man as divine as myself ”; each was “my loving comrade,” even if he lay unheralded and unknown. These singular soldiers represented for Whitman “the real war,”

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the true meaning of the devastating conflict. His abstraction from the one to the many and his embodiment of the many in the one served as both political and poetical synecdoche. (p. 262)

The poem, “The Wound Dresser,” about his experiences is relatively short with only 65 lines. It may be found in the volume, Leaves of Grass: the Death-bed Edition, which appeared in 1892, just two months before Whitman’s death, though the poem was written closer to the time when he was nursing the wounded. There is also a small book entitled Walt Whitman: The Wound Dresser (Bucke, 1949), which is now out of print. This book contains a newspaper article published in February 1863 in the New York Times and another article from the Brooklyn Eagle published in March of the same year. These two articles by Whitman describe the conditions in the hospitals in the Washington D.C. area. However, most of the book consists of letters written to his mother while Whitman was caring for the wounded. The letters recount his daily activities as a nurse and the immediacy for him of what he was experiencing and what he was learning about the experience of being among the sick and wounded. In the letters to his mother, Whitman talks about friendship and daily affection as healing agents. He describes his approach in one of the earlier letters: … I saw as I looked that it was a case for ministering to the affection first, and other nourishment and medicines afterward. I sat down by him without any fuss; ... led him to talk a little himself; got him somewhat interested; wrote a letter for him to his folks ... (He has told me since that this little visit at that hour, just saved him; a day more, and it would have been perhaps too late.) (Burke, 1949, pp. 7-8)

By careful listening, observation and reflection on what he was experiencing, Whitman developed a nursing approach that he felt saved lives, especially by encouraging the young men not to give up.

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In the letters, Whitman occasionally commented on the scarcity of caregivers of the right sort in the hospitals and how needed he felt. As the poem continues, it is interesting to note that Whitman was not aware of any other wound dressers. An attendant follows holding a tray, he carries a refuse pail, Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again.

Other than an attendant who is helping him, there seems to be no other caregivers there to meet the needs of the sick and wounded. Indeed, Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) is credited with starting professional education programs in nursing in England. She had published what is considered the first textbook on nursing in 1860, only two years before Whitman began volunteering his services. In America, Clara Barton (1821-1912) had resigned from her job at the beginning of the Civil War to work on the distribution of supplies for wounded soldiers. Dorothea Dix (1802-1887) served with the Union Army as superintendent of women nurses. Whitman struggled with lack of availability of both supplies and personnel needed to provide even minimal care for the wounded, sick and dying men he visited. He essentially taught himself how to be a nurse by listening to the sick and wounded and reflecting upon what he could do or learn to do to relieve their suffering. A basic aspect of phenomenology is the description of beingin-the-world, a description of what the one experiencing is aware. The description is always from the perspective of the individual who has had the experience. Individuals are naturally immersed in their experiences. The one who experiences is not a scientific observer behind a one-way mirror observing and rating experiences in the world. Being in the world does not take place in controlled laboratory settings. The individual observes the world and sometimes reacts to it while simultaneously living in it. As Whitman said in his poem:

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I onward go, I stop, With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds, I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable, One turns to me his appealing eyes—poor boy! I never knew you, Yet I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you.

Another feature of being-in-the-world is time. To be in the world is to be present in the moment. One can try to remember what it was like to be in the world yesterday. In terms of tomorrow, one may have expectations or presuppositions about what it will be like to be in the world tomorrow. In regard to one’s own experiences, there is memory of the past and speculation on the future. As Merleau-Ponty (1962) has pointed out there can be no awareness of or perspective on present experiences. The present is only a fleeting instant. It comes and goes so quickly there is no opportunity to ponder it. The poem illustrates this point. On, on I go, (open doors of time! open hospital doors!) The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away,)

One can return in memory to the fleeting instant. Thus in silence in dreams’ projections, Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals,

Some engage in the activity of meditation as an attempt to hold on to present experiences. The person who practices meditation seems to slow the passage of time and thereby become more aware of the present. If time seems to pass more slowly, then the present can be considered in more detail. Without meditation, one returns to the experience as a memory of what has passed. Consider walking through a modern hospital for those wounded in war today. What one sees and hears is unique to the

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times in which we live. Wounds have been cleaned, disinfected and bandaged. Usually wounds are not visible. The wounded have most likely been given pain-killing drugs so they are resting quietly. There is the barely audible hum of machines that have been attached to the wounded in order to remove harmful substances or to provide health-restoring medicines. There are not many doctors or nurses “near” the patients. They are spending short periods of time with other patients or working with the technologies involved in diagnosis and healing or filling out computerized charts and records. Over a hundred years ago, Walt Whitman sat beside patients and was aware of the breathing sounds of the wounded soldiers and of the silence and his reactions to both. The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through I examine, Hard the breathing rattles, quite glazed already the eye, yet life struggles hard, (Come sweet death! be persuaded O beautiful death! In mercy come quickly.) …… The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand, I sit by the restless all the dark night, some are so young, Some suffer so much, I recall the experience sweet and sad, (Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested, Many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips.)

Whitman provides a profound phenomenological description of what he was aware as a nurse. His awareness of others (the wounded and the attendant) and his awareness of his own reaction still resonate with readers today. I dress the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound, Cleanse the one with a gnawing and putrid gangrene, so sickening, so offensive, While the attendant stands behind aside me holding the tray and pail.

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I am faithful, I do not give out, The fractur’d thigh, the knee, the wound in the abdomen, These and more I dress with impassive hand, (yet deep in my breast a fire, a burning flame.)

The poem distills several years of experience into a few lines that are intimate, graphic, and profoundly affecting. The richness of this poem has been further amplified in a musical setting. III. Th  e Wound Dresser, an Orchestral and Vocal Piece by John Adams The world premiere of The Wound Dresser by John Adams occurred in 1989 in Minnesota. John Adams conducted the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Sanford Sylvan sang. The piece, 20 minutes in length, features a baritone soloist with the instrumentation of two flutes, two oboes, clarinet and bass clarinet, two bassoons, two horns, trumpet, timpani, synthesizer, and strings. Adams took the words from the last portion of The Wound Dresser poem and set them to music. In the first part of the poem, not used by Adams, Whitman positions himself as an old man remembering back to the Civil War years. An old man bending I come among new faces, Years looking backward resuming in answer to children, …

His listeners ask, What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics, Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?

What he remembers most vividly are his nursing experiences: “To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead; …” Whitman’s vivid descriptions of his experiences as a nurse comprises the last three-fifths of the poem. It is upon this latter

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part of the poem that John Adams based his musical piece. The musical piece begins with the previously discussed line, “Bearing the bandages, water and sponge, Straight and swift to my wounded I go, …” Steinberg (2002) has written about the music, The Wound Dresser, composed by John Adams. Steinberg used the terms sympathy, resonance, and consonance. The music has a strong resonance; and the reverberation of sympathetic vibration achieves this resonance. The sympathetic vibrations are achieved through musical instrumentation and the baritone voice. Sympathetic vibration itself takes place when two entities are vibrating with the same intensity. According to Steinberg, Adams was particularly interested in “the resonant power of consonance.” Consonance is achieved through resonance and sympathetic vibration and consonance is the desired end. Consonance is accord or agreement or “a simultaneous combination of tones conventionally accepted as being in a state of repose, which is the opposite of dissonance” (Steinberg, 2002). Whitman resonated with the young men. He was also empathic and there was sympathetic vibration. Adam’s music expresses these same qualities as it accompanies Whitman’s poetry; and the overall effect is sublime and powerful. Cahill (1989), in liner notes to a 1989 recording of The Wound Dresser by Adams, wrote of the power and relevance of Whitman’s poem today. She noted that while Adams was working on the piece, his mother was totally involved in caring for his father, who was near the end of his life and suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. I was plunged into an awareness,” remembers Adams, “not only of dying, but also of the person who cares for the dying. The responsibility is tragic and also incredibly exhausting, and the bonding that takes place between the two is one of the most extraordinary human events that can happen—something deeply personal of which most of us are completely unaware.

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Cahill also quoted Adams as saying that the poem itself attracted him because “it is the most intimate, most graphic, and most profoundly affecting evocation of the act of nursing the sick and dying that I know of. It is also astonishingly free of any kind of hyperbole or amplified emotion, yet the detail of the imagery is of a precision that could only be attained by one who had been there.” IV. Listening to Patients: A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice Sandra Thomas and Howard Pollio (2002) have applied the ideas of phenomenology and hermeneutics to nursing research and practice. Chapter Two of Listening to Patients: A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice focuses on the activity of doing phenomenological interviews in nursing settings. Thomas and Pollio provide a guide of 22 practical steps to follow when doing phenomenological interviews. Examples of steps are: arranging for interviews, obtaining informed consent, asking open-ended questions, terminating interviews, and preparing written transcripts. Other features of the phenomenological research interview are: selection of the research participants, formulating the opening question, carrying out the bracketing interview, establishing the interpretive research group, reading the transcript in the interpretive group, mining the data for metaphors, deciding what is thematic, developing and refining the thematic structure and obtaining feedback from the participants. Finally, Thomas and Pollio discuss issues of reliability, validity and generalizability when doing such research. A major portion of Listening to Patients is devoted to telling the stories of various kinds of patients. The topics of these stories have to do with the following: living with an implanted defibrillator, living with chronic pain,

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living with a diabetic sibling, living with a daughter who has an eating disorder, living with postpartum depression, recovering from a stroke, staying out of an abusive relationship, and wresting meaning from a time of spiritual distress.

Thomas and Pollio (2002) focus primarily on doing phenomenological research in hospital and outpatient settings. They frequently suggest either implicitly or explicitly that nurses could greatly improve on what they do if they would take the time to be phenomenological interviewers. The phenomenological interviewer attempts to understand the lived experience of the patient. They are trying to understand the experience of the patient from the perspective of the patient. In the epilogue to Listening to Patients, the authors present several issues as a summary to their book. They state: Nursing education needs to adopt a more open, dialogic style of teaching such that the next generation of nurses will be able to empathize more fully with their patients. A student nurse who does not remember his or her own pain is not likely to be especially caring to someone who now is in pain. Students must be encouraged to reflect on their own experiences and on their daily interactions with patients. (p. 255)

On the same page they also state, “Being with” a patient is often as significant a role for the nurse as “doing for.” Sometimes it may be even more meaningful simply to be with the patient as a person, as one human relating to another.

The approach to nursing that Thomas and Pollio (2002) promote in Listening to Patients was anticipated by Walt Whitman. As described in his poem The Wound Dresser, Whitman was passionately devoted to “being with” the sick and wounded as opposed to “doing for.” Whitman’s approach has also been described and promoted by others:

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• Healing Through Communication: The Practice of Caring (Montgomery, 1993) • From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (Halpern, 2001) • Empathy in Patient Care: Antecedents, Development, Measurement and Outcomes (Hojat, 2007) Walt Whitman was an empathic nurse. The philosopher J.D. Trout has emphasized the importance of empathy in health care in his book The Empathy Gap (2009). Trout believes that empathic citizens can “build bridges to the good life and the good society.” In “The Wound Dresser,” Whitman has written beautifully on the idea of just being with someone. In Children of Adam there is the nine-section poem called, I Sing the Body Electric. In its fourth section, Whitman (2001, pp. 122-123) writes: I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough, To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough, To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough, To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then? I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea. There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well, All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

The importance of “being with” a patient and of phenomenological listening continues to be acknowledged in the literature on nursing. Wojnar and Swanson (2007, p. 172) suggest that the “interactions inherent in holistic nurse-patient transactions be explored through phenomenological inquiry.” They point out the use of descriptive and interpretive phenomenological methods “to illuminate knowledge relevant to holistic nursing practice” (p. 179) may lead to developing better clinical interventions.

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Conclusion Walt Whitman shared with his readers his thinking as he nursed in a poem, in letters and in newspaper articles. He cared as best he could for suffering soldiers. He made a difference in the lives he touched. He expressed criticism in newspaper articles because the sick and wounded were not getting the care they deserved; and he hoped to help improve conditions. He worked most often alone to humanize inhuman treatment settings. All the while, he was teaching himself how to nurse. He was fascinated by the stories he heard from the sick and wounded, stories for which they had not found listeners. He filled notebooks with notes on individuals as an aid to meeting individual needs. He developed a shared meaning between patient and nurse and was profoundly affected by his experiences. He was a gifted writer willing and able to share his experiences with his mother, friends and the reading public. Because he listened respectfully to the men he served, the unique perspective of his experiences and those of the sick and wounded are available and still resonate with readers today. References Bucke, R. M. (ed.) (1949). Walt Whitman: The wound dresser. New York: Bodley Press. Cahill, S. (1989). Liner notes for the CD Fearful symmetries and The wound-dresser. New York: Elektra Nonesuch. Faust, D. G. (2008). This republic of suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Halpern, J. (2001). From detached concern to empathy: Humanizing medical practice. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Hojat, M. (2007). Empathy in patient care: Antecedents, development, measurement and outcomes. New York: Springer. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. (C. Smith, Trans.) London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Montgomery, C. L. (1993). Healing through communication: The practice of caring. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

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Morris, Jr., R. (2000). The better angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Steinberg, M. (Jan., 2002). Stagebill. New York: New York Philharmonic. Thomas, S. P., & Pollio, H. R. (2002). Listening to patients: A phenomenological approach to nursing research and practice. New York: Springer. Trout, J. D. (2009). The empathy gap. New York: Viking. Whitman, W. (2001). Leaves of grass: The “death-bed” edition. New York: Modern Library. Wojnar, D. M., & Swanson, K. M. (2007). Phenomenology: An exploration. Journal of Holistic Nursing, 25, p. 172-180.

28 Václav Havel’s New Statecraft of Responsible Politics by Hwa Yol Jung

Political Science, Moravian College, Bethlehem, PA 18018 [email protected] Society for Phenomenology and the Human Sciences ABSTRACT: Václav Havel is a playwright who turned into a statesman of extraordinary courage, wisdom, and morals by the exigency of his time. He has been the most prominent voice in post-Communist Eastern Europe. His close fellow-traveller was Jan Patočka who was a student of Husserl and Heidegger, and closely read the phenomenological ethicist Emmanuel Levinas who earmarked dialogical ethics as “first philosophy.” Havel’s signature essay “living in truth” marks the heart of his morality in politics, that is, the confluence of morality and politics. For him, politics as “the art of the impossible” defies politics as “the art of the possible” or Realpolitik. Responsibility as “first politics” is a moral alternative to violence whose ultimate telos is to destroy the Other. Morality is not a branch of philosophy, but first philosophy. —Emmanuel Levinas, in Totality and Infinity (1969) The secret of man is the secret of his responsibility. —Václav Havel, in Letters to Olga (1983)

There is something refreshing and novel about Václav Havel’s philosophic politics that appeals to, and attracts the critical attention and acclaim of, contemporary intellectuals from all political persuasions: Richard Rorty, Steven Lukes, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Roger Scruton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Robert N. Bellah, and PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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Robert Jay Lifton. From the side of conservatives, Havel represents the death of communism as a totalitarian political system and the “end” of ideology and history as the transparent triumph of American liberalism. From the side of political radicalism, he symbolizes the ultimate victory of the powerless. In other words, he is a philosopher-statesman for all seasons. For many intellectuals, it is the working of Havel’s philosophic politics, of the politics of the “antipolitical” that is attractive and intriguing. It is summed up in the idea of “living in truth” as moral sensibility. In his Reinventing Politics which surveys Eastern European politics from Stalin to Havel, Vladimir Tismaneanu (1992: 133) writes poignantly: “Nobody better expressed the commitment to a politics of truth than the Czech playwright and human rights activist Václav Havel.” There is indeed something avant-garde and forward-looking in Havel’s thought. In the words of Herbert Marcuse (1978: 9), the artistic or aesthetic contains the categorical imperative that things must change, and the truth of art lies in its power to deconstruct the monopoly of established reality by making a commitment to “an emancipation of sensibility, imagination, and reason in all spheres of subjectivity and objectivity.” There is, then, no contradiction between the aesthetic and proteanism: as Robert Jay Lifton (1993: 10) suggests, Havel is “perhaps the most dramatic exemplar of public proteanism.” For me, Havel’s politics of “living in truth” and his “Charter 77” group in Czechoslovakia, whose intellectual pillar was Jan Patočka—once an assistant of Husserl and a student of Heidegger—vindicates the efficacy of the jesterly against the high priesthood of totalitarian politics, of “the power of the powerless,” of the existential politics of conscience, and of the success of nonviolent resistance for the creation of a “post-totalitarian” or “post-communist” political order. Havel, in brief, vindicates the possibility of responsible politics. It is no accident that Havel’s speech delivered to the Joint Session of the U.S.

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Congress on February 21, 1990 was sloganized as “consciousness precedes Being” (“and not the other way around, as the Marxists claim”).1 Havel is foremost a writer, an artist of the word for which he lives and dies. He is above all a philosophic playwright and essayist who belongs to the culture of the word which also becomes a potent political weapon. Writing about words, Havel (1991: 377) says in a deeply pensive tone: … indeed, words can be said to be the very source of our being, and in fact the very substance of the cosmic life form we call man. Spirit, the human soul, our self-awareness, our ability to generalize and think in concepts, to perceive the world as the world (and not just as our locality), and lastly, our capacity for knowing that we will die—and living in spite of that knowledge: surely all these are mediated or actually created by words?

It is also our common knowledge that Havel’s phenomenological meditations and writings were deeply influenced by Jan Patočka who, as has above been noted, was a student of Husserl and Heidegger, an admirer of Masaryk’s democratic humanism and Comenius’s pansophic humanism, and an active political dissident—unlike his mentor Heidegger, I might add—who willingly risked his life and died in 1977 during a political interrogation. Havel’s lengthy and best known essay “The Power of the Powerless” was written in 1978 and dedicated to the memory of Patočka, and it also testifies to the ineliminable imprints of Husserlian and particularly Heideggerian meditations on the way of his thinking. Patočka’s sense of crisis in European civilization, it should be noted, reflects Husserl’s (1970) own profound sense of crisis and decline in European rationality which is rooted in modernity in the Galilean mathematization of nature that eventually “decapitates”—to use Husserl’s own word—philosophical thinking. In his effort to resolve this crisis of European humanity, Husserl discovered and introduced the phenomenology of the Lebenswelt

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or what Patočka calls the “natural world” which pertains to everyday “social reality” as the founding and funding matrix (Sinngebung) of theoretical thinking—both scientific and philosophical. The discovery of the everyday sociocultural life-world must be ranked as one of the most monumental accomplishments of twentieth-century philosophy. Moreover, Patočka’s reckoning of crisis in European humanity fundamentally as the lack or absence of moral ordering and the role of philosophy to come to its rescue is motivated by and indebted to Husserl’s vision of the philosopher as the “civil servant of humanity.” In this paper I wish to focus not on Havel’s Husserlian and Heideggerian meditations but rather on (Emmanuel) Levinasian meditations on the ethics of responsibility and to explore its philosophical grounding and its paradigmatic implications for the philosophy of politics. So far, many commentators on Havel including Richard Rorty have observed the grounding of Havel’s philosophic politics in Husserlian and Heideggerian meditations but failed to recognize the importance of his Levinasian meditations on his philosophic politics. It may be said that Havel’s Levinasian meditations make him rather unique and revolutionary in contemporary political thinking. They are found in Havel’s prison letters to his wife written between June 1979 and September 1982 which were published as Letters to Olga (1989). Interestingly, they are reminiscent of the “journalistic” style of philosophizing which the French existential philosopher Gabriel Marcel once cherished and promoted. Havel’s Levinasian meditations in Letters to Olga focus their attention on the ethics of responsibility.2 While Husserl and Heidegger searched their philosophical roots in “Athens,” Levinas’s inspiration for the primacy of the ethical comes from the religious heritage of “Jerusalem.” In significant measure, Levinasian meditations are post-Husserlian and post-Hei­ deg­gerian. Levinas himself acknowledges that the prime importance of the ethical is the Jewish contribution to the history of

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Western philosophy.3 He turns to Judaic texts for his (heteronomic) ethics of responsibility. For Havel, likewise, morals are the basic stuff of all politics. He is quintessentially a Levinasian who practices in his statecraft a heteronomic ethics of responsibility as “first politics.” The concept of freedom paints the philosophical landscape of modern philosophy in the West including existential philosophy from Søren Kierkegaard to Jean-Paul Sartre. In The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948: 34), Simone de Beauvoir was ready to assert the idea of existential philosophy as “the only philosophy in which an ethic has its place” because it alone allows the real freedom of choice between what is good and what is evil: what one chooses determines one’s own destiny, including one’s morals. On the other hand, however, the concept of responsibility I wish to explore in Havel’s philosophic politics and its genealogy is only a recent discovery. It begins its career in earnest in the nineteenth century with the revolutionary pronouncement of the primacy of “Thou” by Ludwig Feuerbach in formulating a philosophy of the future whose maturity, I suggest, has come of age in Levinas’s heteronomy.4 For the late French/Jewish phenomenologist Emmanuel Le­ vinas, who is regarded by many as the most important moral philosopher of the twentieth century, morality is the sinew of human coexistence and ethics is “first philosophy” (prima philosophia or philosophie première). “When I speak of first philosophy,” he (1999: 97) emphasizes, “I am referring to a philosophy of dialogue that cannot not be an ethics.” For him, heteronomy alone is the site of responsibility if not ethics itself. By it, he means to favor the other in an asymmetrical relationship. The heteronomic ethics of responsibility is anchored in the primacy of the other (alterity) over the self (ipseity). Altruism for its name sake, therefore, is exemplary of responsibility. As the “you” or “we” is not a plural of the “I,” ipseity alone renders ethics im­ possible. Indeed, it defaces or effaces the ethical. It is the primary

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presence of the other that makes the ethical possible. Thus Levinas holds that human plurality is not a multiplicity of numbers, but is predicated upon a radical alterity of the other. As heteronomy is the ground of the ethical, alterity may be spelled “altarity” [the title of Mark C. Taylor’s book (1987)] for the very reason that “altar” is derived from the Latin altare that signifies “a high place.” In this sense, the idea of “altarity” elevates the world of the other, and transforms it into an elevated text. In the elevated ethical text of “altarity,” responsibility precedes and is inclusive of freedom, whereas freedom as autonomy excludes the possibility of responsibility. To put it thusly, responsibility is to heteronomy what egocentricity is to autonomy. Levinas’s heteronomic ethics affirms subjectivity (or conscience) never for itself but only for an “other” (pour l’autre). Subjectivity comes into being as heteronomic: “it is my inescapable and incontrovertible answerability to the other that makes me an individual “I,” i.e., it is called the “meontological version of subjectivity” (Levinas and Kearney, 1986: 63). Answerability or responsibility is for Levinas (1982: 95) “the essential, primary and fundamental structure of subjectivity. For I describe subjectivity in ethical terms. Ethics, here, does not supplement a preceding existential base; the very mode of the subjective is knotted in ethics understood as responsibility.” Although responsibility without freedom is a sham, freedom is ancillary but not contrary to responsibility simply because we can be free without being responsible, but we can never be responsible without being free.5 “Existence,” Levinas (1987: 58 and cf. 1969: 84-85) declares, “is not condemned to freedom, but judged and invested as a freedom. Freedom could not present itself all naked. This investiture of freedom constitutes moral life itself, which is through and through a heteronomy.” Levinas’s “meontology,” as the literal meaning of the term itself registers, escapes and goes beyond the “tyranny of ontology.” It is the “foundation” but not a “superstructure” of ontology. It may be said that from the existential standpoint of Levinas’s

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heteronomy the very idea of existence (ex/istence) has been profoundly misunderstood among its antagonists as well as protagonists: as its etymology shows, what is really central to it is not the centrality but the eccentricity (ex-centricity) of the self toward the world of others (Mitwelt) and other nonhuman things (Umwelt). The human as eccentric is a being who is always already exposed to and reaches the outside world of what Levinas himself calls “exteriority.” Thus the motto of existence must be: do not go inside, go outside. Be a moral agent first, not an epistemological subject. The authenticity of existence is guaranteed not by egocentricity, but only by heteronomy or a dialogue of eccentric agents. In the end, the idea of existence as eccentricity promotes the heteronomic ethics of responsibility which refutes both egocentrism and anthropocentrism (or speciesism), including the planetary domination by technology of the earth. Humans are responsible for sustaining the entire “green” earth and the entire population of its inhabitants both human and nonhuman. Havel, for whom politics begins as ethics or ethics is the foundation of politics, is fully aware of the historic consequences of Kierkegaard’s “crowd” which is faceless, hypnotic, conforming, indolent, indifferent, and demoralizing; José Ortega y Gasset’s “hyper-democracy” based on the purely reactive “masses,” and above all Heidegger’s anonymous “they” (das Man) which is, as Hannah Arendt has definitively shown, the social genesis of totalitarian politics sui generis in the twentieth century. The totalitarian political system is, according to Havel, where ordinary people are knowingly caught in a network of the ideological rituals of living in untruth. Jean Baudrillard (1983: 44) warns of technocracy in which “the masses are a stronger medium than all the media…. Mass(age) is the message.” Arendt (1965) narrated most tellingly the conforming “automatism” (Havel’s term) of Adolf Eichmann. It is of utmost importance to understand her controversial reportage concerning Eichmann’s “banality of evil” as “thoughtlessness.” By “thoughtlessness,” she

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meant Eichmann’s utter inability to think from the standpoint of an “other,” i.e., the erasure of the other’s difference. Eichmann’s “banality of evil”—the term which offended or angered her Jewish friends—is indeed a sobering reminder that the politics of identity or the abolition of the other’s difference results in the inhumane politics of cruelty, suffering, violence, and extermination as well as the politics of racism and colonialism. We would be remiss if we forget to point out that the ethics of responsibility based on heteronomy is a radical shift from Anglo-American “rights talk” since John Locke whose center is the self in everything we do and think. If rights have their place in the ethics of responsibility, they are only the “rights of others” rather than the acquisitive or possessive claims of the self. The ethics of responsibility is “otherwise” than “rights talk.” What “rights talk” is to Ptolemaic geocentrism, the heteronomic ethics of responsibility is to Copernican heliocentrism. Responsibility thusly defined is a Copernican reversal of social, political and ethical thought which—to repeat—began with Ludwig Feuerbach who discovered “Thou” at the center of human dialogue for the future of philosophy. Havel closely read Levinas during his prison years in Czechoslovakia. Following Levinas, he considered responsibility as the innermost secret of moral humanity. His signature idea of “living in truth” marks the heart of his conception of politics as well as morality in rejecting Machiavelli’s Realpolitik and totalitarian politics in the twentieth century, both of which accept and take for granted violence as a matter of inevitability or necessity. The famous or infamous dictum of Karl Clausewitz affirms the inseparability of violence from politics since for him “war is the continuation of politics by other means.”6 Violence is without doubt an utter failure of human dialogue, of communication. It eschews responsibility: it is intrinsically an irresponsible act because it intends to efface, harm, or kill an “other.” As a freshman in college in 1954, I was introduced to Alfred

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North Whitehead’s inspiring work Adventures of Ideas (1954) which left an indelible impression on me. It taught me an unforgettable lesson on the endearing idea that human civilization is the victory of persuasion over force. As a measured failure of persuasion, violence takes a heavy toll on humans and nonhumans alike in abolishing difference. The breach of civility is predicated upon one’s epistemological infallibility and moral inculpability which are a deadly mix: I can never err and do nothing wrong or, to put it differently, the other might never be right and might never do anything right. The other is ultimately seen in the image of an enemy. J. Glenn Gray’s (1959) The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle, which is a deeply phenomenological study of homo furens (warriors), is instructive. Among the issues that Gray observes such as the appeals of battle, camaraderie, death, guilt, and even a delight of “fearful beauty” in destruction, there stands out the “abstract” image of the enemy that anaesthetizes man the warrior. It is the monstrous—totally dehumanized—image of the enemy who is at best “subhuman.” To repeat: violence is an irresponsible act because it intends to eradicate the other’s differences. Violence is a result of identity politics or of “essentializing” cultural politics—to borrow Edward W. Said’s felicitous term— whether it be Carl Schmitt’s polarizing confrontation between “friends” and “enemies,” Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” as the ultimate triumph of American liberalism, or Samuel P. Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” All three positions are coun­terproductive in the globalizing world of multiculturalism because they allow no possibility of dialogue as the middle path of the two extremes. In case of Fukuyama, the alleged triumph of American liberalism turned out to be premature in light of the waning or decline of American exceptionalism.7 In case of Huntington, he dismisses the globalizing effect of different cultures. As Said put it judiciously in 2003: Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together of cultures that

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overlap, borrow from each other, and live together…. But for [this] kind of wider perception we need time and patient and skeptical enquiry supported by faith in communities of interpretation that are difficult to sustain in a world demanding instant action and reaction (quoted in Hobson, 2004: 322).

Over four decades ago Leszek Kolakowski (1968: 9-37) perceptively juxtaposed two prevailing styles of philosophizing that exist side by side in any given age or epoch: one is the “priestly” style of yang and the other the “jesterly” style of yin. Kolakowski’s juxtaposition parallels the unfusable distinction between official monologue and carnivalesque dialogue in Mikhail Bakhtin and between power in being and dissidence in Havel. For Bakhtin (1984: 252), whose dialogism relies heavily on the artistic world of Dostoevsky’s novels, dialogue is never a means for something else but an end in itself: “Dialogue…is not the threshold to action, it is the action itself…. To be means to communicate dialogically. When dialogue ends, everything ends.” Dialogue is “unfinalizable”: by its intrinsic structure, it cannot and must not come to an end. For Bakhtin’s dialogism, there is a twofold difference between dialogue and (Hegelian and Marxian) dialectics. On the one hand, dialectics is the conceptual overdetermination of dialogue in pursuit of acquiring absolute knowledge. On the other hand, it is serious enough to be a violent, this is, life-and-death struggle between two opposing forces, the phenomenon of which Hegel so ably formulates in his Phenomenology of Spirit as the irreconcilable struggle between the master and the slave for mutual recognition. The soul of dialogue, according to Bakhtin, is carnivalization—the corporeal phenomenon which is both playful and hierarchal at the same time. Carnivalization, though quintessentially corporeal, is not carnage. It is for Bakhtin the political embodiment of playfulness which is a cardinal element of the aesthetic in transforming consciousness and creating a new way of conceiving the world by breaking up the colorless and prosaic monopoly of

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the established order. Based on his provocative study of Rabelais, the carnivalesque model of the world for Bakhtin deconstructs, transgresses, subverts, and transforms the canonical order of truth and the official order of reality. Dialogue portends to be a protest against the monological “misrule” of hierarchized officialdom.8 Havel’s compatriot Milan Kundera (1988), who is also acquainted with Husserlian and Heideggerian meditations, comes to the conclusion that the artistic spirit of the novel is incompatible fundamentally, that is, ontologically, with the politics of totalitarianism. For the truth of totalitarianism or totalitarian truth is ignorant or intolerant of doubting, questioning, relativity, ambiguity, lightness, and playfulness all of which signifies the artistic spirit of the novel. The art of the novel is likened to the Rabelaisian response of laughter as opposed to the abstract spirit of philosophy’s priestly asceticism which knows of no laughter. Alluding to the idea that “man thinks, God laughs,” Kundera sees the art of the novel as “the echo of God’s laughter.” The novel’s spirit opposes one who has no sense of humor, one who cannot laugh. It is no mere accident that Havel received in 1986 the Erasmus Prize. One may say that Havel deserved the prize because there was such Erasmusian “folly” in his thought that the powerless can transform the world.9 Havel’s responsible politics is without question the politics of civility, of nonviolence. While the purpose of violence—war, revolution, murder, capital punishment, torture, etc.—is to obliterate or eradicate the other, alterity, or heterarchy, nonviolence means to preserve difference or heterogeneity as the soul of dialogue, of responsibility since but for difference, there would be no need for dialogue or communication. Willingness to speak or engage in a dialogue shows the intent of breaking the vicious cycle of violence—as well as silence—which is too readily accepted as the continuation of politics by other means. Havel’s “dissident” may be likened to Camus’s “rebel.” Camus’s The Rebel (1956) was meant to be a critique of Marxism as

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the dialectical metaphysics and eschatological politics of revolutionary violence. For the rebel is one who justifies the existentialist thesis that the human is the only creature who refuses to be what he/she is. He/she protests against death as well as tyranny, brutality, terror, and servitude. Havel’s dissident is a true rebel who senses and cultivates his allegiance to human solidarity with no intention of obliterating the other. He is able to say that I rebel, therefore we exist. In an interview published as “The Politics of Hope,” Havel also talked about the role of an intellectual as a perpetually “irritant” rebel (or gadfly) who is self-consciously capable of detaching himself/herself from the established order of any kind and who is vigilant to and suspicious of belonging to the “winning side.” Havel shows that—to borrow the eloquent language of Roger Scruton (1990: 88) in writing about Masaryk and Patočka—“the individual soul is the foundation of social order and ... the care of the soul, and the care of the polis, are two aspects of a single concern.” For Camus the refusal to be what we are or the existential facticity and imperative of transformation in perpetuity must be dialogical, that is, nonviolent. He (1956: 283-284) writes: Dialogue on the level of mankind is less costly than the gospel preached by totalitarian regimes in the form of monologue dictated from the top of a lonely mountain. On the stage as in reality, the monologue precedes death. Every rebel, solely by the movement that sets him in opposition to the oppressor, therefore pleads for life, undertakes to struggle against servitude, falsehood, and terror, and affirms, in a flash, that these three afflictions are the cause of silence between men, that they obscure them from one another and prevent them from nihilism—the long complicity of men at grips with their destiny.

Rebellion or nonviolent subversion stands tall in the midway between silence and murder in refusing to accept what we are. The rebel or dissident willingly acknowledges the dialogical in-

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terplay between the ethical principle of culpability and the epistemological principle of fallibility, whereas the revolutionary thrives on the monological absoluteness of inculpability and infallibility however noble or ignoble his/her cause may be. Epistemological dogmatism and moral absolutism have no place in Levinas’s heteronomy, Bakhtin’s dialogism, and Havel’s responsible politics which always recognize the ever-present, porous moment and zone of ambiguity that resides in between complete doubt that paralyzes action and absolute certainty that inflicts suffering, terror, and death on ordinary humanity. For Havel, in conclusion, morals are the basic stuff of all politics. Thus, politics is never a tetragrammaton (or four-letter word) precisely because it is deeply rooted in and inseparable from the moral makeup of humanity. Here Havel (1969: 300) follows Levinas for whom not only is ethics “first philosophy” but also politics without ethics “bears a tyranny within itself.” Havel speaks of politics as “morality in practice,” “practical morality,” “anti-political politics,” and even “the art of the impossible” (Havel, 1977) against Machiavelli’s immoral politics as the “art of the possible.” For Havel, Machiavellian politics promotes “living in untruth,” that is, in manipulation, image-making, deception, and above all violence. Here Havel’s political spirit of nonconformity defies the usual business of politics as the art of the possible and replaces it with the unusual business of politics as the art of the impossible. It makes a U-turn from the received tradition in the modern West of Realpolitik. His so-called “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 signifies a radical transformation of politics from the art of the possible to the art of the impossible which is grounded in the ethics of responsibility as “first politics.” Politics as the art of the impossible is deeply rooted in the moral makeup of humanity itself. The ethics of responsibility grounds the politics of civility which renunciates or negates force and violence in favor of dialogue and communication.10 Indeed, responsibility is the only

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moral alternative to violence. Havel goes so far as to say that in order to make the impossible a reality, we must first dream about making in perpetuity the world safe for dialogue and communication for what he calls “earthly interest” which is at once global and encompasses all living beings—not just humans but also nonhumans as well.11 He shows the working of nonviolence as an active engagement in the making of history rather than merely passive resistance and reaction to violence. References Arendt, Hannah. 1965. Eichmann in Jerusalem. Rev. and enl. ed. New York: Viking Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Baudrillard, Jean. 1983. In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities or, The End of the Social and Other Essays. Trans. Paul Foss, John Johnston and Paul Patton. New York: Semiotext(e). Beauvoir, Simone de. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press. Camus, Albert. 1956. The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Random House. Cox, Harvey. 1969. The Feast of Fools. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1992. “Freedom and Responsibility in a World Come of Age,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, 46: 269-281. _____. 1993. “Politics Without Cliché,” Social Research, 60: 433-444. _____. 1995. “A Performer of Political Thought: Václav Havel on Freedom and Responsibility.” In Theory and Practice (Nomos 37). Eds. Ian Shapiro and Judith Wagner DeCew. New York: New York University Press, 464-482. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. _____. 2006. America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Havel, Václav. 1987. Living in Truth. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber and Faber.

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_____. 1989. Letters to Olga. Trans. Paul Wilson. New York: Henry Holt. _____. 1991. Open Letters: Selected Writings 1965-1990. Ed. Paul Wilson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. _____. 1997. The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice. Trans. Paul Wilson and others. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Hobson, John M. 2004. The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. New York: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hutchins, Robert M. 1967. “The Civilization of the Dialogue.” In The Human Dialogue: Perspectives on Communication. Eds. Floyd W. Matson and Ashley Montagu. New York: Free Press, v. Jonas, Hans. 1984. The Imperative of Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jung, Hwa Yol. 1990. “Mikhail Bakhtin’s Body Politic: A Phenomenological Dialogics,” Man and World, 23: 85-99. _____. 1998. “Bakhtin’s Dialogical Body Politics.” In Bakhtin and the Human Sciences. Eds. Michael Mayerfeld Bell and Michael Gardiner. London: Sage Publications, 96-111. _____. 1999. “Difference and Responsibility.” In Phänomenologie der Nature, a special issue of Phänomenologische Forschungen. Eds. Kah Kyung Cho and Young-Ho Lee, 129-166. _____. 2000. “Taking Responsibility Seriously.” In Phenomenology of the Political. Eds. Kevin Thompson and Lester Embree. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 147-165. _____. 2001. “John Macmurray and the Postmodern Condition: From Egocentricism to Heterocentricism,” Idealistic Studies, 31: 105-123. _____. 2002. “Responsibility as First Ethics: Macmurray and Levinas.” In John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives. Eds. David Fergusson and Nigel Dower. New York: Peter Lang, 173-188. Kohák, Erazim. 1984. The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kolakowski, Leszek. 1968. Toward a Marxist Humanism. Trans. Jane Z. Peel. New York: Grove Press.

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Kriseova, Eda. 1993. Václav Havel. Trans. Caleb Crain. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kundera, Milan. 1988. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. New York: Harper and Row. Levinas, Emmanuel. 1969. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. _____. 1972. Humanisme de l’autre homme. Montpellier: Fata Morgana. _____. 1982. Ethics and Infinity. Trans. Richard A. Cohen. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. _____. 1987. Collected Philosophical Papers. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff. _____. 1999. Alterity and Transcendence. Trans. Michael B. Smith. New York: Columbia University Press. _____ and Richard Kearney. 1986. “Dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas.” In Face to Face with Levinas. Ed. Richard A. Cohen. Albany: State University of New York Press, 13-33. Lifton, Robert Jay. 1993. The Protean Self. New York: Basic Books. Marcuse, Herbert. 1978. The Aesthetic Dimension. Boston: Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 1969. Humanism and Terror. Trans. John O’Neill. Boston: Beacon Press. Putnam, Hilary. 2008. Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Scruton, Roger. 1990. “Masaryk, Patočka and the Care of the Soul.” In The Philosopher on Dover Beach. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 74-88. Taylor, Mark C. 1987. Altarity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tismaneanu, Vladimir. 1992. Reinventing Politics. New York: Free Press.

