The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness 1003350666, 9781003350668

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF MINDFULNESS

The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness brings together two schools of thought and practice that – despite rarely being examined jointly – provide an incredibly fruitful way for exploring thinking, the mind, and the nature and practice of mindfulness. Applying the concepts and methods of phenomenology, an international team of contributors explore mindfulness from a variety of different viewpoints and traditions. The handbook’s 35 chapters are divided into seven clear parts:

• • • • • • •

Mindfulness in the Western Traditions Mindfulness in the Eastern Traditions Mindfulness, Ethics, and Well-Being Mindfulness, Time, and Attention Mindfulness and Embodiment Applications: Mindfulness in Life Conclusion: Mindfulness and Phenomenology?

Within these sections, a rich array of topics and themes are explored, ranging from Stoicism and the origins of mindfulness in Buddhism and eastern thought to meditation, self-awareness, the body and embodiment, and critiques of mindfulness. Additionally, the book delves into the ways the ideas of leading phenomenological thinkers, including Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Levinas, and other leading thinkers, such as Irigaray, can contribute to understanding the relationship between phenomenology and mindfulness. A valuable resource for those researching phenomenology and applications of phenomenology, this handbook will also be of great interest to students and practitioners of mindfulness in areas such as counseling and psychotherapy. Susi Ferrarello is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at California State University, East Bay, USA. Among her books is the recently published The Ethics of Love (Routledge, 2023). She is also a philosophical counselor and writes for Psychology Today. Christos Hadjioannou is Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus. He has edited volumes on Heidegger’s philosophy as well as on Irigaray’s philosophy. He is currently writing a monograph on Heidegger and the Stoics (forthcoming 2024).

ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOKS IN PHILOSOPHY

Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy are state-of-the-art surveys of emerging, newly refreshed, and important fields in philosophy, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, thinkers, and recent developments in research. All chapters for each volume are specially commissioned, and written by leading scholars in the field. Carefully edited and organized, Routledge Handbooks in Philosophy provide indispensable reference tools for students and researchers seeking a comprehensive overview of new and exciting topics in philosophy. They are also valuable teaching resources as accompaniments to textbooks, anthologies, and research-orientated publications. Also available: THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHILOSOPHY OF RESPONSIBILITY Edited by Maximilian Kiener THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF WOMEN AND ANCIENT GREEK PHILOSOPHY Edited by Sara Brill and Catherine McKeen THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PROPERTIES Edited by A.R.J. Fisher and Anna-Sofia Maurin THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVIDENCE Edited by Maria Lasonen-Aarnio and Clayton Littlejohn THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF MINDFULNESS Edited by Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/RoutledgeHandbooks-in-Philosophy/book-series/RHP

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF PHENOMENOLOGY OF MINDFULNESS

Edited by Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou

Cover image: © Getty Images First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-39631-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39634-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35066-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668 Typeset in Sabon by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou

1

PART I

Mindfulness in the Western Traditions

17

1 Pyrrhonian Epoché, Mindfulness, and Being-in-the-World Georgios Petropoulos

19

2 Mindfulness as Motivation for Phenomenological Reduction Ming-Hon Chu

38

3 A Levinassian Critique of Mindfulness Pierrick Simon

54

4 Merleau-Ponty and Mindfulness Timothy Mooney

66

5 Husserl and Mindfulness Susi Ferrarello

78

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Contents

6 Logoi of the Soul: Phenomenological Mindfulness in Plato’s Phaedrus95 Tanja Staehler 7 Heideggerian and Stoic Mindfulness: Two Competing Models with Common Ground Christos Hadjioannou

106

PART II

Mindfulness in the Eastern Traditions

121

8 Radical Relationality: A Philosophical Approach to Mindfulness Inspired by Nishida Kitarō Francesca Greco

123

9 Phenomenological Insights from Postural Yoga Practice Hayden Kee

138

10 A Phenomenology of Mindfulness Practice in Sufism152 Marc Applebaum 11 Deluded Mindfulness175 Jason Dockstader 12 Deconstructing Mindfulness: Heidegger, Tanabe, and the Kyoto School189 Kurt C.M. Mertel and Samuel S. White PART III

Mindfulness, Ethics, and Well-Being

205

13 Could Mindfulness Be Short on Meaning?207 Luce Irigaray 14 Freeing Ourselves from Technology: Rethinking Mindfulness219 Lisa Foran 15 ‘Let It Be’: Heidegger and Eckhart on Gelassenheit231 Dermot Moran 16 Mindfulness as Open and Reflective Attention: A Phenomenological Perspective252 Diego D’Angelo vi

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17 Mindfulness as Ethical Practice: Lévinas’ Phenomenology and Engaging with the World Nikolaus-Palle Carey

266

PART IV

Mindfulness, Time and Attention

277

18 Contrasting Emotions and Notions of Temporality in Mindfulness Practice and in Heidegger’s Phenomenology Evie Filea

279

19 Varieties of Self-Consciousness in Mindfulness Meditation Odysseus Stone 20 Husserl on Emotional Expectations and Emotional Dispositions Towards the Future: A Contribution to Mindfulness Debates on Present Moment Awareness and Emotional Regulation Celia Cabrera 21 Being Mindful about Nothing Mahon O’Brien

290

304 317

22 The Respiratory Context of Dukkha and Nirvana: The Buddha’s Mindful Phenomenology of Breathing Petri Berndtson

337

PART V

Mindfulness and Embodiment

351

23 Between Phenomenology and Mindfulness: The Role of Presence in the Clinical and Therapeutic Context Anya Daly and Chris McCaw

353

24 Heidegger’s Gelassenheit as Embodied Mindfulness Tomás Lally 25 Parallel Lives of Buddha and Socrates: On Epochè as Transcendental Transformation Carlos Lobo 26 Being Mindful of the Other Magnus Englander

367

378 399

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Contents PART VI

Applications: Mindfulness In Life

411

27 Mindfulness and the Phenomenology of Aesthetics: Reappraising Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty Colleen Fitzpatrick

413

28 Mindfulness and Creativity: The Impact of Michel Henry and Otto Rank on Psychoanalysis Max Schaefer

425

29 The Mindfulness of Sacrifice: Towards a “Phenomenology” of History438 Joseph Cohen 30 Engaging with Life Mindfully Gerhard Thonhauser

445

31 Meditation, Lucidity, and the Phenomenology of Daydreaming James Morley

457

32 Thinking Being: The Educational Scope of a Fruitful Convergence between Phenomenology and Mindfulness Eduardo Caianiello

474

PART VII

Conclusion: Mindfulness and Phenomenology?

489

33 Phenomenology and Mindfulness-Awareness Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol

491

34 Mindless Obfuscation: A Reply to Depraz, Petitmengin, and Bitbol502 Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi 35 Mindful Clarification: Why It Is Necessary to Reply Once Again to Stone and Zahavi Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol

508

Index

513

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CONTRIBUTORS

Marc Applebaum teaches phenomenological psychological research at Saybrook University. His publications focus on consciousness studies, the phenomenology and hermeneutics of religious experience, and qualitative research methodology. An organizational consultant and pastoral counselor, he is co-founder of Itlaq Foundation, a California-based nonprofit organization dedicated to a phenomenologically informed, non-sectarian approach to meditative practice, intercultural dialogue, and open inquiry in the service of ethical community. He has presented internationally on varied topics in phenomenological research and serves on the board of journals including The Humanistic Psychologist and the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. He can be reached at [email protected] Petri Berndtson, PhD, is research associate of the Institute for Philosophical Studies at the Science and Research Centre Koper, Slovenia. His main research interests and expertise lie in the experiential phenomenon of breathing, phenomenology (especially Merleau-Ponty), embodiment, the elemental poetics of air (Bachelard), and contemplative studies. He is the author of Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Respiratory Primacy of Being (Routledge, 2023) and the co-editor of Atmospheres of Breathing (SUNY Press, 2018). He is a practitioner of mindfulness of breathing meditation and other forms of breathwork. He has also given many experiential workshops on mindful breathing and various somatic practices. Michel Bitbol is emeritus researcher at CNRS/École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France. He received an MD, a PhD in physics, and a “Habilitation” in philosophy. He formulated a philosophy of quantum mechanics based on phenomenological and neo-Kantian conceptions. He then turned to a first-person conception of consciousness arising from an experience of the phenomenological époché. More recently, he engaged in a debate with the philosophical movement called “speculative realism”, from the same standpoint. Some relevant publications are: “Neurophenomenology, an ongoing practice of/in consciousness”, Constructivist Foundations, 7(3), 165–173, 2012; “Review of Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy. Evan Thompson”, Journal of Mind and Behavior, 36, 101–112, 2015; “Consciousness, being and life: phenomenological approaches to mindfulness”, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50, ix

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127–161, 2019; M. Bitbol, “The tangled dialectic of body and consciousness: a metaphysical counterpart of neurophenomenology”, Constructivist Foundations, 16, 141–151, 2021. Celia Cabrera is Assistant Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET). She received her PhD from the University of Buenos Aires in 2017. Her research interests are focused on the field of Husserlian phenomenology, especially on phenomenology of emotions and willing, ethics, and value theory. She has published various articles in the field and has co-edited a volume on phenomenology of emotions. She held doctoral and postdoctoral research stays at the Husserl-Archiv of the University of Cologne and at the University of Graz. Eduardo Caianiello holds a doctorate in philosophy and cognitive sciences (EHESS, Paris) and is a professor of philosophy in French high schools. He is the author of several books all devoted to the immense question of education (first of all to scientific thought) in the absence of a paradigm that allows the conception of a natural human subjectivity, effective and capable of a real evolution, autonomously generated. Among others: La science et la voix de l’évenement. A la recherche du sens, foreword by Alexis Philonenko (L’Harmattan 2010); Sperare nella scuola. Una nuova educazione alla scienza nel sistema dei licei. (Aracne 2010), foreword by Bruno D’Amore and Jean Dhombres. Intelligence de la nature, nature de l’intelligence. Le chiasme poétique comme base expressive d’une mathématisation de l’intelligence humaine. foreword by Massimo Marraffa (Aracne 2022). His doctoral thesis – the book La genèse des mathématiques et la puissance dynamique du mental humain. Une démonstration d’existence, préface de Gérard Vergnaud et Bruno D’Amore (EUE 2011) founds an integrated vision of the incarnate human mind (the mental body of Man) as a dynamic entity and physical force capable of personal educational development: the only reality able to account really (and not mythographically) for the phenomena of mathematical neuro-cognition. Eduardo Caianiello is the creator of EIRONEIA, School of Philosophy (www.eironeia.eu). Nikolaus-Palle Carey is a final-year undergraduate student at California State University, USA. He lives with his wife, along with their cats and pigeons, in Oakland, California. When he’s not suffering from impostor syndrome, he enjoys reading, writing, and fencing. Ming-Hon Chu is a doctoral researcher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He specializes in phenomenology and focuses primarily on the methodological problem of motivation. He also has a cross-disciplinary interest and is working on the phenomenology of dreaming. He has published a monograph, under the title Formen der Versunkenheit, on Eugen Fink’s phenomenology of dreaming. Joseph Cohen is Associate Professor in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Founding Co-member of Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco, Principality of Monaco. Founding member and Secretary of Irish Phenomenological Circle. Principal Investigator of “Jewish Philosophy and Contemporary Thought”, Newman Center for the Study of Religions, University College Dublin. Founding Member of International Research Group “L’Humain qui vient/The Human to Come”, in collaboration with: Le Fresnoy Studio National (France), School of Philosophy, University College Dublin (Ireland), Penn State University (USA), Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage (UMR 8566 CNRS/EHESS – Paris) (France), Collège de France. Member of Aesthetics and Art Theory x

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Research Group: “L’Incertitude des Formes/The Uncertainty of Forms”, Le Fresnoy – Studio National (France). Directeur de Programme at the Collège International de Philosophie (Paris) (2004–2010). Member of Editorial Committee for French Journal Les Temps Modernes (Paris, Gallimard) (2010–2016). Member of Editorial Committee for French Journal Cités (Paris, Presses Universitaires de France) (2010–2016). Member of “PHILéPOL” Research Cluster, Université de Paris V René Descartes (2009–2016). Anya Daly completed a doctorate (en-cotutelle, Université de Paris 1 et University of Melbourne, 2012. Anya conducted doctoral research in France (2005–2010) under the supervision of Professor Renaud Barbaras, and two years in Ireland under the mentorship of Professor Dermot Moran, on an Irish Research Council Fellowship (2016–2018). Anya is currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Tasmania. She is also co-lead of the EthicsLAB, School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. Anya investigates the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of perception, aesthetics, philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism, and Buddhist philosophy. Diego D’Angelo, PhD, is currently a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in philosophy at the University of Würzburg, Germany. He obtained his PhD at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau and at the Università degli Studi di Milano with a thesis on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology of perception, now published by Springer (Zeichenhorizonte. Semiotische Strukturen in Husserls Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung). His main research topics include phenomenology and hermeneutics. He is working on a new book under the title Embodied Attention. Phenomenological Perspectives. Natalie Depraz is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Rouen Normandy and a University Research Member at the Husserl-Archives in ENS-Paris. Here are some of her publications related to the topic of the present volume: On becoming aware. A praxis of experiencing (with F. J. Varela and P. Vermersch), Amsterdam-Boston, Benjamins Press, 2003; “Empathy and Compassion: Confronting Experiential Praxis and Buddhist Teachings” (with F. J. Varela) in Space, Time, Culture (D. Carr and Cheung Fai eds.), Dordrecht, Kluwer, Contributions to Phenomenology, 2004; “Epoché in light of Samatha-Vipassana Meditation. Chögyam Trungpa’s buddhist teaching facing Husserl’s Phenomenology” (T. Sparby ed.), Meditation Special Issue, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2019, vol. 26, no. 7–8; “Husserlian Phenomenology in the light of microphenomenology”, in Husserl, Kant and transcendental phenomenology (I. Apostolescu, C. Serban eds.), Berlin, de Gruyter, 2020, pp. 505–523. Jason Dockstader is a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy, University College Cork, Ireland. His research interests are in metaethics, Chinese philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Magnus Englander, PhD, is Associate Professor at Malmö University and Associate Editor for the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology. He is the author of multiple articles in phenomenological psychology and editor of the book Phenomenology and the Social Context of Psychiatry (Bloomsbury, 2018) and co-editor of Empathy and Ethics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023). xi

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Susi Ferrarello is Associate Professor at California State University, East Bay, USA. Among her books is the recently published The Ethics of Love (Routledge, 2023). She is also a philosophical counselor and writes for Psychology Today. Evie Filea is a PhD candidate in philosophy in University College Dublin and a lecturer in Dublin City University. Her current research interests are focused on the performativity of philosophy. Her PhD project examines several aspects of Martin Heidegger’s early philosophy in relation to Edward Bond’s late dramaturgy. She has a background in pedagogy, drama and visual arts and she is always looking for opportunities to integrate these fields when communicating and teaching philosophy. She has presented her work in several international Conferences and workshops, and she is often invited to interdisciplinary events as a guest speaker. Colleen Fitzpatrick is a visual artist, who lives in Ireland and combines practice and theory in a non-institutional setting. Colleen is a former Tutor in the Department of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway where she obtained her PhD in the Philosophy of Art and Culture in 2016. Her research focuses on philosophical aesthetics and phenomenology, particularly in relation to Eastern philosophies and painting. She holds a BA and an MA in psychology from University College Dublin and a BA in fine art from the Atlantic Technological University, Co Mayo, Ireland. Colleen is also a qualified instructor of yoga. Lisa Foran is Assistant Professor of philosophy at the UCD School of Philosophy where she researches and lectures in European thought. Her research uses translation to approach the ethics of intersubjective relations within the frameworks of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Her current work uses those frameworks to investigate the relationship between translation and aesthetics. She is the author of Derrida, The Subject and the Other: Surviving, Translating and the Impossible (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), editor of Translation and Philosophy (Peter Lang, 2012), and co-editor of Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (Springer, 2016) as well as numerous book chapters and articles. Francesca Greco is currently a research assistant in the DFG Koselleck-Project “Histories of Philosophy in Global Perspective” (2019–2024) and a PhD student at the University of Hildesheim in the field of intercultural philosophy with a focus on Japanese Philosophy. Her main research interests are negativity, relationality, and the history of philosophy in global perspective. She co-edited the 10th volume of Frontiers in Japanese Philosophy “Transitions. Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy” (2021) and her recent publications include “Die Begegnung mit den eigenen Schatten: Polylogisches Philosophieren in globaler Perspektive zur Zeit der Dekolonisierung” (2023), “Reformulating Indifferentism” (2022), “A Look into the Storia delle storie generali della filosofia and its English Edition from a Global Perspective” (2022), and “Logik der Grenze: Räume des Übergehens im Anschluss an Nishida Kitarō” (2021). She is the winner of the DAAD-Prize 2022 for the outstanding achievement of a foreign student and has also produced several video conferences on YouTube. Christos Hadjioannou is Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus. He earned his PhD at University of Sussex (2015). He held research positions at University College Dublin, and Sofia University

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Contributors

“St. Kliment Ohridski”. He has edited volumes on Heidegger’s philosophy as well as on Irigaray’s philosophy. He is currently writing a monograph on Heidegger and the Stoics, forthcoming in 2024 (Palgrave Macmillan). Luce Irigaray is trained in philosophy, linguistics, literature, psychology, and psychoanalysis. She has got a doctorate in philosophy and literature (University of Louvain, Belgium, 1955); in linguistics (University of Nanterre, France, 1968); in philosophy (University ParisVincennes, 1974). She also received four honorary doctorates from the School of Advanced Studies of the University of London; from the University College of London; from the University of Nottingham; from the University of Bergen, Norway. Luce Irigaray made her career in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris, France. She has held a seminar in University of Paris-Vincennes and in the College de Philosophie, Paris, and also in various universities across the world – for example in the University of Rotterdam (Holland), the University of Bergen (Norway), the University of Macerata (Italy). She also gave lectures and participated in conferences all over the world. Hayden Kee is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research is primarily in phenomenology with a focus on mind, language, and embodiment. He also has a personal and philosophical interest in yoga philosophy and practice. He is a certified vinyasa yoga teacher. Tomás Lally is a final-year PhD student pursuing a practice-based PhD in English and Philosophy at University of Galway. His philosophy thesis is on the origins of subjectivity. He is also completing a novel on the theme of new beginnings. He has presented papers at international conferences, most recently at the British Society for Phenomenology annual conference held at University of Exeter in August 2022. His paper was titled: “The Origins of Shame”. He is currently preparing that paper for publication. Carlos Lobo, Centre Gilles-Gaston Granger, Université d’Aix-Marseille. Phenomenologist and epistemologist, he published recently “Some Reasons to reopen the question of foundations of probability theory following the Rota way”, The Philosophers and Mathematicians, Ed. H. Tahiri, Springer, 2018, and co-edited Weyl and the Problem of Space, From Mathematics to Philosophy, Springer, 2019; Écrire comme composer, le rôle des diagrammes en musique, Delatour, Paris; 2021; When Form Becomes Substance, Diagrams, Power of Gesture and Phenomenology of Space, Birkhäuser, 2022. Chris McCaw is a lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education and Education Fellow at the Contemplative Studies Centre, University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the lives and work of teachers under conditions of social, technological, and political change, drawing on resources in philosophy and social theory. Chris’ research interests include the nature of teaching and learning, reflective and reflexive practice, the purposes of education, post-secularism in education, and questions of self, identity, and agency. His current research projects explore the integration of contemplative practices into educational discourses and practices, and the implications of post-truth conditions for education. Chris conducts qualitative, empirical studies as well as theoretical inquiries into the foundations of teaching, education, and contemplative practices.

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Contributors

Kurt C.M. Mertel is currently Associate Professor of Philosophy at the American University of Sharjah. He is the co-editor of three books in critical social theory: Hans-Herbert Kögler’s Critical Hermeneutics (Bloomsbury, 2022), Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Johann P. Árnason’s Macro-Social Theory (Routledge 2023), and Democratizing Critique: Social and Political Philosophy After James Bohman (Routledge, forthcoming). His work appears in the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Social Criticism and the Journal of Philosophy of Education, among others, and is currently completing a two-volume monograph on Heidegger’s Being and Time: Re-thinking the Sociality of the Self: The Emancipatory Project of Being & Time (Volume 1) and Authentic Selfhood and the Possibility of an Individualizing Sociality: The Emancipatory Project of Being & Time (Volume 2) (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). Timothy Mooney is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. He has published articles on phenomenological philosophy, deconstruction, and process thought. Together with Dermot Moran, he has edited The Phenomenology Reader (Routledge, 2002). More recently he has authored Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed (Modern European Philosophy) (Cambridge University Press, 2022). Dermot Moran is the Inaugural Holder of the Joseph Professorship in Catholic Philosophy, Boston College. He was previously Professor of Philosophy (Metaphysics & Logic) at University College Dublin. He is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy and Institut International de Philosophie. Publications include: Introduction to Phenomenology (2000), Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology (2005), Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (2012), and, co-authored with Joseph Cohen, Husserl Dictionary (2012). He is currently Past President of the Fédération International des Sociétés de Philosophie (FISP). James Morley is a professor of clinical psychology at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Since 2014, he has served as the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Phenomenological Psychology and is the recent past president of the Interdisciplinary Coalition of North American Phenomenologists (ICNAP). His publications and research interests are in the application of phenomenological thought to psychological research methodology and topics such as social theory, imagination, and South Asian thought. Mahon O’Brien is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. His work is largely concerned with issues in phenomenology, in particular, the work of Martin Heidegger. He has published three books titled Heidegger: Heidegger and Authenticity: From Resoluteness to Releasement (2011), Heidegger, History and the Holocaust (2015), and Heidegger’s Life and Thought: A Tarnished Legacy (2020). He is also interested in the history of philosophy more broadly and has published papers on topics in ancient philosophy and feminist philosophy. In 2019, O’Brien co-edited a volume of essays with Luce Irigaray and Christos Hadjioannou – Towards a New Human Being. In 2022, O’Brien was one of the four contributors to a book edited by Irigaray – Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality: Heidegger in Question. Claire Petitmengin is Professor Emerita at the Mines-Télécom Institute and an associated Member at the Husserl-Archives in ENS-Paris. Her research focuses on the usually unrecognized dynamics of lived experience and micro-phenomenological methods enabling us xiv

Contributors

to become aware of it and describe it. She studies the epistemological conditions of these methods, as well as their contemplative, educational, therapeutic, and artistic applications. Her main publications related to the topic of the present volume are Le chemin du milieu. Introduction à la vacuité dans la pensée bouddhiste indienne, Paris, Dervy, 2017, and “On the Veiling and Unveiling of Experience: A Comparison Between the Micro-Phenomenological Method and the Practice of Meditation”, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2021, vol. 52, pp. 36–77. Georgios Petropoulos is a teaching fellow at the UCD School of Philosophy. He has published on phenomenology, continental philosophy, ancient Greek philosophy, and philosophy of education. His current research focuses on phenomenology, philosophy of play, and philosophy for/with children. He is a co-organizer of the annual Irish & International Young Philosopher Awards and member of the research team for the BodyDementia project funded by the Irish Research Council. Max Schaefer is a Sessional Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Prince Edward Island. His areas of focus include phenomenology, post-structuralism, 19th and 20th century German and French philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and psychoanalysis. Max has published articles in journals such as Philosophy Today, Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, Studia Phaenomenologica, and Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. He has served as editorial assistant for the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology. Pierrick Simon is a French independent philosophy researcher specialized in phenomenology. He focuses on the therapeutic potential of philosophy. For this purpose, he studies mindfulness, spiritual exercises, and remedies to toxic political polarization. His interest gravitates toward the idea of a pragmatic phenomenology. Tanja Staehler is Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her publications include Die Unruhe des Anfangs. Hegel und Husserl über den Weg in die Phänomenologie ( “Phaenomenologica”, Springer 2003), Plato and Levinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics (Routledge, 2010), and Hegel, Husserl and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). She has published articles on phenomenological method, art, literature, dance, sexuality, pregnancy, and childbirth. Odysseus Stone is a philosophy PhD fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) at the University of Copenhagen. He specializes in phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, and also has an interest in Buddhist philosophy. His PhD project is a philosophical investigation of mindfulness, especially drawing on phenomenological tradition. He has previously published two articles co-authored with Dan Zahavi which critically appraise recent comparisons between phenomenology and mindfulness. Aside from his work on mindfulness, he is currently working on the topic of attention, where he is looking at the potential of phenomenology and enactivism to illuminate issues contemporary philosophy of mind. Gerhard Thonhauser has been working at the chair of practical philosophy (Prof. Sophie Loidolt) at TU Darmstadt since February 2019. From 2004 to 2010, he studied philosophy and political science at the University of Vienna. He graduated in philosophy with a xv

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thesis on the concept of temporality in Kierkegaard and Heidegger. He did graduation in political science with a thesis on Judith Butler’s political theory. Several study and research stays at the University of Copenhagen. In 2011–2012, he obtained DOC-scholarship of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW). In 2012–2016, he was a scientific assistant at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna (chair for social and political philosophy; Prof. Hans Bernhard Schmid). In 2016, he obtained doctorate degree in philosophy with a thesis on Heidegger and Kierkegaard. In 2017–2018, he became Erwin Schrödinger Fellow of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) at Free University of Berlin (Prof. Jan Slaby) and was associated with the Collaborative Research Center 1171 Affective Societies. Samuel S. White is an independent researcher and translator based in South Asia whose work is centered around Dzogchen, political theology, ontology, and ethics. Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark and the University of Oxford, UK, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. He is the author of Self-Awareness and Alterity (1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005), Self and Other (2014), and Husserl’s Legacy (2017). He co-authored The Phenomenological Mind (2012) with Shaun Gallagher, and has recently edited The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Phenomenology (2012) and The Oxford Handbook of the History of Phenomenology (2018).

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INTRODUCTION Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou

This handbook provides an overview of the topic of phenomenology and mindfulness with the goal of creating a fruitful dialogue between these two traditions, to bring about possible overlaps and incongruities, exploring historical as well as systematic connections. Both phenomenology and mindfulness are inclusively construed. Phenomenology is understood as an umbrella term that includes philosophers and approaches that follow from Brentano’s and Husserl’s phenomenological discoveries, extending to and including philosophers that bring together phenomenology with psychoanalysis, such as Luce Irigaray. Mindfulness includes a wide range of conceptions of mindfulness, from Eastern, Buddhistinspired, strands of meditation practices and theories to Western, Stoic-inspired, versions of mindfulness.

Background Since the 1970s, clinical psychologists have developed several therapeutic applications based on mindfulness. Mindfulness involves techniques that focus attention on the present moment. It modifies an individual’s relationship with their surroundings and themselves, offering relief from stressful emotions and improved management of physical pain. Mindfulness as a form of meditation derived from the Buddhist tradition can be defined as an attitudinal modification that includes elements such as abstaining from judgment, acceptance, letting go, gratitude, and non-striving. Originally the term derives from “sati” (to remember, to observe) a crucial notion in Buddhist traditions, including Zen, Vipassanā, and Tibetan meditation techniques. Jon Kabat-Zinn’s therapeutic adaptation of Buddhist mindfulness significantly contributed to its popularization in Western societies. Interest in mindfulness in Western societies started when a few psychotherapeutic programs, such as the programs led by Jon Kabat-Zinn, John Teasdale, and Zindel Segal, integrated mindfulness into their practice. One of the most popular centers is The Center for Mindfulness at UMass Memorial Medical Center, which was created by Kabat-Zinn in the 1970s. It had initially began as a Stress Reduction clinic that soon developed into Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts (Williams & Kabat-Zinn, 2013, p. 3). Kabat-Zinn DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-1

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initially focused on patients with chronic disease, with the initial hypothesis that the practice of mindfulness could help alleviate pain and suffering stemming from chronic disease. For many years, up until the late 1990s, mindfulness was practiced “under the aegis of behavioural medicine” (ibid.). However, in the late 90s interest in mindfulness rose exponentially, spreading into such fields as clinical and health psychology, cognitive therapy, neuroscience, law, business, leadership, etc. (ibid.) Its influence on medicine rose to such an extent that mindfulness became “integrated into mainstream medicine and science” (ibid.), with professional health bodies (such as the NHS and NICE) recommending it as a practice to help alleviate negative psychological emotions such as depression and generalized anxiety disorders. Definitions of mindfulness have varied from Kabat-Zinn’s formulation as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally” (1994, p. 4). This heightened awareness is believed to have a therapeutic effect by liberating practitioners from harmful cognitive and affective patterns. As mentioned above, this volume is not solely dedicated to Buddhist strands of mindfulness; it also aims to explore other strands of mindfulness, including those derived from the Stoic tradition. Some academic philosophers have capitalized on this renewed interest in “mindfulness” to promote Stoic philosophy. One such example is the Stoicism Today project at Exeter University (UK) and its associated organization, Modern Stoicism, based in the United Kingdom, which uses Stoic mindfulness as a therapeutic approach based on the Stoic theory of emotions.

Different Forms of Mindfulness Despite the perceived systematicity and coherence in mindfulness practice, several scholarly debates and controversies have arisen, questioning its scope, practice, and even its very definition as the last section of this handbook will show. Some debates revolve around historical angles, exploring different ways mindfulness has been conceived within Buddhist philosophy and tensions internal to Buddhism itself (Anālayo, 2014). Others touch on the fidelity of modern scientific and therapeutic accounts of mindfulness to classical Buddhist accounts (Bodhi, 2016). Additionally, research on mindfulness spans various theoretical perspectives, including networks of attention, modes of perceptual processing, motivation, and learning-supportive environments, as well as its application in education and institutional change (Gethin, 2011). Other controversies pertain to research conducted in the spectrum of the behavioral sciences and theoretical and empirical advances in those fields, for example, advances in psychological theory, basic science, as well as applied science (Brown, Creswell, & Ryan, 2015, p. 4). While our understanding of mindfulness greatly improved in the past thirty years, as Brown, Creswell, and Ryan, point out, “the science continues to grow rapidly”, “taking a multilevel approach that allows us to ask sophisticated questions about the predisposing factors, correlates, mechanisms, and consequences of mindfulness, and training in it, at neurophysiological, subjective, and overt behavioral levels, and in a range of functional domains—including neural, cognitive, conative, affective, physical, and social—that are of interest to scholars, researchers, and health care providers in a variety of disciplines” (2015, p. 5).

Different Forms of Phenomenology While we, editors, have tried to refrain from imposing on the contributors a strict definition or agenda of phenomenology, keeping a broad understanding of what phenomenology 2

Introduction

as a theory and a practice might entail, it must be clarified from the beginning that here phenomenology is not meant in the way cognitive scientists employ it to refer to “phenomenality” or, as Gallagher and Zahavi describe this position, “as the label for a first-person description of what the ‘what it is like’ of experience is really like” (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2021, p. 21). Phenomenology here refers to the movement and the method that began with Edmund Husserl in 1900, as a new way of doing philosophy that reconnects philosophy with concrete living experience, which was later on connected with the epoché and the phenomenological reduction. Furthermore, as attested from the diversity in style and argumentation in the chapters that follow, we have sought to be inclusive of the whole spectrum that spans across the “analytic” and “continental” poles, with some chapters being more technical, analytic, and/or scholarly (e.g., Lobo, Moran, Cabrera), while others being more poetic or continental (e.g., Irigaray, Cohen, Caianiello). Of course, while there has been some important literature that looked at the common ground between phenomenology and mindfulness, more can still be explored, both from a unifying and a critical standpoint.

The Purpose The fact that at the moment phenomenology of mindfulness is not a classical topic of research, with many new ideas and lines of research being explored, makes this handbook quite different from other traditional reference works that map current research. Instead, this handbook wants to map uncharted territory, pointing out main problems and directions for future research. We created this handbook to serve as a reference volume on the phenomenology of mindfulness, to analyze the practice of mindfulness from both subjective and objective perspectives. In fact, the genitive in “Ηandbook of the phenomenology of mindfulness” is both a subjective and objective genitive; that is, it is a work of phenomenology whose object of analysis is the practice of mindfulness, but it is also about phenomenology being done mindfully. Depending on the perspective and the argument put forward, some chapters shift the emphasis on one side while others put the emphasis on the other side, while in some chapters, the level of overlap between phenomenology and mindfulness assumed is such that the ambiguity dissolves. Due to the novelty of the phenomenology of mindfulness as a topic of research, this handbook represents a pioneering effort to map uncharted territory, identifying key problems and directions for future exploration. It delves into the commonalties between the two in order to highlight the relevance of a phenomenological engagement with mindfulness. The intersection of phenomenology and mindfulness is central to contemporary debates and will likely become even more critical in the future. Thus, the handbook aims at creating new avenues of research, enabling readers to learn about alternative approaches to mindfulness, especially the relevance of a phenomenological engagement with the topic of mindfulness.

Synopsis of the Book Part I is dedicated to an investigation of mindfulness in Western tradition from ancient to contemporary philosophy. In his chapter, Petropoulos examines Hume’s portrayal of Pyrrhonian skepticism as an extreme form of doubt that clashes with everyday life. Using Hume’s perspective, a Pyrrhonist “cannot expect that his philosophy will have any constant 3

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influence on the mind: Or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail” (2007, p. 116). Despite historical criticisms of Pyrrhonists for their perceived inaction, Hume’s interpretation of Pyrrhonism has significantly influenced the ongoing debate surrounding whether a Pyrrhonist can hold any beliefs at all. This chapter aims to present an alternative understanding of Pyrrhonian skepticism, challenging Hume’s assertion by demonstrating how Pyrrhonian philosophy can indeed benefit society and shape our perception of our relationship with the world and others. This will be accomplished by initially exploring an interpretation that aligns Pyrrhonism with the non-judgmental aspect of mindfulness, followed by an examination of how Pyrrhonian skepticism sheds light on the correlation between humans and the world, resembling a proto-phenomenological approach. Chu Ming-Hon emphasizes the growing interest among philosophers regarding the relationship between phenomenology and mindfulness. Alongside the phenomenological descriptions of mindful experiences, a debate arises regarding the applicability of mindfulness training to the practice of phenomenology. Within this chapter, the author suggests that the practicality of phenomenology itself is a fundamental theoretical issue, emphasizing the significance of this debate. Given that phenomenology primarily operates as a transcendental discipline, it becomes necessary to clarify its methodological foundation, encompassing both the practical and theoretical conditions for engaging in the phenomenological reduction. The author argues that this line of inquiry initially unfolds in the works of Edmund Husserl, followed by his last assistant, Eugen Fink, who systematically shapes the same investigation through a transcendental theory of motivation. In this theoretical framework, the author aims to assess the relevance of mindfulness to phenomenology. By conducting a thorough examination of the motivation behind the phenomenological reduction, the author contends that it becomes possible to determine the extent to which mindful training can complement the practice of phenomenology. Pierrick Simon states that if one acknowledges that mindfulness constitutes a phenomenological endeavor, while also recognizing its explicit therapeutic nature, a productive comparison can be made. This comparison can greatly benefit from Levinas’ critique of phenomenology. First, familiarity with mindfulness enables an understanding of Levinas’ polemical stance against the potential dangers of narcissism in Husserl’s philosophy and tragic heroism in Heidegger’s thought. Levinas’ critique challenges the notion of equanimity as a presumed guarantee of consciousness. Without this insight, Levinas’ ideas are often perceived as circular, with his rejection of the reduction of experience to selfsufficient object-consciousness seemingly based on ethical arguments that already presuppose a different structuring of experience. Sebbah (2007) refers to this as a “method of pleonasm,” where repetition aims to persuade. However, Levinas actually employs a method of oxymoron, highlighting a stark contrast between intrinsic peace of mind and suffering. Once grasped in this manner, Levinas’ work becomes essential for contemplating the limitations of phenomenology and mindfulness. Levinas suspects that phenomenologists are driven by a therapeutic concern, which can be morally criticized. Equanimity is a presupposition ingrained in their method from the outset. In the case of mindfulness, its intention is transparent. Does this constitute a damning moral critique of phenomenology and mindfulness? No, Levinas’ aim is not to advocate for a specific ethic but to broaden the scope of phenomenology. Through this lens, mindfulness is seen as a practical undertaking with a limited scope: the alleviation of suffering. As for phenomenology, it can 4

Introduction

only be all-encompassing if it becomes less akin to mindfulness, relinquishing its exclusive inclination toward consolation. In Mooney’s chapter, it is highlighted that specific themes and ideas present in MerleauPonty’s later writings bear resemblance to the theory and application of mindfulness, which can also be traced back to his earlier works. Merleau-Ponty views the fundamentally embodied subject as an active and self-altering being, while also recognizing that our endeavors are often influenced and prompted by the unique perceptual characteristics of the objects themselves. Within his philosophy, he presents a form of mindfulness that invokes the enchantment and awe reminiscent of childhood experiences. In Ferrarello’s chapter, the examination revolves around investigating the potential connection between the application of Husserl’s phenomenology and mindfulness, specifically exploring the extent to which Husserl’s phenomenology, in combination with mindfulness, can serve as a resource for emotional well-being and mental health. The perspectives on this matter vary, with some regarding phenomenology as a means to attain a specific type of mindfulness (Stone & Zahavi, 2021), while others perceive both phenomenology and mindfulness as comparable psychological tools that contribute to human well-being. To elucidate this further, the author provides a concise and selective history of the term mindfulness, focusing on the aspects that overlap with Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly his theory of epoché and reduction. Ultimately, the aim is to illustrate how these concepts can be employed and the specific areas of personal and social life where they currently demonstrate their beneficial effects. In her chapter, Staehler delves into the exploration of phenomenological mindfulness by utilizing Plato’s Phaedrus as a key reference. The choice of the Phaedrus is particularly fitting due to its inclusion of the renowned Platonic myth concerning the soul (psyche): the portrayal of the soul as a chariot equipped with wings, venturing into the celestial realm before descending to the earthly realm and assuming embodiment. Moreover, the Phaedrus serves as an apt dialogue to address the contentious relationship between the soul and the body. Through analysis, it becomes apparent that Plato’s perspective on the body is not as dismissive as commonly believed. The meandering path of logoi taken by Socrates and Phaedrus demonstrates that our embodied nature is what defines our humanity, enables experiences of love, and establishes connections with both nature (phusis) and other individuals. In his chapter, Hadjioannou conducts a comparative analysis of two competing models of mindfulness within the Western tradition: a Heideggerian model and a Stoic model. The chapter provides a structured overview of these models, with a specific focus on their divergent theoretical perspectives on well-being, emotions, and the significance of unhomelikeness and homelikeness. The argument put forth is that Stoic mindfulness aims at well-being in terms of oikeiōsis, achieved through a particular form of attention that involves the suppression of passions. In contrast, Heideggerian mindfulness aims at well-being through the interplay of unhomelikeness and homelikeness, facilitated by anticipatory resoluteness. Notably, Heideggerian mindfulness does not seek to eliminate passions; rather, it is motivated by a specific passion, namely angst, and embraces the presence of passions. Despite the considerable differences and incongruity between the two models, the chapter asserts that the Heideggerian model of mindfulness emerges from the Stoic model, as the concept of authenticity relies on the recovery of the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis (appropriation). Furthermore, Heideggerian mindfulness is depicted as involving a certain reversal of Stoic mindfulness in relation to homelikeness. However, it also entails a revival of the Stoic idea of oikeiōsis, evident, for instance, in the homological connection between oikeiōsis and Befindlichkeit. 5

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Part II examines the development of mindfulness in the Eastern tradition and where possible draws comparisons with Western tradition, emphasizing in particular, how Western tradition received mindfulness and developed it in its own direction. In her chapter, Greco aims to establish a connection between the practice of Mindfulness and the philosophy of Nishida Kitarō through the concept of “radical relationality,” which she derives as a natural outcome of Nishida’s philosophical framework. This connection serves two main purposes: to provide an epistemic-philosophical foundation for the practice of Mindfulness and to offer a practical application for Nishida’s Logic of Place. Greco begins by highlighting the shared objectives of both approaches, emphasizing their common ground in the realm of relationality. The focus then shifts to three pairs of concepts within Nishida’s Logic of Place, which are further developed and interconnected with Mindfulness. These pairs of concepts include the deep roots of the Logic of Place in the notion of “Pure Experience” and “Self-Awareness,” its original foundation in the concept of “Place” and its manifestation in the idea of the “Eternal Present,” and its evolution into an “Absolutely Contradictory Self-Identity” of the “World” with itself. Finally, Greco explores the practices of chadō and aikidō as experimental frameworks for experiential exploration and investigates the intertwined relational aspects of Mindfulness and the Logic of Place, specifically in relation to spatial-material and interpersonal dimensions. Kee focuses on the existing discourse pertaining to the intersection of phenomenology and yoga that has primarily revolved around the classical yoga of Patanjali in dialogue with transcendental phenomenology, as well as the Buddhist Yogacara tradition in relation to phenomenology. However, there has been a notable lack of attention given to the more physically oriented practices of hatha yoga and its contemporary counterpart, modern postural yoga. In this chapter, Kee sets out to address this gap by presenting a framework for a phenomenological interpretation of postural yoga practice. By utilizing postural yoga as a testing ground, Kee aims to explore and refine phenomenological themes of embodiment. This exploration encompasses concepts such as the body’s openness, its connection to the earth, the body’s reflexivity, its fleshly nature, the body schema, and the notion of the minimal self. Additionally, Kee highlights the potential significance of reflecting upon yoga breathing practices for phenomenologists with a clinical or ontological interest in the breath. In the following chapter, Applebaum presents an approach to the phenomenological investigation of practitioners’ experiences within the context of mindfulness meditation. The author draws primarily from the phenomenological philosophy of Husserl and Fink, as well as the existential phenomenological method of qualitative research in psychology that emerged at Duquesne University during the 1960s. The specific mindfulness practice examined in this study is “meditative remembrance” or silent dhikr, which originates from classical Sufism and is currently practiced within a contemporary, traditionally authorized Sufi lineage. By analyzing dhikr as a distinctive form of mindfulness meditation, the study demonstrates how phenomenology can delve into the meanings embedded within meditators’ narratives. Simultaneously, the author aims to emphasize the significance of Husserl and Fink’s exploration of self and world-constitution for the study of meditation. Particularly, the chapter highlights phenomenology’s ability to trace the generative flow of constituting consciousness, which underlies, and in a certain sense, precedes the personal ego. In the next chapter, Dockstader examines two Chinese traditions that share a unique and non-conventional approach to mindfulness practice. Both the classical Daoism of the 6

Introduction

Zhuangzi and the medieval Buddhism of the Tiantai school present a perspective on mindfulness that is rooted in distinct metaphysical and epistemic viewpoints. Using contemporary philosophical language, these traditions combine a strong many-one identity perspective in mereology, a novel form of existence monism in fundamental metaphysics, and an explosive trivialism in epistemology to develop their respective approaches to mindfulness. In these frameworks, each moment of experience or thought is accessed and understood as creating, inherently encompassing, and ultimately being identical to every other moment of experience. According to these traditions, every phenomenon, although partially coherent and locally meaningful, is globally incoherent and arises from the discerning yet deluded minds of sentient beings. By contemplating this deluded mind, one can strive toward soteriological goals of liberation and independence. In the Zhuangzi, this perspective is conveyed through concepts such as the “fasting of the mind” and “sitting in forgetfulness,” which align with Nature’s continuous production of momentary distinctions that encompass the infinite multiplicity of the Dao. In Tiantai, similar ideas are found in discussions of the “contemplation of the mind” and the “contemplation of inherent inclusion,” where the aim is to access “one moment of experience as three thousand worlds,” with these “three thousand worlds” representing all phenomena created by the deluded mind, which encompasses everything. The chapter introduces the concept of “deluded mindfulness” as a novel form of mindfulness emerging from these traditions, and explores its potential therapeutic benefits by embracing the diverse and contradictory understandings of mindfulness present in contemporary discourse. Mertel and White’s chapter explores the perspectives of Tanabe Hajime and Martin Heidegger on the implications of mindfulness that go beyond subjective experience and self-control, thereby considering the possibility of freedom beyond mere will to power. Both thinkers deconstruct traditional notions of subjectivity in their distinct ways, making their critical dialogue a valuable contribution to an emancipatory understanding of mindfulness and subjectivity. The chapter focuses on their respective deconstructions of conventional conceptions of subjectivity, highlighting their emancipatory intentions and accounts of mindfulness. First, it examines Tanabe’s approach of “overcoming” subjectivity through mindfulness as metanoetics, which he considers to be a superior alternative to Heidegger’s existentialism. Second, it critically engages Tanabe’s metanoetics with Heidegger’s concept of Besinnung, which serves as Heidegger’s own representation of mindfulness. While Tanabe’s metanoetics aims to dissolve subjectivity into a communal subject or “species,” Heidegger’s Besinnung achieves this by deconstructing ecological or species-centric modes of thought. The central claim of the chapter suggests that Besinnung provides a more compelling foundation for an emancipatory project by circumventing the ethical and political challenges inherent in metanoetics. In Part III mindfulness is applied to ethics and well-being in order to see how the practice can improve the quality of our life and guides our ethical choices in daily life. The chapter titled “Could Mindfulness Be Short on Meaning?” is an original contribution by Luce Irigaray that she specifically wrote for this Handbook. The chapter provides a nuanced and indirect critique of mindfulness by engaging critically with the historical development of Western philosophy. Although the term “mindfulness” is not explicitly used in the text, Irigaray’s references to concepts related to the mind, such as the “mental,” “logos,” “consciousness,” “knowledge,” “reasoning,” and “dialectics,” demonstrate her perception of mindfulness as another metaphysical concept that Western philosophy has prioritized and that requires transcendence. 7

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Understanding Irigaray’s writing style and her use of concepts can be challenging and somewhat elusive to those unfamiliar with her work. However, her later writings, where she explores the ideas of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hegel, provide crucial context to properly grasp the critique of mindfulness presented in this particular text. According to Irigaray, Western philosophy, starting from its early days with figures like Socrates, has reduced human beings to their mental capacities, disconnecting them from their true nature, sensitive life, the body, and their passions, as exemplified in tragic portrayals. Her critique of Western metaphysics simultaneously serves as a call to return to our origins, to embrace genuine humanity, and to reconnect with our natural, individual differentiation. In this essay, Irigaray advocates for a return to Dionysian tragic wisdom, which embraces the passions instead of suppressing them, translating them into meaningful experiences. She proposes a path that is both active and passive, contrary to Heidegger’s perspective, acknowledging and affirming the significance of sexuate difference as a determining factor in personal and collective individuation. Another way she articulates this idea is by advocating a return to the real, which has been severed from us by the logos that immobilizes and disrupts the truth of our existence and the partiality of our gendered lives. In this context, Irigaray critiques mindfulness and advocates for an alternative form of Dionysian, tragic, embodied, and tactile experience that transcends being “short on meaning.” Foran’s chapter sheds light on the prevalent emergence of terms and practices such as “Wellness Clinics,” “Lunchtime Mindfulness Zooms,” “Mindful Communities,” and “Wellness Toolkits” in post-COVID workplaces. These practices serve as cost-effective solutions for employers aiming to address the repercussions of the past years, which have led to a widespread mental health crisis. However, Foran argues that these practices are symptomatic of a larger issue, namely the encroachment of techno-corporate influences on Buddhist thought. The chapter begins by examining the incorporation of mindfulness into the workplace, and subsequently proposes a productive parallel, albeit not a direct mapping, between the problems arising from the technological framing of the world and Marxist critiques of capitalist society. Furthermore, Foran contends that mindfulness itself has been co-opted within a techno-capitalist framework. Similar to Heidegger’s reconceptualization of philosophy as a form of “poetic thinking,” mindfulness may need to undergo a reformulation to shed the remnants of its corporatization. In the next chapter, Moran delves into the exploration of Eckhart’s radical mysticism while critically reassessing the accuracy of Heidegger’s interpretation of Eckhart and its relevance in contemporary understanding of “mindfulness”. Among the classical phenomenologists, Martin Heidegger, along with his doctoral student Käte Oltmanns, devoted considerable attention to Meister Eckhart. Eckhart’s theological perspective, drawing from the negative tradition influenced by Dionysius the Areopagite, portrays God as “nothing” (MHG: nichil) or “nothingness” (MHG: niht; Latin: nihileitas, nulleitas). According to Eckhart, the human soul attains a union with God by emptying itself. It is essential for the soul to be devoid, receptive, and “virginal” to receive the divine and achieve oneness with the Ultimate. Similar to Marguerite of Porete’s notion of the soul needing to be “annihilated” to merge with God, Eckhart emphasizes the necessity of self-emptying. The chapter scrutinizes Heidegger’s interpretation of Eckhart’s concepts of “releasement” (Abgeschiedenheit; Middle High German: abgescheidenheit), “letting be” (Gelassenheit, Middle High German: gelâzenheit), and living “without why” (Ohne Warum; MHG: âne warumbe). These interrelated notions are examined in relation to Eckhart’s discussions on “purity” (Lauterkeit, 8

Introduction

MHG: lûterkeit), “being naked” (blôz), “empty” (îtel, ledic), and “free” (vri) to gain a comprehensive understanding of Eckhart’s perspective on self-emptying detachment. In the next chapter, D’Angelo begins by providing a concise overview of the definitional challenges within current mindfulness research. The chapter then proceeds to establish conceptual distinctions that lay the foundation for a comprehensive phenomenology of mindfulness. The author presents arguments to differentiate mindful experiences from various related concepts: (a) mindfulness meditation, (b) mindfulness as a trait or disposition, and (c) mindfulness as a capacity. To illustrate these distinctions, the text examines a literary example and a real-life scenario, ultimately formulating a definition of mindful states. According to this definition, an experience can be considered mindful when the individual maintains an open and attentive stance toward their surroundings while simultaneously adopting a reflective attitude toward their own experience. Open attention experiences, which encompass mindfulness as a subset, are further characterized along three dimensions: horizonality, non-judgmentality, and emotional steadiness. In contrast, the reflective stance is articulated along two axes: first, as the dissolution of the dichotomy between the inner and outer worlds, and second, as a state in which the subject possesses knowledge of their own mental states. Carey’s chapter focuses on the interconnection between ethics, embodiment, and mindfulness. In contemporary discourse, the term “mindfulness” is frequently associated with mental health, personal well-being, and a market focused on commodifying these experiential aspects. From social media life coaches to high-level corporate mentors, practices such as mental centeredness, being present in the moment, and meditation evoke images of calm, confident, and successful individuals. However, the modern understanding of mindfulness often lacks the ethical foundations commonly attributed to the Buddhist Eightfold Path, which heavily influenced the development of mindfulness practice. While adherence to specific spiritual principles is not required to engage in these practices, many modern approaches overlook a crucial aspect of experiencing a lived self within the world. The phenomenological processes of Edmund Husserl, further explored by Emmanuel Lévinas through his concept of intersubjective encounters between the self and an unknowable realm of otherness, establish a connection between contemporary mindfulness practices and the ethical dimension they often disregard. Lévinas’ phenomenology imbues the practice of mindfulness with the understanding that engaging with the world in an intersubjective manner between selves, both internal and external, inherently involves an ethical component, regardless of religious doctrine. Another aspect we deemed important to emphasize when considering the relationship between mindfulness and phenomenology is time and how it influences our notion of attention. For this reason, in Part IV we invited contributors to explore the active influence that mindfulness holds on our sense of time and our attention. In her chapter, Filea examines the common theme between Mindfulness and Heidegger’s early conceptualization of phenomenology, which involves the process of detachment from the everyday mode of living to gain a fresh perspective. The focus is particularly on the contrasting descriptions of temporality and emotions found in Heidegger’s phenomenological shift from the inauthentic mode of experiencing the world and those described by practitioners of Mindfulness when perceiving the world with “mindfulness awareness.” It is observed that while both accounts highlight being absorbed in mundane tasks as functioning on autopilot, the moment of breaking free is understood radically differently. According to Heidegger, detachment from inauthenticity and irresolute existence is depicted as a sudden 9

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and intense event associated with anxiety (Angst), contrasting with the passive tranquility of Dasein’s everyday involvement in the “they-self,” revealing the future as Dasein’s fundamental temporal dimension. On the other hand, Mindfulness entails interrupting everyday preoccupations by blocking unnecessary worries or future-oriented dreaming and shifting attention to the present moment. The mental shift to a mindful mode of experiencing the world is associated with stillness, peacefulness, and calmness, contrasting with the perceived stress and overwhelm of daily encounters in the world for Mindfulness practitioners. Ultimately, it is argued that despite the shared themes between Heidegger’s early work and Mindfulness as a secularized Buddhist practice, the two accounts not only have unresolved metaphysical and ontological differences but also diverge significantly in their implications for therapy, with one rooted in choice and responsibility and the other in receptivity and acceptance. Stone’s chapter explores the intersection between phenomenology and strands of Buddhist philosophy, asserting that consciousness encompasses both other-luminosity (object-directed intentionality) and self-luminosity (pre-reflective self-consciousness or reflexive awareness, referred to as svasaṃvedana). Recent arguments have suggested that certain forms of mindfulness meditation involve an intensified form of self-consciousness, termed “cranking up the lights on pre-reflective self-consciousness”. This chapter pursues two objectives. First, it develops the aforementioned proposition while addressing two challenges. The first challenge involves reconciling the formal, structural nature of pre-reflective self-consciousness with the idea that it can vary in intensity. The second challenge is to reconcile the notion that pre-reflective self-consciousness is not objectdirected with the possibility of enhancing awareness of an experience at a pre-reflective level. Second, drawing on contemporary mindfulness research and engaging in dialogue with philosophy of mind and Buddhist thought, Stone argues that a shift in focus toward a distinct kind or mode of self-awareness closely linked to the agentive nature of active attention would significantly enhance our theoretical understanding of self-awareness within mindfulness. In the next chapter, Cabrera examines the anticipatory nature of experience and the potential for present-focused attention from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology. The focus of analysis is on the emotional dimension of expectations. Within the framework of Husserlian phenomenology, the concept of emotional expectation elucidates a subject’s orientation toward the future as an affective tension, representing an emotional mode of being directed toward what is to come. The chapter aims to explore the contributions of Husserl’s investigations into the relationship between different temporal phases of consciousness to the ongoing debate in the field of mindfulness concerning the ability to center attention on the present moment and observe and regulate emotions. The chapter begins by presenting the concept of emotional expectation and the anticipatory aspect of time-consciousness in Husserl’s phenomenology. This entails clarifying the distinct emotional character of expectations and elucidating how they differ from and intertwine with intellectual expectations. Subsequently, an overview is provided of the sedimentation of feelings within emotional dispositions and the resonance of feelings. The role of attention in redirecting consciousness to the present moment and in the observation of emotions is also discussed. The argument put forth is that while every experience encompasses temporal modes of the past, present, and future, attention can prioritize what is presently given and intervene to observe emotions as they unfold. The chapter aims to describe the passive genesis of dispositions that shape present experiences and future expectations, while also 10

Introduction

exploring the possibility of active intervention from the present moment to reconfigure this passive predelineation. O’Brien’s investigation delves into Heidegger’s persistent endeavor to elucidate the fundamental impulse driving his philosophical thought. Heidegger once again grapples with the enigmatic essence of “being,” the accompanying enigma of nothingness, the intricate interplay between presence and absence, and the overarching aspiration to transcend the confines of Western metaphysics in pursuit of a new beginning—a fresh inquiry into the meaning of being. This ambitious undertaking necessitates a quality akin to mindfulness. Mindfulness, on certain occasions, is described as the reflective and inquisitive attitude of a thinking that does not prematurely conflate being with actuality, but rather discerns their distinction and recognizes absence as a negation of presence. It embodies a mode of thinking that comprehends the profound implications of grasping the ontological difference, acknowledging that being itself is not a being, and that the emergence of meaningful presence in something typically involves a dynamic interplay between presence and absence. A question that often remains unasked, or at least insufficiently explored, pertains to the implications of Heidegger’s efforts to rehabilitate the role of absence in our experience and understanding. What would it signify to transcend the metaphysics of presence? Heidegger consistently asserts that the transformative impact would be momentous. However, can we truly conceive the potential ramifications of such a shift? Moreover, given the importance of the role of the body in mindful practices we considered it important to dedicate space to the examination of what the embodiment means in mindful practices. Hence, in Part V our contributors examined this point from different perspectives leveraging on the notion of empathy, daily presence, externalizations, and so forth. Since Jaspers’ influential work in the early 20th century, phenomenology has played a crucial role in the therapeutic field, aiding in the comprehension of anomalous experiences and psychopathology. In the 21st century, “mindfulness” has emerged as a prominent treatment method for individuals grappling with mental health issues, offering greater balance and insight. Phenomenology and Buddhist mindfulness converge in their emphasis on sensation, bodily awareness, and meticulous attention to experience, with attentive perception serving as the methodological nexus between these two traditions. This chapter from Daly and McCaw investigates the underlying factors contributing to the therapeutic efficacy of mindfulness. While its benefits are well-documented, the question remains: why does mindfulness yield positive outcomes? Employing a “reverse-­ engineering” approach, the authors explore the role of presence, proposing that certain mental health challenges can be understood as a failure or refusal of presence. Examples include depersonalization, characterized by a lack of presence to oneself, and derealization, involving a lack of presence in the world. Symptoms not only manifest as indications of presence breakdown but also serve as coping mechanisms to avoid confronting suffering, perpetuating the absence of presence. While individuals experiencing mental health challenges may struggle to maintain a sense of presence, it is imperative for psychiatrists and therapists to cultivate a robust and attentive presence during therapeutic encounters. The chapter delves into the means of achieving and sustaining this attentive presence, particularly in the context of an encounter with the patient. Central to addressing this inquiry is the exploration of the nature and significance of attentive perception and mindfulness in establishing presence. Here, the intersection of phenomenology with Buddhist meditational practices presents intriguing avenues for investigation. 11

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In the next chapter, Lally contends that a comprehensive understanding of mindfulness necessitates recognizing the fundamental role of the embodied subject. This embodied subject exists prior to reflection or language, experiencing bodily awareness on a prereflective and pre-linguistic level. Within such an understanding, the Heideggerian concept of Gelassenheit or releasement can be fully comprehended and effectively applied. Notably, Being and Time overlooks the embodiment of Dasein, which has been interpreted as a deliberate omission aiming to emphasize the unity of Dasein and resist the division of mind and body. The central claim of this chapter is that an embodied approach to mindfulness is crucial for a radical development and comprehensive understanding of Gelassenheit or releasement within the Heideggerian framework. This perspective recognizes the interconnectedness of mind and body and conceptualizes mindfulness as a state of attentiveness and presencing, distinct from the cognitive model favored by Stoic accounts and, to some extent, by Heidegger. The author characterizes Heidegger’s account as minimally cognitive, acknowledging the cognitive nature of the non-willing thinking elucidated by Heidegger. To further develop the notion of Gelassenheit, the author draws on the Buddhist concept of non-self and Iris Murdoch’s concept of unselfing, employing them in an ontological context rather than an ethical one. Additionally, the author explores the temporality of now-consciousness central to mindfulness by employing Hannah Arendt’s concept of the present as the gap between past and future, diverging from Husserl’s notion of a retentive-protentive structure of temporality. Ultimately, Gelassenheit or Releasement is more fully understood within the framework of an embodied mindfulness grounded in the unified subject. Lobo’s chapter examines Husserl’s contemplation of Socrates and Buddha within the context of an ancient tradition known as “parallel lives,” which can be traced back to Plutarch. Husserl revitalizes this tradition by employing the method of parallelization to compare axiological and logical reasoning in his 1902 ethics lectures. The application of this method raises the question of compatibility between the implementation of transcendental epoché and a universal ethical epoché, aiming to avoid falling into skepticism. Schopenhauer proposed an intriguing but theoretically and ethically incomplete solution known as the annihilation of the will-to-live, which he viewed as a form of transcendental self-transformation. By engaging with Indian and Buddhist thought, particularly after the release of Neumann’s new translation of the Buddha’s teachings, Husserl embarks on a meditation that allows him to make progress toward a more satisfactory solution to the aforementioned compatibility issue. Englander explores the concept of mindfulness within contemporary psychology, particularly focusing on its association with a form of meditation conducted by clients under the guidance of professionals. In recent years, there has been a shift toward the concept of social mindfulness in psychology, which refers to prosocial behavior, specifically the act of providing a stranger with a choice. While this construct aligns with the original idea of unselfishness in Buddha’s teachings, it has been incorporated into the realm of natural scientific psychology. Although this chapter centers on the Western interpretation of social mindfulness, the aim is to highlight an experiential gap evident in the current psychological trend. The chapter proposes that applying a phenomenological analysis of empathy within the context of interpersonal relationships can shed light on this experiential gap, providing a more meaningful understanding of how social mindfulness can be achieved as an unselfish act. 12

Introduction

Englander describes empathy as the process of grasping the meanings expressed by others within the interpersonal dynamics of a we-relation. The chapter concludes that empathy, as a form of interpersonal understanding, is fundamental to the practice of social mindfulness. Drawing on applied phenomenology, the chapter suggests that an empathic attitude can be fostered through a phenomenological approach to empathy training, offering pedagogical strategies to cultivate empathy. In Part VI we asked our contributors to examine the application of mindfulness to ­practical life. Fitzpatrick’s chapter delves into the intersection of aesthetics and mindfulness within a phenomenological framework, specifically exploring the role of painting as a mindfulnessbased intervention. The examination draws upon the aesthetics theories of Mikel Dufrenne and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, both of whom incorporate features that align with mindful practices and embody the mindful attitude. Notably, subject-object reciprocity, which ­enhances perception and embodiment, is one such feature highlighted in their works. The concepts of attentiveness, universality, the other, and the present moment, which hold significant importance in Buddhist philosophy and contemporary psychological theories of mindfulness, also play key roles in the phenomenological aesthetics discussed by Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne. Both philosophers emphasize the psychological and ontological significance of the aesthetic experience, providing a fruitful foundation for understanding its relationship with mindfulness. While Merleau-Ponty focuses specifically on painting within his developed theory, Dufrenne offers a general phenomenology of aesthetics. However, this chapter narrows its focus to painting, drawing from Dufrenne’s aesthetics to illustrate how phenomenology allows for a more comprehensive understanding of both mindfulness and painting beyond their individual meanings. Within this context, painting is viewed as a process of mindfulness for both the artist and the spectator. Introducing the notion of mindfulness into phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience, particularly in relation to painting, expands and develops the ideas of Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne in ways that were not explicitly envisioned by the philosophers themselves. Schaefer’s chapter explores the contributions of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank to the field of psychoanalysis, particularly focusing on their insights into the nature and significance of mindfulness and creativity. Schaefer argues that Henry and Rank offer valuable perspectives that shed light on these aspects within psychoanalysis. The analysis begins by examining Henry’s critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, which reveals inconsistencies in Freud’s understanding of the unconscious and the affective dimension of an individual’s life. According to Schaefer, Henry’s work emphasizes the importance of life’s inherent creativity in the development of one’s personality and the resolution of neuroses. However, Schaefer also highlights the limitations of Henry’s perspective, particularly regarding the role of mindfulness. Schaefer argues that Henry’s conception of life as a self-contained reality fails to adequately address the relationship between life, creativity, and intentionality, which is crucial for understanding the intersubjective nature of mindfulness and creativity. To address these limitations, Schaefer brings Henry’s insights into dialogue with Rank’s psychology of difference. Rank similarly recognizes the centrality of affectivity and creativity in human life and psychoanalysis. Through this dialogue, Schaefer highlights the dynamic relationship between mindfulness and creativity, noting that they can both strengthen and 13

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weaken each other. Additionally, Schaefer emphasizes that both mindfulness and creativity involve a balance of self-enclosure and openness to others and the broader cosmos. Ultimately, Schaefer argues that the integration of mindfulness and creativity can significantly contribute to the well-being of individuals and the goals of psychoanalysis. By recognizing the importance of both aspects and their interplay, psychoanalysis can better serve its purpose of improving human well-being. In the next chapter, Cohen aims to lay the foundation for a phenomenology of History. By examining the perspectives of Husserl’s “transcendental phenomenology” and Heidegger’s “Thought of Being,” the author seeks to elucidate the meaning, intentionality, and context that give rise to the “mindfulness” of History. While acknowledging the differences between Husserl’s phenomenological method and Heidegger’s retrieval of phenomenology, the article explores how both approaches address the question of the meaning of Being in relation to the “historical event” and our “being-historical.” The chapter argues for a concept of justice that acknowledges the uniqueness of each historical event and resists the tendency to subsume them within a grand narrative of historical comprehension or sacrificial economy of historical development. This notion of justice paves the way for a novel concept of “historical mindfulness” that challenges conventional practices of historical remembrance and commemoration. Instead, it calls for an unconditional and unconditioned responsibility toward the singular and unique aspects of historical phenomena. By engaging with the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger, the chapter seeks to deepen our understanding of History and emphasizes the need for a mindful approach that respects the irreducible singularity of historical events. In his chapter, Thonhauser examines the relationship between the phenomenological attitude and mindfulness in Buddhist thought. Phenomenologists distinguish between three modes of comportment: distant observation, skillful absorption, and the phenomenological attitude. The author focuses on Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenological attitude as a means of letting things reveal themselves as they truly are. Engaging in phenomenology, according to Heidegger, does not lead to the discovery of a fixed essence or true nature of things. Instead, it confronts us with a fundamental groundlessness that affects both the mind and the world. When approaching the self mindfully, we encounter the dynamic and groundless nature of care through which the self is enacted. When approaching the world mindfully, we recognize that being itself has a historical dimension, meaning that all ontologies are limited in how they allow entities to reveal themselves and subject to historical variation in their mode of disclosure. In conclusion, a mindful engagement with life involves acting with an awareness of the groundless nature of the self and the world. This requires openness to unexpected manifestations and a willingness to reconsider one’s current understanding in light of new encounters. By adopting the phenomenological attitude, individuals can cultivate a mindful approach to existence that embraces the inherent uncertainty and historical contextuality of both the self and the world. In his investigation, Morley challenges the notion that daydreaming is inherently incompatible with meditation, suggesting instead that a phenomenological exploration of daydreaming can provide valuable insights into the barriers to learning meditation. Rather than viewing daydreaming as a hindrance, the author proposes using the consciousness of daydreaming as a tool for a more comprehensive understanding of meditation itself. The author discusses the findings of an ongoing second person phenomenological psychological

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research project on daydreaming, examining its structural aspects. These findings are then compared briefly to the paradigms of “single-pointed” meditation, such as classical yoga, and “open monitoring” systems found in tantrism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the possibility that within the experiential structure of daydreaming, there may exist a pathway to meditative awareness, which has been described in phenomenological literature using concepts like the “tacit cogito” (Merleau-Ponty, 1970) and “marginal consciousness” (Gurwitsch, 1973). The author suggests that meditative awareness could be seen not only as an achievement but also as something that individuals already have access to, albeit in a restrained or ambiguous manner due to their immersion in certain aspects of the natural attitude. Finally, the practical feasibility of incorporating this approach into concrete pedagogy is considered, emphasizing the potential benefits of integrating daydreaming consciousness into the process of learning and practicing meditation. In his chapter, Caianiello explores the possibility of teaching mathematics in Full Consciousness within a traditional classroom setting. The author addresses the concern that the logical intellect, when actively engaged in thinking according to contemporary understanding, may hinder the experience of Fullness of Being. Caianiello argues that a fruitful synthesis can emerge from combining the practice of Full Consciousness with the theories of Phenomenology. By granting the potentially logical Intellect a second chance and recognizing its perceptual and deictic foundation, akin to Aristotle’s νοῦς, a thought that is both rational and emanating from the fullness of the thinker’s Being can be born. This “Thinking Being” represents a unique opportunity for the logical Intellect to align with the vital urgency of the situation. The author suggests that this synthesis can be achieved by reestablishing a deep connection between the logical-mathematical word and the poetic word. Currently divorced and unresolved, these two realms can be reintegrated to facilitate the teaching of mathematics in Full Consciousness. The chapter highlights the need for this reconnection and presents it as a transformative union between rationality and the richness of human experience. Finally, Part VII, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness?”, questions if it is actually possible to establish a viable connection between phenomenology and mindfulness. Thanks to the dialogue between Zahavi and Stone on the one hand and Bitbol, Depraz, and Petitmengin on the other hand, we have the opportunity to see both sides of a difficult debate verging on the problem of phenomenological theory and practice in mindfulness.