Endnotes 1. In the same speech, Havel (1997: 18) also said: “Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our Being as humans, and the catastrophe towards which this world is headed, whether it be ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization, will be unavoidable. If we are no longer threatened by world war or by the danger that the absurd mountains of accumulated nuclear weapons

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might blow up the world, this does not mean that we have won. We are in fact far from definite victory.” 2. During the years of his imprisonment, Havel had access to Levinas’s collection of essays entitled Humanisme de l’autre homme (1972) (see Kriseova, 1993). 3. Most interesting is Putnam’s (2008) recent discussion of Levinas’s Judaic texts concerning such issues as universalizing Jewish particularism without the intent of proselytizing it, moral responsibility for others which cannot be derived from metaphysics or epistemology, and comparison between Buber and Levinas as what Putnam calls two “hedgehogs” of dialogism. 4. A trio of Feuerbach’s successors of heteronomy in the twentieth century is Levinas, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray, and the Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin. See Jung (1990, 1998, 2000, 2001, and 2002). 5. Elshtain (1992, 1993, and 1995) discusses the fusion of freedom and responsibility as taking the center stage of Havel’s political thought and action. For a definitive work on responsibility, see Jonas (1984). 6. Cf. in his Humanism and Terror (1969 and 1947 in French), Maurice Merleau-Ponty declared that “humanism”—Machiavellianism notwithstanding—is not immune from violence. He asserted with firm conviction that one who abstains from violence toward the violent is an accomplice of violence itself. Not only is violence the common origin of all political regimes, but also violence is our lot as long as we humans are incarnate beings. 7. It is interesting to note that in his 2005 Castle Lectures at Yale University entitled America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and Neoconservative Legacy (2006), Fukuyama recants his previous views concerning the “end of history” thesis (1992). He now contends that his “end of history” thesis is “an argument about modernization” (2006: 54). If the model of American liberalism is identified with that of modernization, however, there is little difference between the two. 8. Cox (1969: 82) rightly contends that “The rebirth of fantasy as well as of festivity is essential to the survival of our civilization, including its political institutions. But fantasy can never be fully yoked to a particular political program. To subject the creative spirit to the fetters of ideology kills it. When art, religion, and imagination become ideological tools they shrivel into caged birds and toothless tigers. However,

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this does not mean that fantasy has no political significance. Its significance is enormous. This is just why ideologues always try to keep it in harness. When fantasy is neither tamed by ideological leashes nor rendered irrelevant by idiosyncrasy, it can inspire new civilizations and bring empires to their knees.” 9. Bakhtin (1984: 160) describes the deconstructive power of carnivalization as follows: “[it] is past millennia’s way of sensing the world as one great communal performance. This sense of the world, liberating one from fear, bringing the world maximally close to a person and bringing one person maximally close to another (everything is drawn into the zone of free familiar contact), with its joy at change and its joyful relativity, is opposed to that one-sided and official seriousness which is dogmatic and hostile to evolution and change, which seeks to absolutize a given condition of existence or a given social order. From precisely that sort of seriousness did the carnival sense of the world liberate man. But there is not a grain of nihilism in it, nor a grain of empty frivolity or vulgar bohemian individualism.” 10. In echoing Alfred North Whitehead, Hutchins (1967: p. v) writes: “The Civilization of the Dialogue is the negation of force.” 11. It is rather moving to recapture Havel’s defining moment of conscience that includes our responsibility for the order of natural things. As he watched dense brown smoke scattered across the sky from a huge smokestack of a hurriedly built factory, Havel (1987: 136) writes poetically: “Each time I saw it, I had an intense sense of something profoundly wrong, of humans soiling the heavens. If a medieval man were to see something like that suddenly on the horizon—say, while hunting—he would probably think it the work of the Devil and would fall on his knees and pray that he and his skin be saved.” Of course, his concern for the natural order is hitched to his ontological presumption that everything is “inter-being” with everything else in the world. Havel (1997: 93) refers to the synchronistic effect of lepidoptery or—to put it simply—the “butterfly effect” (of chaos theory): “a belief that everything in the world is so mysteriously and completely interconnected that a slight, seemingly insignificant wave of a butterfly’s wings in a single spot on this planet can unleash a typhoon thousands of miles away.” Gray (1959: 237-238) makes an extremely important point: “What is missing so often in modern men is a basic piety, the recognition of dependence on the natural realm.... There is

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no dearth of religions in our time, and they fulfill certain needs, but there is a general absence of religious passion for belonging to an order infinitely transcending the human.... This separation of man from nature as a consequence of our too-exclusive interest in power is in part responsible for the total wars of our century. More than we ever realize, we have transferred our exploitative attitudes from nature to man.... The butchering of each other was almost easier to endure than the violation of animals, crops, farms, homes, bridges, and all the other things that bind man to his natural environment and help to provide him with a spiritual home.... Hardly anyone considers it possible that the poisoning of fish in the ocean by these experiments might be worthy of condemnation. Man can sin only against man, it seems, or possibly against God, not against nature.” See also Jung (1999) for a discussion of the ethics of responsibility which encompasses the order of nature as well as of humanity. In The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense (1984: 13), Erazim Kohák, who is a translator of Havel’s writings and a commentator on his thought, makes eminent sense when he remarks that “To recover the moral sense of our humanity, we would need to recover first the moral sense of nature” (italics added for emphasis).

29 Exposure, Absorption, Subjection—Being-in-Media by Chris Nagel [email protected]

Philosophy, California State University, Stanislaus Society for Phenomenology and the Media ABSTRACT: In the Introduction to Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, he argues for the relevance of the book’s subtitle, “The Extensions of Man.” Specifically, McLuhan claims that media—that is, electronic media—are extensions of the human nervous system, permitting a range of contexts, contacts, and experiences. To clarify what this means, I develop a phe­no­ menological interpretation of media as existential, lived situation, drawing from McLuhan’s own account while critically analyzing it, and bringing into play the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Our being-in-media may be as decisive for us as McLuhan seems to have thought, but may also be far better characterized by expo­ sure, absorption, or subjection than by McLuhan’s optimism.

Preliminary After three thousand years of explosion, by means of fragmentary and mechanical technologies, the Western world is imploding. During the mechanical ages we had extended our bodies in space. Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system itself in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned. Rapidly, we approach the final phase of the extensions PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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of man – the technological simulation of consciousness, when the creative process of knowing will be collectively and corporately extended to the whole of human society, much as we have already extended our senses and our nerves by the various media. (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, pp. 3 f.)

Immediately following this, McLuhan cites the complaint of the book’s editor that so much of his material is new, and thus likely to hurt sales.1 Perhaps some of what had seemed new in McLuhan’s account is his emphasis on the affective dimension of media “extensions.” In his view, mechanical technology and its concomitant media form, print, develop attitudes of abstraction and detachment, allowing, for instance, a surgeon to act upon a patient without being “humanly involved” (McLuhan, Understanding 4). Electric media move us to “participate, in depth, in the consequences of our every action” (McLuhan, Understanding 4), thus toward an “implosion” of “social and political functions,” involvement in which we cannot avoid (McLuhan, Understanding 5). In closing his Introduction, McLuhan proclaims: The aspiration of our time for wholeness, empathy and depth of awareness is a natural adjunct of electric technology… The mark of our time is its revulsion against imposed patterns. We are suddenly eager to have things and people declare their beings totally. There is a deep faith to be found in this new attitude—a faith that concerns the ultimate harmony of all being (McLuhan, Understanding 5f ).

How could media, these commonplace, everyday phenomena, have such broad and profound effect upon us? My sense is that it has remained unclear what McLuhan understands to be the relationship between electric media and this faith in ultimate harmony. Moreover, I believe that the implications, if not indeed the full meaning of McLuhan’s pronouncements about media, have not been made clear. Undoubtedly, McLuhan himself is primarily responsible for this state of affairs. But rather than decide whether or not to dismiss him as a charlatan, I would like

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to take a second look at McLuhan’s generalizations about media, by letting them provoke a more careful examination of our being-in-media. I will begin by reinterpreting McLuhan from a phenomenological standpoint, drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I will turn from this toward a brief consideration of McLuhan’s faith in the harmonizing potential of electric media. I. The Medium is the Message McLuhan’s central argument in the first part of Understanding Media distinguishes mechanical from electric technology, focusing on the claim that the shift toward electric media technology is decisive for human societies and for human being. In one of his notoriously recursive expressions, McLuhan tells us that “electric light is pure information,” before going on to explain that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,” and finally that “the ‘message’ of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs” (McLuhan, Understanding 8).2 Similarly, the “content” (in scare quotes, à la McLuhan) of any medium introduces a deformation of the scale, pace, or pattern of human affairs. To study media, McLuhan explains, we should turn our attention from the socalled “content” toward… well, toward what? McLuhan insists that electricity is decisive as a medium, that is, as a deformation that alters scale, pace, or pattern, “by making things instant. With instant speed the causes of things began to emerge to awareness again …” (McLuhan, Understanding 12). As an example, McLuhan presents cubism, which rejects “the illusion of perspective in favor of the whole” presented by way of all facets of an object painted in two dimensions. Later, “[t]he effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense ratios or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance” (McLuhan, Understanding 18).

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Readers of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception may note a passing resemblance between McLuhan’s discussion and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of perception. For example, the notion of media as “extensions” may bring to mind the blind man’s stick,3 and the self-recursive relation of media and “content” may appear similar to Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on “The Body as Expression, and Speech.” While I think it is plain that McLuhan’s writing on media is not a phenomenology, I don’t think taking a phenomenological approach to his work is arbitrary or capricious. In a similar way to McLuhan’s insistence that we do not see media, Merleau-Ponty noted the strange blindness of traditional philosophy to perception. Their projects are both directed toward making the invisible (media, perception) visible, or at least palpable. Here, I will adopt what I hope will prove a coherent and intelligible strategy by reinterpreting McLuhan’s enigmatic expressions as though they were a first step toward a phenomenology of media. The initial aim of this reinterpretation is to account for media as extensions of consciousness, which means media are extensions of perception—that is, media are ambiguously both projections of ourselves as perceivers, and situations in which we perceive. Media are milieux, rather than conduits, as I will attempt to explain. Consider this passage from Merleau-Ponty’s chapter on “Sense Experience”: My body is the seat or rather the very actuality of the phe­ nomenon of expression (Ausdruck), and there the visual and auditory experiences, for example, are pregnant one with the other, and their expressive value is the ground of the ante­ pdredicative unity of the perceived world, and, through it, of verbal expression (Darstellung) and intellectual significance (Bedeutung). My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension.” (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 235)

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Sense experience is not a pathway through which material objects have effects on consciousness, nor a gathering of data to fill in the formulae of consciousness, but instead seem to be a kind of pregnancy or latency of meaning and of objects. Media, as extensions of consciousness, ground the “antepredicative unity of the perceived world,” for example, by shedding (electric) light upon it. One of the problems with this is that what media mediate and what perception perceives becomes harder to identify. For Merleau-Ponty, perception is how-it-is-that-there-is-aworld, rather than a mechanism or conduit for data from the world to enter consciousness. Similarly, for McLuhan it appears that media is how-it-is-that-there-is-information or how-it-isthat-there-is-pattern. The sense of media mediating between is pretty thoroughly lost. This interpretation of the notion that media are extensions of consciousness seems to lead to a paradox. In McLuhan’s terms, media “content” is really another medium, which suggests that there is nothing in media but media. The paradox in MerleauPonty’s phenomenology of perception is that the body-subject’s projection into the world (that is, perception itself), as an expression or behavior with a certain style, finds objects in the world only because they correlate to that style. Perception proceeds by projecting a perceptual field (that is to say, the world), but that projection takes place only because there is a world there to be perceived. There is a world there to be perceived neither because of an act of mine to achieve it (to create the unity of the world), nor because the objective whole of the world exists a priori, but because of perception. In turn, perception is neither a particular act of a bodily organ, nor a particular act by consciousness, but is instead the openness of the body-subject to its perceptual field. It is not I who touch, it is my body; when I touch I do not think of diversity, but my hands rediscover a certain style which is part of their motor potentiality, and this is what we mean when we speak of a perceptual field. I am able to touch

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effectively only if the phenomenon finds an echo within me, if it accords with a certain nature of my consciousness, and if the organ which goes out to meet it is synchronized with it. The unity and identity of the tactile phenomenon do not come about through any synthesis of recognition in the concept, they are founded upon the unity and identity of the body as a synergic totality. (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 316f )

The ambiguity of perception, frequently remarked upon by Merleau-Ponty commentators, plays an important role here as well. Perception is ambiguous in several senses or dimensions. For this interpretation of McLuhan, the most important ambiguity in perception is that of the projection and openness of the body-subject. On one hand, perception is movement towards or into the perceptual field, reaching, grasping, penetrating, and appropriating the field and its emergent objects. On the other hand, for perception to take place, the body-subject must be open to the field itself, subject itself to that field.4 The perceiving subject must, without relinquishing his place and point of view, and in the opacity of sensation, reach out towards things to which he has, in advance, no key, and for which he nevertheless carries within himself the project, and open himself to an absolute Other which he is making ready in the depths of his being… Expressed in more general terms, there is a logic of the world to which my body in its entirety conforms, and through which things of intersensory significance become possible for us (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 325 f.).

In sum, perception is Merleau-Ponty’s account of the bodysubject’s being-in-the-world. There is a world through the covalent projection/openness of the body-subject. One (possibly controversial) way to put this is that the world is neither the body-subject’s, nor the world’s; and the body-subject is neither the world’s, nor its own. They are co-foundational. The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given,

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not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life. Its counterpart within me is the given, general and pre-personal existence of my sensory functions in which we have discovered the definition of the body. (MerleauPonty, Phenomenology 330)

Returning to McLuhan’s phrase, “the medium is the message” can be interpreted to indicate that media extend consciousness into a media field. What becomes sensible within that field is what correlates to the particular style of the media. Media do not merely extend certain sense organs. They serve as projections of perception as a whole towards the world and touching upon that world. In so far as they find their echo in that world, media projections maintain openness to an absolute Other, and constitute unity and significance. What there is to perceive through media is therefore always set forth by the style of media. At the same time that media are extensions of consciousness, therefore, they are also modes of openness to the media field. The medium is the message: the medium is how it is that consciousness or perception is there at the origin of sense and meaning. McLuhan says: “Any invention or technology is an extension or self-amputation of our physical bodies, and such extension also demands new ratios or new equilibriums (sic) among the other organs and extensions of the body” (McLuhan, Understanding 45). The human-technology relationship involves us in certain imperatives: we must “embrace” and “serve” technology in order to “use” it (McLuhan, Understanding 46). The “closure” or “equilibrium-seeking” is necessary to constitute unity and significance. Media are neither mere tools of ours, nor are we the playthings of media. That “embrace” of technology is the establishment of covalent, cofoundational relationship. We experience through media only insofar as this relationship exists.

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II. First Example: TV One implication of this interpretation relates to the brief explorations of different forms of media in Part II of Understanding Media. While it may make sense to regard clocks, airplanes, games and weapons as media, and discuss them alongside telephones, telegraphs, advertisements, and so forth, it is not immediately clear how Part II proceeds from Part I, and particularly the discussions of media as extensions and the phrase “the medium is the message.” To take a look at a first example, television, the “cool” medium of “involvement in depth” and “presentation of processes, rather than products” (McLuhan, Understanding 309), contrasts with the “hot” medium of print. This is because the form of the TV image, “visually low in data” (that is, in 1964), functions by way of the penetration of light through the screen, producing a mosaic which the viewer “unconsciously reconfigures” into whole works.5 McLuhan notes that for this reason, the TV image lacks the third dimension, and therefore requires viewers to “‘close’ the spaces in the mesh by a convulsive sensuous participation that is profoundly kinetic and tactile” (McLuhan, Understanding 314). All media are shapes of perception and consciousness, which project a media field and subject consciousness to that field. The unity of that field, and the unity of perception, are constantly achieved in the interplay and covalence of projection and subjection. Perceptual unity strives to balance optimum clarity and richness, Merleau-Ponty says, finding objects emerging in concreteness and wholeness (Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology 318). The low level of data in the TV image distorts the field in a particular, describable way. The shape of the TV image beckons for perceptual contact to close the spaces, compose clarity, and constitute unity and signification, like a mosaic or like pointillism (McLuhan’s other analogy). Since there is much more for the TV audience to do, perceiving the TV field demands greater

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participation in depth—in the depth of the image. Reiterating this in The Medium is the Massage, McLuhan writes: Television demands participation and involvement in depth of the whole being. It will not work as a background. It engages you. Perhaps this is why so many people feel that their identity has been threatened. This charge of the light brigade has heightened our general awareness of the shape and meaning of lives and events to a level of extreme sensitivity. (McLuhan, Massage 125)

The way the TV image and TV perception lead to such “heightened awareness” and “extreme sensitivity” is somewhat more clear if we understand perception as a projection and openness to a meaningful whole. The style of that perception prefigures sense and direction, and evokes a way of being-in-the-world. III. Second Example: Ads The notion that “content” isn’t the key to understanding media is difficult to make sense of at first. After all, the chapter on advertising discusses what looks very much like the “content,” or at least the ideological gist, of ads. But the question for me is, how does advertising work as a medium? How does it extend consciousness, what is its particular style, and what media field opens in and for advertising? McLuhan tells us something about it: Ads seem to work on the very advanced principle that a small pellet or pattern in a noisy, redundant barrage of repetition will gradually assert itself. Ads push the principle of noise all the way to the plateau of persuasion. They are quite in accord with the procedures of brain-washing. This depth principle of onslaught on the unconscious may be the reason why. (McLuhan, Understanding 227)

Now, to offer a re-interpretation of this passage according to the strategy developed so far: The media field of advertising is

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founded upon a particular shape of consciousness, of perceptual projection and of openness to this media field. This shape of media-perception is attentive and subject to contrasts of noise and pattern, redundancy and repetition. The emergent object in the advertising field is the pattern, that pellet of clarity and signification which can only be significant against the background of redundancy, repetition, and noise. After all, any ad deliberately attended to is nonsense. If approached in a perceptual style that is not projected as advertising, that is, that is not characterized by pattern-seeking-in-repetitive-noise, the perceptual field fails to be advertising. Whatever that is, it is not an ad. But when advertising succeeds, its affective power is incredibly impressive: Ideally, advertising aims at the goal of a programmed harmony among all human impulses and aspirations and endeavors. Using handicraft methods, it stretches out toward the ultimate electronic goal of a collective consciousness. When all production and all consumption are brought into preestablished harmony with all desire and all effort, then adver­ tising will have liquidated itself by its own success (McLuhan, Understanding 227).

IV. The Aspiration of our Time I have called McLuhan’s analysis of electric media’s emerging power and dominion “optimistic.” The overriding tendency of his proclamation focuses on emergent harmony, empathy, and community. On the other hand, McLuhan occasionally acknowledges the electric media’s potential for dominance: Electrical information devices for universal, tyrannical wombto-tomb surveillance are causing a very serious dilemma bet­ ween our claim to privacy and the community’s need to know… How shall the environment be programmed now that we have become so involved with each other, now that all of us have become unwitting work force for social change? (McLuhan, Massage 12)

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This is difficult to explain within the boundaries of McLuhan’s own work. Media, as extensions of consciousness, appear on his account to open us to one another, to create the possibility of a global village, to transcend time and space. Once in a while, McLuhan takes note of what seems to be the exact contrary potential. How can the electric media’s potential for both empathy and domination be accounted for? I would like to combine two approaches. The first of these draws upon feminist criticism of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. One of the fundamental problems in Merleau-Ponty’s work is the presumption of the anonymity of the body-subject. Some feminist critics have suggested that the so-called anonymous body is instead quite obviously a masculine body: the metaphors of projection, grasping, penetrating, transcendence, and so forth describe a style of being-in-the-world that is culturally linked to a gendered performance.6 To call this body “anonymous,” and worse, “normal,” establishes a masculine norm for perception. Without assessing the value of this criticism here, I would like to apply this strategy to McLuhan’s likewise anonymous “man” whose extensions media seem to be. For McLuhan as well, the “extensions of man” for the most part extend transcendence of consciousness and perception, grant dominion over time and space. Granted, the affective character of such extensions is empathetic and deeply sensitive, rather than heroic and domineering, but the possibility of that empathy and sensitivity is founded upon a kind of perceptual superpower. What is left out of both accounts is into what or whom these perceptual penetrations or extensions transcend. The “field” of perception and media is after all populated, or else no form of empathy would be possible. If those Others in the perceptual or media field are, like the anonymous “man” of media extension, also empathetic and sensitive, then it matters profoundly how extension happens. There is a covalent relation, after all: perceiving is not only penetrating, but also being penetrated; media is not only extending into, but being extended into. The media field is

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not only entered into, but the media subject becomes absorbed within that field. We cannot perceive from outside the world. Furthermore, we cannot perceive anonymously. The style of perception is already self-expression, already our presence before and to the perceptual field. I become the body-subject I am through subjecting myself to perceptual openness, to being perceptually penetrated. I become the media-subject I am through subjecting myself to media openness, media penetration. When I watch TV, not only is my perception extended, but so too is the TV image extended into me. Finally, insofar as media are extensions of man, who is this “man”? Whose extensions are these media projections? And in fact, we know a bit about the answer to that question, and to whom our media perception subjects us. Who is extending into whom? Who is penetrating whom? To what end? References Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. by Colin Smith. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1986 [1945]. McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994 [1964]. McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.

Endnotes 1. Yet here and throughout Understanding Media, McLuhan’s account depends on a fundamental prevailing European philosophical assumption about the human situation. In brief, there is nothing new about the mind-body dualism in McLuhan’s work. I suppose it is obvious that no consciousness can be “extended” through “technological simulation” without the underlying material infrastructure (and all that that implies about physical changes to planet and people), but the trajectory imagined here is clearly a transcendent collective consciousness.

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2. Interpreted through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of speech, which in turn owes much to Merleau-Ponty’s reading of Saussure’s linguistics. Any act of speech takes place in a particular linguistic situation, a synchronic state, and is meaningful by way of the diacritical relations between signs in that synchronic state. At the same time, as an innovation, a new speech act, it deforms those diacritical relations. 3. “The blind man’s stick has ceased to be an object for him, and is no longer perceived for itself; its point has become an area of sensitivity, extending the scope and active radius of touch, and providing a parallel to sight.” (p. 143) “The blind man’s world differs from the normal person’s not only through the quantity of material at his disposal, but also through the structure of the whole… The senses are distinct from each other and distinct from intellection in so far as each one of them brings with it a structure of being which can never be exactly transposed.” (224, 225) 4. Often, this is discussed in rather more metaphysical language than I have used here: the body-subject’s transcendence is often con­ trasted with the immanence of the perceptual field, for instance. The ontological implications of Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception are beyond the scope here; the more descriptive language is more useful in articulating this interpretation of McLuhan. 5. The argument I am making in this paper seems only to be all the more pertinent if, as McLuhan says, improved TV (HD) ceases to be TV at all. 6. Among others, see Sullivan, Shannon, “Domination and dialogue in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.” Hypatia 15,1: 175182; Butler, Judith, “Sexual Ideology and Phenomenological Des­ cription.” The Thinking Muse. Ed. Jeffner Allen and Iris Marion Young. Bloo­mington, IN: Indiana University Press.

30 Local Workers, Global Workplace, and the Experience of Place by Lori K. Schneider, PhD

Philosophy, Fielding Graduate University [email protected] Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists ABSTRACT: This paper presents selected findings from a her­ meneutic phenomenological study of how remote workers in global corporations experience and interpret local place. The re­ search was based on Heidegger’s thinking about space, place and dwelling, Giddens’ conception of globalization as “time-space distanciation,” research on remote work, and concepts from archi­ tectural theory. The eight study participants were knowledge wor­ kers in the United States and Europe who work full time from home as employees of three large global corporations. In this paper I share several insights about remote workers’ rich and varied lived experience of place. Key findings include the importance of managing the threshold between work and home and the need to create spaces for interaction at work. Some remote workers learn to shape, choose, or create places that better suit them, while others prefer to remain in place. Those remote workers who find that working at home brings opportunities to become more deeply involved in their local communities may ultimately help communities become more globally-connected while retaining unique local qualities. This research suggests that the essential phenomenological nature of place is both spatial and temporal. A place is a specific location within physical space that acquires personal meaning, arising from a person’s past history and evolving with ongoing or PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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repeated experience. Individuals make meaning of place as Center (groundedness or rootedness), Setting (activity, convenience or purpose), and Source (generativity, inspiration or transcendence). Each facet of place experience contains, reflects, and tends toward the others; all contribute to the meanings of place. We shape and respond to places based on these lived meanings; places shape us as our lives take place within them.

This paper presents selected findings from a hermeneutic phenomenological study of how remote workers in global cor­ porations experience and interpret local place. The research was broadly interdisciplinary, based on Heidegger’s (1971) thin­king about space, place and dwelling, Giddens’ (1991) conception of globalization as “time-space distanciation,” research on remote work, and concepts from architectural theory. The eight study participants were knowledge workers in the United States and Europe who work full time from home as employees of three large global corporations. As this was a phenomenological study, ho­wever, I began with my own experience. I. Prologue: Personal Experience of the Home Workplace My research question, “how do remote workers in global corporations experience and interpret local place?” arose directly from my own experience of working remotely (that is, from my home) for a major global corporation for the past several years. When I first began working at home, I needed to set up and equip my home office—to create my work place—with my prior knowledge of what it is like to work in centralized offices as my only guide. In those days working remotely was still rare, and having any degree of control over the arrangement of my work place was something outside of my experience. Cubicle dwellers generally have little influence over the design of their office space. They are typically provided with standard modular furniture pieces, which are bolted together and attached to the cubicle’s free-standing half-walls. Individual cubicles are

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then bolted together to form long rows. The view from one end of a cubicle “farm” (as such an arrangement is sometimes called by those who work within one), with its long rows of cubicles vanishing into the distance, is reminiscent of a field of wheat or corn—it is a monoculture of identical worker units. Inside these cubicles, the views remain essentially similar. Desks, cabinets, and bookshelves are located in the same relative place within each cubicle, over and over again. Only when one looks closely do clues to the individuality of each worker emerge—or not. Depending on the degree of work place formality or a particular employee’s location or role, workers may or may not be permitted to add photographs, decorative items, and other personal touches to their work space. For example, a small radio might be permissible in a back office in a warehouse but not on the receptionist’s desk at the front lobby. The most grimly oppressive work place in my experience spoke eloquently of the organization’s lack of caring for its employees. The cubicle “farm” in which I worked was located in an area that was originally built as a loft for parts storage above a manufacturing floor, and then walled in when more office space was needed. It was accessible only by two steep stairways, one at each end of the immense building. A series of narrow passageways zigzagged between closely-spaced cubicles. The ceilings were low. There were no windows. The air was stale, warm, still. People scurried about silently, heads down. Despite the crowded conditions, it was eerily quiet most of the time, in a muffled, deadened sort of way. Working there, I was afraid. I was afraid of a fire starting in this enclosed, poorly accessible space. I was afraid of my manager, who demanded that I work long hours when I had a small child in day care and needed to be home to pick her up by 6:00. I was afraid of losing my job. Everyone was afraid of being fired on the spot, because we were all working for a new client who had been given the power to remove any of us from the account for any reason. We were “standing reserve,” in Heidegger’s terms,

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on-call cogs terrified of being rendered obsolete by the very machinery that enslaved us. Our fear was tangible, visible in frozen facial expressions, shuffling gaits and closed, defensive sitting positions. Yet no one ever spoke of it; no one wished to be seen as too weak for the job. Most centralized work places that I worked in were not as toxic as this one was. I often enjoyed the social opportunities that centralized work places create. People pop their heads up over cubicle walls for impromptu conversations, or gather around the water cooler or in the lunch room for more extended casual time. Conference rooms create larger places for formal or informal meetings, collaborative work efforts, celebrations, beginnings and endings. Parking lot parties and company picnics celebrate the achievement of company goals. Work colleagues become friends at after-hours gatherings at bars, restaurants, golf courses, and one another’s homes. Employees come and go, coworkers watch one another’s families grow and change, romances are made and broken. Thus, over time, work places take on many of the complex human characteristics of society, though on a smaller scale. Work life becomes shared life, played out against the often drab but usually functionally effective taken-for-granted places of centralized offices. We understand the rules, play by them most of the time, and take some comfort in the stability that such rules and structure provide. Everything changes when one begins working from home. None of the pre-given parameters of the centralized work place are there anymore. In Schutz’s terms, the typifications that had structured and explained our shared experience at work are gone. For those in the centralized work place, even though Heideg­ ger’s Gestell or “enframing” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 19) reduces us to standing reserve, it also gives us a place (unsatisfactory though it often is) in which to stand, and a recognized status within the system. As new remote workers, we are still standing reserve, but we must learn to redesign and recreate our relationship to the

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system. Technology becomes even more visible because it becomes our primary tie to the rest of the world. Formerly takenfor-granted supports such as the high-speed copier and the office supplies cabinet are no longer “ready to hand” (Heidegger, 1962), leaving the remote worker feeling inadequate or incompetent until she figures out how to recreate those supports and tools or obtain them elsewhere. What feels at first utterly liberating—there is no one looking over my shoulder!—can become frightening when I realize that I now stand alone, and I must create my work world. The room that I selected for my first home office was unlike anything I had ever seen in a work place. It was a wide-open loft with double-doors on two walls, a half-wall on the third side, and a huge skylight—but I thought that buying and putting in heavy office furniture would be enough to define this space as an “office.” Yet, with the loft’s half wall, I could not close out the sights and sounds of the rest of my house. This place was too exposed, too open. As it turned out, I did not stay long in that loft office. When my husband lost his job, I suddenly realized that I could live anywhere and take my job with me. It was a critical shift in my perception. We decided to move. My next home office was contained within a computer armoire in a small apartment while we prepared to move from California to Washington. This office was too small and too exposed to be comfortable. Yet it was a fully functional work place, and it taught me that a work place is not defined by furniture but by what one does there. All I really needed to do my work was a computer, a phone and a printer. To be truly productive, however, I needed a separate room with a door, preferably away from the busy parts of the house. My next three homes, all in Washington state, were chosen at least in part by consideration of where I would put my office. While I chose homes with promising potential offices, I stopped

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taking spaces as given. If the room wasn’t bright enough, I added windows. To create psychological separation from the rest of the house, I experimented with unusual paint schemes, like barn red and avocado. While I was moving from house to house, looking for the place where I might finally feel completely at home and learning to create work places more consciously, my company was changing also. It was growing in size and becoming more globalized in its operations. Over time I grew accustomed to working with increasingly distant colleagues, first in other time zones and then in other countries. My perception of my work itself began to change. I began to view my work as process and product rather than location and co-presence. Work became not necessarily something one goes to but a set of activities that one does. I began to see work place as transparent and irrelevant, as possibility and choice. Physical space has become malleable; space is both site of and material for the creative act of conscious place-making. I have learned to imagine unconventional uses of space. I have learned to look critically at space and to question the “goodness of fit” of spaces as potential places where I might wish to live and work. In choosing where to live and work, I have chosen how to live and work. I have learned to find my own place within my mental and physical worlds, to create places in the inside-ness and outside-ness of my life. My experience of this shift, against a lifelong backdrop of awareness and appreciation of beautiful, dramatic places, led me to this research. I wanted to know, was my experience unique? How do other remote workers in other global corporations experience and interpret the local places of their home and work lives? How does a place that was previously defined as “empty loft,” “spare bedroom,” “den,” or other type of room suddenly become re-placed as a work place? What are some possible variations of the home work place, once freed of organizational constraints? How do these variations reflect the personalities and life

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histories of their creators, the remote workers who work within them? And how might this experience of working in a home work place ultimately redefine place experience itself? II. The Research Process In creating the research design for this study, I relied primarily on van Manen’s (1997) guidelines for self-reflection, protocol writing, interviewing, and thematic analysis. van Manen’s specific hermeneutic phenomenological approach was appropriate because my intention was to build an interpretation of local place as experienced by remote workers in global corporations. I hoped to gain insights into how remote workers experience the meaningful places of their homes, communities, and regions, as well as how they experience place in general. While I used van Manen’s guidelines for the actual research design, I repeatedly turned back to Heidegger for the philosophical foundation of my inquiry. The research participants were all remote workers at global corporations, 4 men and 4 women ranging in age from 37 to 64, who worked full-time from home for a large (defined as having 1,000+ employees) company doing business globally. Tenure as remote workers ranged from 3 to 12 years. Seven participants were U.S. citizens who live and work in the U.S., while the eighth person was from the UK but moved to France, and had worked from her home in both countries. I conducted the interviews via telephone, with follow-up questions addressed via email or instant messaging—very similar to the way the research participants and I normally work. I guided participants in bracketing aspects of their experiences in two specific ways. First, I asked them to describe both current and remembered places in terms of each of their senses in turn. Second, I asked them to begin by thinking about the completely local, personal places of their home offices and then moved outward to their homes, their neighborhoods and communities, and their regions.

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I also asked each participant to take several photos of his or her work place and of any details about the work place that she liked, disliked, or found meaningful in some way. Beyond the immediate bounds of the home work place, I encouraged each participant to take photos of any aspect of her home and community that she had strong feelings about—attachments, connections, pride, or any sort of feeling that made her “place” special in a good or bad way. This portion of the research was entirely optional; 5 of the 8 participants elected to share photos. What emerged from the interviews was a combination of detailed place descriptions and stories about their current and remembered experiences of places. Nearly everyone thought reflectively about their experience of place at certain points during the interview. A few told me that they would make changes in their offices or in the ways that they interact with distant colleagues as a result of our interview. It was not my intention to teach participants how to “do phenomenology” but rather to collect data from them that would allow me to describe and interpret their experiences, identify preliminary themes in their experiences, and present this description and interpretation to them for their validation. For each participant, I wrote what I called a “summarized description,” using their words, and photos if provided, as well as my narrative and interpretative comments. When all 8 participants had approved their own summarized descriptions, I wrote a synthesis description document in which I identified and discussed common themes in their place experiences. I asked all 8 participants to review and provide feedback on that document; four of them elected to participate in this additional optional activity. Finally, I distilled these themes into models that captured the essence of place experience as articulated and co-interpreted by these 8 study participants. Each of the above levels of interpretation occurred simultaneously with my personal reflection on and interpretation of my place experiences, as well as my engagement with and interpreta-

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tion of Heidegger’s writing on place and its influence on phenomenological architectural theory. I carried out this extended engagement with Heidegger before, during, and after planning and conducting the interviews and doing my analysis. Heidegger’s writings, as well as writings about him and drawing on his ideas, thus broadened the horizons of my own inquiry. The initial interpretation of the participant data suggested that place experiences are primarily personal, and that the most intense place experiences may be the most personal. Place experiences that endure or are repeated over time take on deeper levels of personal meaning. Memories and symbolic/metaphorical interpretations of place contribute to an overall intensification of place experience. Most of the remote workers in this study value various personal aspects of their offices (such as decor, collections on display, and proximity to family members) more than their utilitarian value as places for working. The experience of place may become more nuanced with exposure to a variety of places. Those remote workers who have moved to other regions (either before or after they began working from home) seem to have deeper personal place experiences than do those who have stayed in one community all their lives. As I reflected more deeply on the data and my initial level of interpretation, additional themes emerged. III. Themes in Remote Worker Place Experience The study participants’ descriptions of their home and work places suggested five broad themes of place experience. The first two themes I found mentioned in the literature on remote work when I later did a literature review. The remaining three are unique to this study and are suggestive of the essence of place experience itself (since my question was really about the nature of place experience itself, set in the context of the home work place, rather than what it is like in general to be a remote worker).

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The first theme identified was what I called On the Threshold Between Work and Home, or how remote workers manage the threshold or transition between their home and work places and their home and work lives. The remote work literature treats this in terms of “work-life balance,” whereas the experienced remote workers in this study discussed in much more positive terms how they create and use boundaries to structure the work day. While each participant defined and managed the threshold between work and home differently, all had a threshold, and all knew exactly what it was (as did, generally, those around them). Without such an intentionally-maintained threshold, work/life balance can be threatened, as the remote worker does not have the physical separation that the central office worker can rely on to keep home and work lives separate. The threshold may be physical (a door), temporal (a regular time that work starts), porous (stepping in and out of work to assume other roles such as parent), attitudinal (when I am in this room, I am at work), or any combination of the above that meets the needs of a given remote worker. Crossing the threshold is a more-or-less conscious act of assuming an alternate identity (as either worker or home-dweller), or rather, of letting these alternate identities come to the fore at the appropriate times and places for each. The second theme was Creating Spaces for Interaction at Work, or how remote workers manage both task-related and social interaction with co-workers and how they collaborate effectively across distance. Even the most solitary worker occasionally needs to interact with others for task-related reasons or simply to connect with another human being. The existing research on remote work has identified “isolation” as an issue for remote workers, but most of the participants in this study framed their experience in positive terms as an opportunity to create collaborative spaces that worked for them. Some have expanded their personal social networks to compensate for their non-proximity

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with co-workers. Others have learned to make do with less interaction than they might like. One participant has turned collaboration across distance into a work specialty. He is recognized as an expert who uses and teaches others to use collaborative tools such as instant messaging and web meetings to be more productive than they could be if they were face to face. The third theme was The Remote Worker in the Community, or the relationship between remote workers and the broader places beyond their offices and homes. For several of the remote workers in this study, the opportunity to become more closely connected to their community was a significant benefit of working remotely. Whether the remote worker remains in place or chooses to move elsewhere, being at home all day enables a level of community intimacy that is not possible for a central office worker who commutes some distance to work. Some participants appreciated remote work for the opportunity to remain close to extended family (perhaps far from a major job market) without concern for forced relocation by their employer. Others pursued local community volunteer opportunities that they were either unaware of or did not have time to do before they began working from home. This finding suggests a potential asset for communities having many remote workers in their midst. The fourth theme was Place as an Opening of Possibilities and Choosing of Alternatives, or the “aha!” experience of remote workers who have realized that they can choose, move to, or create a place that expresses who they are and how they want to live rather than remain constrained by physical ties to a centralized work place. This theme was important to three of the eight remote workers in this study, and to me. Once one grasps that one need not be defined geographically by one’s job, one’s understanding of place is forever transformed. Place becomes something that is amenable to creative interpretation and use—a medium through which one can express who one is, what one values, and what one wishes to achieve in all aspects of one’s life.

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This transformation in the remote worker’s relationship with place comes about because remote work offers the possibility of reflecting on the nature of place. As I thought about and experimented with ways of arranging my home office, I learned to create work and home places that supported the way I prefer to work and to live—places that combine privacy, views, and aesthetically pleasing design. Similarly, when one study participant attempted to work for a year in a non-private space within a very small house, she learned that she needed a work place that was separate from the rest of her house. She then designed such an office when she and her husband remodeled a historic farmhouse. She had gained a perspective on place that allowed her to shape places to her needs, to build places and consciously dwell in them, to suit places to life and not the other way around. The fifth and last theme was Work Place in the Context of the Remote Worker’s Life, or ways in which the home work place fits into the larger context of the remote worker’s life. This theme was relevant for several study participants who had small children or who were near retirement, and who had chosen their place of residence for phase-of-life considerations. Ultimately, a place is a stage upon which we play out our lives. No one place is likely to be perfect forever; most people need or want different types of places at different phases of their lives. Working remotely frees people from having to make do in a place that does not suit them. As with the theme of place as possibility, when one’s employer no longer controls this fundamental aspect of one’s life, many creative and previously impossible alternatives emerge. These five themes emerged directly from the participants’ interview data, rather than from any preconceived conceptual framework. The initial data interpretation and identification of themes were mine alone, but I provided an extended description of the themes to all participants for review, and the themes were verified as appropriate by those who provided feedback. It is

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possible that another researcher would have identified a different set of themes, yet these themes organized the data usefully. While the first two themes describe ways that remote workers organize and manage their work lives, the remaining themes may reveal something about the nature of place experience in general. IV. A Model of Place Experience I introduce here a thematic model of place experience and interpretation, a threefold model representing three facets of place experience, which I identify as Center, Setting, and Source. The model is not directly informed by Heidegger’s thinking (although my overall philosophical orientation is so informed), yet it shares with Heidegger’s fourfold of earth, sky, mortals and divinities the characteristic that each of these three facets contains, reflects, and tends toward the other two. Center is a view of place experience and interpretation in terms of being grounded in history and relationships, or of being rooted in a home place. This relates to the theme of place within community. Setting is a view of place experience and interpretation in terms of activity, convenience or purpose that take place within a place. This relates to the theme of place within life context. It is effectively an instrumental or utilitarian orientation to place, in that the place becomes—in terms of Duncan’s (1989) use of Burke’s notion of the “pentad”—the scene within which life’s activities take place. Source is a view of place experience and interpretation in terms of generativity, inspiration or transcendence. This relates to the theme of place as possibility—of making places that support one’s life purpose or core values, rather than utility or convenience. For each person in this study (and by possible extension, for other people), one or more of these facets can be used to describe salient aspects of his or her place experience and interpretation.

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In describing a particular person’s place experience as primarily oriented to one facet, for example to place as Center, I do not mean to imply that he or she never experiences place as Setting or Source. Of course he does things in places and finds inspiration from places, but, whether throughout his life or at this time, being grounded or rooted in place is most important to him. Nor do I intend this as a developmental model of place experience and interpretation. All three facets are equally important and equally valid, and each person experiences places in terms of all of these, often at different times but occasionally at the same time. Which facet or facets are primary at any given time depends on an individual’s history and present circumstances, and may change over time and with repeated experience of the same place. For example, I chose my town for its spectacular setting next to mountains, oceans, and forests, but the longer I live here, the more I feel grounded and centered in its history and the more dedicated I become to it as the source of possibilities for my future. Places are locations that take on layers of personal meaning over time for individuals through the ways that they reflect our orientation to Center, Setting and Source. Hence an integrated model of place experience and interpretation would take into account two components of place (physical location and meaning), the three facets of place experience upon which the meaning of place is based, and the deepening and changing of meanings over time. An ideal place would serve all three of these facets. It would be a place in which I have a long personal history, a place that is conducive to the events and purposes of my life, and one that nourishes my spirit and supports my continued self-development. This would be a sort of enriched or enlightened Center into which all three facets of place experience have merged and become stabilized in equilibrium.