Acknowledgments Early drafts of most chapters were presented at a conference held at the University of Cyprus, 1–3 June 2022, sponsored by the university itself (“ONISILOS” Funding Scheme), as well as by the A. G. Leventis Foundation, and the Deputy Ministry of Tourism of the Republic of Cyprus. Christos Hadjioannou is thankful to Susi Ferrarello for being such an amazing collaborator in this project. He is also thankful to Associate Professor Antonis Tsakmakis for his support, as well as to all faculty, staff and students, at the Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus, who helped out with the organization of the conference. Finally, he is thankful to his family: to his wife, Irene, for her companionship and support, and to his children, Polyxeni and Miltiades, for teaching him the limits of mindfulness while co-editing the handbook.

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References Anālayo, B. (2014). Perspectives on Satipatthāna. Birmingham, UK: Windhorse Publications. Bodhi, B. 2016. The Transformations of Mindfulness. In Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement, edited by R. E. Purser, D. Forbes, and A. Burke, 3–14. Cham: Springer. Brown, K. W., Creswell, J. D., & Ryan, R. M. (Eds.). (2015). Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: The Guilford Press. Gallagher, S., Zahavi, D. (2021). The Phenomenological Mind. New York: Routledge. Gethin, R. 2011. On Some Definitions of Mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1): 263–279. Gurwitsch, A. (1973). The Collected Works of Aron Gurwitsch (1901–1973), edited by J. GarcíaGómez. Cham: Springer. Hume, D. (2007). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life. London: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1970). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Sebbah, F.D. (2007). Décrire l’être comme guerre. In D. Cohen-Levinas & B. Clément (Eds.), Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée (pp. 139–155). Paris, France: PUF. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (3-4):158–185. Williams, J., Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Introduction. In J. Mark, G. Williams, J. Kabat-Zinn (Eds), Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins and Applications (pp.  1–18). New York: Routledge.

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PART I

Mindfulness in the Western Traditions

1 PYRRHONIAN EPOCHÉ, MINDFULNESS, AND BEING-IN-THE-WORLD Georgios Petropoulos

Introduction: Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonism Pyrrhonian skepticism is a philosophical tradition that takes its name from Pyrrho of Elis. Pyrrho is a peculiar philosophical figure who, like Socrates, left us no writings. The philosophical revival of his thought, however, by Aenesidemus of Knossos in the 1st century BC, and the detailed presentation of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus in the 2nd century AD, has made Pyrrhonian skepticism a noteworthy part of the Western philosophical tradition. According to Sextus Empiricus, Pyrrhonian skeptics are different both from dogmatic philosophers and from other skeptics. They are different from dogmatic philosophers in that they do not hold a central doctrine. But they are also different from other skeptics in that they do not claim that knowledge is impossible. They rather suspend judgment about the possibility of knowledge and about things that are not evident to them. The notion of suspension of judgment (epoché) is a fundamental idea of Pyrrhonian skepticism, indicating that Pyrrhonists do not give their assent to things that are not apparent to them. In his Outlines of Pyrrhonism,1 Sextus Empiricus presents Pyrrhonian skeptics as persons who, disturbed by the contradictions they experience in the world, embark on a philosophical journey of truth seeking, with the hope of discovering the true nature of things and achieving a state of tranquility (ataraxia). However, because they realize that the conflicting philosophical accounts about the true nature of things are equipollent, they suspend judgment and at the moment that they suspend judgment they find themselves in a state of ataraxia (PH, Ι 10). The twist here is that the Pyrrhonian skeptic ends up reaching ataraxia not by finding truth as she had hoped to, but through the suspension of judgment (PH, I 26–27). Ataraxia is something that happens fortuitously after the suspension. With this philosophical journey in mind, Sextus Empiricus describes Pyrrhonian skepticism as the ability to oppose things which appear and are thought of in any way at all; an ability by which, because of the equipollence (isostheneia) in the opposed objects and accounts, we come first to suspension of judgment (epoché) and afterward to tranquility (ataraxia) (PH, I 8). The juxtaposition of opposing accounts is not something new in ancient Greek thought. The sophists made use of this technique. But what is peculiar about Pyrrhonism is that DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-3

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it juxtaposes opposing accounts not with the aim of winning an argument, but with the aim of liberating oneself and others from disturbance (tarache) (Flintoff, 1980; Kuzminski, 2008, p. 42). Pyrrhonists, “are philanthropic and wish to cure by speech (logos), as far as they can, the conceit and rashness of the Dogmatists” (PH, III 32). But how are we to understand the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment? This has been a question that has troubled scholars of Pyrrhonian skepticism and has led to one of the most famous debates in Pyrrhonian scholarship, about whether the Pyrrhonian skeptic holds any beliefs at all.2 According to a radical strand of interpretation, championed by Myles Burnyeat (1998), among others, the Pyrrhonian epoché implies a suspension of beliefs of every kind. On the contrary, Michael Frede proposes a less extreme interpretation, which allows that the Pyrrhonian skeptic can assent to some basic beliefs that help guide him in living his life (Frede, 1998, 1999; see Eichorn, 2014, p. 122). The radical interpretation raises the question of whether it is even possible to live without holding any beliefs at all. Relevant to this issue is the charge of inactivity (apraxia), which challenges the Pyrrhonist on the grounds that a life without any kind of belief would be completely paralyzing and would render one incapable of performing any action at all. It would be impossible for Pyrrhonists to perform any kind of activity without having some sort of beliefs. The charge of inactivity has been leveled against the Pyrrhonists since antiquity (Machuca, 2011), but in its modern version this charge can be traced back to David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where he presents Pyrrhonian skepticism as an excessive kind of skepticism that is at odds with everyday life. A Pyrrhonist, Hume says, “cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: Or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail” (2007, p. 116). Hume’s point is that the Pyrrhonist cannot consistently live her skepticism, because in order to perform any action at all she needs to hold at least a basic belief about the state of affairs. The main assumption here is that suspension of judgment involves a suspension of beliefs of every kind. But there has also been another way of interpreting Pyrrhonism. The debate about whether the skeptic has beliefs or not relates to the translation of Sextus’ claim that the Pyrrhonists live their lives adoxastōs (PH, I 23). Many scholars on both sides of this debate translate adoxastōs as “without beliefs” or “without opinions” (Barnes, 1998; Burnyeat, 1998; Frede, 1998). However, a different translation of adoxastōs is also available in Pyrrhonian scholarship.  Robert Burry (1933), for example, has translated adoxastōs as “non-dogmatically”. Translating the term in this way opens up an interpretation that emphasizes how the Pyrrhonist can have beliefs about how things appear to her, but does not hold onto these beliefs in a dogmatic fashion (Pentzopoulou-Valala, 2002; Öymen, 2012; Eichorn, 2014). This reading emphasizes Sextus’ claim that the Pyrrhonists do not question what appears (phenomena), rather they question the dogmatic adherence to judgments formulated on the basis of these appearances (Öymen, 2012). When we investigate whether existing things are such as they appear, we grant that they appear, and what we investigate is not what is apparent but what is said about what is apparent… (PH, I 19).3 So, the Pyrrhonist would not deny that at a given moment honey appears sweet to him, but to assert that sweetness is an objective characteristic of honey is for them an unjustified 20

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leap, for under different conditions the honey might not appear sweet at all (see PH, I 20). Even the claim that different accounts about the true nature of things are equal, should not be viewed dogmatically, since the Pyrrhonist does not claim that different accounts are objectively equal but that they appear to be equal (PH, I 203). As John Heaton suggests, “the sceptic suspends judgement as to what things are ‘in their nature’ so he/she lives by appearances” (1997, p. 89). On the understanding that the epoché does not involve the suspension of all beliefs, but rather of dogmatic assertions that are supposed to reveal the true nature of things, Pyrrhonism can be seen as a philosophy that not only circumvents the charges of inactivity, but in fact also safeguards the significance of everyday life (bios) against the philosophical dogmatists (Eichorn, 2014, p. 125): [N]ot only do we not fight against living experience, but we even lend it our support by assenting undogmatically to what it relies on, while opposing the private inventions of the Dogmatists. (PH, II 102, trans. by R.G Bury) Indeed, Sextus informs us that the Pyrrhonist acts in accordance with everyday observances, which include: (1) their natural capacity to perceive and think, (2) the compulsion of feelings (e.g., hunger makes one eat), (3) the laws and customs of one’s state and culture, and (4) the practical knowledge acquired through the practice of crafts and arts (e.g., the art of medicine in the case of empirical doctors, like Sextus Empiricus himself) (PH, I 23). Building on the interpretation of the Pyrrhonian skeptic as a person who abstains from dogmatic assertions and judgments, this chapter wishes to shed some light on an interpretation of Pyrrhonian skepticism which shows that, contrary to Hume’s claim, Pyrrhonism can positively influence a person as well as exert an influence on how we understand our relation to the world and others. I will do so by focusing first on an interpretation that brings Pyrrhonism close to a notion of mindfulness that can be found in Eastern philosophies as well as secular applications of mindfulness, and then by showing how we can find certain proto-phenomenological elements in Pyrrhonian skepticism.

Mindfulness and Pyrrhonism It is important to begin this section by highlighting a difficulty involved in attempting to relate Pyrrhonian skepticism to mindfulness. This difficulty has to do with the fact that mindfulness is a broad concept with a rich and diverse history that ranges from the central role of mindfulness in Buddhist thinking and practice, to contemporary uses of mindfulness in healthcare, inspired by Jon Kabat-Zinn (1994, 2011). To narrow down the scope of my discussion, I will focus on one aspect of mindfulness, which can be found both in the Buddhist tradition, and the application of mindfulness in contemporary therapy. Notwithstanding their differences, in both approaches to mindfulness one can find a tendency toward non-judgment (Nyanaponika, 1962; Kabat-Zinn, 1994, 2011; Bishop et al., 2004; Gunaratana, 2011; Lutz et al., 2015).4 In the Buddhist tradition, non-judgment is often associated with a liberation from the dogmatic clinging to beliefs and metaphysical truths (Flintoff, 1980; Kuzminski, 2008; Greenslade, 2014). In the case of mindfulness-based therapy, non-judgment is associated with the overcoming of inflexible beliefs that prevent us from adopting an open and accepting orientation toward our experiences (Stone & Zahavi, 2021; Mattes, 2022). 21

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That Pyrrhonian skepticism bears some relation to Eastern philosophies is not a new idea. Central here is Diogenes Laertius’s claim that Pyrrho traveled to India and was influenced by Eastern philosophers for the development of his skepticism and the suspension of judgment that characterizes it (1925, IX 61). Despite the fact that we do not have enough evidence to conclusively decide if Pyrrho was influenced directly by Eastern thinking, several scholars argue that we have good reasons to examine the relationship between Pyrrhonism and Eastern philosophies, especially Buddhism (Flintoff, 1980; McEvilley, 1982; Kuzminski, 2008; Beckwith, 2015). Two aspects of Pyrrhonian skepticism that seem to point eastward are (1) the suspension of judgment about metaphysical truths and (2) the fact that Pyrrhonists present themselves as therapeutic philosophers who seek ataraxia. John-Paul Flintoff (1980) argues that Pyrrhonism is quite a peculiar movement in Greek philosophy because it is the only Greek philosophy that opposes metaphysical truths and doubts the power of language to reveal the truth by way of assertion. This skepticism toward metaphysical truths, he claims, is equally central in the early Buddhist sutras, which present the Buddha as being agnostic about metaphysical truths (p. 91). Adrian Kuzminski endorses this view and compares the Buddha to the Pyrrhonists who “took a radically undogmatic stance with regard to metaphysical or speculative beliefs, famously neither affirming nor denying them, but rather suspending judgment about them” (2008, p. 37). Kuzminski elaborates on this point and states that like Pyrrhonism, Madhyamaka Buddhism refuses to give assent to any dogmatic assertion, “to the point of calling into question the fundamental tenets of traditional Buddhism itself” (2008, p. 55). Kuzminski, therefore, links the Pyrrhonian non-dogmatic stance with the Buddhist problematization of our tendency to “cling” (Upādāna) to fixed views (2008, p. 55). Another point of congruency between the two traditions, is the prominence of therapy in both Pyrrhonism and Buddhism. What is crucial here is that the opposition toward metaphysical truths is not just a philosophical opposition, but is motivated by the therapeutic goal of overcoming disturbance (tarache) in the case of Pyrrhonism, and overcoming “suffering” or “dissatisfaction” (duḥkha) in the case of Buddhism (Flintoff, 1980; Kuzminski, 2008; Beckwith, 2015).5 Special emphasis is given here on the philanthropic element of Pyrrhonism, which we have mentioned in the introduction. In this view, Pyrrhonism can be understood as a therapeutic practice advocating non-judgment, which brings it very close to Buddhist thinking.6 In both Buddhism and Pyrrhonian skepticism, the goal is some kind of liberation from suffering, which “is achieved by resisting assent to any identification with extreme or dogmatic views or beliefs…” (Kuzminski, 2008, p. 42). McEvilley goes so far as to propose that there is a similarity between the Pyrrhonian assent to appearances and the non-judgmental mindfulness found in Buddhism. Pyrrhonism and mindful Buddhist practice, he says, mark a liberation from conceptual thinking and a return to life itself. McEvilley draws on Sextus’ claim that the Pyrrhonist “drinks when thirsty and eats when hungry”, suggesting that this assent to appearances is reminiscent of the “Zen definition of enlightenment as the state in which one eats when hungry and sleeps when tired” (McEvilley, 1982, p. 18). Of course, one should tread carefully when linking Pyrrhonian skepticism with the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, as there is a major difference between the two traditions in terms of method. A fundamental component of Buddhist mindfulness is meditation, which is completely absent from Pyrrhonism. The Pyrrhonian path to ataraxia is not one of meditation. Rather, it involves the philosophical practice of juxtaposing philosophical arguments and realizing that they balance each other out. 22

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Notwithstanding the aforementioned methodological difference, the similarities between the two traditions have motivated Josef Mattes to examine how Pyrrhonism might be related to mindfulness-based therapy, which has admittedly been influenced by Buddhism. Starting with the question of whether the Pyrrhonian skeptic can live according to his skepticism, Mattes suggests that insights drawn from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) allow us to give an affirmative answer to this question, and invite us to reflect on the possibility that the Pyrrhonian way of life might be a good life. A central claim in ACT is that one of the roots of human suffering is psychological rigidity (Hayes et al., 2012, p. 64; Mattes, 2022, p. 109). In contrast, psychological flexibility and cognitive defusion are presented as important strategies that contribute to a good life. Cognitive defusion refers to a person’s capacity to notice and stay with her thoughts or feelings without adding the judgment that those thoughts or feelings are bad or good, true or false. The most characteristic example that points to the Pyrrhonian capacity for defusion is Sextus Empiricus’ claim that the Pyrrhonist will feel physical pain, but will not suffer the additional pain of believing that pain is evil (Mattes, 2022, p. 115). This ability is interpreted by Mattes as an ability to suspend judgment about the event and focus on the event itself. The idea here is that judgments and inflexible beliefs can have a negative effect on our well-being, because they hinder us from adjusting to our environment. Mattes gives the example of a person who holds the rigid belief that only material wealth will make someone happy. By dogmatically holding onto this belief about the complete identification of happiness with material wealth, this person is likely to fall into depression if she goes bankrupt, since she will be unable to re-orient her life under the new circumstances. The Pyrrhonist, on the other hand, would not face this problem precisely because she suspends judgment about the truth or falsity of the statement “wealth brings happiness”. In doing so, she has a much more flexible approach to life and this contributes to her well-being. This succinct presentation of the therapeutic aspects of Pyrrhonism aims to illustrate one way in which Pyrrhonian Skepticism may be linked to the topic of mindfulness. Although Pyrrhonism lacks the most important aspect associated with mindfulness (i.e., meditation), there are ways in which one can find links between the non-judgmental attitude that mindfulness seeks to cultivate, and the suspension of judgment found in Pyrrhonism. However, more might need to be said about what exactly being non-judgmental means. The question about the scope of the notion of non-judgment is raised by Stone and Zahavi (2021) who wonder if non-judgment involves the suspension of the as-structure of perception: “the fact that I do not (for example) see things simpliciter but rather as beautiful or strange; or as objects of a such-and-such a kind; or (perhaps even) as climbable or edible” (p. 165). By critically reflecting on the relationship between the mindfulness movement and phenomenology, Stone and Zahavi suggest that if by non-judgmental we mean a desire to put aside the “as-structure” of perception for the sake of achieving a pure perception, then phenomenology and mindfulness might not ultimately be that close to each other. Stone and Zahavi highlight that phenomenology is not interested in silencing beliefs, assumptions, and desires, but rather aims at making us realize “the extent to which what we encounter in experience is inescapably intertwined with our cognitive and affective contributions” (p. 177). They argue that phenomenology marks neither a turn to the subjective realm nor an attempt to see objects “as such” by suspending our thoughts about them. Phenomenology, they claim, focuses on how the world reveals itself to us, and therefore is concerned with the subject-world correlation. The points developed by Stone and Zahavi are important because they invite us to consider the extent to which mindfulness practices and 23

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(for our purpose) Pyrrhonism point to the phenomenological direction of the subject-world correlation. As I will try to show, the non-judgmental element of Pyrrhonism does not point to a desire to reach a pure perception. On the contrary, I would like to argue that one of the philosophical merits of Pyrrhonism is that it directs our attention to the way in which we are always in-the-world, thus prefiguring an important phenomenological insight.

Phenomenology and Pyrrhonism The idea of linking phenomenology to skepticism of any kind might naturally raise some eyebrows. As is well known, Edmund Husserl understood phenomenology as a method that seeks to overcome “the rocks of extreme scepticism” (Husserl, 2008, p. 17) that have been besetting philosophical and scientific thinking since Socrates and Plato confronted the skepticism espoused by the sophists. Husserl interprets skepticism as an anti-philosophical and anti-scientific position that attempts to prove “the impossibility of all philosophy, i.e., the impossibility of an ultimately justifying science” (Husserl, 2019, p. 59). Husserl’s attitude toward skepticism is apparent already in his early critique of psychologism, which he links to skepticism (Husserl, 2008, p.  75 ff). But it is also apparent in his Crisis of European Sciences, where he tries to defend the idea of a universal philosophy from the skepticism of his age (Husserl, 1970, p. 12). The hope that Husserl might acknowledge some kinship between Phenomenology and Pyrrhonian skepticism in virtue of their common use of the notion of epoché, is quickly betrayed. As Dermot Moran suggests, Husserl uses Greek terms not so much because he finds a connection between ancient Greek thought and phenomenology, but because he wants to use a philosophically neutral language (Moran, 2021, p. 99). Things do not seem to be much different if one turns to Martin Heidegger who in Being and Time explicitly expresses his distaste for skepticism, by stating that the problem of the existence of the external world is a pseudo problem (2009b, p. 50).7 The scandal, he says, is not that philosophers have not managed to prove the existence of the world, “but that such proofs are expected and attempted again and again” (BT, p. 249). According to Heidegger, skepticism about the existence of the world is grounded in a philosophical dualism that distinguishes between a knowing subject on the one hand and an independent world on the other hand. As Edward Minar suggests, this conceptual “isolation” paves the way for questions about how the subject can move out of its inner sphere and apprehend a world of objects (Minar, 2003, p. 193; see BT, pp. 86–87). Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein goes against representational accounts of the subject-object relation and their tendency “to take ‘knowing’ as our primary way of interacting with things” (Guignon, 1983, p. 39). In this Cartesian vision, perception is understood as “a process of returning with one’s booty to the ‘cabinet’ of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it” (BT, p. 62). Even prior to BT, Heidegger states that both skepticism and those who attempt to refute it, do not really deal with the question of truth in an original way. They merely ask whether or not there is truth, but they do not bother to ask what the meaning of truth is (Heidegger, 2010, p. 8). Notwithstanding the above, I would like to suggest that there is a way of linking Pyrrhonism to phenomenology. A first thing to notice is that Husserl’s attitude toward skepticism is not entirely negative. In his First Philosophy lectures, Husserl shows a way of incorporating skepticism into the pre-history of phenomenology. Skepticism, he says, is this trend in ancient Greek thought that performs a turn toward subjectivity (2019, p. 55). 24

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In fact, he suggests that “skepticism derived its power in secret from that dimension which philosophy had not yet grown eyes to see, namely, the sphere of pure consciousness.” Further down Husserl continues: [I]n skeptical arguments about which one cannot say for sure to what extent they are really meant seriously, a completely new theme of the most universal significance enters, albeit in primitive and vague form, into the philosophical consciousness of mankind. For the first time, the naïve pregivenness of the world becomes problematic, and from thence, too, the world itself with regard to the fundamental possibility of cognizing it and with regard to the fundamental sense of its being in itself. Otherwise put, for the first time…the totality of possible objectivity in general, is viewed “transcendentally,” as the object of possible cognition, of possible consciousness in general. (Husserl, 2019, p. 62) What passages like the above indicate is that there might be after all a way of incorporating skepticism into the pre-history of the phenomenological tradition. But to what kind of skepticism is Husserl referring? For the most part, Husserl links ancient skepticism with the relativism of ancient sophists like Gorgias and Protagoras. There are, however, signs that Husserl distinguished between the anti-philosophical skepticism of the sophists, and the skepticism of Pyrrhonism. As Moran notes, Husserl is aware of the difference between dogmatic skepticism and the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment (Moran, 2002, p. 188). Indeed, in his First Philosophy lectures, Husserl makes an indirect reference to Pyrrhonism when he states that the skepticism of the “later medical empiricists” (i.e., the Pyrrhonists) is an exception to the dogmatic skepticism found in ancient Greece: Ancient Skepticism is, to be sure, steadfastly and consciously a negativism, an antiphilosophy that acknowledges no philosophy whatsoever (and that means no objective philosophy whatsoever) and declares none to be possible in principle. It has no sphere of positive cognition and work; it knows of no true method, unless we count its techniques for constructing skeptical paradoxes. The only exception is the empiricism of the later medical empiricists, which, however, had but little influence on the total picture of ancient philosophy. (2019, p. 149) The text is crucial because it juxtaposes the negative, anti-philosophical skepticism of the sophists with Pyrrhonism. Although not mentioned explicitly, the implication of Husserl’s words is that Pyrrhonism could be thought as an exception to the anti-philosophical spirit of the ancient skepticism. But in what way can we say that Pyrrhonian skepticism is philosophical? Can it be said that Pyrrhonism is closer to bringing consciousness to the fore in a way that sophistry could not. This is what Klaus Held claims in “The Controversy ­Concerning Truth: Towards a Prehistory of Phenomenology”. Held (2000) argues that Pyrrhonian skepticism constitutes a third way in ancient philosophy because it is a philosophical tradition that goes against both the anti-philosophical relativism of the sophists and the objectivism of Plato and Aristotle. Pyrrhonism is unique in that it circumvents the controversy concerning truth between relativists and objectivists. It does so by showing that for every affirmative assertion its negation is conceivable, creating 25

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thus a balance that makes it impossible to dogmatically cling to an assertion about the being of beings. But what is the positive philosophical contribution in this? Held suggests that the Pyrrhonists separate being from appearance in a way that prefigures the Kantian distinction between appearances and things in themselves. In doing so, Pyrrhonism becomes “the most extreme philosophical opposition to the natural attitude”, because it challenges our belief that we can have access to things-in-themselves us they are independently of us (Held, 2000, p. 42). Pyrrhonism is for Held the movement in ancient philosophy that brings forth subjectivity as a mode of appearing, thus prefiguring modern accounts of subjectivity. However, Held concludes that Pyrrhonism is not phenomenological at its core, because it thinks of the subject in representational terms, promoting a subject-object dualism that phenomenology eventually overcomes (p. 46). Held’s interpretation of Pyrrhonism is not the only attempt to reflect on the relationship between Pyrrhonism and phenomenology. In her comparative analysis of Husserl’s phenomenology and Pyrrhonian skepticism, Tereza Pentzopoulou-Valala claims that Pyrrhonism is not strictly speaking phenomenological since it does not examine how objects are constituted in transcendental subjectivity. However, she argues that Pyrrhonism performs a quasi-thematization of the lifeworld insofar as it reveals that the concrete experience of everyday life is ontologically prior to the act of theoretical judgment (2002, pp. 189–190). John Heaton makes a similar observation, but he links Pyrrhonism to the existential phenomenology of Heidegger. He suggests that the Pyrrhonian skeptics “can be seen as forerunners of the Heideggerian notion of being-in-the-world (Heaton, 2003, p. 41). Like Held and Pentzopoulou-Valala, Heaton emphasizes the way in which Pyrrhonism questions the ability of language to express truth by assertion (Heaton, 1997, p. 86), but he moves on to suggest that Pyrrhonism challenges the representational distinction between an inner sphere and an external world. I believe that this emphasis on how Pyrrhonism challenges assertoric judgments and how this could imply a proto-phenomenological thematization of our being-in-the-world is something that deserves further examination.8 In the next two sections of this chapter, I discuss how Heidegger problematizes the idea that truth is found in assertions; and I propose a way of reading Pyrrhonism along the lines of Heidegger’s existential phenomenology.

Heidegger on Judgment and Being-in-the-World A key component of Heidegger’s critique of western metaphysics is his claim that it fails to thematize the worldliness of human existence, and instead tends to understand the world as the mere collection of present-at-hand things. Crucially, Heidegger links this tendency of reducing things to present-at-hand objects, (1) to the predicative function of language that has been prioritized in philosophical thinking, and (2) to the philosophical prejudice that understands truth as “the property of a certain class of judgements or assertions” (Dahlstrom, 1994, p. 777). In BT and the lecture courses that preceded it, Heidegger makes references to a theory of judgment that is prevalent among his contemporaries, and which is traced back to a particular reading of Aristotle’s discussion of the relation between truth and assertion. Heidegger’s key point is that contemporary theories of judgment focus exclusively on the predicative aspect of assertions and miss Aristotle’s point that an assertion is primarily a letting be seen; a revealing (see Campbell, 2012, pp. 149–150). On the basis of this restrictive understanding of Aristotle’s remarks about assertions, the philosophical tradition has concluded that 26

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the possibility of finding truth resides in the act of judging; specifically, it resides in the act of a subject attempting to determine what an object is in itself (Heidegger, 2010, p. 115).9 In section 44 of ΒΤ, Heidegger declares that he wishes to confront three basic assumptions about the essence of truth: 1 that the “locus” of truth is assertion (judgment); (2) that the essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgment with its object; (3) that Aristotle, the father of logic, not only has assigned truth to the judgment as its primordial locus but has set going the definition of “truth” as “agreement” (BT, p. 257). During the 1920s, Heidegger exhibited an eagerness to challenge these three assumptions by showing that a different understanding of logos and truth lies hidden in the works of Aristotle and in Greek philosophy in general. Heidegger holds the philosophical prioritization of the predicative function of language as being responsible for the subject-object distinction, which hinders us from reaching a deeper understanding of human existence as being-in-the-world.10 His main charge against this modality of language is that it de-­ contextualizes the phenomena which it explains with the result that it distorts the horizontal essence of our experience. What is concealed by this specific modality of language is that “the world is primarily experienced in significance” (Figal, 2006, p. 84). Although Aristotle is commonly credited with developing propositional logic and for paving the way for the identification of logos with assertion, Heidegger claims that Aristotle also pointed in a direction that has remained unthematized by the philosophical tradition. In particular, Heidegger suggests that Aristotle’s discussion of logos in Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας (De Interpretatione) reveals an aspect of logos that cannot be reduced to the objectifying function of an assertion, and indirectly points to the dependence of propositional logic to a more primordial unconcealment of beings (Heidegger, 2010, p.  107ff; BT, p.  269). The key point that Heidegger consistently develops during the ’20s is that the possibility of finding truth or falsity in an assertion is based on a more fundamental experience of truth as unhiddenness/unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of beings. Heidegger claims that such an experience of truth is to be found in ancient Greek thought which does not restrict truth to judgments but relates truth to “perception as such and the simple perception of something” (Heidegger, 1985, p.  55). Heidegger’s phenomenology develops this last point in a hermeneutic direction, suggesting that propositional truth is derivative of a pre-reflective understanding of things through our direct engagement with the world (Petropoulos, 2021). This insight becomes explicitly thematized in the distinction that Heidegger draws between a primordial, pre-predicative understanding of beings “as something” and the “predicative-as” that is found in assertions. In BT he calls the primordial “as structure” of experience a “hermeneutical-as”. He says: “the primordial ‘as’ of an interpretation (ἑρμηνεία) which understands circumspectively we call the ‘existential-hermeneutical as’ in distinction from the apophantical ‘as’ of the assertion” (BT, p. 201). By drawing such a distinction, Heidegger wants to show that predication presupposes a prior understanding of the subject matter. Every act of having something before our eyes and perceiving it, is in and of itself a matter of “having” something as something. Our directional being-unto-things-and-people functions within this structure of “something as something”. In short it has the as-structure. However, this as-structure is not necessarily related to predication (Heidegger, 2010, pp. 121–122). 27

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The point here is that we always and already understand “something as something” before making it an object of theoretical reflection and knowledge. In BT, Heidegger argues that assertions presuppose the discovery of something that has already shown itself. He claims that the primary meaning of assertion is that of pointing out (Aufzeigen) which “is performed on the basis of what has already been disclosed in understanding or discovered circumspectively” (BT, p. 199). Circumspection for Heidegger has the sense of a particular way of seeing that reveals beings in their usability (BT, p. 98). For example, the statement “the hammer is heavy”, when uttered while we engage in hammering, is an utterance that points out the hammer in terms of its usability; to be more precise in terms of its unsuitability for performing our project. That is to say, the hammer is primarily revealed to us as something ready-to-hand and not as an object merely present-at-hand (see BT, p. 196). When, however, we engage in predicative assertions, we ascribe a definite character to the object to which our assertion is directed. Heaviness becomes now an objective property of the hammer. In this way, Heidegger says, we are performing a narrowing down of the ­object. The object is not anymore ready-to-hand but an entity that is stand-alone and present-at-hand for a subject. To understand better why the transition from ready-to-hand to present-at-hand marks a narrowing down of that about which we speak, more needs to be said about the significance that the concept of readiness-to-hand acquires in Heidegger’s attempt to shed light on Dasein’s existence as being-in-the-world. Readiness-to-hand is a concept that Heidegger uses to point to the fact that in our everyday lives we, for the most part, treat objects as equipment for the accomplishment of our everyday tasks and projects. Continuing with Heidegger’s famous example, the hammer is primarily revealed to us by way of using it and not by attempting to define it. But Heidegger does not stop there, since the aim of his analysis is to bring into relief Dasein’s existence as being-in-the-world. He therefore proceeds and draws our attention to the fact that there is no stand-alone equipment; that things reveal themselves to us as equipment only because they belong to a totality of equipment (BT, p. 97). The hammer is, therefore, relevant to us in relation to other objects that we use while hammering (nails, etc.). Furthermore, the hammer is used in order to produce a certain product, so it relates to the end-product of our activity (e.g., fixing a desk or creating a new object). Finally, the end-product of our activity relates to other human beings who will make use of it. Others are therefore already implied in my act of hammering (BT, p. 154). What is important to note here is that by focusing on the readiness-to-hand of an object (e.g., the hammer) a whole context of meaningful relations reveals itself. In other words, by reflecting on readiness-to-hand we become aware of our being-in-the-world. It is precisely our immersion into a context of meaningful relations that gets forgotten when we treat objects as stand-alone, present-at-hand things. Heidegger therefore challenges the idea that judgment or assertion is the sole locus of truth.11 Such an assumption signals the forgetting of the primordial as-structure of experience. In judgments or assertions, the “as-structure” of our engaged dealing with beings gets transformed to such an extent that we end up reducing beings to merely present and isolated things. It is from such reductive understanding of things as merely present, that the notion of pure or bare perceptions arises. Heidegger challenges such a view, showing that perceptions always and already “involve human understanding and reveal the world as manifesting complex structures of intelligibility on an immediate level” (Mulhall, 1990, pp. 120–121). So, the most important deficiency of judgment is that it tends not to take into consideration the meaningful horizon from within which things reveal themselves to us. In judgment 28

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the “what is” of an entity, is not derived from its function or from its relatedness to other things; it is derived, instead, from the fact that it is something that stands against a knowing subject. As we have indicated, Heidegger criticizes the tendency to take “knowing” as the primary way of interacting with beings. The problem about the existence of an external world emerges precisely from this tendency to distinguish between an inner and an outer sphere. What is being missed in this line of thought is human facticity; namely, the fact that human existence is always and already in-the-world. With these thoughts in mind, I would like to suggest that the hidden aspect of Greek thinking, which points to a primordial unconcealment of beings, can be found in Pyrrhonian skepticism. Pyrrhonism, I will suggest, shows the derivative nature of assertions and judgments and in so doing, invites us to reflect on the pre-reflective manifestation of beings in our everyday lives.

Pyrrhonism and Being-in-the-World In the introduction to this chapter, I mentioned some of the key aspects of Pyrrhonism, as presented by Sextus Empiricus. There we saw that an important aspect of Pyrrhonian skepticism is the suspension of judgment in the face of conflicting dogmatic accounts that seem to be equally convincing. We also mentioned that before having to suspend judgment, the Pyrrhonist was hoping to reach ataraxia by finding the truth about things that perplex and confuse him, but against all odds he found ataraxia only when he suspended judgment. Finally, we saw that the Pyrrhonist’s suspension of judgment applies only to dogmatic ­assertions about how things are in reality, and not to appearances. One way of interpreting Pyrrhonism is through the lens of a Cartesian method of doubt, by assuming a distinction between a knowing subject and an external world. From within such a framework, the Pyrrhonist can be thought of as a philosopher who is on an epistemological quest for indubitable truths, and who methodically opposes different claims in order to find which of them is more convincing. Not being able to find any one of them to be more convincing than the others, she remains in a state of doubt that can potentially have a paralyzing effect in her everyday life. The assumption here is that human beings have a knowing relationship to the world, which in turn means that without knowledge the subject is left groundless – without any connection to the external world. This is why Hume claims that at the end of the day, Pyrrhonists must put aside their skepticism and act according to common-sense knowledge and beliefs. On this interpretation the Pyrrhonist’s admission that they act according to everyday observances carries no positive philosophical significance. On the contrary, it shows that the Pyrrhonists cannot be true to their skepticism insofar as they engage in activities that presuppose knowledge. However, a different picture of Pyrrhonism comes into view if one is willing to focus on Sextus’ claim that appearances constitute the criterion of persuasion for the skeptic (PH, I 22). Considered in this light, Pyrrhonism reveals itself not so much as a philosophy of knowledge, but rather as a philosophy that challenges theoretical assertions in a way that sheds light on the priority of everyday and concrete experience. This image of the Pyrrhonist gains traction if one interprets the Pyrrhonist’s adherence to everyday observances as a positive phenomenon. Ordinary human beings, Sextus says, “set out on journeys by land and by sea and construct ships and houses, and produce children” without having to pay attention to any arguments or to have theoretical knowledge about how things come into being (PH, II 244–245). This insight, I think, comes extremely close to Heidegger’s dismantlement 29

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of the “knowing subject” in his phenomenological analysis of everyday existence. Seen through a phenomenological lens, the Pyrrhonist can be seen as a thinker who puts his finger on the idea that issues of epistemic objectivity are derivative issues and that human beings exist primarily as being-in-the-world. This interpretation takes seriously the fact that the Pyrrhonist never throws her skeptical gaze at appearances but rather at what is said about appearances (PH, I 19). The Pyrrhonian adherence to appearances, together with the admission that they act according to everyday observances can be taken as signs that there is nothing that distinguishes Pyrrhonian philosophy from non-philosophical common sense (Frede, 1998). From a phenomenological perspective we could say that the Pyrrhonists act in accordance with the natural attitude (Pentzopoulou-Valala, 2002). However, as Eichorn suggests, there is something that differentiates the Pyrrhonian acceptance of common life from that of ordinary people (Eichorn, 2014, p. 130). Pentzopoulou-Valala (2002) suggests that one way of thinking about this difference is to distinguish between a non-philosophical, non-thematic adherence to common life, on the one hand, and a philosophical-thematic one, on the other hand. By availing of this distinction between “pre-philosophical” and a “philosophical” acceptance of common life, we can attempt to reconstruct the Pyrrhonian philosophical journey. Prior to philosophy and prior to becoming a Pyrrhonian skeptic, the young Pyrrhonist has a particular standpoint toward beings, reminiscent of the natural attitude. She takes what appears as true, assuming that we have direct access to things in themselves as they are independently of us. There are, however, within the world of the natural attitude, at least two features that can trigger a philosophical quest for truth. First of all, things can appear different under different circumstances. The young Pyrrhonist is therefore disturbed by the contradictions that she meets in the world (Heaton, 1997, p. 83). Second, the young Pyrrhonist lives in a world replete with philosophical arguments and ideas, which means that arguments and ideas are part of her world just as much as everyday phenomena. In other words, the practice of philosophy is for the young Pyrrhonist a historical-factical possibility. The young Pyrrhonist has therefore access to different arguments about the true being of things. In fact, different philosophical theories about the same phenomenon can also contribute to the young Pyrrhonist’s disturbance (Heaton, 1997, p. 83). As we have seen, the Pyrrhonist begins her philosophical journey with the hope that via philosophy she will discover the true nature of things and find peace of mind (PH, I 26). However, she realizes that none of the philosophical arguments available can help her distinguish between true and false appearances. The Pyrrhonist finds herself in a situation where opposing arguments appear to carry equal weight. She suspends judgment about the truth or falsity of appearances, decides to adhere only to phenomena and act according to everyday observances. In a way, the Pyrrhonist returns precisely to the place where she started. She started from everyday life, and she has returned to it. The return however is different because everyday life is now a positive phenomenon and the Pyrrhonist is capable (1) of challenging the prioritization of theoretical assertions over concrete experience and (2) of making insightful observations about human facticity. The first element that allows us to draw a link between Pyrrhonism and the existential phenomenology of Heidegger is the way that Pyrrhonism questions the ability to find truth by assertion (Klaus, 2000, p. 39; Heaton, 1997, p. 86). As we have seen, during the ‘20s Heidegger develops an interpretation of the Greek word ἀλήθεια as unconcealment, claiming that this forgotten sense of truth is irreducible to the truth of theoretical assertions or judgments, but rather points to a more primordial revealing of beings. It seems to me that 30

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Pyrrhonism points precisely to the derivative essence of propositional truth in a way that corroborates Heidegger’s claim. Throughout the Outlines of Pyrrhonism Sextus Empiricus is at pains to show that the Pyrrhonists are not making dogmatic assertions about the nature of things. When they announce that something appears to them in such and such way, they are merely reporting “a human feeling which is apparent to the person who feels it” (PH, I 204; see also PH, I 197). In other words, the Pyrrhonian announcements should not be understood as judgments about things as such, but as statements that reveal the concrete experience of the Pyrrhonist.12 Here it is worth quoting a text from BT, which, I think, ­Sextus Empiricus would have appreciated: assertions about the happenings in the environment, accounts of the ready-to-hand, “reports on the Situation”, the recording and fixing of the “facts of the case”, the description of a state of affairs, the narration of something that has befallen. We cannot trace back these “sentences” to theoretical statements without essentially perverting their meaning. Like the theoretical statements themselves, they have their “source” in circumspective interpretation. (BT, p. 201) In this text, Heidegger clarifies that not all assertions are theoretical in the sense that they turn that about which they speak to an object of knowledge. As we saw in the example with the hammer, the statement “the hammer is heavy” does not necessarily intend to say something objective about the nature of the hammer. When seen from within its context, this statement says something about the worker-hammer relation. But this is exactly how Sextus Empiricus wants us to understand the Pyrrhonian statements. For example, when Pyrrhonists state that “opposing claims appear equal”, they do not claim that they are indeed equal, but that the arguments reveal themselves as equal to them. Indeed, Sextus seems to be pointing in the same direction as Heidegger when he distinguishes between a general sense of assertion and a specific one. In the general sense, assertion refers to the judgment that either posits or denies something about an object. Sextus informs us that the Pyrrhonists refrain from making such assertions. But they have no reservations about using assertions in the special sense of talking about their affections (pathê) – how things “passively move us and lead us to assent” (PH, I 192–193). Of course, one cannot talk about a complete overlap between Pyrrhonism and Heidegger’s phenomenology. For one thing, in the text quoted above, Heidegger is pointing toward the priority of circumspective understanding over theoretical assertion and judgment. What we have said so far indicates that Pyrrhonism affirms the priority of concrete experience over theoretical judgment. This does not necessarily imply that Pyrrhonism thematizes the priority of circumspective understanding in the way that Heidegger’s phenomenology does; but despite the fact that one cannot talk about a thematization of circumspective understanding by Pyrrhonian skepticism, I would like to suggest that Pyrrhonism offers insightful observations that reveal human facticity. In presenting the arguments that the Pyrrhonists develop against the dogmatists, Sextus Empiricus brings into relief human existence as an embodied, socially embedded and context-dependent modality of being. As a way of confronting the dogmatic assumption that it is possible to know things in their true nature, the Pyrrhonists observe that our experiences are never experiences from nowhere but always experiences that involve bodily and affective dispositions. Sextus mostly provides examples from medicine where things 31

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appear different to people with healthy and people with unhealthy bodies. For example, the same water would feel hot if poured on an inflamed spot but lukewarm to a healthy body, or the same honey would seem sweet to a healthy person but bitter to someone with jaundice (PH, I 101). The point being conveyed here, is that things can appear different to people with different bodily dispositions. The same holds true about people with different affective states: “the same affairs are burdensome to those in grief but delightful to those who rejoice” (PH, I 111).13 Sextus’ examples indicate that we relate to things around us through pre-reflective dispositions. This in turn points to a positive appreciation of human facticity that has been explicitly thematized by phenomenologists and Heidegger in particular. Indeed, Sextus goes so far as to claim that the idea of having no disposition at all is absurd: But to declare that he is in no disposition at all—as, for instance, neither in health nor sickness, neither in motion nor at rest, of no definite age, and devoid of all the other dispositions as well—is the height of absurdity. (PH, I 112–113) This passage constitutes, I think, a very clear acknowledgment of human facticity. The text reveals that contrary to the dogmatic philosopher who believes that it is possible to step out of one’s facticity and know things as they are independently of us, Pyrrhonism sheds light on human facticity and challenges the idea that it is possible to free oneself from all standpoints. But Sextus Empiricus is not suggesting that the appearing of beings depends solely on the dispositions of the perceiving subject, but also on how things are related to one another (PH, I 136). The idea here is that we do not experience an object as such, independently of the things with which it is related. Diogenes Laertius informs us that Pyrrhonists would give examples of the relation between right and left, father and son, or daylight and sun (1925, IX 77–78). The point here is that an object experienced as existing on my right is first of all on the right of an embodied subject, but it is also perceived in relation to an object that is on the left. In a similar vein someone is a father only in relation to a child, and so on. The Pyrrhonists use this mode of arguing for the sake of going against dogmatists who claim to be able to know what things are independently and according to their nature (PH, I 135).14 It is crucial to notice, however, that this argument from relationality reveals something important about perception. It indicates that perception is always relational. The idea that something is experienced always in relation to something else brings the Pyrrhonist quite close to Heidegger’s understanding of perception as taking place within a relational context (Heidegger, 2005, p. 19). This in turn, implies that for the Pyrrhonist, there is no such thing as a pure perception of a present-at-hand thing. The suspension of judgment practiced by the Pyrrhonist, therefore, cannot be understood as pointing to the idea of a pure perception or bare attention. On the contrary, it can be argued that Pyrrhonism acknowledges human facticity and is aware of the reciprocity between subject and world. This interpretation is strengthened when one pays attention to the Pyrrhonian reflections on customs and rules of conduct that are acceptable in one cultural context but unacceptable in a different one (PH, I 145ff). Such observations can easily be interpreted as an endorsement of cultural relativism. However, I would like to suggest that one can read here a profound understanding of human facticity and the inter-subjective constitution of

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meaning. One must not forget Sextus Empiricus’ claim that the Pyrrhonist lives his life in accordance with appearances that depend on “passive and unwilled feelings” (PH, I 22). But as numerous scholars have noted, the “unwilled feelings” do not refer only to senseperceptions. For the Pyrrhonist an action can appear immoral, an argument can appear valid, and a political regime can appear unjust (Eichorn, 2014, pp. 141–142). As we have seen the Pyrrhonist lives in accordance with everyday observances which include: (1) the capacity to perceive and think, (2) the necessitation of feelings (e.g., hunger makes them eat), (3) the handing down of laws and customs, and (4) the practical knowledge acquired through the practice of crafts and arts (PH, I 23). It is therefore crucial to bear in mind that among the things that “passively move and lead” the Pyrrhonist, Sextus includes dispositions that one acquires through the practice of crafts and arts, as well as dispositions emerging from an inter-subjectively constituted horizon of meaning (e.g., laws, customs, and rules of conduct). These dispositions are for the Pyrrhonist constitutive aspects of human existence and as important as our bodily and affective dispositions. This means that Pyrrhonism not only challenges the dogmatic belief that we can reach the truth about a being as such by way of theoretical assertions, but also seems aware of the factical dimension of human existence – the fact that human existence is an embodied, socially and culturally embedded being-in-the-world. If my interpretation is correct, then Pyrrhonism prefigures phenomenology insofar as it shows that theoretical knowledge is not the primary way in which we relate to other beings. Among other things, we relate to our environment by actively engaging in the practice of crafts and arts, and through our coexisting with other human beings. Pyrrhonism, therefore, brings us back to existence by challenging the theoretical gaze and showing that we cannot step outside our own facticity. The Pyrrhonian suggestion that one can live a perfectly good life without ascending to any theoretical judgments, points precisely to the priority and irreducibility of human facticity. Here we should be careful not to push the interpretation too far. I do not mean to suggest that Pyrrhonism and Heidegger’s project are identical. One must bear in mind that Heidegger’s discussion of everydayness is a discussion of the ontic realm and is only a preparatory step toward the revival of the question of the meaning of Being and the ontological difference implied in this question. The Pyrrhonist would not go so far as to suggest that a pre-reflective understanding of Being is implied in our everyday existence. A philosophical investigation toward what remains hidden or concealed is out of the question for Pyrrhonism. Furthermore, for existential phenomenology facticity is the starting point. As Merleau-Ponty puts it, for phenomenology “the only way to understand man and the world is by beginning from their ‘facticity’” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. xx). For Pyrrhonism, however, the realization of human facticity comes at the end of their philosophical journey. Pyrrhonism shines an initial beam of light onto human facticity but does not attempt to fully illuminate it through an analysis of the structure of lived experience in the way that phenomenology does. One can speculate about why this cannot happen from within the framework of Pyrrhonism. One possible answer is that a thematic analysis of human facticity would require the use of theoretical assertions and the development of a body of knowledge that detaches itself from appearances and concrete experience. Heidegger himself was aware of this risk and it is for this reason that he linked phenomenological explication to a formal indication that sheds light to a phenomenon without engaging in dogmatic judgment that would foreclose its genuine sense (see Dahlstrom, 1994).

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Conclusion This chapter began with Hume’s refutation of Pyrrhonian skepticism on the grounds of inconsistency. According to Hume the Pyrrhonist cannot live his skepticism because a life without any belief whatsoever would lead to a paralyzing inactivity. In contrast to this reading of Pyrrhonism, I have attempted to show ways in which Pyrrhonian skepticism can be understood positively as a philosophy that provides important insights about the well-being of individuals as well as the situatedness of human existence. I have done this first by discussing how Pyrrhonism can be linked to the non-judgmental aspect of mindfulness. I then raised and considered the question of the scope of non-judgment through an engagement with the critical remarks of Stone and Zavavi. With this question as my guide, I have argued that the Pyrrhonian suspension of judgment does not cherish the idea of pure perception. On the contrary, Pyrrhonian skepticism shows an awareness of human facticity indicating that perception always involves a standpoint. Regarding my phenomenological reading of Pyrrhonism, I hope to have shown that the latter can be thought of as part of the pre-history of phenomenology (especially existential phenomenology) insofar as it exhibits (1) a similar concern for showing the limitations of propositional logic and (2) a commitment to concrete experience. This chapter does not wish to nullify the differences between these two traditions which are many and which would require a separate chapter to address adequately.

Notes 1 Henceforth PH will be used as a shorthand for Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Pyrrhōneioi Hupotupōseis). For the most part I use the translation of J. Annas and J. Barnes (2000), with the exception of one passage where I use Bury’s translation (1933). 2 For an overview of the debate see Morison 2014. 3 See also PH I 225–227. 4 For a critical reflection on mindfulness and non-judgment, see Dreyfus, 2013. See also Stone and Zahavi, 2021. 5 For a discussion of how to translate duḥkha, see Peacock, 2014. 6 Beckwith focuses on the similarities between Pyrrhonism and the early philosophical-religious system of early Buddhism. Kuzminski, however, delves into the relationship between Pyrrhonism and Mahayana Buddhism. 7 Henceforth BT. 8 It is worth noting here that there is one piece of evidence that allows us to think that, like Husserl, Heidegger might have also thought that Pyrrhonian skepticism is different from other skepticisms. This piece of evidence comes from Heidegger’s plan to give a lecture course on Sextus Empiricus in the Winter Semester of 1922–1923 (Van Buren, 1993). Unfortunately, he did not eventually give this course, leaving us with nothing more than an opportunity to speculate about what his approach toward Pyrrhonism might have been. Given that Heidegger’s readings of the philosophical tradition show elements of phenomenological appropriation, we have reason to believe that there would have been at least some elements of Pyrrhonism that he would see as valuable for phenomenology. 9 In this context, Heidegger uses the word “judgment” to refer to the act in which a subject takes a theoretical stand in relation to an object (BT, 56/32). 10 “With the subject/object distinction, one does not get at the facts of the matter; the basic phenomenon of being-in-the-world does not come into view” (Heidegger, 2009a, p. 40). 11 He does not deny that judgment and assertion is one of the ways in which humans relate to things. What he challenges instead, is the view that this is the primary way that we do so. 12 Here the Pyrrhonist should not be understood as drawing a representational distinction between how things appear to her and how things really are. This would be a dogmatic claim about the

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Pyrrhonian Epoché, Mindfulness and Being-in-the-World nature of appearances and is in fact to be found in the dogmatic philosophers who claim that things are in reality different from how they appear (Frede, 1998, p. 15; See also Heaton, 2003, p. 87). The Pyrrhonist is not claiming to have access only to impressions (i.e., an inner sphere) in contradistinction to an external world. As Frede notes, when the skeptic refers to things that appear to him, he also includes observations about the world around him (1998, p. 20). 13 Crucially, Sextus resists the temptation to describe the healthy state as natural and the unhealthy as unnatural. In fact, Sextus states that as far as appearances are concerned both healthy and unhealthy bodies are “in a natural state” (PH, I, 104). Although this point might appear to be subscribing to an extreme skepticism that suspends judgment about whether a body is sick or healthy, we must not forget that Sextus Empiricus was himself a practicing doctor who was perfectly capable of treating a medical condition, acting according to his medical expertise. What he challenges is our capacity to reach a theoretical de-contextualized definition of healthy and unhealthy. Seen from a phenomenological perspective the Pyrrhonian adherence to appearances allows him to take the experience of a patient seriously pointing in the direction of contemporary applications of phenomenology in healthcare, where emphasis is given to the concrete experiences of patients. 14 “So, since we have established…that everything is relative, it is clear that we shall not be able to say what each existing object is like in its own nature and purely, but only what it appears to be like relative to something” (PH, I 140).

Bibliography Barnes, J. (1998). The Beliefs of a Pyrrhonist. In M. F. Burnyeat and M. Frede. The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett. Beckwith, C. I. (2015). Greek Buddha: Pyrrho’s Encounter With Early Buddhism in Central Asia. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bett, R. (2019). How to Be a Pyrrhonist: The Practice and Significance of Pyrrhonian Skepticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bishop, S., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., Anderson, N., Carmody, J., Segal, Z., Abbey, S., Speca, M., Velting, D. & Devins, G. (2004). Mindfulness: A Proposed Operational Definition. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11 (3): 230–241. Burnyeat, M. F. (1998). Can the Sceptic Live His Scepticism? In M. F. Burnyeat and M. Frede. The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett. Campbell, S. M. (2012). The Early Heidegger’s Philosophy of Life: Facticity, Being, and Language. New York: Fordham University Press. Dahlstrom, D. O. (1994). Heidegger’s Method: Philosophical Concepts as Formal Indications. The Review of Metaphysics 47 (4): 775–795. Dreyfus, G. (2013). Is Mindfulness Present-Centered and Non-Judgmental? In M.G. Williams and J. J. Kabat-Zinn. Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins and Applications. London: Routledge. Eichorn, R. (2014). How (Not) To Read Sextus Empiricus. Ancient Philosophy 34: 121–149. Figal, G. (2006). Heidegger’s Philosophy of Language in an Aristotelian Context: Dynamis Meta Logou. In D. Hyland and J. P.  Manousakis. Heidegger and the Greeks: Interpretive Essays. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Flintoff, E. (1980). Pyrrho and India. Phronesis 25: 88–108. Frede, M. (1998). The Sceptic’s Beliefs. In M. F. Burnyeat and M. Frede. The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Indianapolis: Hackett. Frede, M. (1999). The Sceptics. In D. Furley. Routledge History of Philosophy. Vol. II: From Aristotle to Augustine. New York: Routledge. Greenslade, R. (2014). Mindfulness and Therapy: A Skeptical Approach. In M. Bazzano. After Mindfulness: New Perspectives on Psychology and Meditation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Guignon, C. B. (1983). Heidegger and the Problem of Knowledge. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company. Gunaratana, M. (2011). Mindfulness in Plain English. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications. Hayes, S., Strosahl, K. & Wilson, K. 2012. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The Process and Practice of Mindful Change. 2nd ed. New York: Guilford Press.

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Georgios Petropoulos Heaton, J. M. (1997). Pyrrhonian Scepticism: A Therapeutic Phenomenology. JBSP. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 28 (1): 80–96. Heaton, J. M. (2003). Pyrrhonian Scepticism and Psychotherapy. Existential Analysis 14 (1): 32–47. Heidegger, M. (1985). History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2005). Introduction to Phenomenological Research, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2009a). Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, trans. Robert D. Metcalf and Mark B. Tanzer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2009b). Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Heidegger, M. (2010). Logic: The Question of Truth, trans. Thomas Sheehan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Held, K. (2000). The Controversy Concerning Truth: Towards a Prehistory of Phenomenology. Husserl Studies 17 (1): 35–48. Hume, D. (2007). An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, trans. David Carr. Evanston (Ill.): Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (2008). Logical Investigations, J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2019). First Philosophy, Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920-1925), trans. Sebastian Luft and Thane M. Naberhaus. Dordrecht: Springer. Πεντζοπούλου-Βαλαλά, Τ (2002). Η Πρόκληση των Σκεπτικών. Αθήνα: Ακαδημία Αθηνών. In T. Pentzopoulou-Valala. The Challenge of Skeptics. Athens: Academy of Athens. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life. London: Piatkus. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2011). Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble with Maps. Contemporary Buddhism 12: 281–306. Kuzminski, A. (2008). Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. Lanham MD: Lexington. Laertius, D. (1925). Lives of the Eminent Philosophers. vol. 2, trans. R.D. Hicks. London: Heinemann. Lutz, A., Jha, A.P., Dunne, J.D. & Saron, C.D. (2015). Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-Related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective. The American psychologist, 70(7): 632–658. Machuca, D. E. (2011). Ancient Skepticism: Pyrrhonism. Philosophy Compass 6 (4): 246–258. Mattes, J. (2022). ACTing as a Pyrrhonist. International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 12 (2): 101–125. McEvilley, T. (1982). Pyrrhonism and Mādhyamika. Philosophy East & West 32 (1): 3–35. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D. A. Landes. Routledge. Minar, E. H. (2003). Heidegger’s Response to Skepticism in Being and Time. In J. Floyd and S. Shieh. Future Pasts: The Analytic Tradition in Twentieth-Century Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moran, D. (2002). Edmund Husserl: Founder of Phenomenology. Oxford: Polity. Moran, D. (2021). Husserl and the Greeks. JBSP. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 52: 98–117. Morisson, B. (2014). Sextus Empiricus. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato. stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/sextus-empiricus/ Mulhall, S. (1990). On Being in the World: Wittgenstein and Heidegger on Seeing Aspects. Routledge. Nyanaponika, T. (1962). The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: A Handbook of Mental Training on the Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness. New York: Samuel Weiser. Öymen, ÖK. (2012). Doubt and Anxiety: An Existentialist Reconstruction of Pyrrhonism. Journal of Ancient Philosophy 6: 1–16. Peacock, J. (2014). Sati or Mindfulness? Bridging the Divide. In M. Bazzano. After Mindfulness: New Perspectives on Psychology and Meditation. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Petropoulos, G. (2021). Heidegger’s Reading of Plato: On Truth and Ideas. JBSP.  Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 52: 98–117.

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Pyrrhonian Epoché, Mindfulness and Being-in-the-World Sextus Empiricus. (2000). Outlines of Scepticism. J. Annas and J. Barnes trans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sextus Empiricus. (1933). Outlines of Pyrrhonism. R.G. Bury trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4): 158–185. Van Buren, J. (1993). Heidegger’s Early Freiburg Courses, 1915-1923. Research in Phenomenology 23 (1): 132–152.

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2 MINDFULNESS AS MOTIVATION FOR PHENOMENOLOGICAL REDUCTION Ming-Hon Chu

The growing interest among philosophers in the relation between phenomenology and mindfulness is mainly driven by the question: how far do the two practices resemble each other? On the one hand, someone argues for their affinities in method or goal, and thereby suggests that training in mindfulness is advisable or even compulsory for phenomenology (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017; Bitbol, 2019; Depraz, 2019). On the other hand, others insist on the fundamental difference between the two, despite accepting the possibility of their cross-fertilization (Stone & Zahavi, 2021). Here, I do not attempt to offer any straightforward solution to the debate, about which there is a good list of references. In this chapter, I aim to lay bare an often-ignored precondition of phenomenology. I introduce a theoretical framework for evaluating the significance of mindfulness to phenomenology, namely, the motivation for carrying out the method of phenomenological reduction, or what phenomenologists alternatively call the “beginning of philosophy” (Fink, 1988, 1995; Husserl, 1989, 2019). The problem of motivation is crucial to phenomenology in both a practical and a theoretical respect. Practically speaking, it is questionable how the method of phenomenological reduction can be carried out, provided the psychological difficulties in abstaining from habitual belief and sustaining the state of pure contemplation. Theoretically speaking, inquiry into the motivation for the phenomenological reduction is a necessary step to bring the scientific task of self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung)1 to an end, given that phenomenology obliges itself to clarify the conditions of possibility of its own effectuation. In other words, the problem of motivation is paramount to both the factual and the transcendental aspect of phenomenological methodology. Thanks to those pioneering studies by the few phenomenologists interested in mindfulness, the practical significance of mindfulness to phenomenology has become more visible now. Accordingly, phenomenologists are encouraged to learn from the Eastern traditions of meditation how to cultivate corporeal as well as mental conditions favorable to phenomenological meditation. This chapter aspires to supplement what has already been done, strictly from a theoretical point of view, by explaining why the concrete instructions and descriptions of mindful practice can have a more intimate bearing on the transcendental project as such. 38

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-4

Mindfulness as Motivation for Phenomenological Reduction

This work is divided into five parts: (1) The first part summarizes a few established views on the convergence between phenomenology and mindfulness, with my focus on the debate over the utility of mindful training to phenomenological philosophy; (2) The second part explains why the practicality of phenomenology is in itself a core theoretical issue, hence the potential methodological relevance of mindful training to phenomenological philosophy; (3) The third part introduces Edmund Husserl’s theory of motivation for phenomenological reduction; (4) The fourth part introduces Eugen Fink’s theory of motivation for phenomenological reduction; (5) The fifth part indicates how far Husserl and Fink themselves have already foreseen a dialogue between phenomenology and mindfulness.

Juxtaposing Phenomenology and Mindfulness Broadly speaking, there are two streams of studies juxtaposing phenomenology and mindfulness. The first stream applies phenomenological concepts to the elucidation of mindful experiences. The second stream explores the utility of mindful training to the exercise of phenomenological investigation in general. For sure, these two streams often mingle with each other, hence the prospect of “cross-fertilization” (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, p. xxxv; Bitbol, 2019, p. 1). For the current purpose, I focus on the second stream as a guiding thread for thematizing the problem of motivation. Authors who debate the comparability between the practice of phenomenology and the practice of mindfulness are of particular relevance here. Probably The Embodied Mind (2017), the book co-authored by Francisco Varela, Eleanor Rosch and Evan Thompson in 1991, blazes the trail of comparing phenomenology to mindfulness, although phenomenology only plays a transitional role in their whole project.2 The whole project is animated by the gulf between sciences of mind and lived experiences, or the disconnectedness between first-person and third-person knowledge of oneself (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, p. xxxv). Unsatisfactory consequences follow. Either we accept what the sciences tell us and deny our lived experiences, or we hold fast to our lived experiences and ignore the sciences. As diagnosed by the authors, this rift is symptomatic of the scientific culture of the West, where people are caught up in the constant oscillation between those two tendencies (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, p. xix). In order to fill up the gap, the authors propose that it is necessary to enlarge the domain of cognitive science to include our direct experience. Therefore, a disciplined perspective on human experiences is needed. Phenomenological philosophy and Buddhist mindfulness are two candidates suggested for taking on this role (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, p. 33). However, at least in the first edition of The Embodied Mind, phenomenology was portrayed as a failed or broken-down project, since it got bogged down in abstract reflection typical of the Western scientific culture (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, p. xx). As specified, Husserl’s turn toward experience is still entirely theoretical and thus devoid of the practical dimension (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, p. 19). In contrast, the mindful approach to experience is open-ended and transformative. It cultivates the practitioner’s ability of self-awareness and fosters experimentation of new possibilities. Thereby, the Buddhist tradition of mindfulness is welcomed as a remedy to the West, helping to create an open space for the circulation between cognitive science and human experiences (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 2017, pp. xx, 235). Thereafter, there are two important contributors to the “circulation”, Natalie Depraz and Michel Bitbol, who engage with mindfulness more for the sake of phenomenology than 39

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for the sake of cognitive science. While The Embodied Mind quickly dismisses phenomenology as abstract theory, Depraz (2003, 2019) and Bitbol (2019) to a large extent entrust phenomenology, primarily Husserlian, with the task of exploring a vast variety of lived experiences, despite their sober awareness of its practical drawbacks. Mindfulness is then appreciated as a practical discipline for improving the performance of phenomenology. In the co-authored book On Becoming Aware (2003), Depraz takes on the twofold philosophical challenge of (1) introducing phenomenology as a solid method for describing lived experiences, and (2) exposing the limitations of phenomenology as it was historically presented. In short, given that the success of phenomenological reduction presupposes a radical change from a “habitual ethos” to an “anti-natural ethos” (Depraz, 2003, p. 185), Husserl’s reflections on the conversion are “astonishingly theoretical and general” (Depraz, 2003, p. 185). He seems to lack interest in working out the corporeal and spiritual ­techniques required for carrying out the reduction. To rectify this deficiency, Depraz suggests bringing phenomenology and the oriental traditions of mindfulness into communication. Accordingly, “a truly phenomenological experience has to be trained and cultivated” (Depraz, 2003, p. 179). While Husserl only hints at the structural characteristics of different ways of reduction, Buddhist meditation provides us with a concrete predisposition to their execution, hence the methodological foundation missing in Husserlian phenomenology (Depraz, 2003, pp. 202–203). The author goes on to compare the classical ways of reduction to the Tibetan yanas, a theme further elaborated in the article “Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassanā Meditation” (2019). While demonstrating how phenomenology and mindfulness can converge, the limits of their homology are well kept in sight. Accordingly, their main differences reside in goal as well as level of experience and description. The aim of Husserlian phenomenology is essentially gnoseological, whereas Buddhist meditation gives primacy to a soteriological end (Depraz, 2019, p. 51). Besides, a phenomenologist studies the eidetic structures of lived experiences, whereas a Buddhist meditator attends to singular lived experiences which come and go. Bitbol shares similar opinions regarding the differences between phenomenology and mindfulness. In the article “Consciousness, Being and Life” (2019), Bitbol contrasts them as an epistemic and a therapeutic project, respectively (Bitbol, 2019, p. 132). While the central motivation of phenomenology is overtly knowledge, the Buddhist path of mindfulness aims at uprooting the existential cause of suffering. Thereby, a practitioner of mindfulness pays exquisite attention to the moment to moment unfolding of experiences, instead of trying to grasp any invariable feature of them (Bitbol, 2019, p. 144). In terms of method, Bitbol seems to agree on the deficiency in phenomenology. While Buddhist teachings are very rich in methodological prescriptions about how to meditate, he remarks, the phenomenological literature is very discreet about methodological issues (Bitbol, 2019, pp.  137–138). Thus said, he believes that phenomenology is “a renewed strategy of ascesis” (Bitbol, 2019, p. 130) and “consists of a radically participatory stance that bears existential similarities with mindfulness” (Bitbol, 2019, p. 128). It is because, according to Husserl, the radical quest for knowledge implies an outright transformation of life comparable to a religious conversion. Phenomenology can then take advantage of mindful training as “a variant of its own methodological precondition” (Bitbol, 2019, p. 128). Despite the rough demarcation of goals and means, both authors anticipate practical rewards from the convergence of phenomenology and mindfulness, based on the observation that the two approaches to lived experiences do share some common grounds in terms of 40

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motivation as well as methodology. However, this goodwill faces the recent challenge from Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi. In the article “Phenomenology and Mindfulness” (2021), the two critics claim that “the differences touched upon are far more substantial than the two authors are prepared to acknowledge” (Stone & Zahavi, 2021, p. 21). Although Stone and Zahavi still admit the possibility of cross-fertilization, to a large extent they are not convinced by the outlined strategies to place mindful practice at the core of phenomenological practice, for their commonalities are much thinner than expected. As a result, “being a skilled practitioner of mindfulness is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good phenomenological philosopher” (Stone & Zahavi, 2021, p.  22). They further argue that Buddhist philosophy is a more legitimate source of inspiration for phenomenology.

Between Theory and Practice So far, I have summarized the mainstream debate over the value of mindful training to phenomenological investigation. Mindfulness is either more suitable than phenomenology to unravel our lived experiences, or it can become the best complement to phenomenology, or it can barely fit in the phenomenological project at all. No matter which side one takes, the focus is on the missing link between the natural attitude and the phenomenological attitude. Mindfulness is considered a potential partner of phenomenology only because the exact operation of the phenomenological reduction remains enigmatic. We know what Husserl and his followers want to achieve, but we are unsure how to reach there. A natural way to tackle this missing link is by equipping the philosopher with practical guidelines. The classical distinction between theory and practice then becomes prominent here. For those interested in promoting mindfulness within the phenomenological domain, Husserl’s scientific ideal remains an empty promise as long as it lacks the proper means to realize itself. Notwithstanding the theoretical strength of phenomenology, the additional quest for practical rigor animates the grand tour of the East. It is hoped that the oriental schools of meditation will help to bring an abstract theory down to a concrete reality. While it is quite common for any theory to meet the problem of practicality, the distinction involved here is not an ordinary one. The missing link between the natural and the phenomenological does not concern the application of a theory, but the initiation of it.3 In Husserl’s expression, it concerns the very “beginning of philosophy”.4 The practicality in demand here matters before rather than after theory. But what makes the initiation of phenomenology such a difficult issue? Why is phenomenological theory preceded by practice of an extraordinary kind? “As in the case with all undertakings which are new in principle, for which not even an analogy can serve as guide, this beginning takes place with a certain unavoidable naïveté. In the beginning is the deed”, Husserl has remarked (Husserl, 1970, p. 156). True, phenomenology is first and foremost a theoretical discipline. At least with Husserl’s intention, phenomenology is modeled after the ancient ideal of first philosophy. It sets itself the ambitious goal of laying an absolute foundation for all sciences. Being a foundational science of all sciences, phenomenology calls for a radical suspension of all worldly beliefs. It strives to liberate our thoughts from any inherited or habituated doxa which remain philosophically unexamined. The beginning philosopher leaves behind every mundane interest and thereby opens up a transcendental field of research. 41

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To ensure the purity of transcendental research, Husserl introduces the method of epoché and reduction.5 He further indicates different ways of enacting epoché and reduction, among which the Cartesian way, the psychological way, and the ontological way, are the cardinals.6 In fact, access to the transcendental has been a problem occupying almost the whole intellectual life of Husserl. He is well aware of the unclarities in his presentations, and constantly revises his methodological ideas under the guise of new introductions. His adherence to transcendentalism even leads to the history of Husserlian heresies (Ricœur, 1967, p. 4). Controversy lies within the robust conversion from mundanity to transcendentality. Critics doubt if it is possible at all to enact the epoché and the reduction as designed by Husserl, provided the radical abstention demanded.7 There can be milder doubt over its practical possibility, or stronger doubt over its theoretical possibility. Even though one accepts the scientific ideal projected by Husserl, one can still doubt if the scientific ideal is realizable or not. One can even doubt if a purely transcendental standpoint is in principle conceivable or not.8 In fact, the practical possibility of the epoché and the reduction also affects the theoretical possibility of phenomenology in general, for a theory with no share in reality is likely to be wrong. In other words, an inquiry into the practicality of Husserlian phenomenology is at the same time an inquiry into the “reality” of the transcendental enterprise as such.9 For this reason, the problem of practice matters here. If the practice preceding the theory is called into question, then the foundation of the theory is also shaken. Especially in the phenomenological context, the quomodo of the access to lived experience ceases to be a mere practical issue. It touches upon the core of transcendental theory as well. The practical a priori becomes itself a transcendental issue to be worked out theoretically.10 According to Husserl, the “reality” of phenomenology is of necessity a practical idea, which indicates an endless course for meditative works. Along this endless course, the phenomenologists are responsible for clearing up all puzzles of the goal and of the course itself.11 Phenomenology, for the sake of its completion, then needs to thematize itself to explicate its own conditions of possibility. This program falls under the heading of a “phenomenology of phenomenology” (Husserl, 2002, p. 178). In light of the scientific self-reflection, we can see that the promotion of mindful training to phenomenological philosophy shows a sign of optimism, whereby the practical possibility of transcendental research is presupposed. As I am going to show, strictly from a theoretical perspective, phenomenology is also responsible for recognizing its own lack in methodology to cater for any fruitful cross-fertilization. And I believe a phenomenological study of motivation can make a first move.

Husserl’s Theory of Motivation Clarification of the practical a priori is indeed an intrinsic demand of phenomenology. As a transcendental philosophy which strives for an absolute foundation of science, it is obliged to legitimize itself by laying bare its own conditions of possibility. Husserl characterizes transcendental philosophy by “the motif of inquiring back into the ultimate source of all the formations of knowledge, the motif of the knower’s reflecting upon himself and his knowing life […]” (Husserl, 1970, pp. 97–98). Accordingly, transcendental phenomenology as a goal is “a science that contains its own foundation and is absolutely self-sufficient; indeed, it is the only absolutely self-sufficient science” (Husserl, 1989, p. 152). 42

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Husserl adds that “Philosophy can take root only in radical reflections on the sense and possibility of its own enterprise”. Accordingly, these reflections aspire to clarify the proper soil of its own activity, “the absolute soil of pure experience”, and must proceed altogether “by way of an absolutely transparent method”, such that “there cannot be any unclear, problematic concepts or any paradoxes” (Husserl, 1989, p. 160). This radicalism in an absolutely transparent method will eventually “lead to a whole science, a science of the beginnings, a “first” philosophy […]” (Husserl, 1989, p.  161). Thus said, the self-critical project of “phenomenology of phenomenology” does not reach its mature form throughout Husserl’s lifelong career of radical reflection. The access from mundanity to transcendentality remains enigmatic to this day.12 Indeed, the debate on the phenomenological relevance of mindfulness is itself a great revelator of the missing link. It seems to indicate that something substantial is lacking at the core of phenomenology. Even Husserl’s methodological delineations of epoché and reduction fall short of the mark. Besides inviting the Eastern traditions to save phenomenology, I wonder if phenomenology has from itself any theoretical insight to offer about its own lack. And I believe that the problem of motivation discloses an ideal framework for phenomenology to make sense of its own lack. Husserl’s own methodological presentations are revealing and concealing at the same time. By introducing different ways to the epoché and the reduction, he leaves us the impression that the entrance to the transcendental field is totally up to our liberty. For example, in Ideas I he refers to the “complete freedom” we have for shutting ourselves off from any judgment belonging to the natural attitude (Husserl, 1983, p. 61). As long as we will, we can always follow the step-by-step instructions from the master and stand where he stood. Phenomenology’s claim to scientificity is precisely built on the practical possibility of a community sharing the same theoretical vision. Yet, we can almost suspect that he hides the stumbling blocks which stand in the way of phenomenology. In the “Epilogue” (1989) to his Ideas, originally published as a journal article in 1930, Husserl confesses that there “reside the greatest stumbling blocks on the path to understanding, for one will no doubt feel it is asking much too much that a mere “nuance”, arising out of a simple change in attitude, should have such a great significance and indeed be decisive for all genuine philosophy” (Husserl, 1989, p. 147). Before we meet the practical difficulties in the “simple change in attitude” from the natural to the phenomenological, we meet the theoretical difficulties in making evident the philosophical significance of such a change. In response, phenomenology calls for a radical self-understanding on the part of the philosopher with regard to the “compelling motivation which forces the philosophizing Ego to reflect back on that subjectivity of his own […]” (Husserl, 1989, p. 147). In this specific context, the problem of motivation becomes the key to the entrance of phenomenology.13 Husserl considers the motivation for the “simple change of attitude” decisive for the very being of philosophy as such.14 Indeed, Husserl has paid extraordinary efforts just to elucidate the motivation for the initiation of phenomenology. According to his self-portrait, in the course of many years of reflections he has “pursued various ways, all equally possible, aimed at exploring, in an absolutely transparent and compelling fashion, such a motivation as presses beyond the natural positivity of life and science and forces upon us, by displaying the necessity of the phenomenological reduction, a conversion to the transcendental attitude” (Husserl, 1989, p. 148). He adds: “These ways are therefore ones that lead to the beginning of a serious philosophy. They need to be thought through in reflective consciousness, and thereby they 43

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themselves belong properly to the beginning, inasmuch as a beginning can in fact arise only in the beginner’s self-reflection” (Husserl, 1989, p. 148). In other words, his minute introductions of various ways to the phenomenological reduction are not mere pedagogic means to guide other beginning philosophers, but they fulfill at the same time the intrinsic task of a first philosophy, a science of the beginnings. As a genuine beginner, Husserl gets his own motivation from his surroundings.15 In response to the disappointing situation of German philosophy of his time, Husserl feels the urge to “reinstate the most original idea of philosophy”, which has laid at the basis of European sciences since its first solid formulation by Plato. He thinks it belongs to “the great task of our time” to “intentionally explicate the genuine sense of this idea of philosophy” and to “demonstrate the possibility of its realization” (Husserl, 1989, pp. 138–139). In other words, motivated by the scientific situation, he sets himself the target to work on a phenomenology of phenomenology. In my reading, this “great task of our time” gets exemplary condensation in the lecture series of First Philosophy (2019) in 1923 and 1924. The whole lecture course is divided into two parts, corresponding to two large frameworks for explicating the beginning of philosophy. The first part deals with the “critical history of ideas”, whereby Husserl traces the origin of the guiding idea of philosophy in European history, as well as its partial realizations in different philosophical systems since Ancient Greece. The second part lays out a “theory of the phenomenological reduction”, which focuses on the realizability of the guiding idea in the personal life of a beginning philosopher. Given that both divisions inquire into the motivations for the initiation of phenomenology, they depart from very different perspectives, leading to very different conceptions of motivation.16 In the first part, Husserl situates phenomenology in the European tradition of philosophy, and reviews how the original idea of philosophy motivates the emergence of phenomenology. When it comes to the second part, his attention turns to the inner motivations of the beginning philosopher, including both the implicit tendency and the explicit decision to take up a philosophical vocation, thanks to which phenomenology can eventually take place in a concrete stream of consciousness. Husserl thereby sheds light on the radical beginning of philosophy in both a social-historical and a personal-psychological framework.17 In other words, Husserl values both social-historical and personal-psychological motivations as preconditions for establishing the first philosophy.18

Fink’s Theory of Motivation No doubt Husserl is aware of the problem of motivation as decisive for the methodological self-understanding of phenomenology.19 But he barely thematizes the “compelling motivation” for securing a programmatic study of it, probably because he has entrusted this ­project to his last assistant Eugen Fink. In the Sixth Cartesian Meditation (1995) which Fink composed in 1932, we find arguably the most explicit treatment of the problematic access to phenomenology. There, Fink proposes a systematic reflection on phenomenology’s own methodological root, under the rubric of transcendental theory of method (Transzendentale Methodenlehre). Its central task is precisely “to complete phenomenology in ultimate transcendental self-understanding about itself”. In other words, it “intends nothing other than a phenomenology of phenomenology” (Fink, 1995, p. 8). He further specifies the fundamental problem of the transcendental theory of method as the “phenomenology of the phenomenological reduction” (Fink, 1995, p. 29). 44

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Next, Fink broadly divides this metatheory into two parts. The first part concerns “the beginning of phenomenology”, whereas the second part deals with “the phenomenological onlooker”.20 For the current purpose, we focus on the part about the beginning of phenomenology. Regarding the beginning of phenomenology, Fink thematizes the motivation for conducting phenomenological reduction as the chief problem (Fink, 1995, p. 30). Accordingly, the philosopher must first give up the natural attitude in order to perform the phenomenological reduction. The expected shift from the mundane to the transcendental, however, remains enigmatic. Even though phenomenology is in general a theoretical discipline, its coming into effect depends on somebody in the world putting it into practice out of certain motivations. Otherwise, the whole transcendental enterprise would simply float like a castle in the air. Given the radical change of attitude demanded by the phenomenological method, it is unclear how the whole train of transcendental self-reflection can commence at all. Unlike Husserl, Fink does not admit the slightest continuity between mundane and transcendental self-reflections. He rejects motivations either of psychological or of historical origin,21 for they all presuppose the possibility of motivating phenomenology inside a mundane situation. Yet, this is the exact thesis he firmly opposes. He believes that any ascription of phenomenology to a mundane motive compromises the radicality of this transcendental discipline, since no participant in our belief in the world can render our belief in the world questionable. “‘Compelling’ motivation for the phenomenological reduction”, he stresses, “is not there in the natural attitude and for reasons of principle” (Fink, 1995, p. 32). He insists that mundane and transcendental self-reflections do not differ from each other by a matter of degree. They are rather “qualitatively different” from each other.22 In consequence, a transcendental self-reflection can only be motivated by the flash of “transcendental insight” itself.23 In other words, Fink conceives the practice of phenomenology as strictly self-conditional. “The phenomenological reduction presupposes itself” (Fink, 1995, p.  36), he concludes. Then he finds it necessary to identify the transcendental sense of motivation in contradistinction to the mundane sense of motivation.24 Retrospectively speaking, the transcendental theory of method does not care about “the de facto motivation in the phenomenologist at any particular point” (Fink, 1995, p. 30) at all, but only the motivation in a specifically transcendental sense, namely “the phenomenological fore-knowledge” (Fink, 1995, p. 36). Thus said, despite the unnatural beginning of phenomenology, such a robust conversion of attitude must still take place somewhere de facto. It must still rely on somebody living in the world to let it happen. In a somewhat paradoxical manner, Fink says: “The motivation for the action of reduction is the awakening of a questionableness that indeed enters the scene in the natural attitude, but which in principle ‘transcends’ the horizon of all questions that are possible within the natural attitude” (Fink, 1995, p. 37). So, on the one hand, phenomenology as an event of transcendental self-reflection “enters the scene in the natural attitude”. But it, on the other hand, transcends the horizon opened up by the natural attitude. Even though the beginning of phenomenology is completely unprepared inside any mundane situation, when it happens de facto, the transcendental insight must still “flash out” at a particular point (Fink, 1995, p. 34). Fink calls this unique kind of occasion an “extreme situation” for the natural attitude (Fink, 1995, pp. 33–34). Fink clarifies such a unique kind of occasion more extensively in an unfinished draft intended to introduce the “system of phenomenological philosophy” (1988), which he composed during 1931 and 1932. There he discloses more explicitly the tension between the 45

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radical and the unique situatedness of philosophy. Such a tension arises because, according to Fink, philosophy begins only by stepping across the threshold of the world. In his preliminary analyses of our pre-philosophical life, he seems to affirm that philosophy takes place in our life as one of the basic possibilities of human existence.25 In order to clarify the ground of philosophy, we need to investigate the human situation presupposed by every human self-reflection. There rests a widest and deepest situation, a basic situation encompassing all particular situations, which is equal to the world itself.26 Fink then equates the most radical human self-reflection, hence the beginning of philosophy, with the reflection on the world-situation.27 Nevertheless, he reserves his judgments right after he characterizes philosophy as a radical human self-reflection. He doubts if we can ascertain immediately the subjects of philosophizing, as long as we are confined to our naive self-understanding as human beings in the world. Before philosophy really takes place, it seems that the question of who is philosophizing cannot find a definite answer.28 In the end, he suggests that a genuine philosophical self-reflection necessarily transcends the scope of all human self-reflections as well as the world-situation as such.29 The phenomenological reduction, Fink emphasizes, is precisely the basic method of a world-transcending reflection.30 Anyway, Fink conceives the phenomenalization of the world as the inevitable starting point of philosophizing, no matter if its subject lies inside or outside the world. But he also points out that the phenomenalization of the world is an alien event to our ordinary life, such that its significance and its motivation remain in darkness. It seems impossible to ­prescribe at all the proper situation of the beginning of philosophy.31 Indeed, Fink has sketched there an inspiring solution for comprehending the situatedness of the “transcendental insight”. Echoing his view on the double-sidedness of the philosophizing subject, he also adopts a double interpretation of the beginning of philosophy. In his preliminary analyses, he refers to some religious experiences as occasions for revealing the philosophical truth, albeit not immediately. According to Fink, the world can become completely mysterious and incomprehensible to us, for example, through the suffering of a stroke of fate, the sudden awareness of death and transience, or the outburst of dread (Fink, 1988, p. 30). These are the extreme situations which shake the familiarity of our world and transform it into a “universal questionability” (Fink, 1988, p.  33). Underlying these religious experiences are the religious motivations, which spring up from life itself, direct our attention away from inner-worldly affairs to the absolute ground of the world.32 Fink approves these religious motivations for their immense philosophical significance, since they lead us to a “first preconception of the absolute” (Fink, 1988, pp. 30–31). Meanwhile, Fink also reminds us not to equate religious truths with philosophical truths immediately. Despite the immense philosophical significance of religious motivations, due to the immense power of our human habit in the belief in the world, at the beginning we are not mature enough to understand the religious motivations which life has imposed on us. Otherwise, our interpretations of the religious experiences risk degenerating into mere “worldviews” (Fink, 1988, p. 31). While it is too easy to think that we can escape imprisonment in the world (Fink, 1988, p. 34), he emphasizes that “the philosophical approach to these religious motivations is by far the most difficult” (Fink, 1988, p. 31). After all, Fink recognizes the truths revealed by our religious experiences as anticipations of the philosophically founded truths (Fink, 1988, pp. 31–32). After the phenomenalization of the world has brought itself to a full scientific rigor, he sees a prospect of interpreting 46

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the religious motivations for the beginning of philosophy. Before reaching a mature stage of transcendental reflection, they nevertheless permit only a formal characterization (Fink, 1988, p. 32). In short, Fink attempts to reconcile the situatedness and the radicality of philosophizing by a double interpretation of its motivations.33 While the factual occasions motivating the universal questioning of the world appear obscure and indeterminable to us human beings, once we convert ourselves into a genuine philosopher as a phenomenological onlooker, then we become capable of spotting the transcendental insight which underlies every awakening moment. And this transcendental insight will finally shed light on the philosophical significance of our extreme situations.34

Concluding Remarks Husserl’s and Fink’s theories of motivation are two examples demonstrating how phenomenology can proceed to clarify its own methodological ground.35 They represent two contrastive approaches. While Husserl’s focus is more intellectualistic, stressing the significance of philosophical tradition as well as the resolution of a philosopher to carry on its tradition, Fink highlights more the existential mood underlying a radical departure from all worldly affairs.36 Apart from their differences in view, they both miss out detailing the “enigmatic practice that is at the heart of the phenomenological endeavor” (Morley, 2010, p. 231). Perhaps one can defend Husserl and Fink by arguing that intellectual or existential motivations are already sufficient for founding a transcendental theory. For sure, it is debatable whether a transcendental theory must include any practical prescription in detail. As stated at the beginning, I do not intend to offer a straightforward answer here. My aim in this chapter is to propose a theoretical framework, namely the study of motivation for implementing phenomenological reduction, for evaluating the significance of mindfulness to phenomenology. If mindful training can really complement the practice of phenomenology, does it imply any theoretical lacuna which phenomenology must fix for itself? Is mindful training a mere private concern of certain phenomenologists, or does it indicate a necessary requirement to clarify the practicality of phenomenology? These are open questions for further reflections. Husserl himself would welcome an in-depth dialogue between phenomenology and mindfulness. In “Socrates-Buddha”, a manuscript written in 1926, Husserl juxtaposes the Greek and the Indian traditions of thought to compare two noble norms of cultural life. He views their basic difference in their ultimate goals. Accordingly, the Greek tradition strives for the theoretical goal of truth, whereas the Indian tradition aspires to the practical goal of liberation (Erlösung). “The Indian is in the universal practical attitude” (Husserl, 2017, p. 411) he concludes.37 Despite the fundamentally ethical-religious orientation of Indian thought, Husserl highly appreciates its “transcendentalism”, namely its ultimate vision of the world as a “pure phenomenon in subjectivity” (Husserl, 2017, p. 414). In a review on Buddhism written in 1925, Husserl characterizes “the highest flower of Indian religiosity” as “not transcendent, but transcendental” (Schuhmann, 1992, p. 25). He adds that “Buddhism can be paralleled only with the highest formations of the philosophical and religious spirit of our European culture” (Schuhmann, 1992, p. 26).38 Perhaps Fink is another prophet who has foreseen the cross-fertilization between phenomenology and mindfulness. In a conversation with Dorion Cairns, Fink suggests that 47

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various phases of Buddhistic self-discipline essentially coincide with those of phenomenological reduction (Cairns, 1976, p. 50). In a manuscript of 1934, Fink outlines a plan for a structural comparison between phenomenology and Buddhism, both serving “the system of the self-completing spirit” (Das System des sich vollendenden Geistes) (Bruzina, 1992, p. 287). There he compares, albeit only suggestively, the philosophical idea of the absolute with the Buddhist teaching on nirvana.39 If phenomenology is really in need of more practical guidelines to save its effectiveness, then at the same time it is theoretically responsible for disclosing this need to itself. I have proposed the transcendental theory of motivation as an ideal horizon which allows theory and practice to meet. The classical distinction between theory and practice tends to get blurred at the margin of phenomenological investigation. When we examine the emergence of the whole discipline, theory is itself subsumed under practice, and practical issues become theoretical issues as well. Although we can safely admit the divergence of goals and means between phenomenology and mindfulness, since they both target the cultivation of self-awareness in a broad sense, I believe their dialogue will continue to thrive.

Notes 1 The term “self-reflection” is not the only choice for translating the term “Selbstbesinnung”, and may not even be a good choice in certain contexts. For example, as pointed out by the translators of Martin Heidegger’s work Besinnung, Heidegger deliberately distinguishes Besinnung from reflection, especially Besinnung of the self from reflection on the self, since he only regards reflection as a derivative mode of Besinnung. Surprisingly, the translators have picked the term “mindfulness” for translating the Heideggerian notion of “Besinnung”. See Emad & Kalary (2006, xxiii– xxv). Following Husserl and Fink, in this chapter I focus on the scientific mode of Besinnung, so I prefer to use the term “reflection”. 2 There are earlier works comparing phenomenology to the Hindu or the Buddhist tradition (Sinari, 1965; Puligandla, 1970; Hart, 1987). By mindfulness, I refer specifically to their modern adaptations in the Western world, especially since Nyanaponika has identified “mindfulness” as the “heart of Buddhist meditation” in 1954 (Gethin, 2011, p. 266). 3 Husserl has elaborated extensively on the application of phenomenology in the factual world under the rubric of ethics. Nevertheless, he has not reflected much on the existential preconditions of its practice. He mostly takes the division between a mundane and a transcendental perspective for granted. As Hans Rainer Sepp highlights in his book-length study on theory and practice in Husserl’s phenomenology, Husserl barely thought about the direct connection between mundanity and transcendentality, especially the putting into effect of the epoché: “Ist bezüglich der Erschließung des Transzendentalen nicht eine direkte Umwandlung des Weltlebens, ohne Vermittlung, denkbar? Dies hätte zur Voraussetzung, daß eine direkte Verbindung zwischen Transzendentalität und Mundanität nachgewiesen werden kann. / Die Grundthese dieser Untersuchung ist, daß Husserl eine solche Verbindung nicht dachte […] Demgegenüber wird hier die These vertreten, daß es eine direkte Beziehung zwischen Transzendentalität und Mundanität gibt, und zwar im Vollzug der Epoché selbst. […] Die Epoché selbst beschreibt Husserl nur als Methode, als Grundstück der Theorie, und reflektiert sie nicht in ihrem existenziellen Vollzugsinn” (Sepp, 1997, p. 19). 4 It may sound suspicious to equate the initiation of phenomenology with the “beginning of philosophy”, as long as we take the expression at its face value. Husserl, especially in his later thoughts, interprets the history of ideas teleologically, which then culminates in phenomenology as the genuine actualization of the guiding idea of philosophy. Thereby, at least two senses of the “beginning of philosophy” are there in Husserl’s usages: (1) the emergence of the primitive forms of philosophy in our communal history, and (2) the fresh initiation of phenomenology by a solitary thinker. According to the second sense, successful employment of the phenomenological method also marks the beginning of philosophy. As Husserl once said: “Aus Meditationen, aus einsamen Selbstbesinnungen entquillt jeder echte Anfang der Philosophie.” (Husserl, 1989, p.  169) He

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Mindfulness as Motivation for Phenomenological Reduction also wrote: “[D]er wirkliche Anfang ist die Tat selbst, nur sie selbst erweist vollkommen in der Wirklichkeit die Möglichkeit. […] Der eigentliche Anfang ist also die Tat, das Vorgehen selbst, als Anfang der Philosophie selbst, sich als wirklicher Anfang so bezeugend […]” (Husserl, 1993, p. 399). For the current purpose, only the second sense is relevant here. 5 While there are loads of interpretations regarding the relation between epoché and reduction, I think it is safe to ignore their subtle differences for the current purpose. As Husserl affirms: “Der prinzipielle Sinn der transzendentalen Epoché und Reduktion ist immer derselbe […]” (Husserl, 2002, p. 59) On many occasions, scholars have their own preferences in using either one or both notions interchangeably for designating the method of phenomenology in general. 6 Iso Kern is among the first to frame Husserl’s phenomenological method in three ways. Despite the far-reaching impact of his tripartite division, the accuracy of his interpretation is still debatable. See Kern (1962). 7 For an overview of relevant criticisms from other phenomenologists, see Sepp (2003, pp. 200–206). 8 Relevant here is Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous remark on the impossibility of a complete reduction: “The most important lesson of the reduction is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why Husserl always wonders anew about the possibility of the reduction” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, [14]). 9 Husserl affirms that philosophy as an idea is realizable. Also, he emphasizes that this idea is to be realized only in a relative and provisional style, in an infinite process of history (Husserl, 1989, p. 139). 10 Depraz stresses emphatically the concrete dynamic between the practical and the theoretical in the gesture of the phenomenological reduction. Accordingly, (1) the phenomenological reduction is not simply a formal method of theoretical analysis, but first of all embedded in an effective practice; meanwhile, (2) this very practice is less a contingent instrument than an essential approach to a novel kind of scientificity. Phenomenology thereby needs to disclose the unknown practical roots of its own method and recognize this very practice as scientific through and through (Depraz, 1999, p. 98). 11 “If our ‘Cartesian meditations’ are to be, for us nascent philosophers, the genuine ‘introduction’ into a philosophy and the beginning that establishes the actuality of a philosophy as a necessarily practical idea (a beginning to which belongs therefore the evidence of a course – constitutable as an ideal necessity – for an infinity of executing work), then our meditations themselves must carry us so far that, in this respect, they leave no puzzles as to the course and the goal” (Husserl, 1960, p. 88). 12 Sebastian Luft has summarized four sets of basic problems which emerge from Husserl’s methodological reflections but left unresolved, including (1) the motivation for the reduction, (2) the parallelism between phenomenology and psychology, (3) the relation of the worldly and the transcendental Ego, and (4) enworlding (Verweltlichung). These themes all fall under the heading of “phenomenology of phenomenology” outlined in Eugen Fink’s Sixth Cartesian Meditation. See Chapter 3 of Luft (2011). 13 “In other words, out of this the shift to the phenomenological attitude arises as an absolute requirement in order for philosophy to be able to set its distinctive project on the soil of that experience which is in itself the first and consequently in order for philosophy to begin at all” (Husserl, 1989, [147]). 14 “Only if this motivation, which calls for a very precise and deeply penetrating interpretation, has become a living and compelling insight will it be clear that what at first seems so odd […] actually is what decides between the being or non-being of a philosophy […]” (Husserl, 1989, [148]). 15 Since the various ways to the phenomenological reduction can only be thought through in the reflective consciousness of a practicing beginner, who is on the way “to set into motion the radical beginning of a philosophy” (Husserl, 1989, [160]), Husserl in his old age is proud to call himself “a genuine beginner”: “Even if I had to tone down the ideal of my philosophical aspirations practically to that of a rank beginner, at least in my old age I have acquired the perfect certitude that I deserve to be called a genuine beginner” (Husserl, 1989, [161]). 16 The lecture course is separated into two parts mainly because of the Christmas break in 1923. What is astonishing, as commented by Luft, is how “the systematic trajectory of the lecture course breaks off radically after the Christmas break” (Luft, 2019, p.  xxii). Luft finds it “not at all clear why there had to be such a strong rupture before and after the break”, since the historical

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Ming-Hon Chu narrative in the first part does not come to a satisfactory ending (Luft, 2019, p. xxiii). According to my reading, Husserl separates the two parts with “strong rupture” on purpose. In the beginning section of the lecture course, he states clearly that “a historical backward glance will serve as a spiritual preparation”, such that it “will reawaken primal, powerful motivations which can set our interest and our will into motion” (Husserl, 2019, [VII 6/7]). In other words, it is according to his plan to structure his exposition into two parts: one on the “primitive beginnings” of philosophy in history, another one on the “inner motivational sources” of our current spiritual life (Husserl, 2019, [VII 6/7]). 17 It is debatable whether Husserl conceives the historical and the psychological motivations here in a mundane or a transcendental sense. I assume a broad sense of psychology and of history here. 18 My interpretation of First Philosophy gets further support from Dorion Cairns’ records (1976). In his conversations with Husserl during 1931 and 1932, he brought up the question of “how convincing a motivation to the performance of the phenomenological epoché can be before that epoché itself and the development of phenomenology itself” (Cairns, 1976, p. 39). As their conversations proceeded, they discussed whether “a motivation under the guidance of the ideal of science” or “a motivation under the guidance of the ideal of “radikal” ‹radical› knowledge” is better for introducing the method of phenomenology. Cairns defended the ideal of radical knowledge as a more desirable motivation, since it is not culturally laden and thus universally applicable to every individual. While Husserl defended the ideal of science because of a simpler exposition, he has also considered the motivation through the ideal of radical knowledge and developed it in the lecture course of First Philosophy, held almost ten years before their conversations. See Cairns (1976, pp. 80–81). Besides, Guillermo Hoyos Vásquez (1976) has attempted a systematic reading of the “teleology of history” and the “teleology of intentionality” in Husserl’s works, which correspond neatly to the two parts of First Philosophy. 19 For example, Husserl has left the following annotation of the Sixth Cartesian Meditation: “Die Reflexion hat ihre Merkwürdigkeit. Schon das ist ein Problem, wie sie motiviert ist, und wie, wenn sie eingetreten ist, ohne weiteres das Bewusstsein des „ich kann abermals reflektieren “zustande kommt und dann das „ich kann immer wieder“– als Bewusstsein der offen unendlichen Iteration” (Fink, 1988, p. 204). 20 Fink also calls the problems addressed by these two parts the “why” and the “how” of phenomenologizing respectively: “Inasmuch as phenomenology gets its real beginning precisely in the reduction as the pregiving and opening up of the problem dimension of philosophy (in a phenomenological sense), we can first of all ask not only how phenomenologizing comes about as the performance of the reduction, but why it takes place at all. In other words, this is the question of the motivation of the phenomenological reduction” (Fink, 1995, 30); “The theory of method of the phenomenological reduction, however, has to do not only with the ‘why’ of the action of reducing, but also, and above all, with the ‘how’ of phenomenologizing itself. Is it not precisely the phenomenological onlooker who does the reducing?” (Fink, 1995, p. 39) 21 “[J]ust as the phenomenological reduction is not within reach of an ‘anthropological-existential’ characterization (and critique), phenomenologizing in itself is as little able to be explicated by ‘historicizing’ interpretations.” (Fink, 1995, 129) 22 Fink further claims that the “self-reflection of the phenomenological reduction is not a radicality that is within human reach; it does not lie at all within the horizon of human possibilities” (Fink, 1995, p.  32). By claiming so, he does not mean to depict the phenomenological reduction as something like a supernatural phenomenon. He wants to indicate a higher and purer level of selfconsciousness, self-consciousness as a transcendental subject, than our ordinary self-consciousness as human beings in the world. He explains that: “it is not that man reflectively thinks about himself, but rather that transcendental subjectivity, concealed in sell-objectivation as man, reflectively thinks about itself, beginning seemingly as man, annulling itself as man, and taking itself down as man all the way to the ground, namely, down to the innermost ground of its life” (Fink, 1995, p. 32). This higher and purer level of self-consciousness is attainable only through the radicality of the phenomenological reduction, a self-reflection with “a wholly new kind of structure” (Fink, 1995, p. 32). 23 “Transcendental radicalism is of a nature that is different in principle motivated by transcendental insight, it puts into question what can never be put into question at all in the natural attitude. […] If we take ways into phenomenology to mean a continuity in motivation that begins in the natural

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Mindfulness as Motivation for Phenomenological Reduction attitude and by inferential force leads into the transcendental attitude, then there are no such ways” (Fink, 1995, p. 33). 24 “Phenomenological cognition is never motivated by mundane but always by phenomenological knowledge. The concept of motivation too must at the same time be freed from mundane ideas and taken in a new transcendental sense” (Fink, 1995, pp. 35–36). 25 “Wer philosophiert? Auf alle diese Fragen liegt die Antwort bereit: der Mensch. Dies ist zwar in keinem Sinne zu bestreiten. Die Philosophie hat ihren „Ort“im Leben des Menschen, ist eine der Grundmöglichkeiten seines Daseins” (Fink, 1988, p. 18). 26 “Alle in den sonstigen Selbstbesinnungen sich offenbarenden Situationen befinden sich, ohne es zu wissen, innerhalb dieser Grundsituation, die sie alle umgreift. Diese umgreifende Grundsituation hat die grösstmögliche Weite und eine Tiefe, die keine Selbstbesinnung auf das eigene individuelle Leben und Wesen je erreichen kann” (Fink, 1988, p. 24). 27 “Die radikale Selbstbesinnung des Menschen, mit deren Vollzug die Bewegung des Wissens der Philosophie beginnt, ist die abgründige Reflexion auf seine Weltsituation” (Fink, 1988, p.  24). He adds that the reflection on the world-situation is equal to the self-reflection on the conditions of possibility of all other self-reflections: “Die Besinnung auf die Welt als Situation ist die Selbstbesinnung auf die Bedingung der Möglichkeit aller sonstigen Selbstbesinnungen” (Fink, 1988, pp. 24–25). 28 “Vielleicht zeigt es sich, dass der „Mensch“keineswegs ein Ursprüngliches und Unzurückleitbares ist, sondern dass die Frage nach dem Menschen gerade zurückleitet in den Ursprung des Menschen, der sich in ihm verhüllt, dass keine noch so philosophisch sich gebärdende Auslegung des menschlichen Daseins, solange sie in dieser Einsatzreflexion befangen bleibt, einen wirklichen Begriff der Philosophie sich anzueignen imstande ist. Vor dem Wirklichsein der Philosophie kann die Frage nach dem eigentlich in ihr Philosophierenden keine Beantwortung finden” (Fink, 1988, p.  19). According to Fink, philosophy can truly begin only when we are ready to uncover the hidden and profound dimensions of ourselves: “Erst wenn wir die Bereitschaft gewonnen haben für das Unbekannte schlechthin, unter Hintanstellung aller voreiligen und vorlauten Meinungen, sind wir frei für den Beginn und das Beginnen der Bewegung des Wissens, welche die Philosophie ausmacht” (Fink, 1988, p. 26). 29 “Die radikale Selbstbesinnung kommt nur in Gang, wenn wir imstande sind, in einer äussersten Anstrengung über die Welt im Ganzen hinausfragend, sie preisgebend, eine den Boden der „Ur-phänomene“durchbrechende, sich von der Welt im Ganzen abstossende und sie transzendierende Fundamentalreflexion zu vollziehen, die unsere wahre und letzte Situation […]” (Fink, 1988, p. 63). 30 “Diese die Welt transzendierende Reflexion nennen wir die „transzendentale Reflexion“; ihre methodische Ausgestaltung: die phänomenologische Reduktion” (Fink, 1988, p. 63). 31 “Die Phänomenalisierung der Welt […] ist ein dem gewöhnlichen Leben so befremdliches Geschehen, dass nicht nur nicht die mögliche philosophische Bedeutsamkeit, sondern selbst eine Motivation dafür dunkel bleibt. Und in der Tat haben wir zumeist für den Vollzug einer solchen Phänomenalisierung keinen Anlass. Die Motivation, die zu diesem radikalsten Infragestellen der Welt selbst führt, kann nicht bestimmt angegeben werden. Die die Menschen jeweils zur Philosophie treibenden Anlässe sind nicht nur mannigfaltig, sondern auch für diese verborgen und untypisierbar” (Fink, 1988, p. 29). 32 Fink also calls a religious motivation turning our world into a universal mystery a “shock” (Erschütterung) (Fink, 1988, 33). 33 Depraz once suggested replacing the vocabulary of motivation, “which is quite incapable of characterising the type of predisposition for the reduction which we are looking for”, with the term “aid”. She thinks that “the structure of motivation is aporetic”, since “it remains dependent upon the factical and a-phenomenological duality of natural exteriority and transcendental interiority” (Depraz, 2003, pp. 199–200). This is correct as long as we only confer a factual meaning to the concept of motivation. In my reading, Fink’s conception of motivation transcends precisely the factual register. Anyway, her employment of the term “aid” coincides a lot with the transcendental role of motivation I wish to highlight in this chapter: “In making use of the term ‘aid’ (‘supports’ in French), we are trying to define the framework, or the context, which makes the disclosure and the unfolding of the reduction possible. An aid is neither an a priori, nor a contingent condition. It makes its contribution to the reduction. Without it, the reduction could not take place and yet, even with the aid, there can be no a priori guarantee that a reduction will take place. In

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Ming-Hon Chu other words, an aid is not a mechanical trigger automatically releasing the reduction but it is not a circumstance which remains extrinsic to its accomplishment either. In this way we try to render intelligible the concrete genesis of the reductive activity which cannot be naively empirical since it is upheld by the transcendental meaning which inhabits it” (Depraz, 2003, p. 200). 34 Fink has included a section on the “situation of reduction” in his early work “Presentification and Image”. There he has already mentioned the need for a transcendental self-grounding (Selbstbegründung) of “phenomenological objectivity”, whereby the phenomenologist clarifies its “mundane-objective” character as an occurrence in the natural attitude. He reminds us not to confuse this transcendental self-grounding with the “transcendental self-critique” delineated by Husserl, which focuses purely on the naivety inside the transcendental sphere (Fink, 1966, p. 16). 35 For sure, they are not the only contributors to the phenomenological self-explication in terms of motivation. Many other phenomenologists, like Max Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Dorion Cairns, Ludwig Landgrebe, Jan Patočka, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Enzo Paci, et al. have also participated, directly or indirectly, in the debate over the motivation for phenomenological reduction. It awaits future studies to review their relevant contributions systematically. 36 The inspiration from Heidegger is obvious here. 37 Meanwhile, Husserl also specifies the mutual implication between theory and practice, such that neither the Greek tradition is exclusively theoretical, nor the Indian tradition exclusively practical. For he writes: “The universality of ethics (ethical praxis) encompasses the universality of science as one praxis among many. Every truth of knowledge corresponds to a practical truth, if it is right that every judgment, as a practical activity, when directed towards truth, is a practical truth. […] Conversely: any statement about the truth of the will and therefore ethics must be true as knowledge. Only if the activity of practical deliberation takes place in the realm of true judgements of knowledge and ends in true judgements of the kind that express practical truth can practical truth itself be practically possible” (Husserl, 2017, pp. 412–413). 38 For further discussions about Husserl’s view on Buddhism, see Sinha (1971), Schuhmann (1992), Ni (2011), and Lau (2016). 39 The outline is as follows: “Das System des sich vollendenden Geistes / I. Teil: Kosmologie (Demonstration) / II. Teil: Phänomenologie des Geistes (Reduktion) / III. Teil: Meontische Kosmogonie (Spekulation). / In der Sprache der alten Metaphysik, I. Kosmologie, II. Psychologie, III. Theologie / in der Sprache des Buddhismus: I. Lehre vom Samsâra; II. Der siebenfache Weg; III. Lehre vom Nirvâna” (Bruzina, 1992, p. 287). Fink coined the term “meontic”, which literally means nonbeing, to characterize the absolute, so the origin of the subject and the world. See Bruzina (1992).

References Bitbol, M. (2019). Consciousness, Being & Life: Phenomenological Approaches to Mindfulness. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50, 127–161. Bruzina, R. (1992). Last Philosophy: Ideas for a Transcendental Phenomenological Metaphysics – Eugen Fink With Edmund Husserl, 1928–1938. In D. P.  Chattopadhyaya, L. Embree & ­ J. Mohanty (Ed.), Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy (pp. 270–289). SUNY Press. Cairns, D. (1976). Conversations With Husserl and Fink. Martinus Nijhoff. Depraz, N. (1999). The Phenomenological Reduction As Praxis. Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2–3), 95–110. Depraz, N. (2003). The Philosophical Challenge. In Depraz, N., Varela, F. & Vermersch, P. (Eds.), On Becoming Aware: A Pragmatics of Experiencing (pp. 170–203). John Benjamins. Depraz, N. (2019). Epoché in Light of samatha-vipassanā Meditation. Journal of Consciousness ­Studies 26 (7–8), 49–69. Fink, E. (1966). Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939. Martinus Nijohoff. Fink, E. (1988). VI. Cartesianische Meditation. Teil 2. Ergänzungsband. Kluwer. Fink, E. (1995). Sixth Cartesian Meditation: The Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method, R. Bruzina (Trans.). Indiana University Press. Gethin, R. (2011). On Some Definitions of Mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 263–79. Hart, J. (1987). Transcendental Phenomenology and Zen Buddhism: A Start of a Conversation. Zen Buddhism Today 5, 145–160.

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Mindfulness as Motivation for Phenomenological Reduction Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, D. Cairns (Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy, D. Carr (Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, F. Kersten (Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Husserl, E. (1989). Epilogue. In R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer (Trans.), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (pp. 407–430). Kluwer. Husserl, E. (1993). Die Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften und die Transzendentale Phänomenologie. Ergänzungsband. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1934–1937, R. N. Smid (Ed.). Kluwer. Husserl, E. (2002). Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion: Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935), S. Luft (Ed.). Kluwer. Husserl, E. (2017). Socrates-Buddha, A. Iyer (Trans.). The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, 15, 398–415. Husserl, E. (2019). First Philosophy: Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920–1925), S. Luft & T. M. Naberhaus (Trans.). Springer. Kern, I. (1962). Die drei Wege zur transzendental-phänomenologischen Reduktion in der Philosophie Edmund Husserls. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 24, 303–349. Lau, K.-Y.. (2016). Husserl, Buddhism and the Crisis of European Sciences. In Phenomenology and Intercultural Understanding: Toward a New Cultural Flesh (pp. 53–66). Springer. Luft, S. (2011). Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press. Luft, S. (2019). Introduction to the Translation. In E. Husserl, S. Luft & T. M. Naberhaus (Trans.), First Philosophy: Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920–1925) (pp. xiii–lxxxv). Springer. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception, Trans. D. A. Landes. Routledge. Morley, J. (2010). It’s Always About the Epoché. In T. Cloonan (Ed.), The Redirection of Psychology: Essays in Honor of Amedeo Giorgi (pp. 223–232). University of Quebec Press. Ni, L. (2011). Husserl und der Buddhismus. Husserl Studies 27, 143–160. Puligandla, R. (1970). Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation. Philosophy East and West 20(1), 19–33. Ricœur, P. (1967). Husserl: an Analysis of His Phenomenology, L. E. Embree (Trans.). Northwestern University Press Schuhmann, K. (1992). Husserl and Indian Thought. In D. P.  Chattopadhyaya, L. Embree & J. Mohanty (Ed.), Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy (pp. 20–43). SUNY Press. Sepp, H. R. (1997). Praxis und Theoria: Husserls Transzendentalphänomenologische Rekonstruktion des Lebens. Karl Alber. Sepp, H. R. (2003). Epoché vor Theorie. In R. Kühn und M. Staudigl (Ed.), Epoché und Reduktion. Formen und Praxis der Reduktion in der Phänomenologie (pp. 199–211). Königshausen & Neumann. Sinari, R. (1965). The Method of Phenomenological Reduction and Yoga. Philosophy East and West 15 (3/4), 217–228. Sinha, D. (1971). Theory and Practice in Indian Thought: Husserl’s Observations. Philosophy East and West 21 (3), 255–264. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3–4), 158–185. Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (2017). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, revised edition. MIT Press. Vásquez, H. G. (1976). Intentionalität als Verantwortung. Geschichtsteleologie und Teleologie der Intentionalität bei Husserl. Springer.

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3 A LEVINASSIAN CRITIQUE OF MINDFULNESS Pierrick Simon

Introduction: Hesitating About Mindfulness The criticisms leveled against mindfulness meditation are far-ranging, but they tend to share one common trait: critics will argue that the phenomenological pretension of the practice is wrong. They will either argue that the theory which motivates mindfulness fails to describe the necessary structure of our subjective experience accurately (which is what phenomenology aims to do), or that it fails to prove its relevance, since it describes only subjective experience, no matter how well (undermining phenomenology as a discipline by questioning the relevance of the “merely subjective”). Thus, it is either the phenomenological accuracy (faithful descriptions of subjectivity) or the phenomenological ambition (claimed pertinence of describing subjectivity) of mindfulness which is called into question. It would be a strange critic who would argue that mindfulness is bad, while granting the full force of its phenomenology. Yet, we might find in the person of Emmanuel Levinas someone who most closely matches this paradoxical position. The nature of his career-long hesitation toward phenomenology is of immediate relevance to those who feel hesitant toward mindfulness. He championed the counter-intuitive idea that phenomenology is a covert philosophical consolation, meant to bring you peace of mind, at the expense of an authentic relationship to other people (Levinas, 1971, 1978). He thus masterfully anticipated mindfulness of the Kabat-Zinn kind, which owns up to the idea that contemplation itself brings peace (Kabat-Zinn, 1990)—but he did so with seemingly harsh criticisms of a self-soothing attitude which disconnects you from others. At the same time, he never gave up on phenomenology, and always considered himself a phenomenologist (Levinas, 1982a, p. 20). Taking stock of his critique might cast a new light on played out debates: the criticisms might speak to mindfulness proponents who would not so easily accept the phenomenological dimension of the practice being dismissed, and it might help skeptics (Ratnayake & Merry, 2018) navigate their hesitation toward the practice, as they see how someone else grappled with a similar issue. Therefore, we would do well to examine Levinas’ critique of phenomenology and see how it can serve as a critique of mindfulness. Crucial to that endeavor will be the question of whether we are talking about a damning critique—a criticism of moral vices that we have to combat—or a philosophical critique—an examination of the limits 54

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-5

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inherent to a particular project’s presuppositions. It is not an easy question when it comes to Levinas. First, one needs to understand Levinas’ critique of phenomenology fully and see why mindfulness meditators are uniquely well-equipped to be receptive to it. Second, analyzing the nature of that receptiveness leads us to redirect the critique of phenomenology against mindfulness. This is the point of the analysis where the moral condemnation of mindfulness seems most dire. However, third, I am going to argue that the critique does not entail a rejection of mindfulness. Instead, it asks of us to distinguish mindfulness and phenomenology carefully from one another and double down on their specificities, on account of them both having limited but very useful strengths.

Levinas as a Philosopher of Suspicion Levinas’ critique of phenomenology is moved by a suspicion, best summarized in the words of someone whom he felt was “too often present” in his philosophy “to even be quoted” (Levinas, 1971, p. 14), a man named Rosenzweig, who wrote, as the opening of his masterpiece: “To reject the fear of all things earthly, to take its venomous sting away from death, and its pestilential breath away from Hades: this is what philosophy dares to do”1 (Rosenzweig, 1921, p.  19) [Translation mine; same goes for all translations within this article]. To put it less poetically, it means that philosophers are guilty of creating theories to avoid all that is troubling and alienating. Philosophical consolation is thought to be the most natural mode of philosophy, but it is also thought to be an illegitimate avoidance behavior. Its goal is to not have to deal with true alterity: anything that we cannot contain or comprehend, such as death, suffering, or anguish. Philosophy circumvents those things by granting ultimate autonomy to subjects. What this means is that anything that first appears different to that subject is in fact revealed to just be “more of the same”. Death is nothing for us (as it cannot be experienced), and suffering and anguish are merely the result of unclear thinking. According to Levinas, when this line of reasoning gets too far, it prevents an authentic relationship with alterity, which, in turn, prevents a true moral regard for other humans. They too are Otherness, and constantly translating Otherness into Sameness is tantamount to cutting them out of our lives entirely (Levinas, 1971, 1978). Someone who does not want to be challenged by what is alien and strange is not open-minded enough to have an authentic relationship with other people. First and foremost, Levinas wants to apply that suspicion to Husserl and his phenomenology. In an early commentary, he accuses him of “intellectualism” (Levinas, 1931, p. 141). He is disappointed that Husserl puts a lot of emphasis on theoretical knowledge and perception, when his concept of intentionality—the way consciousness is directed toward objects—could make room for other things, such as the affective dimension of life. Later, Levinas rescinds that charge (Levinas, 1949, p. 34), but it is only because, by then, his suspicion is radicalized: Husserl’s concept of intentionality was never really fit for welcoming true alterity in the first place. Levinas explains why not by emphasizing the teleological structure of husserlian intentionality (Pradelle, 2007, p.  78). By being directed toward objects, consciousness aims toward them with an end goal. It does so with “acts of meaning” which find their purpose in “intuitive fulfillment” (Kidd, 2014, p. 131). For instance, if I believe that there is a tree behind the building in front of me, currently out of my view, this belief is an “act of meaning” not yet intuitively fulfilled by the perception of the tree. It is directed toward the situation of there being a tree, but a piece is missing as of yet: the intuitive perceptual confirmation. There is, of course, the 55

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possibility of being disappointed and finding out that there is no tree there after all. However, for Levinas, this disappointment is not shocking enough. The fundamental problem is the kind of meaning we entertain. Here, the “meaningful” is thought of as mere identification and confirmation. Once we see the tree, we identify this object as that which we were aiming at, in the first place. This is what bounds how the tree can be meaningful to us. Small disappointments will not shake us out of this way of thinking about things. It is especially problematic since Husserl then takes this union between intuitive fulfillment and empty (as of yet) act of meaning as a source of legitimate knowledge: the fulfillment consists in acquiring “evidence”. For Levinas, this entire thing is suspect. When we derive our sense of meaning and evidence from the idea that what is given to us does not exceed what we aimed at, we are not making room for authentic surprises. Levinas puts a very nietzschean suspicion to work against this theory: he claims that intentionality works as a Will-To-Power which seeks to assimilate Otherness, to ultimately confirm the self-sufficiency of consciousness (Pradelle, 2007, p. 86). The accusation is no longer that of intellectualism, but that of “narcissism” (Levinas, 1967, p. 231), the glorification of sameness as a manifestation of one’s quality and power. For Levinas, the remedy is to understand the possibility for things to be meaningful as the possibility for them to be truly Other and unexpected. The way Levinas modifies his criticism of Husserl (going from intellectualism to narcissism) reflects a certain intellectual milieu that he is a part of. What Barbaras says of Merleau-Ponty is also true of Levinas: At bottom, like almost all post-Husserlian phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty will lean on these weak points—which are in fact fracture lines—that are all the phenomena that threaten the closure of transcendental consciousness and the primacy of objectifying intentionality. Phenomena such as: the other, affectivity, temporality, the flesh, the Earth, etc.2 (Sebbah & Barbaras, 2010, pp. 91–92) It is clear, then, that what distinguishes your philosophy in this climate is not so much an opposition to Husserl, but how you go about justifying this opposition. Levinas is influenced by Heidegger in his reading of Husserl very early on, hence the first formulation of the opposition, but eventually aspires to distinguish himself from Heidegger. He wants to spell out how his critique is different from that of his colleagues, and how his suspicion can even apply to them. Thus, Levinas begins the work of turning his suspicious interpretation to Heidegger. This is a surprising twist because, on the face of it, it seems that Heidegger is immune from the rosenzweigian suspicion. His philosophy is a philosophy of anguish, which advocates a non-evasive relationship to Death, and which departs from Husserl when it comes to the transcendental subject and objectifying intentionality. How would the accusation even work? Levinas makes the following evaluation of Heidegger: The idea which seems to preside the heideggerian interpretation of human existence, consists in conceiving existence as ecstasy, one which is possible only as an ecstasy towards the end. The tragedy of existence is thought to be this finitude and this nothingness in which man throws himself gradually over the course of his existence.3 (Levinas, 1947, pp. 18–19) 56

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In Levinas’ estimation, Being is exalted as Good by Heidegger, as a consequence of the fact that his philosophy of anguish is essentially terror against the possibility of Nothingness, death. Levinas picks up on an underlying tragic heroism present in this story: the need to accomplish one’s fate, against a background of finitude. He doesn’t take kindly to it, as he sees it as a story told by a shameless subject fascinated by his own powers. And so he uses this as the basis of his claim that Heidegger treats Nothingness as Evil and, in contrast, Being as Good. This is especially worrying for Levinas, since he takes it that what challenges us, death and finitude for example, is Otherness. Essentially, it would mean that Heidegger treats Being as Good and what challenges us, Otherness, as Evil. Levinas is, therefore, moved to argue the exact opposite, and claims that Being is Evil and Otherness is Good. This genealogy is important to keep in mind, because as Franck puts it, the entirety of Levinas’ work rests on that interpretation of Being as Evil (2001, p. 90). Franck goes on to say that this is a problem since this interpretation is “never justified” and never “ontologically established”. We will soon see how, on the contrary, this polemical move against Heidegger (and we have to remember that this is what it is: a polemical move) is grounded in a description of experience that can be justified (though, admittedly, Franck’s contention is with what counts as legitimate justification).

What Is Levinas Ultimately Up To? We have uncovered two dimensions of Levinas’ suspicion: narcissism and heroism. Taken together, these dimensions help uncover a third one, which we might call “equanimity” or “serene indifference”. This is evident based on the way that Levinas treats both narcissism and heroism. Against narcissism, he leverages the motif of invasive trouble (trouble coming from the outside). As in Totality and Infinity, Otherness breaks into the solipsistic subject, who wasn’t expecting it, and could not have, and it breaks their complacent serenity. Against heroism, he uses the motif of intrinsic trouble (trouble coming from the inside). This is where we get the motif of claustrophobia (Levinas, 1947). We feel stifled and trapped by Being, which is Evil, and we are in need of an escape from it. We are, in a way, smoked out of our complacent narrative of heroism. It breaks the serenity of the hero who sleeps soundly at night because they know that they are doing Good. Depending on what motif you focus on, you might have a different idea of what Levinas is up to. For example, Sebbah, after analyzing the way Levinas equates Being and Evil, suggests that the philosophical legitimacy of Levinas’ starting point must be a “method of pleonasm” (Sebbah, 2007, p. 154). According to this method, redundancy produces phenomenological evidence. In other words, Being is strictly synonymous with Evil, but to talk of Being as Evil in a redundant yet meaningful way (like good pleonasms do) helps to show the necessary structure of experience. If you agree with that, you will tend to insist on all that is circular in Levinas’ work. For instance, Levinas’ very own take on the hermeneutical circle, the circular nature of interpretation, where the whole is what makes us understand a part, and yet parts are what make us understand the whole (as when we are reading a text, for example). Levinas’ hermeneutical circle is the following: The moral necessity of Otherness is established by the insufficiency of Sameness, but the insufficiency of Sameness is, in turn, established by the moral necessity of Otherness. 57

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This circle does indeed exist in Levinas’ thought, but it is a mistake to see it as his primary source of philosophical legitimacy. As we saw, the critique of Heidegger is, in a way, derived from the critique of Husserl. It means that the motif of intrinsic trouble is derived from the motif of invasive trouble. There is something about Levinas’ project which originally takes its roots in a critique of philosophy as the consolation of the inner citadel, the impregnable fortress of indifference of the master of wisdom who escaped the logic of suffering. The kind of latent stoicism that we might detect in Husserl’s work. If I’m right, the philosophical legitimacy of Levinas’ analysis has much more to do with a method of oxymoron. The meaningful appearance of contradiction establishes phenomenological evidence. In this case, such an oxymoron could be “Suffering Consciousness” or “Vulnerable Consciousness”. Consciousness can be invaded by trouble. The fascinating idea here is that it should strike us as strange that consciousness should ever come to suffer. The serene ­indifference of consciousness seems guaranteed, and yet it is not! This is where a parallel with mindfulness becomes extremely interesting. It is true that the more mindful you are the more surprising it can be that consciousness can possibly suffer. This is because, in mindfulness meditation, the dispelling of suffering relies on a contemplative attitude, which is thought to be intrinsic to consciousness, or to imitate a deep feature of consciousness (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, 2005). Equanimity seems guaranteed. If you are astonished by the fact that suffering still arises, Levinas’ work can really speak to you. Mindful people can thus be better readers of Levinas than non-mindful people. Two features of his work would be compelling to them. First, his method relies on the intuition that consciousness is somehow naturally expected to be impervious to suffering. It is a strange and rare intuition to have, but it should be familiar to mindfulness practitioners. Second, if you are mindful of affects, you are less likely to think that Levinas finds legitimacy in the circularity of his epistemology. If you are in touch with your affects, you are better able to follow the plot: his entire work is a dramatic depiction of the trouble you run into when you adopt a method which is not open enough to surprises. From that point of view, circularity is not seen as ideal because it is not open-ended. It is a lower-tier argument within Levinas’ philosophy. However, for this dramatic depiction to speak to you, you need to be both aware of suffering and of the desire to overcome it, which should be familiar to mindfulness meditators.

Mindfulness as Indifferent Phenomenology That being said, mindfulness meditators are in an uneasy situation here. They are primed to understand Levinas, but that is because it seems that they are being called out for engaging in a practice bordering on the unethical. Let us examine how fair the criticism is: to what extent can a critique developed against phenomenology be applied to mindfulness? Much like phenomenology, mindfulness involves a suspension of judgment and the resolution to go back to things themselves, in their actual manifestation. Jon Kabat-Zinn defines mindfulness as “moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, as non-reactively, and as open-heartedly as possible” (Kabat-Zinn, 2005, p. 108). Described in this way, mindfulness appears to be a state of mind that one cultivates. Yet, the cultivation of that state is arguably identical to the state: “moment-to-moment” corresponds to paying attention to the “present moment”, and “non-judgmental awareness” corresponds to “non-reactive open-heartedness” in a fairly straightforward way. Furthermore, this cultivation has to be understood as methodical in 58

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so far as it relies on the understanding of guiding principles which lay out a procedure before us. Think of all that is needed to make someone understand what the above definition even means. What are the terms “judgment”, “reaction”, and even “ ­ present moment” to be the opposite of? For example, am I not always in the present moment? Where else could I be? The answer is that imagining the past with regret and plotting for the future with worry is the “time travel” being criticized. Thus, the pedagogy of the practice is informed by ­guiding principles, the two main ones being: 1 A distinction between, on the one hand, an unreflective attitude, and on the other hand, a mindful attitude. For instance, if we are angry at an unjust situation, mindfulness will ask of us to notice how we imagine the situation and how we feel the anger in our body. It makes us uncover subjective aspects of the experience that we had overlooked, even though they were the ingredients of our experience of anger toward the injustice. The unreflective attitude works the same as what phenomenologists call the natural attitude: it posits entities as existing independently from consciousness in an unproblematized way, and thus takes the shape of a third-person perspective on things. (It would describe the injustice as “There is something wrong going on, out there in the world.”) On the contrary, the mindful attitude cares about how entities manifest to consciousness, and so it is a first-person perspective on them. 2 The therapeutic bent of the endeavor, the goal of alleviating suffering, which points our attention primarily toward types of experiences: recurring challenges and their likely remedies. The natural attitude is shown to be full of suffering, and mindfulness is the cure. The fine-grained attention to the particularity and singularity of experiences is only a means for the therapeutic endeavor, which is more oriented toward types of ­experiences. For instance, anger in general, more than this or that anger, which has to be treated. Thus, mindfulness does not entail any theoretical knowledge of Buddhism, but it is embedded within an interpretative framework which derives key elements from Buddhism: chief of which is the therapeutic nature of its philosophy. Moreover, the way it deals with a supposed unreflective natural attitude makes it a phenomenological method: we ought to recover the first-person perspective through a careful examination of the general structure of subjectivity. Once this is established, it becomes trivially easy to leverage the levinassian suspicion against mindfulness. As stated above, mindfulness is obviously embedded in a culture of therapy: a meditator knows that they meditate in order to transcend suffering. It thus ­commits three mistakes that Levinas is very worried about. 1 It falls for an optimism of innocent intentions. Through a distinction between Consciousness and the contents of consciousness (Ratnayake & Merry, 2018), we obtain, for all intents and purposes, an excellent subject: innocent, self-sufficient, and a legitimate source of knowledge. Something Levinas diagnoses as unacceptable (Romano, 2011). 2 It commits to an optimism of elucidation. As in with Husserl, “To say that, at the basis of all intentions, even affective or relative, is a representation, is to conceive the entirety of spiritual life by analogy with light”4 (Levinas, 1949, p. 35). With mindfulness, in principle, anything can be brought to the light of consciousness, which is to say, anything can become an object of contemplation. This presupposition is not questioned. 59

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3 It indulges a false open-endedness. It is implicitly, or even explicitly, assumed that the dispelling of suffering is the natural end-point of the inquiry, and the sign that you’ve examined the object enough. If anything contradicts that, you need to be more mindful. This flies in the face of Levinas’ way of doing philosophy (Dubost, 2006) by indulging a kind of confirmation bias.

On the Possibility of Escaping Suspicion Now the question is: would rejecting Levinas’ concerns be as trivially easy as making this case against mindfulness? After all, once laid out for us to see, Levinas’ criticisms can often seem heavy-handed. Is there a way to reject this accusation right away by showing how ridiculous it is? Two possible immediate objections to it come to mind. The first would be to argue that this levinassian-inspired critique relies on a gross exaggeration of mindfulness. It captures the virtue of mindfulness (the therapeutic dimension) and turns it into a vice for no good reason. The counter-objection to that would be that this analysis is still useful to criticize how Mindfulness is commodified, for example in the phenomenon of McMindfulness (Purser & Loy, 2013). Even if it is a caricature, caricatures can serve a good purpose. The second immediate objection would be that the critique is “completely off the mark”. To say that it understands nothing about mindfulness. For example, it would be untrue to say that we practice mindfulness in order to transcend suffering. The practice relies on abandoning such goal-orientedness. The counter-objection to that would be that to make this case, you either need to claim that the therapeutic virtue of mindfulness is completely incidental or inexistent, which is a hard case to make. Or you need to argue that it is relatively incidental. You would argue that by emphasizing certain aspects of the mindful spiritual path and how a path is not the same thing as a philosophical theory or exercise (Harter, 2018). Unfortunately, if you do that, you are still confronted with some of Levinas’ most subtle arguments. On the one hand, if you choose to characterize the path as one of Subitism5 (spiritual awakening is obtained suddenly, through understanding, with relatively no efforts, as efforts were perhaps part of your confusion), you probably have to defend an illusory view of suffering in order to account for why understanding is enough for enlightenment. The thing to understand is that suffering is an illusion. However, if you do claim that suffering is an illusion all the way down, you face Levinas’ motif of invasive trouble: pain is imperious, unexpected, and cannot be an illusion, since the very fact that it comes seemingly out of nowhere is all the proof we need to believe in it. The method of oxymoron leads to treating the testimony of paradoxical experiences as a kind of proof in its own right (Dubost, 2006). No one could have invented such an incredible lie, so there must be truth to the testimony of our experience: strangely, consciousness can suffer. On the other hand, if you characterize the path as one of Gradualism (enlightenment is obtained through incremental efforts to change the nature of your mind so that it ceases to be caught in unhealthy workings), you have to defend your heroic project and face Levinas’ motif of intrinsic trouble. How can you make sure that this discipline you are dedicating yourself to is not a premature turn away from the call of others? In the case of mindfulness, how do you know it is not ruining your healthy capacity for boredom? Boredom is the claustrophobic suffering that awaits you when your link with Otherness becomes insufficient and you are left alone with yourself. It urges you to reconnect with alterity. So there is a certain horror in training yourself to be content with whatever is here, treating boredom as a kind of illusion, a kind of restlessness that could be transcended for good. In 60

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a levinassian perspective, what you are doing with that kind of training is being obsessed with the accomplishment of your fate and neglecting your duty to Otherness. In any case, though it is not clear who should win these debates, it is fairly clear that you cannot avoid answering this levinassian critique. The main question to answer is “With phenomenology and mindfulness, how ready are we to take experiences that contradict the theory into account?” There are reasons to be pessimistic about that readiness, but also reasons to be optimistic.

Contending with the Critique: What Does Levinassian Wisdom Look Like? What are we to do about this critique? Thinking that this is a damning moral critique would be to miss the point. Levinas develops meta-ethical reflections which are meant to reform phenomenological method so as to make room for surprises. He believes that, in spirit, phenomenology is fundamentally open-ended (and he hesitates whether to call it a “method” or not) as long as people do the work of re-opening its potentialities (Levinas, 1967, p. 155), as they tend to get prematurely closed off. If he never gave up on phenomenology, perhaps we should not give up on mindfulness. I would like to propose a strategy to do that work of reform that his teachings call for. My proposal is to introduce a little more pragmatism and pluralism into phenomenology and mindfulness. It is not a groundbreaking proposition, as it mainly helps to clarify some tendencies that are already present in those spaces. That said, it is good to encourage those tendencies. Let’s begin with phenomenology. We could worry that, right now, phenomenology is too similar to mindfulness. It defaults easily to philosophical consolation (soothing teachings, assumed innocent intentions, optimism of elucidation, false open-endedness). This is because of the standard story that phenomenologists like to tell. We describe our starting point as giving up on all preconceived notions. We claim that this has the virtue of getting us to our end-goal which is to uncover ontological truths. Absolute truths about the structure of being. In other words, we want to claim that our starting point is not aiming at anything in particular except whatever necessary truth we will happen to uncover in the end. This professed indeterminacy is what leads us to being biased toward consolation. After all, this is “the most spontaneous and natural tendency of philosophy”6 (Levinas, 1982b, p. 163). Instead, it might be better to acknowledge that there is a plurality of possible phenomenological reductions, each specified by different starting assumptions. Those assumptions are anchored to different target-experiences. In the case of a phenomenology of equanimity, we are aiming for the “Oceanic feeling”. This is the feeling of peace and one-ness with the rest of the universe. However, in the case of a phenomenology of vulnerability, the goal is the “Mysterium tremendum”, the feeling of horror while facing mysterious Otherness. What would justify this pluralism would be that phenomenological statements are not transparent descriptions of the laws of consciousness but attempts at providing the interlocutor with a target-experience. All phenomenological statements are “meditative exaggerations” as Harter (2018, p. 162) puts it: they balance out habitual tendencies, bending the stick in the other way, so to speak. It is this attempt at changing someone’s mind which indirectly conveys truths about the laws of consciousness. Conversely, mindfulness is too similar to phenomenology. At least it is too similar to the kind of ontological phenomenology described above. The problem here is that some mindfulness proponents argue that the philosophical legitimacy of mindfulness comes from its ability to uncover truths about the nature of being in an unbiased way, without any ulterior 61

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motive. They see this as a solid epistemic foundation, which safeguards the practice from being merely a form of brainwashing, as effective as it might be. The fix here is to draw upon rich traditions of Buddhist philosophy which are comfortable with purely pragmatic accounts of meditation. For instance, Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification) written by Buddhaghosa and analyzed by Heim (2015) and Heim and Ram-Prasad (2018) as a purely pragmatic phenomenology for enlightenment. The goal of the practice is not primarily thought to be the uncovering of ontological truths. The point is to get the meditator to attain a certain experience. If, going forward, we take the point of mindfulness to be to reach the oceanic feeling, it is a good thing, but it might limit the scope of what the community of meditators might achieve. Mindfulness would be limited by the boundaries of the phenomenology of equanimity and could not include the teachings of Levinas. If, instead, the target-experience is taken, more minimally, to be the reduction of suffering, then mindfulness will be able to include the wisdom from the phenomenology of vulnerability as well. Again, this is not a ground-breaking initiative since many people (many skilled meditation teachers) already come to that resolution, but it helps clarify certain conflicting tendencies.