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Concluding Thoughts In this paper I have introduced a model of place experience and interpretation based on a small-scale phenomenological research project. This research was done in the context of a larger study that examined my deepening personal engagement with Heidegger’s thinking about space, place and dwelling, as well as Heidegger’s own lived experience as a “remote worker” who did most of his writing from home offices within his two homes. While none of the remote workers in this study would have described their experience in terms of Heidegger’s ideas, my own thinking was informed and enriched by them. For example, Center seems related somehow to the “earth” of Heidegger’s fourfold, while Source seems aligned with the “sky” or perhaps with the “divinities.” That line of thought, however, will be a subject for future exploration. References Duncan, H. D. (1989). Culture and democracy: The struggle for form in society and architecture in Chicago and the Middle West during the life and times of Louis H. Sullivan (reprint ed.). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Giddens, A. (1991). The consequences of modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1971). Poetry, language, thought (A. Hofstadter, Trans.). New York: HarperCollins. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). New York: Harper Torchbooks. van Manen, M. (1997). Researching lived experience: Human science for an action sensitive pedagogy (2nd ed.). London, Ontario, Canada: The Althouse Press.

31 Gaston Bachelard’s Topoanalysis in the 21st Century: The Lived Reciprocity between Houses and Inhabitants as Portrayed by American Writer Louis Bromfield by David SEAMON

[email protected] Architecture, Kansas State University Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Network ABSTRACT: This article contributes to phenomenologist Gas­ ton Bachelard’s call for topoanalysis by examining houses and inhabitation depicted in two works by American writer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). The first work considered is “The Hands of God,” a 1939 short story that recounts the defilement of a 300-year-old Basque farmhouse. The second work considered is Bromfield’s last novel, the 1951 Mr. Smith, which depicts the unraveling, pre-World-War-II home life of Wolcott Ferris, a con­ ventional Midwestern, middle-class husband and father. These two works demonstrate how, regularly in his creative efforts, Bromfield depicted a lived reciprocity whereby house and inha­ bitants mutually sustain and reflect each other, sometimes in positive ways that facilitate engagement and care; at other times, in negative ways that intimate or spur personal or social disso­ lution. The article concludes by considering implications for phenomenological research on houses and homes in the 21st century. The argument is made that, on one hand, inhabitation involves a lived whole unified by its total character. On the other hand, inhabitation involves a lived dialectic founded in a twofold significance involving internal diversity versus external connecte­ dness. In both these inner and outer relationships, there are PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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“sustaining” and “undermining” situations—e.g., the home as a place of comfort and regeneration versus the home as a place of unease, vulnerability, or conflict. Most broadly, the persp­ ective argued for here looks inward toward the uniqueness of particular homes and inhabitations but also recognizes that they are integrally related outwardly to the world beyond, in­ clu­ding other places, the broader societal context, and global interconnectedness.

Introduction In his Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard used an approach he called topoanalysis—“the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives” (Bachelard 1964, p. 8).1 This article contributes to topoanalysis by examining homes and inhabitation portrayed by the American novelist and agricultural writer Louis Bromfield (1896-1956). Though relatively unknown today, Bromfield was regarded in the 1920s as one of America’s most promising young writers (Anderson 1964; Scott 1998). In 1939 at the age of forty-two, Bromfield ended a fourteen-year sojourn in France and, with his family, returned to his native rural Ohio to start one of America’s most significant 20th-century agricultural and ecological experiments: Malabar Farm, a 1,000-acre property in east-central Ohio. Here, Bromfield demonstrated that eroded and exhausted farmland could again be made productive, mostly through topsoil restoration (Anderson 1997, 1999; Beeman 1993; Beeman & Pritchard 2001, pp. 4953; Bromfield 1945, 1948, 1950, 1955a, 19955b; Bromfield Geld 1962; Fleming 2006; Little 1988; Lord 1961; Nelson 2001; Nelson 2005; Seamon 2008). The considerable amount of time, attention, and money that Bromfield lavished on Malabar Farm and the construction of a large dwelling there that he called the “Big House” intimates a pivotal theme in his life and writings: The lived relationship between human beings and the world in which they find themselves.

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One way Bromfield explored this relationship was in accounts of the interconnections between houses and their inhabitants. On one hand, he suggested that the particular character of inhabitants affords a particular ambience evoked by their home: There is a kind of aura about every house I have ever entered, so strong that I believe I could tell you a great deal about the owners after ten minutes spent within the walls—whether the wife was dominant, whether the family was happy or unhappy, and almost exactly the degree of education and culture and knowledge of the person who built and furnished and lived in it (Bromfield 1945, p. 73).

On the other hand, though the character and quality of the inhabitants shape their house, the house contributes to the character, experience, and world of the inhabitants, partly through its nature as a physical thing and partly through the history of earlier inhabitants who found comfort or discomfort there: Houses affect the lives and the character and happiness of people who live in them as much as all these things affect the houses themselves. I know of houses which have caused divorces and deformed the lives of children growing up in them, because they were badly planned for the personalities of the people who have occupied them. I know that almost any reader who has lived in many houses has had the experience of hating certain houses, partly because of the aura left by predecessors and partly because of the stupidity or harshness of the house itself (ibid., pp. 74-75).

I. A Basque Farmhouse One of Bromfield’s most thorough and sensitive portrayals of the lived reciprocity between house and inhabitants is his 1939 short story, “The Hand of God,” in which the American narrator documents the defilement of a graceful, 300-year-old Basque farmhouse overlooking a tiny fishing village on northeastern

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Spain’s Bay of Biscay, just a short distance from the French border (Bromfield 1939, pp. 224-56). The narrator had been searching for a house near the sea to rent summers and, from the first moment he sees the dwelling when walking his dogs on the moor, he realizes that the Basque farmhouse has “peace and dignity and beauty and age” (ibid., p. 225). All houses have personalities, and the quality of peace is central to the Basque farmhouse: The moment you came into [the farmhouse], out of the hot sunshine into the cool of its big tiled entrance hall, you were aware of its personality, and the longer you stayed there, the more you knew that this was a house in which charming people had lived, people who were simple and knew the things in life which had value and those which had not (ibid., pp. 226-27).

Most recently, the Basque farmhouse had been owned by Monsieur André, who loved and cared for the dwelling until he died, leaving the dwelling to his widow, who would rent but not sell the property because she wished to return to the house to die. “It is a place,” she writes to the narrator, “which grows about the heart” (ibid., p. 226). Having rented the farmhouse for five summers, the narrator and his family must leave suddenly for America, though he hopes in time to live there again. After four years away, the narrator makes plans to return and writes to a friend for news about Monsieur André’s widow and the farmhouse. The friend replies that the widow had died three years ago and the house has been sold to the Onspenskis, an unscrupulous husband and wife who swindle unsuspecting investors. Even though the friend warns the narrator that the farmhouse has been made over in ways he will not like, he makes an appointment with the Onspenskis, thinking he can buy the dwelling from them and undo the changes. As he approaches the house, he realizes immediately that “something awful had happened” (ibid., p. 242): The flowering hedge around the farmhouse had been replaced with a high concrete wall that eliminated the

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garden’s magnificent views of sea, sky, and mountains; shutters, balconies, and flower boxes had been removed; the old plaster walls had been violated “with wide sheets of glass and harsh window frames of steel”; the orchard and kitchen garden had been replaced by an “ugly red tennis court” (ibid., p. 243). As the narrator leaves, realizing he could never live in the house again, Madame Onspenski asks him how he likes the changes she and her husband have made. He looks at her, “wondering that there were people in the world of so little taste and sensibility” and then replies, “Madame, you have murdered a house” (ibid.). II. A Topoanalysis of the Basque Farmhouse In interpreting the lived relationship between inhabitants and houses as portrayed in Bromfield’s story, one can first highlight the powerful way in which his account substantiates the dialectical aspect of the relationship: Qualities of inhabitants sustain qualities of house, which in turn sustain qualities of inhabitants. One can apply the phenomenological insight of psychologist Bernd Jager (1985): A house…, when properly inhabited, not merely remains something seen; it itself becomes a source of vision and light according to which we see…. To enter and finally to come to inhabit a house… means to come to assume a certain stance, to surrender to a certain style of acting upon and of experiencing the surrounding world…. (pp. 218-19).

The Basque farmhouse, in the very first moment in which the narrator encountered it, instantaneously projected its ambience of serenity and comfort, which the narrator would come to safeguard by taking care of the property and allowing it to remain what it was. From Jager’s perspective, one can say that the farmhouse became the “source of vision” as inhabitant and house fell readily in synch—an emotional, synergistic conjoining

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poignantly described by Monsieur André’s widow as “a place which grows around the heart.” In contrast, the situation of the unscrupulous Onspenskis illustrates a devolving relationship between inhabitants and dwelling in that the couple were not only ignorant of the farmhouse’s uniqueness but transmogrified its grace and beauty into hideousness. Their self-centered, grasping stance toward the world annihilated a place. “You have murdered a house,” the narrator rightly accuses Madame Onspenski. Bromfield’s short story points to another significant aspect of topoanalysis: The lived ways in which physical and built qualities enhance or undermine the inhabitant-house relationship. Bromfield emphasizes that, at least partly, the Basque farmhouse’s uniqueness as a place relates to its built elements—the dwelling’s secluded site; its sheltered placement in relation to north winds; its low, friendly hedge and comfortable garden supporting neighborly sociability; its large windows with shutters opening to balconies with fine views. These architectural and environmental features contribute to the serenity and enjoyment of the place by affording exhilarating encounters and situations automatically unfolding in and around the house through the taken-for-granted course of everyday life—for example, coming in from the hot sunshine to the cool of the big tiled entrance hall; or lying on the balcony at night, looking up at the stars. The farmhouse’s physical features and associated environmental experiences allow the narrator, in Jager’s words, “to surrender to a certain style of acting upon and of experiencing the surrounding world.” The particular environmental and architectural physicality of the place contributes to the narrator’s style of being; his daily life is indebted to the farmhouse because it contributes so much to what that daily life is. The result is a world that is comfortable and gracious architecturally and environmentally. On the other hand, the Onspenskis’ disconnectedness with the farmhouse leads to the inappropriate physical and built changes that unsettle and destroy the singularity of the place: plaster walls

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replaced by glass sheets; shutters and balconies removed; orchard and garden converted to tennis court; the high concrete wall destroying neighborly contact and garden views. In this situation, the farmhouse can no longer be a “source of vision” because the Onspenskis lack the capacity “to see”—they are oblivious to the sensibility or refinement necessary for “surrendering” to the place. Their crippling, oafish character rebuffs and suffocates the farmhouse’s hospitable ambience; through their obtuseness and willfulness, they extinguish the magic and wonder of the place. III. The Uncanny In his story of the Basque farmhouse, Bromfield illustrates how human beings can appropriate or disappropriate lived qualities of house and home that afford a supportive ambience and sense of place. In other writings, Bromfield explores how lived qualities of house and home can overwhelm human beings and move them into a situation that has sometimes been called, after Freud, the “uncanny”—the unexpected incursion of troubling understandings and encounters that before were out of sight (Freud 1919). The uncanny, says architectural theorist Anthony Vidlar, is “the fundamental propensity of the familiar to turn on its owners, suddenly to become defamiliarized, derealized, as if in a dream” (Vidlar 1992, p. 7; also see Berstein 2008, pp. 60-61). Bromfield’s most sustained portrayal of the uncanny is in his last novel, Mr. Smith, written in 1951. This book describes the last few years in the life of Wolcott Ferris, an ordinary, late-thirties, Midwestern, pre-WWII businessman married with two children. In a moment of revelation that breaks him open and brings him face to face with the uncanny, Ferris realizes that his life is devoid of substantive accomplishment: “[What I have done] is largely meaningless, routine, average, banal, without savor or satisfaction” (Bromfield 1951, p. 7). He sets himself to examine, through writing about it, this emptiness: “I must put

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on paper in some concrete form the pattern and significance, if any, of my own existence” (ibid., p. 34). Much of what he finds centers on his own domestic and social life in Oakdale, a fictional suburb of a Mid-Western community Bromfield calls “Crescent City,” a place at least partly based on his hometown of Mansfield, Ohio. Ferris’ revelation unfolds in the most mundane of home situations: This passionate desire all began one October morning… while I was shaving and suddenly looked into my own eyes and saw myself…. I stood there with my razor poised, looking into my own eyes, thinking, This is you? This is the guy you have to live with for the rest of your life?.... Why are you shut off from everyone and every­ thing in spite of every effort to lose yourself?.... What are you missing? What precious experience… have you not had while life rushes on day after day with never any time to be alone, to think, or to do anything but the monotonous secure round of a mildly prosperous existence (ibid., pp. 24-25).

This revelation provokes Ferris “to explore the thing which in the last analysis was me” (ibid., p. 27). He realizes that he must consider “the whole of living as it touched me and I touched it” (ibid.). An integral element in this uncomfortable wholeness is his home in a suburban neighborhood of “nice expensive houses built by middle-class people moderately successful in life like Enid [his wife] and myself ” (ibid., p. 7). These houses: … were all decorated alike in rather rich-looking muddy colors because the decorator… was aware that these people (like Enid and me) wanted nothing revolutionary. They wanted something “rich” but not strange. The reds of the curtains and the upholstery were never quite red, nor the yellows yellow. All the colors were dimmed and muddy. “Off-white” was an expression [the decorator often used]… and “off-white” got somehow fixed in my brain as a symbol of so many things in the lives of all my friends and of Enid and myself (pp. 7-8).

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With America’s entry into World War II, Ferris becomes a Captain in the Army and is stationed on a remote Pacific Island with four enlisted men who must guard a compound of Quonset huts housing war supplies. Here, with plenty of time to be alone and write, Ferris is able to complete his life story, out of which arises “a kind of satisfaction… a kind of purification and the realization of purpose, without which my life would have remained incomplete and even confused and meaningless” (pp. 272-73). Shortly after he completes his manuscript, he is shot dead by one of the enlisted men who claims he mistook Ferris for one of several Japanese soldiers hiding on the island. IV. Implications for Homes and Inhabitation Ferris’s story as presented by Bromfield in Mr. Smith is significant for topoanalysis because it portrays, early on in the 1940s, a situation in which the taken-for-grantedness of one’s home life suddenly falls into question and sets the questioner on a quest. As Jager (1985) explains, a house, when really inhabited, becomes a source of vision through which we better see, yet for Ferris, this source of vision suddenly becomes a distressing selfconsciousness from which he is apart (in the sense of severed) rather than a part (in the sense of whole). His assumed stance of security and ease is sundered by vulnerability and shock. What, from Freud’s perspective, “should have remained a secret or hidden has come forth” (Freud, 1919/1973-74, vol. 17, p. 224). In confronting what he sees, Ferris arrives at a freer and more authentic way of inhabiting his world: “Whatever happens now, I have at least done something… I have achieved satisfaction and even peace…. I am purged and clean and empty” (Bromfield 1951, p. 333). Since Bromfield’s early portrayal, the house-as-trap-and-baddream has become a major theme in artistic and social-science portrayals of suburban life. Its continuing power is indicated by

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films like director Sam Mendes’ 1999 American Beauty or director Todd Haynes’ 2002 Far from Heaven, which, in different ways, call the American suburban way of life into question. This emphasis on the darker, less seemly aspects of homes and inhabitation adds an important new dimension to Bachelard’s claim that “All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home” (Bachelard 1964, p. 4). If the house is “our corner of the world,… our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the world” (ibid.), then a need is to incorporate phenomenological means to examine contemporary inhabitation’s more hidden, unsettling, and unexpected meanings and experiences. How, in short, are inhabitation and home to be interpreted in the 21st century? One conceptual need is to rephrase the nature of house and home in ways that incorporate its more typical, positive qualities but also provide a place for those qualities’ less typical, sometimes cryptic, opposites. For example, the intimacy of similarities typically assumed in phenomenological discussion on homes must be complemented with a recognition of and openness to difference (Manzo 2003; Massey 1992, 2005; Moore 2000; Morley 2000). Or the assumption of home associated with conventional-family structure must, as cases warrant, be replaced by non-traditional relationships and linkages (Blunt and Dowling 2006; Gorman-Murray 2006; Johnston and Valentine 1995). Or the phenomenological recognition of home as anchor and place of safety must be supplemented with the recognition that home can sometimes be a place of instability, discomfort, fear, or even violence—as in spousal, partner, or child abuse (Manzo 2003; Rose 1993; Young 1997). One of the most provocative recent expressions of such a reconstituted home and inhabitation is the five-year run of writer and director Alan Ball’s popular Home Box Office television series, Six Feet Under, which completed its final season in 2005 (Ball and Poul 2003). In this comedy-drama, a widowed mother, her teenage daughter, and two adult sons live in the upper stories of a Pasadena dwelling that, on ground and basement

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levels, houses their family mortuary business. In their love and concern for each other, though sometimes left unspoken and often expressed awkwardly, this family represents a more or less ordinary American home. But in many other ways—the fact that the daughter skirmishes with drugs and sex, that one son comes out as a gay man, that the mother struggles with the sudden loss of her husband, that the brothers as morticians bring the outside world of differences into their home through death—this program’s picture of contemporary inhabitation holds onto Bromfield’s place that grows around the heart but accommodates otherness, dysfunction, and emotional travail, both of the home and of the world the home enjoins. Privacy, security, family, intimacy, and continuity are all present in Ball’s domestic portrayal, but they are coupled in a lived dialectic with familial tensions, public conflicts, otherness, and hazard (Akass and McCabe 2005; Fahy 2006). In his writings about houses and homes, Bromfield registered the opposing lived poles presupposed and invoked by the phenomenon of inhabitation, but in none of this work did he draw these lived poles together as is done so well, for example, in Six Feet Under. As this television series suggests, the need today is for an at-homeness that directs itself inwardly toward inhabitants but also directs itself outwardly toward the world beyond the home, which is comfortable and secure yet open to uncertainty, inconstancy, strife, and difference (Massey 2005). Recognizing the need for an expanded conception of homes and inhabitation, I conclude with a preliminary attempt to delineate three claims that might assist with topoanalysis in our postmodern time. These claims are tentative and no doubt incomplete; they are grounded in the existential recognition that home and inhabitation incorporate both commonality and difference—both a lived wholeness and a lived dialectic that, when considered together, provide one conceptual means for explicating and organizing the multidimensionality of home and athomeness. Note that the first claim relates to the wholeness of

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the inhabitation experience, while the second two claims relate to its dialectical aspects. 1. Home involves a lived whole unified by its total character

• Home is not precisely defined in extent, in activity, in inhabitants, or in material contents. • These dimensions of home can change without undermining its nature, provided the total character of “home” remains unimpaired. • Materially, home is a dwelling occupying a particular place at a particular time, furnished in a particular way, with a particular inhabitant, set of inhabitants, or family. • The significance, identity, and reach of home is not confined to its own boundary or contents but connects to and potentially affords and is afforded by the world beyond the home. • In short, home is characterized by a unity in diversity that marks the reality of the particular home. 2. Home involves a lived dialectic founded in a twofold significance relating to internal diversity versus external connectedness.

• This lived dialectic exists for home as it is a place unto itself but also as it exists in relation to the larger world of which it is both apart and a part. • The inner, more private, significance of home arises from its being apart from the rest of the world, while the outer, more public, significance of home arises from its contact with the world of which it is a part. • These two significances are not the same and may even contradict each other, but both are integral to home as inhabitation. • One way that this dialectical quality of home is revealed is through situations that exaggerate one lived pole or the other—e.g., the home that exists only for visitors, or the home that turns its back to the world and is inhospitable.

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3. In both the inner and outer significances of home, there are “sustaining” and “undermining” situations, as summarized in Table 1.

• Home as “sustaining” refers to a lifeworld situation that affords human well being, of both individuals and family; aspects of a sustaining at-homeness can include rootedness, appropriation, regeneration, at-easeness, and warmth (see table 1). • Home as “undermining” refers to a lifeworld situation that in some way calls into question or disrupts human well being, of both individuals and family; aspects of an undermining at-homeness can include disconnectedness, intimidation, degeneration, uneasiness, and coldness (see table 1). • The home’s more outwardly-oriented, public significance can also be considered in terms of “sustaining” or “undermining” situations; aspects of home’s sustaining, outwardly-oriented situation can include permeability, accessibility, reciprocity, and legitimacy, whereas undermining aspects can include fragmentation inaccessibility, isolation, and illegitimacy (see table 1). • On one hand, a sustaining home can be said to afford and reflect “existential insideness” (Relph 1976, p. 55)—i.e., the home and the world in which it finds itself is typically experienced without self-conscious awareness yet, in its lived nature, sustains a sense of individual and familial well-being and worth. On the other hand, the home that, for whatever reason, undermines a sense of individual and familial well being and worth can be said to afford and reflect “existential outsideness” (ibid., p. 51)—i.e., a sense of separateness and alienation from the home or from the wider world in which that home finds itself.

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 able 1. Inhabitation and home’s inner & outer significances— T sustaining & undermining situations (based in part on Blunt & Dowling 2006; Jager 1975, 1985; Manzo 2003; Moore 2000; Relph 1976, Seamon 1979). Inwardly-oriented, more private significance of home Sustaining situations • Rootedness (taken-for-granted bodily familiarity, including routine actions). • Appropriation (autonomy and control of the home and immediate surroundings). • Regeneration (restorative atmosphere—e.g., place for physical and psychological rest and relaxation). • At-easeness (freedom to be what one most comfortably is, including familial support). • Warmth (supportive atmosphere involving a combination of material and human qualities).

Undermining situations • Disconnectedness (bodily unfamiliarity and confusion; spatial disorientation). • Intimidation (interference with autonomy and control; imposed actions and patterns). • Degeneration (disintegrative atmosphere—e.g., disruption of physical and psychological rest and relaxation). • Uneasiness (imposed manipulation of selves or family, e.g., house robbery or domestic violence). • Coldness (harsh, uncomfortable, or disruptive atmosphere).

Outwardly-oriented, more public significance of home Sustaining situations • Permeability (physical and spatial connectedness with world beyond home). • Accessibility (range of outside places and situations readily available). • Reciprocity (physical and existential interactions and exchanges between home and larger world. • Legitimacy (informal & formal of acceptance of home by the larger world).

Undermining situations • Fragmentation (physical and spatial disconnectedness with world beyond home). • Inaccessibility (limited range of outside places and situations). • Isolation (minimal or no physical and existential interactions and exchanges between home and larger world. • Illegitimacy (informal & formal rejection of home by larger world).

Overall situation (suggested by Relph 1976) • Existential insideness (home and • Existential outsideness (a sense of home place experienced without directed alienation and separation from home or self-conscious attention yet laden with or from the wider world in which home significances that are tacit and finds itself ). unnoticed).

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Reference Akass, Kim and McCabe, Janet, eds., 2005. Reading Six Feet Under: TV to Die for. London: I.B. Tauris. Alexander, Christopher, 1985. The Production of Houses. New York: Oxford University Press. Alt­man, Irwin and We­rner, Carol, eds., 1985. Home Environments. New York: Plenum. Anderson, David D., 1964. Louis Bromfield. New York: Twayne. ____. 1997. Louis Bromfield and Ecology in Fiction: A Re-Assessment. Midwestern Miscellany, 25: 48-57. Bachelard, Gaston, 1964. The Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press. Ball, Alan and Poul, Alan, eds., 2003. Six Feet Under: Better Living through Death. New York: Home Box Office. Barbey, G., 1989. Towards a Phenomenology of Home. Architecture and Behavior, 5: 1-10 [special issue on phenomenology of home]. Beeman, Randal S., 1993. Louis Bromfield Versus the “Age of Irritation,” Environmental History Review, 17 (spring): 91-102. ____. & Pritchard, James A., 2001. A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Bernstein, Susan, 2008. Housing Problems. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Blunt, Alison and Dowling, Robyn, 2006. Home. New York: Taylor & Francis. Boschetti, Margaret, 1993. Staying in Place: Farm Homes and Family Heritage. Housing and Society, 17 (3): 57-65. Bratton, Daniel, 1999. Ruined Landscapes in Three Novels by Louis Bromfield. Comparative Culture, 5: 1-11. Bromfield, Louis, 1939. It Takes All Kinds. New York: Harper and Brothers. ____. 1945. Pleasant Valley. New York: Harper and Brothers. ____. 1948. Malabar Farm. New York: Harper and Brothers. ____. 1950. Out of the Earth. New York: Harper and Brothers. ____. 1951. Mr. Smith. New York: Harper and Brothers. ____. 1955a. Animals and Other People. New York: Harper and Brothers. ____. 1955b. From My Experience. New York: Harper and Brothers. Bromfield Geld, Ellen, 1962. The Heritage: A Daughter’s Memories of

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Louis Bromfield. New York: Harper and Brothers [reissued with epilogue, Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000]. Carter, John T., 1995. Louis Bromfield and the Malabar Farm Experience. Mattituck, New York: Amereon House. Chawla, Louise, 1995. Reaching Home. Environmental and Archi­t­ec­ tural Phenomenology, 6 (2): 12-15. Cooper Marcus, Clare, 1995. The House as a Mirror of Self. Berkeley, CA: Conari. Fahy, Thomas,2006. Considering Alan Ball: Essays on Sexuality, Death and America in the Television and Film Writings. London: McFarland. Fleming, Deborah, 2006. Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm, and Faith in the Earth. Organization and Environment, 19 (3):309-20. Freud, Sigmund, 1919. The Uncanny, reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (trans. James Strachey). London: Hogarth Press, 1973-74, vol. 17. Gorman-Murray, A., 2006. Homeboys: The Uses of Home by Gay Australian Men. Social and Cultural Geographies, 7:53-69. Gramly, Allene Holt, 1987. Louis Bromfield. Mansfield, Ohio: Appleseed Press. Graumann, Carl F., 2002. The Phenomenological Approach to PeopleEnvironment Studies. In Robert Bechtel and Ara Churchman, eds., Handbook of Environmental Psychology, 2nd ed. (pp. 95-113). New York: Wiley. Harries, Karsten, 1993. Thoughts on a Non-Arbitrary Architecture. In David Seamon, ed., Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing (pp. 41-59). Albany, New York: State Uiversity of New York Press. Heidegger, Martin, 1971. Poetry, Language, and Thought. New York: Harper & Row. Hughes, James M., 1979. Louis Bromfield: Ohio and Self-Discovery. Columbus: The State Library of Ohio, 1979 [reprinted 1997, Wooster Book Company, Wooster, Ohio]. Jager, Bernd, 1975. Theorizing, Journeying, Dwelling. In A. Giorgi, et al., eds., Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology, vol. 4 (pp. 235-60). Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. ____. 1985. Body, House and City: The Intertwinings of Embodiment, Inhabitation and Civilization. In David Seamon & Robert Mugerauer, eds., Dwelling, Place and Environment (pp. 215-25). New York: Columbia University Press.

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Johnston, L. and Valentine, G., 1995. “Wherever I Lay My Girlfriend, That’s My Home”: The Performance and Surveillance of Lesbian Identities in Domestic Environments. In Bell, D. and Valentine, G., eds., Mapping Desires: Geographies of Sexualities (pp. 99-113). London: Routledge. Korosec-Serfaty, 1984. The Home from Cellar to Attic, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 4: 303-21. Little, Charles E., ed., 1988. Louis Bromfield at Malabar. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press. Lord, Russell, 1961. Afterword, in Louis Bromfield, The Farm. New York: New American Library. Manzo, Lynn, 2003. Beyond House and Haven, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 23: 47-61. Massey, Doreen, 1992. A Place Called Home, New Formations, 17:3-15. ____. 2005. For Space. London: Sage. Moore, R., 2000. Placing Home in Context, Journal of Environmental Psychology, 20 : 207-18 Morley, David, 2000. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. New York: Routledge. Mugerauer, Robert, 1994. Interpretations on Behalf of Place. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Nelson, Philip J., 2001. The Ideal of Nature and the “Good Farmer”: Louis Bromfield and the Quest for Rural Community.” Ohio History, 110 (winter-spring): 5-25. Nelson, Velvet, 2005. The Temporal Landscape in the Writing of Louis Bromfield. The Great Lakes Geographer, 12 (2):1-13. Olivier, Marc, 1977. The Psychology of the House. London: Thames and Hudson. Owings, L. C., 1997. An Ohio Walden: Louis Bromfield and Malabar Farm. In Quest for Walden: A study of the Country Book in American Popular Literature, with an Annotated Bibliography, 1863-1995 (pp. 128-42). London: McFarland. Pallasmaa, Juhani, 2005. Encounters [esp. part 3, “Inhabiting”]. Helsinki: Rakennustieto. Relph, Edward C., 1976. Place and Placelessness. London: Pion. Rose, Gillian, 1993. Feminism and Geography. Cambridge: Polity. Scott, Ivan, 1998. Louis Bromfield, Novelist and Agrarian Reformer: The Forgotten Author. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellon Press.

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Seamon, David, 1979. A Geography of the Lifeworld. New York: St. Martin’s. ____. ed., 1993. Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Pheno­ menological Ecology. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. ____. 2000. A Way of Seeing People and Place: Phenomenology in Environment-Behavior Research. In S. Wapner et al., eds., Theoretical Perspectives in Environment-Behavior Research (pp. 157-78). New York: Plenum. ____. 2008. Place, Belonging, and Environmental Humility: The Experience of “Teched” as Portrayed by American Novelist and Agrarian Reformer Louis Bromfield. In D. Payne, ed., Writings in Place: John Burroughs and his Legacy, (pp. 158-73). Newcastle, Great Britain: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ____. & Mugerauer, Robert, eds. 1985. Dwelling, Place and Enviro­nment: Towards a Phenomeno­logy of Person and World. New York: Columbia University Press. Shaw, S., 1990. Returning Home. Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 8:224-36. Vidler, Anthony 1992. The Architectural Uncanny. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. Winning, A. ,1990. Homesickness. Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 8: 78-89. ____. 1991. The Speaking of Home. Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 9: 172-81. Young, Iris Marion, 1997. House and Home: Feminist Variations on a Theme. In Intersecting Voices: Dilemmas of Gender, Political Philosophy, and Policy (pp. 134-64). Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Endnotes 1. Earlier versions of this article were presented as papers at the annual meeting of the Association for the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), Houston, February, 2008; and for a special session, “Bodily and Environmental Phenomenologies,” sponsored by the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Network, at the annual meeting of the International Association of Environmental Philosophy (IAEP), Pittsburgh, November, 2008.

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2. Discussions of home and inhabitation include: Alexander 1985; Altman & Werner 1985; Barbey 1989; Berstein 2008; Blunt & Dowling 2006; Boschetti 1993; Chawla 1995; Cooper Marcus 1995; Graumann 2002; Harries 1993; Heidegger 1971; Jager 1975, 1985; Korosec-Serfaty 1984; Manzo 2003; Massey 1992, 2005; Morley 2000; Mugerauer 1994; Norberg-Schulz 1985; Olivier 1977; Pallasmaa 2005; Relph 1976; Seamon 1979, 1993; Seamon & Mugerauer 1985; Shaw 1990; Vidler 1992; Winning 1990, 1991.

32 The Fragile Phenomenology of Juhani Pallasmaa by M. Reza SHIRAZI

Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow Guest Researcher in Technische Universität Berlin Department of Urban and Regional Planning Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Network [email protected] ABSTRACT: This essay argues that Finish architect and phe­ nomenologist Juhani Pallasmaa’s way of architectural understan­ ding involves what might be called a “fragile phenomenology,” by which is meant a style of phenomenological interpretation that is contextual and multi-sensory. Pallasmaa’s fragile phe­nomenology moves beyond the hegemony of vision to enrich the presence of the body by giving attention to lived experience and replacing one-dimensional vision by multi-sensory percep­tion. This article provides an overview and preliminary critique of Pallasmaa’s fra­ gile phenomenology by evaluating his inter­pretation of architect Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1938-39). The article con­cludes that Pallasmaa’s style of architectural understanding largely involves a “phenomenology from within.” In regard to the Villa Mairea, for exam­ple, we gain an in-depth phenomenological un­derstanding of many architectural aspects of the building, though we gain a less clear understanding of the building as a whole and of its lived relationship with site and surroundings.

Introduction Juhani Pallasmaa is a Finnish architect and phenomenologist whose numerous writings on phenomenology have played a vital PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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role in developing phenomenological discourse in architecture. Influenced by Edmund Husserl and his notion of “presuppositionless looking,” Pallasmaa writes that phenomenology “means ‘pure looking at’ the phenomenon” or “viewing its essence.”1 One prominent aspect of Pallasmaa’s phenomenology is his notion of “multi-sensory architecture.” His attention to the supremacy of vision in both Western philosophy and architecture points to a problematic emphasis in the history of the perception of space. He argues that the process of perception has been suf­fered by the excessive emphasis on sight and neglecting the presence and importance of the other senses. He explains: “Experience of architecture is multi-sensory; qualities of matter, space and scale are measured equally by the eye, ear, nose, skin, tongue, skeleton and muscle. Architecture strengthens … one’s sense of being in the world, essentially giving rise to a strengthened experience of self.” 2 In fact, an architecture of the senses holds us near to things and brings us into the “within.” Criticizing the supremacy of vision is criticizing “phenomenology from without”—a phenomenology founded in “viewing from distance” and a “far looking at.” Instead, the aim must be a “phenomenology from within”—a “near phenomenology.” Often drawing on a cinematic language, Pallasmaa presents mostly architectural “close ups”—not “long shots.”3 In this sense, his approach to perception is rooted in what he calls a “sensory architecture” through which the body approaches things intimately and experiences them as “nearby.” A second prominent aspect of Pallasmaa’s architectural phenomenology is his emphasis on architectural experience as a verb rather than as a noun. In interpreting architecture as a verb, one focuses on action and movement in perception. This perspective emphasizes multi-sensory engagement, since the moving body is typically more open and present to the moment than the static body. As he explains, “A building is encountered; it is approached,

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confronted, related to one’s body, moved through, utilized as a condition for other things. Architecture directs, scales, and frames actions, perceptions, and thoughts.” 4 In this regard, Pallasmaa criticizes three current tendencies in architecture: The commodification of buildings; the self-defeating search for newness; and the hegemony of the marketable image. Instead, he contends that architectural theory, criticism, and education must return attention to the now-neglected cultural grounds of architecture, attempting to present a more complete experience of the building grounded in the fullness of bodily encounter rather than the experiential limitations of visual interpretation only. One example of the less than adequate visual approach is the visual constriction of computer-aided design: By reinforcing visual manipulation and graphic production, computer imaging further detaches architecture from its multisensory essence; as design tools, computers can encourage mere visual manipulation and make us neglect our powers of empathy and imagination. We become voyeurs obsessed with visuality, blind not only to architecture’s social reality but also to its functional, economic, and technological realities. 5

Instead of a reductive, visual understanding of architecture, Pallasmaa advocates a turn toward haptic experience, which is grounded in a gradual comprehension of architecture, detail by detail, because it affects all the senses and the body as a whole. This mode of experience requires empathy and patience but is crucial because it offers nearness and affection rather than distance and control. Moreover, instead of attending to a one-dimensional, image-based approach to architecture, Pallasmaa suggests attention to “peripheral vision,” which goes beyond the object to perceive it contextually. As he explains, “focused vision makes us mere observers; peripheral perception transforms retinal images into spatial and bodily experience, encouraging participation.” 6 Drawing on Gianni Vattimo’s ideas of “weak ontology” and “fragile thought,” Pallasmaa prescribes, as a counter to today’s

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visually-dominant architecture, what he calls a “fragile architecture”—i.e., an architecture of the “fragile image,” which is “contextual, multi-sensory, and responsive, concerned with experiential interaction and sensual accommodation. This architecture grows gradually, scene by scene, rather than quickly manifesting a simple, domineering concept.”7 In a similar way, Pallasmaa proposes a “weak urbanism” that might counter the dominant approach to town and urban planning grounded in precisely organized strategies and strong urban forms that dominate the city visually. In some ways, his alternative is similar to medieval townscapes that arose organically without consciouslydirected principles or designs. Pallasmaa emphasizes that this kind of “weak urbanism” is mostly haptic rather than ocular: “The eye reinforces strong strategies, whereas weak principles of urbanity give rise to the haptic townscape of intimacy and participation.” 8 I. A Fragile Phenomenology Drawing on his idea of a “fragile architecture,” I call Pallasmaa’s way of architectural understanding a “fragile phenomenology.” In this sense, one can say that fragile phenomenology tends to be contextual and multi-sensory. It emphasizes experiential interactions and sensuous accommodations that grow gradually, sense by sense. Fragile phenomenology surpasses the hegemony of vision, enriches the presence of the body, pays attention to lived experience, and replaces one-dimensional vision by multisensory perception. But when considering Pallasmaa’s interpretations of architectural works based on his “fragile phenomenology,” one notes that they generally suffer from two weaknesses, the first of which is rooted in his excessive concentration on “nearness,” staying mostly “within” and presenting “close ups” in experiencing a work of architecture. This “near” attention neglects considering

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a work of architecture in macro-level—in other words, in its relationship and linkage to the larger-scale surroundings and region. One can draw on architectural phenomenologist Christian Norberg-Schulz’s terminology and say that the fragile phenomenology of Pallasmaa does not consider the genius loci of the work; it immediately enters the realm of the building and its immediate surroundings, interpreting only the building in detail. 9 A second weakness of Pallasmaa’s fragile phenomenology is that, in many of his design investigations, the interpretations sometimes seem episodic and disjointed rather than in-depth and continuous. Most of his analyses are partial selections through which he highlights some particular aspect of architectural experience. One example is in the second part of Eyes of the Skin where he discusses the importance and presence of the senses separately to show how human perception is fundamentally fulfilled not merely through the eyes but through all the senses. Pallasmaa divides his discussion into each sense separately, offering evidence to prove the importance of the sense in question. In providing concrete examples, he claims that the architecture of Le Corbusier and Richard Meyer “clearly favour sight, either as a frontal encounter, or the kinesthetic eye of the promenade architecturale.” 10 He argues that the architecture of Erich Mandelsohn and Hans Scharoun emphasizes muscular and haptic plasticity because these architects suppress the ocular perspectival dominance. He claims that Frank Gehry’s buildings evoke kinesthetic and haptic sensations and that Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture “is based on a full recognition of the embodied human condition and of the multitude of instinctual reactions hidden in the human unconscious.” 11 He contends that Alvar Aalto’s architecture involves a deep muscular and haptic sensation: Aalto’s architecture incorporates dislocations, skew confron­ tations, irregularities and poly-rhythms in order to arouse these

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bodily, muscular and haptic experiences. His elaborate surface textures and details, crafted for the hand, invite the sense of touch and create an atmosphere of intimacy and warmth. Instead of the disembodied Cartesian idealism of the architecture of the eye, Aalto’s architecture is based on sensory realism; his buildings are not based on a single dominant concept or Gestalt; they are sensory agglomerations.” 12

For all the architects that he refers to here, Pallasmaa presents broad claims but never gives detailed evidence to make his claims convincing. What is absent is a “multi-sensory” interpretation of a given work. Instead, what is introduced is mostly selective, onesense-focused interpretations of different buildings and architects rather than a multi-sensory interpretation of “one” work. This style of presenting evidence leads to an incomplete understanding of a building’s comprehensive architectural experience. In other words, Palassmaa does not demonstrate how a work of architecture affects all the senses, or how we can perceive a work of architecture in a multi-sensory way. One might say that his interpretations provide a partial set of phenomenological concerns rather than a comprehensive phenomenological reading of particular buildings or places. Obviously, this comprehensive way of interpretation stands against his “fragile phenomenology,” by which he intends to provide a multi-sensory, multi-dimensional, and gradual comprehension of architecture. II. Aalto’s Villa Mairea To illustrate the weaknesses of Pallasmaa’s “fragile phenomenology,” I review one of his most prominent interpretations— his book-length discussion of architect Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea (1938-39). 13 I examine how he applies his “fragile phenomenology” in interpreting this building and how the result illustrates the shortcomings highlighted above. Pallasmaa begins his interpretation of the Villa Mairea broadly. He considers the house as

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an example of the ideal relationship between the architect and the client—in this case, wealthy Maire Gullichsen, who requested that Aalto make something Finnish but in a contemporary spirit. 14 Pallasmaa explains that Aalto had considerable freedom in the design process, discussing every detail with the client and changing some aspects of the house’s design as construction proceeded. Pallasmaa claims that, although Aalto was a functionalist in the 1920s, his design philosophy gradually changed so that, by 1935, he condemned functionalist rationalism. Aalto came to believe that “rational” design suffered from a noticeable lack of human qualities. As he explained in 1940, [I]t is not the rationalization itself that was wrong in the first and now past period of modern architecture. The wrongness lies in the fact that the rationalization has not gone deep enough. Instead of fighting rational mentality, the newest phase of modern architecture tries to project rational methods from the technical field out to human and psychological fields…. Technical functionalism is correct only if enlarged to cover even the psychophysical field. That is the only way to humanize architecture. 15