Charting Paths Through the Literature: Opening and Closing Philosophical Systems To conclude this analysis, let’s acknowledge that the levinassian critique of mindfulness I presented you with is composed of three things—an interpretation of Levinas’ work, an interpretation of what mindfulness is, and an interpretation of what phenomenology is—and that those are each highly debated points. They are broad scholarly domains in their own right. To free you from the limitations of my particular point of view and opinions on this topic, I need to give you a sense of the leg room there is regarding these points of contention. Let me begin by pointing out that my sensibility lies with Craig’s characterization of Levinas (2010), she rightly points out that some commentators make his ethics “look sublime, beautiful, angelic; others make it seem disastrous, impossible, masochistic”, the way we see it, it is “messy, unpredictable, and minimal” (Craig, 2010, p. 67), close to William James’ pragmatism and pluralism. This extends to my view of mindfulness and phenomenology. I interpret mindfulness as mindfulness meditation, one among many equally valid spiritual exercises, because I interpret it pragmatically. I similarly hold that several phenomenologies can be true in their own way. Therefore, when it comes to further readings about the links between Levinas, phenomenology, and mindfulness, one can envision two paths. The first is that of “inspired re-openings”: what matters is to capture the spirit of the text and to prevent it from closing off further possibilities. It leans on the fragmentary nature of philosophical motifs and practices (the way they hold loosely together) to allow pluralism. The second path is one of “systematic reconstructions”: the practice of reconstructing a philosopher’s arguments systematically, using as a justification the fact that their ideas cohere and hold tightly together. In this mode, the letter of the text is primary, and so is the way it might conflict with other texts. Both paths are equally valuable. When it comes to systematic reconstructions, one finds a helpful overview of Levinas’ work in The Cambridge Companion to Levinas, in particular Bernasconi’s article “What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer?” which, as the title suggest, tackles the important question “What even is the point of Levinas’ anti-ego, borderline antiphenomenology, philosophy?”. In the French language, Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée also offers a high-quality map of the territory of Levinas’ thought, and acts 62

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as a helpful guide. With special mention to Pradelle’s article “Is there a phenomenology of ethical meaningfulness?” which addresses the phenomenological status of the levinassian system. Just as centered on core theoretical problems is Dubost’s article (2006) reconstructing Levinas’ method. In addition to those deep dives, Cohen-Levinas and Schnell (2016) have put together two helpful volumes, each about the interpretation of one of Levinas’ masterpieces (Totalité et Infini and Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence). Perpich’s The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas provides an account of Levinas’ thought on normativity, which opens toward an application of his philosophy to concrete cases. As far as inspired re-openings are concerned, one could not find a method to follow, but only inspirations. They usually take the form of treating the notion of the “Face”, the epitome of Otherness in Levinas’ philosophy, as only one among many “scenes of violence” (Levinas, 1982a, p. 11) that interest him, and not as the obvious culmination of his system. If you think there can be several epitomes, this path is for you. You can begin by reading Levinas on issues of pain and suffering (1991, 1994), which offers an alternative starting point. Then, there is, of course, Megan Craig’s book (2010), which advocates for a chaotic reading. There is also Romano’s article (2011) which defends the hypothesis that Levinas should be read as a “moralist” first and foremost, of the kind who resists systematic readings. To tackle him as a storyteller, Buckingham’s book, Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling, is helpful. The volumes Levinas and Asian Thought (Kalmanson, et al., 2013) and Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (Chanter, 2001) are similarly enlightening through an array of analyses that question Levinas from a non-European perspective or a feminist perspective. See also Kayser’s Emmanuel Levinas: la trace du féminin (2000) for an analysis of the feminine in his work. Otherwise, another original way to interrogate Levinas’ thought is taking his phenomenology of time as central to his philosophy. For this, you have Coe’s book (2018) in English, or Galabru’s book (2020) in French. As far as the literature on mindfulness is concerned, what is relevant to our assessment is the question: what is and what is not entailed by mindfulness? What comes as a package and what is, on the contrary, separable from it? One could first become acquainted with Jon Kabat-Zinn’s characterization of mindfulness (1990, 2005) and then compare it to other perspectives: Murphy wrote “Mindfulness-Based Therapy in Modern Psychology: Convergence and Divergence from Early Buddhist Thought”, and Cassaniti wrote Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia. Indeed, this question can often be asked as part of a comparison between the mindfulness of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and its eastern source. However, it is fairly standard to acknowledge that this genealogy is relevant but not decisive when it comes to figuring out what mindfulness commits us to. Hence the existence of several discussions that seek to answer this question on an immediate conceptual level. Such as the debate between people who view mindfulness as “bare” non-elaborative attention and people who view it as a kind of cultivation over and above ordinary attention. In the first camp, I take Puc’s definition of mindfulness (2019) to find the right balance between non-elaboration and cultivation. In the second camp, I think Dreyfus (2011) portrays well the overall therapeutic argumentative context which allows for Puc’s mindfulness to get off the ground. Otherwise, for the links between practice and theory, Ratnayake and Merry (2018) wrote an article about what is entailed theoretically by the loss of ordinary selfhood in mindfulness meditation, and Depraz (2019) wrote on the overlap between phenomenology and mindfulness, entering into discussion with Stone and Zahavi (2021), who are skeptical of that framing. 63

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Notes 1 “Die Angst des Irdischen abzuwerfen, dem Tod seinen Giftstachel, dem Hades seinen Pesthauch zu nehmen, des vermißt sich die Philosophie” (Rosenzweig, 1921). 2 “Au fond, comme à peu près tous les phénoménologues post-husserliens, Merleau-Ponty va s’appuyer sur ces points de fragilité –qui sont en fait des lignes de fractures– que sont tous les phénomènes qui viennent menacer la clôture de la conscience transcendantale et le primat de l’intentionnalité objectivante, à savoir autrui, l’affectivité, la temporalité, la chair, la Terre etc” (Sebbah & Barbaras, 2010, pp. 91–92). 3 “L’idée qui semble présider à l’interprétation heideggerienne de l’existence humaine, consiste à concevoir l’existence comme extase, possible, dès lors, uniquement comme une extase vers la fin; et, comme conséquence, à situer le tragique de l’existence dans cette finitude et dans ce néant dans lequel l’homme se jette au fur et à mesure qu’il existe” (Levinas, 1947, pp. 18–19). 4 “Dire qu’à la base de toute intention, même affective ou relative – se trouve la représentation, c’est concevoir l’ensemble de la vie spirituelle sur le modèle de la lumière” (Levinas, 1949, p. 35). 5 For a discussion on Subitism and Gradualism as it relates to mindfulness see Dunne, 2011, p. 76 onward. 6 “le mouvement le plus spontané, le plus naturel de la philosophie” (Levinas, 1982, p. 163).

References Bernasconi, R. & Critchley, S. (Eds.) (2002). The Cambridge Companion to Levinas. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Bernasconi, R. (2002). What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer? In S. Critchley & R. Bernasconi (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (pp. 234–251). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Buckingham, W. (2013). Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling. London, England: Bloomsbury Publishing. Buddhaghosa, B. (1991). (ca. 5th century C.E). In B. Ñāṇamoli (Ed.), The Path of Purification: Visuddhimagga. Seattle, WA: Buddhist Publication Society. Cassaniti, J.L. (2018). Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chanter, T. (Ed.) (2001). Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Coe, C.D. (2018). Levinas and the Trauma of Responsibility: The Ethical Significance of Time. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press. Cohen-Levinas, D. & Clément, B. (2007). Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée. Paris, France: PUF. Cohen-Levinas, D. (Ed.). (2011). Lire Totalité et Infini d’Emmanuel Levinas. Pars, France: Hermann. Cohen-Levinas, D. & Schnell, A. (2015). Relire Totalité et Infini d’Emmanuel Levinas. Paris, France: Vrin. Cohen-Levinas, D. & Schnell, A. (2016). Relire Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence d’Emmanuel Levinas. Paris, France: Vrin. Craig, M. (2010). Levinas and James: Toward a Pragmatic Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Depraz, N. (2019). Epoché in light of samatha-vipassanā meditation: Chögyam Trungpa’s Buddhist Teaching Facing Husserl’s Phenomenology. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (7-8), 49–69. Dreyfus, G. (2011). Is mindfulness present-centred and non-judgmental? A discussion of the cognitive dimensions of mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 41–54. Dubost, M. (2006). Emmanuel Levinas et la méthode de l’altérité: de la phénoménologie à la vigilance éthique. In A. Bozga & A. Szigeti (Eds.), Studia Phaenomenologica VI: a Century With Levinas, Notes on the Margin of His Legacy (pp. 31–58). Bucharest, Romania: Humanitas. Dunne, J. (2011). Toward an understanding of non-dual mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 71–88. Franck, D. (2001). Dramatique des phénomènes. Paris, France: PUF. Galabru, S. (2020). Le Temps à l’œuvre: Sur la pensée d’Emmanuel Levinas. Paris, France: Hermann.

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A Levinassian Critique of Mindfulness Harter, P.  -J. (2018). Spiritual exercises and the Buddhist path: An exercise in thinking with and against Hadot. In D.V. Fiordalis (Ed.), Buddhist Spiritual Practices (pp. 147–179). Berkeley, CA: Mangalam Press. Heim, M. (2015). Buddhaghosa on the phenomenology of love and compassion. In J. Ganeri (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (pp. 171–189). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Heim, M., & Ram-Prasad, C. (2018). In a double way: Nāmarūpa in Buddhaghosa’s phenomenology. Philosophy East and West 68 (4), 1085–1115. Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of european sciences and transcendental phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. New York, NY: Delacorte. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness. New York, NY: Hyperion. Kalmanson, L., Garrett, F. & Mattice, S. (Eds.). (2013). Levinas and Asian Thought. Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Kayser, P. (2000). Emmanuel Levinas: la trace du féminin. Paris, France: PUF. Kidd, C. (2014). Husserl’s phenomenological theory of intuition. In L. Osbeck & B. Held (Eds.), Rational Intuition (pp. 131–150). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Levinas, E. (1931). Théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl. Paris, France: Vrin. Levinas, E. (1947). De l’existence à l’existant (2nd ed.; new preface added in 1977). Paris, France: Vrin Levinas, E. (1949). En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger (4th ed.; Essays added in 1967). Paris, France: Vrin. Levinas, E. (1971). Totalité et Infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (14th ed.). Paris, France: Librairie générale française. Levinas, E. (1978). Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence (10th ed.). Paris, France: Librairie générale française. Levinas, E. (1982a). Éthique et infini (15th ed.). Paris, France: Librairie Générale Française. Levinas, E. (1982b). F. Rosenzweig: L’Étoile de la Rédemption. Esprit 63 (3), March 1982. p. 163. Levinas, E. (1991). La souffrance inutile. In Entre nous: essai sur le penser-à-l’autre (pp. 100–112). Paris, France: Librairie générale française. Levinas, E. (1994). Une éthique de la souffrance. In J.-M. von Kaenel (Ed.), Souffrances: Corps et âme, épreuves partagées (pp. 127––137). Paris, France: Autrement. Murphy, A. (2016). Mindfulness-based therapy in modern psychology: Convergence and divergence from early Buddhist thought. Contemporary Buddhism 17 (2), 275–325. Perpich, D. (2008). The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pradelle, D. (2007). Y a-t-il une phénoménologie de la signifiance éthique?. In D. Cohen-Levinas & B. Clément (Eds.), Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée (pp. 73–98). Paris, France: PUF. Puc, J. (2019). In defence of bare attention: A phenomenological interpretation of mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (5–6), 170–190. Purser, R. & Loy, D. (2013). Beyond McMindfulness. Huffington Post. July 7. Retrieved from https:// www.huffpost.com/entry/beyond-mcmindfulness_b_3519289 Ratnayake, S. & Merry, D. (2018). Forgetting ourselves: Epistemic costs and ethical concerns in mindfulness exercises. Journal of Medical Ethics 44 (8), 567–574. Romano, C. (2011). Signification et phénomène: Comment lire Levinas? In D. Cohen-Levinas (Ed.), Lire Totalité et Infini d’Emmanuel Levinas (pp. 11–26). Paris, France: Hermann. Rosenzweig, F. (1921). der Stern der Erlösung. (A. Derczanski. & J-L. Schlegel Translation, 1982) The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Sebbah, F.D. (2007). Décrire l’être comme guerre. In D. Cohen-Levinas & B. Clément (Eds.), Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée (pp. 139–155). Paris, France: PUF. Sebbah, F.-D. & Barbaras, R. (2010). Renaud Barbaras répond aux questions de F.-D. Sebbah. Rue Descartes. 2010/4 (70), 91–92. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4), 158–185.

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4 MERLEAU-PONTY AND MINDFULNESS Timothy Mooney

Introduction and Overview In Merleau-Ponty’s later work, we find certain themes and conceptions that show an overlap with the theory and above all the practice of mindfulness. These include the reversibility of the flesh, the richness of things in the perceived world that draw us towards them, and the emphasis on painting as that medium that brings this world of perception to light, the ways in which we perceive it and better ways of perceiving it. In this chapter, I wish to argue that many of these themes are also found in his earlier work, glanced on in The Structure of Behaviour and set out in much more detail in Phenomenology of Perception.1 In the second work, Merleau-Ponty characterises the essentially embodied subject as at once an essentially projective existent. It does not live in a world of proximate opportunities and threats, but is situated in the further and virtual future, or rather futures. This is due to productive imagination and the skilled and schematised body with its motor intentional schematisations of postures and perceptual fields. Yet Merleau-Ponty does not see projection in exclusively imaginative and volitional terms, or as the choosing of exclusively authentic and self-transformative courses of action (which are only the possible provinces of adult life). Many of our projects are solicited by the things themselves as determinable indeterminacies that draw us closer, not to command them, but to appreciate their singularities or perceptual styles. It should be noted that Merleau-Ponty has almost nothing to say about an appreciation of things in their use, and hence almost nothing that can contribute to their careful and mindful use. In his descriptions of living amongst the things, however, he proffers in effect a kind of mindfulness that evokes much of the magic and wonder of childhood and that enjoins a more centred existence in adulthood.

I Mindfulness is a theory and a practice in which the value of the theory can best be seen in the practice. In my understanding, it is a technique for living in the moment, and with persistence it is the successful endeavour to do so. To be mindful is to live fully in the present, to maintain an ongoing attentiveness to our perceptions, our thoughts, our emotional

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DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-6

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and bodily feelings and our wider milieu. This attentiveness is at once an acceptance of our perceptual and conscious and affective states, without evaluating or judging them from on high. Originating in Buddhist beliefs and meditative practices, contemporary mindfulness has a more secular character, indebted very much to the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn. It is to be stressed that mindfulness is not an arcane or mystical practice, or something that is imposed on our ordinary existence from outside. Rather it is the cultivation of capacities that we already possess, and which when cultivated will help ourselves, our loved ones and friends and all those whom we will encounter. Mindfulness is accessible to all, reduces stress and the negative emotions, and allows us to better negotiate the troubles and even the triumphs of everyday existence. Elation can be as unwarranted as depression or melancholia. It is no less important to stress that we must of necessity practice mindfulness as embodied beings, not as supposedly Cartesian ghosts supposedly living in Galilean machines. Mindfulness is quite explicitly a practice for human beings as integrally psychophysical unities in the world. The person familiar with phenomenology will immediately spot some similarities between mindfulness and the Husserlian methodology of bracketing or silhouetting the natural attitude of world belief and returning to it as a phenomenon for elucidation. What is called the reduction is a return enquiry or a questioning back. The task is not to take the attitude within which we perceive worldly things as true or false. Rather it is to reveal it in its original and innocent sense, a sense that philosophy can uncover but never alter. More than the natural belief must be put in parentheses, since it is only held in awareness by virtue of appearances for that awareness. For this reason, the entire phenomenon of the being who lives believingly in the natural attitude has to be bracketed. Put another way, its flow of awareness with its perceptual objects and fields and memories and imaginings and anticipations must be placed in parenthesis, and with them its lived body and everything that is perceived in it, on it and from it. Everything must be bracketed so that nothing is lost for reflective focus (Husserl, 1982, pp. 112–113, 125–126, p. 172). Whatever I perceive thematically is always and already implicated in a situation, such as the mountain that I am seeing in front of me and above me and feeling under my feet, and that I am ascending to get exercise and to enjoy an impressive view from the very top. What is bracketed is the whole experience, the phenomenon of the seen and felt mountain and anticipated panorama in the world for this conscious existence, of the effort I am making and hence of my body as engaged in the project of climbing. The believed and the believer are recognised as the correlates of each other. The conscious embodied existent for whom things and world come to appearance must of essential necessity be a factor in their description (Husserl, 1960, pp. 33–35). It might be thought that this is to introduce theoretical reflection into our perceptual episodes, but Merleau-Ponty would respond that specifically phenomenological reflection thematises our innocent and attentive relations to the things of perception. It is imperative to take things as they present themselves and as they have their own proper significations for us. In this specifically phenomenological version ‘[r]eflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the foundation of the world; rather, it steps back in order to see transcendencies spring forth and it loosens the intentional threads that connect us to the world in order to make them appear’ (PP, p. lxxvii). And if I am to be faithful to this procedure ‘I must not first define the senses, but rather regain contact with the sensoriality that I live from within’ (PP, p. 228). Attentiveness to my comportment in perceiving and for that matter to the comportment of children shows me that we do not 67

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begin with discrete sensory capacities that must then achieve harmony. Rather than being made up of externally juxtaposed organs, the living and perceiving body is a synergetic system in which the different modalities are taken up together (PP, pp. 224–225, 232–234, 242–243). The unity between our different organs of sense and between these and our powers of movement is original. It is not ‘produced gradually and through accumulation… [r]ather this translation and this assemblage are completed once and for all in me’ (PP, p. 151). The communal work shortly after birth is of course rudimentary and cannot yet facilitate the performative and recursive syntheses needed for cognitive activities. On the phenomenological view, nonetheless, one’s limbs are not objects or focal powers of action. Ordinarily my leg is with me as an ambulatory power, not as something located eighty centimetres beneath my head. My hand is with me as a power of grasping and lifting and manipulating. The first in moving downwards perpetuates my moving forwards, and the second in rising upwards what I desire to take hold of (PP, pp. 87–88, p. 147). One has no more to objectify one’s limbs through the flow of an action than one has to search for them to begin, whether the action commences and proceeds in this way or that. My not having to objectify my body is due to the work of the body schema as the holistic and projective organisation of posture. Each of its projections towards a certain end Merleau-Ponty calls an operative intentionality or motor intentionality. Working with vision, the vestibular system and other sources, each sub-representational plan of action for the body is in one and the same blow a route to realisation, since it predelineates the path to be taken through the perceptual field. It articulates space and the things within it into practical vectors and lines of force. In so doing it constitutes an anisotropic spatiality of situation as opposed to an idealised spatiality of indifferent position. This can be seen when I prepare to use my bicycle. Having unlocked it outside the library building, I lift it up and out of its stand before riding off on it. In this action there is no need for me to visually locate my arms and calculate the trajectory or route that the one will take towards the handlebars and the other towards the underside of the saddle. The final position of each arm is already anticipated in its movement, and as Merleau-Ponty puts it, ‘I have no need of directing it toward the goal of the movement, in a sense it touches the goal from the very beginning and it throws itself toward it’ (PP, p. 97). More than this, I do not have to plan or survey the ways that my hands are opening to take their holds on handlebars and saddle. Each limb is adapting itself to the shape and size of its target before reaching it, sketching out in advance the form of the latter. The limb is manifesting a pre-comprehension of what is to be attained, an orientation towards the appropriate outcome. The reaching and grasping and lifting up and out are at one with the desire and efforts that inhabit these movements, constituting an internal relation between intention and action, between the thought of readying the bicycle and its execution (PP, p. 78, pp. 96–97).2 In this account, what I am doing, why I am doing it and the way of doing it (if and so far as it is conscious) pertain to conscious intentionality or act intentionality. The subconscious way of proceeding and how I am proceeding that way pertain to motor intentionality, which does not attend act intentionality from without. The two are moments of one overall intending. Within it the former is invisible, an operative moment free of the act-object cognitions involved in learning the skills whose deployments it prefigures. In the progression from infancy through to maturity, the acquisition of a bodily skill that is deployed without representation and bodily objectification entails the reworking of our postural organisation. Once the skill is fully acquired ‘our previous movements are integrated into a new motor entity,’ and ‘the first visual givens are integrated into a new 68

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sensorial entity’ (PP, pp. 143, 155). In concert with language and instruction, it is just this schematised and schematising body that frees up the productive imagination for the framing of new and novel possibilities. For Merleau-Ponty to be human is to be making some possibilities real and to be considering other ones. Some possibilities are weighted positively and valorised, in that I desire them and think I should pursue them. I may even picture a life leading decades to attain, yet reckon with in the light of my existing skills or those that I envisage acquiring in the future: [T]he life of consciousness - epistemic life, the life of desire, or perceptual life - is underpinned by an “intentional arc” that projects around us our past, our future, our human milieu, our physical situation, our ideological situation, and our moral situation, or rather, that ensures that we are situated within all of these relationships. The intentional arc creates the unity of the senses, the unity of the senses with intelligence, and the unity of sensitivity and motility. (PP, p. 137) It is not difficult to see early Heideggerian resonances in the foregoing, and this is confirmed when we look elsewhere in Phenomenology of Perception. The normal person reckons with the possible, and beneath all the meanings of the word sense ‘we find the same fundamental notion of a being who is oriented or polarised towards what he is not’ (PP, p. 454). My existence itself is an act or a doing, since ‘an act, by definition, is the violent passage from what I have to what I aim at, or from what I am to what I have the intention of being’ (PP, p. 401). And it is ‘by resolutely taking up what I am by chance, by willing what I will, and by doing what I do, that I can go further’ (PP, p. 483). And Merleau-Ponty seems to take the world as a reservoir of resources for a self-transcending subject. Even prior to conscious projection, ‘my first perception inaugurated an insatiable being who appropriates everything that it can encounter, to whom nothing can be purely and simply given because it inherited the world’ (PP, p. 374). He adds that this existent ‘carries in itself the plan of every possible being.’ We strive for an optimal hold on what we engage with, and when the ends we aim at cannot be achieved with our natural means, we construct instruments, projecting a cultural world around ourselves that drives back the natural world (PP, p. 25, p. 148). This raises the worry that each of us is regarded at our most basic as an egotistical project of acquisitive appropriation. Others and things would seem to be the means for realising our projects before being anything else. And the natural world for our projects would seem to closely resemble that of the early Heidegger. We will recall that in the natural world of Being and Time the wood is first and foremost a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock and ore and the river a power of water to be harnessed (Heidegger, 1962, p. 100). Merleau-Ponty is another thinker who exemplifies what the later Heidegger calls the age of the world picture. The world is frozen into a structured image that is amenable to scientific calculation and exploitation, and it is exploited because of the modern subject’s will to enhance its being. In this story, an increase in industrial production is willed at every level of human existence, effecting an unending spiral of consumption. And if everything is implicitly taken as a reservoir of raw material, according to Heidegger, humanity itself will come to be absorbed into this standing reserve. Having developed its own momentum in technology the will to will is turning against its possessor. The subject is being enslaved by its own fabrications, being levelled down to a bland uniformity like the natural world itself ( Heidegger, 1973, pp. 106–110; Heidegger, 1977, pp. 16–17, p. 27, 129–134). 69

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II All this looks like a world away from mindfulness. But some of Merleau-Ponty’s remarks can I think be qualified. In my reading, the hyperbolic remarks about an insatiable being appropriating everything it can encounter harks back to a child whose enthusiasm and curiosity were boundless, and who even today encounters the things of the world as wondrous and inspiring (PP, pp. 45–46, p. 86, p. 361). On this interpretation, our dealings with others and things are not being taught in fundamentally instrumental terms, and would include acts of bringing both lives and things to further expression through speaking speech (Merleau-Ponty’s phrase for the creative use of language) or some other art. This reading is consistent with his attentiveness to the transcendence of others and their singular styles, and with his contention that the most authentic existence will be lived in solidarity with them. Every authentic project is ‘mine’ as my decision and lived by me, though whether my responsiveness is sourced in oppressed people all around me or in a loved one standing before me, I cannot consistently will freedom for myself without willing it for everyone (PP, p. 373, pp. 479–481, p. 483). And when we consider our world, it is stressed that it is an open and indefinite multiplicity where relations are reciprocally implicated, as distinct from the scientistic picture of a scientific universe, namely, of a complete totality in which all relations are reciprocally determined (PP, p. 73, p. 122). When he turns to the things of the world, moreover, Merleau-Ponty gives us an account of attentiveness to the things that are solicited by the things themselves, and that is not to be understood in causal or calculative terms. Nor is attentiveness to be understood in an intellectualist register. If infants are initially driven forward by their instincts, constituting elementary interest formations to facilitate the fulfilment of biological needs, they soon begin to show a distinctively perceptual interest beyond mere striving. Only by way of this interest can a proto-objective configuration exercise an allure leading to its objectification, such that the attentionally targeted thing is the motive and not the bare cause or bare reason of the perceptual event. As we grow up the perceptual interest founds and becomes interwoven with a cognitive interest, initially practical and then more abstractly theoretical. Yet the syntheses that precede thematic perception always let us apprehend something as inviting or repelling before it is cognised as green or red or round or square (PP, pp. 26–29, p. 33, p. 154, p. 334; Merleau-Ponty, 1963, p. 176). What also persists from infancy is the endeavour to perceive an attractive object as clearly as possible. Our postural attitudes already display our orientation towards the best articulations of things, well before we pursue the optimal appearances and actions that are requisite in our crafts or professions (PP, p. 261, p. 316, pp. 332–333). Early and interested viewings in infancy carry into more extensive actions favoured as the best and the easiest ways of reaching richer perceptual givenness or fulfilment. The sensible articulations of things are revealed by factically interested existents, not by spectators with no concerns before or after theoretical cognition (PP, p. 29, p. 33, p. 316). If we describe the real as it appears to us, we find it already laden with anthropological predicates. Each perception is a communion, and we can only posit the empirical thing ‘at the end of a gaze or at the conclusion of a sensory exploration that invests it with humanity’ (PP, p. 334). Such communion is solicited or invited by the things themselves, and when we recognise that these draw us in closer, it needs to be added that the horizon of perceptual attention is not the mere anticipation of the hidden aspects of a thing. It is also an anticipation of features within the aspect directly present to the perceiver that are too distant to be clearly 70

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articulated from the current standpoint. We are co-intending in this way when we walk up to a notice board to read it. So is the baby who crawls towards a shiny something and who lifts it up to see it better after clutching it (APS, p. 43; PP, pp. 30–31, 32–33, p. 242). These ongoing explorations are important in showing us that the thing already has a dynamic sense for the infant, for it has motivated both the interest in and the expectation of new and novel fulfilments. It is apprehended as offering more than has been given through attention so far. The infant already has the engaged awareness that what is currently perceived has not been exhausted perceptually. Exploratory attention is for the most part experienced as a progressive and satisfying passage from a broad and loose determination of an object to one that is more refined and more distinct. There is neither chaos at the outset of an exploratory episode (since infants are motivated or attracted by certain configurations) nor complete determination at its close (since only some features are now more determined within an unsurpassable indeterminacy). It is the very broadness and looseness of features – their element of indistinctness – that motivates continuing explorations leading to novel articulations. Both causal and intellectual accounts see indeterminacy in exclusively negative terms, as something to be diminished and ultimately eliminated, whereas for Merleau-Ponty ‘[w]e must recognise the indeterminate as a positive phenomenon’ (PP, p. 7).3 The indeterminacy of a thing is not immediately evident in developed perception with its sedimented skills and cognitions, and neither is its singularity. Knowing how to get our bearings and deal with things in our busy working lives, we easily use the doorknob here and the latch and lever over there. But when I have the time and the interest to attend closely to an empirical thing, it ceases to be an allusion to or a token of some general type, and I realise that it has a distinctive perceptual style, the apprehension of which evokes something of the novelty of infant perception. In zoning in on a once-off pattern of wood grain or of rings, I am seeing this feature of the tree or bench for the first time, even though I saw this particular object before (PP, p. 41, pp. 45–46). These uncommon episodes tell us that adult perception usually passes over the empirical depth and richness of the perceived thing, and that the concepts we employ constantly do. Yet the contours of natural objects are of no concern to the scientistic intellectualist. Their styles are inexact and for this reason irrelevant, in that they lie beneath the purview of physico-theoretical concepts (PP, pp. 40–41). Descartes thinks this way when he affirms the sameness of the piece of wax. As materially extended in length and breadth and depth it can assume an infinity of shapes and positions. These determinations are objective but indifferent, since they hold for each and every body. What is perceptually distinctive about beeswax and what is expected of it are dismissed altogether. For everyday perception it will rapidly become soft when heated and assume a shade that suggests its softness. This will in turn suggest the muffled sound it would make if it were struck. These potentialities contribute to the sense of sameness of this particular something, even if the original smell, sweetness and shape have vanished without the possibility of return, but Descartes has never admitted them as evidence for its permanence. These so-called ‘secondary’ qualities have no bearing on the identities to be determined by the natural scientist (PP, pp. 34–35). To counter this very adult intellectualism and scientism we need to be mindful of the original path taken by consciousness: We will have but an abstract essence of consciousness so long as we have not followed the actual movement by which consciousness continually recovers possession of its own operations, condenses and focuses them in an identifiable object, gradually shifts from “seeing” to “knowing,” and obtains the unity of its own life…In actual 71

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perception, taken in its nascent state and prior to all speech, the sensible sign and its signification are not even ideally separable. An object is an organism of colours, odours, sounds, and tactile appearances that symbolise and modify each other, and that harmonise with each other according to a real logic…[intellectualism] passes to a consciousness that would possess its law or its secret, and that as a result strips the development of experience of its contingency and the object of its perceptual style. (PP, pp. 40–41) One may well espouse an intellectualism without a scientism, but still forget that adult perception usually passes over the fineness of grain of the perceived thing, and that the concepts we employ always do. In a developed awareness, according to John McDowell, our use and public expression of demonstratives such as ‘this’ or ‘that’ show that conceptual capacities extend to the very edge of sensibility and go all the way down. Everything is perceived as a determinable particular, and in this light we can call a variant of a colour ‘that shade’ of the thing, and develop a concept that is as fine grained as the actual perception of that shade, proceeding from determinability to actual determination. In the absence of the colour, the concept remains adequate if it survives in thoughts based on memory (McDowell, 1996, pp. 56–59, 171–173). If demonstratives can reach the edge of objectifiable sensibility, this is of course because the pre-conceptual structure of figure and background gives them their purchase. Even then these concepts do not convey the horizonal predelineation in which the sense of the present figure is bound up with potential appearances. When finer-grained concepts are brought into play, moreover, they do not close off the possibility that what is brought to direct presence will surprise us without models drawn from previous experience. Things are conceptually determinable without ever being fully determined or conceptually saturated. Even our empirical concepts for the features of figures are at best indicative of our perceptual discriminations. This is discovered in going beyond sedate episodes of apprehending homogeneously coloured expanses. Imagine seeing a piece of lacework for the first time, without having encountered a Teneriffe pattern or point coupé. The initial conceptualisation by way of a demonstrative will be coarse grained, and when finer concepts come to be acquired on the basis of a newfound interest, it is highly unlikely that they will keep up with the large and ever increasing variety of lace patterns that one will encounter in the future. Such concepts will stabilise visual memories and therefore help to perpetuate them, but can hardly prevent the ultimate decay of their details. With complex patterns, it is hard to provide a substitute for direct acquaintance or even for the pictures found in brochures. Were it somehow possible for an expert in lacework to have fine-grained empirical concepts based on memories of all the patterns perceived to date, the latter could only be reconstructed accurately by being painstakingly drawn out on paper, since each remembered glance only registered one sector of a complex pattern before shifting. The reactivation of such memories stands in need of sensible illustration, unlike ‘that shade’ or homogeneously coloured expanse. Even then the expert’s everyday repertoire of concepts and images would lag far behind the complexities exhibited by other things of use and beauty.

III It should not be forgotten that, in discussing our perceptual interests, Merleau-Ponty is typically concerned with natural things rather than with artefacts, a concern that goes 72

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beyond the pursuit of practical and instrumental projects. Consciously wrought products cannot help but bear references to their creators. When we attend to them, they appear as if placed on the natural world rather than as inexhaustible things that are immanent within it (PP, p. 338). It is natural things that fascinate us in their depth and empirical richness, a view that we also find in Merleau-Ponty’s later work, not least on painting. He remarks that impressionism first sought to capture the way that objects originally appear to us, without fixed and precise contours and at the same time without tones that are broken up altogether. Things were depicted in their outdoor presence in the light and air, that is, within a certain vibrant mood or atmosphere. Cézanne more than anyone would both preserve and surpass this aesthetic. Like the impressionists, he does away with exact contours, giving colour priority over the outline. If one were to trace out the shape of an apple in a continuous line, one would make an object of the shape, abandoning the visible world for geometry. Not to indicate any shape at all would be to deprive objects of their identity. He seeks to avoid a fissure between the stable things that we see and the shifting ways they appear. The aim is to depict matter as it takes on form, the birth of order through the spontaneous organisation of parts (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 11–12, p. 13). To paint the impression of an order coming into presence, Cézanne departs from impressionism, using graduated colours with unique progressions of chromatic nuances across each object. The object is not submerged in its wider relationships and deprived of solidity and materiality. Instead, it is subtly illuminated from within. One’s glance rebounds amongst the modulated colours and finds the shape that emerges from them all, just as it does in lived perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 11–12, 14–15). And in seeing the shape of things one should also see their hardness and softness and smoothness and even their odour. For all that such a seeing can only hint at the unsurpassable plenitude that defines the real. Hard outlines do not just sacrifice the process of emergence, but also depth, that dimension in which the thing appears, not as spread out before us, but as an inexhaustible reality of reserves. Cézanne would sometimes ponder for hours before putting down a stroke, which would have to contain the air, the light, the object, the character and the style. Each brushstroke must satisfy an infinite number of conditions, the expression of existence being an endless task (Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, pp. 14–15). All this is well and good, and yet Merleau-Ponty pays little attention to the things that we fashion for use. On his account, it is only when artefacts present themselves as obstacles that we pay heed to them, to this roadway or metro door as stubbornly impassable (PP, p. 144, p. 464). Yet the case can and should be made that the difference between the world of natural things that draw us towards them and the world of artefacts is not absolutely unbridgeable. We can be mindful in admiring and exploring things and also mindful in using them. This point has already been broached by Heidegger and Robert Pirsig and has been admirably expounded by Matthew Crawford. Building on his experiences as a political philosopher and as an independent mechanic in the United States, Crawford decries the devaluation of manual skills and trades in today’s so-called knowledge economy. Running with this is the designed inaccessibility of everyday appliances. To use things with care and to select those that one can maintain and repair through the years is a good route to a happier and more fulfilled life. Such a way of being will be geared into concrete reality and less into a succession of digital representations that will invariably culminate in frustration.4 And even when one is not mindful of what one is doing in a deliberate way, it is surely the case that a mindful relation to the implements that we take up can become habitual. What is done more carefully is usually done better in any event. One can learn to hasten slowly. 73

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So far I have concentrated on a mindful relation to the things, and have said little about the body beyond the theory of its motor intentional schematisations. These are subconscious, not ordinarily being perceived reportably or imaginatively represented, even if they can be and are reworked through deliberate practices. And it strikes me that to cultivate a habitually mindful body as an integral moment of one’s psychosomatic existence would be to zone in on what phenomenologists have called the lived body or living flesh. From the outset, Merleau-Ponty takes up the longstanding insight that to touch is always to be touched, to have the feeling of touching. By way of both passive touch and active or haptic touch, the body is constituted as an outside with an inside. Everything that is felt on from outside is at once felt within from inside, and in a Husserlian vein this permanent presence of my body with me is a structural condition of recognising this body as uniquely mine and of correlating the visual appearances of my extremities with the feeling of them. And such correlation is itself a condition of appresenting or indirectly perceiving the bodies of others as having their own sensitive interiorities. Merleau-Ponty agrees; my body’s presence with me is a condition of grasping others and the things in the world. The perception of both and the perception of one’s own body vary together because they are two sides or moments of a single experience. But even when I thematise the bodily reflexivity of touching and being-touched needed to recognise this body as mine, its ambiguity is ineliminable, a characteristic of the phenomenon that Husserl passes over. I may try to register my body from the outside over the course of an activity, as if it were an external thing being-touched. Alternatively, I may try to feel it explicitly from the inside in doing the touching. Yet I have to switch from one to the other, giving only one my attention. I am always too late to catch the overall phenomenon (PP, pp. 94–95).5 It is well known that in Merleau-Ponty’s late ontology of the flesh the self-sentient and the sensible cross over into each other. The flesh of the body and the flesh of the world are always a couple becoming one where this oneness is immanent without ever being realised in fact. The toucher is only in the world as touched and tangible, and the seer in the world as seen and as visible, and the relation of activity and passivity is always reversible in principle and often in fact, where it is another that brings me under their eyes or under their hands, or where they might do so. The self-sentient as both active and passive is exposed in the world, a passivity that is not dominated by activity, which for its part is not surprised by the former (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 138–9, pp. 142–143). But in some situations, and by way of the reversibility of the flesh of body and world, this passively being exposed in the world can come to the fore. Merleau-Ponty remarks that many painters have sometimes had the sense of being looked at by the things, which does not mean that trees or flowers or hills are looking back, but that each marks out a possible perspective or point of view from there on me as the painter just here (Merleau-Ponty, 1964a, pp. 167–168, 1968, p. 139, p. 245). In a somewhat Sartrean register, each of us in the outdoors is exposed to a possible gaze. Reflection that is aware of itself as reflecting on the unreflected knows that it cannot give rise to a kind of objectification that would catch the lived body’s peculiar reflexivity and reversibility in themselves. It can only point to these constitutive moments of experience (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.  45). But would the kind of attention enjoined by mindfulness therefore involve a kind of naivety, since it cannot get to the heart of our bodily activities, only focusing on one or other term at a time? The defender of a mindful approach could, I think, respond that the said approach is not to be modelled on a transcendental philosophy that endeavours to capture our experiencing and experienced body and the experienced world. Still less, it is concerned with the essential features of experience and following on 74

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this with their material a priori or non-causal conditions. It does indeed enjoin a kind of naivety in its focus on the present, but not of a harmful variety. Its proponent could respond, further, that it avoids or evades a specifically Western presumption, namely, of existence being essentially projective, where self-realisation or authentic life are regulative ideas that we must endlessly approach without ever reaching. The highest or the best are taken as somewhere else and in the future. As for the objection that one can only be mindful of one term or aspect of one’s experience at a time, focusing on this or that facet of an object or this or that moment of embodied and affective life, the mindful person can remark that this approach renounces a panoptical conception of experience no less than a reflective and theoretical stance in general. I would hazard the guess that its practice involves a sliding transition of attentiveness, which will more often overlap with what the phenomenologist calls a sliding transition of manifolds. In the latter, each appearance slides smoothly into the next one as we track something in moving or as it moves, as there is an approaching or a receding. In a sliding transition of attentiveness, we would indeed shift from one facet of an object to another, zoning in and out and across, but without any intrusive breaks. And in focusing on our overall perceptual life, we would shift our focus from the active to the passive and from the somatically felt to the affectively felt, without taking these as discrete parts of the experience, that is, without taking them as pieces that would be discontinuous with each other. Each moment has its own value, and each can be appreciated in its presence in the present. On my view, Merleau-Ponty comes closest to a mindful relation to the thing when he writes of its perceptual style, of seeing its distinctive style for the first time or as if for the first time. And the first time has its own dignity, which is more often passed over by later rationalisations and reconstructions. Here, he can best speak for himself: Theoretical and practical decisions in my personal life can certainly grasp my past and my future from a distance; they can give my past, along with all of its accidents, a definite sense by following it up with a certain future, of which, après coup, this past will be said to have been the preparation; and they can introduce a historicity into my life. But there is always something artificial to this order. I currently understand my first twenty-five years as a prolonged childhood that had to be followed by a difficult weaning process in order to arrive finally at autonomy. If I think back to those years such as I lived them and such as I now carry them with me, their happiness refuses to be explained by the protected atmosphere of the parental milieu – the world itself was more beautiful, things were more fascinating – and I can never be certain of understanding my past better than it understood itself while I lived it, nor can I ever silence its protests. (PP, p. 361) Merleau-Ponty would often say that he had an incomparable childhood, and this he had in common with Sartre. For such individuals the world of the child will always be something of a magical domain and a lost realm, of the sort addressed so well by A. A. Milne and Henri-Alban Fournier. Merleau-Ponty can assert this, moreover, whilst recommending a life that is more closely oriented around the present. We find him to be in substantial agreement with Jules de Gaultier about what the latter calls the ‘Bovary Syndrome.’ Somebody caught within it habitually constructs scenarios that are only remotely realisable or not at all. Such a person’s imaginative powers are both affectively and effectively sundered from 75

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others and from situations that might moderate them and in which they could be actualised. For this reason disappointment is a fate. What we would call real life is always happening somewhere else, and the here and now is so featureless and sterile as to be incapable of transformation. A disposition to idealise other people in themselves and in idealised relationships with oneself becomes the gravedigger of the kind of existence that can pursue live possibilities (Gaultier, 1902, 216ff.). In foregrounding a more centred existence where enduring interests run with a certain equanimity, by contrast, Merleau-Ponty can hardly fail to be in accord with the proponent of mindfulness.

Concluding Remarks So far as I am aware, very little has been written on Merleau-Ponty and mindfulness prior to the essays published in this collection. In the piece above, I am much indebted to the warm and deeply personal work of David Abram, who has brought out so well the living and breathing spell of the sensuous as appreciated by Husserl, Heidegger and MerleauPonty (and as lived pervasively by pre-industrial peoples). For an explication of many of the grounds of a mindful relation to others, I am much indebted to the work of Anya Daly. It has struck me for a number of years that in our consumerist world the person is rarely encouraged to mind things, and minding them is made increasingly difficult when inaccessibility compounds designed obsolescence. What I wanted to say on these issues has been said so much better by Matthew Crawford. Given that most of us will still be city-dwellers in the foreseeable future, the task is to foster mindfulness throughout the metropolis. The best city will be a greened one and the best products built to last with easily changed and interchangeable parts. In the countryside, it goes without saying that much should be done to encourage (comparatively) small-scale organic farming and the provision of unmodified and unpatented seeds and seedlings.

Notes 1 Merleau-Ponty 2012. Henceforth PP within the main text. 2 Here I am reworking my account in Mooney, 2022, pp. 141–142. 3 Here I am drawing on Mooney 2022, pp. 63–64. For a remarkable study of the allure of things and the participatory structure of perception according to Merleau-Ponty see Abram 1996, pp. 44–67. 4 Crawford 2010 passim. 5 For an excellent account of the reversibility of the flesh, of its ethical implications and of how Merleau-Ponty’s later account resists a Levinasian critique see Daly, 2016, pp. 178–184.

Bibliography Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous. Vintage. Crawford, M. (2010). Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. Penguin. Daly, A. (2016). Does the Reversibility Thesis Deliver All That Merleau-Ponty Claims It Can? European Journal of Philosophy 24 (1): 159–186. Gaultier, J. (1902). Le Bovarysme, essai sur le pouvoir d’imaginer. Société du Mercure de France. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. Basil Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (1973). The End of Philosophy, trans. J. Stambaugh. Harper and Row. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt. Harper and Row. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. D. Cairns. Nijhoff.

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Merleau-Ponty and Mindfulness Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. In First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten. Nijhoff. McDowell, J. (1996). Mind and World. Harvard University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1963). The Structure of Behaviour, trans. A.L. Fisher. Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a). The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays, trans. A.B. Dallery et al and ed. J. M. Edie and J. Wild. Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b). Sense and Non-Sense, trans. H.L. Dreyfus and P.A. Dreyfus. Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible, Followed by Working Notes, trans. A. Lingis and ed. C. Lefort. Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception, trans. D.A. Landes. Routledge. Mooney, T. (2022). Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed. Cambridge University Press.

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5 HUSSERL AND MINDFULNESS Susi Ferrarello

Introduction1 This chapter explores the continuity (if any) between the application of Husserl’s phenomenology and mindfulness. As a result of this investigation, it will be possible to understand if and to what extent Husserl’s phenomenology—and its potential combination with mindfulness—can be used as a resource for emotional well-being and mental health. Some consider phenomenology as a way to achieve a certain kind of mindfulness (Stone & Zahavi, 2021), while others view phenomenology and mindfulness as equivalent psychological resources to provide for human well-being (Walach, 2021). Because both phenomenology and mindfulness involve paying attention to the present experience with a specific attitude (Lundh, 2020), I believe that both can offer support to individuals experiencing emotional problems (Lutz, Dunne, 2008; Lutz, Jiha, 2016; Guendelman, 2017). Yet since both phenomenology and mindfulness come from very rich traditions, in this chapter I focus on the application of specific concepts—for example, epoché, transcendental, time–of Husserl’s phenomenology and on a limited reconstruction of the history of mindfulness. As rightly Harrington and Dunne (2015) point out there is a particular selectivity in building the narrative of certain ideas and traditions. The tradition of mindfulness, too, we are building a narrative around a very complex tradition that although developed outside of the western context it became crucial for us, in positive and negative ways. David Loy and Ronald Purser, for example, emphasized the western circulation of a certain kind of mindfulness that they ironically called “McMindfulness” (Purser and Loy, 2013; Purser, 2019) which packages mindfulness in a popular and late-capitalistic shape offered to people available to invest a good amount of money. In general, as Depraz remarks (2019), Husserl’s phenomenology and mindfulness share the common objective of paying attention to the present lived experience. The main goal of meditative practice (samatha) is to stabilize the mind; that is, being able to slow down the emergence of thoughts and observe them as they come to our attention. This goal makes mindfulness quite close to the application of Husserl’s theory in phenomenological descriptions (Depraz, 2019). 78

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In what follows I provide a short and selective history of the term mindfulness and I focus on the aspects which overlap with Husserl’s phenomenology, namely his theory of epoché and reduction, to finally explain how we can use these notions and for what areas of our private and social life they are currently bringing benefit.

What Do We Mean by Mindfulness? The British scholar Thomas W. Rhys Davids, founder of the Pāli Texts Society, was among the first to translate with mindfulness the Pāli term sati2 (Gethin, 2011). Pāli is the language in which the earliest canon of Buddhist texts was written. As it often happens with translations of etymologically rich terms, the term mindfulness is one of the possible choices he could have made out of a wide variety of suggestions that the current dictionaries available to him3 at the time offered: “remembrance, memory, reminiscence, recollection,” and, for verb smarati, “to remember, recollect, call to mind, bear in mind, think of, be mindful of.” As Rhys Davids remarks: “sati is literally ‘memory,’ but is used with reference to the constantly repeated phrase ‘mindful and thoughtful’ (sato sampajāno); and means that activity of mind and constant presence of mind which is one of the duties most frequently inculcated on the good Buddhist” (1881, p. 145). In early Buddhist texts we find the term sati to both indicate remembrance but also to be ardent, alert, and mindful. Similar to Husserl’s phenomenological description of time (1991, 2013), sati indicates that faculty of embodied remembering that keeps together present, past, and future (satipaṭṭhāna), leaving aside the distress and distractions that the meditator might be experiencing.4 To use an example from a notable early book named The Questions of King Milinda, we see how the main five spiritual faculties for the meditator are faith, energy, mindfulness, concentration, and wisdom as they appear in the dialogue between the King Milinda and his teacher Nagasena: the king asked: “And what is the mark of mindfulness?” “Calling to mind and taking up.” “How is calling to mind a mark of mindfulness?” “When mindfulness arises, one calls to mind the dharmas [elements of existence] which participate in what is wholesome and unwholesome, blamable and blameless, inferior and sublime, dark and light.” (Mendis and Horner, 1993, p. 37) As shown in this passage sati (or proper mindfulness) allows us to be aware in time of the object of our attention; this is different from clear comprehension or wise mindfulness (samprajñāna/sampajañña) which enables us to weigh our experience and see if it is a wholesome or unwholesome one. Another form of mindful meditation, developed from early Buddhism is the contemporary Vipassana meditation popular in the West. This form of meditation invites the meditator to initially focus on breathing.5 When concentration is lost, the meditator is encouraged to see where the mind went without getting distracted by or judgmental of this metaawareness (i.e., blaming oneself for getting distracted). This style of meditation—which literally means “to see things as they are,” “insight”— questions the idea of a permanent core of identity underlying our ever changing experiences. As we will see, similar to Husserl’s phenomenology, our approach to reality occurs 79

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through the thesis (position from the Greek tithemi) that the ego takes in relation to the phenomenon (in Husserl’s language Stellungnahme). These theses are neither fixed nor permanent. The epoché, bracketing, has the role to parenthesize the assumptions related to these theses in order to “see things” as they are given to us or “come back to the things themselves.” By understanding the selfless nature of all things, we manage to see the world as it appears to us because it does not confuse itself with our own emotional reactions to its appearance but we let go of emotions and habits that do not serve us. Through this meditation we come to realize what Buddhists call the “three marks of existence”: all of reality is characterized as impermanent (anitya/anicca), selfless (anātman/anatta), and conducive to suffering (duḥkha) (Dunne, 2015). The goal for the meditator is to achieve calm and insight. In the West, Chögyam Trungpa has proposed an approach of Buddhist meditation following the Tibetan Kagyü lineage that consists of sitting on a cushion in order to come into connection with one’s own experience, (comparable, again, to the Husserlian motto “come back to the things themselves”) and stay with your own confusion. While samatha encourages the stability of one’s focus, Vipassana aims at intensity or clarity. An example that is often used to explain the importance of this combination is a lamp trying to show murals on a cave wall. The flame needs to be intense and steady, because if it flickers it cannot illuminate everything. According to Depraz (2019), Chögyam Trungpa’s presentation of the basic practice of samatha-vipassanā sitting meditation shows some similarities to Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions, and allows the latter to be endowed with concrete richness and practical operability.

Main Aspects of Contemporary Mindfulness: Bare Attention and Attentive Recollection What emerges from these traditions that give rise to different forms of mindful meditation is a particular attention to time and remembrance, non-judgmental attitude in relation to one’s own thoughts, and aiming at a well-being that is in line with one’s ethical values (Lobel, 2017). The roles that time and memory, judgment and ethical discernment actively play during practice are certainly key and are interpreted in different ways according to the tradition of reference (Dunne, 2015, p. 256). As we saw above, the early Buddhist context points to a practice of mindfulness that incorporates the role of memory (calling to mind, remembering, recollecting) as essential for cognitive and evaluative lucidity in respect to a certain phenomenon (discriminating what is wholesome from the unwholesome). In contrast, the contemporary Western practices emphasize the awareness of the present moment, with no judgment or evaluation. Both traditions refer to a notion of time for which the present now is at the same time bearer of the past retention and future anticipations. Remembrance here in the Buddhist tradition both in the Eastern and Western interpretation of sati relates to the presence of mind, attentiveness to the present, awareness, wakefulness, and heedfulness that we can easily find in Husserl’s early and late writing on time (1981). The notions of time and memory should not be taken as a nostalgic look at the past or anxious expectations of the future but as the presence of mind of being able to observe the temporal multidimensionality now in its protentions that look toward what is about to happen and the retentions that retain what has just been. Memory as recollection is the ability to see the temporal multidimensionality quality of the present now without forgetting the object in what has just been perceived and/or anticipating what the object in the way it is going to be. 80

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While Husserl’s writings on memory seem to be more focused on the cognitive advantages of this application, in mindfulness the meditative practice allows the practitioner not to lose focus and awareness. As John D. Dunne writes: the metaphor here appears to be that losing focus on an object is akin to ‘forgetting’ the object, and thus the mental facet that prevents one from losing that focus can be metaphorically referred to as ‘remembering’ (smṛti), since ‘to remember’ is ‘not to forget.’ Thus, during Mindfulness of Breathing, for example to maintain the mental facet smṛti does not mean that one ‘remembers’ the sensations of breathing; instead, it means that one sustains attention on those sensations without becoming distracted away from them. (2015, p. 258) In mindfulness of breathing as it is in Husserl’s phenomenology attentiveness is an act inclusive of both memory and evaluation (1973, 2001). The ability to tend to the present now in its Janus-shaped form involves that we select which aspects of our acts (of breathing) we decide to pay attention to over others, and we will retain them instead of others. Attentiveness involves that we choose to pay attention and we choose which aspect of the phenomenon is worthy of being observed and not forgotten.6 Seeing the phenomena (whose etymology literally refers to the Greek phainomai what appears to/for me) is a selective process that often conflicts with one’s own ego. It often happens that we do not really see things, partly because we choose to not bring to predicative clarity certain perceptions, partly because we are “‘seeing’ our thoughts about them”, our “concepts” or the assumptions that our ego is taking in relation to them in its natural attitude (Kabat-Zinn, 2005, pp. 41, 43; Husserl, 1989). Similar to what Husserl explains in Experience and Judgment (1973a) and Lectures on Passive Syntheses (2001), our epistemic capacities to see the phe0nomena, label them with a predicate and grasp their sense, might be compromised by “our affective awakening in the present” (2001, p. 221) which gives way to reproductive associations that are disconnected from our embodied being and from the phenomena themselves. In mindful practices, Kabat-Zinn remarks “Our thoughts are often highly inaccurate and unreliable (Kabat-Zinn, 2005, p. 261), they “distort or detract from…bare experience itself” (Ibid., p. 119), creating a “distorted reality” that often ­sustain a great deal of ordinary suffering (Kabat-Zinn, 1990, p. 70). Hence, mindfulness proposes a non-judgmental attending to present moment experience and all perceptions that are based on a kind of attention that is capable of being affectively connected to the body. In order to avoid confusing the concepts of the thinking mind with the reality of direct experience (Goldstein & Kornfield, 2001, p. 25), Kabat-Zinn (as well as Husserl’s theory of epoché) “proposes a nonjudgmental awareness through which we can experience things without the lenses of our likes and dislikes and opinions, which are usually coloring and filtering direct experience” (Kabat-Zinn, 2013, p.  291).7 The practical achievement deriving from this practice is the reduction of the emotional charge and alertness that certain phenomena exert on us. As Lutz and colleagues remark: Dereifying the memory of a stressful argument, one perceives the recollection of the event as actually a series of thoughts; experienced in this way, the memory no longer induces stress. (Lutz, Jha, Dunne & Saron, 2016, pp. 640, 647) 81

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Determining the fine line that separates the actual experience from our predicative activity of producing concepts is a thorny issue both in philosophy and Indian Buddhist philosophy (Sharf, 2018). Both Husserl and the mindfulness tradition sketched here advocate a notion of experience and conceptualization for which the object directly and immediately presents itself to us—“in the flesh” (e.g., Husserl, 1997, §5)—in contrast to its re-presentation, for example in recollection, imagination, or symbolic thinking. “Back to the things themselves” is the original motto behind Husserl’s phenomenology that invites us to abandon our mental constructions that prevent us from seeing the reality as it appears to us while hiding it behind theories, interpretations, and habitual patterns. The goal is to come back to the phenomena themselves and let them speak to us. (Husserl, 2001, LI). As Husserl declared, “We can absolutely not rest content with ‘mere words’…. Meanings inspired only by remote, confused, inauthentic intuitions – if by any intuitions at all – are not enough: we must go back to the ‘things themselves’” (2001, I, p. 168). In that sense the non-judgmental attitude of these meditative forms align with the Husserlian prepredicative interpretation of experience. Each lived-experience already contains an implicit intentional “as-structure,” which prefigures the structure of judgment. As Husserl puts it, things “are given in immediate sense experience as useful, beautiful, alarming, terrifying, attractive, or whatever” (Husserl, 1973a, p. 53). What we want to achieve both in mindfulness and with Husserl’s phenomenological descriptions is a state of “bare attention.” In contemporary notion of mindfulness “bare attention” may point to Nyanaponika’s influential discussion of mindfulness as it appears in The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (1962). Different from “right mindfulness” (s_a_m_m_ās_a_t_i_), for him, bare attention8 points to our capacity to overcome our tendency to see everything from the point of view of ego and personality, rather than seeing things as they are. It returns here again to the understanding of the nonpermanence of reality and the self-less notion of reality. Yet, different from much of Buddhist exposition, Nyanaponika did not define bare attention as non-conceptual and non-verbal. Closer to Husserl’s approach, according to this tradition, the activity of labeling what we perceive can create order in our insight. The practice of Mahāsī Sayādaw’s system of insight meditation one fosters one’s capacity of discrimination and precision. Nyanoponika, in fact, supports an “open, receptive, and non-judgmental attitude” in bare attention as well as the importance of verbal labeling of our mental states to clean and liberate our mind.

Husserl’s Connection to Mindfulness Husserl’s connection to the Pali’s Buddhist tradition and its meditative technique is more explicit than one would expect.9 Eugen Fink, one of Husserl’s late assistants who helped him, among other things, with the edition of the Cartesian Meditations, said to Dorion Cairns “that the various phases of Buddhistic self-discipline were essentially phases of phenomenological reduction” (Cairns, 1976, p. 50). While it is difficult to make a straightforward connection between phenomenology and mindfulness in general, especially when reflecting on the primary goal of Husserl’s phenomenology of establishing it as a rigorous science (2002), Husserl wrote a short essay in 1925 in honor of Karl Neumann, the first translator of large parts of the Pali Canon of Buddhist scriptures10 from the original Pali into German. Husserl praises Neumann’s work (1989, p. 125) and immediately suggests a comparison with his notion of transcendental (“the purest essence of Indian religiosity—springing unsullied in both 82

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appearance and actuality is, I would say, not so much ‘transcendent’ as ‘transcendental’”). Then he moves to describe Buddhism in these terms: That Buddhism—insofar as it speaks to us from pure original sources—is a religioethical discipline for spiritual purification and fulfillment of the highest stature— conceived of and dedicated to an inner result of a vigorous and unparalleled, elevated frame of mind, will soon become clear to every reader who devotes themselves to the work. (1989, p. 125) From his reading of Neumann’s translation Buddhism appears to Husserl as a religious and ethical discipline aimed at spiritual purification to reach an elevated frame of mind. For Husserl Buddhism, more properly speaking this portion of translation of the Pali Canon inspires a deeper contribution for the Christian religiosity and the philosophical renewal of our culture (“it will at the same time also contribute to a new deepening and empowerment of Christian intuition, which will benefit from the inner comprehension of Christian religiosity. The splendid Neumann edition is of inestimable value for anyone who is taking part in the ethical, religious, and philosophical renewal of our culture” (1989, p. 126). Husserl’s comparison of Buddhist tradition with his notion of transcendental allows us to justify the intuitive assonances that we drew so far between certain aspects of the meditative practice and Husserl’s application of the phenomenological method. Husserl’s understanding of time (1981), non-judgmental descriptions of the phenomena (1973), and ethical renewal to achieve well-being (1970a,b, 2004) encounter in several points the main sources informing contemporary mindfulness and its various approaches. In order to unfold this continuity, it is necessary to look at Husserl’s theory and practice of epoché as it opens the doors to that transcendental dimension that Husserl himself compared to the Buddhist tradition (1989, p. 125). In fact, epoché involves “a certain refraining from judgment,” “the abstention from position-takings” (“das Sichenthalten”), that is “depriving them of acceptance” (“das Aussergeltungsetzen der Stellungnahmen”), and “the putting out of play” (“das Ausserspielsetzen”) (Husserl, 1970a,b, p. 20) our spontaneous assumptions about life as we experience it. The epoché invites the person to abandon the naïve attitude to approach life and to refrain from reifying thoughts and emotional patterns in order to see the essence of the phenomena.

The Theory of Epoché, the Natural Attitude, the Transcendental and Time As Taminiaux (2004) remarks, epoché indicates a suspension of what “blocks the way to the phenomena” (p.  9). What is this blockage? Our assumptions or more precisely that natural attitude with which we naively approach our experience of reality (Husserl, 1989, p. 69). In order to see the phenomena we need to remove ourselves as much as possible from them in order to let themselves speak. In this way life and its reality would be able to communicate to us the wonder that they can bring forth. At the time of Logical Investigations, it was not yet clear how phenomenology helped, as Husserl’s motto stated, to come back to the things themselves. It was still unclear how we could look at the essence of the things themselves without conflating that essence with our personal point of view. The question still standing was: how can we describe the essence of our lived-experience without blurring it with our thought and emotional patterns? 83

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Let us use this set of words: a house/this is a house/I see this house/I look at myself glancing at this house. This group of words indicates four different positions that one can take to observe and describe the same house. The difference in the degree of observation among these positions is determined by two essential devices that phenomenology uses: the epoché, and reduction. From Greek, epoché indicates parenthesis, in the sense of suspension of judgment, while reduction (from Latin re-ducere) points to “a coming back to.” Reduction is another step that follows epoché.11 From the natural naive attitude with which I engage with life without thinking about it (a house),12 I progressively transition to a reflective way of describing this house that culminates in the point where I can see myself looking at the house. This final degree of observation is phenomenologically reflective; an ego-cogito-cogitatum (lit. I-think-the thought), that is, I observe myself looking at this content. This transition is possible thanks to the epoché and reduction. Through the epoché,13 that is, an act of self-determination (Selbstbesinnung, 1970, p. 188), I parenthesize myself as a human being living in the world and I commit to witnessing myself as a neutral observer of this living being. Due to the epoché, we discover the world as a content of a reflective subjectivity (in Latin, ego cogito qua cogitatum). Depending on how deep I want to go with my analysis, I can choose to apply a philosophical or a scientific reduction with which I suspend my philosophical or scientific knowledge when I am looking at a given phenomenon; or I can apply the phenomenological reduction which, similarly to the epoché,14 allows me to see the essence (Wesensshau) of the phenomenon through the suspension of any personal existential assumption. Through this reduction, I commit to become a phenomenologist; an observer describing the phenomenon as it discloses itself. After the phenomenological reduction, I might even apply a transcendental reduction through which I suspend my temporality and witness the being of the phenomenon as an original impression in time (Urimpression); a living present from which the horizon of time synthesizes the constitution of our knowledge. In fact, one of Husserl’s decisive philosophical contributions was his analysis of inner time-consciousness, his discovery of the extent to which normal experience involves all three temporal modes (present, past, and future). The constitution of our perception is an affective phenomenon synthesized through and by time. Each present now is always gravid with a lingering past and anticipation of the future. Each now is a horizon that collects all the perceptive data that affect our being in the lingering past and anticipating future. Temporal structures are crucial to perception and action, and for making sense of everyday experience. We live in a coherent and meaningful world precisely because we can navigate through time. The world of human existence is made up not only by overlapping pasts belonging to individuals, but also by shared pasts belonging to groups and communities (Husserl, 1973, p. 223). Time is what allows us to recognize the meaning of what we experience and to see reality as it is independent of our thought construction or emotional pattern. As we saw above, we can stop reifying our thoughts (Wielgosz, Goldberg, Kral, Dunne, & Davidson, 2019) and see the real world as it appears to us when we approach reflection not as a projection of our past patterns to the present but as a process that disentangles and explicates the structures that were implicitly contained in the pre-reflective experience (Zahavi & Stone, 2021, p. 242). The transcendental position emerging from the transcendental reduction does not erase the normal human being living its life in the natural attitude,15 rather it is coexistent with this naive subject that lives in the life-world (Lebenswelt).16 This transcendental position is a functioning locus of experience from which I can see how every object is an object for a 84

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subject in an infinite stream of possible meanings.17 In this primal flow of living presence, the transcendental ego discovers myself as the original Other looking at me from the origin of being/time. I, myself, appear to this original functioning of being as primary Other. I discover myself as I-we,18 that is, as a primordial origin of intersubjectivity.19 Intersubjectivity can be described as a relationship between me and another. The peculiarity of this relationship lies in the fact that the Other is not alien to me, but is “within me,” Leibhaftig (in person).20 “The other man is constitutionally the intrinsically first man” (Husserl, 1982, p.  124). In fact, when I perceive another person, the other is genetically constituted in the midst of my own flowing experience within the natural attitude; my perception of the other is not posited before or after my self-presence, but blossoms as a natural experience alongside my self-presence. In my own simple living and perceiving, the other appears as a natural part of my being-in-the world; one could almost say, as a companion.

Husserl’s Epoché and Mindfulness The comparison of Husserl’s epoché with mindfulness and the westernized interpretation of Buddhism (Nelson, 2017) is controversial. Stanisław Shayer (1899–1941), the first director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Warsaw, described epoché (bracketing) as the method of the Buddha in reducing positive knowledge to its essence. He considers the Buddhist epoché a more radical critique of the obscuring conditions of consciousness than Husserl’s transcendental philosophy that intends to elucidate the genesis and conditions of consciousness for the sake of a foundational grounding of knowledge. In Husserl’s text Socrates-Buddha (1927) Husserl, too, compares his westernized view of Buddha (Nelson, 2017) with Socratic mission of awakening of human consciousness. According to Husserl, the Buddhist universal renunciation of the world (Weltentsagung) and the Socratic “transcendental attitude” are both expressions of the “categorical imperative of renunciation” (“kategorische Imperativ der Entsagung”) (Luft, 2010, p. 17). Yet, he believes that the Buddhist ethical religious attitude remains post-mythic and atheistic and accordingly it does not achieve the transcendental dimension because its purpose is not scientific knowledge but a meditative practical approach to a better life (Luft, 2010, p. 5). The practical character of Indian philosophy places this philosophy, according to Husserl, in a pre-epoché and according pre-transcendental position. However, in other writings (e.g., the abovementioned review of 1925) we can see Husserl and Fink recognizing the transcendental dimension of Buddhist self-analysis unlike Husserl’s writing from 1927 “Socrates-Buddha” where he identifies Buddhism with a higher form of the natural attitude (Bruzina, 1992; Mohanty, 1992; Schuhman, 1992). With this in mind a comparison between Husserl’s epoché and the mindful approach as resulting from various interpretations of earlier philosophical traditions remains very tentative. If a comparison is possible, I think it should remain on an applicative ground. According to Depraz (2019), for example, it is possible to draw a comparison between Husserl’s epoché and the stages of samatha practice since both indicate a suspension of the natural attitude that is neither instantaneous nor definitive. While the latter encourages the meditator to rest in order “to maintain a continuity of attention and become aware of the subtlest, tiniest discursive thoughts” (Trungpa, 1979, p. 39),21 Husserl writes “we put out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence of the natural attitude” (1938, p. 61). We apply the epoché to question what we normally assume as true even though the world remains “according to consciousness as an actuality” (1938, p. 61). The epoché is 85

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used to clear our sight and keep our mind focused and free from assumptions. As Perniola (2011) observes, citing Husserl’s Vienna Lectures, conscious awareness stands as the “human posture which immediately intervenes in the whole remainder of practical life with all its demands and ends” (Perniola, 2011, p. 158). This trains, as Jacobs remarks, human “perceptiveness to the difference between what appears and the way in which it appears to me” (Jacobs, 2013, p. 354). In that sense, according to Depraz (2019) Husserl’s phenomenology describes the essential structures of the experience of the subject in the same way as mindful meditation connects the subject to her or his first-person fine-grained singular lived experience. Accordingly, the practical praxis of epoché is comparable to the first-person experience of samatha meditation (Depraz, 2019). Both in mindfulness and in the application of Husserl’s phenomenological epoché, when I exert epoché, I do not eradicate or deny reality but I contemplate it from a distance. Reality is still there before me without validity (Geltung) or any specific appeal for me. This is what Husserl calls the “neutralization” of validity, distinguishing the epoché firmly from any destructive negation (Depraz, 2019),22 epoché indicates a change of attitude, an ethical commitment, hardly ever can it be limited to just a linguistic act of negation. In Husserl’s words it refers to the matter (“Materie”) or the quality (“Qualität”) of the act (Husserl, 1982, Section II/V§20). At the semantic level Husserl rejects the idea that the epoché has anything to do with a negation of the General Thesis (Husserl, 1962, p.  100), that is, Husserl refuses to identify the epoché with “just thinking” (Husserl, 1962, p. 99), “assuming” (Husserl, 1962, p. 99) or “doubting” (Husserl, 1962, p. 100). For Husserl epoché is a practical act that involves “a certain refraining from judgment.” Similarly, in mindful meditation, epoché holds a meta linguistic position in relation to the way in which we contemplate our experience of reality. For this reason, in his short articles (1925, 1926) Husserl refers to Buddhism as a “means of seeing” which is quite the opposite of European observation (1989, p. 252). His own phenomenology, too, proposes a means of seeing that cannot be confined to a theory since his “transcendental phenomenology is not a theory” (1931, p. 13) and cannot be associated with either idealism or realism. The heart of his philosophy is a methodology that allows us to connect with life as it is given to us despite our limits.