Pallasmaa interprets the Villa Mairea as a model of Aalto’s changing ideas: “The design and execution of the Mairea take place in the middle of this essential change in Aalto’s philosophical stance.”16 Pallasmaa points to resemblances between Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Aalto’s Villa Mairea that probably resulted from parallel intentions. Both houses have a horizontal configuration in which the low, main spaces flow toward the outdoors and make a fusion of architecture, landscape, and nature. In both houses, too, the focal point of the living areas is the hearth, which projects a primordial sense of protection and homeliness. Pallasmaa explains that “The two houses arouse strong tactile and motoric experiences, and both exhibit a wide spectrum of atmospheres ranging from archaic heaviness and rusticity to extreme elegance and lightness.” 17

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Another characteristic of the Villa Mairea that Pallasmaa draws attention to is the independence and separation of its two floors. The ground floor encompasses the living spaces; and the first floor, the sleeping area. While the living spaces are open to the courtyard, the bedrooms have little contact with it; for example, the guest room and corridor have not been provided with even a glimpse of the courtyard. Pallasmaa writes: Even the opening of the main staircase on the second floor, which is the main mediator between the two levels, has been subtly closed by a floor slab to diminish the visual impact of the vertical connection. Consequently, there is a feeling of privacy and secrecy, and the stairs appear to slide downwards in oppos­ ition to the normal reading of a rising staircase. 18

III. Villa Mairea as Fragile Architecture Having introduced the Villa Mairea, Pallasmaa begins his phenomenological reading, based on his concept of sensory architecture. He states that the house exemplifies the strategy of a “fragile architecture” grounded in “an additive and episodic ensemble that grows detail by detail from below”—not an all-powering, ideal abstract structure dictated from above. He contends that Aalto “was not a Cartesian idealist, but a Bergsonian sensory realist. He aims at a perceptual impact from the real vantage point of the viewer instead of intellectual formal considerations.” 19 Further, Pallasmaa claims that the Villa Mairea reflects not a retinal architecture but a tactile architecture evoking all the senses and needing to be experienced through the body’s moving through the house’s spaces. This interpretation derives from a verb-like notion of space grounded in motive experience—not a noun-like notion grounded in stasis and constancy. In this regard, Pallasmaa equates the experience of the Villa Mariea with a forest walk in which we confront numerous stimuli and details

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that are integrated into the embodied perception of moving through space:“ There is no given centre point; the perceiver himself is the moving centre of his experience, and the situations unfold as an unbroken flow of observations.” 20 Pallasmaa also argues that Aalto considered both biological analogies and psychological dimensions in his designs; thus, the emotional impact of his architecture is rooted in sensuous, archaic images of shelter, protection, comfort, togetherness, and familiarity. He claims that, in the Villa Mairea, two contrasting aspects of Finnish dwelling are presented: Direct summer connection with the outdoors as illustrated most dramatically by the courtyard; and a sheltering winter face illustrated by interior furnishings that emphasize warmth. Pallasmaa also contends that Aalto uses a collage technique by which images of continental modernity fuse with a timeless, vernacular tradition. The result, he claims, is a brilliant fusion of oppositions: modernity vs. tradition, avant-garde vs. primordial. Pallasmaa’s evidence, expressed in collage-like fashion, is architectural details presented without order or sequence. One example is his discussion of the house’s sauna terrace, which juxtaposes modernist steel and concrete construction with rustic wood structures. The house is thus “archaic and modern, rustic and elegant, regional and universal at the same time. It refers simultaneously to the past and the future; it is abundant in its imagery and, consequently, provides ample soil for individual psychic attachment.” 21 The result, Pallasmaa argues, is that the Villa Mairea relates to the deepest existential dimensions of life and evokes a powerful architectural lived space: The building is thoroughly integrated and, regardless of nu­ merous surprises and incongruities, the whole is firmly held together by a consistent atmosphere. The whole is reflected in its parts: the folded mass of the studio and the twisted entrance anticipate the freely rhythmic flow of interior spaces. The flue of the fireplace behind the end wall of the dining room unexpectedly cuts diagonally across the roof to a chimney concealed in the wall

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of the service wing; it incorporates the stairs and creates a diagonal cut in the interior wall which is further echoed in the slight slant of the ceiling of the dining room. 22

IV. A Phenomenology from within The examples I have presented here illustrate how Pallasmaa interprets the Villa Mairea in terms of a fragile phenomenology. On one hand, this interpretation remains collage-like, episodic, and partial, so that it is difficult to draw a clear, comprehensive understanding of the building. Rather, the perceiver appears to be a bird-like seer who flies over and through the building, focusing his or her interpretation on special parts and places of the house that appear interesting or surprising. Although Pallasmaa considers the Villa Mairea a collage-like building, its episodic character does not necessarily require an episodic reading. If, as Pallasmaa suggests, a fragile phenomenology should develop gradually, step by step, the concern is that his way of interpreting the house is more arbitrary and piecemeal than comprehensively considered and holistic. On the other hand, Pallasmaa’s “near” reading of the Villa Mairea invokes a “phenomenology from within.” We gain a close, in-depth phenomenological understanding of the house, though its relation and linkage to site and surroundings are largely neglected. In Pallsamaa’s interpretation of Villa Mairea, the way this building is related to its environment remains disregarded. We only see the house in “close up” apart from any wider-ranging genius loci. To be sure, Pallasmaa’s contribution to phenomenological discourse is immensely important. By means of his fragile phenomenology, we may discover hidden, not-yet-considered aspects of architecture. He offers a way to develop a deep, multisensory, and lived experience of architecture. In pointing out weaknesses of his fragile phenomenology, I do not wish to imply that his work is a failure. Rather, I suggest that, by identifying

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and discussing these concerns, the method of fragile phenomenology might be strengthened and extended with the result that our understanding of architecture and architectural experience might be made more penetrating and comprehensive. Endnotes 1. J. Pallasmaa, The Geometry of Feeling: A Look at the Pheno­ menology of Architecture, in K. Nesbitt, ed., Theorizing A New Agenda For Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965—1995 (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 450. Perhaps the single best introduction to Pallasmaa’s phenomenological writings on architecture is J. Pallasmaa, Encounters: Architectural Esssays, P. MacKeith, ed. (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2005). An earlier version of this article was published in Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology, 20 (2): 4-8. 2. J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes Of The Skin: Architecture and the Senses (London: Academy Editions, 1996), p. 28. 3. In fact, Pallasmaa, has written on the relation between architecture and film; see J. Pallasmaa, The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema (Helsinki: Rakennustieto Oy, 2001). 4. J. Pallasmaa, Stairways of the Mind, in Encounters, p. 60. 5. J. Pallasmaa, Towards an Architecture of Humility, in Encounters, p. 193. 6. Ibid., p. 194. 7. Ibid., p. 195. 8. J. Pallasmaa, Hapticity and Time, in Encounters, p. 328. 9. C. Norberg-Schulz, Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture (NY: Rizzoli, 1980). 10. J. Pallasmaa, Eyes of the Skin, p. 49. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. J. Pallasmaa, Image and Meaning, in J. Pallasmaa, ed., Alvar Aalto: Villa Mairea (Helsinki: Alvar Aalto Foundation, 1998), pp. 70-125. 14. Ibid., p. 70. 15. A. Aalto, Humanizing Architecture, Sketches, pp. 77-78 [1940]; cited in J. Pallasmaa, J., ed. Alvar Aalto: Villa Mairea, p. 75. 16. J. Pallasmaa, Image and Meaning, p. 75.

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17. Ibid., p. 80. 18. Ibid., p. 85. 19. Ibid., p. 86. 20. Ibid., p. 90. 21. J. Pallasmaa, Identity, Intimacy and Domicile: Notes on the Phenomenology of Home [originally 1992], available at: http://www2. uiah.fi/opintoasiat/history2/pallas.htm [accessed June 8, 2009]. 22. J. Pallasmaa, Image and Meaning, p. 98.

33 Keynesian Phenomenology and the Meltdown by Dennis E. Skocz

Philosophy, Independent Scholar [email protected] ABSTRACT: The paper aims to show how key phenomenological concepts inform Keynesian economics. There is no indication that Keynes “knew” phenomenology but it well describes what he was doing when he brought “psychological” factors to bear on economic problems. With his “phenomenological turn,” Keynes freed economics from neo-classical models and could then revise theory to explain the Great Depression and prescribe a way out of it. Arguably, such a “turn” today could expose the gap between Wall Street practice and Main Street realities as it points to a need to ground financial abstractions in lived economic experience.

John Maynard Keynes is arguably a phenomenologist of “the economic.” His careful reflection on the lived-experience of economic actors helped ground his economic theory and enabled him to escape the binds of then-prevailing economic models. With the break-through insights he gained into economic phenomena as experienced by key actors—consumers, savers, investors, borrowers, lenders—Keynes was not only able to revise economic science to better describe the operation of the late capitalism of his day but also to prescribe policies to help economies mired in the Great Depression to emerge from that condiPHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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tion. Financial collapse and economic meltdown in our time, I suggest, can be understood as proceeding from a progressive alienation of economic practice and theory from the lived experience of economic actors; whatever policies peoples and their governments adopt to resuscitate the global economy will want to find their anchor in the ground truth of economic life as lived by individuals and families whose decisions and actions are not fully inscribed in any economic science. I will endeavor to show how key phenomenological concepts inform Keynes’ approach. There is no indication that Keynes “knew” phenomenology. Nonetheless, clues to an unrecognized phenomenological approach are scattered throughout The General Theory. Keynesian language hints at phenomenological notions: “expectation” as “determining output and employment; “propensity to consume” (GT 89), which is affected in part by objective factors like amount of income but also by “the subjective needs and the psychological propensities and habits” of individuals; the “state of confidence” of investors, to which practical men pay the “closest and most anxious attention” (GT 142); and, “liquidity preference,” itself subjective, which depends on three “motives” that Keynes explicates. Starting from phenomenological concepts, one finds analogues in Keynes: the notion of phenomenon itself, as what is given to experience, offers the best sense of what Keynes means by subjective or psychological—I will support this interpretation soon; the situated subject with its perspectival view of the object is reflected, for example, in Keynes’ consideration of how differently borrowers and lenders view interest rates – apart from the obvious fact that borrowers like them to be low and lenders, high (GT 144-145); Husserl’s “problematic possibility” serves to describe the field of choice facing the investor who, unlike the rational economic man of classical theory, is torn between “conflicting tendencies” regarding the investment of funds (GT 93). Temporality, especially the future as inherently uncertain and undetermined, figures very

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prominently in Keynes’ thought. Imaginative variation leading to essential insight is employed again and again. And, to end this enumeration, Keynes’ investors, savers, consumers, workers, speculators, and entrepreneurs are arguably best understood as eidetic types rather than either arbitrary constructs or generalizations awaiting empirical confirmation. At first blush, Keynes seems everything but a phenomenologist. The General Theory is a daunting work of several “Books” replete with the mathematical formulae that have become staples of macro-economic theory. Nonetheless, phenomenology intervenes at a critical point in Keynes’ analysis, first to extricate theory from an impasse and then to redirect theory to macro-economic factors previously left out of account. The General Theory, as its full title implies, covers employment, interest, and money. Consumption, savings, and investment are also themes at the heart of the work. I focus on the savings-investment relationship as a point of entry for the interpretation undertaken here. The pressing historical-practical challenge of Keynes and his contemporaries was the Great Depression; the issue: how to overcome the devastatingly high unemployment of that crisis— and, how to account for the tendency of capitalism to work chronically below full employment. The economics of Keynes’ day held that the laws of short and long-term price equilibrium would ensure the optimal employment of labor and the other factors of production without intervention from outside the market. The laws of supply and demand applied as much to savings and investment, and to labor and capital, as to goods and services in “first-order” commodity markets. The interest rate, like the price for a commodity, would guide the flow of savings into investment so that needed capital goods would be devoted to production of goods to satisfy future consumption needs and wants. Likewise, the price of labor, the wage, would incentivize the full employment of labor in production. The theory seemed self-evident and beyond dispute, but labor and finance markets

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were not showing the self-correcting action theory anticipated. The price of labor fell but that did not incentivize the employment of more workers. Savings (non-consumption) increased, but investment did not expand proportionately as theory would have it. I will focus on the savings-investment nexus since a phenomenological move is most evident in this aspect of Keynes’ theory. Pre-Keynesian theory held that money set aside by savers would flow into the hands of investors when the “price was right”: when the interest rate was high enough to persuade or incentivize consumers to save and low enough to justify investors to borrow. The model did not allow for leakage or paradox. It assumed that all money removed from consumption went into savings and all savings became investment (i.e., funds directed to production for future consumption). Theory also indicated that interest rates would be high enough for lenders to loan money for productive investments and low enough for borrowers to pay back a loan if the venture yielded low returns. The effect of what I have called Keynesian phenomenology was to challenge this and other critical assumptions. Keynes situates himself and his readers into the deliberative and decision-making moment of saver-consumers and investors respectively and describes the field of motives and choices which present themselves to each. Savers, for example, might remove funds from consumption but not commit them to productive longer-term investment or to any kind of investment at all. Investors, for their part, might well choose profitable but not productive investments. Not all money that is removed from current consumption ends up funding productive investment. Moreover, when money is saved and not directed to productive investment, the economic impact in terms of production is negative, i.e., there is less production and less employment. To be sure, the analysis is much more complex, but I want to focus on what is very arguably phenomenological in Keynes’ approach.

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Under the heading of psychological or subjective factors, Keynes describes a range of eight motives and choices that bear on consuming or saving. By “subjective” in The General Theory, Keynes does not mean the arbitrary. He is not referring to mental events or mind contents without a bearing on the external world. His use of that word—as well as “psychological”—indicates what he means: subjective and psychological refer to how given objects present themselves to a deliberating-deciding subject. Subjective does not refer to a realm of objects apart from those we deal with in everyday [economic] life, but rather to the way in which those objects present themselves to us. Let me now review the eight subjective factors or motives. Precaution motivates savings as a “reserve for future contingencies.” In the case of precaution, the future looms as unpredictable. Foresight, by contrast with precaution, prompts savings when future needs can be anticipated and funds have to be set aside to cover those needs. Calculation motivates savings when expected appreciation in the value of money saved will allow for greater consumption in the future than at present. The motivation of improvement points to savings as a way of withholding consumption until a time when opportunities arise that allow for greater enjoyment from expenditure (e.g., an off-season vacation might allow one to book a trip at lower cost and derive more enjoyment from sightseeing when crowds are less). Independence comes from withholding current spending and consumption so that one may “enjoy the sense of independence and power to do things, though without a clear idea or definite intention of specific action.” Enterprise looks for freedom of maneuver; it prompts withholding current consumption to allow for opportunizing at some point in the future. Pride will prompt savings to “bequeath a fortune.” Avarice motivates saving as hoarding. In delineating the motives and choices of the consumer-saver at the beginning of Chapter Nine, Keynes makes use of the distinction between because-of and in-order-to motives that Schütz was careful to make

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in his works. In so doing, Keynes underscores the importance of temporality in describing the essential features of the decisionmaking process, inasmuch as the because-motives form the temporal (past) background for positing the goal or would-be (future) outcome of the subject’s decision and action. This unorthodox application of imaginatively transposing his thought into the field and flow of differing motivated decision-making situations sets him apart from his contemporaries who see spending and saving behavior as a linear function of price or the interest rate. I will endeavor to show later the importance of this phenomenological move to Keynes’ theory. Let me elaborate further—phenomenologically—the analysis Keynes makes. In his tour d’horizon of motives, I would suggest that Keynes focuses on the future. In the descriptions, the future constitutes the field of choice. The future essentially defines the subjects as oriented to possibilities-of-being. Keynes implicitly acknowledges what Husserl called the horizon-structure of experience and understands that subjects—in this case, deliberating subjects—make choices within a “horizon [which] in its indeterminateness is co-present [with a subject and its object] from the beginning as a realm [Spielraum = room for play] of possibilities” (EJ, 32). For Keynes, as for Husserl, the future appears in expectation or anticipation as possibility. In all eight descriptions, the future looms ahead, indeterminate. We shall see that the uncertainty of the future will also figure very significantly in the timehorizon of the investor. Keynes is describing a temporality structure in which the future is pre-figured by various kinds of motives which orient present decisions toward objectives or future end-states. The future horizon, already-always undetermined, can be accentuated by a pre-given motivational habitus like precaution. Habitus develops over time as experience fulfills or disappoints anticipations. The cumulative knowledge of the world thus acquired constitutes a habitus which then operates as a pre-disposition. The sense of habitus finds elaboration in Alfred

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Schütz’s notion of the biographically determined situation (PSR 76). The deliberating-deciding subject faces a future horizon of choice against the background of her past, her biography, of what she has already lived through and experienced and brings with her in addressing the possibilities-of-being that present themselves for choice. The biographically determined situation not only locates the subject at a specific point in time and place, but also works to sort the choices within the field of choice according to what is or is not within the scope of the subject’s control. The individuals described by Keynes are situated subjects: motivated in specific ways; understood as eight types, they have certain characters, even virtues and vices (e.g., avarice). Some, we infer, have families and all grow old and all are, alternatively, egotistical, altruistic, energetic doers, and anti-social recluses. In describing each outlook, Keynes situates himself within the lifeworld of a particular kind of subject; thus he takes a first-person hermeneutical perspective, endeavoring to view the world from the perspective of the subject of interest. The cautious person, for example, will perceive the future as especially uncertain and avoid spending in order to have funds on hand to deal with contingencies. Although his account is brief and compact, Keynes’ discussion of psychologically motivated subjects or, more precisely, subject-types, differs greatly from the account of economic choice given by classical economics which assumes a de-historicized subject, a rational economic man who operates to maximize gains and minimize losses. Rational economic man operates outside of any spatial or temporal context: outside history, society, or the succession of generations. Rational economic man acts, dispassionately, by rule rather than motivation and character. In fact, rational economic man is dispensable. Classical theorists can plot demand and supply schedules, move them right and left, and pinpoint their intersection without ever talking about the motivation of buyers and sellers, investors or savers,

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and how they come to the preferences and decisions that mobilize resources in an actual economy. Economics, it was thought, does not have to consider subject-types and their correlative possibilities of being. It is enough—or so it was thought—to posit a demand schedule, for example, and to imagine that as the price of any good increases the quantity demanded will decline. Any differences, individual or typical, will find a demand schedule or curve with its distinctive quantitative values or slope. And, this is all that is needed to get on with the work of economics which is to correlate and predict functional dependencies between aggregate quanta: income, savings, investment, consumption. That Keynes considered subjective factors—the ones mentioned and others—was not some idiosyncratic indulgence on his part, however. Inter alia, the elaboration of these subjective factors and like considerations bearing on investors made it possible to disclose why aggregate saving did not translate into investment or into productive investment as classical economics predicted. Before indicating how this phenomenological move of Keynes’ exposes the weakness of pre-existing theory and allows Keynes to replace it with a more dynamic and faithful model, I will shift to the side of the investor and borrower. Here the significance of a phenomenological explication becomes arguably greater. If the investor is to make use of the funds which savings afford, then the investor must borrow funds at a rate sufficiently low so that expected earnings from the sale of her production will allow for a profit—moreover, a profit that is greater than what could be had by putting the money into securities traded in a financial market. Even this brief description suggests that the future horizon of the investor-borrower is compounded by uncertainties: what might a product made using inputs of labor, materials, and capital goods purchased at prices that might vary over the course of production yield at the conclusion of the production cycle? What would an amount equal to the cost of those production

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inputs yield if invested in the financial market? Investment in production entails a long-term commitment of resources—“all the eggs in one basket”—for an uncertain result realized in a relatively distant future. A financial investment, by comparison, exposes the investor to the constant revaluations of a market where each is more interested in what all others in the market are doing than in the fundamental profitability of enterprises represented by securities (GT 154-155). Guessing, in this case, becomes guessing about guessing. Nevertheless—and this is most important—the financial investment offers much greater liquidity: one may enter and withdraw from the market frequently and expeditiously. Keynes deconstructs the seemingly objective models of investment planning to show just how “subjective” they are. In estimating the costs of production, an investor makes use of a concept called the “marginal efficiency of capital”: how much productive output can be had from increasing increments of capital. The terminology as well as the theory suggest that the benefit of increasing increments of capital to production can be calculated with some precision. Keynes dispels this impression by pointing out that the efficiency of capital is all about expectations concerning prospective outcomes or yield (GT 141). The term, “marginal efficiency of capital,” suggests a cost-benefit calculation that one makes with “objective” data on both the cost and benefit side of the equation. Keynes speaks to the facts here: there are no such facts. The would-be investor leans into a future, given in the mode of possibility, uncertainty, and risk. But there is more. The investor is a borrower, i.e., depends upon a lender for the capital required to move ahead with a project if conditions are “right.” Now, one most look at a possible investment project from two perspectives. The noematic object here (the project) must be viewed from two standpoints, each the standpoint of a biographically situated subject-type. In this case, Keynes also points to the affective modalization [my term] that

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each brings to the matter. The investor-borrower looks at the project with doubt: will prospective yields cover production costs? The lender looks, Keynes says, with hope that she will gain more than could be had by a secured financial investment or by a series of short-term trades in the financial market. Keynes complicates his analysis still further, but I wish only to call attention to the phenomenological moves he makes: first, in introducing perspectivalism; and then, in considering affective modification. While both the borrower-investor and the lender are oriented to the same proposed-project, each views it as a uniquely biographically situated subject (PSR 316). Additionally, Keynes alludes to two moods or affects which “color” deliberation and decision. From Husserl onward, phenomenologists have attested to the cognitive dimension of affectivity (II, 10). The particular affects which Keynes refers to, however, are especially interesting, because they are specifically related to the deliberating and judging experience itself. Doubt and hope attend decision-making as affective constituents. Doubt for sure—and, hope quite arguably—belongs to the consideration of problematic possibilities. Schutz calls attention to a distinction in Husserl between problematic and open possibilities. In the former, the deliberatingdeciding subject finds herself with a variegated field of possibilities. Different alternatives present themselves with differing degrees of salience. Some occupy the foreground of choice; others figure as remote possibilities in the background of choice, if they figure at all. These problematic possibilities are not inert alternatives, passively awaiting election, until they meet up with a disinterested will. Rather, alternative possibilities contend for the attention and ultimately affirming judgment of the subject judger-decider. In the contestation, first one, then another alternative “makes its case”; in this process, the subject wavers and waffles. Doubt is the name for the prevailing affective condition until the moment of resolution settles the matter (81). (Hope, I

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would venture to add, is the “happy-side” of doubt and it should be possible to put forward a phenomenology of hope, in the moment of deliberation and decision, that parallels what Husserl and Schutz have said about doubt: first, I hoped this … and then that …) That Keynes should give prominence to doubt and hope in discussing investment and lending decisions attests to his understanding of economic choice as falling within the paradigm of problematic possibility. But, one asks, what about open possibility? Open possibility describes a field of choice in which the subject is not situated and all possibilities have equal weight. The contestation described above does not take place. This second kind of possibility is near to that of rational economic man. Unsituated, with no biographical baggage, rational economic man faces a field of choice with the aim of maximizing gains and minimizing losses in any decision. Alternative possibilities are regarded equally, inasmuch as they are viewed with one consideration in mind: how much will they contribute to optimizing gains (or minimizing loss)? It now becomes possible to explain how Keynes’ phenomenological move frees him from the aporias of classical economics. On the issue of savings and investments, classical economics held that savers, investors, borrowers, and lenders all operated according to the reductive model of classical economics. The interest rate would generate and regulate the movement of funds: higher interest rates would attract savings from consumer-savers and prompt lenders to lend; at the same time, the interest rate would rise or fall so that at some point what lenders were willing to lend would equal what borrowers were willing to borrow. In all of this, the determinant was the interest rate (price of money) to which all responded with the same simple rule and logic, i.e., that of rational economic man: maximize gains and minimize losses. The phenomenological variations that Keynes considered showed why the predictions of classical economics did not bear

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out. The eight situated consumer-savers were not motivated by movements of the interest rate. Their decisions about how much to save, as a percentage of their income, were fairly fixed by their biographically determined situations. As for lenders, borrowers, and investors—important “first-line” players in the matter of investment and, therefore, employment—they had to contend with a future time-horizon that equated with risk and uncertainty. It is, of course, fairly obvious, that a higher rate of return (interest) will draw a higher level of investment, but the problem is that the higher rate of return is associated with a higher risk, and risk—as Keynes so repeatedly indicated—is fundamentally incalculable. Now, of course, economic science did not grind to a halt with a critique of classical theory and its models. Keynes went forward with theories and models of his own. These latter were, in their own way, quite abstract and certainly complex. Aggregate demand, rightfully associated with Keynes’ new theorizing, aggregates. We individual consumers and our biographically determined choices are as lost in the aggregates of post-Keynsian macro-economics as the lived-reality of our choosing is unrecognizable in the demand schedules of micro-economics. The point is that with the analyses described here, Keynes was able to see where his predecessors had gone wrong and was able to build new models that took into account the “negative” results of his phenomenology. One example will have to suffice to illustrate this. If interest rates could not be relied upon to generate and move funds into productive investments that would boost employment, then government investment in public works would have to do the job. The phenomenological turn served a critical and deconstructive purpose rather than offering prototypes for the construction of new models for economic theorizing. Keynes’ turn to the lived experience of “the economic” also underscores the rootedness of any human science in the lifeworld. When classical economics found itself at an impasse in explaining the abysmal and persistent

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conditions of the Great Depression, it was necessary to go back to lived experience of the consumer, saver, investor, lender, borrower, speculator, entrepre­­neur—and yes, the worker (whose situation Keynes described at length, although more from an empirical rather than experiential standpoint)—in order to “get things right.” “Back to the things themselves!” is Husserl’s way of putting it. In the current downturn/meltdown/recession is there a lesson to be drawn from Keynsian phenomenology? I believe there is. First, there seems a direct lesson to be learned about the utility of monetary policy when uncertainty about the future is allprevailing. Keynes’ discussion of the future must have seemed all the more persuasive to his contemporaries given the fact that he wrote during the depression with its pervasive sense of anxiety about the future. Monetary policy in the United States today has brought interest rates to bargain-basement levels and this has not spurred borrowing, purchases, and investment. Undoubtedly, consumers and investors today are not the rational economic men of monetary theory who increase borrowing as interest rates fall. For them, as for their Depression-era counterparts, the future looms as a horizon of heightened uncertainty. Biographically situated with the fresh experience of expectations dashed, the propensity to invest is minimal. A second more general lesson has to do with alienation. In our recent experience, more and more lending occurred through securities that were increasingly removed from the assets (e.g., homes) that they were based on. As the securities, derivatives, became more sophisticated their prospective yields become harder to estimate—and easier to inflate. If economic theory can disconnect us from economic reality, so too can economic practices. Lending practices leading to the current recession have alienated us from lived economic reality to an unprecedented degree. Wall Street became ever more remote from Main Street. Whatever economic policies are adopted to address the problems

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of the current recession or to prevent a recurrence of something like it, it will be necessary to acquire greater visibility regarding the transactions that make up financial practice. This means a close-up, if not a first-hand, view of economic realities as experienced by actors in the “real economy.” Bankers once knew the borrowers they made loans to and the assets they had claim to. It is unlikely that the financial sector can be reconstituted as an aggregate of local banks serving customers in the neighborhood. Nevertheless, as Keynes was able to cut through the abstractions of classical economic theory and reassess problems from the standpoints of first-order economic actors, so too, it would seem, policy and practice must somehow drill down through the layers of abstraction that separate financial instruments from the assets they comprise and get “back to the things themselves.” References Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company) Schutz, Alfred, The Problem of Social Reality: Collected Papers 1 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1962) Husserl, Edmund, Experience and Judgment, trans. James S Churchill and Karl Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973)

34 Portkeys, Resurrective Ideology, and the Phenomenology of Collective Trauma* by Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.

Philosophy and Psychoanalysis [email protected] California Phenomenology Circle ABSTRACT: In this essay, I extend my conception of emotional trauma as a shattering of the tranquilizing “absolutisms of everyday life” that shield us from our finitude and our existential vulnerability, to a consideration of collective trauma. Using the collective trauma of 9/11 and its aftermath as my prime example, I illustrate how traumatized people fall prey to “resurrective ideologies” that promise to restore the sheltering illusions that have been lost. I suggest that an alternative to these grandiose illusions can be found in our “kinship-in-finitude.” Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold. –William Butler Yeats I’ll be with you when the deal goes down. –Bob Dylan

I. Emotional Trauma During the more than 17 years since I had the experience of a devastating traumatic loss, I have, in a series of articles culminating in a book (Stolorow, 2007), been attempting to understand and conceptualize the essence of emotional trauma. Two interweaving central themes have crystallized in the course of PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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this work. On the one hand, emotional experience is inseparable from the contexts of attunement and malattunement in which it is felt, and painful emotional experiences become enduringly traumatic—that is, unendurable—in the absence of a relational context in which they can be held and integrated. On the other hand, emotional trauma is built into the basic constitution of human existence. In virtue of our finitude and the finitude of our important connections with others, the possibility of emotional trauma constantly impends and is ever present. In trying to grasp our present era as an Age of Trauma, I focus first on this second theme—trauma’s existentiality. I glimpsed emotional trauma’s existentiality first-hand, as it was exhibited in a traumatized state that I experienced at a conference in 1992, at which I relived the terrible loss that had occurred 18 months earlier: There was a dinner at that conference for all the panelists, many of whom were my old and good friends and close colleagues. Yet, as I looked around the ballroom, they all seemed like strange and alien beings to me. Or, more accurately, I seemed like a strange and alien being—not of this world. The others seemed so vitalized, engaged with one another in a lively manner. I, in contrast, felt deadened and broken, a shell of the man I had once been. An unbridgeable gulf seemed to open up, separating me forever from my friends and colleagues. They could never even begin to fathom my experience, I thought to myself, because we now lived in altogether different worlds. (Stolorow, 2007, pp. 13-14)

The key that for me unlocked the meaning of the dreadful sense of alienation and estrangement inherent to the experience of emotional trauma was what I came to call the absolutisms of everyday life: When a person says to a friend, “I’ll see you later” or a parent says to a child at bedtime, “I’ll see you in the morning,” these are statements whose validity is not open for discussion. Such

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absolutisms are the basis for a kind of naïve realism and opti­ mism that allow one to function in the world, experienced as stable and predictable. It is in the essence of emotional trauma that it shatters these absolutisms, a catastrophic loss of inno­ cence that permanently alters one’s sense of being-in-the-world. Massive deconstruction of the absolutisms of everyday life exposes the inescapable contingency of existence on a universe that is random and unpredictable and in which no safety or continuity of being can be assured. Trauma thereby exposes “the unbearable embeddedness of being.” As a result, the trau­ matized person cannot help but perceive aspects of exis­tence that lie well outside the absolutized horizons of normal every­ dayness. It is in this sense that the worlds of traumatized persons are fundamentally incommensurable with those of others, the deep chasm in which an anguished sense of estran­gement and solitude takes form. (Stolorow, 2007, p. 16)

In shattering the tranquilizing absolutisms of everyday life, emotional trauma plunges us into a form of what Heidegger (1927/1962) calls authentic being-toward-death, wherein death and loss are apprehended as distinctive possibilities that are constitutive of our very existence, of our intelligibility to ourselves in our futurity and finitude—possibilities that are both certain and indefinite as to their “when” and that therefore always impend as constant threats. Stripped of its sheltering illusions, the everyday world loses its significance, and the traumatized person, as shown in my traumatized state at the conference dinner, feels anxious and uncanny—no longer safely at home in the everyday world. Several outcomes of such traumatization are possible. If a relational home can be found in which traumatized states and anxiety can be held and eventually integrated (and I will have more to say about this in a later section), the traumatized person may actually move toward a more authentic way of existing, in which existential vulnerabilities are embraced rather than disowned. More commonly, in the absence of such a relational home, he or she may succumb to various forms of dissociative

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numbing. Alternatively, traumatized people may attempt to restore the lost illusions shattered by trauma through some form of what my collaborators and I (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, in press) call resurrective ideology—collective beliefs about one’s being-in-the-world that seek to bring back to life the absolutisms that have been nullified. II. Resurrective Ideology We came to the concept of resurrective ideology in the context of our effort to make sense of Heidegger’s involvement in the Nazi movement. How could it be, we wondered, that the philosopher who contributed so much to liberating our view of humanity from the prevailing rule of dehumanizing objectification could have given himself over to a ghastly mass political movement unmatched in history for its de-individualizing and annihilating objectifications? In our psychobiographical study of his life and works, we found that Heidegger’s attraction to National Socialism took form in the context of a confluence of three traumatizing circum­ stances that followed the completion of his magnum opus, Being and Time, and that plunged him into a crisis of personal annihilation: The loss of his lover and sustaining muse, Hannah Arendt; Being and Time’s being greeted by the academic world with noncomprehension and deafening silence; and his dying mother’s expressing only disappointment in him for breaking with the Catholic Church. We wrote: As Arendt pulled away from him and gave herself to other relationships, as the prodigious effort to complete Being and Time came to an end and the work met incomprehension, as his mother died in a state of bitter disappointment in and estrangement from him, did Heidegger feel the world itself pulling away from him and a slipping away of his own identity as well? … It was within the context of such feelings of self-loss and world-loss that the glory of National Socialism was found. It is our belief that by

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embracing Nazi ideology and … sup­ porting Nazi policies, Heidegger was attempting to resurrect himself and recover a sense of his own empowered individuality as a person in control of his own destiny. (Stolorow, Atwood, & Orange, in press).

Can we discern analogous processes of traumatic shattering and resurrective ideology at work in our own current era? III. An Age of Trauma The tranquilizing absolutisms of our everyday world seem in our time to be severely threatened from all sides—by global economic collapse, by global diminution of natural resources, by global warming, by global nuclear proliferation, and by global terrorism. As Lear (2006) puts it: We live at a time of a heightened sense that civilizations are themselves vulnerable. Events around the world … have left us with an uncanny sense of menace. We seem to be aware of a shared vulnerability that we cannot quite name…. It is [an existential] vulnerability that we all share in virtue of being human. (pp. 7-8)

Here I wish to focus in particular on the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 as a devastating collective trauma (Davis, 2006; Welch, 2008; Wirth, 2004) that inflicted “a rip in the fabric” (Lear, 2006, p. 65) of the American psyche. In horrifyingly demonstrating that even America can be assaulted on its native soil, the attack of 9/11 shattered our collective illusions of safety, inviolability, and grandiose invincibility, illusions that had long been mainstays of the American historical identity. In the wake of such shattering, Americans became much more susceptible to resurrective ideologies that promised to restore the grandiose illusions that have been lost. It was in this context of collective trauma and resurrective ideology that Americans fell prey to the abuses of power of the Bush administration.

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Following 9/11, Bush et al. did not merely go after Al Qaeda. Fueling and exploiting the dread of retraumatization, they declared war on global terrorism and drew America into a grandiose, holy crusade that enabled Americans to feel delivered from trauma and “to bathe themselves collectively in the belief that we are that blessed City on a Hill called upon by the Lord to rid the world of evil” (Davis, 2006, p. xiv). Bush essentially said to us: “You have not been devastated and crushed. You are not exposed as excruciatingly vulnerable human beings, just as vulnerable to assault, destruction, death, and loss as are all other people around the world. You are still great and powerful, godlike, and together we will bring our way of life to every nation on earth.” Tragically, every effort to actualize such ideological illusions inflicts collective trauma on those whom we attack, and they respond with an intensification of their resurrective ideologies. It is this dialectic of traumatic collapse and ideological resurrection that fuels the lamentable, endlessly recurring cycle of atrocity and counteratrocity that has been so characteristic of human history.1 IV. Portkeys to 9/11 How did Bush and then McCain and Palin attempt to keep us in the grip of their resurrective ideologies? They did so by making use of what I call portkeys to trauma. Portkey is a term I borrowed from Harry Potter (Rowling, 2000) to capture the impact of trauma on our experience of time. Harry was a severely traumatized little boy, nearly killed by his parents’ murderer and left in the care of a family that mistreated him cruelly. He arose from the ashes of devastating trauma as a wizard in possession of wondrous magical powers, and yet never free from the original trauma, always under threat by his parents’ murderer. As a wizard, he encountered portkeys—objects that transported him instantly to other places, obliterating the duration ordinarily required for travel from one location to another.

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I use the term portkey to refer to any experience that returns one to an experience of traumatization. Bush, McCain, and Palin used portkeys to the collective trauma of 9/11 in an attempt to keep us terrified and under the spell of their resurrective ideologies. Bush’s most infamous portkey, one that led us into war with Iraq, was the bogus threat of weapons of mass destruction. What better way to return us to the emotional devastation of 9/11 than with the specter of nuclear annihilation? More recently, the McCain campaign followed suit with their deplorable “tribute” to 9/11 at the Republican National Convention, whereby we were forced to relive once again the horrifying collapse of the World Trade Center. And McCain assured us that he knew how to protect us and keep us safe. And more abominable still, there was Palin’s recurring smear against Obama, accusing him repeatedly of “palling around with terrorists,” as if he were in league with Osama Bin Laden himself, a dangerous portkey to 9/11 that has incited crowds to the brink of violence. Even the current economic collapse can reanimate the feelings of helplessness and terror spawned by 9/11, and McCain attempted to exploit this portkey too by emptily claiming that, wizardlike, he alone knew how to fix the situation. V. An Alternative: Siblings in the Same Darkness Davis (2006) suggests that to learn from history we must be able to live in experiences of collective trauma rather than grandiosely evade them. I would add with regard to the trauma of 9/11 that we must be able to grieve—grieve not only for the people who were killed but also for the illusions and innocence we have lost. How can this be done? In search of an alternative to resurrective ideology, I return to the theme of emotional trauma’s context-embeddedness and, especially, to the claim that emotional trauma can gradually become integrated when it finds a relational home in which it

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can be held. What makes the finding of such a relational home possible? I have contended (Stolorow, 2007) that just as finitude and vulnerability to death and loss are fundamental to our existential constitution, so too is it constitutive of our existence that we meet each other as “brothers and sisters in the same dark night” (Vogel, 1994, p. 97), deeply connected with one another in virtue of our common finitude. Thus, although the possibility of emotional trauma is ever present, so too is the possibility of forming bonds of deep emotional attunement within which devastating emotional pain can be held, rendered more tolerable, and, hopefully, eventually integrated. Our existential kinshipin-the-same-darkness is the condition for the possibility both of the profound contextuality of emotional trauma and of the mutative power of human understanding. Imagine a society in which the obligation to provide a relational home for the emotional pain that is inherent to the traumatizing impact of our finitude has become a shared ethical principle. In such a society, human beings would be much more capable of living in their existential vulnerability, anxiety, and grief, rather than having to revert to the defensive, destructive evasions of them that I have been discussing. In such a societal context, a new form of identity would become possible, based on owning rather than covering up our existential vulnerability. Vulnerability that finds a hospitable relational home could be seamlessly and constitutively integrated into whom we experience ourselves as being. A new form of human solidarity would also become possible rooted not in shared resurrective grandiosity but in shared recognition and respect for our common human finitude. If we can help one another bear the darkness rather than evade it, perhaps one day we will be able to see the light.

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References Davis, W. A. (2006). Death’s dream kingdom: The American psyche since 9-11. London & Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row. (Original work published 1927) Lear, J. (2006). Radical hope: Ethics in the face of cultural devastation. Cambridge, MA & London: Harvard University Press. Rowling, J. K. (2000). Harry Potter and the goblet of fire. New York: Scholastic Press. Stolorow, R. D. (2007). Trauma and human existence: Autobiographical, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reflections. New York & London: Routledge. Stolorow, R. D., Atwood, G. E., & Orange, D. M. (in press). Heidegger’s Nazism and the hypostatization of being. International Journal of Psychoanalytic Self Psychology. Vogel, L. (1994). The fragile “we”: Ethical implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time.Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Welch, B. (2008). State of confusion: Political manipulation and the assault on the American mind. New York: Thomas Dunne Books. Wirth, H.-J. (2004). 9/11 as a collective trauma: And other essays on psychoanalysis and society. Giessen, Germany: Psychosozial-Verlag. Zizek, S. (1989). The sublime object of ideology. London & New York:Verso.

Endnotes * Written for presentation at the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Freedom and Sovereignty, Globalization and Colo­ nization, Davis and Elkins College, Elkins, West Virginia, November 14-15, 2008, and at APA’s Division of Psychoanalysis Annual Spring Meeting, San Antonio, Texas, April 22-26, 2009. 1. Zizek (1989) too, from a Lacanian perspective, claims that the aspiration to abolish an originary traumatic kernel that lies at the core of human existence is the source of such destructive ideologies and atrocities.