Epoché, Solipsism and Attentiveness in Husserl’s Phenomenology and Mindfulness In his Phenomenological Psychology (1962) Husserl gives us the example of looking at a tree to explain how we can overcome the limits of our seeing. A tree is given to us in different ways, or “adumbrations,” if each of these were identical with the intended object as such, then with every new movement I would be presented with a new object (1962, p.  180). Even if I cannot perceive the wholeness of the tree from all sides at once, my memory tells me that previous perceptions of this same tree were provided by others and this tells me something about the data that are at the moment inaccessible to me (1973a, p. 377). Every perception I have is not a private event that limits itself to that moment in space in time, a perceived tree presents itself to me as a possible perceptual object for others as well as for me (Husserl, 1989, p. 123). The methodological praxis that the epoché opens up does not lead to solipsism (Overgaard, 2002) but shows the interrelatedeness of life. The world as it is opened up by the transcendental epoché and reduction is one permeated 86

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with selflessness and intersubjectivity. The world, Husserl says, is experienced as having the meaning “Fürjedermann-da” (1989, p. 124).23 Similarly, we can understand that if we use sati, mindful recollection. For this reason, Depraz (2019) affirms that similar to what happens in a meditative setting, epoché, by repeatedly putting to one side my preconceptions and my worldly attachments transforms my sense of time and the way in which this inner sense of time supports the continuity of my inner world. The word Nachträglichkeit is used by Husserl to point to a postponement of judgment in relation to the impression that each now leaves on us and at the same time to indicate the heightened attentiveness related to the perceptive content of that impression, that is, loss, opacity, passivity of the object as perceived in that moment (Brand, 1955). Therefore, epoché and reduction appear to the meditating I as an horizon in which I tend to myself by reflecting on how I paid attention to the object I am still contemplating. Both samatha and the application of epoché help to strengthen our ability to observe the phenomena and truly see them without ourselves occluding that seeing. Both practices help our way of seeing the phenomena as they appear to us without adhering to an authoritative, prescribed code of ethics, but promoting life’s well-being, for oneself and others. In both viewpoints the awareness of mental events as selfless and impermanent fosters a non-judgmental present centered approach that values compassion and release of attachment and distractions.24

Ethical Renewal and Well-Being in Husserl’s Phenomenology and Mindfulness In both practices the goal is well-being meant as renewal of who we really are from an ethical and existential point of view. Both Husserl’s phenomenology (1970a,b, 198925) and mindfulness practice embody what Buddhist teaching calls a system of ethics or virtue (sila); it includes both cognitive dimensions of attentive awareness and ethical qualities such as compassion, courage, and equanimity. The coincidence of virtue and our presence to who we are is called sheshin, “awareness” or attentive awakeness in Husserl (1989, 2001). According to Mipham Rimpochè (2000), from the stage of samatha onward, we are able to feel the presence of “presently knowing” or “self-knowing” (p. 17), which deepens within the learning of attentive presence. This presence allows us to develop the “watcher” or in Husserl’s terms the neutral observer that although not self-conscious it allows the meditating subject to contemplate the arising of the thoughts to consciousness at the very moment they appear. Sakyong Mipham goes even further, as he depicts sheshin as the ability to recognize the thought even before it appears (Mipham Rimpochè, 2000, p. 17), thus testifying to the possibility of cultivating self-anticipation. We therefore let the thoughts fade away, defuse before they even appear, so that our meditation can continue. Both in Husserl and in the meditative practice anticipation passes through affection that appears as a specifically active way of being attentive; affection (from Latin ad and facere the ability to be influenced/impressed by external agents) actively keeps us connected to our bodies. Beyond the opposition between activity (focused) and passivity (purely associative), affection defines a peculiar quality of perceptive attention that corresponds to a potentiality of attention itself. For this reason according to Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1989/1991), cultivating this form of grounding affective attention allows us to apprehend the object perceived within its anticipation in the perceptive act rather than—as Descartes 87

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did—pre-determine perceptive data in formal categories separated from the body and the sensible world. Both in Husserl’s phenomenology and mindfulness bodily senses and, more broadly, the sensible world are key to our understanding and contemplation of the world without which our mind would not gain calm and tranquility but would be left wandering in the labyrinth of the reification of its thoughts. Senses and affects, far from being—as Descartes naïvely thought—deceiving enemies assist us to operate an epoché of a new kind, which brings us back to our primordial sensibility embodied in the world (Husserl, 1970a,b, §44, §45, and §47). It is thanks to this form of epoché that we can dismantle the pattern of our habitus, not only the individual ones (ontogenetic) but also those implied in our common history (phylogenetic) (Husserl, 1970a,b). As in the vipassanā practice, the epoché applied to our common life-world understands our corporeality as an Urpraxis (Husserl, 1973/2001, p. 328) that confirms to us that the vital world that surrounds us and where we live with others is really there, totally present in all of our perceptive and kinesthetic acts.

Major Contemporary Influences Both Husserl’s phenomenology and mindfulness meditation techniques are currently used to provide care for one’s well-being, education, and support in psychological distress. Owen Flanagan (2011) used the term “eudaimonia Buddha” to describe happiness or flourishing as a way of life entailing virtue, compassion, and mindfulness. Different from a mere state of pleasure, eudaimonistic well-being involves a continuous work on one’s own being within the contemplation of the world accompanied sometimes, as in the case of Zen Koans, with cognitive elements to generate compassion and to teach how to look at reality in new ways.26 In Western society mindfulness has been used to develop trainings—one of the most popular is Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), which emphasizes the focus on the present moment of awareness and a non-judgmental stance which we discussed above. As we develop our capacity to be attentive to our experience of the moment, we may find that we develop a healthier relationship with both ourselves and others. Paul Grossman (2015) insisted on the embodied ethics that this form of practice involves. Andrew Olendski (2001) stresses the importance of accepting each object of experience without favoring nor opposing one for others. This mindful approach increases our chances to live a happy life because it helps the individual to welcome and willingly embrace all dimensions of experience, uncomfortable as well as comfortable, painful as well as pleasant. Mindfulness is also available as a standard psychotherapy in the United Kingdom, where a recent cross-party parliamentary report also recommended implementing MBIs in various areas of public life, including education and the criminal justice system (Mindfulness AllParty Parliamentary Group, 2015). In education, for example, mindfulness helps parents and teachers to attune to the child’s internal world. A wide literature confirms how mindful educators can help to create a considerate environment for children’s learning and promote their well-being (Schonert-Reichl & Lawlor, 2010; Raes and colleagues, 2014; Kuyken and colleagues, 2015). The neuropsychologist Siegel, uses mindfulness to develop our awareness of the power of our mind; he encourages us to envision the mind as a wheel whose center is our awareness from there we receive information through the four streams of awareness as elements that come to us from the rim of the wheel. The goal is to allow the mind to be open and spacious enough so that any element of the rim of the wheel can enter conscious experience but not take it over. 88

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In this realm, the connection between Husserl’s phenomenology, neurology, and mindfulness has revealed itself particularly pertinent and prolific. Its applications ranged from pedagogy to psychiatry, social work to nursing, the arts and sport.27 To cite one, Varela’s neurophenomenological approach (1996) tries to bridge the first-person approach to lived experience and the third-person approach to understand the mind from an “objective” perspective. Hence being meditators and skilled phenomenologists is a requirement to be able to contemplate and understand states of mind that otherwise would appear opaque to our seeing. Husserl’s phenomenological approach (Husserl, 1989) is also used in art therapy (Betensky, 1995) to develop the attitude of “looking and seeing” in which unique attention is paid to the authentic experience of the art process and art product of the creator. Husserl’s understanding of the interconnection of embodiment and attention made his phenomenology relevant for studies in sport psychology where the flesh of the body (Kerry & Armour, 2000) and the attention we can pay toward it becomes key to situate sport experiences and avoid traumatic injuries (Allen-Collinson & Hockey, 2001). Moreover, the impact that Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and contemplation of the essences has on nursing literature is quite evident (Paley, 1997). These Husserlian concepts are in fact conducive to see the inner world and needs of the patients and attune with these. A similar dynamic is in place with the application of Husserl’s methodology in pedagogy to systematically combine theories and practice of Bildung and education (Brinkmann, 2020). Husserl’s main themes—time, lived body, world, otherness—are systematically used to improve the effectiveness of teaching and the quality of the learning experience. Mindfulness, as a lived experience, is a foil for teaching that helps students to develop tools to approach reality with more insights and reduce traumatic stress whenever it arises. Mindfulness at the center of humanistic psychology and existential phenomenology has been used as a specific attitude that through overcoming the limits of the natural attitude establishes a deeper understanding of the human being and its psychological wellbeing (Gustin, 2018). Being mindful as a phenomenological attitude can be described as a deliberate intentionality, where the person is present in the moment and open to what is going on, harnessing personal values and accepting the unfamiliar, thus achieving a sense of being peacefully situated in the world, and able to apprehend one’s being-in-the-world.

Notes 1 Heartfelt thanks to Anya Daly for taking the time to reading this chapter and suggest her precious edits and feedback to me. 2 The earliest translation of this term comes from Gogerly’s 1845 “correct meditation” for samma sati in the context of the eightfold path. Gogerly’s translation of portions of the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta as found in the Mahāvagga of the Vinaya (Vin I 8–14) was first published as part of a piece entitled “On Buddhism” (Gogerly 1845, pp. 23–25); it was subsequently reprinted in Gogerly (1908, pp. 65–66), and is referred to in Rhys Davids (1881, p. 144). 3 Monier Williams 1872, Childers 1875, Böhtlingk and Roth 1855–1875. 4 According to Dunne (2015, p.  258) “Contemporary Mindfulness and Classical Buddhist styles clearly diverge on the role of memory. One point of convergence that is worth noting here (…) Contemporary Mindfulness which cultivates a present-centered awareness without conceptual elaboration, a kind of recollective memory must be operative at times. This occurs most obviously at the time of distraction in formal practice, when to recognize the mental state as distracted, the practitioner must recall at least that one is to be undistracted. Or, more elaborately, one must recall that one intends to focus on the task at hand, such as remaining aware of the sensations of breathing in the present moment.”

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Susi Ferrarello 5 The focus on the breath has roots in the classical Sattipaṭṭhāna Sutta, the foundational text in the Pāli canon where the text gives clear directions for mindful breathing: “Ever mindful he breathes in, mindful he breathes out. Breathing in a long breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing in a long breath’; breathing out a long breath, he knows, ‘I am breathing out a long breath.’” (Satipaṭṭhāna Sutta: The Foundations of Mindfulness, translated from the Pāli by Nyanasatta Thera.) 6 Similarly Dunne (2015) showed how Buddhist practice, developed particularly in the Tibetan M_a_h_ām_u_d_r_ā _tradition encourage, too, to focus on the present in a non-judgmental acceptance of all feelings that arise. Mahāmudrā meditation emphasizes an open, non-dual awareness. It sees the origin of suffering as lying in the subject-object duality, from which arises all conceptual thought. Thus the goal of Mahāmudrā meditation is to create a non-dual awareness, which is centered on the present and lacks all evaluation and any specific object. Mahāmudrā meditation can therefore be seen as another traditional source for current mindfulness practices. Ch’an and Zen traditions, too, focus on non-dual awareness, and as we saw before Kabat-Zinn has acknowledged the influence of these traditions on his development of current mindfulness techniques. 7 In the 1950s and 1960s several Western practitioners of Buddhism joined Theravada monastic orders. Among them one highly influential writer, Nyanaponika, identified “mindfulness” as the “heart of Buddhist meditation,” (the title of his widely read treatise, first published in 1954). Nyanaponika studied mindfulness meditation with two Celonese monks, Kheminda Thera and Soma Thera, and practiced meditation in Burma with Mahāsī Sayādaw. The Western understanding of mindfulness seems to trace back to this line: Burmese meditation teachers such as Mahāsī Sayādaw and U Ba Khin. 8 As we read in Stone and Zahavi (2022, p. 345) “The term bare ignores the fact that attention is always embodied in an individual person with a unique biography and personality who is embedded in a particular context. When embedded in the right mindfulness of the noble Eightfold Path, awareness is intertwined with a nexus of values that give it a broad and rich purpose. Even awareness of the breath can be affected by our underlying presuppositions and expectations. There is thus a spectrum of mindfulness, with some practices including a great deal of conceptualization, and others less conceptualization and evaluation.” 9 See, for example, Husserl, 1973a, p. 241. 10 In particular, here Husserl refers to Neumann’s translation of “The Speeches of Gautama Buddha” which was a three-volume translation of Pāli language Theravāda Buddhist discourses attributed to the historical Buddha from the Majjhima Nikaya (“Basket of Middle-length Discourses”) of the Sutta Pitaka. 11 Perniola based on Bossert’s restating of Spiegleberg states that reduction is not necessary for epoché, as “Husserl never succeeded in clarifying the relation between epoché and reduction” (Perniola 2011, p. 159, citing Bossert). According to Jacobs (2013) while epoché initiates a “radical bracketing of the world” that allows us to gain “phenomenological insights,” a significant change occurs to the “character of the reduction” (p. 361). Lübcke (1999) believes that if Husserl succeeded in changing phenomenology into transcendental phenomenology, the “sense of the epoché” changed (p. 6). McGuirk (2008) remarks that “both of these notions can be understood as means of bringing about the reorientation of the philosophizing subject from the natural to the phenomenological attitude” (p. 106). Schmitt (1959) agrees with that part of literature which sees no difference between the use of the terms epoché and reduction in Husserl’s early and middle period and “in the thoroughly explicit presentation of the phenomenological reduction contained in the five lectures on the Idea of Phenomenology,” which occurred in 1905 to perhaps 1917 (p. 190). 12 As Husserl states all that we know from our natural attitude in relation to the phenomenon is subjected to a “parenthesizing” that is, “a certain refraining from judgment” about the phenomenon, “which is compatible with the unshaken conviction of truth, even with the unshakable conviction of evident truth” (Husserl, 1983, pp. 60–61). 13 Epekhô —I stop—dates back also the work of the French philosopher Michel de Montaigne whose essays use the key word of the Pyrrhonians to indicate as well abstention aimed at achieving ataraxia, imperturbability. “Epechists,” as Montaigne called them, are those like the Stoics who stress the importance to exert suspension over any temptation of assensus (Cicero, Academics, 2, 32, 104, etc. Cf. about this Migniosi (1981, pp. 311–319). Cf. about epoché, Depraz (2004, pp. 361–363).

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Husserl and Mindfulness 14 In particular, see: Husserl, Ideas I, “The Thesis of the Natural Standpoint and its Suspension” (§§ 27–32). 15 Findlay (2012) argues, a “residuum” of the natural thesis remains that “cannot be put out of action” (p. 70). 16 In the first volume of Ideas, Husserl had already introduced this concept under the heading of Umwelt to mean a surrounding natural world, and it is only after writing the Cartesian Meditation and, most of all, in the Crisis that Husserl elaborates a proper “Umweltanalyse” to explicate the idea of an objective world shared within the intersubjective life of a living community (Husserliana, vol. IV, p. 222; Husserl 1989, p. 234). Husserl uses the notion of Lebenswelt in different ways: Geistige Welt (spiritual world), Umwelt (surrounding world), Heimwelt (home-world), Interessenwelt (world of interest), Allwelt (all world), Welthorizont (world horizon), Weltvenichtung (annihilation of the world), Verweltichung (in-worlding). All these variations indicate the radicality of the importance of the lifeworld in the meaning-making process of our lives. 17 See Husserl, 1970, 105: “in forming and having them.”...we are subjects for this world, ...experiencing it, contemplating it, valuing it, relating purposefully;... it has an ontic meaning given by our experiencings...; and it has the modes of validity which we as subjects of validity ...bring about or possess from earlier on as habitual acquisitions.. which we can reactualize at will.... “There are two attitudes; in one, the perceptive, we are” ...directed straightforwardly toward the object ... our gaze passes through the appearances towards what continuously appears through their continuous unification;...In the reflective attitude (by contrast) ....the sequence of appearances themselves is thematic, rather than what appears in them”. 18 Here, and similarly in Husserl’s manuscripts from 1920s, Husserl often uses the expression ­“I-Thou-relationship,” which seems closely to point to Buber’s work, I and Thou, published in 1923. Yet, it seems that when Husserl used this expression in 1920, it was not influenced by ­Buber’s writing because Husserl did not seem to possess any copy of his work in his library (as Husserl’s collection of books shows at the Husserl Archive in Leuven). In fact, Husserl and Buber met for the first time in 1928, when Buber visited Husserl in Freiburg. 19 Ströker (1993) and Held (2007) defend, in fact, Husserl from the attack of solipsism because the transcendental ego is a meditating stance functioning for and not just a solus ipse; it is, in fact, the original streaming of time in relation to which being comes to existence and it is the first ‘other’ through which we can experience this primal empathy (see Husserl, Paris Lectures, section 44 and Husserl VI, pp. 149, 150, 153) that allows us to encounter the radical other. 20 The sources Husserl borrowed to develop his theory of intersubjectivity are especially indebted to Brentano (1973), Stein (1989), and Fink (1995). From Brentano he took the theory of intentionality to explain the subject-object relationship and from Stein the notion of empathy to clarify the manner in which we perceive otherness. 21 See for example: “You draw yourself in. You close out all external feedback; you close yourself in with yourself; you close your mind into the sensations of your breathing and your thought patterns. Finally you reduce your mind thoroughly into your breath” (Trungpa, 1979, p. 37); “...you take your mind from wherever it’s been or out of whatever it’s doing, and we initiate the practice by putting the mind on the object of meditation;… I am going to place my mind on that. There is a quality of definiteness, like placing a glass on a table” (Mipham Rinpoche, 2000, p. 49). 22 About the tendency to confuse epoché and negation, see Husserl (1913/1962, I, §30), and Löwit (1957). 23 There is also a solipsistic epoché whose task is to show how another subjectivity would appear to my solipsistic world (Husserl, 1989, p. 124). 24 See Depraz, 2019: “Even in Mahāmudrā teaching, while one is supposed to suspend judgment during formal practice, the training also involves ‘preliminary practices’ that cultivate concern for the suffering of others and commitment to relieve others of that suffering. Thus while formal Mahāmudrā practice is aligned with the non-judgmental, present-centered approach of contemporary mindfulness practices, classical Mahāmudrā practice is embedded within a larger context that emphasizes cultivation of Buddhist values of compassion and relief of suffering.” 25 In the third essay of the Kaizo articles, entitled “Renewal as a problem for an individual ethics,” Husserl describes the subject of ethical willing as an awakened type of human being (Husserl, 1989, p. 62). This new, rational, and awakened person “frees herself from the naiveté of a normal life and decides or determines herself” (Husserl, 1989, p. 36).

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Susi Ferrarello 26 Zhuangzi’s playful stories are intended to shift the reader to more open and flexible ways of thinking about the world. 27 Bitbol (2019), Bitbol and Petitmengin (2013a), Bitbol and Petitmengin (2013b), Colombetti (2014), Depraz (2019), Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch (2003), Lundh (2020), Lutz et al. (2015), Varela and Shear (1999), and Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991).

References Allen-Collinson, J. & Hockey, J. (2001). Runners’ Tales: Autoethnography, Injury and Narrative. Auto/Biography IX (1 & 2), 95–106. Betensky, M. G. (1995). What Do You See? Phenomenology of Therapeutic Art Expression. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Bitbol, M. (2019). Consciousness, Being & Life: Phenomenological Approaches to Mindfulness. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50, 127–161. Bitbol, M. & Petitmengin, C. (2013a). A Defense of Introspection from Within. Constructivist Foundations 8 (3), 269–279. Bitbol, M. & Petitmengin, C. (2013b). On the Possibility and Reality of Introspection. Kairos 6, 173–198. Brand, G. (1955). Welt, Ich und Zeit. den Haag: M. Nijhoff. Brentano, F. (1973). Psychology from the Empirical Standpoint, Rancurello, Terrell and McAlister (Eds.). London: Routledge, 1973. Brinkmann, Malte. (2020). Bildung and embodiment. Learning, practice, space and democratic education. 10.4324/9780429264696-13. Bruzina, R. (1992). “Last Philosophy: Ideas for a Transcendental Phenomenological Metaphysics: Eugen Fink with Edmund Husserl, 1928–1938” Cairns, D. (1976). Conversations With Husserl and Fink. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Colombetti, G. (2014). The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Depraz, N. (2019). Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassanā Meditation. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (7–8), 49–69. Depraz, N., Varela, F. & Vermersch, P.  (2003). On Becoming Aware. Amsterdam: John Benjamin Publishing Company. Dorion, C. (1976). Conversations with Husserl and Fink. Dordrecht: Springer. Dunne, J. D. 2015. Buddhist styles of mindfulness: A heuristic approach. In Ostafin BD, Robinson MD, Meier BP, editors. Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-regulation. 2015 edition. Switzerland: Springer. Findlay, J. N. (2012). Notes on the Ideen of Husserl. The Philosophical Forum 43 (1), 65–89. Fink, A. (1995). Evaluation for Education & Psychology. New York: Sage Publications. Flanagan, O. (2011). The Boddhisattva’s Brain. Cambridge: MIT Press. Gethin, R. (2011). On Some Definitions of Mindfulness, Contemporary Buddhism, Vol. 12, No. 1, Goldstein, J., & Kornfield, J. 2001. Seeking the Heart of Wisdom: The Path of Insight Meditation. Boston: Shambhala. Grossman, P.  (2015). “Mindfulness: Awareness Informed by an Embodied Ethic. Mindfulness 6, 17–22. Guendelman, S., Medeiros, S., & Rampes, H. (2017). Mindfulness and Emotion Regulation: Insights from Neurobiological, Psychological, and Clinical Studies. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 220. Gustin, L. W. (2018). Being Mindful as a Phenomenological Attitude. Journal of Holistic Nursing: Official Journal of the American Holistic Nurses’ Association 36 (3), 272–281. Held, K. (2007). “Phenomenology of ‘authentic time’ in Husserl and Heidegger. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (3), 327–347. Harrington, A. & Dunne, J. D. (2015). When Mindfulness Is Therapy: Ethical Qualms, Historical Perspectives. The American Psychologist 70 (7), 621–631. Husserl, E. (1959). Erste Philosophie (1923/24): Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion (R. Boehm, Ed.). Springer. ———. (1962). Phänomenologische Psychologie. The Hague: Nijhoff.

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Husserl and Mindfulness ———. (1970a). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. (Cairns, D., Trans.). Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1970b). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. Carr, D. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. (1973a). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Dritter Teil: 1929–1935 (Kern, I., Ed.; Vol. 3). Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1973b). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Erster Teil: 1905–1920 (Kern, I., Ed.; Vol. 1). Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1973c). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität: Texte aus dem Nachlaß. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928 (Kern, I., Ed.; Vol. 2). Kluwer. ———. (1973d). Experience and Judgment. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ———. (1982). Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. Seventh impression. The Hague/Boston/London: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.. ———. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (Rojcewicz, R. & Schuwer, A., Trans.). Kluwer. ———. (1997). Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Collected Works of Edmund Husserl, Volume VI. ———. (2001). Logical Investigations Volume 1. Edited by Dermot Moran. New York: Routledge. ———. (2004). Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924 (Peucker, H., Ed.). Kluwer Academic Publishers ———. (Nenon, T. & Hans-Rainer(Eds.) (1989a). Aufsätze und Vorträge 1922–1937. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ———. (2013). Grenzprobleme Der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der I­ nstinkte, Metaphysik, Späte Ethik, Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937), Husserliana XLII. Eds. Sowa, R. & Vongehr, T. Dordrecht: Springer. ———. (2002). “Philosophy as Rigorous Science.” Trans. Marcus Brainard, The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy II (2002), 249–295. ———. (1991) On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), Barnett Brough, J. (trans.), Dordrecht: Kluwer. Jacobs, H. (2013). Phenomenology as a Way of Life? Husserl on Phenomenological Reflection and Self-Transformation. Continental Philosophy Review 46 (3), 349–369. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. New York: Delta Trade. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005). Coming to Our Senses. New York: Hyperion. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Some Reflections on the Origins of MBSR, Skillful Means, and the Trouble With Maps. In M. G. Williams & J. Kabat-Zinn (Eds.), Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins and Applications. London: Routledge. Kerry, D. S. & Armour, K. M. (2000). Sports Sciences and the Promise of Phenomenology: Philosophy, Method, and Insight. Quest 52 (1), 1–17. Lobel, D. (2017). Philosophies of Happiness. New York: Columbia University Press. Löwit, A. (1957). L’épochè de Husserl et le doute de descartes. Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale 4, 399–415. Lübcke, P. (1999). A Semantic Interpretation of Husserl’s Epoché. Synthese 118 (1), 1–12. Luft, S. (2010). “Sokrates-Buddha: An Unpublished Manuscript from the Archives by Edmund Husserl. Husserl Studies 26 (1), 1–17. Lundh, L. G. (2020). Experimental Phenomenology in Mindfulness Research. Mindfulness 11, 493–506. Lutz, A., Slagter, H. A., Dunne, J. D., & Davidson, R. J. (2008). Attention Regulation and Monitoring in Meditation. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(4), 163–169. Lutz, J., Brühl, A. B., Scheerer, H., Jäncke, L., & Herwig, U. (2016). Neural Correlates of Mindful Self-awareness in Mindfulness Meditators and Meditation-Naïve Subjects Revisited. Biological Psychology, 119, 21–30. Lutz, A., Jha, A., Dunne, J. & Saron, C. (2015). Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-Related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective. American Psychologist 70 (7), 632–58.

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Susi Ferrarello McGuirk, J. (2008). Phenomenological Reduction, Epoché, and the Speech of Socrates in the Symposium. Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (1), 99–120. Mendis, N. K. G. & Horner, I. B. (1993). The Questions of King Milinda. Kandy. Buddhist Publication Society. Migniosi, R. (1981). Reawakening and Resistance: The Stoic Source of Husserlian épochè. Analecta Husserliana 11, 311–319. Mipham Rimpochè, S. (2000) Seminary Transcripts 1999, Teachings from the Sutra Tradition — Book 2, Halifax, NS: Vajradhatu Editorial Group. Mohanty, N. (1992). Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy: The Concept of Rationality. Albany: State University of New York Press. Montaigne, M. de (2004). Apologie de Raimond Sebond, in Essais, II, Paris: P.U.F. Nelson, E. S. (2017). Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought. London: Bloomsbury. Nyanaponika (1962). The Heart of Buddhist Meditation: A Handbook of Mental Training Based on the Buddha’s Way of Mindfulness. London: Rider. Olendski, A. (2001). “The Construction of Mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 50–77. Overgaard, S. (2002). Epoché and Solipsistic Reduction. Husserl Studies 18 (3), 209–222. Paley, J. (1997). Husserl, Phenomenology and Nursing. Journal of Advanced Nursing 26 (1), 187–193. Perniola, M. (2011). The Expanded Epoché. Iris 3 (6), 157–170. Purser, R. (2019). The faux revolution of mindfulness. Transformation, May 19, 2019. Purser, R., and Loy, D. (2013). Beyond McMindfulness. The Huffington Post. July 1, 2013. Raes, P., Griffith, J. W., Van der Gucht, K. & Williams, J. M. G. (2014). School-Based Prevention and Reduction of Depression in Adolescents: A Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial of a Mindfulness Group program. Mindfulness 5, 477–486. Rhys Davids, T. W. (1881). Buddhist Suttas. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Schmitt, R. (1959). Husserl’s Transcendental-Phenomenological Reduction. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 20 (2), 238–245. Schonert-Reichl, K. A. & Lawlor, M. S. (2010). The Effects of a Mindfulness-Based Education ­Program on Pre-and Early Adolescents’ Well-Being and Social and Emotional Competence. Mindfulness 1 (3), 137–151. Schuhmann, Karl (1992). Husserl and Indian Thought. In D. P. Chattopadhyaya, Lester E. Embree & Jitendranath Mohanty (eds.), Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy. Indian Council of Philosophical Research in Association with Motilal Banarsidass Publishers. Sharf, Robert. 2018. Knowing Blue: Early Buddhist Accounts of Non-conceptual Sense Perception. Philosophy East and West 68(3): 826–870. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2022). “Bare Attention, Dereification, and Meta-Awareness in Mindfulness: A Phenomenological Critique” Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (pp. 341–353). New York: Routledge. Stein, E. (1989). On the Problem of Empathy, trans. Waltraut Stein, ICS Publications, Washington D.C. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (3-4):158–185. Ströker, E. (1993). Husserl’s Transcendental Phenomenology. California: Stanford University Press. Taminiaux, J. (2004). Metamorphosis of Phenomenological Reduction. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Trungpa, C. (1979). Seminary Hinayana–Mahayana. Boulder, CO: Vajradhatu Publications. Varela, F. J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: a Methodological Remedy for the Hard Problem. J. Conscious. Stud 3, 330–349. Varela, F. & Shear, J. (1999). First-Person Methodologies: What, Why, How? Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (2-3), 1–14. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1989/1991). The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wielgosz, J., Goldberg, S. B., Kral, T. R. A., Dunne, J. D. & Davidson, R. J. (2019). Mindfulness Meditation and Psychopathology. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology 15 (1), 285–316.

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6 LOGOI OF THE SOUL Phenomenological Mindfulness in Plato’s Phaedrus Tanja Staehler

This chapter addresses phenomenological mindfulness with the help of Plato’s Phaedrus by following Socrates and Phaedrus on their path of contemplation. This path is windy; it takes them into the countryside and thus to the elements. Nature is an alien place for ­Socrates as he describes himself as a “stranger to nature”. But strangeness is also the nature of the philosopher, allowing him to address the crucial topic of soul (psyche). The Phaedrus stands out among the Platonic dialogues in several ways. It combines two crucial Platonic themes: that of the soul (its nature, origin, and destiny) and that of love or Eros. It combines them by discussing what happens to the soul when we fall in love. In doing so, it also combines the crucial themes of mythos and logos (as the questions addressed in it require mythos and logos to work together). Furthermore, it is the dialogue in which the famous “critique of writing” occurs, and therefore the dialogue which Jacques Derrida takes as his point of departure for “Plato’s Pharmacy”. Not just Derrida, but also Emmanuel Levinas was fascinated by the Phaedrus; Levinas alludes to the Phaedrus more than to any other Platonic dialogue.1 Martin Heidegger also gave a crucial role to the Phaedrus, albeit an indirect one: in Plato’s Sophist, Heidegger states that the Phaedrus constitutes the framework for the basic questions of Platonic philosophy (Heidegger, 2003, p. 223/321). Furthermore, the Phaedrus is a dialogue par excellence. It assembles two interlocutors who focus very much on each other as well as on the matters in question. In order to explore phenomenological mindfulness with the help of Plato’s Phaedrus, some opening explanations on the relevant concepts are called for. Phenomeno-logy comprises of phenomenon and logos. An idea of phenomenon that will prove useful for my purposes can be found in Heidegger’s Being and Time when he explains that the phenomenon in the phenomenological or emphatic sense is not “that which proximally and for the most part does show itself,” but rather, “something that lies hidden” and yet “belongs to what thus shows itself” as its ground (Heidegger, 1991, p. 35). My reading of the Phaedrus will be an attempt to uncover different dimensions in the Phaedrus and inquire on the basis of what shows itself into that which lies hidden as meaning and ground. In this fashion, my first focus will be the different meanings of logos that will give us a richer sense of the phenomenological.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-8

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Dimensions of Logos Logos first appears as Socrates tries to determine what Phaedrus was doing in the house of Lysias, the rhetorician. Socrates suspects that most likely, Lysias was offering logoi as nourishment on this occasion (Phaedr. 227c). The first meaning of logos to arise in the dialogue is thus speech, and Lysias’s speech is determined more closely when Phaedrus says that it is a logos erotikos, a speech about love. In a Platonic dialogue, we expect logos to refer not only to speeches – since this meaning leads us into rhetoric – but predominantly to reason or argument, as the determining features of philosophy. Phaedrus indeed informs us right away about the argument of Lysias’s speech: “Lysias argues (legei) that it is better to give your favours to someone who does not love you than to someone who does” (227c). Rather than contesting Lysias’s argument directly, Socrates’s critique comes about by introducing an ethical dimension of logos: “I wish he would write that you should give your favours to a poor rather than to a rich man […]. Then his speeches would […] contribute to the public good besides!” (227c–d). We thus learn that speeches not only make an argument and need an argument; but speeches can also contribute to the public good. What we do not (yet) find out is whether the fact that Lysias’s speech does not contribute to the public good makes it ethically harmful or neutral. Phaedrus proceeds to read out Lysias’s speech and then asks Socrates about it. Socrates, in what can be interpreted as an instance of Socratic irony, pretends to be quite surprised when Phaedrus wants to know whether he agrees with Lysias’s argument: wasn’t he, ­Socrates, only expected to pay attention to the rhetorical side of the speech? For a while, Socrates acts as if he accepts the rhetorical distinction between the form and the content of a speech. Not only does he restrict his criticism to the form of Lysias’s speech; he even offers to give a speech with the same argument (an alternative logos as speech based on the same logos as argument). Yet before Socrates starts to deliver his speech, he hesitates and tries to back out. This gives Phaedrus the opportunity to offer his own, different logos. Phaedrus says: “My logos is an oath” (236d), the oath being that he will never recite another speech for Socrates if Socrates does not deliver the promised speech on love. Phaedrus thus introduces yet another dimension of logos: oath, commitment. A logos can be an oath, and perhaps a logos is ­always an oath of some sort. Socrates has to give in since he is, by his own admission, a philologos, a lover of speeches. This confession may come as another surprise: Socrates is a philosophos, a lover of wisdom. If he is also a philologos, this leaves us wondering about the relation between logos and sophia. Moreover, is Socrates a lover of logos as speech, logos as reason, or logos as argument? At this point in the dialogue, the topic is logos as speech; but we might already suspect that there are significant connections between the different meanings of logos. Socrates presents his speech, and he points out that a definition of the subject-matter – Eros – needs to be given at the beginning of a speech. This definition is what Lysias had left out. What is love? Love is some kind of desire, we find out; more specifically, it is desire without logos (aneu logou epithumia; 238c). The brief explanation which Socrates provides for this claim relies on the idea that we have two principles in us: judgment or reason (logos) on the one hand, and outrageousness (hubris) on the other hand. Eros seems to be closer related to outrageousness; or at least this is how Eros initially shows itself. This determination of the relationship between Eros and logos will be reversed in ­Socrates’s second speech which will lead us to the deeper and initially hidden meaning of 96

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Eros. Why can the definition of Eros as desire without logos not be maintained? Three hints are given. First, Socrates says that his speech (as well as that of Lysias) was “horrible” because it offended the god, Eros. Second, a hidden connection between logos and Eros has already been hinted at in the talk about a logos erotikos and about Socrates as a philologos, a lover of speeches. We have learned that Eros can be the subject-matter of a logos, and logos can be the object of love. There is a logos of love, and a love of logos: not necessarily a ­symmetrical relationship, but definitely a close intertwinement and a mutual implication, especially when we consider the hidden ground of these phenomena. The third, most developed clue is presented by Socrates in his second speech.2 There he explains how Eros is a divine madness (mania). Socrates distinguishes between a bad, human madness and a good, divine madness. Divine madness takes four shapes; the fourth of these is called Eros, which leads us into philosophy. This madness comes about because our souls have at one time seen justice, self-control, etc., as such, and they get excited if reminded of this primordial vision. To explain the character of this primordial vision, ­Socrates introduces the myth of the chariots which explains the complex nature of our ­human souls.

The Precarious Nature of Human Souls Socrates explains that souls can be understood through the analogy of a team of winged horses and a charioteer. While the gods have charioteers and horses from good stock, humans have to deal with mixture rather than purity. One of our horses is beautiful and good, the other is ugly and bad. Socrates points out that it is the “bad horse” which drags the chariot toward the earth as the chariots move around to catch a glimpse of justice as such, along with the other “objects” (247b). Some souls manage to take in more of what the virtues in themselves are, others less. But sooner or later, every soul tumbles down to the earth, either by its own fault or others’. It first seems that the bad horse is at fault when the souls strike and damage one another, but Socrates says explicitly that it is the fault of bad charioteers if this happens (248b). It is the charioteer’s task to pay attention and to keep the chariot on the right track. The horses’ task is to pull the chariot along, and it is clear from the beginning that they will do so in different fashions; the charioteer has to balance the more earthbound horse with the horse that is directed toward the heavens. Once the soul is on earth, Eros, the divine madness, can befall us. We fall in love when we see something beautiful which reminds us of the beauty our souls saw in the heavens. Interestingly, it follows that those who remember best what they have seen – and these are, as Socrates points out, the philosophers – experience love more strongly (251a). They exhibit all the features of madness, even though they try to hide them when in front of others. That is the reason, or at least one of the reasons, why philosophers appear strange: they are most strongly afflicted by the special, divine madness we call Eros. Ordinary people think that the philosophers are sick – but they are enthusiastic (in the literal sense of having the god in them, being possessed by a god). What happens to the two horses when the soul is in love? It is not surprising that the “bad horse,” whose character is further specified as wild and stubborn, will be connected to the physical side of love. But we need to read more closely. As the lover encounters the loved one, the good horse is dominated by its sense of shame and does not jump on the loved one right away, while the bad horse goes wild and leaps forward. The task of ­the 97

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charioteer is in this situation largely to keep the bad horse in check until it is willing to approach the loved one’s soul slowly and properly. Socrates gives a long description of how the bad horse needs to be tamed and what a strenuous and painful procedure this is; but we must remember that it was the bad horse who initiated the movement in the first place. No matter how uncivilized the bad horse’s movement is in the beginning, this horse provides the strongest force in our erotic response to beauty.3 The Phaedrus thus provides accounts (logoi) for several features of the experience (or phenomenology) of being in love. It responds to questions such as: how is it that the lover seeks out the beloved’s closeness at all times, yet cannot really give rational explanations as to why this is the case? Why does the lover, most of the time, appear to be mad? Plato says that Eros causes our souls to grow wings again. This is a process which we are not used to at first, but to which we easily become addicted. When the loved one is taken away from us, the wings dry out and again and cause us pain. Hence our desire to be around the loved one at all times – a desire that cannot be accounted for by reason: we cannot explain why the loved one’s presence exerts such a strong pull. Our desire is not merely caused by the beloved’s physical appearance, nor is it an entirely intellectual attraction; it is something that goes beyond all those features. Seeing the beautiful beloved is nourishment for our wings, and thus makes our souls stronger. The Platonic myth accounts for several other features of Eros. It helps to explain why there are such different kinds of loving relationships: they depend on our character or on the constitution of our souls. Furthermore, the myth justifies the varying or even contradictory behavior that lovers sometimes exhibit. Such changes would be caused by attempts to tame the horses, while letting them run free at other times. Plato’s descriptions can thus be read on the literal level of an engagement between lovers, but also on the level of Eros in relation to philosophy. Plato describes a desire that is evoked in the realm of the sensible and yet transcends all sensibility. Eros is not free-floating, not merely spiritual, and it is not merely physical either. It reminds us of who we are as human beings, weighed down by the heaviness of earthly existence while at the same time reminding us of who we can be if we allow our souls to grow wings. Eros does not turn away from earthly beauty but is inspired by it. It is remarkable, however, that the essential features of Eros can only be captured by a mythos, even though Eros, for Plato, is so intimately connected to philosophy. Eros moves our souls. It accounts for the fact that we are drawn to the loved one without being able fully to say why and how. Similarly, we enter into philosophy without fully being able to explain how we ever make a beginning in philosophy. Eros is the other of logos, yet intimately connected to it. Without Eros, we would not be able to philosophize; we would not be able to reflect on logos. The paradox of philosophy’s beginning consists in the fact that we can only see the beginning in retrospect. We are pulled in, attracted through a ­madness that we can only explain after the fact. If the relationship between logos and Eros is so crucial indeed, it might help us to find an answer concerning the question of what the Phaedrus is ultimately about. Two obvious and conflicting answers are: Eros on the one hand and rhetoric on the other hand. The first answer stems from the first half of the dialogue, the second answer from the second half, in which Socrates and Phaedrus examine the essence of speech. But not only do these two possible answers differ substantially; each of them also has to discard one major part of the dialogue as irrelevant. A third answer is possible and was first suggested by Friedrich Schleiermacher: the theme of the Phaedrus is neither Eros nor rhetoric, but philosophy. I cannot fully defend this claim here, but one advantage is obvious: if the dialogue is about 98

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philosophy, then the two halves of the dialogue are connected, and both are necessary in order to determine what philosophy is. Perhaps a more plausible formulation of this possibility would be to say that the theme of the dialogue is the relation between logos and Eros. In order to examine whether such a reading is plausible, we need to examine the (in-)famous critique of writing.

Written Logoi The critique of writing holds a central position in Plato scholarship, dividing scholars between those who argue that the Platonic dialogues are exempt from this critique (most importantly, Schleiermacher (1969), but also Leo Strauss4), those who argue that the critique of writing needs to be taken most seriously and should lead us to search for an unwritten doctrine (as the Tübingen School claims), and those who try to find a balance between the two extreme positions. Proponents of an esoteric interpretation usually focus on Socrates’ second argument against writing in which he criticizes the written text for speaking indiscriminately to every audience. On the basis of this criticism, it is argued that Plato was hiding certain messages from the wider audience; but such an interpretation is one-sided as it does not consider all arguments presented.5 When the Phaedrus as a whole and the different arguments involved in the critique of writing are considered fully, it turns out that the critique is more complex than was at first presumed. While the critique of writing occurs close to the end the Phaedrus, the theme of writing already surfaces at two earlier points, each time in relation to writing’s worth or value. If we consider that logos is a major theme of the Phaedrus, it is not surprising that the difference between written and spoken logos arises repeatedly as a topic. The first relevant passage can be found quite early on in the dialogue, after Phaedrus has convinced Socrates, the confessing philologos, to leave the town with him and listen to Lysias’s speech about love. When Phaedrus wants to recite the memorized speech to him, Socrates says: “Only if you first show me what you are holding in your left hand under your cloak, my friend. I strongly suspect you have the speech itself. And if I’m right, you can be sure that, though I love you dearly, I’ll never, as long as Lysias himself is present, allow you to practice your own speechmaking on me” (Phaedr. 228e). Socrates here maintains that he prefers the written speech over Phaedrus’s merely memorized version of it, and that the presence of the written speech makes Lysias himself present in some capacity. These claims are not as such unusual, but they are certainly worth noting since they seem to contradict Socrates’ later statements about writing. We would be likely to agree with Socrates that it is preferable to hear Lysias’s speech read out literally from the written version rather than having it recited by Phaedrus from memory, which would risk omissions, divergences and mistakes.6 One might wonder, however, whether it would not be even more desirable to have Lysias himself present, fully present and not just by way of the written speech; if this would be preferable to the written speech, Socrates’ statement might not contradict the critique of writing as he presents it later. Much later in the dialogue, yet still before the critique of writing, Phaedrus suddenly raises a hearsay argument against writing, claiming that “the most powerful and renowned politicians are ashamed to compose speeches or leave any writings behind” (257d). After Socrates has reminded Phaedrus of various famous politicians and lawgivers who did not reproach writing in the least, he summarizes the results as follows: “It’s not speaking or writing well that’s shameful; what’s really shameful is to engage in either of them shamefully 99

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or badly” (258d). This statement is simple yet significant since it could undermine the critique of writing. It is a rather self-evident statement; this makes it at first convincing, but potentially weak in relation to a more detailed consideration of writing which Socrates attempts later. The critique of writing by way of the myth of Theuth is introduced as Socrates refers back to his earlier statement. After he has elaborated on shameful speaking in comparison to good speaking, where good speaking involves knowledge of the truth, he says: “What’s left, then, is aptness and ineptness in connection with writing” (274b). The myth that follows thus already presupposes the observation that writing is not in itself shameful, but only when deployed shamefully. Furthermore, Socrates pauses before presenting the myth which he has heard from the ancients and limits its impact somewhat by pointing out that we might not care as much about myths and what other people say if we could actually make discoveries for ourselves. Nevertheless, he presents and interprets the myth rather than pursuing an independent discussion. The myth goes that Theuth, a very creative divinity, invented various arts, such as the art of the number, that is, arithmetic, but also the art of the letter, that is, writing. It is important to take note of the fact that writing is introduced as an invention. Inventing something means opening up a realm of possibilities that has not existed beforehand. Furthermore, it usually means that the new invention can be put to good as well as bad or harmful use. If we keep in mind what Socrates said earlier, namely, that writing is not in itself shameful, it would appear sensible to investigate the useful and the harmful applications of this new invention. Theuth, however, is so enamored with his new invention that he merely focuses on the positive features, of which he names two when he presents the art of writing to the Egyptian king Thamus. He calls it “a potion [pharmakon] for memory and for wisdom” (275a). Thamus finds himself disagreeing on both accounts. The straightforward concern is that writing encourages forgetting since people will rely on what has been written rather than exercising their memory. It is more difficult for Thamus to come up with an argument as to why writing does not make people wiser (yet we should also keep in mind that Theuth has not really explained how, according to him, it strengthens wisdom). Thamus claims that students will be provided “with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality” because they “will hear many things without being properly taught” (275a).7 While Thamus’s apprehension seems to arise from the temptation for students to read a lot and think they have understood without examining the subject matter carefully, it is not clear whether a careless student might not just as well pick up lots of hearsay information (that is, spoken rather than written information) and thereby give the appearance of wisdom rather than being truly wise. In his interpretation of the myth, Socrates criticizes writing for its vulnerability to various misunderstandings. The argument which Levinas cites most frequently concerns the speech as being abandoned by its “father;” as a consequence, it “can neither defend itself nor come to its own support” (275e). The author or writer abandons the text, leaving the interpretation to us. Socrates explains, furthermore, that the written words remain silent or, when questioned, merely repeat what will already have been said. Finally, the written words do not consider their appropriate recipient, but speak indiscriminately to everybody. This latter problem becomes apparent, for example, when a philosophical text is extracted and used in political or economic contexts. All the problems which Socrates mentions are true problems and serious concerns; yet the question remains, what conclusion to draw? The Socratic solution which is 100

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developed as the text proceeds seems to consist in rejecting writing and not taking the written text seriously.8 An alternative conclusion which could be drawn from the very same considerations would be to regard these problems as hermeneutical problems and engage actively in hermeneutical considerations. It could also mean to diagnose an essential ambiguity at the core of the written text which calls for examination rather than rejection.

Theuth’s Myth as Interpreted by Heidegger and Derrida Socrates, however, continues his criticism by way of a direct comparison between speech and writing, introducing speech as the better and more capable brother of writing which avoids the pitfalls of the written letter. Phaedrus concludes that speech is “living, breathing discourse” (276a). At this point, we will pause and explore the opposition between living and dead logos with the help of interpretations supplied by Derrida and Heidegger.9 Derrida considers the myth of Theuth carefully under the heading of “Plato’s Pharmacy”. He examines the assumptions and presuppositions that inform Plato’s critique of writing in order to question the Platonic privilege of speech over writing. Derrida alerts us to the fact that Socrates, when he describes speech as the superior brother of writing, actually introduces speech as a logos “that is written down, with knowledge, in the soul of the listener” (276a). Thus Socrates feels the need to refer back to writing (in the soul) when he is actually trying to show how speech is more primordial than writing. The ambivalent status of writing also becomes obvious in its designation as pharmakon (cf. 274e). Derrida points out that pharmakon, which can mean “poison” as well as “remedy”, is rejected by Plato before its status is really clarified. This rejection takes place, so Derrida explains, because the pharmakon is artificial and because it is a mixture in which oppositions are absolved (Derrida, 1981, p. 99). According to Derrida, this is one of the prejudices operating in the text which ultimately concern relations of origin and derivation, where the derivative would always be considered inferior. Socrates himself says that writing exhibits certain similarities with painting (cf. Phaedr. 275d), thereby reminding us of his vehement criticism in the Republic of images as doubly derivative, copy of a copy. Heidegger, in his lecture course on the Sophist, attends to the Phaedrus by way of an excursus and interprets the issue of derivation quite differently. In this lecture course, Heidegger proposes a rather sympathetic10 reading of what is usually referred to as Platonic Forms, emphasizing two points in particular. First, Plato’s talk of Forms serves to show that we neither construct nor derive the Forms (as a common-sense explanation regarding the emergence of concepts would have it); they are given to us, and we depend on this giving (Heidegger, 2003, p. 231/334). Everything we are dealing with in everyday life is already removed from the original Form. Logos is thus derivative in the plausible sense that it ­depends on something showing itself, something coming to appearance. Second, according to Heidegger, the anamnēsis doctrine points to certain obstacles or inhibitions which are essentially human. The dialectical process of synagoge, of collecting things into an appropriate unity, is a process that we engage in despite certain obstacles which stem from our human nature. If we succeed, it feels as if something has come to us that we once knew but had since forgotten. We are indeed familiar with this experience: when we finally have an insight, the idea often seems self-evident, leaving us to wonder whether we should not have known this all along. The insight is then experienced as if there had previously been an oversight. 101

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As human beings, we constantly move in the space between remembering and forgetting. That is why we have and need writing; we do not imagine that the gods rely on it. However, this does not foreclose the possibility of condemning writing as inferior and of establishing a hierarchy among different logoi. Derrida claims that Plato is clearly working with such a hierarchy; Heidegger does not deny this but places the hierarchy elsewhere. What Plato rejects, according to Heidegger, is a “free-floating” (German: freischwebend) logos, a logos that is absolved, that has lost its connection to what it is talking about (Heidegger, 2003, p.  235/339). Such a logos does not reveal, but conceals. Since this logos pretends to be capable of something which it cannot actually accomplish, it seems justified to hold that Socrates describes this logos as appearing to be alive, yet as in fact remaining silent when questioned (Phaedr. 275d). On the basis of the distinction between a free-floating logos and a logos that stays in touch with what it talks about, one could argue that writing has the potential to be freefloating logos, but is not necessarily free-floating (or dead, as Socrates would call it). Yet from a Derridean perspective, this interpretation would appear too generous; and indeed – if Socrates wants to make a more subtle point, why does he reject writing in such an outright fashion? We should remember that there are several passages in the text which support a reading as suggested by Heidegger, namely, that writing opens up the possibility of misunderstandings, but that it may also stay connected to the subject-matter discussed in it. There is the passage from the beginning of the Phaedrus concerning Lysias’s presence by way of the written speech, and also Socrates’s later claim that writing is not itself shameful, but bad writing is. The myth of Theuth seems more rigorous in its critique, but as mentioned earlier, we need to keep in mind that writing is explicitly introduced as an invention, thereby opening up a realm of (good and bad) possibilities. But how shall we then interpret a statement like this: “How could they possibly think that words that have been written down can do more than remind those who already know what the writing is about?” (275d). It seems Socrates is claiming here that I will understand a written text only if I already know what the text is telling me. If taken literally, this is an outrageous claim. Yet we need to keep in mind that learning, according to the anamnēsis doctrine, is always remembering. As we have seen, this idea can be interpreted on a phenomenological rather than metaphysical level, since an insight does not strike me as something entirely new, but as something that I should or could have known. If all learning is concerned with something that I latently already knew, then the same would unsurprisingly hold for learning from a written text. When Socrates, in his first objection, relates writing to painting, he focuses on a specific feature of both: if asked, written or painted works remain silent. More precisely, they repeat the same thing again and again. This feature of repetitiveness is significant because it could be used to define the object at stake here: it is a “work” – be it a written work or an artwork. A work is an object which stays self-same and repeats the same “message”. This characteristic could even be considered the strength of a work; it has the ability to stand in itself and “signify just that very same thing forever” (275d). Socrates says that this feature of the work is frustrating when we want to learn more from the work; yet we might wonder whether this frustration could lead to the realization that it is a different kind of learning which is called for here: a critical engagement with the work rather than an expectation to receive complete and final answers. The features of the work that emerge from the first objection are confirmed by ­Socrates’s second objection, and especially by its initial part: the written speech “rolls about 102

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everywhere”, like a ball (275e). It “rolls about” because it has a certain materiality and in that sense, resembles a spatio-temporal object. The written text can be taken somewhere – like the speech of Lysias under Phaedrus’ cloak. It can be stored up, even for generations to come. Indeed, the text is accessible to everybody who finds it, and there are definite dangers in this. Yet it should also have become obvious that its material nature strengthens the written text. Through the written dialogues, Plato and Socrates are in some sense present for us. Theuth is thus right to be proud of his invention: writing is a great reminder. Perhaps it even makes us wiser; Theuth – in Socrates’s presentation – does not spell out how the new invention would make the Egyptians wiser, but we can imagine what he may have in mind. Facts, insights, stories, and discoveries can be recorded, shared, and accumulated, across people and even across generations. It has even been argued that the emergence and development of philosophy in ancient Greece were dependent on the possibility of writing (Segal, 1995, p. 194). The systematic and logical development of thought certainly benefits from being recorded. Writing thus proves an ambiguous phenomenon, a true pharmakon (as both Theuth and Thamus call it) in both senses: remedy and poison. Ascribing ambiguity to the phenomenon of writing does not just mean that writing can be good or bad, helpful or harmful. It means that the very materiality which sustains and strengthens the written text at the same time makes it vulnerable. Or, to bring out the precarious nature of the written text more clearly, the self-sufficiency of the written text makes it possible for the text to close itself off, as it were. Being self-enclosed, the written text does not protest when it is misread, but repeats the same message over and over again. Reading is thus never sufficient. We need to appropriate what we read, and in that sense, to read is to be reminded. The written text needs to be revived by way of thought, discussion, and dialogue; otherwise, it indeed remains dead and stale. Just as there is bad and good writing, there is also bad and good reading. Even good writing may, in its obliviousness to its audience, become an object of bad, manipulative reading. This means that we need to learn how to write well and how to read well. Plato recommends that we engage in dialectical discourse; obviously, dialogue is the form of writing that comes closest to this recommendation.

Embodied Souls As embodied, the logos can endure beyond the life of the human soul in one body. In terms of phenomenological mindfulness, deeper dimensions of our soulfulness have emerged through our means of expression, addressing the other, whom we encounter in the most intense and intimate form through Eros. Choosing Eros as the most intimate subject, Socrates manages to capture our attention – although it was allegedly Lysias who did so, but who got it all wrong. For embodied souls, Eros is not a bad thing. It is the most intimate connection to a dimension in which our souls would be truly knowledgeable and understand beauty on the highest level. On this highest level, beauty and the good belong intimately together; and in the presence of any trace of this, our souls are so smitten that they start philosophizing, pushing through to deeper levels of our existence, revealing the disclosed, going beyond and beneath that which shows itself. Such connection from soul to soul is the most human we can be. The Phaedrus is a dialogue about souls and soulfulness; but despite a long-standing conviction that Plato was hostile to the body (based on an out-of-context citing of the dictum in Plato’s Phaedo about the body as prison of the soul), these souls are certainly very much 103

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embodied when they undergo the precious experiences of falling in love and philosophizing. In closing, I would like to gather some moments of a strong emphasis on embodiment in the Phaedrus – in line with the earlier reading of the ways in which materiality as in the written logos also has distinct advantages. Already the setting of a dialogue in general alerts us to the role of the body. Dialogues are only possible because two (or more) people get together, in the bodily sense.11 When I read a philosophical treatise, there is little trace of the body. In reading Platonic dialogues, I inevitably imagine the interlocutors talking to each other as they stand, walk, sit, lie down – and Plato usually gives quite precise information about these proceedings. While these characteristics hold for all Platonic dialogues, the Phaedrus presents a special case. The Phaedrus is the only dialogue in which Socrates leaves the city walls behind, taking a walk to the river where he and Phaedrus settle down. Already in the very first sentence, Socrates brings up the theme of movements: “Phaedrus, my friend! Where have you been? And where are you going?” (227a). Phaedrus takes the question literally: he has been with Lysias, and he is going to take a walk because he has been “sitting there the whole morning” (ibid.). It is, in other words, Phaedrus’s body that calls him to take a refreshing walk. It is not possible to focus on logoi all day long without drinking, eating, or stretching your legs. John Sallis reads Socrates’s question in a less literal and more philosophical fashion (Sallis, 1996, p. 105 ff.). Socrates would then ask where Phaedrus comes from as a human being, and what his destiny is going to be. This question only makes sense for incarnated, finite beings, and not for stones, angels, or gods. The question is answered, in a somewhat indirect fashion, through the myth about our souls as tumbling down from the heavens, becoming incarnated, and returning to the heavens after a definite period of time. As Socrates joins Phaedrus on his walk, seduced by the speech that Phaedrus promised, the two of them start looking for the best place to sit. This place requires careful choosing; they will only be able to attend to and fully appreciate the speech if the bodily position is right. And the right position, for a sentient being, does not mean to notice the body as little as possible, but to feel the light breeze, smell the fragrance of the blooming chaste-tree, and listen to the song of the cicadas (230b). When the elements of a given place are right, our souls can appreciate logoi even more as our bodies are delighted. Phenomenological mindfulness based on these ideas would involve the reflections that tie together our connections to world and to each other. We can best undertake such reflections when we take walks with each other and exchange live discourse. However, if that is not possible, Plato’s written dialogues can inspire us to reflect. The most important reflections, according to the Phaedrus, would concern the nature of our souls and especially what happens when we fall in love, soul to soul. If we learn to be properly mindful of the deepest connections from soul to soul, philosophy as love of wisdom involves all the wisdom about our most soulful and mindful connections. What matters is connection, and most importantly, the connection between logos and soul. If this connection gets broken, the path to injustice is paved. Yet if connection is maintained, both oral and written logos are fruitful for exploring our relation to the world and each other. Important is also the connection to the present. If we get drawn away from the present into the past (by way of nostalgia, regret, etc.) or future (by way of phantasy, anxiety, etc.), our mindfulness is in peril. Our logos will be at great danger to become detached from soul, and as such, might start rolling in all directions. We need to work hard to keep the connections in place and reflect on the significance of keeping our soul attuned. Yet if we manage, all our logoi, whether oral or written, will be mindful. 104

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Notes 1 This certainly holds true for Totality and Infinity; in Otherwise Than Being, Plato’s Parmenides is equally important. 2 A fourth argument could be made by pointing out inconsistencies in the argument that one should give favors to a non-lover: Why would anybody make this argument if he/she was not in love? Seth Benardete describes this inconsistency very well when he states that “the non-lover was simply the lover in disguise” (Benardete, 1991, p. 176). 3 What Socrates does not explain is how the bad horse is drawn to the loved one’s soul: has it, after all, caught a little glimpse of beauty and recognizes it in the loved one’s soul? Or does it simply go after everything that the charioteer directs its nose toward? The movement does not appear to be without a direction. If our desire is always instigated by a memory of beauty, if this is indeed the reason and explanation for all desire, then the bad horse has to have some connection to beauty as well. It may not itself participate in beauty, but it seems to be quite capable of desiring it. 4 Although a proponent of the esoteric approach, Strauss comes to conclude that the “Platonic dialogue, if properly read, reveals itself to possess the flexibility or adaptability of oral communication” (Strauss, 1964, p. 53). 5 The claim that esoteric readings are based on a one-sided interpretation of the critique of writing is explained in Staehler, 2013. In that article, I also explore several strengths of the esoteric approach, especially the consideration of setting, interlocutors, myths, and apparently marginal comments. 6 This claim could be examined with the help of other examples. Reciting a speech might have a larger performative aspect than reading a speech. However, even when we are interested in performance, we prefer the actors to recite the play literally. 7 Particularly striking are Thamus’ formulations which bring up associations with Socrates: the students “will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing” (275b)—in other words, unlike Socrates, they do not know that they know nothing. 8 Cf. the Seventh Letter: “On this account no sensible man will venture to express his deepest thoughts in words, especially in a form which is unchangeable, as is true of written outlines” (343a). 9 The remainder of Socrates’s exposition consists of a rather questionable analogy between writing and sowing which is less relevant for our purposes. In the analogy, Socrates calls writing a kind of play. He compares it to sowing seeds in the middle of the summer when the plants grow fast without going through their natural slow cycle. The dialectician, in contrast, would leave time for his plants to grow. Yet it is not clear how writing would have anything to do with speed (unless Socrates is thinking again of Thamus’ remark concerning the artificial erudition brought about through writing and reading). Strange is also the claim that the plant of dialectics can help “itself as well as the man who planted it” (276e) whereas Socrates had explained before that it is the father who has to help and support the logos rather than the other way around. 10 A very different reading is given in Heidegger’s “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth.” 11 Nowadays, we might also have dialogues on the telephone or by writing letters to one another; but here as well, corporeality and materiality are involved.

Bibliography Benardete, S. (1991). The rhetoric of morality and philosophy. Plato’s Gorgias and Phaedrus. The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1981). Plato’s pharmacy. In J. Derrida, Disseminations, University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. ( 1991). Sein Und Zeit. Niemeyer. _____ (2003). Plato’s Sophist. Indiana University Press. Plato (1997). Complete Works. Hackett. Sallis, J (1996). Being and Logos: Reading the Platonic Dialogues. Indiana University Press. Schleiermacher, F. (1969). ‘Einleitung’ zu ‘Platons Werke’. In K. Gaiser (ed.), Das Platonbild. Zehn Beiträge zum Platonverständnis (pp. 1–32). Olms. Segal, C. (1995), Spectator and listener. In J.-P. Vernant (Ed.), The Greeks (pp. 184–217). University of Chicago Press. Staehler, T (2013). Theuth versus Thamus: The esoteric Plato revisited. Journal of Ancient Philosophy 7 (1), 65–94. https://doi.org/10.11606/issn.1981-9471.v7i1p65-94 Strauss, L (1964). The City and Man. Rand McNelly.

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7 HEIDEGGERIAN AND STOIC MINDFULNESS Two Competing Models with Common Ground Christos Hadjioannou

Introduction Why should we be interested in Stoic and Heideggerian models of mindfulness?1 Philosophers and cognitive therapists have reacted to the relatively recent success of MindfulnessBased Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) in various ways—some by calling for a properly westernized version of mindfulness, one that would draw on western philosophy and its distinct theoretical background.2 This has gone hand in hand with some philosophers’ call for a rejuvenation of Stoic philosophy, drawing attention to the fact that MBCT and Stoicism share the same basic principles with respect to the nature of emotions and ways of dealing with them.3 Several online platforms now offer patients training in Stoic Mindfulness.4 The popularity of MBCT has sparked a resurgence of the Stoic school of thought. As a result, not only is mindfulness becoming more popular, but so is the specific Stoic notion of well-being—eudaimonia. At the same time, other philosophical schools have been put forward as western models of mindfulness. Particularly Martin Heidegger’s existential phenomenology, which is critical of Stoicism and is concerned with death, anxiety, and authenticity, has arisen as a significant competitor to Stoic mindfulness. The dispute between the two models of mindfulness lies primarily in their views of emotional life: their appraisal of emotions (or moods) like anxiety, and their prescriptions for how to mindfully regulate them for the sake of our well-being. At first glance, they seem to propose diametrically opposing emotional regulation techniques: while Stoicism is thought to call for a total abolition of intense emotions like anxiety, Heidegger goes in the opposite direction when he urges us to deliberately accept and even embrace anxiety. However, a close examination of both Stoicism and Heideggerian philosophy reveals a more nuanced situation. Stoicism, on the one hand, does not really call for the complete elimination of emotions, and Heideggerian philosophy, on the other hand, does not regard an unqualified embracing of anxiety as the end of the story. Rather, it holds that an experience of joy and being at home5 in the midst of anxiety is possible and desirable. A juxtaposition with Stoic mindfulness will greatly help in clarifying key issues about the main 106

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characteristics of an existentialist-phenomenological version of mindfulness—specifically with respect to its aims, namely its conception of well-being, and how the homely and the unhomely are related to it. The chapter shows that Heideggerian mindfulness inherits the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis (“appropriation” or “familiarization”), yet radicalizes it so as to (1) embrace the passions (whereas the Stoic version calls for apatheia—extirpating the passions); and (2) embrace the fundamental homelessness in human existence. The two models are hereby described schematically, primarily in terms of what they aim for, rather than the techniques used for achieving them or the specific type of attention involved. The chapter proceeds as follows. The first section, entitled “A Schema for Stoic Mindfulness,” provides the schema for a Stoic theory of mindfulness in terms of well-being, freedom from passions and appropriation (eudaimonia, apatheia, and oikeiōsis). The next section, entitled “A Schema for Heideggerian Mindfulness,” schematizes a Heideggerian theory of mindfulness, connecting it to well-being, affectivity (moods) and the uncanny. The last section offers some concluding remarks.

A Schema for Stoic Mindfulness The Stoic school of thought spanned many centuries and showcased philosophers with such diverse views that it is often difficult to identify the overarching tenets that unify it in its distinct phases (Early Stoa, Middle Stoa, and Late Stoa). The problem is exacerbated by the fact that we do not possess any original texts from the early Stoic period, that is, from philosophers such as Zeno and Chrysippus. However, we can reconstruct a unified Stoic theory by emphasizing certain tendencies, such as the sustained focus on virtue and eudaimonia. The modern Stoic movement attempts to overcome the countless hermeneutic issues that have perturbed scholars so as to offer a solid practical philosophy that speaks to contemporary human beings in their everyday lives. Debates concerning a Stoic version of mindfulness are very much alive and many issues remain unresolved. As Massimo Pigliucci acknowledges, there exists “an ongoing debate within the contemporary Stoic community about our version of ‘mindfulness’ […] whether it is, in fact, something that the ancient Stoics did, and whether it should be incorporated in modern Stoic practices” (2022, p. 374). I shall try neither to minimize nor resolve these issues here, but will offer a schema that plausibly puts the notion of oikeiōsis at the center, thus enabling an important dialogue to be fostered between Stoicism and existential phenomenology, with the overarching aim of constructing a Western version of mindfulness. The Stoic schema that I propose is conceptualized thus: mindfulness is a form of attention (prosochē) whose telos is the achievement of eudaimonia, which is characterized as oikeiōsis and at the emotional level involves the cultivation of apatheia. Let us now turn to a brief description of each of the conceptual ingredients that make up the schema: prosochē, eudaimonia, oikeiōsis, and apatheia.

Prosochē One of the important subjects of controversy in Stoic scholarship concerns the precise nature of prosochē and the question whether it counts as a key idea in Stoicism. Katerina Ierodiakonou argues that it is highly questionable whether the notion was actually employed by Chrysippus or other members of the early Stoa (2021, p. 207). 107

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“Prosochē” is a Greek word that literally translates as “attention,” though, as Pigliucci points out, it is often also translated “mindfulness” (2022, p. 375)—the same way that “being mindful” of something, in English, is synonymous with “paying attention” to it.6 It names a technique the Stoic must practice so as to relate in a specific way to the present moment. Prosochē is the state of mind that enables us to focus on sense-impressions and thoughts, as well as on the Stoic principles, so as to guide us to a eudaimonic life: to observe the precept to live in accordance with nature, and to attend to the fundamental distinction between what is up to us and what is not (Ierodiakonou, 2021, p. 210). Ierodiakonou speculates that prosochē was “not considered just as a stage toward the ultimate good, but as constituting the ultimate good [eudaimonia] itself by being part of it” (2021, pp. 205–206). In effect, prosochē is intrinsic to wisdom (ibid., p. 211). However, for the ordinary, as-yet unwise person, who exhibits varying degrees of attention (ibid., p. 212), prosochē requires effort, perseverance, and practice. Pierre Hadot argues that “attention (prosochē) is the fundamental Stoic spiritual attitude” named by Epictetus, involving “a continuous vigilance and presence of mind, selfconsciousness which never sleeps, and a constant tension of the spirit,” thanks to which “the philosopher is fully aware of what he does at each instant, and he wills his actions fully” (1995, p. 84). More specifically, as Chris Fisher argues, prosochē works “by constantly reminding the agent to pay attention to the here and now (hic et nunc),” and specifically to the following three things: present representations (the sensations that impress themselves on the psyche), present impulses (desires and aversions that define moral will [prohairesis]), and present actions (Pigliucci, 2022, p. 376).7 Prosochē is also associated with the distinctive philosophical-therapeutic act of katharsis (purification), which consists in the “purification of judgments from certain errors,” something that, as Robertson suggests, could be referred to as “cognitive katharsis” or “cognitive hygiene” (2010, p. 158), which would be the result of Stoic mindfulness (2010, p. 159). This means that another result of prosochē would be freedom from passions since passions are a product of bad or unhealthy cognitions. This would also amount to becoming unafraid of death, as Seneca writes, and enjoying life (Robertson, 2010, p. 165).