35 Merleau-Ponty and James Agee: Guides to the Novice Phenomenologist by Sandra P. Thomas

[email protected] Nursing, University of Tennessee Center for Applied Phenomenological Research ABSTRACT: French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and American novelist and journalist James Agee are credited with inspiring a novice in phenomenological research inquiry to see the lifeworld freshly. Insights derived from their works were particularly relevant to nursing studies of ill persons whose bodies had become obstacles rather than enablers and whose worlds had shrunk to windowless hospital rooms. Both Mer­ leau-Ponty and Agee provided guidance regarding genuine dia­ lo­gue with other persons, discovering deeper meaning in the words and phrases spoken by interviewees, and the vibrant writing that “opens a new field or a new dimension” to the rea­ der of the research report.

Introduction Nearly two decades ago, I came to an impasse in my scholarly work. It was clear to me that the methodology of “objective” positivistic science, in which I had been trained, could not reveal the deeper meanings of the emotional phenomena which I was studying, phenomena that were highly salient to the discipline of nursing and to my specialty of psychiatric nursing (e.g., emotions of anger, stress, and depression). I became convinced of the merits of a phenomenological approach to studying these PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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phenomena.1 Numeric scales could not fathom the depth of women’s anger about violations of their values, their rights, and their trust—violations occurring within their most significant interpersonal relationships. My study participants needed to tell me stories about the anger that metaphorically “simmered” on the “back burner” until it “boiled over” in response to egregious violations of relational reciprocity. I needed to invite them to share richly contextualized narratives that painted pictures of the situation, the provocateurs, and the anguish inherent in relational rupture.2 How could their anger be measured by a questionnaire if the phenomenon of anger is shared between two people? Noted Russon, “Emotions…participate in intersubjective space, and cannot have their meaning determined except through being taken up by others.”3 To wit, Merleau-Ponty observed that the emotion of anger is “in this room: It is in the space between him and me that it unfolds.”4 Only within existential phenomenology has emotion been given its rightful prominence.5,6 Emotion cannot be reduced to the physiological alterations or motor behaviors commonly measured by researchers in laboratory experiments. Within classic philosophy, emotion had been viewed as inferior to reason. In particular, anger was viewed pejoratively, as a kind of temporary insanity. There was no acknowledgment that anger could have protective functions, such as defending oneself from injustice, or strategic objectives, such as those identified by Sartre. From the perspective of existential phenomenology, the myriad ways that humans are emotional are ways of being-in-the-world7 that deserve serious investigation by scholars.8 Thus began my transformation from using quantitative research methodologies to learning a phenomenological method of inquiry developed by psychologist Howard Pollio and colleagues at the University of Tennessee,9 which entails one-onone in-depth interviews with individuals who have experienced the phenomenon of interest. This approach is based in large part

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on the existential phenomenology of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.10 My new aim in research was not to establish correlations among variables but to produce faithful descriptions of human experience, unfettered by theoretical formulations and presuppositions. To accomplish this, I had to set aside much of what I had learned about the scientific enterprise (e.g., random sampling, hypothesis testing, statistical significance). I had to confront my own subjectivity as a psychiatric nurse researcher and the life experiences that shaped my preunderstandings of the phenomena that drew my interest, i.e., “the inseparability of researcher and self ” described by Drew.11 “Phenomenologists raise self-awareness to a prominent level of functioning in their work.”12 Thus, in mid-career, I had to undertake a journey toward a new “manner or style of thinking.”13 In this paper, I credit the works that have helped this non-philosopher learn to perceive, and to write, as a phenomenologist. I write with the hope that these remarks from a nurse will be of some interest to a multidisciplinary audience. I draw from selected writings of two men that provided inspiration on my journey: Maurice Merleau-Ponty and American novelist and journalist James Agee. I have chosen the word “inspiration” rather than “instruction,” because neither Agee nor Merleau-Ponty left me any “tidy answer,” instead a “legacy of questions.”14 First, I briefly describe my two sources of inspiration, who thought and wrote during the same turbulent sociohistorical period. I. Maurice Merleau-Ponty and James Agee: Mavericks among their Peers Merleau-Ponty was a maverick among philosophers, rejecting both historical determinism and absolute freedom, rejecting both realism and idealism, and rejecting both dogmatism and relativism. He explicitly rejected the mind-body dualism of Descartes. He was not shy about revealing his differences with

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colleagues (e.g., Sartre, with whom he had a difference of opinion about the philosopher’s proper level of engagement in the politics and social issues of the day).15 Nevertheless, he retained a respectful tone regarding his philosophical forebears and colleagues, eschewing the “hypercompetitive adversarial style of much … philosophical discourse.”16 Merleau-Ponty was criticized within philosophical circles because his work did not conform to academic philosophy’s traditional emphasis on abstract concepts such as Truth and Beauty, but sought instead to understand the primordial phenomena that precede concept names and, in fact, cannot be easily articulated. One critic alleged that “Merleau-Ponty changes and inverts the ordinary sense of what we call philosophy.”17 Speaking directly to Merleau-Ponty in a seminar, his former thesis advisor Emile Brehier admonished, “I see your ideas as being better expressed in literature and in painting than in philosophy.”18 Ironically, in the same seminar, M-P was accused of not being radical enough.19 To a non-philosopher, navigating Merleau-Ponty’s writings proved to be challenging; even philosophers have considered his language difficult.20, 21 He employed a dialectical writing style that makes the reader wonder which stance he actually espouses. To complicate matters further, for a novice seeking to grasp his thought, there are notable differences between the ideas he put forth in “early” and “later” treatises. However, Carman22 has traced the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s thought and identifies logical continuities throughout his work. For my purposes in this paper, it is not necessary that I digress into parsing the discrepancies between “early” and “later” Merleau-Ponty. Now a brief word about James Agee. Because Agee may be less familiar to a reading audience of phenomenological philosophers, let me defend my selection of him as a guide. Indeed, James Agee was not a philosopher, but his work was sometimes more abstract than philosophy,23 and like a phenomenological philosopher, Agee’s primary research instrument was his “indi-

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vidual human consciousness.”24, Agee actually lived with tenant farmers in the rural American South for 8 weeks in 1936 while researching their lives as “working and ill-used people of the world,” an immersion experience that he characterized as “a peculiarly good opportunity to try to see … unanswerable questions of human and earthly and universal destiny, human art, human life.”25 Agee’s goal was to “tell everything possible as accurately as possible: and to invent nothing.”26 He hoped to produce a written text of the same stunning clarity as the accompanying photographs of the farmers’ faces and their dilapidated shacks that were being taken by his collaborator (Walker Evans). The resultant book, with its Biblical title Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is “an intense and complex examination of not only its putative subject matter but also the act of perceiving itself.”27 Agee seemed to possess “the same kind of attentiveness and wonder [and] the same will to seize the meaning of the world” as the phenomenological philosophers.28, I contend that Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a phenomenological investigation in the truest sense of the term, and I will refer to it throughout this paper. Like Merleau-Ponty, the maverick among philosophers, Agee was a maverick among journalists: “He was always out of step, and he had very little respect for the Zeitgeist.”29 His pieces for magazines were often seen as “quirky” and rejected—or heavily modified—by his editors.30 Agee was a bohemian, a “hippie” before there were hippies, who felt that educational and religious institutions had “deadening and muffling power over what was pure and immediate in perception, in thought, and in art.”31 His interest in impoverished farmers was puzzling to publishing houses and literary critics, and his book about them received acclaim as a masterpiece only decades after its 1941 publication. How did I become interested in James Agee? Perhaps because it is part of my family lore—my mother was an Agee—that we are distant relatives of the famous writer. Upon investigation, I learned that all Agees in the United States are descended from a

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common Huguenot ancestor, who fled France during religious persecution. It pleased me to claim a biological connection to the writer, however distant it may be. I am also connected to him because of place. I live in Knoxville, Tennessee, where Agee spent his early childhood, and I teach at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a site of lively scholarship about Agee and a repository of his papers. Most importantly, however, I name Agee as a guide because his writing illuminates the human condition. Literature does not engage in “explicit philosophical reflection [but] presents us with the material on which we can reflect.”32 “The true reader of Agee is compelled, as in an act of communion, to an expansion of consciousness.”33 Moreover, his writing serves as a consummate exemplar of the vivid description toward which a phenomenologist must strive. II. Similarities between Merleau-Ponty and James Agee as Thinkers and Writers Although I have never seen comparisons of Merleau-Ponty and Agee in published papers, I began to discover rather amazing commonalities as I became better acquainted with the lives and works of the two men. As they were inducted into their preunderstandings of the world in very different cultures, separated by the Atlantic Ocean, the commonalities seem uncanny. Both men were concerned with consciousness, perception, language, the meaning of existence, the horrors of World War Two. Agee distrusted modernity’s glorification of science, just as Merleau-Ponty did. Describing Agee, Lofaro and Davis34 said he had a “sensitive, unsettled, and wide-ranging mind.” Acknowledging the restlessness of his thoughts, Agee wrote that “I fail to carry one idea through; before I realize it, I am whirled along the rim of another—and so on—ad nauseam. Yet, from time to time, I am aware of a definite form and rhythm and melody of existence.”35

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Madden noted that “Agee was always keenly, often crippingly, aware of the opposite possible truth to whatever he was passionately analyzing and advocating at the moment. Knowing the nature of things as they are, he looked at both sides.”36 Unsettledness is also a cardinal characteristic of Merleau-Ponty, who referred to himself as the “philosopher who does not know”; to Merleau-Ponty, meaning was always ambiguous, mixed up with nonmeaning.37 His student, Claude Lefort, called him “a thinker who had a gift for breaking certainties, introducing complications where one sought simplification.”38 Sesquipedalian words and ponderous, lengthy paragraphs were typical of both writers. Agee was accused of being arty and pretentious39 and Merleau-Ponty of hyperbole.40 Critics have pointed out that Merleau-Ponty’s arguments were not systematically organized; his writing, “in its cadence and its incomplete state, is the very form of a thought in emergence, in process.”41,42 Likewise, critics bemoaned the “maddening complexity” of Agee’s work.43Agee himself admitted that he was “much more interested in complexity and contradictions than in conclusions.”44 I believe that this statement fits Merleau-Ponty as well. To counter the criticisms of their writing, I remind readers that both men struggled with ambiguity and paradox. Should we expect “tidy answers” to profound existential questions?45 III. Biographical Similarities between Merleau-Ponty and Agee Biographical similarities between the two men are abundant. Born within a year of one another, albeit on different continents, both Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) and Agee (1909-1955) lost their fathers at an early age. Raised in the Christian faith as children, both became alienated from institutional religion in adulthood. Despite being privileged with regard to superior intellect and education at the best schools in their respective nations, both men became exquisitely attuned to the plight of the ordinary

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person, often finding poetry in the minute details of mundane daily existence. Undeniably, the similarity between the views of Agee and Merleau-Ponty is attributable, in part, to their lived experience during a unique historical era: the first half of the twentieth century, “with its projects, disappointments, wars, revolutions, audacities, inventions, and failures.”46 As Merleau-Ponty pointed out, writers cannot choose to live in a certain historical landscape, and their work “is always a response to life’s very particular events.”47 Writings of Agee often depict a “harsh and unloving world…whose institutions had become tarnished.”48 Agee referred to industrial air pollution as “the breath of a collective beast, the breath of our time: foul, sterile, baneful to the things we cherish”49 and to television as “ghastly gelatinous nirvana.”50 Merleau-Ponty spoke of the post-war “abyss of modern society” with its problems of urbanism, traffic, and “the new peasantry”: “Our problems call into question contemporary mental, political, and economic systems.”51 Yet, despite the negativity of the aforementioned observations, Merleau-Ponty envisioned a humane social world in which dialogue would take priority over violence,52 and Agee was “always full of innocent … hope.”53 Both men were drawn to Communism for a time, in the aftermath of the war, but subsequently became disillusioned by it. Both of them sought answers in psychoanalysis; we know that both read Freud, and Merleau-Ponty also read Melanie Klein. Agee underwent Jungian analysis. Both displayed intense interest in music and the visual arts that are relevatory of being (Merleau-Ponty mainly in paintings, such as those of Cezanne and Klee, Agee more so in films and photographs, such as those of Evans and Levitt). Finally, both died young, of coronary thrombosis, arguably before their full promise was realized— receiving renewed attention from scholars now.54

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IV. Drawing Insights and Inspiration from Agee and Merleau-Ponty What have I gleaned about being a phenomenologist from my foray into the works of Agee and Merleau-Ponty? In the following paragraphs, I share my insights—perhaps an audacious endeavor, given that I am applying their work to a research method that neither man could have imagined. Furthermore, my understanding of phenomenological philosophy is incomplete and I lack training in literary criticism. I am neither philosopher nor journalist. The philosopher conducts his or her investigations in solitude, reading and reflecting and then sharing insights with other philosophers. The journalist collects facts and stories, then writes for public audiences, such as the readers of magazines. I do research and write because of a different mandate: The findings from my phenomenological investigations must be relevant to the clinical practice of nursing. Like a heliograph—a device that sends messages by flashing the sun’s rays from a mirror—I must send messages from my study participants with chronic pain and emotional distress to practicing nurses, to enlighten nurses about the first-person perspectives of these patients.55 Brief excerpts from some of my studies are included in this paper to illustrate the application of phenomenological philosophy in nursing research. Despite our disparate endeavors, I feel a common bond with Merleau-Ponty and Agee: a dedication to understanding human life in the world. In this quest, we are seeking the “absolute and true” described by Agee in the following passage: It was good to be doing the work we had come to do and to be seeing the things we cared most to see, and to be among the people we cared most to know, and to know these things not as a book looked into, a desk sat down to, a good show caught, but as a fact as large as the air; something absolute and true we were a part of and drew with every breath, and added to with every glance of the eye… We lay thinking of the unprecedented

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and unrecorded beauty, and sorrow and honor in the existence of, a child who lay sleeping in the room not far from us, and of the family up the road, and of the other family that lived near them … and all the things seen and known and wondered over in those hours.56

V. Phenomenological Investigation of the Lifeworld We begin life as “a fragile mass of living jelly… and we all reach the world, and the same world, and it belongs wholly to each of us.”57 The world is already there before we begin to reflect upon it. The world invades us, as Merleau-Ponty noted: “In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me.”58 Concurrently, persons respond to the world: painters through their art, writers through the vehicle of words. Whereas both Merleau-Ponty and Agee exhibited childlike awe of the lifeworld and its profound mysteries, their investigations often focused on the concreteness of “things” in our immediate awareness. We can imagine Merleau-Ponty saying— in response to Husserl’s famous directive to return to the “things themselves”—“The things speak quite loudly for themselves when we stay in the world.”59 In fact, Merleau-Ponty urged us to “return to that world which precedes knowledge” because “true philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world”60 The struggle to see the world freshly, not as science, society, and religious dogma have trained us to see it, preoccupied Agee as well as his French counterpart. Agee scholar Victor Kramer asserted that Agee “saw and loved the world in its immediacy, and he was angered when others (with words, or improper use of camera) failed to see it.”61 Hear these words of Agee: For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him (sic) who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so

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that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.62

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy proved to be an apt lens through which nurse researchers could examine the lifeworld of ill persons, i.e., the hospitals and clinics to which they present their bodies for the ministrations of healers. There is scant attention in the literature to patients’ perceptions of these facilities. Therefore, members of my research team embarked on phenomenological studies of the World of the Patient, first investigating patients’ perceptions of the environment in hospitals. We found that patients cared little about the walls, furniture, or flooring—rendering irrelevant the previous research about “customer-pleasing” hospital design and décor.63 In a subsequent study of the outpatient clinic environment, coldness was thematic, not only the room temperature and the equipment, but also the emotional climate, in which patients felt like “a bunch of cattle” or “objects on a factory assembly line.”64 In both studies of health care facilities, time dragged as patients waited for a few rushed minutes of attention from doctors and nurses. In both, patients yearned for their caregivers to see them in their wholeness, to listen to them, to “enter into” their suffering, in the sense described by Shotter and Katz: “To be fully ‘moved’ by another’s suffering, we have … to take the trouble to ‘enter into’ it.”65 VI. Phenomenological Investigation of the Body Of paramount importance to nurse researchers is MerleauPonty’s elucidation of embodiment, which was unique within philosophy, a radical departure from the concept of body as a mere machine that transported the mind around. To MerleauPonty, the body is the fundamental category of human existence.66 It is the body that first grasps the world and moves with

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intention in it;67 it is the locus of intentionality.68 The body is the focal point of living meanings, the carrier of our mortality, and the origin of all spatial relationships and perceptions of objects: “There is no ‘weight’ without lifting, no ‘smoothness’ without a caress, no ‘circle’ without a curving glance, no ‘depth’ without reach, and no ‘distance’ without gait.”69 “Bodily perspective grounds and informs culture, language, art, literature, history, science, and politics.”70 Nurses engage in the most intimate interactions with the human body: we bathe the body, irrigate it, bandage it, soothe it after painful procedures, and finally, prepare it for its journey to the morgue when all the wizardry and technology of medicine have failed to preserve its life force. Merleau-Ponty made a crucial distinction between the “body object,” the body that endures the indignities inflicted by the medical profession, and the “body subject,” the body of one’s subjective personal experience.71 Before I became a phenomenologist, I confess that I probably perceived my patient’s body as an object, checking an arm to see if intravenous fluid had infiltrated the tissues beyond the vein, or checking a heel to see if a pressure sore had begun to form. A bed bath was mainly a task to be accomplished, among many other tasks, in a cramped time frame. I had not thought about the patient’s first-person perspective of the bath. This account from a cardiac patient reveals that the lowly bath can actually have a healing effect: The bath was a thoroughly visceral experience and the relation to the nurse, too, had that quality of utter physicality. Somehow she seemed to sense the threshold of my body’s tolerance for pain and touch…[After the bath] I simply felt so much better, physically better in a way that was indeed experienced as healing… “physical healing.” The nurse touching me had a peculiar effect: I was allowed to be myself and to feel my own body again.72

To use Merleau-Ponty’s words, “Bodily events [were] the events of the day”73 when patients described their lived experience

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of chronic pain in a study I conducted in 2000.74 The patients were perpetually aware of their bodies because every movement produced twinges, aches, spasms, or sharp reminders of damage and disability. The body was altered, recalcitrant, an obstacle rather than an enabler. Distinctions were made among levels of pain, as exemplified in the words of a study participant who contrasted the ever-present flu-like feeling of “achy all over, just yucky all over” with the more episodic “excruciating pain [in a] particular place like my shoulder or back.”74 Simple activities such as brushing teeth or walking to the mailbox were carefully planned in advance. Despite such pre-planning, pain often intervened; one woman reported being “stunned with the pain” as she was halfway across the lawn walking to the mailbox to retrieve her mail, depriving her from completing a simple act performed daily, so thoughtlessly, by most of us. Merleau-Ponty also emphasized the intertwining of bodies with the worlds they inhabit: “Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism; it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive; it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system.”75 Merleau-Ponty brought the figure/ ground concept from German Gestalt psychology into his work, which helped to convey the seamlessness of body and world. Although phenomena are always perceived as wholes, and described that way by participants in our research interviews, perceived things always have a certain figure or form against a background or environmental context.76 The interviewee’s narrative reveals what is figural (predominant) in his perception, such as searing pain, as well as what is contextual in his environment, such as the windowless hospital room in which he feels confined and afraid or the mechanistic assembly line of the outpatient clinic in which he feels like an object. A phenomenological researcher is obligated to discuss both figure and contextual ground in his or her descriptions of phenomena because the figure that stands out is never independent of its ground.

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VII. I nsights from Agee and Merleau-Ponty regarding Dialogue with other People Connections with other people allow humans to transcend their existential aloneness. From the first gaze of a newborn at his mother’s face, humans spend their lives in “knots” or networks of interpersonal relationships. Within our interpersonal milieu are “all those we have loved, detested, known or simply glimpsed.”77 In contrast to Sartre, who emphasized the potential for conflict with the Other, “epitomized in the sweaty … boxing match,”78 Merleau-Ponty saw the potential for recognition and affirmation from “my double” or “my twin.” In contrast to Heidegger, who warned that other people distract from the pursuit of authentic being, M-P saw Others as fellow travelers in life’s journey.79 He wrote about the intersections of his path, and the paths of other people: “My own and other people’s [paths] intersect and engage each other like gears.”80 Yet, the mere intersection of our paths does not guarantee that we actually come to know them. Merleau-Ponty himself wondered how one could access the private world of another person: “How could I conceive, precisely as his, his colors, his pain, his world, except as in accordance with the colors I see, the pains I have had, the world wherein I live?” 81 At the same time he expressed confidence in the vehicle of dialogue: “In the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground; my thought and his are interwoven into a single fabric… We have here a dual being, where the other is for me no longer a mere bit of behavior in my transcendental field, nor I in his; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity. Our perspectives merge into each other, and we co-exist through a common world.”82 He extolled the benefits of “genuine” conversations, in which new possibilities of meaning could be generated: “Sometimes I feel myself followed in a route unknown to myself, which my words, cast back by the other, are in the process of tracing out for me.”83

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By all accounts from friends and biographers, James Agee delighted in conversation. He was known to be garrulous, and a riveting speaker at social gatherings, yet he was also a careful listener who was genuinely interested in other people and the details of their lives. This passage is illustrative: “When, in talk with a friend, you tell him, or you hear from him details of childhood, those details … are real and exciting to both of you in a way no form of art can be.” 84 His friend Robert Fitzgerald bore testimony that Agee’s “power of attention to another human soul was endless. He had the power to empathize with and to understand folks.” 85 The depth of empathic resonance that Agee achieved with the Alabama farmers was connoted in the words of one of the women. Saddened when Agee and Walker Evans were leaving, she said, “Every one of us cried; they were so good to us, you know. They told us not to cry… It kind of hurt Jim [Agee], you know, that crying.”86 Dialogue is the collaborative method of inquiry chosen by the Applied Phenomenology Colloquy at the University of Tennessee. Pollio has called attention to the original meaning of the word method which consists of hodos (path) and meta (across).87 As I engage in face-to-face, unstructured, dialogue with the Other, a path is created across that space between myself and the Other, enabling movement toward understanding his or her experience. Through language, the Other articulates his or her perceptions, and the phenomenological researcher listens with a scrupulous diligence and empathy that differs from the listening that occurs in everyday conversations. This way of listening requires enormous self-discipline. It is a skill that must be developed by practice and by critical analysis of the typed texts of the audiotaped interviews. During a phenomenological interview, one must silence natural impulses to satisfy one’s own curiosity, to offer personal opinions, or to convey approval/disapproval of the interviewee’s report of his perceptions and actions. Imagine

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listening to a batterer who vividly describes beating his wife (and justifies this atrocious behavior) or to a snake-handler who engages in the seemingly bizarre practice of taking up serpents to achieve a state of religious ecstasy; phenomenological researchers at our university have listened, with utmost respect, to accounts such as these. We are listening in the same respectful way that Harvard-educated Agee listened to the unsophisticated grammar of the Alabama tenant farmers. Although we have not promised any benefit to our interviewees, they routinely thank us for listening to them. In daily life, seldom are most people listened to by another person who is so intensely interested in their experience. Some interviewees profess to have received therapeutic benefit after sharing their stories.88 Interviewing has been criticized within the social sciences because research participants (allegedly) cannot accurately remember all the particulars of their past experiences and cannot accurately describe their internal representations in linguistic form.89 I must take a moment to counter this criticism. In my experience as a researcher, some participants have recalled past events—particularly traumatic ones—in amazing, graphic detail, such as the exact time of the first intimation of impending doom signaling a heart attack. Even if the unfolding narrative is not based on such “flashbulb memory,” and time has blurred some aspects of the person’s experience, I take comfort in these words of Agee: “The ‘truest’ thing about the experience is now neither that is was from hour to hour thus and so; nor is it my fairly accurate ‘memory’ of how it was from hour to hour in chronological progression; but is rather as it turns up in recall, in no such order, casting its lights and associations forward and backward upon the then past and the then future, across that expanse of experience.”90 Merleau-Ponty (correctly) noted that “Description is not the return to immediate experience; one never returns to immediate experience.”91 Furthermore, Pollio has asserted that “the description of an experience as it emerges in a particular context is the experience. To

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proceed otherwise, such as by seeking to capture a more ‘truthful’ version, is to look past the concrete phenomenon at hand in search of an abstract ideal.”92 VIII. Insights regarding Plumbing the Data for Meaning The phenomenological researcher follows a rigorous step-bystep analytic process from (1) initial identification of meaningful words, phrases, and metaphors in the typed interview text to (2) provisional identification of larger themes to (3) development of the final thematic structure comprising the essence of the phenomenon.93 Although this process is unlike that of a philosopher, I believe that it is consistent with Merleau-Ponty’s description of his own process: “I always go from particular things to more essential things.” 94 Agee, too, began with “a careful rendition of the particular” which led to “appreciation of the universal.”95 The very first step in my process is to examine words. I had to cultivate a keen sensitivity to the nuances of my study participants’ choice of words. In phenomenology, every word is important. In our interpretative group at the University of Tennessee, interview transcripts are read aloud. First, we simply let the words wash over us. Then someone will ask the group members to dwell longer with a specific word. We reflect on the participant’s choice of that specific word. Each of us around the table, bringing our own experiential backgrounds and sedimented understandings of that word, offer our thoughts about it. Sometimes a dictionary is consulted to shed light on the word’s etymology and its meanings as they have evolved across time. Consider the meaning of the word “received.” Presumably, when a psychiatric patient speaks of being “received” at the hospital, the patient might merely be describing the admission process (a nurse asking questions, a clerk filling out forms). But in our study, we realized there was a much deeper meaning of

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the word “received.”96 Discovering meaning is always a process of relating part to whole (i.e., the word in question, in relation to the whole of the text). From the surrounding text, we learned what being hospitalized meant to psychiatric patients. The hospital was a blessed refuge from the unbearable chaos of the external world and from their own self-destructive impulses. Admission to the hospital meant being “received” by a caring surrogate family, analogous to being wrapped in a “receiving blanket” and allowed to regress to infancy again, at least for awhile. This process of listening, and re-listening to participants’ words, to ascertain deeper meanings, was beautifully described by Merleau-Ponty: To understand a phrase is nothing else than to fully welcome it in its sonorous being … to hear what it says…The meaning is not on the phrase like the butter on the bread, like a second layer of “psychic reality” spread over the sound: it is the totality of what is said … it is given with the words for those who have ears to hear.97

IX. Discovering the Essence of the Phenomenon “Phenomenology is the study of essences,” said MerleauPonty.98 After scrutinizing hundreds of words and aggregating key words into themes, the phenomenological researcher must undertake a task that resembles clarifying butter to derive the essence of the phenomenon. Although some investigators99 argue that it is necessary to transform the language of the study participants into the abstract conceptual language of the researcher’s discipline, our view is more compatible with that of Husserl, who advised that phenomena can be characterized in language “derived from common speech.”100 We have found that the specific words of the participant are powerful enough to capture the essence of the phenomenon. For example, a psychologist might use the label “regression” to describe the behavior of a

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hospitalized psychiatric patient. But the words of the patient himself convey more meaning, as he speaks of the hospital mercifully allowing him to “cool his head and mind.” For this reason, we prefer to describe the structure of meanings in the simple personal language of study participants whenever possible.101 Sometimes a metaphor best captures the essence of the phenomenon. For example, in my study of chronic pain, interviewees used the metaphor of a tormenting monster, which was sharply discrepant with extant language in the biomedical literature on “pain management:” Obviously, a monster cannot be “managed,” and these study participants bore witness to that fallacy.102 The grim, ongoing struggle with the monster dominated their existence, so that they felt distant from the world and from other people, even family members. The poignant words of one participant: “Now it’s me and the pain” express the grim struggle and the sense of utter isolation. X. Seeking Validation of the Interpretation of the Phenomenon Unlike the philosopher, who can ascertain validation of his interpretations only from other philosophers, in our phenomenological research procedures there is a step involving validation from the study participants themselves. Who else is the expert on his or her own subjective experience? Thus, from a stance of humility, the researcher returns to some (or all) of the interviewees, to engage in dialogue about the tentative thematic structure. What is sought is a fusion of horizons, the “phenomenological nod” described by van Manen.103 I can attest to the exhilaration a researcher feels when a study participant exclaims, “Yes, that’s it!” Would that Agee could have heard the affirming words of one of the tenant farmers portrayed in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: “My daughter got one of ‘em [copy of the book] … and told me she had it, and she wanted me to look at it and give it to me. And I took it home and read it plumb through. And when

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I read it plumb through I give it back to her and I said, “Well everything in there’s true.”104 XI. Insights from Agee and Merleau-Ponty regarding Phenomenological Writing It has been said that a journalist has three responsibilities: to his human subjects, to his conscience, and to his readers.”105 As a phenomenological researcher, I share these responsibilities. When I am satisfied that I truly heard what my human subjects said—verified by their feedback—my task becomes transmitting the study findings to other scholars. I must convince readers that I have been faithful to the phenomenon by scrupulous attention to detail in the written report. Agee’s writing exemplifies this attention to detail. In Let us Now Praise Famous Men he described a farm home “right down to the dust in the corner of the drawers…trying to say that it’s all valid. It all needs attention.”106 His aim was “above all, to make what he had seen visible to other people.”107 To accomplish this aim, he even touched and smelled the clothes of the Alabama tenant farmers: the women’s work dresses, made from flour and fertilizer sacks, and the men’s worn and oft-patched overalls. Agee actually devoted four pages of text to overalls,108 which is perhaps excessive attention to detail—and deplored by at least one critic for its alleged romanticizing of a garment that is iconic of rural poverty.109 In addition to devotion to detail, phenomenological writing must not emulate the prosaic, technical style of quantitative research reports; it must be vibrant, enticing the reader into the sounds and smells of the situation in which the phenomenon is experienced. The reader should be able to sense the anger crackling in the air or the chill in the hospital emergency room. Noted Agee, “Description is a word to suspect. Words cannot embody; they can only describe. But a certain kind of artist, whom we will distinguish from others … continually brings words as

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near as he can to an illusion of embodiment.”110, Merleau-Ponty spoke of the kind of writing that “brings the meaning into existence as a thing at the very heart of the text, it brings it to life in an organism of words, establishing it in the writer or the reader as a new sense organ, opening a new field or a new dimension to our experience.”111 To achieve this level of writing, numerous drafts are required. Agee’s journals reveal his continual text revisions. According to biographer Bergreen, Agee worked over each sentence “as if he were a goldsmith fashioning a tiny, intricate bracelet. Every word had to shine and lend strength, or it was discarded”112 He often read drafts of his work aloud to friends such as Robert Fitzgerald, who asserted that “There isn’t a word in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” that he—and I and others—did not ponder many times.”113, Ouellette advised qualitative researchers to write about our findings like a painter: “The brush is our computer keyboard and the painted canvas is the written document that we produce.”114 It is daunting to face a blank canvas, committing to a representation of the phenomenon that I know will be imperfectly painted. The concept of pentimento is useful here. Sometimes in an old painting, the image of a tree or a boat may be seen, although the painter later covered it with a layer of fresh brush-strokes, having “repented” (changed his mind). Lillian Hellman pointed out that pentimento perhaps could be better described as the artist “seeing and then seeing again.” As I paint my picture, I can correct incomplete understandings of the phenomenon and apply new brush-strokes as I see the phenomenon more clearly. Once I have painted my picture, who is to say that I have been faithful in describing the phenomenon—or merely making a mess with my brushstrokes? When I experience self-doubt, I am comforted by the words of Merleau-Ponty and Agee. Despite their superior command of the writer’s craft, Merleau-Ponty and

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Agee had times of despair when they felt unable to communicate the fullness of their thought. Merleau-Ponty observed that “writers experience the excess of what is to be said beyond their ordinary capacities.”115 Thus, “as a professional of language, the writer is a professional of insecurity.”116 This insecurity is paralleled in Agee’s critical evaluation of his work. Speaking of his efforts to convey the “human divinity” of the tenant farmers in his book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee called the book “the crudest and most fragmentary of beginnings … a record of blindness as well as of perception.”117 Thankfully, affirmation of validity arrives in unexpected ways. For example, as I was preparing this essay, I received an email message from a stranger who had suffered from severe chronic pain since 1996 after a car accident. Somehow a journal article about my research recently caught his eye. He told me, “I recognized every theme in your results—more like jolts of recognition.” The writer’s kindness in contacting me bolsters my intentions to keep expanding my knowledge of phenomenology and to further hone my skill in painting pictures about my findings. I have only begun to learn, feeling much like Agee when he wrote: “To come devotedly into the depths of a subject, your respect for it increasing in every step and your whole heart weakening apart with shame upon yourself in your dealing with it: To know at length better and better and at length into the bottom of your soul your unworthiness of it: Let me hope in any case that it is something to have begun to learn.” 118 Endnotes 1. Sandra P. Thomas, “Through the lens of Merleau-Ponty: Advancing the Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research,” Nursing Philosophy 6 (2005): 63-76. 2. Sandra P. Thomas, Carol Smucker, and Patricia Droppleman, “It Hurts Most Around the Heart: A Phenomenological Exploration of Women’s Anger,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 28 (1998): 311-322.

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3. John Russon, “Merleau-Ponty and the New Science of the Soul,” Chiasmi International 8, 129-137. 4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception (O. Davis, Trans.) London: Routledge, 2004 (radio lecture delivered in 1948). 5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (J. MacQuarrie, Trans.) New York: Harper & Row, 1962 (original work published 1927). 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory (B. Frechtman, Trans.) Secaucus, NJ: Citadel Press, 1948 (original work published 1939). 7. W.F. Fischer, “An Empirical-Phenomenological Investigation of Being Anxious: An Example of the Phenomenological Approach to Emotion,” in Ron Valle and Steen Halling, eds. ExistentialPhenomenological Perspectives in Psychology (New York: Plenum, 1989). 8. Constance T. Fischer, “Being Angry Revealed as Self-Deceptive Protest: An Empirical Phenomenological Analysis,” in Ron Valle, ed. Phenomenological Inquiry in Psychology (New York: Plenum, 1998). 9. Howard R. Pollio, Tracy Henley, and Craig B. Thompson, The Phenomenology of Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962 (original work published 1945). 11. Nancy Drew, “Bridging the Distance Between the Objectivism of Research and the Subjectivity of the Researcher,” Advances in Nursing Science 29 (2006): 181-191. 12. Nancy Drew, “Creating a Synthesis of Intentionality: The Role of the Bracketing Facilitator,” Advances in Nursing Science 27 (2004): 215-223. 13. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 14. Wilma Dykeman, “Introduction: The Agee Legacy,” in Michael Lofaro, ed. James Agee: Reconsiderations (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992). 15. Boris Belay, “Sartre and Merleau-Ponty: The Letters of the Breakup,” in Duane H. Davis, ed. Merleau-Ponty’s Later Works and Their Practical Implications: The Dehiscence of Responsibility (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2001). 16. Taylor Carman, Merleau-Ponty (London: Routledge, 2008). 17. Words of Emile Brehier, during the discussion of the French Philosophical Society following Merleau-Ponty’s presentation of “The

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Primacy of Perception and its Philosophical Consequences” in 1946, cited in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, eds. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). 18. Brehier, in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 19. Beaufort, in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 20. Taylor Carman, 2008, op. cit. 21. Dermot Moran, Introduction to Phenomenology (London: Routledge, 2000). 22. Carman, op. cit. 23. David Madden, “The Test of a First-Rate Intelligence: Agee and the Cruel Radiance of What Is,” in Michael A. Lofaro, ed., 1992, op. cit. 24. Michael A. Lofaro and Hugh Davis, eds. James Agee Rediscovered ( Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2005). Note: after the statement on page 145 that Agee’s primary research instrument was his “individual human consciousness,” the authors added that his “secondary instruments [were] the still camera and the printed word.” 25. Age’s journal, cited in Lofaro and Davis, 2005, op. cit., pp. 4, 148. 26. Agee’s Guggenheim fellowship application, cited in David Madden, op. cit. 27. Michael Lofaro and Hugh Davis, 2005, op. cit. 28. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 29. Dwight Macdonald, “Jim Agee: A Memoir,” in David Madden and Jeffrey Folks, eds. Remembering James Agee, 2nd edition (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1997). 30. John Hersey, “Introduction: Agee,” in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988, originally published 1941). 31. Robert Fitzgerald, “What Was Pure and Immediate: James Agee Memorial Library Dedication,” in Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit. 32. Eric Matthews, Merleau-Ponty: A Guide for the Perplexed. (London, Continuum, 2006). 33. Wright Morris, cited by David Madden, “Mapping Agee’s Myriad Mind: An Introductory Exhortation,” in Michael Lofaro, ed., Agee Agonistes (Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007). 34. Lofaro and Davis, 2005, op. cit. 35. ames Agee, “They That Sow in Sorrow Shall Reap,” in The Collected Short Prose of James Agee (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968).

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36. David Madden, “Introduction: On the Mountain with Agee,” in Madden, Folks, 1997, op. cit. 37. Sandra P. Thomas, 2005, op. cit. 38. Bernard Flynn, “Lefort in the Wake of Merleau-Ponty,” Chiasmi International 10, 2008: 251-262. 39. David Madden, 2007, op. cit. 40. Carman, 2008, op. cit. 41. Taylor Carman and Mark B.N. Hansen, The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 42. Franck Robert, in a paper presented at the Husserl Archives in Paris on May 5, 2007, cited in “Re-Reading Merleau-Ponty in the Light of the Unpublished Writings,” in Chiasmi International 9, 2007: 493-497. 43. Lofaro and Davis, 2005, op. cit. 44. These words are from an unpublished manuscript by Agee, cited by his biographer Laurence Bergreen, page 352, op. cit. 45. Having emphasized similarities between the two men, I must acknowledge dissimilarities, particularly in personality. Merleau-Ponty has been described as “retiring” and “austere” by Dermot Moran, 2000, op. cit., whereas Agee has been described as “hell-for-leather” by his colleague Dwight Macdonald, in Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit., and as “candle-burning-at-both-ends” by his daughter Deedee Agee in “Growing up with the Jimiagees,” in Michael Lofaro, ed., 2007, op. cit. 46. Merleau-Ponty, “Merleau-Ponty in Person: An Interview with Madeleine Chapsal” on February 17, 1958, in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 47. Merleau-Ponty, “Man and Adversity,” in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 48. Victor Kramer, James Agee. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975. 49. James Agee, “Smoke,” in Paul Ashdown, ed., James Agee: Selected Journalism. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985 (original paper published in 1937). 50. Agee, cited in Bergreen, 1984, op. cit. 51. Merleau-Ponty, in 1958 interview, in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 52. Gary B. Madison, “The Ethics and Politics of the Flesh,” in D.H. Davis, 2001, op. cit. 53. Dwight Macdonald, in Madden & Folks, 1997, op. cit.

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54. The renewed interest in Merleau-Ponty is evidenced by a plethora of new books, such as Carman (op. cit.) in 2008, as well as conferences and a trilingual journal, Chiasmi International. Carman claims that MerleauPonty’s work is more topical and urgent than ever, influencing scholars such as Bourdieu, Taylor, and Dreyfus. With regard to Agee, recent books include a two-volume set of his work published by the Library of America, and Michael Lofaro’s edited book, Agee Agonistes (op.cit.), including the papers from a 2005 conference in Knoxville, TN. 55. E. Porter, cited in Sandra P. Thomas, 2005, op. cit. 56. Agee, 1988, op. cit. 57. Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible (C. Lefort, Ed., A. Lingis, Trans.) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. 58. Russon, 2006, op. cit. 59. Daniel Primozic, On Merleau-Ponty. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/ Thomson Learning, 2001. 60. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 61. Kramer, 1975, op. cit. 62. Agee, cited on page 140, Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit. 63. Mona Shattell, “Eventually It’ll Be Over: The Dialectic Between Confinement and Freedom in the World of the Hospitalized Patient,” in Sandra P. Thomas and Howard Pollio, Listening to Patients: A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice (New York: Springer, 2002). 64. Kristina Plaas, “Like a Bunch of Cattle”: The Patient’s Experience of the Outpatient Health Care Environment,” in Thomas and Pollio, 2002, op. cit. 65. J. Shotter and A.M. Katz, “Creating Relational Realities: Responsible Responding to Poetic “Movements” and “Moments’”, in S. McNamee and K. J. Gergen, eds., Relational Responsibility (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1999. 66. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 67. V. Leonard, “A Heideggerian Phenomenologic Perspective on the Concept of the Person,” in E.C. Polifroni and M. Welch, eds. Perspectives on Philosophy of Science in Nursing (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1999). 68. Carman, 2008, op. cit. 69. F.J. Wertz, “Approaches to Perception in Phenomenological Psychology: The Alienation and Recovery of Perception in Modern Culture,” in Valle and Halling, op. cit.

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70. Carman, 2008, op. cit. 71. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 72. Max van Manen, “Modalities of Body Experience in Illness and Health,” Qualitative Health Research 8, 1998: 7-24. 73. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 74. Sandra P. Thomas, “A Phenomenologic Study of Chronic Pain,” Western Journal of Nursing Research 22, 2000: 683-705. 75. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 76. Moran, 2000, op. cit. 77. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 78. W.L. McBride, “Merleau-Ponty and Sartre: The Singular Universal, Childhood, and Social Explanation,” in Duane Davis, ed., 2001, op. cit. 79. Pollio et al., 1997, op. cit. 80. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 81. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit. 82. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 83. Merleau-Ponty, cited in Robert Switzer, “Together in the Flesh: Ethics and Attunement in Hume and Merleau-Ponty,” in Duane Davis, ed., 2001, op. cit. 84. Agee, 1941, op. cit. 85. Robert Fitzgerald, cited in Madden, 2007, op. cit. 86. Hersey, 1988, op. cit. 87. Pollio et al., 1997, op. cit. 88. Thomas, 2000, op. cit. 89. Pollio et al., 1997, op. cit. 90. Agee, 1941, op. cit. 91. Merleau-Ponty, “The Primacy of Perception and its Philo­ sophical Consequences,” in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 92. Pollio et al., 1997, op. cit. 93. See Thomas and Pollio, 2002, (op. cit.) for description of other essential steps in our method: e.g., bracketing of presuppositions and implementing principles of the hermeneutic circle. 94. Merleau-Ponty, “Man and Adversity,” in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 95. V. Kramer, 1992, op. cit. 96. Thomas and Pollio, 2002, op. cit. 97. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, op. cit. 98. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit.

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99. Amadeo Giorgi, “An Application of Phenomenological Method in Psychology,” in A. Giorgi, C.T. Fischer, and E.L.Murray, eds., Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 2. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1975. 100. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Pheno­ menology, New York: Collier, 1931, original work published 1913). 101. Thomas & Pollio, 2002, op. cit. 102. Thomas, 2000, op. cit. 103. Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. London, Ontario: Althouse, 1990. 104. Hersey, 1988, op. cit. 105. Hersey, 1988, op. cit. 106. Panel Discussion on “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men” in Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit. 107. Robert Fitzgerald, “What Was Pure and Immediate” in Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit. 108. Madden, 1997, op. cit. 109. Panel Discussion in Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit. 110. Agee, 1941, op. cit. 111. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, op. cit. 112. Bergreen, 1984, op. cit. 113. Robert Fitzgerald, “A Memoir,” in Madden and Folks, 1997, op. cit. 114. Suzanne Ouellette, “Painting Lessons,” in Josselson, Lieblich, and McAdams, eds. Up Close and Personal. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003. 115. Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World. (J.O’Neill, Trans., C. Lefort, Ed.) Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. 116. Merleau-Ponty, “Man and Adversity,” in Toadvine and Lawlor, 2007, op. cit. 117. Agee’s journal, cited in Lofaro and Davis, 2005, op. cit. 118. Agee, 1941, op. cit.

36 The Concept of Pathology and Psychiatry’s Need for a Philosophy of Life by Osborne P. Wiggins

Philosophy, University of Louisville [email protected]

Michael Alan Schwartz, M.D.

[email protected] The Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry

ABSTRACT: Stipulating that human being-in-the-world lies at the basis of phenomenological psychiatry, we move from the phenomenological notion of the correlation of experiencing subject with his or her experienced world to the level of the organism-environment relationship. Fundamental agreements between Hans Jonas’s and George Canguilhem’s philosophical biologies are shown. These agreements lie in elaborations of the “dynamic polarities” that relate the organism to its environment and the “norms” that preside over this relatedness. Three con­ stituents of this relationship as explicated by Jonas are sum­ marized: (1) since the organism is always threatened with nonbeing, it must of necessity always re-achieve its continued being by its own activity, (2) organisms are both enclosed within themselves, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environments and interacting with them, and (3) organisms are both dependent on their own material components at any given moment and independent of any particular collection of these components across time. Since these three constituents of the organism-environment relationship are governed by norms the PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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organism is also seen to valorize certain aspects of its environ­ ment and not others. In accordance with Canguilhem’s conception of pathology as both restricting the organism’s possibilities and causing pain and suffering, we examine two personality types, the anti-social per­ sonality and the type that H. Tellenbach and A. Kraus call typus melancholicus. Changes in social environments greatly alter what can be termed the “pathology” of these personality types. We conclude by invoking Erwin Straus on the differences between norm and pathology of I-world relationships.

I. Introduction: Self and World Phenomenological psychiatry sets out from the concrete reality of human being-in-the-world. This phrase, human being-inthe-world, signifies that the human being cannot be understood as an experiencing subject without also understanding the world that he or she experiences. Experiencing subject and experienced world are strictly correlated with one another: each necessarily implies the other (Gurwitsch 1966; Doerr-Zegers 2000). When we speak of human being-in-the-world as a concrete reality, we are using the word “concrete” in the sense that Husserl gave it (Husserl 1983). The experiencing subject and his or her experienced world cannot exist apart from one another. The only way to separate them is through performing an intellectual abstraction in which one focuses on one pole of the correlation and disregards the other. Such abstractions are frequently necessary for analytic purposes. Indeed the sciences, with their analyses of more and more precise aspects of reality, are built on numerous abstractions of this sort. Nevertheless, what is learned through such analyses should eventually be resituated within the larger whole of which it forms an abstract part. Only when, in phenomenological psychiatry, the abstracted part of the experiencing subject is conceptually reconnected with the appropriate part of the experienced world do we fully comprehend how the experience truly is an experience of something. It is the whole of

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human being-in-the-world that makes human life understandable (Doerr-Zegers 2000). II. George Canguilhem’s Conception of Pathology Georges Canguilhem seems to start from the same concrete whole when he seeks to comprehend human illness (Canguilhem 1988; 1989; 2008). For Canguilhem, the organism exists in a “dynamic polarity” with its environment. This relationship between organism and world can be called “pathological” when the “norm” governing the relationship has severely reduced the organism’s possibilities and causes it pain and suffering. The norm governs the relationship between organism and its environment; the norm is the structure or order of this relationship. And it is the structure or order of this relationship between the two relata, organism and environment, which can be either “healthy” or “pathological.” Accordingly, for Canguilhem, pathology does not exist in the organism although conditions in the organism certainly constitute some of the factors that must be taken into account. Nonetheless, pathology and health are not solely properties or conditions of the organism. Pathology and health can be attributed only to the organism’s mode of world-relatedness. Thus the Husserlian terms apply to Canguilhem’s position too: the self and its world cannot exist apart from one another; it is only through intellectual abstraction that one can study one term of the relation while ignoring the other. Canguilhem recognizes, moreover, that his concepts make full sense only when they find their systematic places within a more general philosophy of living beings and their essential world-relatedness. The world-relatedness of living beings exists at many levels. It is necessary, we think, to gain some understanding of these levels in order to speak meaningfully of health and pathology. Drawing primarily on Hans Jonas’ philosophy of organism, we shall now sketch this more general theory. And

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following both Canguilhem and Jonas, we shall emphasize the dynamic polarities that permeate organic existence (Canguilhem 1989; Jonas 1966). III. Outline of a General Philosophy of Life We begin our sketch by focusing on the metabolic level of organic life. The existence of living beings is sustained through metabolism. Unlike inorganic matter, the very being of a living entity is contingent upon its own ceaseless metabolic activity. As a result, the existence of the organism from moment to moment is its own dynamic achievement. Inorganic matter need not actively do anything in order to endure as the being it is, but organisms must. This inescapable need to persistently bring about their own continuation through their own metabolic functioning proves that organisms are threatened beings: if they do not actively achieve and repeatedly re-achieve their own reality, they die. Hence we can acknowledge one of the polarities that define life: always threatened by non-being the organism must constantly re-assert its being through its own activity (Jonas 1966, 64-91). This activity, however, must be an organized activity. Metabolic processes are structured processes; they are governed by a norm. It is this very norm and the processes its channels that must be maintained as such (Canguilhem 1989). When the structure fails to determine the direction of the processes, the organism dies. Accordingly, the identity of the organism depends on the maintenance of its internal structure or order. We might even say that the identity of the organism is the identity of the order or structure. This becomes even more obvious when we note that the components that constitute the organism are constantly changing. The material components of the organism come and go, but it is important that the organism remain as the same one. To “remain as the same one” is to maintain the same structure even in the midst of constant change of components.

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In order to maintain this constant change of its components, however, the organism must to some extent be open to its environment, the source of the components. We are now in a position to appreciate another one of the distinctive polarities of living beings. Living beings are both enclosed within themselves, defined by the boundaries that separate them from their environment, while they are also ceaselessly reaching out to their environment and interacting with it (Jonas 1966, 64-91; 1974, 185205). This polarity is found even in the single cell. On the one hand, the cell membrane determines the cell’s boundaries: the reality of the cell extends no farther than this membrane. And indeed these boundaries must be maintained if the cell is to continue to be. If the membrane breaks down sufficiently, the cell dies. Hence the membrane must maintain the separation of the cell from the rest of reality. Death consists in the loss of this separation. This need to remain bounded and distinct from that which is outside is observed at all levels of organic life. From the single cell, through the different organs of animal bodies, to the level of human beings as whole persons, “self ” and “other” are definitely distinguished (Jonas 1996, 5974; 1974, 185-205). On the other hand, the membrane of the cell is semi-permeable so that it may continually exchange its material with realities outside of it. Literally through its membrane the cell metabolically interacts with that which is not itself. Indeed this interaction with other entities is necessary if the cell is to maintain its existence: the cell is physically dependent upon the outside for its continuation in being. This dependency on what is not itself in order to survive evinces the organism’s neediness: lacking self-sufficiency, the living being must of necessity acquire the means for its existence from its environment. However, this unavoidable exposure to the environment, born out of need, manifests again the riskyness of organic existence. The environment can prove harmful and even deadly. The alien and

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uncontrollable nature of the environment poses an additional threat to the already precarious venture that is organic life. Hence the cell is both enclosed within its own boundaries in order to maintain its separate being while it also interacts with outside realities and indeed even exchanges its own matter with them (Jonas 1996, 59-74; Thompson 2007, 128-165). The organism’s relationship to its environment is thus ambiguous. On the one hand, the environment is that which nourishes and preserves the life of the organism. On the other hand, the environment is that which threatens and endangers life. It is for this reason, then, that the organism’s relationship to the world must be structured and channeled with some degree of precision. The organism’s relationships to the environment, in other words, must be governed by a norm or set of norms. Not everything in the environment can be equal. Certain aspects of the external world must carry a positive value and other aspects must carry a negative value. It is only through successfully negotiating its interactions with the environment under the guidance of these norms that the organism can continue to exist (Canguilhem 1989; Margree 2002). Through the metabolic exchange of material components the organism undergoes ceaseless change in its physicochemical make-up. But this change is, as we have seen, a norm-governed, organized change: it is determined by the internal structure of the living being. Through the change, then, the organism maintains its own separate identity while it also exchanges the physicochemical parts that compose it. It is both in flux and stable. Maintaining its stable identity through ceaseless turnover in its material constituents, the being of the organism is both independent of and dependent on these constituents. Some material constituents are always necessary for the existence of the organism; hence the dependence of the organism. But since these constituents will eventually be exchanged for others as the organism continues to live, the organism is independent of precisely these

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constituents, i.e., of whichever constituents compose it at any given time. We can therefore recognize one of the other polarities of living beings: they are both dependent on the material components that constitute them at any given moment and independent of any particular collection of these components across time. This polarity of dependence and independence always permeates organic existence (Jonas 1966; 1974; 1996; Thompson 2007, 128165). As Victoria Margree writes in her excellent essay on Canguilhem: Life is fundamentally that which is not indifferent to its envi­ ronment. Rather, it is that which spontaneously valorizes facets of its environment, reacting adversely to stimuli that threaten its existence, growth, and reproduction, and favorably to those that enhance these. As such, life is that which regulates its relationship to its environment through the adoption of norms of living, that is, patterns of behavior that express an evaluative relation to an environment, that judge a phenomenon to be good or bad for the organism’s survival (Margree 2002, 301).

As we have said, the metabolic activity of the organism is geared toward sustaining the existence of the organism. This being geared toward the sustaining of its own being shows that the metabolism of the organism is “for the sake of ” its own continuation in being. The being that the activity is geared toward preserving is the organism’s future being. The metabolic functioning is for the sake of bridging the temporal gap that separates the organism in the present from its own existence in the future. Life is thus teleological: the present activity of the living being aims at its own future being (Canguilhem 2008; Jonas 1966, 108-126). If we can speak of the metabolic activity of the organism as occurring “for the sake of ” the organism’s future being, this means that at some fundamental level the organism posits its own continuation in reality as a “good.” In other words, the organism posits its own existence as having a positive value. Value

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is thus built into the reality of organic life: it is organic life itself that places value there. It is not human beings and certainly not human agency that introduces value into an otherwise value-free universe. Living beings themselves, by striving to preserve themselves, already signal that, at least for the being involved, its own life is a good (Canguilhem 2008; Margree 2002). IV. Life, Health, and Pathology The self-world relationship is constantly undergoing transformation. The self changes, or the environment changes, or both. Accordingly, the norm governing this relationship changes. Such change is, of course, the very essence of life. Consequently, norms are always dissolving and new ones are created. Yet these norms, through their transformations, do not lose their ultimate end: to preserve the life of the organism and indeed to make it flourish. Hence the norms are always adapting themselves for the sake of this end (Canguilhem 1989). We are now in a position to appreciate Canguilhem’s conception of mental pathology. A mental illness is not merely a deficit or loss of functioning. It is not simply a mental disorder. Mental illness is rather the striving on the part of the organism to adapt itself to large-scale change by establishing new norms for its world-relationships, and these norms take the form they do in order to preserve the life of the organism. Canguilhem seems to say that what make norms “pathological” are two of their features: (1) they restrict the range of possibilities for the self-environment relationship, and (2) they cause pain and suffering (Canguilhem 1989; Margree 2002) Before reading Canguilhem we too had written that one of the core features of pathology is that it diminishes the possibilities of the self-world relation. In agreement with phenomenological psychiatrists such as Erwin Straus (1980) and Medard Boss (1979), we had also called this “a limitation of freedom.”

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We would now like to refer to one of our essays and in this way indicate our accord with Canguilhem on the role of society in mental pathology. In an article entitled “Community and Society, Melancholy and Sociopathy,” we addressed the topic of the social environments of two personality types, the type of personality that is now called “anti-social” and the type that has been called by Hubertus Tellenbach and Alfred Kraus “typus melancholicus” (Wiggins & Schwartz 2002, 231-246; Kraus 1977). Both of these personality types, we claimed, were characterized by greater restrictions in their possibilities for experience and behavior than the “healthy person.” In other words, both types were less free. The melancholy types are unfree because they overidentify with the social roles and norms that are dominant in their society. They cannot achieve the role-distance and freedom from social norms that other people can exercise if they choose (Kraus 1977). Individuals with anti-social personalities, by contrast, are unfree to genuinely identify themselves with the social roles and norms pervading their society. “By nature” they live at a distance from the social roles and norms that they know other people sincerely accept and enact. There are, nevertheless, different kinds of social worlds in which each of these types could not only exist, but flourish and thrive—at least more or less. The melancholic type could more or less flourish living in a smallscale community while the anti-social (or sociopathic) type could more or less flourish in a large-scale society. On the other hand, the typus melancholicus is likely to suffer greatly living in a large-scale society, and the anti-social person would experience significant misery living in a small community. Both types of suffering would be consequences of the different kinds of “limitation of possibilities” (to use Canguilhem’s phrase) that each would experience. In other words, social environment can play an enormous role in determining the pain and suffering of a person who is “pathological” in the sense of having limited freedom.

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Depending on the social environments in which they live, then, these personality types would not be pathological in sense (2); i.e., they would suffer little psychological pain but might instead flourish. But they would still be pathological in sense (1): i.e., the range of their possible world-relationships would remain comparatively restricted (Wiggins & Schwartz 2002, 231-246). We wish to stress that we think we are in complete agreement with Canguilhem here. In order to decide whether the features of a particular personality are “pathological,” one cannot examine solely the features of that type. One must also look at the social world to which the person is related. One must examine the “norm” that structures the relationship between the two relata, self and social environment. Health and pathology are not attributes of an organism considered abstractly, i.e., apart from the environment to which it is related. Health and pathology are characteristics only of the concrete whole, being-in-the-world. We again refer to Victoria Margree. She summarizes Canguilhem’s position as follows: …the same biological feature can prove pathological under some conditions and healthy under others,… pathology is not located simply within the organism, but in its reciprocal rela­ tionships with its environment. As such, an understanding of disease shifts from the isolated and quantifiable bodily fact to the dynamic evaluation of relationships (Margree 2002, 305).

It is important to explain that neither we nor Canguilhem conceive of this “norm” as easily formulated, even when we consider non-human animal life. And, of course, if we speak of the “norm” effective in the human being’s relationship to its world, we can be sure that it would be an even more difficult task to express it in words. In an essay appropriately entitled “Norm and Pathology of I-World Relations,” the phenomenological psychiatrist Erwin Straus has attempted, quite independently of Canguilhem, to sketch the components of this norm, and in his account he shows the disturbances of these norms in various

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kinds of mental disorder (Straus 1980, 255-276). Straus finds ten components of the human-world norm. And as we read Straus’ depictions of these components, we realize how commomplace and ordinary they are in our everyday (and “normal”) experience. So commonplace in fact that we simply take them for granted and never bother to articulate “the obvious.” This is only a part of the massive “taken-for-grantedness” of human activity in the pre-scientific lifeworld that Alfred Schutz believes a phenomenology of the social world should explicate (Schutz 1962). In order to illustrate what we mean, we shall now mention merely a few features of one of these Strausian components. Straus points out that the objects and living beings in the world we encounter are accessible to us while at the same time aspects of these “given” objects and beings remain inaccessible (Straus 1980, 269). We see the sculpture of the javelin thrower in the museum. It is directly given to us, given “in person.” On the other hand, there are aspects of this artwork that are not directly given. Our motility allows us to walk around it and see other sides. However, there are still constituents of it, e.g., the interior of the man’s chest, that are unseen. The Husserlian would say that these internal aspects remain only emptily intended, not originarily given. As Straus says (using his word “the Allon” for “the other”), The Allon, although manifest on its surface, is unfathomable in its depth. On their surface, things are well defined, clearly sha­ ped, and precisely located, but their core eludes compre­hension, description, and demarcation. It keeps its secret… (Straus 1980, 269).

We experience all of this, of course, as “normal.” However, Straus briefly contrasts this “norm” of sensorimotor experience with schizophrenia: “In schizophrenic experience, the balance between the open façade and the hidden core is disturbed; its presence is felt in its overwhelming power” (Straus 1980, 269).

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In schizophrenia the individual may feel that his mind is being taken over and controlled by the quasi-living, alien mechanism inside the sculpture. And the individual may realize with certainty that this control will extend from the sculpture to any part of the globe to which he may travel in vainly attempting to escape it. It is easy to see how this case exemplifies a violation of one basic component of the norm of human experience. Conclusion: The Prospects of a Philosophy of Life for Psychiatry It is not our purpose here to further describe the norm of human-world relatedness and the manifold ways in which it is disturbed in mental disorders. We have sought only to locate the concept of “pathology” in this relationship, or, more broadly conceived, in the organism-environment relationship. With the manifold contemporary advances in psychiatry—in the areas of the refinement of diagnoses, research in neuroscience and genetics, and a more scientific evaluation of therapeutic approaches— psychiatry needs, we think, an unifying orientation that grounds studies of mind, behavior, and brain in a philosophy of life that shows the inherent relatedness of mind, behavior, and brain to the world in which the subject-patient lives. This philosophy of life will require contributions by thinkers from a variety of areas. We have here focused on Georges Canguilhem, Hans Jonas, and Evan Thompson in the philosophy of biology, Edmund Husserl in phenomenological philosophy, and Otto Doerr-Zegers and Alfred Kraus in phenomenological psychiatry. There are other thinkers, however, who bear a very close affinity with the figures on whom we have focused. Therefore, the task, while broad in scope and always requiring attention to developments in the relevant sciences, is indeed realizable.

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References Boss. Medard, Existential Foundations of Medicine and Psychology, New York: Jason Aronson, 1979. Canguilhem, Georges, Ideology and Rationality in the History of the Life Sciences, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988. Canguilhem, Georges, The Normal and the Pathological, New York: Zone Books, 1989. Canguilhem, Georges, Knowledge of Life, New York: Fordham University Press, 2008. Doerr-Zegers, Otto, “Existential and Phenomenological Approach to Psychiatry,” New Oxford Textbook of Psychiatry, edited by M.G. Gelder, J.J. Lopez-Ibor, and Nancy Andreasen, Oxford University Press, 2000. Gurwitsch, Aron, Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966. Husserl, Edmund, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1983. Jonas, Hans, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology, New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1966. Jonas, Hans, Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1974. Jonas, Hans, Mortality and Morality: A Search for God after Auschwitz, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Kraus, Alfred, Sozialverhalten und Psychose Manisch-Depressiver, Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke Verlag, 1977. Margree, Victoria, “Normal and Abnormal: Georges Canguilhem and the Question of Mental Pathology,” Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology – PPP, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2002, 299-312. Schutz, Alfred, Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962. Straus, Erwin, Phenomenological Psychology, New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980. Thompson, Evan, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Life, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007. Wiggins, Osborne, and Schwartz, Michael A., “Community and Society: Melancholy and Sociopathy,” in Diversity and Community: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Philip Alperson, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002.

37 Living with Multiple Psychologies by Akihiro YOSHIDA

Shukutoku University Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo [email protected] International Human Science Research Conference ABSTRACT: Reflecting upon these fifty years of wandering ex­ periences among multiple psychologies, the author attempted an explication of the values that governed his wanderings and iden­ tified some thirty insights regarding their essential meanings. Every psychology student today has to live with the chaotic multiplicity of psychologies. How could a novice, a teacher, a researcher and/or a theoretician live with it? Advices from a few sages were consulted. The theoretical problem of integrating the multiple psychologies emerged. The author proposes that pheno­menological psychology is capable of and thus responsible for contributing toward creating a cosmos among the multiple psycho­logies.

Introduction I have wandered through many psychologies during the past 52 years. Part of this history is narrated in the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology (Yoshida, 2001). This time, let me first explicate the motives for the transitions in my wandering. Then I will attempt to present the insights I gained. Based on the insights of mine and of other writers, I will next consider multiple ways of living with the multiplicity of psychologies. Finally, I will propose how phenomenological psychology might help create a cosmos out of the chaos in present-day psychology. PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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I. Reflection on the Values that Governed my Wandering Let me describe my wandering through a variety of psychologies, something not unusual among the psychology students. The stages in my journey were: Mathematical Psychology (MP), Soviet Rubinsteinian Psychology (SRP), Cognitive Psychology (CP), Folklore Psychology of Master Teachers (FPMT), and Phenomenological Psychology (PhP). To reflect on the motives for my transitions, I will imaginatively recall the lived experiences in each stage and ask the Why-question (Yoshida, 1992): “Why did I do that?” along with What-questiom, such as “What did I experience when I did that?” “What did I pefink (“perceive, feel and/or think” a la J.S. Bruner) when I did that?” “What motivated me when I did that?” and/or “What personal values moved me to do so?” A detailed narrative of my journey has been written but turned out to be too long, therefore, only its skeleton will be presented here as follows: Mathematical psychology (MP). Why did I choose MP as my initial specialty? I had been so good at Mathematics as to wish to develop my mathematical talent. I was encouraged to think of MP as the frontier of psychology developing linearly toward a unified science. I was flattered by my seniors to join their newly developing research. I perceived that I might possibly attain excellence in MP. Because of my previous background, I was too easily convinced that psychology would develop as a natural science. The atmosphere in Japan was favorable to the new American positivistic psychology distinguished from the German, French, and/or Russian psychologies. MP was admired as the most recently developed approach. And as a novice, I was unable to choose on my own but accepted what was recommended by my trusted seniors. Why did I leave mathematical psychology, while I was making progress in it? Perhaps I became aware of its serious epistemological problems, after having studied the technical details. I was disillusioned by the arguments in Multiple-Factor Analysis that “the chief object of science is to minimize mental effort,” the “parsimony” in

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the comprehension of nature and that “no scientific law can ever be proved to be right” (Thurstone, 1947, 52). The positivistic arguments on the “typical structure in social and behavioral sciences” (Torgerson, 1958, 2-11) also disillusioned me. I seriously considered the possibility of leaving Psychology. Soviet Rubinsteinian Psychology (SRP). Why did I choose SRP as my specialty? Because my trusted mentor, whom I respected for his personality and wisdom, advised me to stay in psychology with SRP. I sensed richness in SRP that I encountered for the first time. I had the excitement of exploring the new continent. Soviet Russian Psychology was then considered by many as somewhat socially dangerous for its association with Communism, which stimulated my frontier spirit for exploring the dangerous terrain. Leaving the group of friends in MP brought me a new group of friends attracted by SRP. Twenty years later, in 1981-86, we published the collaborative Japanese translation of Foundations of General Psychology by Rubinstein (1946/1963). I learned that changing one’s specialty inevitably means changing one’s group of friends. New talents, previously unnecessary, became indispensable, such as reading German and Russian. Philosophical arguments in Dialectical Materialism were far more convincing than those in MP to a novice naive realist, especially regarding ontology and epistemology. Cognitive Psychology (CP) Why did I next include Piagetian Psychology into my specialty? My mentor, who was fluent in French, English and German and who had recommended Rubinstein to me, recommended Piaget also. He was the introducer to Japan of the early Piaget, including The Worldviews of Children. SRP also highly evaluated Piaget. Simultaneously, after the publication of J.S. Bruner’s The Process of Education (1960), Piaget was attracting great attention in the US. Everything affected me. While Neo-behaviorism was still dominant in the USA, I was much attracted to the newly developing CPs of J.S. Bruner and D.P. Ausubel, the latter being my academic adviser. I familiarized myself also with Cybernetics of Dr. W. Ross Ashby (1956) along with Information and System Theories, for

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instance, by MacKay (1969) and by Ackoff/Emery (1972), which, later, were found to relate to formal ontology. My mathematical talent revived, because Piaget used mathematical group theory and Ashby used set theory extensively with Isomorphism and Homomorphism. I reinforced my mathematical trainings in Illinois. CPs was not in serious conflicts with SRP, for both Bruner and Ausubel praised Vygotsky highly. SRP was totally unknown in the USA, with no English translations available. They all harmoniously inhabited my little life-world. I believed I had built a solid foundation for researching educational practices in the future. Folklore Psychology of Master Teachers (FPMT). Greatly expecting to contribute to educational practices with my psychologies, I jumped into the pond of practicing teachers led by a prominent Japanese master teacher. Soon, I learned that my psychologies did not work, or that they would not provide what the master teacher needed. Teachers with the master teacher were studying concrete teaching-learning activities in order to enrich their own practices. I had not been prepared to analyze practices so rich in concrete details. I began to learn from what the teachers were doing. As regards psychology, their practical wisdom might be called as FPMT (Folklore Psychology of Master Teachers), but never in any pejorative sense. They were seeking to gain insights into the meanings of teachers’ and children’s lived experiences. They were studying the lived experiences: grasping a mathematical concept, interpreting literary works of art, drawing pictures, singing songs, jumping over box horses, and so on. I was unable to explicate these concrete experiences beyond just applying to them the familiar technical psychological jargons. I became aware that my comments were only touching the surface. Teachers were learning how to teach and learn from descriptive narratives of master teachers. I became disillusioned by the lack of power and relevance of my preceding psychological knowledge and training. I searched and searched for help, and encountered phenomenological psychopathology, then phenomenological philosophy, and finally phenomenological psychology.

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Phenomenological Psychology (PhP). Why did I choose PhP? Why have I stayed with it for 34 years since my first encounter in 1975? I was searching for something with which I could convince myself of the meaningfulness of my work for the friendly respectable practicing teachers. I searched everywhere possible, including psychiatry, martial arts, Noh players’ secrets, film theories, artists’ writings on their skills, literary works of art, literary critics’ writings, and so on. Perhaps I was already sensing positive possibilities in the first person perspective narratives. Then I encountered, on my own, the phenomenological psychopathology of Mieko KAMIYA (1966), and then Koichi OGINO (1973), and others. I felt that the gate to a new world was open. Soon I moved on to Husserl’s Experience and Judgment and Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception. I was delightfully surprised to find that Husserl was originally a mathematician and that his Free Imaginative Variation came from mathematics, which I had learned as a high school student from Polya’s little book (1945/1954). I later encountered the books of van den Berg (1974), Ernest Keen (1975), and Amedeo Giorgi (1970). Soon, I familiarized myself with the works of many authors including Max van Manen, Bernd Jager, Paul Ricoeur, Alfred Schutz, Roman Ingarden, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, Vladimir Jankelevitch and so on. I finally discovered the fertile land of phenomenology and PhP for which I had been unknowingly yearning. I found a wealth of insights that enabled me to offer helps for teachers and children in educational practices, which swept away my anxieties regarding my powerlessness. The welcome of friendly teachers upon my transmigration into PhP encouraged me to pursue it still further. The new world of PhP gradually but steadily became my own. I found many new friends not only in Japan but also in all over the world through Duquesne University and the International Human Science Research Conference (IHSRC). I no longer mind whether I am among the majority or the minority in psychology. Even if I were in a minority, I would be so with pride, hope and

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delight. I would pursue not popularity, although I would not refuse it. I have become far more aware of my lived world of psychology. First Person Psychology (FPP), which had long been a taboo in the field, came to look like a real possibility. A great fertile land now opens before us. Perhaps what keeps me most satisfied with phenomenological psychology is that it enables me to remain honest about what I believe. I can feel that I am permitted to doubt and question myself of what I am doing, and yet I can still remain in and with phenomenological psychology, which is different from all the other psychologies I know of. Summing up, with the background of my naïve faith in natural sciences, I was initiated into MP. With fundamental naïve realism, I was disillusioned with MP and entered the world of SRP. Being also attracted to American openness, I was drawn into the emerging CP protesting against then dominant neo-behaviorism. The robustness and flexibility of practicing master teachers confronting the difficult challenges in the real life inspired me a yearning to understand their minds as FPMT. As if parallel to FPMT, the world of PhP, along with phenomenological psychopathology and phenomenological philosophy, finally became home to this wanderer as the motherland where he can freely breathe fresh air, where he can swim in clean spring water, where he can grow as he wishes, and where he can pursue what he would really like to pursue in and with his life. II. Insights obtained through Reflection on Wandering in Psychology What insights have I accumulated in the course of my wandering in psychology? Regarding the method, I would refer to David Bakan’s “‘miniature’ investigation” method (Bakan, 1974, 94112). As he puts it, this is “the use of the psychoanalytic method (the objective of which is therapy) with the objective of the classical introspectionists (the acquisition of knowledge)” (102). As rationale for this method he succinctly and proudly claims:

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... psychologists can make a major contribution to society not only by rendering to society established truths, but also rendering established possibles with respect to psychological dynamics. In the matter of prediction and control of human behavior, a knowledge of what an individual might possibly do, or possibly feel, or possibly think, places us well on the way toward the achievement of our objective. Given a detailed knowledge concerning the possibles, we can act in such a fashion as to discourage some from becoming actualities, and to encourage others into becoming actualities. The pragmatic usefulness of knowledge of possibles extends from the clinical situation to world affairs. (112).

Some of the insights from my use of the “miniature” investigation method are as follows: 1. There are many psychologies in the world of “psychology,” the totality of which would be impossible for any single person to know thoroughly in his/her limited life time. 2. No single person will, within her/his lifetime, ever be able to know the whole domain of the psychologies, much less the entire world of human knowledge. 3. The impossibility for a single person to cover the whole domain of psychologies necessitates cooperative and organized works among people oriented toward integrating the psychologies if integration is desired. 4. Faced with the multiplicity of psychologies, a novice student would have no other way than initially to choose one, any one, out of the many psychologies quite “by chance” or “by fate.” 5. Even though the choice by a novice could be characterized as “by chance,” the choice would have his/her own reasons. The choice is made in the context of his/her lived world. For example, my choice of Mathematical Psychology had multiple reasons: a) With the backdrop of my previous aspiration to be a mathematician, MP was perceived as within my attainable reach, b) The view of many then influential seniors that MP was the cutting edge of newly developing American psychology and rapidly overcoming the traditional German

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psychology, c) That I was perceived as mathematically talented by my teachers and seniors and thus as suited for specializing in MP. Being young, I was too flattered to resist the invitation to join them, d) The encouraging perception that many psychologists were rushing to get on the bandwagon of MP, e) Under the circumstances, I perceived that MP would assure me of a career in psychology, f ) The perception that the background of MP in the American culture in general, with its victory in World War II and prospective dominance over world psychology, was attractive to many young Japanese, including myself as a survivor of the War. More reasons could be given, but these seem sufficient to show that my choice of MP was not simply “by chance” and that it was quite irresistible for a novice under the given circumstances. 6. A novice has to follow the advice by those knowledgeable in his/her neighborhood. S/he has no other choice, because s/he knows nothing about that particular science. Here, with this first choice, his/her luck, whether good or bad, comes in. 7. Until s/he acquires his/her intellectual independence and confidence, a junior will normally follow the advice of his/her seniors, depending on how much these seniors are perceived as trustworthy. Of course, s/he could be contrary by nature and choose on his/her own against the advice of seniors, which will result in his/her career, good or bad. 8. A young novice will tend to accept a psychology which s/ he perceives to be helpful to promote his/her career. 9. A young novice tends to accept a psychology which s/he perceives to enable him/her to develop and exhibit his/her potential talents. 10. A junior will tend to accept a psychology which s/he perceives has the potential to achieve popularity and power. 11. The possibility should not be excluded that a transition, by truly noble people, could be activated entirely by non-egocentric and/or non-egoistic motives for devotion to great causes,

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such as the welfare of the human kind and/or the mission for the pursuit of the truth. 12. A senior will attempt to recruit, guide, and/or to invite juniors to follow him/her, at least partly motivated, whether consciously or not, to increase his/her own popularity and power in the future. 13. Since a young novice inevitably has made his/her first choice “by chance” or “by fate,” with good or bad luck, s/he has every possibility to become disillusioned with that choice. This disillusionment will be the result of “mismatch” between the progressively revealed nature of the particular psychology and his/her individually willed deep meanings of life, such as for truth, wealth, health, welfare, fame, status, power, and so on. 14. With the psychology first chosen “by chance” or “by fate,” each student would sooner or later experience some disillusionment. But whether or not s/he leaves that particular psychology because of the disillusionment depends upon many factors, including the depth of his/her commitment, the strength of his/her personal ties with those who are associated with it, the available resources to start anew, the perceived remaining years in his/her life, the psychological distances, that is, the perceived similarities and differences, of the attractive neighbor’s family garden, metaphorically, from the present garden of one’s own. For example, I was 40 when I began to consider transferring from SRP and CP to PhP. Many of Japanese friends, doubtlessly out of goodwill, advised me not to make such a change at my age. I made it nevertheless, believing in the abstract naive idea of pure academic freedom. A professor employed for his/her specialty in System Science, for instance, would understandably experience social difficulties to transfer to phenomenology. 15. Transfer from one psychological school to another could recur when one experiences disillusion with the present school and attraction to another. The nature of the disillusion and the attraction will vary in relation to his/her deeply-rooted desires.

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These desires could naturally vary as the context for the person changes. For example, the social and cultural context drastically changed in Japan after the WW II, while the dominating psychology changed from German to American. Gestalt psychology and phenomenology were well known among “grandfathers” of the pre-war Japan. 16. The meanings of the transferring experiences will be differentially understood as the contextual situations change. For example, a transfer from CP to PhP would be understood by onlookers as from “scientific” to “philosophical,” from “objective” to “subjective,” from “mainstream” to “marginal,” from “major” to “minor,” from “brand-new” to “old fashioned,” from “quantitative” to “qualitative,” from “American” to “German,” from “progressive” to “conservative,” from “democratic” to “authoritarian,” and so on. A cognitive psychologist once commented on phenomenological psychology, “It is authoritarian because, like little gods, Husserl, Meleau-Ponty and so on are uncritically being worshiped and bowed down to by phenomenological psychologists.” 17. With regard to a possible transition from one school to another, people would experience a conflict between the willingness to change and the resistance to do so. Everybody naturally has both progressive and conservative tendencies. Therefore, some hesitancy is naturally to be expected. 18. A psychologist in a free democratic society can independently choose and decide whether or not s/he remains with the particular school of psychology to which s/he presently belongs. S/he can remain with the first chosen psychology for life or choose to wander through psychologies. An old friend of mine had remained contentedly as a Hullian neo-behaviorist all his life until 2000. 19. A personal choice among schools of thought is not necessarily a purely intellectual matter, but always accompanied by some socio-economical, political, cultural, historical implications. This point might be obvious, but it must be explicitly stated.

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20. A transfer from one school to another changes the group of people with whom one associates. It could happen that friend today may become an enemy tomorrow and vice versa. 21. The accumulation of psychological knowledge to be absorbed and systematized into “psychology” in general has not always happened. Huge quantities of energies and papers have been and are being wasted even now, failing to build a skyscraper of psychological knowledge. It is sufficient to just recall the literature on neo-behavioristic investigations which are no longer consulted by anybody and simply sit on the library shelves. Many research papers today may have the same fate in the future. 22. The newer is not necessarily better than the older. I recall an epigram by Schopenhauer to the same effect. And, I am convinced of it now. 23. The recent development is not necessarily more advanced and richer in its meanings than the old one. 24. The popularity of any psychological school changes as time goes on and as the context changes. The least popular of psychologies here and now may become the most popular there and then. The popularity of a psychological school does not assure its truth. A more popular school may turn out to be false and may consequently become least popular in the future. However, any school may hold a grain of truth. 26. The truth in psychology is not necessarily only one. There can be many truths not necessarily compatible with each other. 27. The deepest psychological insights can remain the least popular among those satisfied with shallower insights today, and can become popular among those with deeper insights tomorrow. The same applies to places, cultures, societies and historical periods. How could Freud, Husserl or Nietzsche, for instance, have been popular among psychologists in the USA under the hegemony of Watsonian behaviorism? Interesting enough, the value judgments regarding the depth of any insights will also vary according to the kinds of psychologies.