Eudaimonia as Well-Being Prosochē is subjugated to a telos, that is, it aims at the accomplishment of eudaimonia, a concept originating with Aristotle and translated alternately “happiness,” “well-being” and “flourishing.”8 In order to properly understand the Stoic notion of eudaimonia, one must understand its Aristotelian origin. As Engberg-Pedersen argued, “[t]he basic conceptual moves in Stoic philosophy make particular good sense when seen precisely as ways of addressing and responding to Aristotelian positions and issues” (1990, p. 18). This would also explain why and how Stoic ethics was teleological in its basic structure. Just like all arts and crafts have a function and a telos, so too the human being has a certain “function,” which is none other than the achievement of eudaimonia (Aristotle, 2000, p. 11). Eudaimonia is then the end of what is done, the end of all acts (ibid.) and the life lived “in accordance with virtue (arete), where virtue is understood as standing for the state of mind which best fulfills man’s proper function” (Engberg-Pedersen, 1990, p. 19; see Aristotle 2000, Book I). For the Stoics, too, “virtue all by itself suffices for a completely good human life, that is, for eudaimonia” (Nussbaum, 1994, p. 359). 108

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Aristotle’s theory of eudaimonia (in the Nicomachean Ethics) can be called teleological in two distinct senses: in one sense, it is teleological in that eudaimonia is the end of all acts; in another sense, it is teleological in that it offers substantive content to what “the happy life” involves, building, rather crudely, “on the idea of a determinate natural function of a human being” (Engberg-Pedersen, 1990, pp. 20–21). The latter sense is more important because Aristotle did not work out the substantive content of that which would fulfill the formal telos of eudaimonia (ibid.). The distinctive contribution of the Stoics lies in their fleshing eudaimonia out in terms of oikeiōsis. Before looking at the connection between eudaimonia and oikeiōsis, it would be useful to briefly mention the established theories of well-being, so as to understand what theory of well-being eudaimonia involves. According to Derek Parfit, contemporary theories of well-being are classified in the following three categories: (1) hedonist theories; (2) desire theories; and (3) objective list theories (1984, pp. 493–502).9 Eudaimonist theories of wellbeing belong to objective list theories, which “are usually understood as theories which list items constituting well-being that consist neither merely in pleasurable experience nor in desire-satisfaction. Such items might include, for example, knowledge or friendship” (Crisp, 2021). Anna Alexandrova conceives of the three dominant theories in a slightly different way, listing eudaimonist theories as a category in itself, although she also associates eudaimonist theories of well-being with objectivism (Alexandrova, 2017, p. xxxix).10 Alexandrova also mentions other ways of distinguishing between the various conceptions of well-being (that challenge Parfit’s categorization), among them a simple distinction between subjectivist and objectivist conceptions of well-being, whereby desire-theories (dependent on agent-relativity) become absorbed by subjectivism, and eudaimonist theories (dependent on naturalist virtuous function) become absorbed by objectivism (ibid., pp. 158–161). Aristotle, as mentioned earlier, had not worked out the teleological substantive content of that which would fulfill the formal telos of eudaimonia, leaving the objective (dependent on nature) rather underdetermined, as well as the way the objective aspect relates to the subjective—how eudaimonia involves the appropriation of the subjective from the objective. This is what the Stoic doctrine of oikeiōsis offered.

Oikeiōsis The doctrine of oikeiōsis holds that the substantive content of the telos of eudaimonia is to live in homology—harmony—with nature (Engberg-Pedersen, 1990, p. 61). This doctrine established a principle of moral action based on self-awareness. Oikeiōsis begins with the human animal’s first impulse—that to self-preservation—which is based on the organism’s familiarity and awareness of its own constitution, a form of self-consciousness that provides a normative criterion, and the natural impulse toward what is useful and aversion form what is harmful (Martin, 2015, p. 345). Yet oikeiōsis does not name just an innate concern and criterion for self-preservation, but also a process of expansion whereby the organism progressively appropriates its environment, so that, in the case of human beings, the organism is “‘at home’ in the human sphere as a whole” (ibid., p. 352). As EngbergPedersen argues, the doctrine of oikeiōsis managed to do considerably more than Aristotle in the way of specifying the telos of moral action, “by fixing on the distinction between a subjective and an objective approach to the substantive question about happiness (though not in those very terms) and by constructing a theory in which the interplay of these two approaches is central—as it was not in Aristotle” (1990, p. 22). 109

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The telos is “the good” which, following Cicero, is defined as something perfect that is related to nature and pertains to a rational being as rational (ibid., p. 98). The good is identified with nature, and “the good properly,” according to Cicero, “starts to be present and to be understood in its true nature” only at the final stage of oikeiōsis, that is, once the human being is already living in an advanced homology with nature (ibid., p. 99). This means that the process of oikeiōsis should be understood in terms of belonging (ibid.). Oikeiōsis is a process whereby the human being employs her reason so as to know both the world and herself, in such a way that she reflectively appropriates herself as part of nature and at that point grasps what is good and her sense of belonging as good (ibid.). But it is also, as Martha Nussbaum argues, “a natural orientation to one’s own good” (1994, p. 323). In other words, only once we have achieved oikeiōsis will we grasp the good. Oikeiōsis is an achievement of reflective, mindful attention, which integrates the subjective and the objective points of view and dissolves any opposition in beliefs that are mutually inconsistent about some state of affairs (ibid., pp. 198–199). Engberg-Pedersen clarifies what this means by referring us back to “the fundamental distinction between the child’s view and the adult view which lies at the heart of oikeiōsis as the Stoics describe it” (ibid., p. 196). The “child” and the “sane adult” here correspond to two distinct ways in which attention operates and relates to objects or states of affairs. As Engberg-Pedersen argues: The child is someone who is immediately related to a given particular object in ways that the sane adult is not: (1) it is directly concerned with the given object (judging it to be either good or bad), and (2) it is more immediately concerned with the given object, i.e. from a single point of view, its own subjective one. The sane adult, in opposition, (1) relates to the object through a certain understanding of the object, which is wider and is not exhausted by immediacy because it reflects attention being given to a larger number of other experiences in memory and other considerations, and (2) sees the object both from their own subjective view but also an objective view that relativizes the former. (ibid., pp. 196–197) What does this attention and the achievement of oikeiōsis involve with respect to emotional life? Oikeiōsis is supposed to have a therapeutic effect with respect to the passions, that is, intense, akratic emotions. A passion is an abrupt emotional reaction, “a change of mind, from a considered belief to a non-considered one,” and thus a phenomenon of inconsistency that concerns human attention whereby two opposing points of view—the subjective and the objective—clash (ibid., pp. 198–199). Passions are thought to occur because the mind “is divided in the sense that it is made up of a set of beliefs that are mutually inconsistent” (ibid., pp. 198). Being irrational/inappropriate beliefs, passions are products of incorrect cognition and can therefore be cognitively dissolved via willful reflective attention.

Apatheia Leading a life in homology with nature means leading a rational life, whereby the self and the natural world, the “inside” and the “outside,” are not in tension with one another. In oikeiōsis, the dominant affective state is a calm sense of belonging, which indicates a passion-less life. It is not immediately apparent why oikeiōsis should involve the process of overcoming—“curing”—all the passions, but we see it once we distinguish between 110

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passions and other emotional states. Apatheia does not mean being utterly emotionless or unaffected by the environment or the body, but being rid of the passions. There is a category of emotions that the Stoics called eupatheiai that are not classed as passions but considered appropriate states of feeling which the sage, too, experiences (Sorabji, 2000, p. 47). (Nor do the passions include bodily appetites such as hunger and thirst [Nussbaum, 1994, p. 319]).The passions are those emotions that overwhelm and agitate the soul, like the fear of death and existential angst. Following Zeno’s definition, a passion is “an agitation of the soul alien from right reason and contrary to nature,” and thus to be regarded as an illness of the soul (ibid., p. 43). There are several debates about the ontology of passions in Stoic scholarship, and it was also an important point of contention between the ancient Stoic philosophers themselves. For the purposes of this chapter, it is sufficient to mention the position of Chrysippus, whose theory of emotions became the Stoic gold standard, and which held that emotions are evaluative judgments (Nussbaum, 1994, p. 366; Sorabji, 2000, p. 7, p. 95).11 Specifically, emotions consist of two distinct judgments: (1) a judgment that something is good or bad for us, and (2) a judgment about the appropriate reaction (kathēkon) to it (ibid.). Insofar as emotions are judgments, emotional regulation can be achieved by cognitive modification. It follows that, as Nussbaum argues, the emotions must be approached by a therapeutic technique that uses the arts of reason (1994, p. 367). This is not very far from what modern cognitive therapy does when it asks the patient to articulate and then rationally scrutinize (for example) their phobias.12

A Schema for Heideggerian Mindfulness What would a Heideggerian model of mindfulness look like? I propose the following schema: mindfulness is a form of resoluteness (Entschlossenheit) that is motivated by angst, whose telos is authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), which, at the emotional level, involves the acceptance of angst-ridden, unhomelike, being-in-the-world. Let us now proceed to a brief description of the ingredients that make up the schema, with the caveat that what is described are aspects of a unified phenomenon that are only formally, not ontologically, distinct: authenticity (Eigentlichkeit), anticipatory resoluteness (Entschlossenheit), angst, and unhomelikeness (Unheimlichkeit).

Well-Being and Authenticity “Dasein” is Heidegger’s term for the human being, but literally it means “being there.” As Beatrice Han-Pile points out, the ultimate end of all acts that Dasein engages in is Dasein itself, its own selfhood, its own transcendence and freedom (2013, p. 292). Dasein’s freedom is tied to authenticity, which is a form of ownership or appropriation of the self, manifesting itself in a particular relationship to one’s death (McManus, 2015, p. 245). Heidegger’s account of authenticity is a process of complete self-realization that can be regarded as a retrieval of the Stoic notions of oikos (home) and oikeiōsis (Hayes, 2020, p. 138).13 Heideggerian well-being would have to be tied to an understanding of the meaning of being itself is, the meaning of existence; as such, it would have to be connected to a comportment, which differentiates the human being (Dasein) from other beings by virtue of the human being’s “special connection” with the meaning of Being. Given the fact that authenticity in Being and Time is modeled on Aristotelian phronēsis (practical wisdom), a 111

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Heideggerian theory of well-being would share certain structural characteristics with Stoic eudaimonic oikeiōsis. But in order to understand in what ways the Heideggerian and the Stoic understanding of well-being overlap—and differ—let us clarify how well-being is connected to a specific way of being disposed, namely a specific way of being attuned to the world through a mood (Stimmung).

Well-Being as a Disposition (Befindlichkeit) Heideggerian well-being would have to be a way of being-in-the-world, tied to a specific attuned understanding. “Being-in-the-world” names patterns of meaningful existence and engagement with the world, whereby the human being is delivered in a social (intersubjective) world, placed in a meaningful structure, finding himself in an already attuned understanding. As Svenaeus points out, “[t]he attunement of our being-in-the-world seems to be the phenomenon to focus upon, when we try to get hold of the difference between healthy and ill ways of being-in-the-world” (2001, p. 93).14 A linguistic analysis would be helpful here for clarifying the connection between well-being and disposition in Heidegger. In the German language, the word for well-being is Wohlbefinden, which literally means to find oneself well. It denotes a determinate way in which the human being finds itself—it is an expression of what Heidegger called Befindlichkeit, which is a basic structure of being-inthe-world. We can plausibly argue that well-being, Wohlbefinden, is an existential possibility of Befindlichkeit, and as such is a disposition. Let us explain this connection in some more detail. In his analytic of Dasein, Heidegger offers a phenomenological account according to which the nature of human existence is grasped as meaningful being-in-the-world, where the human being understands the world through their everyday practical engagement with things in the world as well as with other human beings. Being-in-the-world is constituted by four basic existential structures (existentials): disposition (Befindlichkeit), understanding (Verstehen), fallenness (Verfallensein), and talk (Rede) (Heidegger, 1962, pp. 171–172).15 These four structures are the transcendental conditions of Dasein’s (being) “there.” “Befindlichkeit” was a word Heidegger used to render the Aristotelian concept of diathesis (Hadjioannou, 2013, p. 223), and it is a noun derived from the reflexive verb sich befinden, which literally means “finding oneself.” In an everyday context, the colloquial German phrase “Wie befinden Sie sich?” means “How do you feel?” or “How is it going?” or “How are you faring?” It refers to the way Dasein finds itself situated, affected by, and attuned to the world, and this is a fundamental way through which the world and particular entities in the world are disclosed to Dasein in a meaningful way (Hadjioannou, 2015, p. 27). Befindlichkeit fulfills various ontological functions, the most important being the disclosive submission to the world, which enables the primary discovery of the world as something that matters (Heidegger, 1962, p. 177; Hadjioannou, 2015, p. 28). As such, it is a primordial way in which Dasein makes sense of the world. The most important way in which Befindlichkeit becomes manifested is through Stimmung (mood). Stimmung is the concept Heidegger uses for the phenomenon of passions, as the ancient Greeks (including the Stoics) understood it16—it denotes a pre-reflective relation that precedes any subjectobject distinction.17 Before we proceed, let us briefly draw an analogy between Befindlichkeit and Stoic oikeiōsis, as this will help shed some light on both of these notions. Befindlichkeit is a 112

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mode of disclosure that opens us not only to entities in the world (discovering) and to the world as a space of intelligibility (world-disclosing), but also to ourselves (self-disclosure) (Withy, 2019, p.  155), and specifically—as shown elsewhere—to our constitution (Verfassung) (Hadjioannou, 2013, pp. 225–226). One can easily draw an analogy here with oikeiōsis, which also non-conceptually discloses the organism’s constitution to itself, in a proto-­transcendental manner (see Hayes, 2020; Martin, 2015). Unlike oikeiōsis, though, Befindlichkeit does not denote an inner condition, but rather arises out of being-in-theworld as such (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176).

Anticipatory Resoluteness Instead of Prosochē Mindfulness in Heidegger would be quite different from Stoic prosochē. The latter has been variably defined as “introspective supervision,” “spiritual attitude,” “presence of mind,” “self-consciousness” and “full awareness,” and is invariably connected to an awareness of “present representations” and “the here and now.” For Heidegger, these modes of attending to phenomena are associated not with mindfulness but rather with mindless engagement with the world, thus associated with inauthentic understanding. According to Heidegger, cognition, intuition, and any form of reflective and representational intentionality, which rely on a subject-object dichotomy, result in inauthentic and distorted ways of understanding existence (see Hadjioannou, 2019). Heidegger describes a mode of “mindful awareness” that would allow for the interplay between presence and absence to become manifest (see O’Brien, 2019).18 In Division II of Being and Time, Heidegger speaks about anticipatory resoluteness,19 which has the following characteristics: (1) It is an awareness not of entities in the world, but of one’s own death, and hence of nothingness, as a possible way to be; (2) It involves a form of commitment and personal investment and embracing, whereby some form of choice is made between possibilities; (3) It is “projective”—looking ahead toward Dasein’s ownmost potentialityfor-being (i.e., death) (Heidegger, 1962, p. 354). As it projects into the future (as opposed to the here and now of Stoic prosochē), it grasps the ultimate as-yet unrealized possibility of existence; (4) It is guided by a disposition (namely angst), meaning it is always already attuned through a mood (even when it appears to be neutral or mood-less,20 contrary to prosochē). In his later work, Heidegger replaced the concept of anticipatory resoluteness with Gelassenheit, a disposition that does not rely on angst (though, according to my reading, it does not extirpate angst), but rather is associated with equanimity and calmness.

Authenticity: Angst and Unhomelikeness The mood mostly associated with authenticity in Heidegger’s thought is angst in the face of death. Angst discloses to the person the essence of their own transcendence and the meaning of being, and discloses authenticity as a possibility that Dasein can choose. Through angst, the person is presented with the possibility of leading an authentic life through its awareness of being-toward-death and resolutely embracing this. Angst plays the crucial methodological role of disrupting the ordinary and familiar and enabling authenticity to arise out of a breakdown of the everyday (Withy, 2012, p.  200). Heidegger writes: “As one of Dasein’s possibilities of Being, anxiety—together with Dasein itself as disclosed in it—provides the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein’s primordial totality of Being” (1962, p. 227). 113

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Angst has a nauseating effect that suspends the meaningful attachment that the person has with the world and their own life and sense of identity. Due to the radical breakdown of meaning, angst transforms being-in-the-world into “not-at-homeness” (Nicht-zu-Hause), revealing the “radically negative finite existence” which is unsettled at the core of its being (Capobianco, 2010, p. 53). In angst, “the world has the character of completely lacking significance [Bedeutsamkeit]” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 231). What angst reveals is the deeper structure of human existence: the unhomelike/unhomely is neither an epiphenomenon nor an epistemological device but rather a primordial, ontological structure (Svenaeus, 2001, p. 93; Todres & Galvin, 2010, pp. 2–3; Kamens, 2019, p. 701). As Hubert Dreyfus argues, this shows that human practices are radically rootless, which means that “human beings can never be at home in the world” (1991, p. 37). If Heideggerian mindfulness amounts to alienating the person from the world and itself, this would constitute an unbearable state that is totally incompatible with the conventional understanding of well-being as well as with the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis. But this depends on the way one interprets authenticity. In what follows, I will describe an interpretation of authenticity whereby angst and the unhomelike are not understood as catastrophic or unsustainable states, but rather make sense of authenticity in terms of a certain stability. Authenticity is about maintaining a relation between self-awareness and the deeper essence of unhomelikeness, so that the unhomelikeness of selfhood becomes somehow embraced or owned in a constant manner. As Heidegger argues, self-constancy is a characteristic of authentic Dasein: “The constancy of the self, in the double sense of steadiness and steadfastness, is the authentic counter-possibility to the non-Self-constancy which is characteristic of irresolute falling” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 322). But if authenticity consists in achieving some form of self-appropriation/self-realization, (1) How does this pertain to angst and the unhomelike?; (2) What is the disposition/mood of authentic Dasein?; and (3) How does it compare/contrast with Stoic oikeiōsis?

Authenticity as Instability and Openness to Angst and Unhomelikeness Authentic Dasein does not achieve any stability or unity that inauthentic Dasein does not have; authenticity is equally exposed to angst, the difference being that authentic Dasein accepts its instability (Egan, 2012, pp. 301–302). 21 This interpretation answers the above questions thus: 1 The constancy of resoluteness (authenticity) does not free Dasein from angst, but rather makes it be ready for angst (ibid., p. 303). In effect, there is no modification or regulation of angst or unhomelikeness—only a kind of readiness and acceptance concerning the unhomelikeness of existence and its norms. Authenticity is a resolve to take ownership of the unhomelike, that is to accept it as one’s own essence. This involves becoming familiar with one’s own nullity, thus remaining an enigma to oneself (Hayes, 2020, p. 145). 2 Angst is acknowledged as the fundamental disposition of Dasein that passively constitutes the affectivity of existence, which may or may not emerge in consciousness. If and when angst becomes manifest, it happens rather unpredictably in a way that shakes the person’s everydayness, without, however, giving rise to metaphysical theories of existence (ontologies) that suppress or deny finitude or the primacy of nothingness over presence and being, or which deflate affects as regard their ontological or epistemic import. 114

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3 Authenticity would in many respects be a kind of reversal of Stoic oikeiōsis. As Hayes argues: “By undertaking to reverse the direction of oikeiōsis from familiarity with oneself to familiarity with that which is most uncanny or unfamiliar (unheimlich), Heidegger privileges our ownmost nullity as what remains incapable of appropriation” (2020, p. 146). One could argue that this apparent reversal of Stoic oikeiōsis constitutes a transcendental critique that begins with the everyday dominance of familiarity, showing the conditions of its own possibility, thus delimiting its provenance and grounding it in the unhomely, in alienation (allotriōsis) and expropriation (see Hayes, 2020, p. 153). This interpretation overcomes important preconceptions concerning Heideggerian authenticity, specifically the following: (1) The misconception that angst is the mood to which authentic understanding is permanently and exclusively attuned; (2) The misconception that unhomelikeness and homelikeness are two antagonistic structures of existence, where one of the two wins out over the other at any given moment and takes control of our beingin-the-world; (3) The misconception that angst and unhomelikeness are terminal events, dead ends, the only way out being a return to where one came from (inauthenticity). A remaining question now is: what does all of this mean for homelikeness? Homelikeness is revealed as something to which we can still return in two ways: either inauthentically, or authentically.

Authenticity and Homelikeness Unhomelikeness needs the homelike in order to emerge—it is a kind of interplay between the familiar and the unfamiliar in which the realm of familiarity is disrupted (Withy, 2012, p.  9). As Svenaeus and Sarvimäki agree, homelikeness and unhomelikeness are equally fundamental and necessary to our existence. Even though authenticity involves a kind of reversal of oikeiōsis, embracing that which remains incapable of such appropriation, this does not amount to a sovereign prevalence of the unhomelike. Anticipatory resoluteness involves an authentic reconnection with the world, and therefore entails a certain rehabilitation of homelikeness. What, then, would be the goal of a mindfulness that aims at well-being, on this Heideggerian model? Would it be the embracing of the unhomely or the re-establishment of homelikeness? My answer is it would be a post-anxiety authentic reconnection with the world in a resolute, equanimous comportment, which would involve giving up a certain paralyzing, absolutist, ontological belief—what Iain Thomson has described as the belief “that there is a single correct choice to make” (2013, p. 273). I thus propose a notion of well-being that is close to one described by Todres and Galvin. In the early Heidegger of Being and Time, homelike being-at-home is associated with inauthenticity, and homelessness is ascribed primordiality and associated with authenticity. Todres and Galvin note how Heidegger in his later work prioritizes the notion of “homecoming,” which is authentically possible for human beings as “a movement from the inauthenticity of a familiar being-at-home (zuhause) through a more authentic embrace of existential homelessness to the possibility of an authentic homecoming” (2010, p. 3). In this movement, the experience of homelessness constitutes an “energising potential that can be itself felt as wellbeing,” providing the motivation for further seeking the experience of homecoming (ibid.). Thus, for Todres and Galvin, the experience of homelessness is an experience pregnant with motivation—a transitional state that gives mobility and refers back to homecoming. 115

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Well-being is thereby that which “grounds the human potentiality for a peaceful attunement to existence (Gelassenheit), which is ‘letting-be-ness’, characterized by acceptance and peace” (ibid., p.  4). Gelassenheit is a disposition, usually translated “releasement” or “equanimity,” which “blocks us from imposing our will on things and thus opens up to alternative ways of relating to reality” (Wendland et al., 2019, p. 2). According to my interpretation, Heidegger’s later notion of Gelassenheit does what anticipatory resoluteness did in his early work. One might be tempted to consider Gelassenheit either an emotionally numb comportment, like Stoic apatheia, which has extirpated the passions altogether, or as a calm emotion, a homelike equanimous feeling that forecloses or supersedes the unhomely passion of angst. But that would miss the ontological character of Gelassenheit, whose aim is not to suppress or abolish the passions or other emotional phenomena, but rather to disentangle them— release them—from the activity of the will as well as from cognition and judgment. Gelassenheit would involve a transformed relation to the passions, including angst and homelessness itself, so as to enable a homecoming to homelessness, a dwelling in homelessness. This would involve a qualified rehabilitation of oikeiōsis. Homelikeness remains open to angst and the unhomelike, freeing Dasein to experience joy in the here and now, in such a way that the here and now is not trapped in the metaphysics of presence and absolute sovereignty. Another Heideggerian term that captures the essence of this homelikeness is “dwelling.” Dwelling, Todres and Galvin explain, “is a form of being grounded in the present moment, supported by a past that is arriving and the openness of a future that is calling” (2010, p. 4). As they argue: Heidegger never eradicates the givenness of homelessness, but what he does open up at various levels and stages is a space in which homelessness does not exclude the possibility of well-being. This kind of well-being has to be inclusive enough in order to hold open the possibility of homecoming within homelessness. (2010, p. 4)

Concluding Remarks This chapter has offered a schematic description of two models of mindfulness, a Stoic and a Heideggerian one, focusing on the different ways they theorize well-being, emotions, and the role of unhomelikeness and homelikeness. It has shown that Stoic mindfulness would have to aim at well-being qua oikeiōsis through a form of attention, which would involve the extirpation of passions. On the other hand, Heideggerian mindfulness would have to aim at well-being as an interplay of unhomelikeness and homelikeness, through anticipatory resoluteness. Heideggerian mindfulness would not only not aim at the extirpation of passions, but would rather be motivated by a passion (angst) and embrace the passions. Heideggerian mindfulness was shown to involve not the sovereign prevalence of unhomelikeness (and angst), but rather a reconnection that involves a certain rehabilitation of homelikeness, expressed through “unshakable joy” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 358). Heideggerian mindfulness was shown to involve a certain reversal of Stoic mindfulness with respect to homelikeness. However, it was also shown that in some respects, Heideggerian authenticity and mindfulness would involve a rehabilitation of the Stoic idea of oikeiōsis, as is revealed for example by the homology between oikeiōsis and Befindlichkeit, where both nonconceptually disclose the organism’s constitution to itself, in a proto-transcendental manner. 116

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Notes 1 This chapter follows closely the analysis made in Hadjioannou (2023). 2 Western (European) versions of mindfulness have metaphysical assumptions that are distinct from and in some respects incompatible with the Eastern ones. Thus Donald Robertson argues that “Stoicism has the advantage of being part of our European heritage, culture and language, in a way that Oriental literature and philosophy are not” (2010, p. 152). Massimo Pigliucci argues that “Different philosophical traditions that use mindfulness (e.g. Buddhism, Stoicism) do so on the basis of distinct philosophical, and particularly metaphysical, assumptions” (2022, p. 371). 3 For example, see Robertson (2010); see also McGlinchey (2004). 4 For example, the Stoicism Today project at Exeter University (UK), and the associated formal organization Modern Stoicism, an international charitable organization, train patients in Stoic Mindfulness and Resilience. See https://classics.exeter.ac.uk/research/projects/stoicismtoday/ and http://modernstoicism.com. . 5 In Being and Time Heidegger refers to the experience of joy in authenticity and angst, though he does not analyze it beyond a passing remark: “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our potentiality-for-Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 358). 6 Richard Sorabji translated it “introspective supervision” (2000, p. 2). 7 Pigliucci argues that Stoic prosochē bears only a superficial resemblance to the mindfulness developed by Kabat-Zinn and the respective Buddhist tradition he appropriated, specifically the Buddhist notion of sati, but a clarification of this difference is beyond the scope of this paper (see Pigliucci, 2022, p. 378). 8 Aristotle conceives of well-being as constituted by the exercise of one’s virtues, offering the perfectionist “function argument,” according to which, as Roger Crisp argues, “the good for some being is to be identified through attention to its ‘function,’” an argument that appears to conflate the good for a person with the moral good (Crisp, 2021). 9 See also Alexandrova (2017, p. 157). 10 Alexandrova uses the following categorization: (1) hedonist theories; (2) subjectivist theories [what Parfit called “desire theories”]; and (3) eudaimonist theories [what Parfit called “objective list theories”] (Alexandrova, 2017, p. xxxix). 11 This position also appeared in Plato’s work when, through Socrates, he referred to fear. (However, it did not hold for other emotions.) In the Republic (604b), Socrates argues that fear is a cognition: the expectation (prosdokia) of impending evil (Sorabji, 2000, p. 20). 12 Although, as Sorabji argues, modern therapy makes one concession to Posidonius: that imagination, as well as judgment, is also important (Sorabji, 2000, p. 154). 13 Heidegger and the Stoics can be seen as part of the same tradition from the perspective of two possible approaches on the topic, what I call the eudaimonic approach and the transcendentalist approach. According to the latter, the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis, as for example Wayne Martin has argued (2015), can be seen as a precursor to Kantian transcendentalism—a predominant interpretation sees Heidegger’s Being and Time as part of that tradition. According to another interpretation, the Stoic notion of oikeiōsis overcomes substantialist versions of selfhood and establishes a relational approach based on the Aristotelian notion of hexis—according to some interpretations, Heidegger’s notion of authenticity also does that. 14 Svenaeus refers to the concept of “health” as opposed to “well-being.” For purposes of this paper, there is no need to strictly distinguish between the two, despite Svenaeus’ warning against confusing healthy being-in-the-world “with other positive moods like well-being or happiness” (Svenaeus, 2001, p. 94). I find Svenaeus’ conception of “well-being” too restrictive. Also, while Svenaeus translates Befindlichkeit as attunement, I translate it as disposition. 15 Heidegger is not consistent on whether talk is one of the existentials, sometimes excluding it or substituting “fallenness” for talk. In Being and Time §68 he lists all four. 16 See Hadjioannou, 2013. 17 A mood is something that assails us, but it comes neither from the “inside” nor from the “outside” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 176). 18 For an excellent discussion of this, see O’Brien (2019).

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Christos Hadjioannou 19 For the purposes of this paper, I mainly focus on Heidegger’s early work, specifically Being and Time. Over the course of his long career, Heidegger changed his approach, trying to resolve the same problems and describe a non-representational form of thinking, by referring, for example, to Gelassenheit (releasement) and Besinnung (mindfulness). 20 As Heidegger argues, even an apparent “lack of mood” (Ungestimmtheit) is a disposition (Heidegger, 1962, p. 174). 21 For this interpretation, see Carman (2005).

References Alexandrova, A (2017). A Philosophy for the Science of Well-Being. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Aristotle. (2000). Book I. In R. Crisp (Ed.), Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy, pp. 3–22). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Capobianco, R (2010). Engaging Heidegger. London: University of Toronto Press. Carman, T. (2005). Authenticity. In H.L. Dreyfus, M.A. Wrathall (Eds.), A Companion to Heidegger (pp. 285–96). Oxford: Blackwell. Crisp, R. (2021). Well-Being,  In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = . Dreyfus, L. H (1991). Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Egan, D (2012). Das man and distantiality in being and time. Inquiry 55 (3), 289–306. Engberg-Pedersen, Tr (1990). The Stoic Theory of Oikeiosis: Moral Development and Social Interaction in Early Stoic Philosophy. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Hadjioannou, C. (2013). Befindlichkeit as retrieval of Aristotelian διάθεσις: Heidegger reading ­Aristotle in the Marburg years. In T. Keiling (Ed.), Heideggers Zeit: Themen, Argumente, Konstellationen (pp. 223–237). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Hadjioannou, C. (2015). The emergence of mood in Heidegger’s phenomenology. Doctoral thesis (PhD). University of Sussex. Hadjioannou, C. (2019). Angst as evidence: Shifting phenomenology’s measure. In C. Hadjioannou (Ed.), Heidegger on Affect, Philosophers in Depth (pp.  69–104). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Hadjioannou, C. (2023). At home in the world: Two western models of mindfulness. Journal of ­Humanistic Psychology. DOI: 10.1177/00221678231197871. Hadot, Pierre. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, A. Davidson (Ed.), Michael Chase (Tr.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers. Han Pile, B. (2013). Freedom and the ‘Choice to Choose Oneself’ in being and time. In M.A. Wrathall (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (pp.  291–319). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hayes, J. (2020). From Oikeiōsis to Ereignis: Heidegger and the fate of Stoicism. In K. Lampe, A. Benjamin (Eds.), German Stoicisms: From Hegel to Sloterdijk (pp. 137–159). London: Bloomsbury. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson (Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell. Ierodiakonou, K (2021). The stoic provenance of the notion of Prosochê. Rhizomata 9 (2), 202–223. Kamens, S. R (2019). Extreme states and extreme conditions: On homelessness and the onticoontological difference. Journal of Humanistic Psychology 59 (5), 697–705. Martin, M. W. (2015). Stoic transcendentalism and the doctrine of Oikeiosis. In S. Gardner, M. Grist (Eds.), The Transcendental Turn (pp. 342–368). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGlinchey, J. B (2004). On hellenistic philosophy and its relevance to contemporary CBT: A response to Reiss (2003). The Behavior Therapist 27 (3), 51–52. McManus, D (2015). Being-towards-death and owning one’s judgment. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 91 (2), 245–272. Nussbaum, M (1994). The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. O’Brien, M. (2019). Being, nothingness and anxiety. In C. Hadjioannou (Ed.), Heidegger on Affect, Philosophers in Depth (pp. 1–28). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. Parfit, D (1984). Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Heideggerian and Stoic Mindfulness Pigliucci, M. (2022). Prosochê as stoic mindfulness. In R. Repetti (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation (pp. 371–382). Ney York: Routledge. Robertson, D (2010). The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy. London: Karnac Books Ltd. Sorabji, R (2000). Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Svenaeus, F (2001). The Hermeneutics of Medicine and the Phenomenology of Health: Steps Towards a Philosophy of Medical Practice. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer. Thomson, I. (2013). Death and demise in being and time. In M. Wrathall (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger’s Being and Time (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy, pp.  260–290). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Todres, L., & Galvin, K (2010). Dwelling-mobility’: An existential theory of well-being. Int J Qualitative Stu Health Well-Being 5, 5444. Wayne, M. M. (2015). Stoic transcendentalism and the doctrine of Oikeiosis. In S. Gardner, M. Grist (Eds.), The Transcendental Turn (pp. 342–368). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wendland, J. A., Merwin, C., & Hadjioannou, C. (2019). Introduction. In A.J. Wendland, C. Merwin, C. Hadjioannou (Eds.), Heidegger on Technology (pp. 1–12). New York: Routledge. Withy, K (2012). The methodological role of angst in being and time. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 43 (2), 195–211. Withy, K. (2019). Finding oneself, called. In C. Hadjioannou (Ed.), Heidegger on Affect, Philosophers in Depth (pp. 153–176). Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

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PART II

Mindfulness in the Eastern Traditions

8 RADICAL RELATIONALITY A Philosophical Approach to Mindfulness Inspired by Nishida Kitarō Francesca Greco

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to bridge the practice of Mindfulness, as founded by Dr. John Kabat-Zinn (1944–) in the 1970s, with a modern philosophical tradition from Japan, namely the Logic of Place (basho no ronri, 場所の論理) developed by Nishida Kitarō (西田幾多郎, 1870–1945). The main link between these two currents of thoughts will be the idea of radical relationality which I will extrapolate by expanding Nishida’s idea of the contradictory self-identity of the world with itself based on the absolute nothingness of its substance. Nishida’s Logic of Place and the practice of Mindfulness have common purposes that meet on the field of relationality. Both approaches arise from concrete issues – about knowledge, the good life, reality, and pain – and each aims “to be true to ourselves” (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, p.  102). Both attitudes highlight the fact that experience and consciousness are veiled by negativity; that is, they are impossible to control and to know in their entirety. Both methods take the temporal present and the presence of the body-mind as their access points to reality and knowledge. Both projects intend to deal with contradictions, in logic and in life, accepting them without eliminating them once and for all. Although several differences can be detected, for example in writing style and atmosphere – lighter and more purposeful in Kabat-Zinn and heavier and somber in Nishida – is interesting, from my point of view, that the two trends differ strongly at one particular point regarding the process of knowledge: for Kabat-Zinn, it is carried out through a meditative mental attitude, and for Nishida it is based on a pronounced bodily intuition. Yet, the intellectual practice of Mindfulness results in a set of practical exercises that involve the body and the mind and their intuitions at the same level, while Nishida’s philosophical purpose often remains anchored in abstract and universalizing propositions. Accordingly, making these two streams of thoughts interact is promising for further research and methods (Ghilardi, 2020). Nevertheless, both propose to (at least partially) set aside a stringent analytical mind that vivisects reality for a relational mind. For Kabat-Zinn (2014), Mindfulness “is simply a practical way to be more in touch with the fullness of your being through a systematic process of self-observation, self-inquiry, and mindful action” (p. 18), and is based on the idea that “the thinking mind can at times be DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-11

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severely fragmented” (p. 78). Such fragmentation leads to isolation and a sense of being lost in everyday life. On the footsteps of the shared doctrines of Buddhism, Kabat-Zinn argues that this isolation – which does not completely exclude a kind of discontinuity, as we will see with Nishida – is a mindless dream from which one can mindfully awake, negatively by ceasing to cling to anything and positively by practicing meditation. Kabat-Zinn suggests that we might appreciate life more, people more, food more, opinions more, moments more, if we perceive, by our own looking more deeply into them, that everything we are in contact with connects us to the whole world in each moment, and that things and other people, and even places and circumstances, are only here temporarily. It makes now so much more interesting. In fact, it makes now everything. […] This new way seems to connect what seems to be isolated. But actually, nothing is ever isolated and needs reconnecting. It’s our way of seeing which creates and maintains separation. […] Mindfulness practice is simply the ongoing discovery of the thread of interconnectedness. At some point, we may even come to see that it is not quite correct to say that we are doing the threading. It’s more like we become conscious of a connectedness which has been here all the time. (p. 156) Nishida, through his own logic, sought to demonstrate how the world – similar to a selfconscious, manifold, and living being – is constantly engaged in the creative activity of self-production. Such self-production involves human beings as much as anything else categorized as living or not, and implies an internal connectedness like the one which defines a unitary organism. This creative relational process is permeated with negativity in the sense that the self-producing world is by no means an entity in its own right, developed or embodied in particular creations. Instead, the world is nothing else than its expressive activity which takes place primarily by self-negating, that is, by negating its own empty nothingness as well as its own being as identity. My attempt to develop Nishida’s investigation of self-consciousness’ activity as a fertile soil for a logic of radical relationality is part of the effort – in the spirit of Yoko Arisaka’s work of extrapolating Nishida’s thought in phenomenology, political philosophy, and the philosophy of race – to extend the Logic of Place beyond the intentions of its author (Arisaka, 2021) and thereby to open up, diffuse, and adapt Nishida’s scholarship “to as many questions of human life and to as many different historical and linguistic contexts as possible, stretching his ideas to the breaking point until they deliver on their full promise” (Heisig, 2016, p. 223). My intention of combining the Logic of Place with Mindfulness can thus be understood in this vein. Although the aim of both of these approaches is to bring their results out in simple and basic activities of everyday life, one can train oneself in the logic of relationality, in addition to formally investigating it, through specific practices whose exercises integrate relational acting and thinking into one’s natural and comprehensive habits. As a model for this training and research process, we can consider the three stages of shu-ha-ri (守 – 破 – 離) common to the learning of the Japanese art-ways and derived from the tea master Fuhaku Kawakami (川上不白, 1719–1807). In this training model the apprentices first go through a phase of perfect adoption of the form (shu, 守, retain) – for example, of an aikidō­ technique – before changing and adapting that form and breaking with the master’s teachings (ha, 破, break through) – for example, by identifying one’s own way to perform a 124

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technique – so that in the end the strictly regulated discipline of the apprentices has been swept away (ri, 離, to cut off or move away) in order to become a living habit without hindrances, that is, performed without thought, external anchors, and greediness (Endō, 2013, pp. 36–41; Fongaro, 2023a, p. 390; Heisig, 2019, pp. 28–32). Staying in the field of Japanese art-ways, there are several arts dedicated to the recognition, perception, and application of the relationality inherent in the constitution of the self and the world and, consequently, dedicated to the cultivation of the resulting contradictory unity in the body-mind. Precisely because of the manner in which both Mindfulness and the Logic of Place treat everydayness, the most common activities of everyday life should not be forgotten: as taking the train, eating, cooking, talking to people, and shopping, for instance, might be for people in some parts of the world. For the Japanese art-ways, it is important to cultivate the (relational) self which will then be reflected in these everyday activities. For this reason, those quotidian practices come across as the most suitable to quickly and clearly bring to light different aspects of this cultivation of the self. In section three of this chapter I will focus on chadō (the “way of tea”) and aikidō (which I understand as a “way of encounter”) as specific practices in which we can emphasize how relationality is effectuated through spatial-material aspects (regarding chadō) and interpersonal relations (regarding aikido).

Nishida and the Logic of a Mindful Relationality “Relationality” is a term chosen by me but inspired by Nishida’s Logic of Place in order to address the dynamic phenomenon – or “event” in the Heideggerian sense of Ereignis (Heidegger, GA11) – of connectedness. If this last sentence seemed to be incomplete, or has left you waiting for something like “connectedness between …”, this is inherently part of the kind of connectedness I call relationality and of its bond with negativity. Hence, the heart of relationality does not lie in the “positive” fact of relating elements to each other in a relation which presupposes the existence of these elements and eventually counts the relation itself as a further element (even if it’s of a different order). Rather, the phenomenon of relationality wants to address the fact that these supposed elements, as well as their particular relations, subsist, in whatever way they do, precisely by virtue of their interconnection, in whatever way they interconnect and whatever it is that is interconnected. The expectation, suspense, or suspension left by the apparently interrupted sentence performatively shows that relationality is a form of emptiness or nothingness which, insofar as it is empty, “makes room for …”. This sentence must remain open to leave space for what particularly and uniquely follows, whether it is an action, a thing, or a relation. Following Nishida’s insight, when I refer to relationality, I mean the dynamic entangling of the world in itself in forming itself without itself having a form. Imagine in this regard a puppet made of woolen threads: every single thread composes the puppet, without being a puppet itself, and the puppet changes shape according to the relational weave composing it, to the limits of its recognizability. By eventually pulling all of the woolen threads one after another, the puppet first slowly deforms – that is, loses its previous form – and then dissolves into nothingness, which is quite different from being destroyed. Thus, focusing on relationality means being mindful that the puppet subsists as a weaving activity – in this case, as a composition of woolen threads. This is followed by the analysis of and interaction with this weave as a nothingness disguised as a manifold, disguised 125

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as a thing, therefore being no-thing or without actually being one thing. In other words, relationality addresses how “nothing exists if not in relation”.1 Relationality therefore investigates something like negative subsistence (of all things) on the basis of linear as well as non-linear entanglements. Looking closer at Nishida’s philosophy, the term “relationality” thus tries to develop the negativity worked out in his search for relations (kankei, 関係) without relata and to think relation from the relation itself. Nishida confronted Aristotelian, Kantian, and Hegelian logics in order to find a logic (ronri, 論理) for understanding the world’s (sekai, 世界) relationship with the self (jiko, 自己) and the place of absolute nothingness (zettai mu no basho, 絶対無の場所) within the world. The logic he came up with in his lifelong research bears the name of basho no ronri (場所の論理, sometimes bashoteki ronri, 場所的論理), namely the “Logic of Place”. There are three cardinal aspects of this logic, each of which involves an interplay of two respective concepts concerning relationality: (1) Basho no ronri has its deepest roots in the concept of the “pure experience” (junsui keiken, 純粋経験) of “self-awareness” or “self-consciousness” (jikaku, 自覚), and (2) finds its original form in the conception of “place” (basho, 場所) and in its “absolute present” (zettaiteki genzai, 絶対的現在). (3) This develops into the idea of the “absolute contradictory self-identity” (zettai mujunteki jiko dōitsu, 絶對矛盾的自己同一) of the “world” (sekai, 世界) as selfidentical to itself.

Pure Experience and Self-Awareness In his early theory, Nishida reflects on the process of knowing and, in particular, on the relation between the knowing subject and the known object in experience. He claims that “it is not that because there is the individual [kojin, 個人] there is experience [keiken, 経験], but rather that because there is experience there is the individual. Experience is more fundamental [konponteki, 根本的] than individual distinctions [kojinteki kubetsu, 個人的区別]” (NKZ 1: 6–7).2 Therefore, the experience of seeing a color or hearing a sound, as well as of playing an instrument, is for Nishida a pure experience preceding both the differentiation into experiencing subject and experienced object, as well as the judgment (handan, 判断) of what kind of color or sound I (ware or ga, 我) am seeing and hearing. Nishida is convinced that the instant (setsuna, 刹那) of perception or action corresponds to the true, ontological form of reality as it is (jijitsu sono mama, 事実其儘) which only secondarily differentiates itself into specific, individual phenomena while still being experienced in its original unity: hence the “experiential ontology” (Feenberg and Arisaka, 1990) of the pure experience does not mean complete undifferentiatedness, but rather a rigorous act of unification and cohesion (genmitsunaru tōitsu to renraku, 厳密なる統一と連絡) that arises exactly because of differences. The dynamic process of (re)unification is what Nishida calls the good (zen, 善) in his first work An Inquiry into the Good (zen no kenkyū,『善の研究』) in 1911. Despite the clearly non-individuated character of pure experience, far from a first-person experience of the noetic I of “I hear”, Nishida, in a reissue of the work in 1936, blames his first theory on a latent psychologism mostly because of the theoretical point of view of his analysis. Who or what hears in the pure experience is not yet individuated and thus not distinguished from the sound; they merge together or, rather, they were never separated in the pure activity of hearing like in a field (of experience). This field of pure hearing – or, in general, pure acting – can be simply called self-consciousness or self-awareness (jikaku, 自覚), where “self” refers to a reflection of sameness in difference. Since in the experience 126

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there is not yet a difference between who hears and the sound, jikaku basically hears itself inside itself, and in this way something hearing (the future I) appears together with something heard (the future sound) – and all this constantly happens inside jikaku itself – in the dynamic development (dōteki hatten, 動的発展) of an internal relationality, so that what reflects and what is reflected are un-differentiated. Such a consciousness or awareness cannot be objectified in the specific form of the subject or the object in a theoretical analysis without losing such undifferentiatedness. It is in this sense that pure experience and jikaku stand for radical relations without relata. The meditation practice at the center of Mindfulness can be seen as the search for the undifferentiated moment of pure experience: “The tack we take in meditation is simply to witness whatever comes up in the mind or the body and to recognize it without condemning it or pursuing it […]. What we are interested in in meditation is direct contact with the experience itself” (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, p. 54). In this state of mind and body, the one meditating tries to return to pure hearing “like a clear mirror [– the mirror is also an image used by Nishida in an attempt to describe a universal as a chōra –],3 only reflecting, itself empty, receptive, open” (p. 90) in order to shorten the “unnecessary distance we place between ourselves and experience” (p. 135). On the contrary, sticking to a subjectivity which is a partial self-construction is what Kabat-Zinn, on the footsteps of Larry Rosenberg, calls “selfing”, that is, the inevitable and incorrigible tendency “to operate in the world from that limited perspective which is mostly fantasy and defense” (p. 171): the isolated I. KabatZinn proposes that we stop trying so hard to be ‘somebody’ and instead just experience being […] [although] no-self does not mean being a nobody. What it means is that everything is interdependent and that there is no isolated, independent core ‘you.’ You are only you in relationship to all other forces and events in the world – including your parents, your childhood, your thoughts and feelings, outside events, time, and so on. Moreover, you are already a somebody, no matter what. You are who you already are. (pp. 172–173)

The Place of Absolute Nothingness and the Eternal Present The idea that the unobjectifiable field of jikaku stands for true reality as a condition of possibility – similar to the Kantian Bewußtsein überhaupt – for particular individuals, which are the focal points (shōten, 焦点) of this field and connected to it through the pure experience, brings Nishida to examine the ontological status of such a reality. Nishida finds the logical foundation of jikaku in the concept of place (basho, 場所) within which individualization takes place and which makes possible the (re)connection between knowing subjects and the known world of objects since “what is [有るもの] must be in a place [何かに於て なければならぬ]” (NKZ 3: 415).4 In his essay Basho 『 ( 場所, Place) of 1927, Nishida builds a complex structure of concentric “circles infinitely containing circles [限なく円が円に於てあるのである]” (NKZ 3: 458)5 following the model of grammatical predication. This field-like structure of spaces unfolds the knowing process in a series of transitions from the particular subject’s level (shugo men, 主語面) to that of the universalizing predicate (jutsugo men, 述語面), inverting Aristotle’s logic of hypokeimenon (kitai, 基体) or individual substance which eludes predication (Greco and Krings, 2021). Radicalizing the insubstantiality of consciousness in 127

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his experiential ontology, Nishida states that the ultimate place-within, containing and thus enabling knowing processes, must be absolutely empty (kūkyonaru, 空虚なる), boundless (mugen, 無限), and formless (katachi naki, 形なき) in order to receive and mirror all things without meddling in this play of mirroring. Nishida calls this place zettai mu no basho (絶対無の場所, place of absolute nothingness), playing “on the word for absolute in Japanese, zettai [絶対], which literally means breaking through or overcoming opposition” (Stanford Encyclopedia, 2019). Indeed, the absoluteness of this place lies in the dialectics (benshōhō, 弁証法) that unify contradictions and thus enable this place which is both completely empty “and yet” (soku, 即) is a plenum of infinite possibilities in their self-determination (jiko gentei, 自己限定). From the perspective of this nothingness – which is a standpoint without standpoint (tachibanaki tachiba, 立場なき立場) – the contradictory self-identity (mujunteki jiko dōitsu, 矛盾的自己同一) of the absolute nothingness with its determinations implies absolute self-negation (zettai jikohitei, 絶対自己否定), that is, the negation of its indeterminacy. Negation becomes – similarly to the Hegelian logic, but not at all identical with it (Suares, 2011) – the engine of the process of knowledge and determination. This shifts the major focus of the ontological analysis to the concept of nothingness. It is noteworthy how nothingness and its absoluteness in this phase of Nishida’s thought assume an almost excessive importance, bordering on hypostatization, since everything is interpreted in the shadow of this concept so that, in referring to Mahayana Buddhism in his work What I Call the Self-Aware Determination of Absolute Nothingness 『 ( 私の絶対無の自覚的限定といふもの』 ) of 1932, Nishida states that “what has form [形あるもの] is the shadow [影] of what is formless [形なきもの]” (NKZ 5:122).6 This is, exemplarily, the case of the eternal now (eien no ima, 永遠の今) through which immediacy and intuitiveness take account of the lived present of individuals, here and now, through the act of unifying – and so creating – the past and future simultaneously: However, starting from something like such an infinite circle [mugendai no en, 無限 大の円] (what we consider the so-called world of objects [iwayuru taishōkai, 所謂 対象界]) is the plane of self-determination [jikogenteimen, 自己限定面] of absolute nothingness, that is, the eternal present [eien no genzai, 永遠の現在] determined by the eternal now [einen no ima, 永遠の今], we can think of something like the so-called absolute time [zettai toki, 絶対時] as the self-determination of that which, while being absolutely nothing, determines itself [jikojishin, 自己自身], an absolute time which flows from the eternal past [eien no kako, 永遠の過去] to the eternal future [eien no mirai, 永遠の未来]. (NKZ 5: 149)7 Similarly, in the practice of meditation taken up by Mindfulness, the focus lies in the activity of perceiving or in bringing yourself back to the present, allowing ourselves to feel what we feel and be there where we are, without following the “need to go over the day’s commitments in your head and live ‘ahead’ of yourself” (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, pp. 133–134).

The World and Its Absolute Contradictory Self-Identity Taking account of the contradictory relationship of the indeterminate and undeterminable basho with its self-determinations in terms of the lived present of single individualities, Nishida was led to consider social phenomena, like the relationship between I and thou 128

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(watashi to nanji,『私と汝』) investigated in his homonymous work of 1932. Nevertheless, Nishida’s approach maintained a prominently me-ontological perspective. Reacting to the critiques of colleagues and students accusing him of neglecting and replacing the agency of individual human actions of concrete subjects with an abstract consciousness, Nishida in the mid- to late-1930s began to investigate more closely the historical world (rekishiteki sekai, 歴史的世界) as counter-determining (gyakugenteisuru, 逆限定する) the self-productive process of the world. As a consequence, Nishida started to pay more attention to the individual (kobutsu, 個物) and the historical body (rekishiki shintai, 歴史 的身体) as co-creators of the world as expression (hyōgen, 表現) of itself – that is, determining – itself, so that “in neither direction [hōkō, 方向] an [absolute] One [issha, 一者] is posited” (NKZ 10: 309).8 This shift in focus brings Nishida to extend the contradictory self-identity from the self or consciousness to the whole word (Elberfeld, 1999, 2014). He begins to analyze more carefully this bilateral dialectic through neologisms such as “acting intuition” (kōiteki chokkan, 行為的直観) and “discontinuous continuity” (hirenzoku no renzoku, 非連続の連続), by which he maintains productivity without setting aside absolute nothingness as the ultimate reality. Concretely, Nishida applied such a dialectic of negation, affirmation, and interdependence to the relationship between nations with questionable results (Arisaka, 2017; Heisig & Maraldo, 1995), but he still criticized the former ideas of cosmopolitanism based on the mistaken idea of individuals as atomic beings (Davis, 2013, p. 197). In contrast to that, individuals are for Nishida active players of the processual dialectic of the world with itself: Our free [jiyū na, 自由な] but at the same time internally necessary [hitsuzenteki, 必然 的], personal [jinkakuteki, 人格的] self [jiko, 自己] is there where, on the one hand, it thoroughly expresses [hyōgen suru, 表現する] the world inside-outside-contradictoryself-identically [uchi to soto to no mujunteki jikodōitsuteki ni, 内と外との矛盾的 自己同一的に],9 and on the other hand, where it determines [gentei suru, 限定する] itself [jiko jishin, 自己自身] as one focal point of the world [sekai no ichishōten, 世界の一焦点], that is, where it is creative [sōzōteki, 創造的]. (NKZ 10: 319)10 The self-productive activity of the world enacted by individuals implies the constant overcoming of the limits of individuality. Reconnecting this thought with the initial issues of his philosophy regarding the knowledge process, he writes in his last work The Logic of Place and Religious Worldview (Basho no ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan,『場所の論理と宗 教的世界観』): “To know [shiru, 知る] is for the self to go beyond [koeru, 越える] the self, to go outside [soto ni deru, 外に出る] the self. And yet, conversely, it is that things [mono, 物] become the self, and things determine [限定する] our self. […] What I call acting intuition [kōiteki chokkan, 行為的直観] is nothing other than this” (NKZ 10: 330–1).11 Translated in Kabat-Zinn’s (2014) terms, the matter of overcoming one’s personal limits can be traced to his invitation to “give more than you think you can, trusting that you are richer than you think. Celebrate this richness” (p. 57). Indeed, following the “willingness to share your own being with the world […] at the deepest level, there is no giver, no gift, and no recipient… only the universe rearranging itself” (p. 58). It is precisely because this path is full of contradictions that one of the greatest merits of Mindfulness is to make peace with our contradictory nature in the practice, seeking for a balance between them without claiming to eliminate them altogether in order to live in peace. In the path of Mindfulness, we are 129

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told to be generous but also to say no, to maintain a spirit of inquiry. At the same time, we are told to listen to ourselves without judgment, to learn from the stillness of the mountains and from the flowing of the river. In the end, Mindfulness consists in finding the balance by ourselves in this multitude of sometimes contradictory proposals. Kabat-Zinn makes it explicit: “Ultimately you have to live the inner work yourself, and that work always comes from the cloth of your own life” (p. 143). But this “you” or “I” is nothing isolated; on the contrary, it is in its essence radically relational and void. Just as with Nishida, in a mindful action there is no clear discernment between me and the world, between me and the thing – otherwise stated, there is a “discontinuous continuity” – which Kabat-Zinn addresses in the episode of cleaning the stove: “I” cleaned the stove and, at the same time, “it’s more like the stove cleaned itself, with the help of Bobby McFerrin, the scrubber, the baking soda, and the sponge, with guest appearances by hot water and a string of present moments” (p. 149). By virtue of the relational correspondence between individuals and the world – even if non-linear – the practitioner can trace through and in his or her own body-mind the ­connectedness with all that directly and indirectly surrounds them in day-to-day encounters, “but it’s no longer personal. It’s just part of the totality of the universe expressing itself” (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, p. 150). It is once that we mind our relationality with the cosmos that “interesting things start to happen” (p. 151). Rocks and ferns, trees and insects, people and pets, feelings and sensations can be great teachers if we listen to them and mind our discontinuous continuity with them. In Mindfulness, similarly for Nishida, the more I look at the universe and the universal, the more I will discover myself and the singular, and vice versa, by tracing the relations and the relationality between us, otherwise it would be “easy to come by the impression that meditation is about going inside or dwelling inside yourself. But ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are limited distinctions. In the stillness of formal practice, we do turn our energies inward, only to discover that we contain the entire world in our own mind and body” (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, p. 80). It is up to us to practice this “vision” daily.

Experimental Settings Whereas both Mindfulness and the Logic of Place aim to achieve results in ordinary life – regarding cognition and action as well as the management of pain and emotions – before reaching their effects in the most spontaneous way, their guiding ideas and the underlying relationality can be actively trained and investigated. The dedicated frameworks, expressly built for cultivating the sensitivity to and enactment of these principles, can be more or less artificial without breaking their connection with everyday life. Indeed, unconscious habits and unaware automatisms assumed over time are exceedingly tenacious to eradicate, modify, or to perceive at all; moreover, a certain resistance to critical thinking and acting occurs more spontaneously than one imagines, as we can note in case of racism, sexism, and discrimination in general. To systematically investigate habits, break their rigidity, or to experiment with other ones, several practices with specific settings have been developed. In many of such settings, a radical relationality can be notably experienced and brought to attention. In these experimental undertakings, one learns to sense and track down the intertwining of relations, to both observe and act within this network, and to affect its swing by taking this phenomenon as the object of our inquiry rather than, for example, the particular person behind the movement. Meditation – in its multiple forms of assuming a posture, sitting, walking, standing, or lying-down – is the main practice 130

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proposed by Kabat-Zinn for developing mindfulness in order to be engaged in everyday life, even when we clean the stove. In addition to meditation, Kabat-Zinn (2014, p. 45) also speaks of dance and painting as mindful practices, thus suggesting that other practices like making music, writing, swimming, fencing, doing artistic gymnastics, team play, and even card and roleplaying games can be added as structured bodily practices in which relationality can be traced back and enacted. Notably, some specific practices have been developed in the framework of Zen-­Buddhism (禅) with the explicit purpose of achieving selflessness (muga, 無我) and sensing the dependent arising (engi, 縁起,) of all things, concepts that can be both considered as different aspects of a radical relationality. These practices are based on different kinds of meditation (zazen, 座禅, in Japanese Buddhist contexts; dhyana, यान, in Sanskrit) and provide a very comfortable ground to explore relationality in its innumerable forms. Moreover, in their syncretic formation and mutual influencing – even with other teachings and doctrines such as Confucian etiquette, Daoist Yin-Yang balance, and Shinto purification rituals – they themselves offer a striking example of relationality. Others practices developed in Japan include martial arts (budō, 武道), such as kendō (剣道), iaidō (居合道), kyudō (弓道), judō (柔道), karate(dō) (空手道), and aikidō (合氣道), as well as performative or aesthetic arts (geidō, 芸道) such as the way of flower composition (kadō, 華道 or ikebana, 生け花), calligraphy (shodō, 書道), nō-theater (能), the way of tea (chadō, 茶道), also the art of rock placement in Japanese dry garden (karesansui, 枯山水) and go-play (碁). In Japanese vocabulary, the art-ways are called “way” (michi or dō, 道). Despite their rigorous structure, they stand in close relation to, and are deeply inspired by, everyday life, aiming to reintegrate the gained experiences into everydayness. In aikidō, for example, Osawa Kisaburo shihan developed the movement of suri ashi (すり足) from the way of using the feet in repairing old futons and stepping on silk wadding (Endō, 2013, p. 23). In chadō the daily custom of tea was transformed into an occasion for meditation, recollection, and aesthetic enjoyment following the Zen-Buddhist master Ikkyū Sōjun (一休宗純, 1394–1481) and his scholars (Hirota, 1995). Similarly, ancient folktales – such as the one about the fox and milk (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, p. 155) – and everyday tasks like preparing food or parenting can also be an inspiration for practicing and playing with relationality. Thus, we can say that the idea of dō of way of life stands for the discontinuous continuity between daily life, exercise, and accomplishment. Relational temporally seen, this means that the practitioner maintains a beginner’s mind (shoshin, 初心) even in advanced stages, vigilantly facing one’s shortcomings and steadfastly working on traits like openness, respect, genuineness, self-reflectivity, frankness, friendship, humility, perseverance, generosity, courtesy, fearlessness, cooperation, empathy, and patience (Ōhashi, Elberfeld, and Krings, 2023). In the following sections I will consider the specific practices of chadō (茶道) and aikidō (合氣道) as experimental practices of radical relationality in which the above intersections between Mindfulness and the Logic of Place find a different field of application, in chadō with a greater focus on objects and in aikidō with a greater attention to interpersonal relations.

Chadō: The Way of Tea In chadō or sadō (茶道), Zen practice is associated with the simple act of serving and receiving tea: “Tea and Zen, one taste” (cha zen ichi mi, 茶禅一味) (Sen 1979; Okakura, 2007). The way of tea is still practiced today in various styles and schools, as in the school 131

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in which I have been training for several of months in the tradition of the Ueda Sōko Ryū (上田宗箇流) (Japanischer Teeweg Ueda Sōko Ryū, n.d.). Synchronization with the environment, positioning of objects, and rhythm of bodily movements are fundamental features of the practice of the tea way, which when compared with other practices, according to Toshihiko Itzuzu (井筒 俊彦) (1981), can be considered a special spatial artform, particularly because of the utensils and the structure of the teahouse (Izutsu & Izutsu 1981). In chadō different tools like bowls (chawan, 茶碗), the whisk (chasen, 茶筅), the scoop (chashaku, 茶杓), the ladle (hishaku, 柄杓), etc. are implemented and frequently displaced in close relation to each other and to the bodies in the room. Usually, practice (keiko, 稽古) and ceremonies (cha no yu, 茶の湯) take place in specific teahouses, whose architectures highlight the aesthetics of the objects and coordinate the movements in terms of all objects and bodies in the room without relating to a specific center of action. In addition to this, in ancient times, such teahouses were placed in the garden of a temple and were thought of as temporary refuges for travelers or pilgrims who usually had to cross a vast, untamed wilderness. The spatial location and the continuous displacement of the tea tools give this practice a pronounced sense of impermanence (mujo, 無常), and yet also a warm welcome for a contact that will occur probably only once in the entire history of the cosmos. The connection through transitoriness and discontinuity is encompassed in the famous phrase ichi go ichi e (一期一会), associated with the tea master Sen no Rikyū (千利休, 1522–1591) (Hirota, 1995, pp. 178–179), which can be literally translated as “one moment, one encounter”, or, as a monk at one of the temples in the Daitokuji (大徳寺) in Kyoto wrote in the fall of 2022 in my book of signatures (goshuinchō, 御朱印帳), “once only, only once”. The uniqueness and impermanence of each moment is reflected in the continuous dislocation within the relational web of bodies and different objects necessary for the preparation of tea, rigorously respecting the space between (maai, 間合い) them. Training in the art-way of tea, one learns not only the formal execution of different ceremonies related to different occasions and seasons of the year, preparing small sweets (okashi, お菓子) and big meals (kaiseki, 懐石), thin (usucha, 薄茶) and thick tea (koicha, 濃茶), each with special utensils; furthermore, the way of tea teaches that the world is not composed of separate objects, a view which attempts to stabilize and solidify what in reality is radically relational and, following this, everchanging and structurally impermanent. The practitioner learns to recognize numerous lines of causal interrelationships, as well as to move in accordance with this chain of irregular and unrepeatable relationships. The relational balance in the aesthetic of spaces and objects, however, is created through dissonance, contrasts, and breaks: incompleteness, imperfection, and rough simplicity are by design highly aesthetic qualities, as are the asymmetrical interruptions of the walls by square windows made of paper, the knot and knotholes of the bamboo teaspoon, the shape, color, and size of the cups, the one curved wooden pillar in the room, the odd lines counted on the tatami, and the dimmed lighting. The complexity of the web of relations is increased by the sequence of movements we perform, and which bring these relationships to light. The practitioner learns to perform specific gestures: stepping in and out the tearoom; moving in it with meticulous steps, hands, and the whole body; saying brief, pregnant, and ritualized sentences; taking viands and tea utensils in and out the room; positioning, using, moving, and cleaning them centimeter by centimeter in mutual relation; and finally putting everything back in its place. In this choreography, the way in which one holds the cup – tightly without squeezing, fingers straight and close – changes the relational atmosphere of the whole space. The gestures then spill over to the surroundings of the practitioner, outside the teahouse and into the garden, the 132

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park, and the temple around the teahouse and, most importantly, in the everyday world of the practitioner, making him or her a person of character and integrity in an aesthetic and ethical sense. The result of the practice is a comprehensive aesthetic of sensitization and ethical perception of the practitioners so that they become, for example, a “tea person” (chajin, 茶人) who recognizes a right action not based on rational, intellectual criteria, but instead on the process of concrete acting transformed into natural reactions: “the most important things cannot be expressed in words, and so the physical manifestations of the do teach by example, rather than through abstract words – it is like pouring liquid from one cup to another” (Masuno, 1999, p. 53). Regarding the transmission of knowledge in the art-ways, this means that “the real teaching is almost entirely non-verbal” (Kabat-Zinn, 2014, p. 184) and proceeds especially through the body or body-mind (身心, shinjin) to the extent that “the posture embodies the attitude” (p. 90) and vice versa.

Aikidō: The Way of Encounter/Contact Structurally more focused on interpersonal relationships is the practice of aikidō (合氣道), a particular martial art developed by Morihei Ueshiba (盛平植芝, 1883–1969) which synthesized various martial arts including jujutsu, spear fighting, fencing, and the art of the sword inspired by Miyamoto Musashi (宮本武藏, 1584–1645) and other sword schools. The philosophical and spiritual principles on which aikidō is based come mostly from Shintō and Zen-Buddhism, so much so that Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki rōshi (大拙貞太郎鈴 木 老師, 1870–1966), seeing master Ueshiba performing, stated: “This is zen in motion” (Endō, 2013, p. 25).12 Despite the combat setting, rather than defeating the opponent and taking off, one objective of aikidō is the perception of and dynamic reaction to an encounter in radical relational unity – within oneself, with the partner, and ultimately with the whole universe. This is the reason why the physical activity is less concentrated on muscular strength and breaking through than it is with evasion and the amplification, centralization, and canalization of energy (ki, 氣). Nevertheless, aikidō requires a hard-trained body as well as a resolute mind; different abilities which must be enacted at once (soku, 即). Said in Ueshiba’s words paraphrased by Seishirō Endō shihan (遠藤 征四郎 師範) – one of the most influential scholars of Ueshiba today – the real target of the practice is “attaining illumination about the infinite adaptability of the body or seeing the movement in the world”13 (Endō, 2013, p. 39), where “adaptability” (henka, 変化) means the ability to change – position as well as technique – depending on the relational happening in which one finds oneself: now like this and now like that, different from moment to moment, from body to body (pp. 54–59). In terms of the practice, this means that the combination of the movements, even if relatively few in “form” (kata, 型 or 形), are practically unlimited in their concrete enactments (Fongaro, 2021, pp.  112–121), as one can see in the numerous seminars that the most renowned masters give around the world. The neutralization effected by the person who defends him- or herself (tori, 取りor shite, 仕手 as in nō-theater) can happen through the immobilization (katame waza, 固め技) or projection (nage waza, 投げ技) of usually one aggressor who will receive the technique (uke, 受け) by redirecting his or her energy (ki, 氣) through different techniques (ikkyo, 一 教, irimi nage, 入身投げ, and so on) in accordance with the typology of attack (shōmen uchi, 正面打ち, ushiro ryōte dori, 後ろ両手取り, and so on); what is especially important is that this happens in the most spontaneous way. Aikidō techniques are made particularly 133

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effective through the vacuum caused by the dynamic, circular movement. The emptiness opened around and within these circles is compared by Endō shihan to an absolute nothingness reminiscent of Nishida’s zettai mu no basho: “I considered ‘kai-kū’ [皆空] to have the meaning of ‘mu’ [無] (nothing), of ‘zettaimu’ [絶対無] (absolute nothingness), in my reading of the Founder’s words”14 (Endō, 2013, p. 41). In his interpretation, to neutralize the opponent’s attack means to coordinate the energies in such a way that their combination results in zero, namely moving together as an undifferentiated one (pp. 55–59). As in Zen practices, instinctive responses to the environment are acquired, refined, and internalized, replacing instinctive reactions related to an egoistic, isolated body that is disconnected from the world, as in the cases of recoiling from fear or becoming paralyzed from indecision. The paradox of training instinctive re-actions shortens the possible gap between decision and action, between mind and body, abandoning the idea that the mind needs first to review and decide in order to then leave the body to carry out the physical activity relying solely on the power of the muscles (Westbrook and Ratti, 2001, p. 22). Obviously the same is true in chadō and other art-ways, but in aikidō particularly, the reaction to an attack makes indecisive and imprecise actions directly dangerous. The relational activity of the body-mind does not look at the speed of execution, but at the manifold unity of the action as if the action would perform itself. Seishirō Endō shihan (2013) describes this experience as follows: “In my keiko, if we are practicing ikkyo for example, I go around to practice the technique with the practitioners one after the other. […] In the beginning, as usual I was consciously showing everyone my way of doing the technique. Once, however, I started to forget and just let my body move as it would until at some point, I found myself moving without any conscious awareness” (p. 63). He describes further how he was able to “savor the sensation of contact with each partner try to do movement that is not forced and is in accordance with the flow, and experience this state of ‘no-mind’ [mushin, 無心], hopefully becoming able to enter this state at any time” (p. 95). In the art-way of aikidō at least three aspects of relationality can be recognized: within the self, with the partner, and in the universe. First, both uke and tori need to coordinate their own body-mind according to position, strength, timing, intention, and distance within oneself in order to dynamically carry out the movements of attack or defense from one’s own center (hara, 腹), located approximately in the lower belly and balancing the ki of the whole body: supporting the architecture of shoulders, hips, and legs and extending the motion through arms, hands, fingers, feet, and toes. Second, through the actions, the ki-energy spreads out from body to body with the intent of unbalancing the partner’s center, both in attacking and defending. In the defense, the energy directed from uke to tori is relationally redirected by tori into the uke’s body and surroundings mostly through circular movements until attracting the partner into empty spaces in which uke can fall in order to further disperse the energy into the surrounding space. Since the ki-energy is universal – that is, it does not come exclusively from or belong to us, nor is it created out of the blue – while practicing aikidō one is therefore in radical relation with the whole universe. In martial arts as well as in eastern medicine, ki-energy is very much like the power of wind, at best flowing between the connection points and lines in the body (meridians) and in the universe, or stagnating when sick (Ohnishi and Ohnishi, 2019). Following the words of Ōsawa Kisaburō shihan (大澤 喜三郎 師範), the aiki (合氣)15 encounter of windy energies practiced in aikidō (合氣道) consists of ki no nagare (氣の流れ, flow of energy), namely, to let flow ki be in deep exchange between our rather finite body and its more likely limitless form as universe (Endō, 2013, p. 21). 134

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Conclusion As we have seen through the idea of relationality, the practice of Mindfulness and the Logic of Place can mutually develop and complement each other in the same direction. This path leads to everyday life and passes through experimental practices – like chadō and aikidō – that amplify and condense different aspects of the radical relationality in which we find ourselves, and which is strongly present in both Mindfulness and the Logic of Place. Kabat-Zinn (2014) warns about the temptation “to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion” (p. 65). The strong tendency to cling to sameness, possessions, or ideals shows how easy it is to come to be imprisoned in negative as well as positive thinking, both confining, fragmenting, and obstructing the relationality of the self “rooted in multiplicity rather than oneness, grounded in complexity and ambiguity, eachness and suchness” (p. 190). Instead, everydayness is both the starting and arrival point of our actions and of our speculations to the point that we might feel like we haven’t moved at all. The practice of “meditation really is [– for Kabat-Zinn –] the one human activity in which you are not trying to get anywhere else but simply allowing yourself to be where and as you already are” (p. 186), because Wherever you go there you are. It seems that to allow ourselves to be where we are, humans usually need to move around many times, and this is also what characterizes them. Accordingly, we can say with Nishida that radical everydayness (byōjōtei or heijōtei, 平常底) should not be simply confused with an everyday habitual consciousness or common sense (jōshiki, 常識), even if both also have contact points: “[radical everydayness] is the free standpoint [jizaiteki tachiba, 自在的立場] of the selftransformation [jiko tenkan, 自己転換] of our selves arising – self-negatively qua self-affirmatively [jikohitei soku kōteiteki ni, 自己否定即肯定的に] – as an individual many [kobutsuteki ta, 個物的多] in the self-negating of the Absolute One [zettaiteki issha, 絶対的一者]. In this point [koten ni, 此点に] our selves touch [fureru, 触れる] both the beginning [hajime, 始] and the end [tomo, 共] of the world [sekai no, 世界の]” (NKZ 10: 357).16 The ideas and practices of radical relationality transform the subject’s relation to their surroundings and finally modify in general the ideas and practices of subjects or individuals themselves, as well as their conception of objects and the world. For a practitioner, a radical relationality in fact requires the displacement of subjectivity at the edge of definability and at the borders of ontology, while a relational logic implies a transition from an ego-logical perspective to an eco-logical one with the consequences of non-substantiality or non-controllability: in a word, negativity.

Notes 1 Here I refer to the title of a talk I gave on the Japanese concept of “betweenness” (ma, 間) at the 5th Conference of the European Network of Japanese Philosophy (ENOJP) in Nagoya in 2019. For further insights into the concept of ma from different disciplines, see Galliano (2004). 2 「個人あつて経験あるにあらず、経験あつて個人あるのである、個人的区別よりも経験が根本 的である」. All references to Nishida Kitarō zenshu will be abbreviate as NKZ followed by volume and pagination. All the translations from the Japanese are my own but I want to deeply thank Enrico Fongaro and Leon Krings for fundamental suggestions. 3 In this regard it is important to remember that for Nishida such mirror has anything substantial and that “similar to one of those ancient Chinese mirrors composed of an opaque sheet of polished metal that, instead of sending back bright ideal images, barely draws from the darkness humble ghosts” (Fongaro, 2023b, p. 464). Translation from Italian is my own.

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Francesca Greco   4 「有るものは何かに於てなければならぬ」.   5 「限なく円が円に於てあるのである」.   6 「形あるものは形なきものの影」. For a critical analysis of the potential hypostatization of absolute nothingness, see Greco and Krings (2021).   7 「か ゝる無限大の円といふ如きものが(我々の所謂対象界と考へて居るものが)絶対無の自己 限定面であるといふことから、即ちそれが永遠の今によって限定せられた永遠の現在である といふことから、絶対に無にして自己自身を限定するものの自己限定として所謂絶対時とい ふ如きものが考へられるのである、永遠の過去から永遠の未来に流れる絶対時といふ如きも のが考へられるのである。」   8 「その何れの方向にも一者を置くのではない。 」   9 The Japanese expression used here is an adverb (marked by teki ni, 的に) modifying “to express” while at the same time being modified by the genitive construction “of inside and outside”. Since it is very difficult to express an adverbial compound containing a genitive in English, a rather unconventional translation has been chosen in order to maintain the adverbial character of the expression, showing that Nishida’s “contradictory self-identity” can be understood not only in a nominal sense, but also and especially as an adverbial modification of a verb, or, metaphysically, as a modulation of a process. I would like to thank Leon Krings for this suggestion. 1 0  「内と外との矛盾的自己同一的に、何処までも自己に於て世界を表現すると共に、世界の一 焦点として自己自身を限定する所に、即ち創造的なる所に、自由なると共に内的に必然的な る、我々の人格的自己があるのである。」 11「知ると云ふことは、自己が自己を越えることである、自己が自己の外に出ることである。而   も逆に物が自己となること、物が我々の自己を限定することである。[…] 私の行為的直観と云 ふも、之に他ならない。」 12 “ 「これは動く禅だ」”. (Endō, 24) The same could be applied from my point of view for philosophy and martial arts in general (Ghilardi, 2019). 13 “千変万化の体の変化を悟るとかまた世界の動向をみて” (Endō, 2013, p. 38). 14 “「皆空」は、 「無」 あるいは 「絶対無」の意であるととらえ、 私は開祖の言葉を読んだ。” (Endō, 2013, p. 40). 15 The sign 合 can have plural meanings: concordance, math, deal, accord (in trade and music), settlement, arrangement to relate to the situation in the practice. 16 「 絶 対 的 一 者 の 自 己 否 定 的 に 個 物 的 多 と し て 成 立 す る 我 々 自 己 の 、 自 己 否 定 即 肯 定 的に、自己転換の自在的立場を云ふのである。我々の自己は此点に於て世界の始に触れる と共に常に終に触れて居るのである。」 “[Die radikale Alltäglichkeit] ist der Standpunkt der Freiheit in der Selbstumwendung unseres Selbst, das als individuelles Viele in der Selbstnegation des Absoluten entsteht, in der die Selbstnegation zugleich Selbstbejahung ist. In diesem Punkt berühren wir selbst den Anfang der Welt und zugleich immer auch ihr Ende” (Elberfeld, 1999, 273); “True free will arises from the unbounded standpoint that is attained when the self is overturned through its own self-negation, and thereby is attained an affirmation of the self which mirrors the absolute’s own self-negation” (Nishida, 1987, 113).

References Arisaka, Y. (2017). The controversial cultural identity of Japanese philosophy. In: B. Davis (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy (pp. 755–779). Oxford University Press. Arisaka, Y. (2021). Transition to the “eternal present”: Nishida Kitarō’s notion of self and responsibility in our context today. In: L. Krings, F. Greco, Y. Kuwayama (Eds.), Transitions: Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy (pp. 50–67). Chisokudō. Feenberg, A. & Arisaka, Y. (1990). Experiential Ontology. International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (2), 173–205. Davis, B. (2013). Nishida’s multicultural worldview: Contemporary significance and immanent critique. 西田哲学会年報 [Nishida Tetsu gakkai nenpō] 10, 183–203. Elberfeld, R. (1999). Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945) Das Verstehen der Kulturen. Moderne japanische Philosophie und die Frage nach der Interkulturalität. Rodopi. Elberfeld, R. (2014). ‘Absolut widersprüchliche Selbstidentität.’ Zur Genese des logischen Grundformel Nishidas von 1911 bis 1937. In: R. Elberfeld, Y. Arisaka (Eds.), Kitarō Nishida in der

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Radical Relationality Philosophie des 2ß. Jahrhunderts. Mit Texten Nishidas in deutscher Übersetzung (pp. 119–135). Karl Alber Verlag. Endō, Seishiro (遠藤, 征四郎). (2013).『響きと結び 。私の求める合気道。』(Hibiki to musubi: Watakushi no motomeru aikido, Vibration and connection: The Aikido that I Pursue). 廣済堂出版, Kosaidoshuppan. Feenberg, A., & Arisaka, Y. (1990). Experiential Ontology. International Philosophical Quarterly 30 (2), 173–205. Fongaro, E. (2021). Trans/Formations. Tentative Remarks on the Practice of Kata as Bodily Experience of Time. In L. Krings, F. Greco, & Y. Kuwayama (Eds.), Transitions: Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy (pp. 112–121). Chisokudō. Fongaro, E. (2023a). Kata. In S. Flavel, C. Robbiano (Eds.), Key Concepts in World Philosophy (pp. 385–392). Bloomsbury. Fongaro, E. (2023b). Postfazione. In K. Nishida, Dall’agente al vedente (pp. 449–469). Mimesis. Galliano, L. (Ed.). (2004). Ma: la sensibilità estetica giapponese. Angolo Manzoni. Ghilardi, M. (Ed.) (2020). Arti Marziali e filosofia. Percorsi tra forme e discipline del combattimento. Mimesis. Ghilardi, M. & Palmieri, A. (Eds.). (2020). Meditazione, mindfulness e neuroscienze. Percorsi tra teoria e ricerca scientifica. Mimesis. Greco, F. & Krings, L. (2021). Logik der Grenze: Praktiken des Übergehens im Philosophieren Nishida Kitarōs. In L. Krings, F. Greco, Y. Kuwayama (Eds.), Transitions: Crossing Boundaries in Japanese Philosophy (pp. 227–277). Chisokudō. Heidegger, M. (2006). Identität und differenz. In: F.-W. v. Herrmann (Ed.), Identität und Differenz. Vol. 11 of Heidegger Collected Works (Heidegger Gesamtausgabe), Vittorio Klostermann. Cited as GA. Heisig, J. W. (2016). Much ado About Nothingness: Essays on Nishida and Tanabe. Chisokudō. Heisig, J. W. (2019). Of Gods and Minds: In Search of a Theological Commons. Chisokudō. Heisig, J. W. & Maraldo, J. C. (1995). Rude Awakenings Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism. University of Hawai’I Press. Hirota, D (1995). Winds in the Pines: Classic Writings of the Way of Tea as a Buddhist Path. Asian Humanities Press. Izutsu, T. & Izutsu, T (1981). The Theory of Beauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan. Springer. Japanischer Teeweg Ueda Sōko Ryū. (n.d.). https://www.teezeremonie-zen.de/teeweg/ueda-s% C3%B4ko-ry%C3%BB/ Kabat-Zinn, J (2014). Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hachette Books. Masuno, S. (1999). Ten Landscapes. Edited by J.G. Truelove. Rockport Publishers Inc. Nishida, K. (1987). Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview (D.A. Dilworth, Trans.). University of Hawai’ Press. Nishida, K. (2003–2020).『西田幾多郎全集』 [Nishida Kitarō zenshu, Nishida Kitarō Collected Works]. 2nd ed. 25 vol. Iwanami. Cited as NKZ. Ōhashi, R., Elberfeld, R., & Krings, L. (Eds.). (2023). Blumenspiegel: Ein Grundlagentext Zur Praxis und Ästhetik des Japanischen Nō-Theaters. Brill/Fink. Ohnishi, T. & Ohnishi, T. (2019). Philosophy, psychology, physics and practice of Ki. eCAM, 2009, 6 (2), 175–183. https://doi.org/10.1093/ecam/nen005 Okakura, K. (2007). The Book of Tea. Stone Bridge Press. Sen, S. (1979). Tea Life, Tea Mind. Weatherhill. Stanford Encyclopedia. (2019). Nishida Kitarō. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nishida-kitaro/#Bib Suares, P. (2011). The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida, Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit. Lexington Books. Westbrook, A. & Ratti, O. (2001). Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere. Tuttle.

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9 PHENOMENOLOGICAL INSIGHTS FROM POSTURAL YOGA PRACTICE Hayden Kee

Introduction “Babies are natural born yogis.” This is a comment that postural yoga practitioners are wont to make when observing infants in their spontaneous bodily explorations. Infants come into the world with everything to learn about their bodies. Their learning is experimental, achieved through what Meltzoff and Moore (1997) calls “body babbling”: infants move their bodies to play with their sensorimotor possibilities throughout development just as they move their tongues, verbally babbling, to experiment with possibilities of their vocal apparatus during language acquisition. We continue to learn about our bodies throughout childhood and, if we are lucky, into adulthood. However, at some stage of development many of us will settle into a kind habitual oblivion toward our bodies. Once we have learned to operate them well enough for our daily routine activities, our bodies can recede into the background of awareness, barring some malfunction that renders them conspicuous to us again. Further, the enculturation of bodies requires that we be able to silence and repress our bodily sensations and desires so that we can participate normally in the human cultural world. In more extreme though all too common cases, shame and trauma can make one’s own body a place of aversion or even terror. The upshot is that many of us end up living in a strained or complacent ignorance of our own bodies in our day-to-day adult life. Consider how seldom most of us are aware of our most basic and vital bodily processes, such as the beating of our hearts or the expansion and contraction of our lungs. Confronted with such estrangement and alienation from our own bodies, establishing a contemplative postural yoga practice can offer a pathway to reembodiment, allowing us to reappropriate our own forgotten bodies and, indeed, to rediscover ourselves. But just what is this body, this self, that we return to and rediscover in yoga practice? Classically, yoga was seen as a path toward moksha, liberation. Such liberation is said to be achieved through overcoming ignorance and achieving insight – insight, indeed, into the true nature of the self and reality. This is the case not only of the classical yoga of Patanjali. It is also true of the later emerging hatha yoga traditions with their emphasis on bodily practices. Hatha yoga is, to take the word literally, a yoga of force. Its path to liberation consists of sometimes quite aggressive practices of bodily discipline and transformation. One might 138

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have thought that a yoga of force, a yoga of the body, is no longer a yoga of knowledge. Yet in the very first lines of the Gheranda Samhita, a canonical source text on hatha yoga, the student asks the teacher to instruct him in the “yoga of the body” which is said to bring “knowledge of the ultimate reality” (Mallinson, 2004). Hatha yoga, then, as a contemplative bodily practice that understands itself as a radically experimental path toward self-knowledge, should be of considerable interest to phenomenology and embodied cognitive science. In this contribution I will offer a phenomenological interpretation of certain aspects of postural yoga practice. I will thus restrict the scope of inquiry to the hatha yoga tradition, with a focus on its bodily practices of posture and breathing. Indeed, strictly speaking, I will primarily be interpreting a contemporary version of hatha yoga practice sometimes called Modern Postural Yoga (Singleton, 2010). While the various yoga lineages themselves offer rich conceptual frameworks for articulating the experience of postural yoga, my aim here is primarily to use concepts from the phenomenological tradition to articulate and interpret yoga practice and experience. While this may shed a different light on postural yoga practice that could be of interest to yoga practitioners and more classical yoga philosophy, that will not be my focus. I am more concerned to see how we can illuminate or revise phenomenological concepts and advance discussions in embodied and phenomenological approaches to the mind by examining yoga practice. There may also be a pedagogical insight for the instruction of phenomenology to be gained from this approach, a point to which I will return in the conclusion. Previously, most discussion of yoga and phenomenology has focused on the classical yoga tradition in dialogue with Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology (Sinari, 1965; Puligandla, 1970; Paranjpe & Hanson, 1988). While this is a legitimate line of inquiry, I am here interested to pursue the possible mutual enlightenment between the hatha yoga tradition, with its emphasis on embodiment, and the embodied aspects of phenomenology and contemporary cognitive science. Comparatively little has been written on this topic (with the noteworthy exception of Morley [2001, 2008]). While I will be focusing on slightly different issues than Morley, I still largely adhere to his methodological inspiration in pursuing this encounter: “Phenomenology needs a somatic methodology that can go beyond academic language and yoga needs a language that will not do violence to the lived somatic experience of contemplative practice” (Morley, 2008, p. 161). Classical, hatha, and modern postural yoga practices are multifaceted. Patanjali’s classical yoga (dating probably from the 4th or 5th century CE) contained eight angas, or “limbs,” of practice. These include various ethical prescriptions (yamas and niyamas), posture or seat (asana), control of the breath or vital energy (pranayama), withdrawal of the senses (pratyahara), concentration (dharana), meditation (dhyana), and samadhi. While Patanjali’s yoga said comparatively little about asana and pranayama, the more bodily components of practice, these aspects become central in hatha yoga practice. Hatha yoga probably emerged around the 11th century and attained its classical formulation in texts like the Hatha Yoga Pradipika around the 15th century. Hatha further develops bodily practices such as purifications, dietary restrictions, mudras, and various binds, or locks (bandhas), and a rich spiritual anatomy of the yogic body with themes drawn from tantra. While the goal of yoga practice continued to be liberation through the attainment of transformed states of consciousness, the path to achieve these increasingly focused on manipulation of the body. Modern Postural Yoga practice, which has emerged over the past hundred years or so, retains various of these practices, but often and increasingly (though by no means exclusively) in secularized form where the understanding of the body 139

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is shaped by mainstream modern science. The focus in much modern postural practice is on asana, with a much-expanded repertoire of postures and techniques supported by mindful breathing. As such, and given the relevance of such practices for phenomenology and embodied cognitive science, asana and pranayama will be the main focus of the ­current contribution.

Posture (Asana) Early Sanskrit uses of the term asana seem to refer simply to a seat one sits on, or to the posture of sitting. Contrary to what is sometimes claimed, it is unlikely that ancient yoga practitioners disposed of anything like the wide range of asanas that one will encounter in Modern Postural Yoga. In later centuries, the scope of the term expanded alongside the growing repertoire of postures. In this sense, asana is roughly equivalent to the English pose and posture, by which it is most often translated. In this section, I will begin with a brief examination of a simple asana to draw out a few themes of phenomenological interest from asana practice. I will then discuss further asanas to show how each illuminates different aspects of embodied experience.

An Initial Example: Tree pose Consider a simple posture such as tree pose (virkasana – see Figure 9.1). The practitioner balances on one foot. The other leg is bent at the knee and opened to the side. The sole of the foot of the bent leg is placed firmly into the inner thigh of the standing leg. There are many variations for the hands and arms. The hands may be placed in prayer position in front of the heart, or the arms may reach up to the sky like branches of a tree. The gaze may be fixed straight ahead or at a point on the floor, or the eyes may converge on the tip of the nose, look up, or even close. Even a simple asana such as this requires considerable awareness and education to be executed expertly.1 Though there is hardly a major muscle group of the body that is not involved in this posture, brute strength and flexibility alone are not sufficient. The body schema must be coordinated and cultivated. In the absence of this training, the novice wavers like a sapling in the wind. In response, he focuses attention on different regions of the proprioceptive body to stabilize the posture. Aspects of the sensorimotor body schema he had previously not attended to suddenly become salient. A precise activation of the standing foot is required to maintain a broad and steady foundation for the pose. However, as the novice directs attention to the standing foot to train its activation, he may find that the buttocks have gone soft. Weight shifts away from the midline resulting in an overall imbalanced posture. The tree wobbles. The correct degree of reciprocal isometric force between the bent leg through the sole of the foot and the inner thigh of the standing leg will help restore equilibrium toward the midline. But in focusing on this aspect of the pose, the practitioner may lose the correct activation of the standing foot, or the deep core muscles may become unstable, and now integrity is lost elsewhere in the body. To hold all of this together at once demands experimenting and cultivating a new awareness – a kind of new body babbling through which we (re)educate the body schema. Eventually, once these local microattunements have become incorporated into an overall structure of bodily comportment, awareness may become less localized. For the expert, awareness may be more a general, monitoring field encompassing the whole 140

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Figure 9.1  Tree pose (virkasana).

balancing body rooted to the earth, balancing in space. She makes minute adjustments in any area where a slight loss of integrity might arise, but without losing awareness of the global integrity of the posture. She stands like a redwood, slow and stable in the winds, adjusting almost imperceptibly. There are three major themes from this initial example that I want to highlight: (1) the grounding and openness of the body; (2) the reflexivity of the body; and (3) the illuminating awareness of the proprioceptive, minimal, body-schematic self. In the following subsections, I will consider a few further asanas and introduce some concepts from phenomenology to further develop these themes. 141

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Grounding and Openness: Upward Bow Pose One might think that there is no thematic object of action or perception in postural yoga practice. Whereas in many other bodily practices, the practitioner is directed toward some external object or objective, postural yoga practice seems to lack any such reference. Or, as we shall see in a moment, the “object” would appear to be one’s body itself, insofar as the practitioner often reflexively acts upon her own body in practice. While there is a certain truth in this, at the same time, the lack of an object of the activity in the common sense of the term in fact allows postural yoga practice to bring to awareness deeper aspects of the relationship of self and world that are often overlooked in our object- and objectiveoriented perception and action. The “objects” of postural yoga practice turn out to be our most primitive objects: the elements of experience and structural aspects of all common perception and action. Considering a posture such as wheel pose (chakrasana, sometimes also called urdhva dhanurasana, “upward bow” – see Figure 9.2). The practitioner begins by lying supine with the knees bent and soles of the feet placed on the floor. The hands are placed beside the head with the fingers pointing toward the feet. The practitioner then presses into the hands and feet to lift the chest, abdomen, and hips toward the sky, creating the shape of a wheel or a bow. To perform this pose with integrity, the body must be thoroughly grounded. We saw this theme already with our study of tree pose, where the foot does not simply rest upon, or happen to find itself on, the ground, but must grab a chunk of earth, as the roots of a tree do, in order to provide a suitable base for the pose. Similarly, in wheel pose, the hands and feet must ground down into the earth in order to support the upward movement of the posture. Indeed, in any movement between postures, in any balancing posture, and even in the simple stillness of standing or sitting, the earth is disclosed in postural yoga practice as that unmoving point of reference for all movement and stillness

Figure 9.2  Upward bow pose (urdhva dhanurasana).

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(cf. Husserl, 1940). As earthly beings governed by gravity, this constant coupling and reference to the earth is a structural feature of our perception, action, and existence. But we are seldom aware of it. Postural practice restores the intimacy of this body-earth pairing. This is also true of more passive aspects of practice that instruct us to release our body into the earth (as opposed to wheel and tree pose, which involve both downward and upward directions of activation). In corpse pose (shavasana), we completely give our bodies over to the earth, allowing them to dissolve back into dust and return from whence they came.2 The grounding action of wheel pose allows me to experience my body in its relation to the earth and to know myself as a gravitational being. Simultaneous to this grounding activation, however, and in equilibrium with it, is an upward movement and opening of my body toward the heavens. If the grounding of hands and feet in this posture illustrates our constant relation to that very special elemental “object” the earth, the openness of the heart and body toward the sky and air illustrates the body’s radical openness, receptivity, and vulnerability. And where the grounding to the earth is that constant, most familiar, unchanging point of reference, the openness before the sky stands for the body’s receptivity toward any possible object, its radical openness to possibility and the unknown. Consider the exposure of the anterior line of the body in wheel pose: the line from the genitals to the chin, along which our most vital organs are most vulnerable, is radically lengthened and utterly exposed. Even the intercostal spaces expand as though the lungs themselves wanted to escape the ribs and inhale directly the surrounding air. The limbs are occupied supporting the weight of the body and hence cannot protect the anterior midline, while the eyes cannot even see that to which the body is exposed. This radical openness of the body before the world illustrates and perhaps helps clarify a concept from Merleau-Ponty’s late phenomenological ontology: the dehiscence of the flesh (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p.  123, 2007, p.  375). In botany, dehiscence is the splitting open of an external structure of a plant to release internal contents, as in the dehiscence of a seed pod to release its seeds. In medicine, dehiscence is the reopening of a closed wound along its incision. In Merleau-Ponty’s ontological appropriation, the term alludes to the radical openness of our sensing bodies to the surrounding world. My experience, my sensing and perceiving of the world, is an “interiority” that inheres in a body that is itself a part of this world, an “exteriority.” This point can be illustrated in the morphology of our sense organs: the eye is the locus of my seeing the world (interiority), while at the same time that very seeing of the world is visible for other visions in the anatomical structure of my eye (exteriority). The exteroceptive senses of vision and touch (the seeing eye that can also be seen, the touching hand that can also be touched) provide clear illustrations of this point. However, there is an interiority of interoception (e.g., proprioception of my muscles and posture, visceroception of my internal organs) that is not so easily reversed into an exterior manifestation. And yet, in poses such as upward bow, it is almost as if the practitioner wanted to bare her most intimate internal sensing before the world, to put it on display, to be more vulnerable, more exposed, more dehiscent toward the world and others. It is no accident that postural yoga practitioners often refer to backbending postures such as wheel pose as heart opening postures. Against the defensive tendencies that lead us to close our posture and hearts, postural yoga practice cultivates the strength and courage to be more open, more receptive, more vulnerable before the world.3 143

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Reflexivity: Bound Lotus Pose and Sundial Pose The openness of the perceiving body and its extension in space allow for a particular orientation of the body that is of special interest to phenomenology: the possibility of the body to reflexively perceive itself, of this openness to close back upon itself. Since my body is one of the things in the world, I can see and touch it like other things in the world. When my right hand touches my left, I realize that my sensing body is also a sensible thing in the world. This prepares the possibility for the “pairing” (Paarung) described canonically by Husserl in his Cartesian Meditations (1977) and later appropriated and elaborated by Merleau-Ponty in various texts (1964, 1968). Because I can experience my body as a touching-touched thing in the world, I can also apprehend other bodies that I perceive as animate bodies like my own, as being the locus of an experiential opening onto the world just like mine, even if that alterity is never given to me in the same original mode of presentation as my own. Various yoga postures experiment with and extend the human body’s native capacity for reflexivity. Consider bound lotus pose (baddha padmasana – see Figure 9.3). The practitioner is seated with legs crossed. Each foot is placed across the upper thigh or in the groin of the opposite leg. The arms cross behind the back and each hand grabs the big toe of the same side of the body on the opposite side of the body (i.e., the right hand grabs the right big toe, which has crossed the midline to the left side of the body, and the left hand

Figure 9.3  Bound lotus pose (baddha padmasana).

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grabs the left big toe, which has crossed to the right side of the body). The torso may remain upright with the sternum elevated slightly, or it may fold forward allowing the lower ribs to rest on the shins and the forehead on the ground, thus adding a further element of reflexivity along with a variation on the grounding theme. Bound lotus pose is no doubt an astonishing experiment and variation on the basic bodily possibility of reflexivity. But is it of any interest to phenomenology? After all, it may seem that the basic insight into the dual-aspectivity of the body (a thing among other things, and my experiential opening onto things) and the possibility of pairing with other bodies that it entails are already completely contained in the much more quotidian experience of my left hand touching my right. While this may be true strictly speaking, I would suggest that in long-familiar experiences of reflexivity, such as my two hands touching one another, we lose the strangeness and wonder of the experience upon which pairing with other bodies is based. When my left hand and right touch one another, I am seldom astonished by the alterity contained within my own dual-aspect body. By contrast, when we arrive at a new mode of bodily reflexivity in yoga practice, we experience anew the marvel of this reflexivity of one’s own body and hence we have the potential to experience anew the insight into alterity that it enables. In some cases, it may even happen that I at first do not realize that it is my own body that I have reflexively discovered. Consider in this light sundial pose (surya yantrasana – see Figure 9.4).

Figure 9.4  Sundial pose (surya yantrasana).

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The practitioner is seated upright with one leg in flexion and placed behind the same side shoulder. The opposite hand reaches overhead to grab the elevated foot, ankle, or shin. This pose demands considerable flexibility and most bodies will require committed practice before they can access it. But when one does eventually achieve this posture, what astonishment to discover one’s left foot above and behind one’s head with one’s right hand! Indeed, at first one might not even realize that it is one’s own foot that one has found there.4 The sequence of experience is something like the following: “(1) My hand has grasped something; (2) that something is a someone, an animate body such as my own; (3) in fact, that someone is me, my own body that I have discovered.” Yoga practice, then, restores the originary experience of the dual nature of one’s body and of alterity within oneself against the complacency and familiarity of the habitual, everyday body. It would be interesting to study empirically whether such practice augments one’s capacity for empathy.

Body Schema and the Minimal Self In all of the postures we have considered so far, the practitioner is cultivating their most basic bodily practical capacity for perceiving and acting in the world. They are expanding and refining the field of the “I can” of activity within the world. That is to say, they are educating the body schema and cultivating its range of possibilities. The practitioner becomes stronger, more flexible, and better coordinated. But at the same time as the body schema’s possibilities are being developed, the practitioner is becoming more sensitized to and aware of their own body. The proprioceptive sense of self, this body as the space of my existing in the world, is being illuminated, elevated from its usual neglected state of pre-reflective self-awareness to the level of an explicit self-awareness. To clarify this point, consider the distinction between body image and body schema. Gallagher and Zahavi (2020, p. 165) define the body image as the “a system of experiences, attitudes, and beliefs where the object of such intentional states is one’s own body.” These may include perceptions, conceptual understanding, and emotional attitudes. By contrast, the body schema involves “(1) the close-to-automatic system of processes that constantly regulates posture and movement to serve intentional action and (2) our pre-reflective[, proprioceptive,] and non-objectifying body awareness.” My suggestion is that in attentively, mindfully cultivating (1), making the usually “automatic” body schema the focus and purpose of our activity instead of its presupposition, we are at the same time heightening (2), elevating it from pre-reflective awareness to a higher, explicit awareness that is nonetheless non-objectifying. In postural yoga practice, my awareness of my body is illuminated, but without it becoming the object of my experience in the usual sense – that is, without it becoming body image.5 I thus disagree with Gallagher and Zahavi when they claim that: To the extent that one does become explicitly aware of one’s own body in terms of monitoring or directing perceptual attention to limb position, movement, posture, pleasure, pain, kinaesthetic experience, and so on, such awareness constitutes aspects of a body image. (2020, p. 165) This may be true of some cases, but not necessarily true of all. We can distinguish between different kinds of “monitoring” or “directing perceptual attention.” Some such monitoring 146

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may be objectifying and thus makes up part of the body image, while other forms of monitoring may be non-objectifying and hence are rather more like a sensitizing and illuminating of the body schema. If I have no afferent proprioceptive feedback from my hand and hence must monitor its movements with careful visual attention, then this is arguably an objectifying monitoring and, as per Gallagher and Zahavi’s account, contributes to the body image. By contrast, if I am monitoring my hand movements with my eyes closed through careful attention to proprioceptive sensation and tactile feedback, then this seems to me to be a different sort of monitoring. It is non-objectifying and is a cultivation of the body schema rather than being an objectifying contribution to the body image. If I am correct about this, then we have here an example of how a phenomenological reflection on postural yoga practice can help us sharpen and revise phenomenological concepts and claims. In articulating the character of pre-reflective self-awareness involved in the body schema, we at the same time touch on the question of the nature of the minimal, core self. This self is an experiential self-posited as the most basic conscious notion of self. Phenomenologists who defend a minimal self-grant that the minimal self is embodied. This theoretical position is a natural complement to a mindful postural yoga practice, in which the embodied aspect of the minimal self is illuminated.6 It is interesting to note that many theoretical views that deny the existence of a core or minimal self are associated with more traditional, seated, still-body contemplative practices. Could it be that this theoretical position is biased by the influence of a practice that is more likely to bring about experiences in which embodiment can more easily be deemphasized? If so, then the obvious rejoinder would be that the support that contemplative postural yoga practice offers for the minimal self view is also biased. But it is at least worth noting that there is a discussion to be had here. A certain privilege has been granted to Buddhist traditions in contemporary contemplative studies (Thompson, 2020). This may have led philosophers interested in contemplative practice as a source of insight or corroboration for views in the sciences and philosophy of mind to overlook the richer array of possibilities that the world of contemplative practices, including postural yoga, has to offer.

Vinyasa: Asana in Motion This juxtaposition of still-body practices with postural yoga is most striking when we consider those styles of contemporary asana practice in which movement is essential to the practice: vinyasa asana practice (from the Sanskrit nyasa, “to place”; and vi, “in a special way”). Vinyasa practice emphasizes movement and transitions between postures more than the final posture at which one arrives. We have seen that some postures exemplarily exhibit the reflexive characteristic of the body, while others exemplarily exhibit its dehiscent characteristic. In many vinyasa series of postures, the practitioner alternates between reflexive, folding, contracting postures; and dehiscent, opening, expanding postures. Movement, and its dynamic interplay with moments of stillness, are the focus of awareness. The self that we experience here is a pervasively motoric, moving self. In its highest expressions, vinyasa becomes meditation in movement.

Breathing (Pranayama) Asana is typically meant to be practiced with mindful, controlled breathing. In vinyasa practice, the sequence of dynamic postures is carefully selected to synchronize with inhalation 147

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and exhalation. Inhalation represents expansion and movement toward the external world, while exhalation is contraction and inward movement. Accordingly, inhalation is often paired with an opening, dehiscent posture, while exhalation may be paired with a closing, reflexive posture. Indeed, breathing is itself a striking emblem of the dehiscence of the body: through the aperture of the mouth, the lungs (internal, typically invisible organs) are open to the outside, which they draw into the body. With inhalation, the lungs and torso expand to take in what is external. Even the intercostal spaces and skin stretch to render the lungs more open to the outside.7 Even when posture is held statically rather than being dynamic as in vinyasa, and the practitioner goes through many cycles of breath while holding a posture, breath is still an important feature of asana practice. Asanas involve twists, bends, and folds. These may compress, stretch, or otherwise challenge the musculoskeletal structures involved in breathing. This forces the practitioner to learn to breathe mindfully and to use different parts of the breathing anatomy. In doing so, the practitioner is not only transforming the way the body breathes normally, creating more space, steadiness, and ease for the breath. She is also raising to explicit awareness the usually automatic activity of breathing, thereby sensitizing her interoceptive familiarity with the respiratory system. This is a further respect in which asana practice educates the body schema and the pre-reflective experience of bodily self that accompanies it, again in a non-objectifying way. Though we are not usually aware of the body schema as being involved in breathing, pranayama practice instructs us on this point.

Another Kind of Breathlessness? While pranayama can be practiced alongside dynamic or static asanas that challenge breathing, the most deliberate pranayama practices involve choosing a stable, comfortable posture that allows the practitioner to concentrate on breathing alone. Hatha yogis have developed numerous pranayama techniques, such as humming bee breath (bhramari pranayama), where the practitioner covers their eyes, nose, mouth, and ears and creates a humming in the skull through a forceful exhalation; and bellows breath (bastrika pranayama), where the practitioner breathes in and out forcefully and rapidly like a bellows. Some of these techniques involve the retention of breath (kumbhaka). Retention may be performed with the lungs full (antara kumbhaka) or empty (bahya kumbhaka). While the practitioner may retain breath by deliberately holding the breath, retention can also come about spontaneously, involuntarily, during pranayama practice. For example, during bastrika practice, the practitioner may find that, without consciously deciding to retain breath, the breath itself – of its own accord, as it were – suddenly stands still.8 If involuntary breath retention occurs with the lungs empty (involuntary bahya kumbhaka), there is literally an experience of breathlessness. In her phenomenological studies of breathlessness, Havi Carel distinguishes between normal and pathological breathlessness (Carel, 2018). Normal breathlessness is the breathlessness a healthy individual might experience after climbing several flights of stairs or after a period of aerobic exercise. Pathological breathlessness, by contrast, is the kind of breathlessness experienced by a person with impaired lung or heart functioning. Carel describes this as “a total and overwhelming experience of loss of control” and as being “acutely unpleasant” (2018, p.  237). What is interesting about involuntary bahya kumbhaka in this context is that, though it is a 148

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form of breathlessness, and is not what one would call “normal” breathlessness, it is also not necessarily an unpleasant experience. If, indeed, it is properly classified as a form of breathlessness, then it appears to occupy a special place in the taxonomy of experiences of breathlessness.9

Ontologies of Breath There has been some interest recently in the experience of breathing not only for breath’s therapeutic and contemplative potential, nor solely for the interests of an embodied phenomenology. Taking inspiration from Merleau-Ponty, recent research even pursues a respiratory ontology (Berndtson, 2018). While these efforts have drawn from phenomenology and various contemplative breath practices, no one has as yet discussed the forceful hatha yoga pranayama practices in the context of a respiratory phenomenology or ontology. The hatha pranayamas could be of especial interest, however, precisely because in their forceful style they push the capacities of breath to its limits. In doing so, they occasionally lead to altered states of awareness that break radically with our everyday experiences of breath and embodiment. In the longstanding tradition of phenomenologists reflecting on the normal condition by way of the abnormal, hatha yoga pranayama may harbor valuable resources for respiratory phenomenology and ontology.10

Conclusion Amid the interest at the intersection of phenomenology, embodied cognitive science, and contemplative studies, there has been very little research thus far into hatha yoga and Modern Postural Yoga. However, asana and pranayama yoga practice contain much to recommend them to phenomenological consideration. Unlike some contemplative practices, postural yoga practice puts our embodiment in focus. Unlike other comparably embodied activities, however, such as dance or pilates, postural yoga draws from a long heritage of both philosophical theory and contemplative practice. This includes a tradition of reflection on embodied contemplative experience with rich conceptual resources for articulating experience which I have here not even begun to integrate. Doing so would further deepen the mutual enlightenment between phenomenology and postural yoga. The hatha yoga tradition also includes other aspects of practice that I have not explored here. A concentration exercise such as trataka (single point staring) offers insight into the embodied nature of vision, while nada yoga (sound yoga) practices do something similar for hearing. Yoga nidra (yoga sleep) brings our consciousness to the liminal spaces that separate waking and dreaming, allowing us a free exploration and phenomenological encounter of boundary phenomena of consciousness. Further, as indicated above, there may be some pedagogical value of postural yoga practice for illustrating certain central ideas of embodied phenomenology. In all of this, we see the tremendous potential awaiting those practitioners and researchers who dare to explore the mutual enlightenment of postural yoga and phenomenology.

Acknowledgments Images by Phoenix Li, procured with funding from the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Arts Publication Subvention Fund. 149

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Notes 1 Expertly here means, with sthira and sukha, steadiness and ease, as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutra 2.46 instructs asana should be performed. 2 The importance of corpse pose in hatha yoga practice signals another theme for discussion ­between yoga and existential phenomenology: mortality. 3 This brief discussion of dehiscence is inevitably inadequate to the full sense of this concept in Merleau-Ponty’s late thought. In particular, I here emphasize only the dehiscence of the animate body toward the world and neglect the reverse movement of dehiscence from the world toward the body. Some readers may also question whether it makes sense to speak of a body as more or less dehiscent. Dehiscence, as a properly ontological concept, might seem to denote a structural feature of animate bodies and the flesh of the world that does not admit of degrees. However, there is some textual precedent for speaking of degrees of dehiscence and, indeed, of flesh. In “Eye and Mind,” Merleau-Ponty describes an imaginary body that would not be able to see or touch itself as an “adamantine body” and “not entirely flesh [pas tout a fait chair]” (2007, p. 355). See the following section. 4 This is especially true if one is being assisted into the posture by an instructor or fellow practitioner. The student may not initially be able to identify if it is her own body or the instructor’s that she has grasped. (This phenomenon is the occasion for much mischief among playful practitioners.) This flags the topic of the experience of intercorporeity in yoga practice, which warrants further investigation. 5 My account of how pre-reflective bodily self-awareness is raised to explicit awareness has some similarities with Dunne’s (2015, 2018) understanding of the enhancement of the ability to monitor self-awareness through certain meditation practices. Thanks to Odysseus Stone for bringing this to my attention. 6 Given the importance of the question of the self in yogic philosophy, it should be noted that different yogic lineages and philosophies have different views on the question. Again, as it is not my current purpose to study these theoretical components of yoga, I set aside the question of whether and which yoga philosophy concurs with the account of the minimal self I am here entertaining. 7 However, though the human body, and mammalian bodies more generally, exhibit the dehiscence of breathing, it is even more clearly on display in the gills of fish, a remarkable illustration of a dehiscent anatomical structure. 8 The phenomenon is rare and its occurrence somewhat unpredictable. As such, to my knowledge it has not yet been studied in the rapidly growing empirical research on pranayama. 9 It could be argued that, because the pranayama practitioner’s blood oxygen levels are not necessarily depleted, or simply because the experience is not unpleasant, or strained, this should not properly be regarded as an incidence of breathlessness. But if this is how one chooses to accommodate the case of involuntary bahya kumbhaka, this is itself an interesting conclusion to reach. The anomalous phenomenon leads us to a more precise account of what we mean by breathlessness. 10 Researchers interested in this topic may also find exploring the rich imagery of dehiscence valuable for thinking through breath as an ontological concept.

References Berndtson, P. (2018). The possibility of a new respiratory ontology. In L. Škof, P. Berndtson (Eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing. State University of New York Press. Carel, H. (2018). Invisible suffering: The experience of breathlessness. In L. Škof, P. Berndtson (Eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing. State University of New York Press. Dunne, J. D. (2018). Reflexivity in Buddhist epistemology. In M. Farjoun (Ed.), Dualities, Dialectics, and Paradoxes in Organizational Life (pp.  82–105). Oxford University Press. https://doi. org/10.1093/oso/9780198827436.003.0005 Dunne, J. D. (2015). Buddhist styles of mindfulness: A heuristic approach. In B.D. Ostafin, M.D. Robinson, B.P.  Meier (Eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation (pp.  251–270). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-2263-5_18 Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2020). The Phenomenological Mind (3rd edition). Routledge.

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Phenomenological Insights from Postural Yoga Practice Husserl, E. (1940). Umsturz der kopernikanischen lehre. In M. Farber (Ed.), Philosophical Essays in Memory of Edmund Husserl (pp. 307–325). Harvard University Press. Husserl, E. (1977). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff Pub. Mallinson, J. (2004). The Gheranda Samhita (illustrated edition). YogaVidya.com. Meltzoff, A. N., & Moore, M. K. (1997). Explaining facial imitation: A theoretical model. Early Development & Parenting 6 (3–4), 179–192. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-0917(199709/12)6: 3/43.0.CO;2-R Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The philosopher and his shadow. In R. McCleary (Trans.), Signs (pp. 159–181). Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible (A. Lingis, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2007). The Merleau-Ponty Reader (L. Lawlor, T. Toadvine, Eds.). Northwestern University Press. Morley, J (2001). Inspiration and expiration: Yoga practice through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body. Philosophy East and West 51 (1), 73–82. https://doi.org/10.1353/pew.2001.0013 Morley, J (2008). Embodied consciousness in tantric yoga and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Religion and the Arts 12, 144–163. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852908X270980 Paranjpe, A., & Hanson, K. (1988). On dealing with the stream of consciousness: A comparison of Husserl and yoga. In A.C. Paranjpe, D.Y.J. Ho, R.W. Rieber (Eds.), Asian Contributions to Psychology (pp. 215–231). Praeger Publishers. Puligandla, R (1970). Phenomenological reduction and yogic meditation. Philosophy East and West 20 (1), 19–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/1397657 Sinari, R (1965). The method of phenomenological reduction and yoga. Philosophy East and West 15 (3/4), 217–228. https://doi.org/10.2307/1397061 Singleton, M (2010). Yoga Body: The Origins of Modern Posture Practice. Oxford University Press. Thompson, E (2020). Why I Am Not a Buddhist. Yale University Press.

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10 A PHENOMENOLOGY OF MINDFULNESS PRACTICE IN SUFISM Marc Applebaum

In occidental societies “mindfulness” is commonly associated with techniques adapted from Theravada Buddhist meditation. Those who practice such approaches to mindfulness often seek stress reduction, greater present-centeredness, and enhanced connection to others and the natural world (see Kabat-Zinn, 2018). As Theravadan meditation was adapted for western audiences during the 1970s and 1980s – largely by westerners who had studied in the East – practices were gradually simplified, secularized, and severed from their Buddhist roots. Reframed as self-help techniques, popularized mindfulness increasingly came to aim at “an enhanced version of mundane experience” (Wynne, 2018, p. 50). While some teachers conveyed an important continuity with the Buddhist origins, meditation was broadly marketed as a tool with which to optimize the quality of one’s already-existing individual life (Wilson, 2014). But Theravadan meditation is predicated upon the non-self (anattā) doctrine, which makes a far more radical claim: that all things are without self – the literal meaning of anattā (Gupta, 2021). The “self” Theravada rejects is I-ness conceived of as a self-­subsisting, personal “owner” of one’s attributes (Albahari, 2006). Buddhism in the main denies the notion that one “has” an enduring personal self; from this perspective, “there is no human being, there is only becoming” (Sarao, 2004, p.  18). Theravada claims that human being’s everyday sense of being-in-the-world – in particular one’s sense of having a bounded personal identity – is illusory, the result of a fundamental misperception which must be seen through. The meditative path aims at awakening (bodhi) and achieving liberation (moksha) by breaking through the mistaken conviction that one has a subsisting, personal ego (Gimello, 2004). Mindfulness in Theravadan practice is therefore directly linked to the discovery, through “nirvanic realization,” of the emptiness of personal selfhood in the light of nondelimited, awakened mind (Albahari, 2013, p. 95 n. 10). The English word “mindfulness” in reference to meditation originated in Rhys David’s 19th-century translation of the Pali term sati (smṛti in Sanskrit; see Gethin, 2011). Sati literally means to “remember” or “recall to mind” (Collins, 1982, p.  163). Why might meditating be conceived of as remembering? To meditate is to form an intention to awaken and gather one’s dispersed attention to that end.1 Progressively deepening sheer awareness loosens obstructive identifications with the contents of one’s consciousness. More than 152

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merely attachment to worldly objects, it is the meditator’s attachment to their own narrative identity that is loosened and ultimately transcended.2 The meditative aim is that awareness “no longer be compulsively captured and lost” in habitual the self-referential narrating that is necessary “to preserve the sense of a bounded self” (Albahari, 2006, p. 208). Liberation is to be achieved through the practitioner’s escaping dualistic self/other distinctions in the recollection of a more fundamental, unitive reality. “Unitive” is defined by scholars of mystical experience as entailing the falling away of self/other and subject/object distinctions, including the sense of strictly bounded personal identity (Forman, 1999; Jones and Gellman, 2022). In Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam, a primary Arabic term for meditation – dhikr – likewise has the literal meaning of “remembrance.”3 As will be seen, as in Theravada, the Sufi path to be investigated here regards meditative practice as a questioning of the meaning of selfhood “down to the bottom” by turning back to the ground of awareness as such. The stream within Sufism to be examined in this study is linked to Muhyiddin Ibn al-’Arabi (1165–1240 CE), known as Shaykh al-Akbar (“the greatest spiritual master”), among the most important and controversial of Muslim mystics (Knysh, 1999). Teacher-to-student lineages shaped by the influence of Ibn ‘Arabi from the 13th century to the present day are described as “Akbari” or “Akbarian” and the meditators whose accounts will be discussed as below are associated with one such Sufi school.4 Like Theravada, meditative practice in Akbari Sufism is said to come to fruition in unitive mystical experience, though that experience is not envisioned as the end of the spiritual journey.5 Therefore mindfulness, as meditative remembrance, refers to awareness practices that yield an awakening in which the practitioner is freed from their habitual, naively dualistic perception of themselves and their surrounding world to a unitive perception of reality. That awakening is claimed to reset and intensify the practitioner’s underlying sense of reality.6 Hence both Theravada and classical Sufism claim that remembrance yields a transformation in human being that includes yet exceeds psychological change. “Psychological” in this context is defined as the realm of human experience within which one’s individual selfhood is normally taken to be strictly defined by the boundary of one’s skin and one’s narrative as the biography of that strictly bounded being.7 Both Buddhism and Sufism purport to yield not only a profound shift in the practitioner’s sense of their identity and boundedness, but also and even more importantly in the person’s ethical and ontological frame of reference. Alongside this common ground, there are significant differences between the two traditions. Theravada claims that meditation is directed toward awakening (bodhi) to the reality that there is no enduring personal or Divine self or soul (Pali attā, Sanskrit ātman): all that exists is awareness as such (Gimello, 2004; Sarao, 2004). Akbari Sufism, in contrast, claims that meditative remembrance yields the effacement of the practitioner’s false sense of separate selfhood and the discovery of the source of their personal, contingent sense of I-ness in (or as) the Divine “I.”8 Hence in contrast to the Theravadan non-self-doctrine, Akbari Sufism espouses a model in which personal selfhood is both “empty” in the sense of being entirely contingent and reliant on the Divine, and “full” as a unique moment-to-moment locus of manifestation for the Divine (see Applebaum, 2019; 2023). The purpose of this study is threefold: to examine dhikr as a distinct form of mindfulness, to exemplify how phenomenology offers a unique means of exploring the meaning of meditative experience, and in so doing, convey a sense of Husserl and Fink’s account of self- and world-constitution, retracing the generative flow of constituting consciousness 153

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which underlies and is in a certain sense prior to the personal ego. I will first offer an overview of meditative remembrance in Akbari Sufism and the way it envisions the aim of meditative practice and the “complete human” (insan al-kamil) in contrast to Buddhism. I will turn to Husserl and Fink’s phenomenological exploration of the layers of conscious life and the constitution of selfhood, as setting the stage for a phenomenological investigation of meditative experience. I will share excerpts from contemporary accounts of meditative Sufi practice, interpreting them phenomenologically, and conclude with reflections on phenomenology and Akbari Sufism’s investigations of the origin and meaning of I-ness. In so doing I propose that phenomenological philosophy and psychology can contribute to the understanding of meditative experience in the light of an expansive conception of selfhood that Husserl termed “transcendental personhood.”

Meditative Remembrance in Akbari Sufism Islamic mysticism emerged in historically recognizable forms in the 9th–10th century CE and came to deeply impact the theological, ethical, poetic/aesthetic, proto-psychological and philosophical achievements throughout the Islamicate world (Geoffroy, 2010; Schimmel, 2011).9 Like the monastic paths in Buddhism, Sufi practice seeks a transformation of the whole human being, meditation being but one facet of this quest. Other dimensions include but are not limited to ethical self-reckoning (muhasaba), spiritual companionship (sahaba), careful reflection including analysis of sacred texts (tafakkara), and acts of service in community (Schimmel, 2011; Al-Daghistani, 2018). The goal of individual spiritual practice in Sufism is, as Shaikh (2012) wrote, “to enable a human being, through the cultivation of virtuous excellence (ihsan), to communicate directly and experientially with her Creator” (p. 35). The cultivation of relational ethics and good character traits in Sufism, known respectively as adab and akhlaq, have simultaneously been understood as the prerequisites for ethical community and proper relationship with God (Lapidus, 1984). Remembrance or dhikr (‫ ) ِذکْر‬means recollecting something important by calling it to mind; hence in the Qur’an dhikr signifies being mindful.10 Remembrance of God – dhikr Allah – is mentioned in connection with prayer as a feature of the human/divine relationship.11 In Qur’an, the human condition is described as one of tending to forget what is most important due to self-centered absorption in the affairs of daily life. The Arabic etymology of the word for human being – insan (‫ – )انسان‬is classically commented upon in just this context: as Cornell (2022) noted, the word for insan can be derived from either of two roots: “one root is the verb anisa, which means ‘to become close or intimate.’ The other root is nasiya, which means ‘to forget’” (p. 14). The frequent references to mindfulness in the Qur’an can be read as a call to awaken humans’ capacity for intimate proximity, over and against their propensity to distraction or heedlessness (Ar: ghaflah; see Izutsu, 2004, pp. 159–160). Moreover this mindfulness is framed as an intrinsically relational and mutual remembering. In the Qur’anic locus classicus commented upon by Sufis, God is reported to say: “So remember Me, I will remember you” (2:152).12 As is typical in Buddhism, Islam, and other religious traditions, only a minority of community members dedicate themselves to a lifelong path of meditative practice in the effort to actualize the faith’s soteriological claims. Historically, Theravada meditation was practiced exclusively by monks until modern reform movements simplified and spread meditation among lay Buddhists (Braun, 2013). The theme of Divine oneness (tawhid) is foundational in Islam and is exemplified in the profession of faith (shahada) reaffirmed multiple times 154

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daily in canonical prayer. Meditative remembrance is a core Sufi practice in the journey to personally and sapientially actualize this oneness (Chittick, 2007).13 As will be seen, for Sufism actualizing oneness does not result in a negation of the human/divine relationship in an undifferentiated unity; rather, it is claimed to clarify, amplify, and complete that intimate relationship. To this end, meditative remembrance practices in Sufism as a whole date back to at least the 10th century CE, taking two primary forms: vocal remembrance (dhikr lisani), often performed in group ceremonies, and silent remembrance, or remembrance of the heart (dhikr qalbi), often performed in solitude (Schimmel, 2011). Silent remembrance has usually been “recognized as superior” according to Schimmel (2011) because it represents a deeper internalization of the meditative aim: the unio mystica in which all vanishes but God (p.  171). Such silent remembrance is emphasized within the lineages linked to Ibn ’Arabi. Dhikr was described in unitive terms well before Ibn ‘Arabi. Abu’l Qasim al-­ Qushayri (pp. 986–1074) described the trajectory of remembrance as follows, commenting on Qur’an verse 2:152 mentioned above: “Remembrance is the immersion of the one who is remembering in the witnessing (shuhūd) of that which is remembered, and then it is being consumed in the existence (wujūd) of that which is being remembered until no trace (athar) remains of you doing the remembering, so that it is said ‘so and so’ once was. So remember Me, I will remember you, i.e., ‘be consumed in Our existence (wujūd) and We will remember you after your annihilation [fana’] from yourself” (2017, pp. 115–116). Likewise, for Ibn ‘Arabi (1980a, 1980b, 2004) and his followers, the primary meditative aim of meditative practice is to personally actualize Divine Oneness underlying the multiplicity of the phenomenal world – thereby discovering oneself to be a locus of that Oneness – and live that realization in service to Divinity and other humans in whatever way best fits the individual person’s unique endowments or “preparedness” (isti’dād).14 The eminent 15thcentury Akbari, ‘Abd al-Rahmān Jami, commenting on a text of Ibn ‘Arabi, wrote that until that Oneness is realized through spiritual wayfaring, the individual person will mistakenly assume that his unique qualities belongs “to him personally” rather than understanding “that they are the attributes of God reflected in the mirror of his preparedness (isti’dād)...” (Chittick, 1982, p. 42). The first leg in the meditative journey is aimed at transcending the illusion of strictly bounded selfhood. This “arc of ascent” (qaws-i su’udi) is said to culminate in the unitive event of effacement (fana’, “passing away from”) the practitioner’s separate selfhood (Chittick, 1979). The meditative arc of ascent is characterized by the Akbaris as progressively freeing oneself from an illusory dualism centered on one’s mistaken conviction in one’s own independent existence, apart from God. The event of fana’, while temporary, is said to permanently alter the practitioner’s perception of self, God, and world. The subsequent return to subsisting (baqa’ billah) in individuated human life altered by and grounded in unity, yet affirming relative multiplicity and valuing human distinctness is known as the arc of descent (qaws-i nuzuli, Chittick, 1979).15 This descent heralds an ongoing process of personal refinement in connection with transcendence and aiming at what Chittick (2019) terms the model of human possibility, the insan al-kamil or complete human. The specific Akbari lineage within which descriptions were gathered is the Nurriya Malamiyya, initiated by Pir Nur al-’Arabi (1813–1887) in the 19th-century Ottoman ­Balkans (Waugh, 2015). Nur al-‘Arabi delineated three primary meditative events on the ascending arc: the effacements of actions (fana’ al-af’al), attributes (fana’ al-sifat), and essence or personhood (fana’ al-dhat), which culminate in the event of meditative “gathering” 155

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(jam’).16 These stations of actualizing unity are mirrored by three further stations on the descending arc, the meditator’s return abiding in immanent life in the world, which are beyond the scope of this study. I have proposed (forthcoming, 2023) that the ascending arc can be conceptualized as the dis-identification from an egocentric locus of identity, followed by a return in the descending arc to individuated selfhood in worldly life characterized by a substantially shifted sense of selfhood “backlit” so to speak by the felt sense of unity. Since unitive mystical experience is said to entail an overcoming of subject/object dualism, it is described as “knowledge by identity” (Forman, 1999, pp.  114–116) or in Yazdi’s words (1992) as “knowledge by presence,” in which human consciousness “is submerged into a unitary simplex of the reality of the self…” (p. 1).17 But if the self’s ground is to be found in and as Divine Oneness, and God is held to be the only true Existent, to whom does this event occur? Who is the experiencer? Putting it another way: whose mindfulness are we talking about? As noted above, Theravada would answer that the fruition of mindfulness practice reveals there is no individual self: one’s sense of having a distinct “I” is an illusion to be dispelled by the meditative path. In contrast Akbari Sufism espouses a qualified non-dualism: unification with the Divine through meditation is said to reveal both one’s ontological poverty and utter reliance upon God as the Source of one’s moment to moment being – a kind of negation – and one’s uniqueness as a never-to-be-repeated locus of Divine Selfmanifestation, through whom God knows Himself – a kind of affirmation. Smart’s (1992) description of Ramanuja’s Vaisnavism echoes the Akbaris’ conception of the relationship between God and humans in a useful way: Smart wrote that for Ramanuja there is an “identity-in-difference between the Lord and his creation…so God is the self underlying these selves” (p. 101).18 Unitive experience for the Akbaris is not regarded as the end of spiritual development. For Ibn ‘Arabi spiritual wayfaring aims at reaching a condition in which one undergoes perpetual refinement and alternation of states, a condition described as the “Station of No Station,” rather than a permanent state of static perfection (Chittick, 2022, p. 327). This Station of No Station is described by Ibn ‘Arabi as one of talwin, “variegation” or “ongoing transformation,” a technical term which he defined as follows: “The servant’s shifting from state to state. For most [users of the term] it represents an incomplete stage. With us it is the most perfect of stations” (1984, p. 40).19 In the same text he defined “stability,” tamkin, writing “with us it means stabilization in talwin. It is called the state of those who have arrived…” (1984, p. 40). Hence mindfulness practice in the Akbari path is not envisaged as resulting in an unchanging mode of enlightenment.20 This study seeks to discern phenomenologically meaningful structures in narratives of meditative experiences which correspond to the ascending arc. In the ascending arc – a theoretical map which will be bracketed in the analyses themselves – the narratives to be examined align with the beginnings of remembrance practice, the effacement of actions, and the taste (Ar: dhawq) of “gathering.” I will next offer a sketch of phenomenology and argue its suitability for the investigation of mindfulness.

Phenomenological Inquiry and Meditative Experience I will focus primarily on the work of phenomenology’s founder Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) and his closest collaborator Eugen Fink (1905–1975), whose contributions exemplify significant common ground, as well as important differences related to the 156

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ground of consciousness, which will be noted below.21 Husserl and Fink are not presented here as representatives of “orthodox” phenomenology: as Ricoeur (1974) noted, the very idea of phenomenological orthodoxy is unsupportable, given Husserl’s repeated reappraisals and new beginnings.22 I will address some main themes in Husserl and Fink’s work as they bear upon human science research in general and the study of meditative experience in particular. Phenomenology seeks to elucidate the underlying structures of consciousness life, from the fundamental properties of consciousness including the perception of self and others, to shared cultural, historical, spiritual, and scientific meanings, all the way down to the unique expressions of essential meanings in the emotional and embodied life of the individual human person. For example, a researcher may seek to explicate the underlying meaningful structure of time consciousness, communal trauma, or filial love. At its depth phenomenology seeks to grasp the way in which consciousness constitutes its objects, including selfhood as such (Husserl, 1982, §24; Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p.  lxxi; Moran & Cohen, 2012, pp. 107–111). In these varied domains, phenomenological inquiry begins with careful observation of particulars, whether in one’s own first person experience or – in phenomenological psychology – through other’s narratives, and seeks insights through fidelity to essential meanings exemplified by but not limited to the empirical details given in those descriptions.23 Husserl terms the inquirer’s overall effort to gain insight into a phenomenon the reduction from the Latin re+ducere: “leading” or “bringing back” the meanings given to a more essential articulation in relation to a particular research interest (Churchill, 2021).24 Phenomenology regards lived experiences as always already meaningful and awaiting explication and understanding. This already-present, holistic meaningfulness is to be recognized and clarified, not constructed by the researcher or pre-emptively interpreted through the lens of existing theory.25 Phenomenological research is not hypothesis-driven, nor does the researcher aim at building a theoretical system: instead, one proceeds by attending to and reflectively clarifying the meaning of what is given. To do so, the inquirer sets aside already-existing theoretical explanations, in order to carefully examine a phenomenon precisely as it is given to consciousness in the here and now (Husserl, 1982, §24). They imaginatively vary the details in order to grasp and give voice to the least variant, essential way in which a phenomenon presents itself as itself (Mohanty, 1991).26 Ricoeur characterized this striving for fidelity to lived experience as “the hyperempirical side of phenomenology” (1967, p. 141). Fink described the practice of Husserl’s phenomenology as an “open system” in which one follows evidence, seeking to articulate essential descriptions having set aside any effort to pre-interpret or pre-systematize one’s findings ahead of essential meanings showing themselves (cited in Bruzina, 2004, p. 87). In such a process, returning repeatedly to critical re-evaluation, each finding is considered valid “only as long as it is not refuted by a renewed analytical insight” (Giubilato, 2018, p. 207). For this reason Fink (1974) wrote, every phenomenological analysis is provisional (§6). The researcher likewise abstains from imposing a causal explanation upon the lived experience under investigation. Imposing such an interpretation upon religious experience, for example, would be to reduce the meaningful religious content of the experience to a mere epiphenomenon – an incidental, concomitant feature of what is fundamentally an empirical/neurological event, or the byproduct of clinical factors – both interpretations demonstrating the attitude phenomenology critiques as “psychologism” (see Davidson, 2021). The researcher sets aside the positivist assumption that lived experiences can be comprehensively understood as nothing but the product of psychological factors, that is, as “real 157

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events taking place in the natural-causal context of psychical life”(Davidson, 1988, p. 2).27 On the contrary Husserl sought to develop a non-reductionistic “science of consciousness that would, at the same time, ground a psychology of consciousness” (Davidson, 2021, p. xv). Alvis (2019) noted that Fink specifically critiqued psychologism in the context of studying religious experience, arguing that Fink warns against reducing religious experience to “the solipsistic theater of human consciousness” (p. 103). For Husserl, to be human is to be always already immersed in a pre-given world and one’s everyday reliance on the facticity of self and world. Phenomenological exploration therefore requires recognizing and suspending one’s habitual ways of perceiving and grasping the world so that one’s own and others’ experiences can stand out freshly, as if for the first time, in a more phenomenally immediate way.28 The inquirer now grasps their previously unrecognized, default standpoint in everyday life, which Husserl terms the “natural attitude” (1982, §30). Unrecognized as an attitude when one is inhabiting it, this natural everyday-ness contains a “dissimulating positing” which is “hidden from reflection” (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 176). This everyday attitude is naively theoretical in that one habitually affirms an unexamined ontology, reflexively positing self and world as being as just what they appear to be.29 Fink preferred to describe this everyday attitude as one of “worldentanglement” (Weltbefangenheit) because one is ensnared by the apparent reality of the objects of one’s perception (Cairns, 1976, p. 95).30 One’s taken for granted, familiar sense of personal identity – in Husserl’s terms, “I-the-man” is perhaps the most psychologically important of those objects (1970). Husserl named the effort to recognize the natural attitude and shift to a more immediate contact with the world using a Greek term employed by the Pyrrhonists and Stoics: epoché (ἐποχή). He used epoché to signify the methodical practice in which one withholds from affirming of the ontological status of what one perceives in order to behold what is present as sheer phenomenal presence, rather than as fact. When the epoché is described as a “procedure…which entails a suspension of our natural realistic inclination,” this might appear to be merely a dispassionate thought experiment (Zahavi, 2003, p. 45). In contrast Mignosi (1981) argued that Husserl derives the epoché via Descartes specifically from the Stoics, for whom it signified not a mere withholding of assent, but rather an active “reawakening from a dream” – in fact, a struggle to free oneself from untrustworthy dreaming in the face of one’s resistance to that awakening (p. 314). In a similar spirit Ricoeur (1967, p. 177) noted that to awaken from a natural attitude, a “special spiritual discipline (ascèse) is necessary in order to destroy its charm,” that is, to break the hold that the unreflective attitude has upon one’s everyday life.31 Awakening from the empirical to transcendental perspective is, Levinas (1998) wrote, “wresting the Ego from its isolation in itself,” a freedom from selfencapsulation (p. 163). This struggle to awaken is no merely formal activity; commenting on Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations Berger (1972) wrote that the epoché and reduction are “an ordeal we must undergo personally,” an “original experience” that has “purificatory value” (p. 106). For Berger this breaking free from one’s natural attitude contains a kind of anguish “deeper than existential anguish, which is that of an individual in the world,” because one is letting go of one’s everyday assumed sense of being-in-the-world, in order to risk witnessing it freshly, with the uncertain promise of renewed sense (pp. 106–107).32 As Hart (1992) wrote, one is inviting “an act of rupture,” that is “at once an act of detachment and disclosure” in that it “opens up the world as a web which we’ve spun, and are spinning…to disclose the primal belief upon which the cords which bind me to the things of the world 158

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are based…” (pp. 6–7).33 Simultaneously, the epoché is not rejecting one’s own or others’ beliefs, nor affirming a skeptical or nihilistic stance; rather, the struggle is to temporarily suspend one’s participating in believing in order to witness the believing life – whether one’s own, or that of another (Ricoeur, 1967, pp. 176–77).34 The implication is that shifting to a phenomenological attitude shakes the ways one’s everyday attitude toward self and world have become sedimented (see Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 466). The outcome of this shift is access to a mode of subjectivity in which one has bracketed one’s factical life in the world and views that empirical life and its facts as constituted by consciousness. “Constitution” does not mean creation or fabrication. Rather, constitution refers to Husserl’s claim that the layer of one’s consciousness that is the source of conscious acts whereby self and world are grasped as objects – the layer Husserl names transcendental subjectivity – that transcends those objectifications.35 In the Crisis (1970), a book Husserl wrote with Fink’s assistance, he highlights the “paradox of human subjectivity”: that human being is both a constituting subject for the world, and a constituted object in the world (§53). Constituting consciousness is one’s ongoing intentional “finding” of the world as this or that, and “finding” oneself as this particular person in the world. Another way to put this is: transcendental subjectivity “finds” itself as this particular empirical subject, and in the process of so doing, “ontifies” oneself as a particular human being in the natural attitude of everyday life, who is then taken as existing factually, an object much like any other worldly object – the tree outside my window, the post office up the street, my neighbor’s dog. It is just this familiar, mundane sense of self-identity that one brackets in the course of effecting the epoché and reduction. The “fact” of one’s self-identity, in Husserl’s terms “I-the-man,” the “personal” or “psychical ego” (1970, §54b) – has been stripped of its facticity, and another stratum of oneself revealed to the inquirer, one which is not captured by the psychological layer: this Husserl named the transcendental ego. Husserl maintained that one discovers this transcendental dimension of selfhood has been constituting world and oneself as “this person” all along (1970, p. 184; 1973, p. 25).36 This discovery does not negate the meaningfulness of psychological selfhood: rather, it enables us to situate it. In recognizing the transcendental, Davidson (2021) wrote, we become capable of “understanding the psychic as a positive reality which is constantly being constituted by transcendental subjectivity” and therefore “relative to and dependent upon” this constituting activity (p. 265). The meaning of I-ness is deepened and enriched, not nullified.37 As Luft (2005) documented, Husserl used the term “transcendental person” to acknowledge the continuum of consciousness from the constituting, extra-temporal dimension of I-ness to the constituted, empirical ego as a particular person in time: indeed, “taking the transcendental ego in its ‘fullest’ dimensions means expanding ‘ego’ into ‘person’”(p. 155). Thus Luft noted “the concept of ‘person’ grasps the entirety of what it means to be a conscious being on all of its levels…in its fullest concretion,” and “implies a unity or identity…” (pp. 153–155) Thus employing the epoché “gives rise to a new sense of ‘I myself,’” because that “I” transcends the merely factical person I had assumed myself to be in the natural attitude (Hart, 1992, p. 9). Discovering the transcendental ego is a tectonic shift for the inquirer. The familiar sense of both self and world has been de-centered, which is why Fink (1995) claimed that whereas the world had been “absolutized” in the natural attitude, effecting the reduction is a “de-absolutizing of the world” which “signifies a more radical ‘Copernican 159

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revolution’ than the conversion from a geocentric to a heliocentric system…” (p.  144). The echo of Husserl’s (1973) similar evocation of Copernicus is notable: the discovery of the transcendental and its role in giving shape to selfhood, relationality, temporality, and “world” is viewed as a monumental de-centering (p.  147). Yet even this transcendental ego ought not to be reified, from a phenomenological perspective: Fink argued that “the transcendental ego cannot be thought of as a being since it itself is the source of being: it is ‘pre-being’ (Vorsein)” (Moran, 2007, p. 22). Thus for Husserl and Fink, the practice of transcendental phenomenologizing is said to reveal hitherto unrecognized dimensions of self and world. Prior to discussing how phenomenological inquiry can be applied to the lived experiences of meditators, some brief comments about the place of God or the Absolute in Husserl and Fink’s phenomenologies is required. I have previously (Applebaum, 2019) addressed the phenomenological conception of the Absolute and meontic, arguing they provide a useful lens through which to interpret classical Sufi texts.38 The meontic as generative ground of being, consciousness, and selfhood can be a useful lens through which to read Akbari Sufi literature, particularly in its references to the Divine, extra-temporal (qadim) dimension from which the human one (muhadath) emerges, in time.39 Despite their differences, Husserl and Fink both understood the Absolute as having a simultaneously transcendent and immanent relation to human being (Marosan, 2021).40 Husserl wrote God is characterized both by nondelimitation and personhood as the “Highest Person and Consciousness” who “resides in the inner mental life” of every individual person as “the inherent, intrinsic, structural implication of their subjectivity” (Marosan, 2021, p. 153).41 Fink maintained that phenomenology needed to go still further in seeking to speak of God, since conceiving of God as a Being – even a Divine being – “could only be considered a basically mundane representation by which one attempted naively to capture conceptually the true radically phenomenological Absolute, the meontic Absolute” (Bruzina, 2004, p. 446).42 Husserl can be said to have emphasized the immanent personal qualities of God despite the Absolute’s transcendence – an emphasis on the immanence expressed in Akbari terms as the “similarity” (tashbih) of the Divine to creation – whereas Fink emphasized the transcendent quality of the Absolute from a more apophatic perspective, which would correspond to what Akbaris term the “incomparability” (tanzih) of the Divine in relation to creation, despite the Absolute’s immanence in creation (for these contrasting terms see Izutsu, 1984).43 While Fink’s phenomenology sought to explore the liminal realm verging on non-being, the distinction between philosophical exploration and mystical seeking was critical. Mercer (2017) wrote that as Fink “wrestles with bringing the absolute into view,” Fink argued that unlike a mystic, a researcher must maintain a loyalty to the lived world, aiming to bring back what is discovered for the enrichment of life in the world (p. 519). Perhaps due to the streams in mystical thought with which he was familiar, which seem to have lacked an analog of the “arc of descent” back into immanence – Fink understood the mystic’s path as a one-way flight from embodied life in the world “for the sake of a mystical sinking into the Nothing” (in Bruzina, 2004, p. 383). For Fink the Absolute, on the contrary, did not signify a mere negation but rather a dynamic “constitutive reciprocalness of nothing and being” which phenomenology was challenged to articulate (Bruzina, 2004, p.  387). Examining first-person accounts of meditative experience is a means of exploring how this reciprocalness and its impacts are lived, personally.