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28. The quality of a popular psychology reveals the quality of the education of those who support it. The replacement of the poorer psychological schools by the richer one requires improved psychological education/training of those being expected to support it in the future. Thus, the value of dissemination efforts for enriching psychological culture among populace should not be underestimated. 29. Every school has its own way of evaluating psychology, including its own, regardless whether implicit or explicit. 30. Every school of psychology has, so long as it exists, its own defenses and attacks, its supporters and critics, its friends and enemies. And every school has its own ways of evaluating, supporting, and criticizing other schools, whether with friendliness or with hostility. 31. A novice cannot easily learn the details of the long battles among the schools of psychology, even the history of the particular psychology s/he has chosen “by chance” or “by fate.” It is as if s/he has been born into the particular psychology, rather than as if s/he has deliberately and voluntarily chosen it. A child never chooses to be born to a particular family, but is born into it “by chance” or “by fate.” The same would apply to a novice’s birth into a particular psychology. 32. Every school of psychology has its own methodology, along with its own ontology and epistemology, whether implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious. And so on and so on ... ad infinitum. We could continue if we wished. However, at this point, let me state a semi-conclusive observation and move to the next step. 33. Under the circumstances described in 1-32, and more, the problem of choosing, transferring to/from, and/or settling down in one among the once-existed, now-disappearing, now-existing, nowflourishing, now appearing, somewhere-existing multiple psychologies raises an ever vexing problem for a psychologist, regardless of whether or not s/he squarely and consciously faces the problem,

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avoids and escapes from it, or negligently and ecstatically forgets it, or even lets his/herself flow with the majority in the mainstream of the period, culture, society, or group s/he belongs to. III. On the Multiplicity of Multiple Psychologies Thus far, I have described a multiplicity of psychologies, which is based upon my own personal experiences and thus powerfully convincing to me personally. However, my description may not be so convincing to others. A more objectively observed, persuasive, and convincing account has been offered by Sigmund Koch: I am under no illusion that huge subcartels of the knowledge in­ dustry can be made to reorganize by rational suasion. I never­ theless propose that the essential noncohesiveness of the activities denoted by the term “psychology” be acknowledged by replacing it with some such locution as the “psychological studies.” Students should no longer be tricked by a terminological rhetoric into the belief that they are studying a single discipline or any set of specialties rendered coherent by any actual or potential prin­ ciple of coherence. The current “departments of psychology” should be called “departments of psychological studies.” The change of name should mark corresponding change in pedago­gical rationale. The psychological studies, if they are really to ad­dress the historically constituted objectives of psycho­logical thou­ght, must range over an immense and disorderly spectrum of human activity and experience. If significant knowledge is the desideratum, problems must be approached with humility, methods must be contextual and flexible, and anticipations of synoptic breakthroughs held in check. At the very least, students should not be encouraged to believe it their responsibility to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that their professors long ago gave up trying to solve—a puzzle which is insoluble in principle, and which has the strange property of becoming less solvable with each attempt to assemble the fragments. (Koch, S. 1999, 134-135)

Needless to mention, the late Prof. Koch (1917-1996) was the editor of the six volumes Psychology: Study of a Science. I feel much

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tempted to accept his advice and would thank him for lifting the heavy burden from my own little shoulders to “put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.” However, on the second thought, I wonder how psychology professors, all psychologists, and/or psychology as a scientific discipline could remain exempt from a responsibility. This is the responsibility to guide their novice students in such ways as to guard against the fate of wandering ever for life in the labyrinthine world of psychologies. Incidentally, I must hurriedly and modestly admit that I have wandered through only a small portion of this chaotic world. An additional question may be raised: Could a so-called science of psychology remain self-contentedly satisfied just by simply renaming itself as “psychological studies” and by assuming the “false” title of a science? Who takes the responsibility to overcome the chaos under the “false” name? This issue has multiple implications according the perspectives of the persons who squarely face it. A novice student may be allowed, with Prof. Koch’s advice, to concentrate on a psychology s/he has chosen. What about a professor who teaches in a psychology department? What about a psychological theoretician who aspires to unify diverse psychologies into one to be called proudly as “Psychology”? The issue would naturally be viewed differently from the different perspectives. However, the distribution of the perspectives according to the roles and functions of the persons involved does not really solve the problem, it only defers the solution. As a novice student ignorant of both psychology and the academy, I have wandered through some psychologies. As a teacher, what should I tell a student who unknowingly faces the chaos of psychologies and is at a loss? I found some surprising advice from a highly respected clinical psychologist and professor, Dr. Tokuji Shimoyama (1919-2009), who wrote (my translation from Japanese): From the very beginning, I have always strictly prohibited my young students from becoming too early a specialist with titles

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of “-ian,” such as Sullivanian, Freudian, Jungian, Rogerian, and so on. I am concerned about the following situation; that is, many excellent young clinicians, to whom an old retiring clinician like me entrust the future of the field, appear to have become small scale specialists and to avoid making efforts to become the generalists they need to be as true clinicians. As for psychotherapy, there exists no single right one. Each individual has to perform the labors suitable to his/her capacity and, more importantly, each should have his/her own psychotherapy [“Jeder hat seine Psychotherapie”]. It needs a long journey. Students in my group focus on clinical psychology, but I allow all of them to choose whatever they want. Accordingly, some take up the educational analysis of psychoanalysis, some specialize in behavior therapy, some others specialize in Gestalt therapy, Miniature-garden therapy, Drawing therapy, Music therapy, Dance therapy, Psychodrama, Naikan therapy, Morita therapy, and so on. The atmosphere is bustling. Criticisms are often directed against it as being devoid of the unified color of a single group. However, I am silently and favorably watching them now as living their “passing identity.” (Shimoyama, 1989, 150)

Let me hurry to add that Prof. Shimoyama defines himself as “specialized in phenomenological anthropological psychopathology,” that he has published books in phenomenological psychopathology, and is well known in Japan for his lucid translation, in 1956, of Ein Psycholog Erlebt Das Konzentrationslager (translated in English as Night and Fog) by Viktor Frankle, his personal friend. Shimoyama’s comments are limited to clinical psychology, while Koch’s observations are on psychology in general, but the issue remains essentially the same. Both recognize the multiplicity of psychologies and take the chaotic situation for granted. Shimoyama would allow his students to choose a single school of psychology, while viewing the identity of the student resulting from the choice as a “passing identity.” Shimoyama views it as necessary and even desirable for each student to travel through multiple schools of psychotherapy in order to become a generalist,

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rather than a narrow specialist in the field. Shimoyama would favor and recommend the situation where each student starts with a single school of psychology, whatever it is, chosen “by chance” or “by fate” as a “passing identity,” continues to journey on to experience multiple psychologies in succession, finally to find his own as Jeder hat seine Psychotherapie, and still to continue to develop as a generalist and to journey on until the end of his/her life as a clinician with wisdom. Shimoyama inhibits himself from imposing a psychological school, including his own, on his students. Rather, he leaves his students free to choose on their own, on their own responsibility. In case a student should choose a school antagonistic to his, he would still accept and approve the choice warmly and encouragingly, viewing the choice as his/her “passing identity.” Shimoyama would after a while encourage the student to begin journeying through new psychologies, until s/he find the psychology suited to his/ her capacity. Shimoyama seems to approve and accept the multiplicity of multiple psychologies. This multiplicity enables the students to explore and discover the psychology suitable to their respective capacities. What has happened to the problem of integrating multiple psychologies into “Psychology”? Shimoyama even seems to be approving the status quo of the chaotic world of psychologies. Students must choose their own psychologies on their own. Imposition will not help students develop better in the long run. He encourages the exploration of the wider world of psychologies, in order to make it possible for each student to encounter a psychology suited to his/her capacity. From this perspective, the multiplicity of psychologies would be positively valued as providing multiple possibilities for students to choose, rather than negatively viewed as chaotic, distracting, retarding and/or disastrous. The problem of the integrative unification of psychologies into a single discipline would seem to have completely vanished. If integration and unification should occur, it should occur in

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the individual lived world of a generalist clinician and/or a generalist psychologist, so he seems to imply. In the context of their Theories of Personality (1957), Hall & Lindzei discuss the first issue of possibly creating a unified “uniquely powerful theory” of personality in contrast to the coexistence of multiple theories of personality and also the second issue of a novice student who must choose while facing with the multiple theories. Both issues can be interpreted as essentially homomorphic in structure with those in general psychology for Koch and in clinical psychology for Shimoyama. Hall & Lindzey’s views are elaborated in the chapter, “Personality Theory in Perspective.” On the issue of creating “a uniquely powerful theory,” they included a section entitled “Theoretical Synthesis versus Theoretical Multiplicity” and ask, “Would it not be better to provide a single viewpoint which incorporated all that was good and effective from each of these theories so that we could then embrace a single theory which would be accepted by all investigators working in this area?” (554). The uniquely powerful theory would combine the individual strengths of existing theories and be more comprehensive and verifiable than any single theory. They write that this line of reasoning is intriguing but has a number of serious objections to it. Their strong conviction is that “this is not the appropriate time or circumstance for an attempted synthesis or integration” (557) and that “an amalgamation of existing theories” offers less hope for advance than almost any qualified theory. Impressive is their assertion that the “theoretical formulation is a “free enterprise’.... No theorist has the right to tell his fellow theorists their business” (553). After 50 years, it seems still not better a time and we do not know when “the appropriate time” will come. Notice that they conceived of the integration as only “an amalgamation of existing theories.” On the issue of how a novice should learn, they argue against leading students to believe “there is only one useful theory.”

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They ask psychology teachers, “Why should the student be given a false sense of harmony? Let him see the field as it really exists— different theorists making different assumptions about behavior, focusing upon different empirical problems, using different techniques for research” (556). Finally: Our general proposal to the student is that he first acquaints himself broadly with the field... Then let him immerse himself in one theory.... Wallow in it, revel in it, absorb it, learn it thoroughly and think that it is the best possible way to conceive of behavior.... After the romance is over and the student is seduced by the theory, he may set about the cold hard business of investigation in order to find out whether his theoretical marriage will withstand the ravages of reality (557).

Let me comment on the key words for the respective writers: “jigsaw puzzle” (Koch), “passing identity” (Shimoyama), and “amalgamation” and “marriage” (Hall & Lindzey). These words are clues that reveal respective perspectives. Koch viewed the outer horizon of multiple psychologies panoramically from a longer distance; Shimoyama viewed the existential issues from the temporal perspective of the life courses of the individual students; Hall & Lindzey viewed the inner horizon of psychologies with their “amalgamation” at a shorter distance, and the choice as an analogue of “marriage”. IV. On Multiple Ways of Living with the Multiplicity of Psychologies (a) The case of a Psychology Teacher.

The multiplicity of multiple psychologies has been widely recognized. Our next focus is how one lives with the multiplicity. A student has an excellent advice from a Shimoyama or a Hall & Lindzey.

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Now I will consider, as a committed phenomenological psychologist, how a psychology professor focused on the next generation of psychologists should face the multiplicity and also how a phenomenological researcher should live therewith. My speculations here are not intended to be a plan to be followed, but only the elaboration of possibilities for the development of phenomenological psychology in particular and psychology in general. I recall how the Japanese Master teacher Enosuke Ashida (1873-1951) once described three types of teachers: a) The first kind attempts to let students know by telling and preaching, b) The second kind happily narrates what s/he has been feeling along the road s/he has traversed, c) The third kind hits the vital points with each of his/her students and enjoys listening to their respective responses. Ashida values C as the best, B as the next best, A as the worst, because A may kill the student’s interest. Also, I recall the saying by a master teacher Tsuneo Takeda (1929-1986) to the effect that “to teach is not to teach” and also that “to teach is to spare and spare, on one’s own responsibility, teaching what one would really like to teach.” (1971, 43) Are we to be “silently and favorably watching (the students) now as living their “passing identity”? (b) The case of a psychological researcher or theoretician.

A psychological researcher could choose either absolutism or relativism. With the former, s/he would believe that the psychology s/he adopts is an absolute truth and all others are false. With the latter, s/he would sincerely believe that the psychology s/he adopts is just one truth among many others. Putting aside the political, social, and economic elements involved, the psychologist will have to work hard to make his/her kind of psychology more beautiful, attractive, convincing and persuasive. In Soviet Russia, SRP was the authorized psychology to be accepted by all, so I was told. However, we are in the “free enterprise” market in

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the free democratic society today. Our phenomenological psychology is undeniably one kind of psychology among many others. V. The Dilemma Inherent in the Perspective of a Phenomenological Psychologist Facing the Multiplicity of Psychologies I am now a phenomenological psychologist living within the world of phenomenological community. From this, I have a vexing problem which I wish to share with you. Living within a school of psychology is very much like living within one of “the many worlds” in “the multiple realities” (James, William. 1890/1981. 920), within a “finite province of reality” (Schutz, Alfred. 1973.23-28), within that “assumptive world” (Frank, Jerome. 1991. 24), or, to go a little further, within that particular “world hypothesis” (Pepper, Stephen. 1942. 1-10). The vexing problem for me is that after a long wandering, I have arrived at PhP and feel it as my motherland, and yet do not know the best way to persuade others to accept my kind of psychology. Which of the following am I qualified to profess? A) Phenomenological psychology is good. B) Phenomenological psychology is better than any others I have known so far. Or, C) Phenomenological psychology is the best up until now. I can make statement A with much confidence and I can also make statement B with my confidence formed through my reflection on my wandering. But I am keenly aware that I cannot make statement C, because I have not yet experienced and will never experience all existing psychologies. After having noticed this, my confidence in the statement B becomes less firm. Have I known and experienced every possible aspect of the psychologies I have known in every possible situation, space, and time, with every possible person? Definitely NOT! Phenomenological psychology believes in the perspectivity of human knowledge. How does perspectivity relate to statements

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A, B and C? As a phenomenological psychologist, I can make these statements if I add to each statement a phrase: “from my own present perspective,” or “as I believe it now.” Therefore, simply put: 1. A phenomenological psychologist, if s/he is deeply convinced of the perspectivity of human knowledge, will not be able simply to state A, B, or C. Notice, that psychologists with other orientations, while neglecting, or being ignorant of, “perspectivity,” would arrogantly make the similar statements as A, B, or C, regarding their own psychologies. It may be out of ignorance perhaps, but they would do so nevertheless. A phenomenological psychologist should never do the same, it seems to me. 2. However, under the politico-socio-economic circumstances described in items 1-33 above, a phenomenological psychologist will have difficulty persuading psychologists of other orientations into her/his own psychology, because those others already have strong faith in their own psychologies. Does the short-sighted arrogance with ignorance necessarily defeat well-informed and long-sighted modesty in the market of “free enterprise”? Are there effective ways for a phenomenological psy­cho­logist to convince/persuade colleagues in other psychologies to believe as s/he believes, in order to create a cosmos out of the chaos of multiple psychologies? The answer will depend upon the self-approved image of PhP itself. 1. PhP is just one school among many others in the multiplicity of psychologies. How could it claim to integrate psychologies into the Psychology? Should not it remain satisfied with remaining as just one among many others? 2. PhP is the best of all known so far. How should this judgment then be conveyed convincingly and persuasively to the majority of psychologists? Remember, the others are attempting to claim the same for their own schools. 3. PhP is the best that will lead the rest in the future, near but not too far. This future dream will involve politico-socio-economic

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struggle in the market of the “free enterprise” and its actualization is not assured at all. The success of the project will not come of itself without much efforts by phenomenologists. 4. PhP is capable of taking the responsibility of integrating the multiple psychologies which are now in the state of chaos. I believe now in 4) above. I would propose to enrich the phenomenological psychology of multiple psychologies and psychologists in order to facilitate the mutual understanding among, and consequently also the integration of, the multiple psychologies. The chaos, from a different perspective, may not be devoid of its value. The chaos could be the fertile soil necessary for bearing the fruits of human wisdom. The noble beauty of a lotus flower, the Buddhism symbol of wisdom, takes its roots in the dirty muddy water full of nourishment. A set of phenomenological psychologies of multiple psychologies may prove the productivity of the chaos affirmatively, not negatively. The integration of psychologies may result not in a single authoritative psychology as the psychology, but in the integrative system of multiple psychologies as they are, each independently actualizing its own strength, while, from the system-builder’s perspective, understanding and complementing each other in such a way that the integrative system as a whole works most effectively in dealing with human problems. I would like to post a public announcement, if I may: Wanted: the phenomenological psychology of multiple psychologies and psychologists. The integrative psychology (x) will not be just an “amalgamation” (x) of multiple psychologies (y)s in the same space Y, but an (x) in a space X of more dimensions. Metaphorically, a cube (x) in the three-dimensional space X will have multiple profiles, shadows and/or cross sections (y)s in a two-dimensional flatland Y, such as a point, a square, a triangle, and a hexagon. In Japanese, a cubic dice is called “SAIKORO,” like “PSYCHOLO-gy.’

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Conclusion Let me cite from Pensées by Pascal: When we want to correct someone usefully and show him he is wrong, we must see from what point of view he is approaching the matter, for it is usually right from that point of view, and we must admit this, but show him the point of view from which it is wrong. This will please him, because he will see that he was not wrong but merely failed to see every aspect of the question. Now, no one is annoyed at not seeing everything, but no one wants to be wrong; the reason for that may be that man is not by nature able to see everything, and by nature cannot be wrong from the point of view he adopts, as sense impressions are always true. (Pascal, 1670/1966, 248)

When and if phenomenological psychology is organized as the integrated unity of phenomenological psychologies of multiple psychologies, then every psychologist, regardless of the school s/he belongs to, will be pleased to learn not only to know that he is not wrong from the point of view he adopts but also to know that he will be able to know better other aspects of the question that he has not seen yet. Thus, hopefully, everyone will be delighted to learn phenomenological psychology. I hope such a day will come soon. After my retirement in spring 2010 at the age of 75, I am looking forward to reading Roman Ingarden’s Der Streit urn die Existenz der Welt and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I seem to be interested now more in possibilities than in realties and/or necessities. An old proverb says “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” but I am now gathering moss from my past wandering. References Ackoff,R.L. & Emery, F.E.(1972) On Purposeful Systems: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Individual and Social Behavior as a System of Purposeful Events. Tavistock

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Ashby,W.Ross (1956) An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall Ashida, Enosuke (1988) ASHIDA Enosuke Kokugo Kyouiku Zenshu. 25 vols. Meiji-tosho Ausubel, David P. (1963) The Psychology of Meaningful Verbal Learning, Grune & Stratton Bakan, David (1974) On Method. Jossey -Bass. Bruner, S. Jerome (1960/1963) Kyouiku no Katei (The Process of Education). Iwanami Frank, Jerome D. and Julia B. Frank (1991) Persuasion and Healing Johns. Hopkins UP. Giorgi, Amedeo (1970) Psychology as a Human Science. Harper Hall, Calvin & Lindzey, Gardner (1957) Theories of Personality. John Wiley James, William (1890/1981) The Principle of Psychology. Harvard UP Kamiya, Mieko (1966) Ikigai ni tsuite (On the reason for being of life). Misuzu Koch, Sigmund (1999) Psychology in Human Context. Chicago UP MacKay, Donald M.(1969) Information, Mechanism and Meaning. MIT Ogino,Koichi (1973) Genshougakuteki Seishinbyorigaku (Phenomenological Psychopathology). Igaku Shoin Pascal, Blaise (1670/1966) Pensées, Penguin Books Pepper, Stephen C.(1942) World Hypotheses. California UP Piaget, Jean (1957) Logic and Psychology. Basic Books Polya, George (1945/1954) Ikanishite Mondai wo Tokuka.(How to Solve It) Maruzen Rubinstein, S.L. (1946/1959) Grundlagen der allgemeinen Psychologie. Volk und Wissen Rubinstein,S.L. (1963) Prinzipien und Wege der Entwicklung der Psychologie. Akademie-Verlag Rubinstein,S.L. (1973) Sein und Bewusstsein: Die Stellung des Psychischen im allgemeinen Zusammenhang der Erscheinungen in der materiallen Welt. Akademie. Schutz, Alfred (1973) The Structures of the Life-World, vol 1. Northwestern UP Takeda, Tsuneo (1971/1990) Shinno Jugyousha wo Mezashite (Aspiring toward a Genuine Teacher) Kokudo-sha Torgerson, Warren S. (1958) Theory and Methods of Scaling., John Wiley

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Thurstone,L.L. (1947) Multiple-Factor Analysis., Chicago UP Shimoyama, Tokuji (1989) Suashi no Shinriryouhou (Psychotherapy with bare Feet). Misuzu Yoshida, Akihiro (1992) On the Why-What Phenomenon: A phenomenological explication of the art of asking questions. Human Studies. 15. 35-46. Kluwer Academic Publishers Yoshida, Akihiro (2001) My Life in Psychology: Making a Place for Fiction in a World of Science. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. Vol. 32. Fall, No.2. 188-202 Yoshida, Akihiro (2006) Values embodied in choosing among possible interpretations. Shukutoku University Graduate School Bulletin. No. 13. 1-20 Yoshida, Akihiro (2006) On Tamamushi-iro Expression: A Phenomenological Explication of Tamamushi-iro-no (Intendedly Ambiguous) Expressive Acts. Essais de psychologie phénoménologique-existentielle. Department of Psychology. University of Quebec at Montreal, 306-335

38 Clinical Listening, Narrative Writing1 by Richard M. Zaner

[email protected] Medicine, Vanderbilt University Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. ABSTRACT: After presenting a brief history of my involvement in clinical settings during my twenty some odd years at Vanderbilt, I turn to some of the specific questions ingredient to that involvement as a phenomenologist. Every such encoun­ ter is not only context-specific, structured by every participant’s biographical situation. Gurwitsch’s analysis of context provides a key way to understanding this complexity. Among the clearest challenge is understanding the presence of multiple narratives, most of them only partially unfolded but all of them situa­ tionally determined. This feature makes prominent the serious question of writing about the unique and individual: the delicate process of negotiation and compromise that charac­teri­zes human relationships in general and in particular underlies any clinical interaction. This leads to a brief analysis of the ethics consultant’s involvement, which is at once therapeutic and diagnostic: figuring out what’s going on and on that basis, determining how best to be helpful in resolving whatever pro­blems are eventually identified and clarified. A brief historical excursus is presented to help clarify this complex of issues. Ethicists are hunters and gatherers at the same time, listeners and collectors of the almost always partial stories which make up any and every clinical encounter. Beyond attending to these stories, ethics consultants are also witnesses and guarantors, ensuring that every clinical narrative has its chance to be told and receives its appropriate hearing, that every “voice” has its chance to be heard. PHENOMENOLOGY 2010, vol. 5: Selected Essays from North America. Part 2: Phenomenology beyond Philosophy. Edited by Lester EMBREE, Michael BARBER, and Thomas J. NENON (Bucharest: Zeta Books / Paris: Arghos-Diffusion, 2010).

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I. The Several Ways to Consider any Clinical Encounter Over the past twenty-five years, I was privileged to consult on a large number of individual clinical encounters,2 during which I was seen, and served, as an “ethicist,”3 At the same time, these and other facets of health care attracted my philosophical interests.4 Accordingly, a distinction became necessary so to enable keeping very different sorts of questions and problems distinct. (1) To consult as an ethicist on a clinical event is to be invited by one or more of the main participants to assist in the situation by focusing on the moral aspects (problems, puzzles, dilemmas, etc.) of the individual circumstances and constituents (people, settings, conditions, issues, etc.) themselves, for their own sakes. In this respect, the ethicist’s concerns are, like any consultant, strictly therapeutic: attempting, for instance, to help a couple understand what they face when they are confronted with a highly problematic pregnancy; to help, where necessary and possible, the providers understand the concerns and situation of patients and families; or to assist a family identify and consider the issues they must confront when continued treatment for one of their members is thought to be futile. Even when the ethicist writes about the situation, in chart notes or other ways to record its specific aspects, the focus is strictly on and for the sake of those with whom the ethicist is consulting. Whichever encounter it may be, what are the questions the participants themselves have to face, whether they want to confront these questions or not? How can they be assisted to face those issues clearly and squarely? What does the situation itself make it necessary for them to face and find some way or other to resolve, so that they may go on with their lives? More simply: what are the issues any specific clinical event poses, which decisions must be faced and what choices made, and with which aftermaths of decisions are they most likely to be able to live with? The ethics consultant seeks to help such people become more aware of and clear about their own moral views so that they can more likely reach decisions commensurate with those views.

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(2) On the other hand, such clinical encounters have many times moved me to reflect on them—whether to gain better understanding of moral life, of moral agency, or some other matter. By means of philosophical reflection, any example whatever of clinical encounters can be reflectively considered in many respects strictly as examples—examples of clinical consultations methodically considered in order to determine which themes are common to the range of examples, and what that may reveal regarding the questions which prompted reflection in the first place. In turn, these common themes may themselves be systematically considered in further reflective work, leading ultimately to a more embracing, more generalized philosophical understanding. In this case, the philosopher’s attention and focus is strictly on a particular encounter, not for its own sake, for the sake of what is exemplified by and through it and others examples of such encounters. Such reflective consideration is most helpful to the work as a consulting ethicist, but must not be confused with it. This attending to a particular event, thing, person, etc., either for its own sake or as an example is possible for any phenomenon. How they relate and mutually clarify each other, as well as the specific nature of each mode of attention are issues, among others, that cannot be taken up here, but must be left for another descriptive analysis.5 What follows below is but one effort to become clearer about prominent features of the clinical event, and is based on my own experiences as a consultant on ethical issues in many clinical situations. II. Encounters are Context-Specific Whatever the clinically presented problems may be, they are strictly problems facing the people whose situation it is most immediately—for instance, the expectant couple mentioned above and their physicians.6 By the same token, the problems, alternatives, decisions, and outcomes, are strictly theirs as well.

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Any encounter presents its own set of issues, moral and other, and these are context-specific in the sense that working with and on behalf of such persons, helping them appreciate and advising them regarding specific issues needing resolution, and the like, requires a strict focus on the situational definitions of each involved person.7 To understand a clinical encounter, there is nothing for it but to try one’s best to get at the concrete ways in which the participants themselves experience and understand themselves and their circumstances, and endow its various components (objects, people, things, time, relationships, etc.) with meaning. Thus in the situation presented by the problematic pregnancy mentioned above,8 although the attending physician had told me that “abortion” was the “problem” needing attention, this was not in fact an issue—neither for the couple nor for the attending physician, as without mentioning this to each other they were each prepared to accept the possibility of early induction and fetal demise. When the dismal prognosis was mentioned and the couple seemed to become “angry,” however, the attending broke off the conversation, as he thought they were angry at him for using the word “abortion.” With conversation at a standstill, one issue was obvious: to enable them to talk and listen to one another and, thus, to straighten out the different understandings in order to identify precisely what was at issue for each of those involved, so as to work toward a common understanding of problems, needed decisions, and, hopefully, acceptable solutions. In every clinical encounter, moral issues specific to the participants and their circumstances are presented for deliberation, decision, and resolution solely within the contexts of their actual occurrence. To find out and understand what’s going on in any clinical encounter— what’s troubling the people, what’s on their minds, and thus to know what has to be addressed and how—requires cautious, attentive listening and probing of their ongoing discourse,

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conducts, the setting, and other matters presented as constituting this specific context. For instance, the couple’s puzzlement about the meaning of “statistically significant”—a term used by the physician while discussing the results of several tests of the fetus—was central to what was interpreted (prematurely, as it turned out) as their “agitation” and “anger,” and this indicated (at least in part) one important theme to be addressed. But these matters could not be considered in abstraction from the actual circumstances: what each person understood, what this led them to think about, etc. I was invited into an already ongoing clinical encounter between the couple and their physician (and others: nurses, medical and radiological consultants, etc.). As I’ve emphasized earlier, physicians are in the nature of the case involved in a complex moral relationship with persons who, due to impairment (in a broad sense, including a difficult pregnancy) and to the relationship itself, are uniquely vulnerable, exposed to the power of those who wield the “art” (technē). The latter are in turn under the obligation always to act justly and with restraint.9 In this respect, every physician (and other health provider) is as such focused exclusively on helping each patient under his or her care: diagnosing, outlining available therapies, and working with each patient to reach a decision most acceptable and reasonable to both physician and patient (and, at times, the family and/or loved ones). The patient (and family) is on the other hand focused on the his or her own condition and on doing whatever is necessary to be cured, get better, or at least helped as appropriate (perhaps, with palliative care, helped with pain management and the like). I have also emphasized earlier that neither patient nor physician (nor other health care provider) is focused on the relationship itself as the primary theme. To be sure, they are, as noted, obviously aware of that relationship; but they are not busy with reflecting on the relationship as such (for instance, with

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determining and assessing its asymmetrical structure). Patients are not philosophers, though philosophers, of course, are patients from time to time. Just that mutual relationship, however, is precisely the focus of the clinical ethics consultant and will, of course, be a central theme for the reflecting philosopher when he or she considers examples of clinical events. This needs to be clearer. III. Illness and Meaning Experienced by the impaired person, the impairment is also interpreted by, and thus has meaning for that person. Others also experience and interpret the person’s condition: family members, those in the person’s circle of intimates (especially close friends and associates), persons in the wider social ambiance, but also the physician, nurse, and other providers helping to take care of the person. Hence, to speak of “the experience and meaning of illness,” as many including myself have done,10 is necessarily to face a highly complex phenomenon, as too few have recognized. Nor is this all. As Schutz has shown, every situational participant experiences and interprets the encounter within his or her own biographical situation:11 typifications, life-plans, senses of self and others, undergirding moral and/or religious frameworks, etc. These encounters are socially framed by prevailing social values, as well as by written and unwritten professional codes, governmental regulations, hospital policies, unit or departmental protocols, etc.—any or all of which may and often do contribute to “what’s going on” in any specific case. Finally, cautious probing reveals that experience and meaning are still more complicated. Again, consider only a patient and her physician. She, like every patient, is a self and thus is essentially a reflexive being.12 Briefly, this signifies that the patient experiences and interprets her own problems or impairment. She also experiences and interprets the physician’s experiences

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and interpretations, including his experiences and interpretations of her (how she is thought to experience and interpret the doctor, her illness, etc.)—and both she and her physician are, in the nature of the case, aware of, though not always focally attentive to this very complexity. In a word, the relationship is complex and reflexive: minimally, each experiences and interprets the other, their respective interpretations, and at the same time, within their relationship each experiences and interprets the relationship itself.13 In the terms used by Gurwitsch, every constituent of a contexture is related to every other constituent (each is placed with respect every other), and vice versa; furthermore, each is related to the entire set of relations, as is the set itself related to each constituent. The relationships that constitute a contexture are, thus, at once reflexive (by referring to another constituent, the first relates to itself as what the other is related to; and vice versa) and therefore complex (a “whole” is precisely that entire set of mutual, complex and reflexive relations). For example, the pregnant woman in the encounter already mentioned not only experiences her pregnancy and her developing fetus,14 but this experience is complexly textured by the ways in which she experiences and interprets what her physician (husband, and others) tell her. Similarly, her physician experiences and interprets her words, expressions and gestures—for instance, he interpreted her as “anger” directed at them and a response to his use of the term, “abortion.” In some respects, moreover, both of them experience and interpret the relationship itself. Regarding diagnostic data, for instance, she told me, “I know they’re only trying to do their best” (i.e., she interprets the relation as “they are trying to help”); and her physician said, “She seems to think we’re being deliberately unclear” (i.e., the relation is “not going well”). But, as emphasized, the relationship itself—its characteristics and features—is not reflectively attended to by either of them.

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To work as an ethics consultant is thus to be a kind of detective or, better, a type of literary interpreter: deliberately probing into the multiple situational “texts” or ways in which the situational participants interrelate, variously experience, talk, listen, and interpret one another. The involvement of the ethicist is thus a work of circumstantial interpretation (both understanding, and being-understanding); reflection on this and other cases is a matter of phenomenological explication.15 What has been pointed out, to repeat, emerges from considering the range of clinical encounters as examples; that is, from philosophical reflection. By contrast, clinical consultation (as opposed to describing or talking about it) is a specifically different kind of activity: its focus is on the effort to help the unique and individual in specific circumstances and for the sake of the individuals themselves. IV. What is to be Discerned The stories patients and others tell invariably arise from and express themes intrinsic to clinical encounters—more accurately, from those encounters in which patients understood that much was at stake, much to be won (by “successful” treatment) and much to be lost (when everything has been done and rescue, cure, or restoration is no longer possible). At the core of these clinical events is an encounter with our own, even my own, mortality and the circumstances which make that especially exposed and exigent: questions of dying and death, loss and grief, and how people deal with them. It seems true that most of us nowadays are only too wellacquainted with the excruciating experience of having to deal with the death of a parent, child, spouse, close friend or other loved one. Those of us in our middle years have learned that we have no choice but to count on facing such situations: not merely to think and make choices about what to do for terminally ill

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relatives—parents, grandparents, children, or others—but to talk about them with strangers—nurses, administrators, physicians and, at times, social workers, chaplains, and still others—many of whom possess real power to control what will occur during those arduous, sad, and painfully extended moments at the end of life. It is not easy to for any of us to discuss such situations in any event; it is all the more awkward and difficult to talk about when someone else who is an intimate is faced with the extreme situation: someone close and dear is dying or faces severe compromise, is in great pain with relief only barely in sight, if at all. It is for most of us next impossible when the individual in question is yourself, is myself. When faced with such situations, Ronald Blythe’s terse comment about Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych comes to mind: that the character of Ivan reveals the “plight of a man who has a coldly adequate language for dealing with another’s death but who remains incoherent when it comes to his own.”16 Faced with the prospect of my own dying—say, on receiving a diagnosis of serious cancer—I am struck dumb, without words or wits to withstand the onslaught of the unspeakable. But, it has also seemed to me, faced with the pending death of a loved one—wife, husband, child, sibling, mother, father—so are we often struck dumb as well. Facing our own not-being, just as when we face the no-longer-being of a loved one, we know the profound inability of language to bear needed witness. We rarely if ever have the right words at hand, if we ever have them, to talk candidly about dying, loss, grief, profound sadness, fear, dread—the inner tremblings of the soul. Instead, we fumble and mumble, waiver and stall for time and still more time waiting for some way to make up our minds. Until, often as not and with a sigh of detectable relief, we revert to talk about “nature” or “God’: rather than making our own decisions, we talk about letting “nature take its course,” or issue desperate,

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prayerful pleas to God, thinking that things are surely out of our hands—God’s will or blind nature, we believe—which only masks needed decision. Many of these awful questions are insistently present as well for those of us actually involved in taking care of such patients, whether as physicians, nurses, chaplains, or ethics consultants—not merely, I mean to say, talking about patients with colleagues on committees, but rather with those who are actually facing a moment of extraordinary decision. Beyond the exigencies of discussing ethical questions with those who actually have to face them and perhaps helping them find some way to settle on some course of action—be they patients, doctors, nurses, family members, or any other—there is also, if we are honest, the arduous chore of putting that talk into written form at some point, into words that go beyond the moment, words that will truly get across the actual sense and feel of those disturbing situations. It is so very difficult, we then realize, to write without obscuring, concealing, masking, or even forgetting to mention precisely what was vital for ourselves and others as we then strived to understand what we were going through. James Agee said it best, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that remarkable work for which he and Walker Evans were once commissioned, in order to write about unique individuals facing themselves across the awesome horizon of their own unique deaths: For in the immediate world, everything is to be discerned, for him who can discern it, and centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands: so that the aspect of a street in sunlight can roar in the heart of itself as a symphony, perhaps as no symphony can: and all of consciousness is shifted from the imagined, the revisive, to the effort to perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is.17

But Agee was even more emphatic about the point I am trying to express with as much directness as I can. His first words about the project he was commissioned by the U. S. Department

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of Agriculture to write, along with Evans’ extraordinary photographs—pictures and words about poor white dirt farmers in the South—give the compelling challenge to any who, like myself in this small essay, would dare write about people in times of utmost distress. Writing about himself, he said: It seems to be curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to [anyone]…to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings, an ignorant and helpless rural family, for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humili­ ation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of “honest journalism” (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and for unbias which, when skillfully enough qualified, is exchangeable at any bank for money (and in politics, for votes, job patronage, abelincolnism, etc.18

Just this challenge haunts my work, though I intend neither science nor art nor journalism: Is it ever possible to perceive anything simply “as it stands,” especially while you are yourself there, too, dans le milieu des choses? And, supposing it can glimpsed, somehow: beyond the perceiving of things while standing in their midst, how then to talk with colleagues, of all sorts, much less, later on, to write about those very things—without dissection, or analytic examination, neither absorption nor digestion, but straightforwardly, without clouds or shadows or anything else obscuring—to say what must be said, and say it so that you get it right? Can any of us “stand” in the face of that “cruel radiance of what is” and tell it like it is? How can we talk or write, when what we must talk and write about is so unique, so singular in its immediacy and potency, and for that very reason seems, contrary to everything we hope to do, so utterly unrecoverable? How put the unconditional into words, how tell the unqualified uniqueness of individual people and their actions, emotions, relationships, circumstances? And

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how then go on to write about these very encounters—standing then at still another remove from their ungetaroundable immediacy—without obfuscating or distorting the very things that most mattered while we were still enmeshed in the moment, in the circumstances that have left such deep marks, still haunting us as we try to figure it all out … in writing? V. Dwelling and the Unique and the Different If you like others of us, are not content just to tell a story, but have to go on and question why that is so, and the rest of what then quickly follows even a slight bent toward philosophical wonder, things quickly become far more complicated. To put myself on the block: what are the characteristics of an ethics consultant’s discourse, especially questions, such that it is seen—or perhaps better, is at all “see-able,” by patients, families, physicians, nurses, even oneself—as having to do with ethics? Still more, what sort of thing is this listening and talking with people about their lives and selves and circumstances, and then more especially writing about those clinical encounters in which I am myself involved as a consultant, hence being unavoidably affected and altered by what’s going on even while also in our very involvement affecting and altering what’s going on? The point I am trying to get clear about has, I think, to go by way of the device of story-telling, which is at least one major reason for my having undertaken to do just that on several occasions. For this device, I have come to believe, comes closest to embodying the significant characteristics of the “talking and listening” which I and any other “ethics consultant” must centrally enact from the very moment of entering someone else’s life and circumstances.19 I have long been centered on this point of emphasis. It was expressed very well by Paul Komesaroff: The major concerns expressed in the public debates about medical ethics ignore many of the most important issues. They ignore, for

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example, the finely textured and subtle nature of the interaction between doctor and patient and the social context in which it occurs. They ignore the manner in which problems are formulated within this relationship and the ways in which the various possible courses of action are identified. Most importantly, they ignore the delicate ongoing process of negotiation and compromise that characterizes human relationships in general and in particular underlies any therapeutic interaction.20

Or, in Agee’s admirable bluntness: is it not “obscene and thoroughly terrifying … to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings”? The question is humbling; I offer here only the following deliberations—along with, of course, my own narratives. VI. The Consultant’s “Involvement” Two things should be acknowledged. First, there are important and difficult questions that stem from the various interactions of the people who first invite a consultant into their situation. On the other hand, there are the obstinate and awkward ethical issues that arise from the consultant’s very involvement. To become involved ineluctably changes things, and not always for the better. This is true, both for those who issued the invitation, which has often been noted, and for the consultant, which has rarely been noted, perhaps because it is so awkward: I myself am then at issue and at risk, like it or not. Note that people who engage in ethics consultation (in whatever manner—whether as professor with a student seeking advice, or as one of us working in a hospital)—are not themselves the ones whose original situation occasioned the request for a consult about whatever questions of ethics it may be. When I become involved, it is at someone else’s invitation—a point a consultant forgets at considerable risk; among others, obfuscating significant components of that very situation. Although not (at least

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initially21) of the consultant’s own making, such situations as we may be invited into, for whatever reason, are reflexive. By accepting such an invitation, the ethics consultant becomes part of (and thus he or she both influences and is unavoidably influenced by) what is and what is perceived (these are not always the same) as going on. Yet by virtue of that very acceptance of the invitation, the consultant at the same time bears and must accept the responsibility for whatever it is he or she eventually does and says as consultant—including what at some point the consultant may then write, and whatever the form that may take (from chart note to case report to, perhaps, a full analysis—or even narrative). To become involved as an ethicist in a clinical encounter demands that one be strictly focused on the individual constituents (people, setting, circumstances, issues, etc.) for their own sake. Such highly focused, individualizing concern is complex, as it is focused not only on the patient(s) and the veritable world every patient (including family, friends, values, concerns, occupations and preoccupations, etc.) presents; but also on the professionals and their own respective spheres of individual and professional concerns, commitments, values, and the like. The ethics consultant must be clinically attentive precisely and solely to the individuals—any and all of them: patients, families, friends and acquaintances; as well as the usual variety of professionals: physicians, consultants, nurses, social workers, therapists, etc.—into whose situation he or she has been asked to become involved. The consultant’s concerns are, like any physician’s, at one and the same time diagnostic and therapeutic—to try and figure out what’s going on and how then one might be helpful in resolving whatever problems are eventually identified and clarified. The consultant thus seeks not only to understand but to be understanding: why a request for the consultation came up in the first place, by or from whom it came, much less what is actually

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learned at the scene about the variety of people, interpretations and views each brings, etc. To help those whose situation it primarily is requires helping them figure out what they are facing and then helping them to talk about it, to articulate their views in the attempt to help them reach an understanding and, in light of that understanding, to identify and clearly face those options, choices and associated decisions which, after as much discernment and deliberation as time and circumstances permit, seem most consonant with who and what they are within their own life-context—including what they have been and what they hope to become. Whatever else all that signifies, the ethics consultant must be rigorously focused on just these individuals within their circumstances and with their concerns. As with any such situation, there is inevitably a strong temptation to forget that focus and instead become concerned with how you or I, the consultant, might see things, and what you or I, the consultant, might decide to do, and the like. Which, of course, is precisely what you and I should by no means ever do: it is not my decision, not my life, not my values, and to the extent I am unable to put my own concerns and values to the side, I have no business consulting with anybody else. VII. On the Context and Clinical Deliberation It should surely be very clear by now that these are difficult issues, to say the least. Of much greater interest to me than casting off still another opinion about one or another “case,” however, are several other, equally significant matters already intimated. First, for all the disputes regarding clinical ethics con­sultation, there are nonetheless certain characteristics that seem to me especially pertinent. (1) Whatever the clinically presented problems may be, they are problems strictly for the people whose situation it is—for instance, a specific family and their physicians, but at some

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point any others who may be or become involved. Any encounter presents its own set of issues, moral and other, and as noted already, these are context-specific in the sense that working with and on behalf of such persons, helping them appreciate and advising them regarding specific issues needing resolution, and the like, requires a strict focus on what might be termed their own situated understanding, or each involved person’s own situational definition. To understand a clinical situation, there is nothing for it but to devise ways of allowing one to get at the concrete, situated ways through which the participants themselves experience and understand their situation, in whatever ways each endows various components (objects, people, things, relationships) with meaning, hence too how each one variously talks about what’s going on—which may include, of course, at least some forms of writing about the situation (patient-chart notes, for instance). Having this in mind, I believe that stories, well-constructed and as faithfully rendered as possible, are precisely the “device” called for. The “logic,” if you will, pertaining to the uniqueness of human individuals is to be found in narrative language: stories capture what needs to be captured, precisely by virtue of their essentially “indirect” ways of relating what needs to be related. (2) To discover then try to understand what’s going on in any clinical encounter—what troubles the people, what’s on their minds, and thus to know what has to be addressed and how— requires cautious, attentive listening to and probing of their ongoing discourse as well as their conducts, the setting, and other matters that constitute this specific context. To “say” or “write” any of this, one must, I believe, learn the discipline of storytelling and writing. And the stories of greatest if not sole relevance are those told by the unique individuals themselves— those whose situation it is—although, it is most often true, these stories are for the most part incomplete, at times poorly said, or may even be exercises in evasion.

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(3) The ethics consultant is invited, and enters into an already ongoing clinical encounter between a patient (often, family, friends and others) and his or her physician (and others: nurses, medical consultants, social workers, and others). Every situational constituent, including any moral issue, is presented solely within ongoing relationships among patient and family and physician—at least, in its core form. And, the “saying” and “writing” of such complex affairs as these relationships, I believe, is best found in the telling of their stories. The clinical ethics consultant, as I’ve emphasized, has an importantly different focus from either the physician or the patient, since he or she has to address the complex, ongoing relationship itself, attending to each of the integral constituents within that temporally unfolding contexture. The ethicist, then, bears the responsibility for enabling the pertinent stories to be told, and of equal importance, that need to be heard. The ethicist’s focus must therefore be strictly on enabling people to listen to one another—which means, I think, to urge that people listen to the stories that are being told. VIII. Writing about Clinical Situations A certain light is thus shed on an intriguing issue buried squarely and in a way deliberately in my own efforts to tell the stories patients have tried to tell me. Every attempt to write about clinical situations includes several quite different kinds of discourse. First, there is my sense of some situation as I earlier encountered it and now write down in my notes (both in the patient chart and in my own records). Second, there is my write-up of my impressions of the situation (more often in a note to the physician, or whoever else requested that I look into the situation). Then, third, there are the critical and interpretive commentaries about some of these situations, included in various lectures, professional articles and presentations given

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from time to time, along with the critical comments, oral and written, which other professionals make on my articles or presentations, and, of course, my responses to those comments. By the time you get to the latter, of course, you are quite a bit removed from the former—and even further from the original discussions, written and oral, that typically occur and are rarely if ever intended for eventual oral or written publication. Beyond this, fourth, there are the stories I have written, using certain situations whose identifiable characteristics have been seriously altered and masked so as to respect the privacy of all concerned—still another remove from the original. Finally, fifth, there are the copious discussions, during and after the events related, with colleagues, both to help think through a situation thoroughly and to guide colleagues, students, and others to learn to think through such situations. All of these many times of listening, talking and writing may help and they may hinder, but all them figure in at least as essential components of the background to the narratives. This way of laying out the multiplicity of discourses, however, may too easily obscure a crucial point. We need to ask about the status of all these writings about some situation. Is any of the writing I’ve mentioned anything like a “factual report,” a “telling” of “what actually occurred”? If this is so, then the proper response to anyone’s concern about “the facts” should be an answer to the effect that, all things considered, what was given is, to the best of my recollection and reconstruction, what “really and truly” occurred. What else could the question possibly mean? Perhaps I’ve invented a story, or certain parts of it—to protect the innocent, I might say— even while I’ve tried to make it “real” and make it look “factual.’ Writing as factual reporting implies that the author is authoritative: the information provided is judged by the author to be all that is needed for an appropriate understanding of what went on. And, since the author is presumed to be the “expert,” then any concerns about “what the facts are” can be answered

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only by direct appeal to what has been factually reported. Since, however, what is reported about is unrecoverable, the moments of its occurring past, there is simply no way to determine whether what was reported is what “in fact” actually occurred. We have only the reporter’s words and his or her “word” about what is reported. Trust is as vital here as it surely is in the clinical event. Unfortunately, if writing a “clinical report” is only “factual recounting” in this sense, it is then supposed that the (often sole) person who could possibly know what “actually (really and truly) happened” is the very one who also now makes that very claim. The (often sole) source of “information” about the case is and can in many instances only be the one who did the consulting and then reported on it—and who is accordingly also the only person capable of settling disputes, correcting misunderstandings, drawing appropriate conclusions, making pertinent recommendations, etc. A wonderful case of conflict of interest! If, that is to say, writing about such situations is just a matter of factual reportage—which may well imply a notion of “the reasonable ethicist” or “ethics expert” comparable to long-standing idea in medicine of “the reasonable physician’—one underlying presumption resembles something on the order of the claim that people who are not directly involved cannot possibly know what’s going on in a specific situation unless similarly involved in the situation—and probably not even then, since to be an “expert” is of course also to know how to report it all, and the only “ethics expert” is of course…there simply is no way out of that question-begging circle. There are all sorts of other perhaps more obvious, if also serious problems with that too-common approach to writing about clinical situations. Perhaps most pertinent here, however, is that such a conception of writing ignores, and must ignore, one of the most prominent features of every clinical situation: that each is packed with interpretations, each type of which is presented as in need of a sort of unpacking. To get at this, permit a brief excursus.

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IX. An Historical Excursus In the ancient world, especially in the skeptical or “Methodist” tradition—whose methodical views derived strictly from the individual’s own clinical experience22—it was believed that each illness or injury was unique precisely because every person who fell ill or was injured was unique and reacted differently. Symptoms were taken as signs of the body’s own powers (physies) called forth to combat the influences of bad living, noxious environment, or both. As is stated in several of the Hippocratic texts, “the physies are the physicians of disease” (Epidemics, VI), and the clinical healer is their servant, acting to support these powers (Epidemics, I). Or, as Eric Cassell says, “the illness the patient brings to the physician arises from the interaction between the biological entity that is the disease and the person of the patient, all occurring within a specific context,” and as these differ so must the physician’s responses differ—even in the case of the same patient coming down with “the same” disease at different times.23 Moreover, Arthur Kleinman has suggested that, “When we speak of illness, we must include the patient’s judgments about how best to cope with the distress and with the practical problems in daily living it creates.”24 For this, it is necessary to utilize one’s own “common-sense” in categorizing and explaining the kinds of distress (moral, social, etc.) brought on by patho-physiological processes. In different terms, utilizing the interpretive categories ingredient to everyday life, it is clear that each of us “order [our] experience of illness—what it means to [us] and to significant others—as personal narratives.”25 Frequently, however, neither the sick person nor his or her family is able to express the full story, the illness experience, adequately or accurately—surely a requirement for judging whether s/he is truly informed, uncoerced, and capable of making decisions. Among other things, as one patient plaintively remarked, while “you want your doctor to understand,” we tend to be “too timid” around them. Another patient also pointed out how im-

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portant it is to talk, to “communicate”; however, he continued, “there are lots of feelings that are hard to put into words, especially if you’ve never had the feeling before.” Patients (to write only about them for the moment) experience their ailments, talk about them, and interpret them. A core clinical task, in Kleinman’s words, is the “empathetic interpretation of a life story that makes over the illness into the subject matter of a biography... [which] highlights core life themes—for example, injustice, courage, personal victory against the odds.”26 For this interpretation (of the patient’s own interpreted and expressed experience), it is necessary to piece together the patient’s telling of what has happened as it is embedded in the patient’s complaints and talk about them. This “piecing-together” is, of course, another work of interpretation developed with the patient, family and health professionals, and eventually also expressed in written form. Beyond this “reading” of the patient’s experience and telling of his or her experience, of course, every clinician (whether physician, nurse or ethics consultant) experiences the patient (smells, sees, touches, etc.), and engages in the diagnostic work that must also be done: physical examination, tests, measurements, instrumental visualizations, and the like, all conducted so as to determine with as much precision as possible what’s happened to the patient and what types of available therapeutic alternatives there might be. These, too, are works of interpretation—often conveyed in different ways to patients—which thus become components in the way patients come to interpret and reinterpret their conditions (diagnoses) and futures (prognoses). Thus are interpretations added to interpretations, becoming factors in subsequent re-interpretations, and so on. Expressed differently, our experiences are thoroughly storied, even while most of the time they are only partially told. The significance of these multiple and complex interpretations is in part the need to develop the linguistic skills—principally,

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listening and talking about sensitive topics with candor and completeness—that are necessary to understand what’s going on in a patient’s life, what’s implicit in his or her discourse (questions, responses, etc.). Such a complex interpretive discipline is or ought to be quite as important as any of those commonly associated with physical diagnosis. X. Clinical Interpreting I can now say more clearly what I’ve been driving at: while the kind of clinical conversational attunement that is focused on patient experience and self-interpretation has only begun to be more appreciated in the health care professions, especially medicine, precisely this methodical discipline is the central feature of clinical ethics consultation.27 In different terms, to be oriented, understanding and sensitive in any clinical involvement, ethicists must learn to be as precise and careful in attending and listening as the physician who auscultates a heart or palpates a spleen.28 Physicians, in Kleinman’s interesting but, I think, misguided, analogy, are “naive realists, like Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, who are led to believe that symptoms are clues to disease, evidence of a “natural” process, a physical entity to be discovered or uncovered”— incorporating a positive tendency to “regard with suspicion patients” illness narratives and causal beliefs.”29 If I am correct in the way I have conceived the work of the clinical ethics consultant, unlike physicians (focused on the patient) and unlike patients (focused on their condition), the clinical ethics consultant must be wholly unlike any “naive realist:” we are like a more philosophical Sam Spade, perhaps, ethicists must bring a clear-headed, strong reflective presence to clinical situations, to ensure that the fundamental questions of moral worth are not avoided, but are instead at the very center of every clinical conversation and decision.

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The patient and family, but also the physician and nurse, and others who may become involved and influence the course of a patient’s condition, thus exhibit interpretive methods quite as much as any one else. They are, in Kleinman’s words, like “revisionist historians,” “archivists,” “diarists,” even “cartographers,” who constantly search their pasts for present meaning, record the most minute difficulties on the map of changing terrain of ongoing illness, and focus on the “artifacts of disease (color of sputum, softness of stool, intensity of knee pain, size and form of skin lesions).”30 Ethicists, I am urging, are hunters and gatherers at the same time, in any case they are listeners and collectors of the almost always partial stories which make up any and every clinical encounter. Beyond hunting for and gathering, collecting, such stories, they are also witnesses and guarantors, ensuring that every clinical narrative has its chance to be told and receives its appropriate hearing, that every “voice” has its chance to be heard. Concluding Reflections I must not ignore what I believe is a crucially important feature of writing, especially narrative writing: in a word it is a way to discover and understand the sense of what was going on in the initial situation now being told. Consider only those moments of initial writing when we are trying to get our thoughts clear, trying to find adequate and accurate ways of expressing what went on in a particular clinical encounter. Those initial, always laborious moments of writing seem most of all a kind of discovery, when we try out first this or that expression, phrase, or word, to listen to whether it says rightly what is on our minds regarding this or that moment in the clinical conversation—that we’ve “had it right.” To appreciate that such phases of writing are, in truth, moments of genuine discovery, is to acknowledge as well that even that much-sought-for final version, the one designed

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for full public display in some published form, may itself continue to be a kind of discovery. If this is granted, then the status of the writer must be similarly reconsidered: rather than simple “data-gatherer,” much less mere recorder of facts—and their adjudicator in case of dispute—the sense of writing-as-discovery suggests that the writer is more hunter than gatherer and has the orientation more of inquirer than recorder, more interrogator than settler of disputes, more the posture of one still learning than one of havingalready learned. I want to emphasize, too, that every moment of consulting must, as I understand these matters, be shared—impressions discussed, initial judgments tested, implications explored, the “lay of the land” properly told. Conversations and writings need to be continually submitted to others, for their understanding but also for their critiques. Understood in these terms, writing may be one aspect of a more general method. Pursuing this notion, we might note that the initial piece of writing often has the form of a narrative. So far as moral issues are in the strictest sense context-specific and -dependent, and to the extent that clinical encounters are invariably a form of passionate drama focused on and by what matters most to those whose situation it is, it then makes good sense to conceive case write-ups as having narrative form, even if only nascent. They are, if you will, somewhat like stories, or at least anecdotes, waiting to be told. Rather than “factual reports,” they are dramatic scenarios with all the array of emotional, volitional, and valuational themes and transactions so characteristic of clinical encounters, and human life more broadly. My “way” of writing has evolved, for better or worse, into this: a perhaps untidy mixing of straightforward story-telling with reflections. I have done it this way because, put most succinctly, I must: that is what happens in these encounters, by everyone involved and not merely by me. People not only act

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and interact; we also think about it and then talk about that; and as our actions are only sometimes “right on,” so for our thinking—and, therefore, our telling of the story, our trying to get it right. So, I find myself mixing up what otherwise may seem very different ways of writing—factual reporting, narrative relating, reflective evoking—but I do so because it is all intimately part of what must be told. “That,” Rosenblatt keenly observes, “it is what we were meant to do.” Indeed, I am constantly seeking that “monumentally elusive tale” which every clinical encounter evokes. If that is true, then writing about my encounters can only be a voyage of continual discovery. With the beacon of Agee’s example in front of me—for all his lamenting, he did after all go on to write, at incredible length and masterfully, even if he was prying “intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings”—I too find myself having nonetheless to enact my own sort of prying, hoping that, a little like Agee, I can gradually discern each of the situations I write and have written about, “centrally and simply, without either dissection into science, or digestion into art, but with the whole of consciousness, seeking to perceive it as it stands,” so that I may perchance, “perceive simply the cruel radiance of what is”—the telling of which, I believe, can only be a story, mixed up, however painfully, with continual reflections. Endnotes 1. This essay is based on my “Afterword” for Richard M. Zaner (guest editor), “Performance, Talk, Reflection: What Is Going On In Clinical Ethics Consultation?” Special Issue for Human Studies, 22: 1 (January 1999), with Introduction and Afterword, pp. 1-3, 99-116 (published simultaneously as a separate hardcover book by D. Reidel, Holland and Boston, 1999); and “Phenomenology and the Clinical Event,” M. Daniel & L. E. Embree (Eds.), Phenomenology of the Cultural Disciplines, Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, Vol. 16

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Contributions to Phenomenology, 1994, pp. 39-66. The essay was first written as part of a book colleagues in Taiwan asked me to write. It is now published (Voices and Visions: Clinical Listening, Narrative Writing, Taipei, Taiwan, National Cheng-Chi University, 2009). 2. As I thought about how to put this book together—unlike my other books, this is drawn from the many articles I have written since first becoming involved in the field, many of them based on the several thousand clinical encounters that engaged me over the twenty years of my tenure at Vanderbilt University Medical Center—I was led more and more to the need to make this distinction. 3. I must note that almost a quarter of the clinical consultations were conducted during the four years of the clinical ethics program I and my colleagues at the Vanderbilt Center for Clinical and Research Ethics set up in 1991 and ran at a local acute care hospital, St. Thomas Hospital, in Nashville, TN. That program was a great success, for the hospital set up its own clinical ethics center with its own personnel, and continues to this day. 4. From what I know of my many years in this field (I first became, as they say, “involved” in 1971 as the first Director of Social Sciences and Humanities in Medicine at the State University of New York at Stony Brook), I was one of the very first of us non-physicians who ventured into the halls and rooms of hospitals as an “ethics consultant”, or “ethicist” (the sibilant name coined for us by physicians). In 1982, I was asked by the head of Vanderbilt Hospital’s Medical Board to set up this service and after some time trying to figure out how this could be done, it was formally instituted in 1984. During my tenure at Vanderbilt, where I first engaged in this practice from 1981 until my retirement in 2002, my best estimate is that I was involved in at least 2000 such consultations at the bedside, with issues raised for me by patients, physicians, nurses, and a host of others in the hospitals and clinics at Vanderbilt. Quite a number of these, in my later years, were with patients involved in one or another research protocol (such as the justly well-known first in utero surgical repair of spina bifida lesions, which gained world-wide attention; my involvement was principally to design, with my colleague, Mark Bliton, an effective and sensitive process for obtaining informed consent from the mothers- and fathersto-be who came desperately seeking “anything” that might help their still unborn babies). However, the bulk of consults were with those

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hospitalized in the more usual sense, due to illness and/or injury, or the debilitating effects of genetic anomalies. 5. See my article, “Examples and Possibles: A Criticism of Husserl’s Theory of Free-Phantasy Variation,” Research in Phenomenology 3 (1973), pp. 29-43; also, “The Art of Free Phantasy in Rigorous Pheno­ menological Science,” in: Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism: Essays in Honor of Dorion Cairns. F. Kersten and R. Zaner (eds.). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973, pp. 192-219. I have engaged these significant issues in an unpublished manuscript, At Play in the Field of Possibles: An Essay on Free-Phantasy Method and the Foundation of Self. 6. As I note later, others—persons, professions, and institutions (with their departments, units, etc.)—are also invariably involved, albeit in different ways. 7. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, Structures of the LifeWorld, two vols., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, Vol. I: 1973; also Richard M. Zaner, Ethics and the Clinical Encounter, Lima, OH: Academic Renewal Press, 2002, pp. 29-52 (reprinted from Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1988). 8. This encounter is also the basis for a narrative, “But How Can We Choose?”, which appeared in The Journal of Clinical Ethics, Fall, 2005, pp. 218-222; and later in Paul J. Ford & Denise M. Dudzinski (Eds.), Complex Ethics Consultations: Cases That Haunt Us, Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp. 29-35. 9. The Hippocratic virtues—justice (dīke) and self-restraint (sophrōsyne)—commonly accepted as key to the Western medical traditions come into play at just this point. 10. Eric J. Cassell, “Making and Escaping Moral Decisions,” The Hastings Center Report, 1, 1973, pp. 53-62; Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives, New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1988; Edmund D. Pellegrino and David C. Thomasma, A Philosophical Basis of Medical Practice, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981; Richard M. Zaner, “Medicine and Dialogue,” The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 15, 1990, pp. 3-325. 11. Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann, Structures of the LifeWorld, two vols., Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, Vol. I: 1973, Vol. II: 1989, pp. 243-247. 12. Richard M. Zaner, The Context of Self, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981.pp. 144-164.

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13. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (with Fear and Trembling), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954; Zaner, The Context of Self, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1981, pp. 199-216. 14. By now, moreover, there seems little doubt but that the fetus also relates, in its own unique manner, to the womb bearing the fetus. 15. Richard M. Zaner, The Way of Phenomenology, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, Inc., 1970 (OP). 16. Ronald Blythe, Introduction, Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. New York: Bantam Books, Classic edition, 1991, p. 10. 17. James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, New York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1939, p. 11. 18. Ibid., p. 7. 19. See my “Listening or Telling? Thoughts on Responsibility in Clinical Ethics Consultation,” Theoretical Medicine 17:3 (September 1996), pp. 255-277. 20. Paul Komesaroff, “From Bioethics to Microethics: Ethical Debate and Clinical Medicine,” in Paul A. Komesaroff (ed.), Troubled Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Postmodernism, Medical Ethics, and the Body. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995, p. 66. 21. As with all human action, things may change as the consultant begins and then proceeds; the consultant may well become a more central “issue” than other ethical matters. 22. Ludwig Edelstein, Ancient Medicine. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967, pp. 193-99. 23. Eric J. Cassell, Talking With Patients, Vol. II, Boston: MIT Press, 1985, p. 4-5. 24. Arthur Kleinman, The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing and the Human Condition, New York: Basic Books, 1988, p. 4. 25. Ibid., p. 49. 26. Ibid. 27. A good case might be made for conceiving clinical ethics as such an interpretive discipline, as I’ve argued elsewhere. 28. Cassell, Talking With Patients, op. cit., p. 4. 29. Kleinman, The Illness Narratives, op. cit., p. 17. 30. Ibid., p. 48.

Notes on Contributors (Parts 1 and 2)

Shazad AKHTAR is currently a doctoral student at Marquette University completing his dissertation on Merleau-Ponty’s and Husserl’s conceptions of “nature” and the “nature/spirit/consciousness” triad. Besides phenomenology, his interests include early Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, mysticism, and Asian philosophy. Gary BACKHAUS is a co-series editor for the book series, Toposophia: Sustainability, Dwelling, Design. He is executive and founding editor for the journal, Environment, Space, Place. In addition, he has edited fourteen volumes and has written many articles for journals such as Human Studies and Analecta Husserliana. He is a phenomenologist whose work spans the human sciences and the arts, but much of his work emphasizes a geographical turn. Michael D. BARBER is Professor of Philosophy at St. Louis University. He is the author of forty articles and six books, including Social Typifications and the Elusive Other: The Place of Sociology of Knowledge in Alfred Schutz’s Phenomenology (1988), Guardian of Dialogue: Max Scheler’s Phenomenology, Sociology of Knowledge, and Philosophy of Love (1993); Ethical Hermeneutics: Rationality in Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation (1998); Equality and Diversity: Phenomenological Investigations of Prejudice and Discrimination (2001); The Participating Citizen: A Biography of Alfred Schutz (2004), and most recently The Intentional Spectrum and Intersubjectivity: Phenomenology and the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians (forthcoming). He is also editing a volume of Schutz’s literary writings and a new volume of Collected Papers. He is editing a volume of Schutz’s literary writings, a new volume of Collected Papers. Bruce BAUGH is Professor of Philosophy at Thompson Rivers University, Kamloops, Canada and Executive Editor of Sartre Studies International. He is the author of over 30 articles and book chapters as well as one book, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (Routledge, 2003).

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Elizabeth A. BEHNKE (Betsy) founded the Study Project in Phenomenology of the Body (currently located in the Pacific Northwest) in 1987. She uses Husserlian methods to investigate such topics as kinaesthetic consciousness, interkinaesthetic affectivity, transformative somatic practice, and bodily protentionality, as well as addressing methodological issues. Her current research interests include such themes as bodily epochē; the kinaesthetic structure of enduring the unendurable; the problem of inner spatiality; and styles and structures of phenomenological practice. W. S. K. (Scott) CAMERON is Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA. After a tenure run dominated by papers in disparate areas including hermeneutics, critical theory, and feminist theory, his current research mines philosophical hermeneutics for insights into the ways we interpret the natural world. Alberto J.L. CARRILLO, PhD in philosophy (1994) at Freie Universität in Berlin. Ernst Tugendhat and Michael Theunissen were his advisors. From 1994 to 1997 he taught courses at the philosophical Institute of the FU-Berlin. In 1998, he accepted a post as professor of philosophy at the Universidad Autónoma de Puebla in Mexico . His main areas of research are history of science, aesthetics, and philosophy of technology. He has written on a wide range of topics, but mainly he has devoted his time to film theory and aesthetics and has focused his studies on the moving image. He is also a member of Sistema Nacional de Investigadores on the highest level. Being the actual president of the SPM (Society for Phenomenology and Media) he has served three times as host for the conferences (2002, 2008, 2010) at Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. www.acarrillocanan.com www.sophenomedia.com, www.philosophyofnewmedia.com. Maureen CONNOLLY, a professor of Physical Education and Kinesiology, has been a member of the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences at Brock University (St. Catharines, Ontario), since 1991. Her ongoing commitment to narrative inquiry intersects with her interest in poetic and bodily expressive modalities and how these might function across scholarly, pedagogic and other creative outlets. A national teaching award winner and a 2009 Erasmus Mundus scholar, Maureen “s teaching and research include curriculum,

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stressed embodiment, dance & movement education. Her theoretical dispositions are semiotic, phenomenological, post/anti-colonial, irreverent and quixotic. Maureen enjoys training, reading, writing, laughing, and authentic interpersonal engagement. Scott D. CHURCHILL is Professor and Graduate Program Director for the Psychology Department at the University of Dallas. He is interested in the development of phenomenological and hermeneutic methodologies, teaching classes in a wide range of topics from clinical psychology and primate studies to classes on cinema, history of psychoanalysis, and existential phenomenology. Dr. Churchill is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Editor-in-Chief for The Humanistic Psychologist, having served previously as Editor of Methods: A Journal for Human Science. His other editorial board affiliations include: Human Studies, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, Qualitative Research in Psychology, Encyclopaideia: Journal of Phenomenology and Education, The Janus Head, Theory and Psychology, The Psychotherapy Patient, and the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology. He is currently senior film critic for the Irving Community Television Network, and a local Roots & Shoots coordinator for The Jane Goodall Institute. Thomas D. Craig is a Communicology scholar in the Niagara Region (Ontario, Canada) with a late-blooming passion for visual media and photographic composition. Over the last several years he has immersed himself in the photographic art and technologies of representation, light, texture and tonality, along with the shadowy details, saturated presence and ongoing social drama of presentation and conflicting interpretation. He is a Communicologist with a disability and a photographer in process focusing on the moving body across culture and discourse, interactive movement profiles, and the human experience of relation. Zachary DAVIS is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Saint John’s University in Queens, New York. He has published articles in the areas of phenomenology and environmentalism. Recent articles include: “A Phenomenology of Political Apathy: Scheler on the Origins of Mass Violence,” “Vitale Solidarität als Überwindung der Umweltkrise,” and “The Commons: A Place for No One, A Place for All.” Currently, he is at work on a book length manuscript on Max Scheler’s political philosophy (Love and Power: Max Scheler’s

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Political Thought and Contribution), as well as an English translation of Scheler’s work, Cognition and Labor: A Study concerning the Value and Limits of the Pragmatic Cognition of the World. Eric DUFFY is a lecturer in the philosophy department at Saint Vincent College and Seton Hill University. His research interests concern the historical areas of early modern philosophy, classical German philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, in the themes of the theory of subjectivity, epistemology, and ethics. He is finishing a book entitled “Mounting the Stage of the World: Theory of the Subject as Actor in the Parallel Positions of Fichte and Sartre.” Lester EMBREE is the William F. Dietrich Eminent Scholar in Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University and was the President of the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology, Inc. (19842005). He is editor in chief of the Encyclopedia of Phenomenology (1997) and co-editor of Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy (2002), the Handbook of Phenomenological Aesthetics (2009), and other edited volumes. He is author of Reflective Analysis: An Introduction into Phenomenological Investigation (2003), Fenomenologia Continuada: Contribuciones al Analysis Reflexivo de la Cultura (2007), and Environment Technology Justification (2009) and also a number investigative and scholarly essays in and on constitutive phenomenology. His deepest interest is in the theory of the cultural sciences, archaeology in particular. Matthew C. ESHLEMAN is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His recent research centers on phenomenology and freewill, see his “What is It Like to Be Free” in Reading Sartre, (ed.) Jonathan Webber, Routledge (2010). He is also working on a genealogical history of armed conflict as it relates to wealth accumulation and questions concerning justification. Saulius GENIUSAS is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at James Madison University. More than a dozen of his articles have been published in North American and European philosophy journals. His main philosophical interests lie in phenomenology and hermeneutics. At present he is working on a book manuscript, The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Matthew J. GOODWIN teaches philosophy at Northern Arizona University and has previously taught at Saint Cloud State University and Missouri State University. In 2007 he received the Martin

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C. Dillon Memorial Lecture Award for “Art and the Deflagration of Being: Setting Passivity Afire.” His main interests are in phenomenology, aesthetics, and contemporary art. He is currently working on a book manuscript on Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetic phenomenological method. Steen HALLING is a licensed psychologist and professor of psychology at Seattle University, Seattle, USA, where he teaches in the MA program in existential-phenomenological psychology as well as in the undergraduate program. His research and publications have focused on topics such as psychology of forgiveness, phenomenological study of psychopathology, psychology of hopelessness, interpersonal relations, and qualitative research methods. He is editor of the International Human Science Research Conference Newsletter, co-editor, with Ronald S. Valle of Existential-Phenomenological Perspectives in Psychology (Plenum, 1989), and author of Intimacy, Transcendence, and Psychology: Closeness and Openness in Everyday Life (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Judith E. HECTOR, Ed.D., University of Tennessee (1978), Professor Emerita of Walters State Community College, Tennessee, continues after retirement to teach mathematics to undergraduates and to consult on preservice teacher education. Her current research interest involves the experiences of women in 19th century German-speaking areas, especially as described in autobiography and fiction. Mark A. HECTOR (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Tennessee. He teaches courses in Humanistic Psychology and Theories of Personality. His areas of interest are Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Existentialism, Aesthetics and Social Justice. His most recent phenomenological research co-authored publication is “Listening to Military Members Returning From Iraq and/or Afghanistan” in Professional Psychology: Research and Practice. George HEFFERNAN, Ph.D., University of Cologne (1981), is Professor in the Philosophy Department of Merrimack College (North Andover, Massachusetts). He specializes in Phenomenology, Existentialism, and Hermeneutics. He is the author of Bedeutung und Evidenz bei Edmund Husserl (1983), Am Anfang war die Logik (1988), and Isagoge in die phänomenologische Apophantik (Phaenomenologica 107) (1989). He is the editor/translator of René Descartes: Meditationes de

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prima philosophia/Meditations on First Philosophy (1990), René Descartes: Discours de la méthode/Discourse on the Method (1994), and René Descartes: Regulae ad directionem ingenii/Rules for the Direction of the Natural Intelligence (1998). He is working on an edition/translation of Augustine: Contra Academicos/Against the Academicians. He has also published numerous articles in various journals and presented numerous papers at various conferences. Emma R. JONES is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her research interests, broadly speaking, include feminist philosophy, 20th Century continental philosophy, and Ancient Greek philosophy. She is working on a dissertation that proposes a new interpretation of Luce Irigaray’s work, particularly as concerns the ontology and ethics of sexual difference. She has an article in PhaenEx: Journal of Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture and one forthcoming in Epoché. Hwa Yol JUNG is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Moravian College in Bethlehem, PA. Although he was trained in Western political theory, he has a strong interest in phenomenology, existential philosophy, hermeneutics, comparative philosophy (East and West), comparative culture, comparative literature, communication theory, and environmental philosophy and ethics. He has authored and edited numerous books, special journal issues, and articles in the above-mentioned fields. His most recent publications include The Way of Ecopiety: Essays in Transversal Geophilosophy (2009) and Transversality and Intercultural Texts: Essays in Phenomenology and Comparative Philosophy (forthcoming). A volume of essays in his honor titled Comparative Political Theory and CrossCultural Philosophy, ed. Jin Y. Park, was published in 2009. He is editing a collection of essays titled Political Phenomenology. His works have been translated into several European and Asian languages. The Institute of Philosophy, which is a branch of the Rumanian Academy of Sciences, is planning to translate all of his major books and essays. Eugene KELLY is professor of philosophy at the New York Institute of Technology. Among his publications: Max Scheler (Boston: Twayne, 1977); Structure and Diversity (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997); “VirtueBased Ethics and Moral Rules in the Non-Formal Ethics of Value,” The Journal of Value Inquiry 31: 387-397, 1997; “Vom Ursprung des

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Menschen bei Max Scheler,” in Person und Wert, ed. W. Henckmann et al. Bonn, Bouvier, 2000; “Zur Schelers Begriff der Philosophie,” in Vernunft und Gefühl, ed. Christian Bermes et al. (Würzburg: Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, 2003); “Material Value-Ethics: Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann,” Philosophy Compass vol.3 no.1 (January, 2008); The Basics of Western Philosophy (Prometheus Books, 2007). He is a member of the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat of the MaxScheler-Gesellschaft, and co-editor (with Tziporah Kasachkoff) of the APA Newsletter on Teaching Philosophy. Sarah LaChance ADAMS is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Oregon. Her interests include phenomenology, philosophical psychology, feminist ethics, and the history of philosophy. She is currently writing her dissertation entitled: “Insights from Maternal Ambivalence: Intersubjectivity and Ethics in Levinas, Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir.” She has published several articles, and is co-editing a book of philosophical essays on pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Leonard LAWLOR is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Penn State University. He is the author of six books: This is not Sufficient: An Essay on Animality in Derrida (Columbia University Press, 2007); The Implications of Immanence: Towards a New Concept of Life (Fordham, 2006); Derrida and Husserl: The Basic Problem of Phenomenology (Indiana, 2002); Thinking Through French Philosophy: The Being of the Question (Indiana, 2003); The Challenge of Bergsonism: Phenomenology, Ontology, Ethics (Continuum Books, 2003); and Imagination and Chance: The Difference Between the Thought of Ricoeur and Derrida (The SUNY Press, 1992). He is one of the co-editors of Chiasmi International: Trilingual Studies Concerning the Thought of Merleau-Ponty. He has translated Merleau-Ponty and Hyppolite into English. He has written dozens of articles on Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Bergson, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Gadamer. He is writing two books: Never will there be enough Written: An Essay on the Problem of the Worst in Deleuze and Guattari (for Columbia University Press) and Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy: Towards the Outside (for Indiana University Press). David LEICHTER (M.A., Northern Illinois University, 2003) is currently completing his dissertation entitled “The Poetics of Remembrance: Communal Memory and Identity in Heidegger and Ricoeur”

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at Marquette University. His interests include the phenomenology of memory and the philosophy of history. Caroline LUNDQUIST is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at the University of Oregon. Lundquist specializes in ethics and moral theory, with an emphasis on the work of Aristotle and Kant. She has also made contributions in the field of feminist phenomenology, including her 2008 Hypatia article, “Being Torn: Toward a Phenomenology of Unwanted Pregnancy.” She is currently co-editing a volume tentatively entitled Philosophical Inquiry into Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering, and writing her dissertation, The Promise of Kindness, in which she characterizes kindness as the preeminent response to the tragic human situation. Chris NAGEL teaches philosophy at California State University, Stanislaus, and is a founding member and past president of the Society for Phenomenology and Media. His main philosophical interests are in phenomenology of perception. Lately that has meant attending to embodiment, subjection, passivity, perforation, absorption, and other experiences of whatever else the opposite of perceptual projection will turn out to be. Chris is a faculty rights representative and activist member of the California Faculty Association – the union of CSU faculty. Dennis SKOCZ is a veteran career diplomat of the U.S. Foreign Service currently working as a consultant in strategic planning and professional development. As an independent scholar with a doctoral degree in philosophy from Duquesne University, Dr. Skocz has published numerous papers in journals (Analecta Husserliana, Environmental Philosophy, Philosophy and the Contemporary World, Glimpse) and anthologies (Lexington Books) on the media, environment and spatiality, and aesthetics. Recent contributions of his include chapters in Symbolic Spaces (Springer Verlag), French Interpretations of Heidegger (SUNY Press), Heidegger and the Earth (University of Toronto Press), and Phenomenology 2005 (Zeta Books). Currently, Dr. Skocz has applied phenomenological analysis to economics and market phenomena. He is active in the Husserl and Heidegger Circles and was president of the Society for Phenomenology and Media. Dr. Skocz is an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Northern Virginia Community College and the University of the District of Colombia.

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Lori K. SCHNEIDER (Fielding Graduate University, PhD 2009) has had a long career with major corporations, first in the information technology field and for the past several years as a leadership development professional for a large global information technology services company. Working from a home office and collaborating with colleagues around the world transformed her sense of place and led to questions about the experience of being in a place. Her dissertation was a hermeneutic phenomenological study of how remote workers in global corporations experience and interpret local place. Her research and practice interests center on Heideggerian, interdisciplinary, phenomenological investigation of place. Areas of inquiry include place-sensitive architecture, local community organizing to build a sense of authentic place, and the transcendent sense of place experienced by those who work or live in multiple places. This is her first scholarly publication. Michael SCHWARTZ, M.D. is a Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Hawaii and a Staff Psychiatrist at Austin State Hospital in Austin, Texas; He is Founding President of the Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP) and a Founding Editor of the journal Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine. In 1998, Dr. Schwartz shared with Professor Osborne WIGGINS the Dr. Margret Egnér Stiftung Prize given at the University of Zurich for “contributing with their work to a more human world in which the human being with its mental needs stands in the center.” David SEAMON (PhD, Clark University, 1977) is a Professor of Architecture at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas, USA. Trained in behavioral geography and environment-behavior research, he is interested in a phenomenological approach to place, architecture, environmental experience, and environmental design as place making. His books include: A Geography of the Lifeworld (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).Dwelling, Place and Environment: Toward a Phenomenology of Person and World (edited with philosopher Robert Mugerauer; New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); Dwelling, Seeing, and Designing: Toward a Phenomenological Ecology (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1993); and Goethe’s Way of Science: A Phenomenology of Nature (edited with physicist Arthur Zajonc, Albany, New York: State University of New York

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Press, 1998). He is editor of the Environmental and Architectural Phenomenology Newsletter. www.arch.ksu.edu/seamon/ M. Reza SHIRAZI is a Georg Forster Postdoctoral Fellow of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and works as a guest researcher at Department of Urban and Regional Planning, Technische Universität of Berlin. He is an Iranian architect who taught and practiced in his home country for five years. From fall 2005 to summer 2009 he did his PhD in the L.S. Theorie der Architektur, Brandenburgische Technische Universität Cottbus, Germany. Shirazi’s dissertation is entitled, “Architectural Theory and Practice and the Question of Phenomenology: The Contribution of Tadao Ando to the Phenomenological Discourse.” His postdoctoral research focuses on the feasibility of Sustainable Critical Regionalism in MENA region, and attempts to propose a more “place-specific” and “situational” interpretation of Sustainability in the context of Middle Eastern cities. Shirazi is co-editor of Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, an international journal of architectural theory. In order to introduce architectural phenomenology to Iranian scholars, architects, and students, he is publishing a “Phenomenological Series” in Farsi. The first book entitled Architecture of the Senses and the Fragile Phenomenology of Juhani Pallasmaa is now under publication. Robert D. STOLOROW received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Harvard University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, in 2007. He is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA School of Medicine and a Founding Faculty Member at the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis. He is the author of Trauma and Human Existence: Autobiographical, Psychoanalytic, and Philosophical Reflections (Routledge, 2007) and coauthor of Worlds of Experience: Interweaving Philosophical and Clinical Dimensions in Psychoanalysis (Basic Books, 2002) and seven other books. For more than three decades, he and his collaborators have been seeking to rethink psychoanalysis as a form of phenomenological inquiry. Sandra P. THOMAS is Professor and Director of the PhD Program in Nursing at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She has a special interest in using existential phenomenology to study lived experience of emotions, such as anger, and clinical conditions, such as chronic pain. This research method is elucidated in her book Lis-

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tening to Patients: A Phenomenological Approach to Nursing Research and Practice, coauthored with psychologist Howard Pollio (2002, Springer Publishing). Thomas and Pollio lead an interdisciplinary interpretive group at the University of Tennessee in which phenomenological philosophy informs analysis of interview data. Thomas is the author of more than 130 journal articles, books, and book chapters. Peter WESTMORLAND (University of California, Irvine, 2010) works in Continental philosophy and early modern philosophy, especially Rousseau. In phenomenology, beyond his proto-phenomenological interpretation ofRousseau, he has recently begun a project on the phenomenology of handedness, examining the asymmetries of experience offered by different varieties of handedness. Osborne WIGGINS (M.A. and Ph.D., New School for Social Research) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky. With Michael Schwartz he has published numerous articles on phenomenological psychiatry. These articles have addressed classification in psychiatry, the lifeworld-science relationship, schizophrenic experience, and other topics. He is a member of the faculty of the M.A. program in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at the University of Louisville. With Annette C. Allen he has recently edited Clinical Ethics and the Necessity of Stories: Essays in Honor of Richard M. Zaner (Springer Publishers). YOSHIDA, Akihiro is Professor Emeritus of the University of Tokyo since 1995. (BA & MA from the University of Tokyo. Ph.D. 1967 of the University of Illinois, USA,). Honorary member of the Japanese Association of Educational Psychology. Member of the International Human Science Research Conference. The field of his interests is in Phenomenological Psychology of Education. He is a co-translator of S.L.Rubinstein; Grundlagen der allgemeinen Psychologie and of D.P. Ausubel; School Learning and E. Keen, A Primer in Phenomenological Psychology. Among his books in Japanese are: I Learn and I Teach: A way toward phenomenology of teaching. Methods of Education, A Psychology of Education, Encountering a Child, A co-editor of the series: Phenomenological Studies on “I Learn and I Teach”. The editor of Heart-Moving Psychological Studies, 2010, Kawashima-shoten, Tokyo, Japan. His articles in English include: “My life in Psychology”, “On Tamamushi-iro (Intendedly Ambiguous) Expression”, and

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“A Phenomenological Explication of a Master Teacher’s Questioning Practices and its Implications for the Explanation/Understanding issue in Psychology as a Human Science”. Richard M. ZANER is Ann Geddes Stahlman Professor Emeritus of Medical Ethics and Philosophy of Medicine at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine and College of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of ten original books and the editor of eleven others. He has published more than 148 articles and book chapters. An issue of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics and a book, Clinical Ethics and the Necessity of Stories: Essays in Honor of Richard M. Zaner, are devoted to his writings; a special lecture in his name in ethics and medicine is presented by Vanderbilt University’s Medical Center; and an archives of his writings is available at its Center for Biomedical Ethics & Society. At present, he is working on the plenary lecture for a forthcoming conference, “Stories of Illness and Healing - Literature, Ethics and Healthcare,” at the University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is also working to complete a third book of narratives. May ZINDEL, M.A. in Art and Aesthetics from Benemerita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, Mexico. (2005) She studied architecture at the University of Illinois and received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently teaches art and art theory at Unarte University . Her art has been exhibited in Mexico , USA , Cuba and Chile, and includes paintings, photography, art objects and videos. A ready-made was awarded first prize in the Puebla State Art Competition. Images that Disturb discusses her ideas on art and aesthetics. Research interests in art and cinema, topics on which have been widely published. She is an advisor for the Department of Arts and Culture, Puebla.

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