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Interpreting Meditative Experience Phenomenologically I have argued (2019, 2023 forthcoming) that phenomenology is well-suited for the study of meditative experience because it invites an attitude of free scientific discovery, unburdened by theological or philosophical presuppositions. The interpretation of the accounts of remembrance that follow is indebted to Existential Phenomenological research pioneered by Colaizzi, Fischer, Giorgi, Van Kaam, and von Eckartsberg (Churchill, 2021). The phenomenological epoché and reduction allow the researcher to bracket the truth claims of Islamic theology and classical Sufism’s Neoplatonic ontology. The reduction does not negate those traditions, but frees the researcher to unfold the meaningful texture of p ­ ractitioner’s experiences. Included in the excerpts below is an example of phenomenological interviewing. As Churchill (2021) noted, such interviewing is rooted in empathy, thus the researcher’s active engagement, not neutral detachment, is required to invite a genuine, self-disclosive exchange (p. 36). In an interview a participant expresses themself not in a vacuum, but in order to be understood by an interested other. The participant must have good grounds to extend trust they will be adequately understood (cf. Englander, 2020). The researcher abstains from questions that lead the participant by telegraphing pre-interpretations, as Englander (2020) notes, while allowing “room for exploration” in order to actively “follow the lived experience of the research participant in the context of the interaction” as a participant-observer (p. 57, p. 58). Participants are invited to speak “from” a living sense of contact with their experience rather than talking “about” or seeking to “explain” it (Applebaum, 2014). Interpreting Sufi accounts of meditative experience phenomenologically also makes use of the hermeneutic dimension of phenomenology. Here, “hermeneutic” does not refer to a particular research method but rather, as in Churchill’s (2021) account, to the insight expressed in varying ways by Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur that meaning is intersubjectively situated – for example, in historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. In sharp contrast to Katz’s (1978) strong constructivist position, research grounded in the phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition can both acknowledge the situated, interpretive contexts of mystical experiences and recognize intersubjective structures of experience that to a meaningful degree span religious traditions or historical periods.44 Akbari Sufism, even as its practitioners are historically, linguistically, and culturally situated, is arguably just such an intersubjective community of practice.

Meditators In recent decades it has been increasingly widely recognized that safeguards must be in place for meditative work, so that if shifts in consciousness occur, they are experienced as freeing rather psychologically disintegrative (Baer et al., 2019; Kuyken et al., 2012). Since the early decades of meditation’s popularization in the United States, the literature has documented practitioners’ risks of psychological disturbance including depersonalization and derealization (for one of the first such studies, see Lazarus, 1976). Moreover, as Ingram, an advanced Buddhist meditator and physician noted, advanced practitioners may encounter a “Dark Night” in which they are confronted with “the fundamental suffering of duality” which, to the degree the meditator becomes stuck, can manifest as depression, anxiety, or other mental health issues (2018, p. 184). Thus it is incumbent upon contemporary meditative

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approaches of any tradition to assess aspiring practitioners’ suitability for such work, carefully supervise and safeguard their process in meditative practice at all stages, and ensure they have access to mental health support in their community if needed. No meditative practices were initiated for the purpose of this study. Rather, long-term practitioners in a traditionally authorized Sufi group who were already descriptively journaling about their meditative practice agreed to share and/or discuss selected excerpts from their journals.45 In the interest of full disclosure, the author has served as both a leader and participant in this group: its mission includes the phenomenological investigation of religious experience as an adjunct to the practice of remembrance, hence the training of meditators in descriptive journaling. Safeguards had been rigorously attended to by their guides within the group in which they were practicing. Within that group, people who wanted to engage in meditation had been first asked to write a confidential self-assessment regarding their aims and histories; if they were in psychotherapy, they were directed to first consult with their therapist, prior to engaging in meditation. Each had received a minimum of three months of introductory education to carefully set the stage for meditative practice, and the introduction of meditative practice itself had been initially limited to ten minutes per day, in order to enable the practitioner and his or her guide to gauge the impacts of practice, which was only gradually increased as the practitioners felt ready and eager to do so. Once those practice commenced, they had received ongoing monitoring by an experienced guide, so that any signs of potential distress would quickly be recognized and addressed, and they had access to external clinical support in the community. Meditators had been engaged in ongoing practice for a minimum of eight years prior to reporting the experiences described below, and are referred to with pseudonyms: Viktor is a European millennial who had practiced remembrance for more than eight years. Trudy and Mike are both Americans who had practiced for over 20 years. Trudy is a retired Baby Boomer, Mike is Gen X. During their years of meditative practice they were encouraged to view the Akbari account of the ascending and descending arc as a heuristic to be bracketed during practice, rather than as representing spiritual stations that they should seek to produce, or which could be anticipated or willfully caused. They have been encouraged to describe their meditative experiences throughout the years of their engagement in practice. The excerpts below can be read as exemplifying the process of witnessing consciousness standing out to the meditator from their habitual sense of personal selfhood.

Excerpts and Discussion Viktor Viktor described recent experiences of deepening remembrance practice, noting: “There is a feeling…that comes up…between excitement and anxiety, and the thought [of me] disappearing….” He reported noticing how the flow of conscious contents he is familiar with noting in meditation now “is interrupted, and loosens…becomes more random and feels less bound to me,” stating that the contents did not cohere in a recognizable story about himself. Along with this, he noticed a shift from a “more solid sense of myself” to an experience of there being “less of a ‘me’ that feels in relation to anything.” As this shift occurred, he reports feeling an embodied and emotional sense of “looseness” that alternatingly feels “exciting, exhilarating and…anxiety provoking.” During the latter moments he reports 162

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imagining that “I will come apart at the seams or collapse like an empty sack that was used to store grain or rice but collapses on itself when it is emptied,” as if perhaps there is not “a [solid] ‘me’ or ‘self.’” The spontaneity of the stream of Viktor’s conscious contents, which in an everyday attitude he pre-reflectively regards as centered on himself as owner, is increasingly freed to manifest just as it is, as he sets aside the effort to do anything other than attend. As this occurs, there is the beginnings of a felt distinction for Viktor between the “me” he normally considers himself to be, his sense of his proprietary role in relation to his stream of consciousness as something with which he is familiar, and so takes for granted as “solid”—and a quality of awareness that is more open, less familiar, and so lacks a predictable storied form. He describes the shift to simply witnessing in bodily terms as a “loosening.” As this loosening and opening occurs, he reports greater spontaneity and liveliness on the one hand, and uncertainty about imagined consequences of continuing to “loosen,” on the other. He becomes aware of a concern that if he suspends identification with agency he might discover that he lacks substance, or felt integrity. Importantly, for him these imaginations are tolerable rather than deeply unsettling. An indistinct sense of self-presence as witness begins to stand out to him; he reports the discovery of a liminal quality of a more relaxed yet vigilant, attentive presence beyond what is familiar. Through the interpretive lens of Sufism, Viktor’ account can be read as the early traces of witnessing consciousness standing out and illuminating mental phenomena from a newly discovered vantage point. It is the taken-for-granted “solidity” of Viktor’s everyday, embodied sense of self, what Husserl (1970) terms the full ego-subject, one’s sense of “I-theman,” that is progressively bracketed in meditative practice (p. 108). The location of his perceiving has begun to shift from identification with his familiar idea of himself as the owner of his moment-to-moment experience, to an unfamiliar, witness position. Hence it is understandable why, phenomenologically speaking, this witnessing or relaxed perceiving both is and is not experienced by him as “himself.”

Mike The practitioner reports having a final meeting with a client who had invited him to breakfast as a gesture of thanks for their years of work together through a supported living agency, now that he was leaving his position. Mike reports that as they began breakfast, “I poured cream into my coffee and started to stir—in that instant, I felt hit like a ton of bricks—suddenly it was intensely clear to me that ‘I’ wasn’t the one stirring the coffee. Yes, it was my hand, I was turning the spoon, I was with the spoon turning and my hand moving, but I knew with total certainty that it wasn’t me myself who ‘owned’ that action. It was like I was cooperating with the coffee-stirring: I felt intensely present, more than ever, like quietly drunk or high, but clear at the same time, that the stirring was happening through me but wasn’t mine. I could guide the stirring, kind of share in doing it, but the doing didn’t belong to me. And with this was a feeling of great ease, quiet joy and excitement, and connection to everyone and everything around me. All of this hit me in an instant—it was like suddenly being stoned, and yet still right there, talking to my client, stirring the coffee, having breakfast. But something had changed deeply and that stayed with me, afterwards, and the feeling is still with me today, years later.” The meditator situates a transformative event during a period of life when his remembrance practice had deepened and intensified. What announced itself to/through him 163

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occurred in the midst of a mutually caring and grateful exchange. In the middle of an everyday action so mundane as to normally be unreflected upon (stirring coffee), he reports being unexpectedly seized by the indubitable felt insight that the action transcended him, that he was not the originating agent of the action. He nevertheless felt he was fully present and participating in the acting, rather than feeling cut off from himself or the world. Pathological depersonalization, in contrast with the meditators’ accounts, can include a “sensation of self-estrangement” and “that the external world is unreal” (American Psychological Association, 2007, p. 298); derealization includes a “diminished feeling of reality…so that it seems strange or unreal” (American Psychological Association, 2007, p. 300). For Mike in contrast, the opposite of these occurred: greater sense of reality and relaxation. For Mike the felt meaning of this was the immediate sense that his perceiving and acting had always already transcended his self-contained (bounded) sense of himself as an agent – but this was being revealed fully for the first time. He felt included as actively collaborating with that more comprehensive agency that transcended him, while retaining a limited degree of agency. This came with a sense of quiet euphoria and interconnection with his surroundings. For him, that comprehensive agent was not localizable nor was it separate from him, rather it conveyed a perceptual and affective sense of underlying oneness that included him. The sense of unity was felt by Mike as a kind of relaxed oneness that connected him with everyone and everything around him, which was relieving and pleasurable. The sense of the truthfulness of this recognition was undoubtable, more real than his previous, taken-for-granted sense of his relationship to “his” actions. The emphasis here, from the interpretive perspective of Sufism, is on the “effacement of actions.”

Trudy In the interview excerpts below, Trudy and the researcher discuss her experiences of remembrance in which she encounters what she describes as a divine “Presence.” Interviewer: “  You wrote that in dhikr you experience ‘my “self” is a part of the “Presence,” and at times I experience it merging with Presence and my sense of “self” feels like it dissolves, and whatever remains of me is an observer that is able to remember my experience.’” Trudy: “Yes…it’s so difficult to describe in words. It merges…I am no longer relating from a place of ‘I,’ ‘Trudy,’ ‘ego,’ ‘self’...I think of the ego as the one who does the directing, like my inner CEO….”   Trudy reports repeatedly discovering in remembrance that she is part of a larger, sacred presence, a part/whole relationship in which her distinctness remains, while at times merging with the whole. In choosing to make herself available – similarly to Mike, evincing a limited yet important degree of agency – she reports her everyday sense of herself as strictly bounded is absent, yet there is an awake witnessing which remains with her after meditation when she is returned to a sense of everyday self/other boundaries. Trudy: “And so what I do, is I’m able to voluntarily let that go for a while, and I feel that I merge and then disappear, and merge with what I call ‘the Presence,’ and I know I’ve experienced the Presence, which I used to think was outside me, but it’s everywhere…I used to think that the Presence came and went, but now I know that it’s me who comes and goes.” 164

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  When she began having transient experiences of a Presence that seemed to transcend her, she had initially interpreted this presence as a separate “other” that sometimes visited her and sometimes absented itself from her. Trudy reports discovering that it was she who fluctuated in her disposability to It, whereas It was always already present to and for her. Therefore now, she says, she realizes that meditative remembrance is a turning back toward a Presence that is already accompanying her, “like a friend.” Trudy: “And we – my presence and The Presence – are relating as one, and I…have disappeared, and yet this observer…is observing what’s going on with me while I’m in this state. The observer isn’t [what I’d call] my ego, it’s not [what I’d normally call] myself…it’s so hard to put words to this…it feels qualitatively very different, it’s me and not me.”   Phenomenally she reports a sense of ambiguity because the location of witnessing or perceiving is both her and not her, in the sense that it is not her everyday sense of herself. She points out that in the midst of this state, she still trusts that she would be able to respond to an external emergency if necessary, since there is still awareness and autonomy in the observing. Similarly to Mike, she reports no fear of losing the ability to navigate in the world as needed, and in both cases there is an enhanced sense of contiguity with a larger whole. Trudy: “So I become very aware of my absorption in this greater presence, and that I have voluntarily done this, voluntarily surrendered, because I find such joy in this, and comfort, and I feel so at home in it. It’s not like I’ve totally disappeared…I use the words 'I've disappeared,’ [but what this means is that] I feel like I have disappeared…the [separate] I, the Trudy, the self…and that I’ve merged, and I’ve let go, and yet…there’s a part of me in there along with the greater Presence.”   When she reports that she has disappeared, this initially might appear paradoxical. Who remains to notice herself disappearing? She appears to be referring to her familiar sense of self, the disappearance of which is noticed by an observing self. It seems this observer continued to be present during this experience, which raises a question for the interviewer: Interviewer: “You said earlier that ‘what’s left of you,’ ‘what remains,’ is this witnessing?” Trudy: “Yes…witnessing is the observer, but it’s not just me that’s observing! The Presence is observing and I know that what I’m saying sounds contradictory, but…it’s partly because the experiences I have are a process…open-ended… it’s a process of discovery, and so it’s not what I could call solidified, it’s fluid.”   Implicit in Trudy’s account is an experience of both perceiving and being perceived after the temporary dropping off of her everyday sense of self. The fluidity she reports conveys the experiential flavor of the dynamism of the locus of perceiving, which is both immanent and transcendent in relation to her. To clarify the texture of her experience phenomenologically, the interviewer carefully probes: Interviewer: “It sounds like what’s left of you in this ‘merging’ is an awake witnessing in the midst of something larger, and also the Presence is witnessing?”

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Trudy:

“Yes it is because…I feel like I’ve been absorbed, merged into this Presence, and yet there’s part of me that is part of that witnessing, and yet I wouldn’t call it an ‘I’ or a ‘self’ and I don’t know how else to identify it?”   For Trudy, the locus of witnessing is both her/not her: sometimes the subject and object of perception are distinguishable, though only relatively so, and sometimes they are unified, though in this experience, never completely so.46

Taken together, for these accounts of meditative remembrance begin with the practitioner’s choice, methodically and over years, to recognize and progressively relax their embodied/affective and imagined/cognitive engagement with their conscious contents in meditating with the intention to connect with the Divine. As this dis-engaged perception of the contents deepens, there is a shift in their previously taken-for-granted sense of the locus of the perceiver (witness) such that themselves-as-the-one-perceiving stands out to them as increasingly, incrementally distinguishable from their familiar self-identity. That familiar self-identity includes the presumed ownership of the constituents of strictly bounded agency, which in Sufi terms are: actions (af’al), attributes (sifat), and sense of I-ness (dhat, identity or fundamental personhood). In moments there may be striking holistic recognitions of this, for example as reported by the second practitioner. These shifts are accompanied by a sense of relaxed attentiveness in open perceiving, and a greater porousness of previously taken-for-granted strict self/other boundaries, without a troubling sense of boundarylessness or destabilization. For the practitioners, these shifts were primarily experienced as enlivening, sometimes perplexing, and relieving of a previously unrecognized burden or tension, rather than destabilizing, and occurring not strictly within sitting meditative practice but also outside of it, emerging unforeseen in the midst of their daily lives. More than merely relief, there is a heightened sense of reality, intrinsic unity and interconnectedness both for the meditator with themself, with their surrounding world, and with a sense of oneness permeating both.47 Notably, felt relationality emerges as a feature of these experiences, particularly for the second two practitioners. Taken together, the data examined here represent a progression related to the ascending arc, without yet arriving at the comprehensive experience of ego-effacement (jam’), since such accounts were not included.

Conclusion Husserl and Fink’s phenomenology investigates consciousness from the perspective of human science through a methodical “questioning back” toward the primordial origins of I-ness. Phenomenological investigation places an emphasis on explicating the given just as it is given to consciousness. In its genetic and constructive modes, phenomenology also explores the arising of consciousness and world; furthermore, phenomenology can extend speculatively into the meontic realm—while always placing priority upon articulating its meaningfulness for life in the world. The practice of mindfulness in Akbari Sufism, as in Theravada, can be said to existentialize the investigation of the origin and meaning of I-ness through meditative practice. In the former case the priority is upon gaining philosophical or human scientific insight; in the latter case, the soteriological aim of the Sufi path privileges the transformative effacing and lived renewal of the whole person over reflective understanding, narrowly conceived. This distinction holds despite the high importance accorded to reflection (tafakkur) and the faculty of intuitive knowing (‘aql) in Akbari Sufism, and 166

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despite genetic and constructive phenomenology’s commitment to pushing the limits of articulatability to the boundary of being and nonbeing. Both phenomenology and Akbari Sufism critique the presumed boundedness of the personal ego and de-center that ego – a move with psychological, axiological, and ontological implications. Transcendental phenomenology’s view of the multiple layers of selfhood enables the researcher to “overcome the naivete of a psychology that considers itself to be describing and analyzing a self-contained and autonomous subject matter”; parallel to classic meditative traditions’ critique of the conception of personal selfhood as strictly bounded and self-subsisting, phenomenological epistemology enables us to “overcome the naivete of thinking that the psychic is somehow responsible for founding itself…” (Davidson, 2021, p. 265). A primary aim of phenomenologizing is overcoming one’s captivity in the natural attitude – entanglement in the world of the psychical ego. In its own quite different but parallel manner dhikr purports to existentialize – as the foundation of spiritual wayfaring – the practitioner’s liberation from a default egocentrism in which one is dominated by attractions and aversions to the world in front of one’s face (Ar: dunya), to the discovery and restoration of an intrinsic mode of ethical comportment with the unitive Source of being that ennobles human beings as loci of Divine self-disclosure.48 I argue that if a phenomenological approach is to take on the task of examining meditative experience not only philosophically but also human-scientifically through the analysis of practitioner’s lived experiences, that approach must draw from both phenomenological-hermeneutic philosophy and existential phenomenological psychology. In so doing – and Davidson’s (1988, 2021) work is a landmark contribution toward this aim – the psychological realm cannot be conceptualized as self-contained and selfgrounding. Rather, a constitutive psychology of the transcendental person is needed, which might even be termed a developmental “onto-psychology” of the transcendental person. Such a research approach, paralleling the clinical approach Davidson calls for, would take account of the full continuum of consciousness inclusive of the transcendental ego and its ongoing constitution of the personal ego with his or her unfolding life story and the awakenings therein. Husserl and Fink’s phenomenology retraces the constitutive flow in which an originarily transcendental consciousness objectifies and ontifies itself as a psychical ego—the “paradox of subjectivity.” It could be said that human psychological development requires “forgetfulness” of the transcendental ground of one’s consciousness in order to navigate in the world as a distinct individual: this would be a psychological interpretation of the Sufi claim that human being (insan) is intrinsically forgetful (nasiya). From the perspective of Sufism, the constitutive domain and its primordial ground is to be discovered through remembrance. Meditative remembrance yields an awakening to transcendence through fana’ on the ascending arc and an awakening within transcendence-in-immanence in baqa’ on the descending arc. Accessing perception of both perspectives yields what Ibn ‘Arabi called the person “of two eyes” (Chittick, 1989, p. 362). Akbari Sufism responds to the paradox of subjectivity not by seeking to resolve the paradox but by inviting the bewilderment (ḥayrah, meaning bewilderment, awe) that accompanies the de-absolutizing of the world and the psychological self on the ascending arc, and by facilitating learning to navigate in the midst of bewilderment on the descending arc.49 Ibn ‘Arabi terms the structure of selfhood that emerges in this journey the “station of no station”: for Ibn ‘Arabi the complete human is an ever-changing isthmus between the created, factical world (khalq) and the Divine or Real (Haqq). 167

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Notes 1 Gethin (2001) wrote that in Theravada sati is a kind of “skillful consciousness” and “when there is no sati the mind floats or drifts on objects of the mind” (p. 40). Collins (1982) notes that sati’s “inculcation…through meditation practice as a continuous psychological skill leads to enlightenment” (p. 163). The complex history of the use of the term sati in Buddhist tradition is beyond the scope of this discussion; as Sharf (2014) notes, it was only in the 20th century Burmese revival of Theravada, which informed American pioneers of the mindfulness movement, that sati came to be understood as “bare awareness” (p. 254; also see as Braun, 2013, p. 143). 2 Narrative identity in this context refers to a person’s representation of themself as the protagonist of their life story; see Ricoeur (1991). 3 Lane (1968) s.v. “‫ ِذکْر‬. ” Sufism is famously difficult to define; Schimmel (2011, 17) noted Sufism emerged as “mainly an interiorization of Islam, a personal experience of the central mystery of Islam, that of tauḥīd” – the essential unity of God – hence in Geoffroy’s (2010) words, Sufi praxes aim to awaken this “living heart of Islam” (p. 1). 4 The term “Akbari” is used in accordance with Chodkiewicz (1993, pp. 13–14). 5 Unitive mystical experience is defined by Jones and Gellman (2022) as entailing “the eradication of a sense of multiple discrete entities”; they emphasize that “the cognitive significance of the experience is deemed to lie precisely in that phenomenological feature.” 6 Stace (1987) claimed that the undoubtable “sense of objectivity of reality” is a feature of mystical experience as such (p. 131). James’ (1982) chapter on mysticism in the Varieties of Religious Experience notes that this sense of the real “is super-lucent, super-splendent, super-essential…super everything that can be named,” (p. 417) and “resembles the knowledge given to us in sensations more than that given by conceptual thought” (p. 405). 7 In Husserl’s terms this definition of psychology refers to the “psychological ego” or “personal ego” within the natural attitude, which will be discussed below. 8 Thus classical Sufism’s frequent emphasis on practicing etiquette (adab) in relation to one’s Lord so as not to arrogate self-subsisting I-ness to oneself: equating one’s limited selfhood with the Divine “I” would be a subtle form of polytheism (Ar: shirk, “association”). 9 Those mystics who came to be called Sufis (practitioners of tasawwuf, self-purification) originated in 9th-century Baghdad; a distinct group of mystics known as malamiyya or malamatiyya (Ar: the “path of blame” or “conscientiousness”) partly due to their self-examination and avoidance of outward displays of piety, originated contemporaneously in Nishapur in Khorasan (Karamustafa, 1994, 2007; Sviri, 2007). Though their influences intermingle in the later tradition, Ibn ‘Arabi distinguishes between Sufis and malamiyya (Chittick, 1989, pp. 372–373). 10 Lane1968, SV ‫ ِذکْر‬. For Qur’anic examples of dhakara see verses 2:60 and 2:231. In Sufism the word muraqaba (Arabic), vigilant attention, is also used as a technical term in meditative practice, but here the emphasis will be on remembrance (see Al-Qushayri, 1997, pp. 143–148 and pp. 193–200). 11 See for example verses 29:45 and 33:35. 12 Remembrance is both vertical and horizontal; remembering people is also sometimes framed as remembering God, as in the hadith that begins with God reported to have said, “O child of Adam, I was sick and you did not visit Me” included in Ibn Arabi’s Mishkat al-Anwar (2008, p. 75). 13 Thus Ibn ‘Arabi defined “the journey” (safar, ‫)سفَر‬ َ in a lexicon of spiritual terms as “An expression for the heart when it starts to turn itself toward the Real through dhikr, the practice of remembrance” (1984, p. 29). 14 For dhikr aiming at the “existential realization of tawhid,” Divine oneness, see Al-Daghistani (2022), 193. For the underlying Akbari ontology, see Al-Attas (1994). 15 Importantly, for Ibn ‘Arabi the spiritual path as a whole entails no suspension of Islam’s religious guidelines for the conduct of daily life in community (shariah), but rather a scrupulous inhabiting and integrating of them, hence the return to individuated life in the world in the descending arc for Ibn ‘Arabi is a life lived pietistically within the strictures of shariah. For a critique of overly universalizing modern interpretations of Ibn ‘Arabi, see Lipton (2018). 16 This model of the effacements is particular to the Nurriya Malamiyya. Pir Nur al-’Arabi taught that “The ultimate ‘veil’ was the separation of man from deity,” and that through remembrance the seeker could “enter into communion with the true source of being/existence” (Waugh, 2015,

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A Phenomenology of Mindfulness Practice in Sufism p. 11; for the Malamiyya or Malamatiyya, also see Holbrook, 1991 and Karamustafa, 1994). For the history of this lineage to the present day, see Toussulis (2011). 17 Jones and Gellman (2022) define unitive experience as characterized by “the eradication of a sense of multiple discrete entities,” emphasizing that “the cognitive significance of the experience is deemed to lie precisely in that phenomenological feature.” 18 I have argued (2023, forthcoming) that for the Akbaris, personhood is itself a Divine attribute rather than an originarily human attribute projected upon divinity. Writing from a Christian Orthodox position, Zizioulas (2006) argued similarly: “...personal presence quâ presence is something that cannot be extrapolated from created existence. It is a presence that seems to come to us from outside this world – which makes the notion of person, if properly understood, perhaps the only notion that can be applied to God without the danger of anthropomorphism” (p. 224). 19 In support of this Ibn ‘Arabi cites Qur’an 55:29, “Every day He [God] is on another affair,” a verse cited the present day by Akbaris to convey the Divine dynamism, mirrored in the human microcosm. 20 Maqam la maqam is usually translated as “station of no station” (Chittick 2022); but in traditional Arab music maqam also means musical mode, so maqam la maqam can be rendered in melodic terms as a “mode-less mode,” and indeed is so for example in Persian Sufi poetry (Alan Godlas, personal communication February 4, 2023). 21 For Fink’s close collaborative relationship with Husserl in producing works like the Crisis, as well as his important engagement with Heidegger, see Bruzina (2004). 22 Ricoeur (1974) argued Husserl’s life’s work was both characterized both by the “radicalization” of exploration “in the direction of the “‘primordial’ and of the ‘originary’” and by the “abandonment, along the way, of possibilities that will no longer be used”; hence “phenomenology is to a great extent the history of Husserlian heresies. The structure of the work of the master implied that there could not be a Husserlian orthodoxy…” (p. 165). See also Ricoeur (1967, p. 4). For Husserl’s view of himself as a “perpetual beginner,” see Merleau-Ponty (2012, p. lxxviii). 23 Husserl: “Here it is a case of inquiries proceeding from realtor human beings back to their ‘manners of givenness,’ their manners of ‘appearing’…” (1970, p. 183). 24 For the reduction, see Moran and Cohen (2012, pp. 273–275). 25 Berger (1941) attributed this approach to Husserl’s “confiance absolue dans la pouvoir de la Raison” (p. 134), a trust in reflective discovery that is “not maintained despite doubt” but rather “found again after doubt” (Berger, 1972, p. 107). 26 For philosophical phenomenology, invariant essences may be sought; for human sciences such as psychology in which meaning is highly context-dependent, the least variant essential meaning for a given context is sought. 27 For Husserl, epistemological “naturalism” in the form of materialism or psychologism falsely collapses all of our encounter with and understanding of the world and ourselves, including consciousness, exclusively into the domain of the natural sciences (see Moran and Cohen, 2012, pp. 218-219). In contrast for phenomenology, as Merleau-Ponty writes, “I am not the result or the intertwining of multiple casualties that determine my body or my ‘psyche;’ I cannot think of myself as a part of the world, like the simple object of biology, psychology, and sociology…the entire universe of science is constructed upon the lived world, and if we wish to think science rigorously… we must first awake that experience of the world of which science is the second-order expression” (2012, pp. lxxi-lxxii). 28 In the Crisis Husserl (1970) wrote “from the beginning the phenomenologist lives in the paradox of having to look upon the obvious as questionable,” looking at the world as “the greatest of all enigmas” (p. 180). 29 For this naive ontology, see Husserliana Vol. XV, p. 147. Ricoeur notes: “Consciousness rids itself of a naïveté…[which] consists in spontaneously believing that the world which is there is simply given. In correcting itself about this naïveté, consciousness discovers that it is itself giving, sensegiving;” afterwards, “consciousness continues seeing, but without being absorbed in this seeing, without being lost in it… (p. 147).” 30 For Fink, this expression which can also be rendered “captivation in the world,” implies “being utterly dazed by something so as to have eyes only for it, and to be at the same time oblivious to the state of captivation within which one is held” (Bruzina, 2004, p. 186).

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Marc Applebaum 31 Ricoeur’s term ascèse – that is, ascetic practice, from the Greek term askesis – does not imply spirituality in a narrow sense, but rather a dedicated working with one’s consciousness in pursuit of refinement and clarity. Hadot’s (1995) Philosophy as a Way of Life (Exercises spirituels et philosophie antique) is relevant in the Stoic roots of this sense of philosophical reflection. 32 “On ne peut ici démontrer, mais seulement faire voire, devoilér” (Berger 1941, p. 134). The language of revealing as “unveiling” (devoilér) is particularly resonant with meditative practice in Sufism, in which unveiling (mukashafa) is a technical term. 33 Hart (1992) noting that Husserl spoke of risking one’s life in the depth of inquiry, commented “the life risked is that of the natural attitude…” (p. 33). Fink, in conversation with Cairns (1976) claimed that the reduction “is not to be regarded as merely an event in the history or the world, it is essentially a catastrophic event, a Weltvernichtung ...” (p. 50). 34 “The reduction is not doubting, since it leaves believing intact without participating in it” (Ricoeur, 1967, p. 18). 35 Thus Ricoeur wrote, Husserl argued in Ideas II that “‘constituting’ is not constructing, even less creating, but rather the unfolding of the intendings of consciousness which are merged together” in the natural attitude (9); similarly, “the self-constitution of the ego is not a construction” (p. 109). 36 Husserl wrote “every human-ego harbors its transcendental ego” (2001, p. 471). “As an I in the natural attitude, I am likewise and at all times a transcendental I, but…I know about this only by executing phenomenological reduction” (1973, p. 37). Once the epoché has been effected, Husserl (1970) wrote, “I am not an ego” (p. 184), meaning that under those conditions the inquirer is not ego-identified with the psychical self of their natural attitude. 37 Davidson’s (2021) excellent study documents how “the turn to the transcendental, Husserl is quick to point out, does not ‘erase’ the existential sense that the psychic has as a positive reality” (p. 264); rather, “from the transcendental perspective, consciousness appears within the life-world to exist as an embodied, individuated psychic reality. It is just that from the transcendental perspective this reality has been rendered transparent as one specific self-objectification of consciousness” (p. 269). Davidson (2021) argues that prior attempts to integrate phenomenological insights into psychology from Merleau-Ponty to Giorgi have failed “to secure the proper transcendental perspective” as “that from which the psychologist may then return…” (p. 267). 38 The term meontic derives from Greek μή + ὄν, meaning non-being. For Fink, Bruzina (2004) wrote, meontic designates “the transcendentally originative as intrinsically beyond being” (p. 567 n 146). Fink uses the term meontic to refer to the transcendental ego, which he criticized Husserl as having to a certain degree hypostasized (Bruzina, 2004, p. 567; see Cairns, 1976, p. 95). More specifically, Fink sometimes uses the meontic to signify “The ‘Absolute’ in the guise of ‘God’” (Bruzina, 2009, p. 568 n 37). 39 Similarly to Fink’s reading of the Neoplatonists, phenomenological readings of premodern Sufi texts employ the epochē. Bruzina noted (2009) that for Fink, “where Neoplatonic (or other doctrines) might speak of ‘emanation,’ this can only be interpreted in phenomenological speculative metaphysics as another metaphor for the meontic relationship of origination; it is not a real process at all” – of course “real” here means empirical, locatable in time and space (p. 450). Similarly, when Fink questioned in conversation with Cairns (1976) whether “the Ur-ego ... is not, perhaps, the Absolute, but the first emanation of the Absolute,” this should be read as phenomenological speculation, not as an affirmation of neoplatonism tout court (p. 95). 40 Exemplifying the way in which Fink occupied a position distinct from both Husserl and Heidegger yet in dialogue with them both, he wrote in a personal note: “Phenomenology is a regressive inquiry into origins; but the origin to be investigated has to be ultimately not simply the origin of meaning…in its constitution, but the origin of being…Being does not mean simply to be the object for a subject…that which phenomenology would claim to reach as the origin of the world and of being, the Absolute, will have to be considered beyond being, in short, meontic…” (in Bruzina, 1992, pp. 276–277). 41 For example, this passage of Husserl’s translated by Marosan (2021): “We should not think of this universal I—who embraces every I-s and reality in himself—as an empirical I. He is infinite life, infinite love and infinite will…God himself also experiences every suffering, every misfortune, every mistake; and only because he lives in others, and he feels with others…” (p. 153 n. 68). 42 God as the “meontic absolute” echoes Meister Ekhart’s “God beyond God” and also finds strong parallels in Ibn ‘Arabi. Husserl remarked to Cairns (1976) that “whole pages of Meister Eckehart

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A Phenomenology of Mindfulness Practice in Sufism (sic) could be taken over by him unchanged,” because “the particular evidences which the mystic has” should be regarded as genuine, within whatever limits they are given (p. 91). 43 The distinction between Husserl and Fink is only one of degree, however: Cairns (1976) reported Husserl speaking with him regarding the transcendence of God and critiquing religions as “naive and therefore unintelligible” to the degree that they viewed God as worldly rather than transcendental, “but in the phenomenological attitude the naive theses of religion receive not only intelligibility, but also a certain validity” (p. 47). 44 Forman (1998) makes a case for what he terms a perennial psychology. 45 In Sufi lineages the authority to serve as a guide (murshid) is formally granted by means of a written “license” (AR: Id __j āza) which confirms that the recipient has received and internalized the first hand, teacher-to-student instruction of their predecessor, and links him or her spiritually to the line of teachers reaching back to that lineage’s founders and ultimately to the Prophet (Vadja et al., 2012). 46 The preceding accounts can usefully be contrasted with Stace’s (1987) claim that mystical experience includes a sense of oneness, heightened sense of reality, feeling of the sacred, and paradoxicality (pp. 131–132). 47 As James (1982) wrote in the Varieties, “In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness,” p. 419). 48 In Qur’an both the words dunya and ‘alam can be translated as “world;” similar to al-Attas (1993) I would argue that phenomenologically dunya (the etymology of which refers to nearness) refers to absorption in the world “in front of one’s face,” while ‘alam implies a more expansive engagement with world, in which what one observes in life are signs or exemplars (‘ayat) of the transcendent. 49 For hayrah as the bewilderment of “finding,” see Chittick (1989, pp. 380–381), and poem 7 in Emir Abd al-Qadir Jaza’iri’s Mawaqif (2004 53; in Giraud’s 2012 French translation 52–53).

References Al-Attas, S. M. N. (1993). Islam and Secularism. International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization. Al-Attas, S. M. N. (1994). The Degrees of Existence. International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization. Albahari, M. (2006). Analytical Buddhism: the Two-Tiered Illusion of Self. Palgrave Macmillan. Albahari, M. (2013). Nirvana and ownerless consciousness. In E. Thompson, D. Zahavi, M. Siderits (Eds.), Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Traditions (pp. 79–113). Oxford University Press. Al-Daghistani, R. (2018). Rethinking Sufism. Spiritual education as a means to counter religious radicalism in Islam. In E. Aslan, M. Rausch (Eds.), Religious Education: Between Radicalism and Tolerance (pp. 243–260). Springer. Al-Daghistani, R. (2022). Sufis: Invoking God’s name and the practice of Dhikr. In O. Leaman (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Islamic Ritual and Practice (pp. 185–199). Routledge. Al-Jaza’iri, ‘A.Q. (2012). Le Livre des Haltes, Tome I: Kitab al-Mawaqif (M. Giraud, Trans.). Albouraq. Al-Jaza’iri, ‘A.-Q. (2004). Mawāqif al-rūḥīyah wa-al-fuyūḍāt al-subūḥīyah. Dar Al-Kotob Al-Ilmiyah. Al-Qushayri, A.-Q. (1997). Sufi Book of Spiritual Ascent (al-Risala al-Qushayriya) (L. Bakhtiar, R. Harris, Trans.). ABC Group International. Al-Qushayri, A.-Q. (2017). Subtle Allusions: Sūras 1-4 (K.Z. Sands, Trans.). Fons Vitae. Alvis, J. W. (2019). God’s playthings: Eugen Fink’s phenomenology of religion in play as symbol of the world. Research in Phenomenology 49, 88–117. American Psychological Association. (2007). APA Dictionary of Psychology (G. R. VandenBos & American Psychological Association, Eds.). American Psychological Association. Applebaum, M. (2014). Intentionality and narrativity in phenomenological psychological research: Reflections on Husserl and Ricoeur. The Indo Pacific Journal of Phenomenology 14 (2), 1–19. Applebaum, M. (2019). Remembrance: A Husserlian phenomenology of Sufi practice. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 33 (1), 22–40.

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Marc Applebaum Applebaum, M. (2023). Dhikr as mindfulness: Meditative remembrance in Sufism. [Manuscript submitted for publication]. Baer, R., Crane, C., Miller, E., & Kuyken, W. (2019). Doing no harm in mindfulness-based programs: Conceptual issues and empirical findings. Clinical Psychology Review 71, 101–114. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.cpr.2019.01.001 Berger, G. (1941). Le cogito dans la philosophie de Husserl. Editions Montaigne. Berger, G. (1972). The Cogito in Husserl’s Philosophy (K. McLaughlin, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Braun, E. (2013). The Birth of Insight: Meditation, Modern Buddhism, and the Burmese Monk Ledi Sayadaw. University of Chicago Press. Bruzina, R. (1992). Last philosophy: Ideas for a transcendental phenomenological Metaphysics–Eugen fink with Edmund Husserl, 1928-38. In L. Embree, D.P. Chattopadhyaya, J.N. Mohanty (Eds.), Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy (pp. 270–289). Indian Council of Philosophical Research. Bruzina, R. (2004). Edmund Husserl & Eugen Fink: Beginnings and Ends in Phenomenology, 1928–1938. Yale University Press. Cairns, D. (1976). Conversations With Husserl and Fink. Springer Netherlands. Chittick, W. (1979). The perfect man as the prototype of the self in the Sufism of Jami. Studia Islamica 49, 135–157. Chittick, W. (2007). The view from nowhere: Ibn al-’ArabĪ on the Soul’s temporal unfolding. In A.T. Tymieniecka (Ed.), Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life (pp. 3–10). Springer. Chittick, W. (2019). Ibn ‘Arabî. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2020 Edition). Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2020/entries/ibn-arabi/ Chittick, W. (2022). The spirituality of the Sufi path. In V.J. Cornell, B.B. Lawrence (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality (pp. 316–330). Wiley. Chittick, W. C. (1982). Ibn ‘Arabi’s own summary of the fusus: The imprint of the bezels of the wisdom. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society I, 31–93. Chittick, W. C. (1989). The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Al-Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination. State University of New York Press. Chodkiewicz, M. (1993). An Ocean Without Shore: Ibn ʻArabî, the Book, and the Law (D. Streight, Trans.). State University of New York Press. Churchill, S. D. (2021). Essentials of Existential Phenomenological Research. American Psychological Association. Collins, S. (1982). Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism. Cambridge University Press. Cornell, V. J. (2022). Introduction to part I. In V.J. Cornell, B.B. Lawrence (Eds.), The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Islamic Spirituality (pp. 1–22). Wiley. Davidson, L. (1988). Husserl’s refutation of psychologism and the possibility of a phenomenological psychology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 19 (1), 1–17. Davidson, L. (2021). Overcoming Psychologism: Husserl and the Transcendental Reform of Psychology. Springer International Publishing. Englander, M. (2020). Phenomenological psychological interviewing. The Humanistic Psychologist 48 (1), 54–73. Fink, E. (1974). De la phénoménologie. Les Éditions de Minuit. Fink, E. (1995). Sixth Cartesian Meditation: the Idea of a Transcendental Theory of Method (R. Bruzina, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Forman, R. K. C. (1998). Mystical consciousness, the innate capacity, and perennial psychology. In R.K.C. Forman (Ed.), The Innate Capacity: Mysticism, Psychology, and Philosophy (pp. 3–44). Oxford University Press. Forman, R. K. C. (1999). Mysticism, Mind, Consciousness. State University of New York Press. Geoffroy, E. (2010). Introduction to Sufism: The Inner Path of Islam (R. Gaetani, Trans.). World Wisdom. Gethin, R. (2011). On some definitions of mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 263–279. Gethin, R.M.L. (2001). The Buddhist Path to Awakening. Oneworld Publications. Gimello, R. M. (2004). Bodhi (awakening). In R.E. Buswell (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Buddhism (pp. 50–53). Macmillan Reference.

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A Phenomenology of Mindfulness Practice in Sufism Giubilato, G. J. (2018). Beyond the genesis, toward the absolute. Eugen Fink’s architectonic foundation of a constructive phenomenology. Horizon: Studies in Phenomenology - Special Issue Transcendental Philosophy and Phenomenology 7 (1), 203–222. Gupta, B. (2021). An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Perspectives on Reality, Knowledge, and Freedom. Taylor & Francis Group. Hadot, P. (1995). Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault (A.I. Davidson, A. Davidson, M. Chase, Trans.). Blackwell. Hart, J. G. (1992). The Person and the Common Life: Studies in a Husserlian Social Ethics. Kluwer Academic Publishers. Holbrook, V. R. (1991). Ibn ‘Arabi and Ottoman Dervish traditions: The Melami supra-order. Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society IX, 18–35. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (D. Carr, D. Carr, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1973). Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (D. Cairns, Trans.). Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book (F. Kersten, Trans.). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic (A.J. Steinbock, A.J. Steinbock, Trans.). Springer Netherlands. Ibn al-ʻArabī, M. (1980a). Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam (A. ʻAfīfī, Ed.; 2nd ed.). Dar al-Kitab al-’Arabi. Ibn al-ʻArabī, M. (1980b). The Bezels of Wisdom (R.W. Austin, R.W.J. Austin, R.W.J. Austin, R.W. Austin, Trans.). Paulist Press. Ibn al-ʻArabī, M. (1984). Sufi terminology: Ibn ‘Arabi’s al-Istilâh al-Sûfiyyah (R.T. Harris, Ed.). Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn Arabi Society, III, 27–54. Ibn al-ʻArabī, M. (2004). The Ringstones of Wisdom: Fuṣūṣ Al-ḥikam (C.K. Dagli, Trans.). Great Books of the Islamic World. Ibn al-ʻArabī, M. (2008). Divine Sayings: 101 Hadith Qudsi Mishkat al-anwar (M. Notcutt, S. Hirtenstein, M. Notcutt, Trans.). Anqa Publishing. Ingram, D. (2018). Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book (Second Edition Revised and Expanded). Aeon Books Limited. Izutsu, T. (1984). Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts. University of California Press. Izutsu, T. (2004). Ethico-religious concepts in the Qur’an. Islamic Book Trust. James, W. (1982). The Varieties of Religious Experience (M.E. Marty, Ed.). Penguin Publishing Group. Jaza’iri, ‘A.-Q. (2004). Mawāqif al-rūḥīyah wa-al-fuyūḍāt al-subūḥīyah. Dar Al-Kotob Al-Ilmiyah. Jaza’iri, ‘A.-Q. (2012). Le Livre des Haltes Tome 1: Kitab al Mawaqif (M. Giraud, Trans.). al-Bouraq. Jones, R., & Gellman, J. (2022). Mysticism (E.N. Zalta, U. Nodelman, Eds.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 Edition). Retrieved October 22, 2022, from Kabat-Zinn, J. (2018). Meditation Is Not What You Think: Mindfulness and Why It Is So Important. Hachette Books. Karamustafa, A. T. (1994). God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200-1550. University of Utah Press. Karamustafa, A. T. (2007). Sufism: The Formative Period. University of California Press. Katz, S. T. (1978). Language, epistemology, and mysticism. In S.T. Katz (Ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (pp. 22–74). Oxford University Press. Knysh, A. D. (1999). Ibn ʻArabi in the Later Islamic Tradition: The Making of a Polemical Image in Medieval Islam. State University of New York Press. Kuyken, W., Crane, R., & Williams, M. (2012). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) implementation resources. Mindfulness Centres at Exeter, Bangor and Oxford Universities, Oxford. Lane, E. (1968). An Arabic-English Lexicon. 8 vols. Librarie du Liban. Lapidus, I. M. (1984). Knowledge, virtue, and action: The classical Muslim conception of Adab and the nature of religious fulfillment in Islam. In B.D. Metcalf (Ed.), Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian Islam (pp. 38–61). University of California Press.

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Marc Applebaum Lazarus, A. A. (1976). Psychiatric problems precipitated by transcendental meditation. Psychological Reports 39 (2), 601–602. Levinas, E. (1998). Discovering Existence With Husserl (R.A. Cohen, M.B. Smith, M.B. Smith, R.A. Cohen, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Lipton, G. (2018). Rethinking Ibn ‘Arabi. Oxford University Press. Luft, S. (2005). Husserl’s concept of the ‘Transcendental Person’: Another look at the Husserl– Heidegger relationship. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13 (2), 141–177. Marosan, B. (2021). Levels of the absolute in Husserl. Continental Philosophy Review 55 (2), 137–158. Mercer, R. (2017). Phenomenology and the possibility of religious experience. Open Theology 3, 516–528. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception (D.A. Landes, D.A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. Mignosi, R. (1981). Reawakening and resistance: A stoic source of the Husserlian epoché. In A.A. Bello (Ed.), The Great Chain of Being and Italian Phenomenology (pp. 311–319). Springer Netherlands. Mohanty, J. N. (1991). Method of imaginative variation in phenomenology. In G.J. Massey, T. Horowitz (Eds.), Thought Experiments in Science and Philosophy (pp.  261–272). Rowman & Littlefield. Moran, D. (2007). Fink’s speculative phenomenology: Between constitution and transcendence. Research in Phenomenology, 3–31. Moran, D., & Cohen, J. (2012). The Husserl Dictionary. Bloomsbury Academic. Ricoeur, P. (1967). Husserl: An Analysis of His Phenomenology (E.G. Ballard, L.E. Embree, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1974). Phenomenology. The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy 5 (3), 149–168. Ricoeur, P.  (1991). Life in quest of narrative. In D. Wood (Ed.), On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation (pp. 20–33). New York: Routledge. Sarao, K. T. S. (2004). Anatman/Atman (no-self/Self). In R.E. Buswell (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Buddhism (pp. 18–19). Macmillan Reference. Schimmel, A. (2011). Mystical Dimensions of Islam. University of North Carolina Press. Shaikh, S. (2012). Sufi Narratives of Intimacy: Ibn Arabi, Gender, and Sexuality. University of North Carolina Press. Sharf, R. (2014). Mindfulness and mindlessness in early Chan. Philosophy East and West 64 (4), 933–964. Smart, N. (1992). Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (2nd ed.). Brill. Stace, W. T. (1987). Mysticism and Philosophy. J.P. Tarcher. Sviri, S. (2007). Perspectives on Early Islamic Mysticism: The World of Al-Hak’m Al-Tirmidhi and His Contemporaries. Routledge. Toussulis, Y. (2011). Sufism and the Way of Blame: Hidden Sources of a Sacred Psychology. Quest Books/Theosophical Publishing House. Vajda, G., Goldziher, I. and Bonebakker, S.A. (2012). “Id__j āza”. In P. Bearman, T. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel, W.P. Heinrichs (Eds.). Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.). Brill. Waugh, E. H. (2015). al-ʿArabī, Muḥammad Nūr al-Dīn. In K. Fleet, D. Matringe, G. Krämer, E. Rowson, J.A. Nawas (Eds.), Encyclopaedia of Islam - Three 2015-3 (pp. 11–12). Brill. Wilson, J. (2014). Mindful America: Meditation and the Mutual Transformation of Buddhism and American Culture. Oxford University Press. Wynne, A. (2018). Buddhism without Nirvana, or Nirvana without Buddhism? Religious Studies Review 44 (1), 49–55. Yazdi, M. H. (1992). The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence. SUNY Press. Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford University Press. Zizioulas, J. (2006). Communion and Otherness: Further Studies in Personhood and the Church (P. McPartlan, Ed.). Bloomsbury Academic.

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11 DELUDED MINDFULNESS Jason Dockstader

Contemporary Mindfulness As with most highly contested terms, one can find many contradictory conceptions of mindfulness today. Bhikkhu Bodhi has described the term as being ‘so vague and elastic that it serves almost as a cipher into which we can read virtually anything we want’ (Bodhi, 2011, p. 22). The aim of this chapter is to claim that such seemingly incoherent all-inclusiveness in the conceptions of mindfulness might not be such a bad thing. In fact, by focusing on specific traditions of Chinese philosophy—classical Daoism and Tiantai Buddhism, in particular—a conception of mindfulness can be developed that will enable it to positively affirm all of its contradictory meanings. The very contradictory plurality of conceptions of mindfulness might itself provide insight into what mindfulness can tell us about the world and how it can help us live in accordance with it. If there is any consensus today regarding the meaning of mindfulness, it is that it has something to do with ‘non-judgemental, present-centred awareness,’ a distinct kind of paying attention: ‘on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally’ (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p.  4; Lutz et al., 2015, p.  636). It is ‘a kind of nonelaborative, nonjudgmental, present-centred awareness in which each thought, feeling, or sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is’ (Bishop et al., 2004, p. 232). Most agree that mindfulness must at least involve some sort of lucid awareness or clear comprehension, some kind of transparent access either to the world, the mind, or both. And the point of reaching such a state of mind is to obtain some sort of therapeutic or soteriological release, whether it be more mundane stress relief or overcoming of anxiety, or something much more extraordinary like embodying and expressing wisdom or reaching full Buddhahood. But this is about as far as it goes with respect to agreement concerning the meaning of mindfulness. Debates have emerged as to whether mindfulness is more a trait, a state, or a practice. There are also more pressing philosophical debates about the meaning of mindfulness along temporal, moral, and epistemic dimensions (Stone & Zahavi, 2021). Looking to its Buddhist pedigree, there are debates concerning the meaning of the Pali sati and Sanskrit smṛti, terms which originally meant ‘memory,’ ‘recollection,’ and ‘remembrance,’ and which when compared to contemporary mindfulness seem to lack an DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-14

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emphasis on present-centeredness, bare attention, and being nonjudgmental. It is hard to tell then whether mindfulness should be understood as being present-centered at the expense of any accessing of the past or projecting into the future, or should be presentcentered in the sense of depending upon past experiences with the intention of preparing for inevitable futurity. Also, if mindfulness is meant to be exclusively present-centered to the degree of being non-evaluative and nonjudgmental, then it is hard to tell what happens to the necessarily moral motivation that leads most to entertain mindfulness in the first place and the moral, or at least normative, content of most mindful judgments. As Rupert Gethin emphasizes, sati is supposed to be an awareness not just of things, but of the value of things (Gethin, 2011, p. 39). Finally, there is much consternation about whether contemporary mindfulness is not epistemically self-refuting to the degree of bordering on an elimination of consciousness itself. If one is meant to be mindful in the sense of utterly nonjudgmental, then it becomes difficult to see how one could exhibit mindful knowledge or wisdom, how one could apprehend things are they truly are, or indeed how one could even remain a conscious being with intentional mental states while becoming so ‘nonconceptually aware.’ The danger is that the lucid awareness gained through mindfulness might drift into an unintentional mirroring of the world that a Mādhyamika like Candrakīrti (ca. 600–650 CE) offered and which has recently been described as a robotic or zombified form of Buddhism (Siderits, 2006, pp. 308–333). Now, of course, most contemporary proponents of mindfulness do not go so far as to follow Candrakīrti, but the ‘dangerous’ epistemic implications of mindfulness remains a contentious issue within contemporary mindfulness and between it and its historical sources. This is not to say that the main lines of dispute in the understanding of mindfulness are only between contemporary secular, scientifically inclined proponents of the practice and historically relevant Buddhists. There is as much disagreement about mindfulness and proper meditative techniques within the Buddhist tradition as there is between the tradition and its champions today. And this says nothing of the non-Buddhist traditions integrated into contemporary mindfulness where something close to the technique seems to have been practiced as well. Contemporary mindfulness appears, then, to be either a contradictory mix or at least a bizarre collection of Theraveda and Mahayana Buddhist elements, latent non-Buddhist Stoic and Christian tendencies, and pieces of contemporary psychological evidence. One could do one of two things about this situation. On the one hand, as most do, one could untangle and resolve these contradictions and show how the apparent tensions are really only superficial and non-threatening. This is usually best done through historical and scientific cherry-picking, or through plain indifference to the problem. On the other hand, one could take the tensions and contradictions in the understandings of mindfulness as an opportunity to explore mostly unaddressed ways of engaging in mindfulness, and contemplation more generally, that aim not to resolve paradoxes but affirm them and, moreover, indulge in their total explosion. This chapter takes the latter route. The view on offer here can be described as a form of meta-mindfulness where the contradictory views about time, morality, and epistemology within the understandings of mindfulness will be found to be inherently true contradictions. The understandings of mindfulness are so contradictory because mindfulness is so contradictory, as are all things. Mindfulness can be a way to access and affirm this, and to experience release on the basis of such an accessing of the inherent contradictoriness of all things. 176

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The key to properly understanding and practicing this sort of mindfulness will be to view mindfulness itself as the meditative or contemplative technique which can access, affirm, therapeutically appreciate, and ultimately identify with the intrinsically contradictory nature of reality. The lucid awareness of oneself and the world found in the Chinese traditions of Classical Daoism and Tiantai Buddhism will be seen as being identical to the delusions of the everyday limited and perspectival mind. There is a way of being mindful—about mindfulness, about the mind, about the world, about everything—that sees lucidity as delusion, the present as the past and future, goodness as evil, truth as falsity, mind as matter, things as their conditions and constituents, and vice versa and so on. Being nonjudgmental will be the best way of making judgments, both moral and epistemic. Being present-centered will be the best way of living entirely in the past and the future. Exhibiting bare attention will be the best way of being utterly immersed in things. Feeling and identifying with all the defiling emotions, false beliefs, and evil deeds that characterize the world, karma, and saṃsāra will be the best way to experience the true peace and moral perfection of nirvanic therapeutic release. This approach will be called ‘deluded mindfulness.’ We can start with an earlier form of this approach in the contemplative practice of Daoist mindfulness as found in the Daoist classic, the Zhuangzi.1

Daoist Mindfulness At the start the fourth of the seven ‘inner chapters’ of the Zhuangzi, entitled ‘In the Human World’ in Brook Ziporyn’s translation (Ziporyn, 2009a, pp. 24–32), there is a discussion between Confucius and his disciple Yan Hui.2 As with each of the discussions in this chapter, there is a concern with determining how to best combine the achievement of wisdom with living an everyday normal human life, especially a life in which there is an attempt to practice one’s wisdom in the context of being employed in a stressful line of work like that of a political advisor. In more general terms, the issue in this chapter is how one can both effectively play their allotted and fated social role while remaining one with the Dao, the Course or Way of all things. The question is, how can one reconcile genuine knowledge, wisdom, and peace of mind with the necessity of having to perform certain social roles? That is, how can one healthily combine the natural or heavenly (tian) power (de) of the Dao within oneself with the pathological necessities of living in the human world?3 Yan tells Confucius that he has heard there is a tyrant in the state of Wei and that he plans on taking his master’s advice to head out in search of a tyrant to remonstrate with and teach the proper moral virtues to. Surprisingly, Confucius—who is ironically Zhuangzi’s mouthpiece in the text given the deep conflict between Confucianism and Daoism—tells Yan he is more likely to get himself executed than anything else doing something so foolish and premature. Yan is not wise enough yet to perform his social role of Confucian political advisor with the requisite agility and ease. Confucius must first teach him about a meditative or contemplative technique needed for successfully thriving in the human world. It is called the ‘fasting of the mind’ (xinzhai) or ‘sitting and forgetting’ (zuowang) (ibid., pp. 26–28).4 Fasting the mind initially involves emptying one’s mind of its own particular intentional content, its own ‘understanding consciousness’ (zhi) (ibid., p. 27). One is to first listen to the world—with all its concrete particular beings with their particular perspectives and preferences, including one’s own—not with one’s ears, but with a mind in which all of one’s own intentions have been merged into a singularity. Then one is to listen to the world not with one’s singular intentional mind, but with one’s vital energies, one’s qi, which is ‘an emptiness, 177

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a waiting for the presence of beings’ (ibid.). What gathers in this emptiness is the Dao itself, the Course or Way of all things, the way all things interdependently emerge and decay. This emptiness in which the Dao gathers is the emptiness of the fasted mind. The fasted mind is the emptiness in which the Dao gathers. It is that in, through, and as which all beings emerge and decay as so many interdependent and transforming perspectives on the world. One is to fast their mind to the degree of listening to the world with one’s vital energies because listening with one’s ears leaves one only hearing what the ears can receive. Likewise, listening with one’s non-fasted mind leaves one stuck at ‘whatever verifies its preconceptions’ (ibid., p. 26). It leaves one with a mind that can only entertain what it can slot into its categories and count in its usual tallies. Instead, with a fasted mind that listens with its vital breath or energies, the powers with which it is disposed to react to the world effectively and spontaneously, it can hear the entire history and future of the Dao’s endless production and destruction of itself as all things, beings, perspectives, and so on. This is what is meant by emptiness, the emptiness the fasted mind becomes by hearing with its vital energies: the openness of an all-affirming identification with and as all the specific and distinct things or perspectives thereby created and destroyed. A fasted mind hears calmly and freely through and as all non-fasted minds hearing the world through their necessarily perspectival and limited ears and intentional minds. The point then of being presentcentered and nonjudgmentally, nonconceptually, and unintentionally aware is to view the world through and identify with all limited, deluded particular memories and projections, all pathological ­attachments and normative judgments. There is thus a oneness to the fasted mind, but a oneness that is also the affirmation of the absolute plurality of all that emerges and decays within, through, and as its emptiness. It sees or hears all things as so many openings and opportunities for its vital energies and powers to be unintentionally exercised, as so many ways it can dwell in and effectively respond to the world. These ways are fated (ming), the workings of the fate of the production and destruction of all things or perspectives; that is how the Dao gathers in the fasted mind’s emptiness. And this is precisely how Confucius thinks Yan could get away with performing his social role of political advisor effectively, how he could ‘play in the tyrant’s cage without impinging on his concern for a good name’ (ibid., p. 27). Yan is to advise him opportunely, whenever the occasion calls for it, without him much realizing that advice is being given or without him much noticing who is giving it. Yan’s performance, if it is done with a fasted mind, will display a virtuosity that consists in Yan forgetting his very existence, of his being absorbed into Nature’s (tian) intrinsic structure, which is the Dao’s endless unfolding of interdependent impermanent perspectives. Yan will ‘make his real home in the oneness, letting himself be temporarily lodged in whatever cannot be avoided’ (ibid.). Zhuangzi has Confucius describe the powers of Yan’s fasted, forgetful mind in quite poetic terms: This will get you close to success. It is easy to wipe away your footprints, but difficult to walk without touching the ground. It is easy to use deception when you are sent into your activities at the behest of other humans, but difficult to use deception when sent into activity by Heaven. You have learned how to fly with wings, but not yet how to fly without wings. You have learned the wisdom of being wise, but not yet the wisdom of being free of wisdom. Concentrate on the hollows of what is before you, and the empty chamber within you will generate its own brightness. (ibid.) 178

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We can thus already see that Daoism offers a unique twist on a meditative or contemplative practice that can be described as a kind of mindfulness. The fasted mind is a mindful mind that is also quite mindless. It exhibits a wisdom free of wisdom. It is a mind full of its own essential emptiness. It is a mind without conscious intentionality, yet is also the very condition of possibility and ultimately the identity of any conscious intention. It is a mind, a fasted mind, that, through its emptiness, gathers the Dao’s expression of itself as all the world’s limited perspectives and beings, including the conflicting and contradictory interpretations of mindfulness as well. A mind without intentional consciousness is the emptiness through, by, and as which all intentional consciousnesses can emerge and decay, can endlessly impermanently interdependently produce and destroy themselves and each other as the world and all its beings. A fasted mind hears, takes, and simply becomes all the limited perspectives of non-fasted minds. Fasting of the mind is a kind of mindfulness that can be not only present-centered and nonjudgmentally aware, but also a remembrance of past and projected future moral and epistemic judgments. And not only this: a fasted mind is the fact that any present-centered and nonjudgmental awareness is already nothing other than past- and future-centered moral and epistemic judgments and vice versa. Such is what gathers as the Dao in the emptiness of the fasted mind. To flesh this out more, let us look to the famous second chapter of the Zhuangzi, the ‘Equalizing Assessments of Things.’ Here we find further description of the fasted mind as a ‘large consciousness [that] is idle and spacey’ (ibid., p. 10), a consciousness that understands ‘the Course that is not a course’ (ibid., p. 17). The fasted mind is a consciousness that ‘can be called the Heavenly Reservoir—poured into without ever getting full, ladled out of without ever running out’ (ibid.). And what is poured into and ladled out of it? Everything, all beings that come to presence as the Dao’s infinity of perspectives in the emptiness of its vital energy, its constant power. The Zhuangzi describes beings as so many perspectives on and of the world, as the indexicals by which things distinguish themselves and are so distinguished. Each being is a ‘this,’ a ‘that’s it.’ Each being is also a ‘that,’ a ‘that’s not it.’ Each being is a this that is also a ‘that,’ a ‘that’ that is also a ‘this.’ Each being is a this/ that (shi/fei) distinction. Shi also means a ‘this’ that is morally and epistemically right. Fei also means a ‘that’ that is morally and epistemically wrong. Beings are not just indexical distinctions, but necessarily limited and perspectival normative judgments (ibid., p.  12). Each being is right. Each being is wrong. Each being is a right/wrong judgment, a true/false epistemic judgment and a good/bad moral judgment. What is therapeutically key for the Zhuangzi is that the large consciousness of the fasted mind, the Heavenly Reservoir, can view all things from their own perspective, from the perspective of each ‘this’ and each ‘that,’ especially insofar each ‘this’ is a ‘this/that’ or ‘right/ wrong’ distinction that is entailed, included, and ultimately identical to the ‘this,’ any ‘this,’ that is making the distinction. Inside each perspective or being are all the perspectives or beings they are not. Inside each ‘this’ are all the ‘thats’ that it is not, which is everything. This is the case for each and every being. This is because, for the Zhuangzi, all beings are constantly transforming and depending (dai) on each other for their existence to such an extent that they are ultimately indiscernible. And this is so since, after all, there is no ‘this’ without a ‘that,’ no ‘right’ without a ‘wrong.’ But, again, such transformative interdependence is so extreme that there is no principled way to discern and thus know how or whether one thing is or is not another. This is a case of what Donald Baxter has labeled the ‘the discernibility of identicals’ (Baxter, 1999). All things are identical, but discernibly so. All things are distinct, yet identical. So, all things are 179

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distinct, they are their own perspectives, but they are only so by including, entailing, and ultimately being everything they are not, all other perspectives. Each thing/being/perspective/this/right is each and every thing/being/perspective/that/wrong and vice versa. There is no getting away from this. It is what each thing is. All things are right and wrong by being each right and wrong, by being each right as being each wrong and vice versa. Each ‘this’ is a ‘this’ and ‘that’ that is all ‘thises’ and ‘thats.’ Now, to be able to take THIS perspective is to have fasted one’s mind, to have filled one’s large consciousness with all perspectives, to have emptied oneself so that the Dao’s ceaseless production of itself as all perspectives can gather, emerge, decay, and interdependently transform in, through, and as one’s/the Dao’s vital energies, its de. In other words, in contrast to Ziporyn’s reading of ‘the Heavenly Reservoir as the Daoist’s wild-card mind, rather than its object, the Course’ (Ziporyn, 2009a, p. 17), I would claim the fasted mind is the Dao, the Heavenly Reservoir is the gathering and unfolding of all the ways or courses that are the Course, and not only any one of them in particular but rather all of them individually and indivisibly. What this involves is no longer viewing this/that distinctions as really opposites, as somehow only relatively distinct or only partially knowable. No, now each ‘this,’ each being or perspective is illuminated as obvious, is transparently viewed and absolutely known as what the Zhuangzi calls ‘the Course as axis, the axis of all courses’: When ‘this’ and ‘that’—right and wrong—are no longer coupled as opposites—that is called the Course as Axis, the axis of all courses. When this axis finds its place in the center, it responds to all the endless things it confronts, thwarted by none. For it has an endless supply of ‘rights,’ and endless supply of ‘wrongs.’ Thus, I say, nothing compares to the Illumination of the Obvious. (ibid., p. 12) Thus, what the fasted mind knows and ultimately is, is the absolute plurality of delusions that are each and every limited perspective, each and every ‘this’ and ‘that,’ right and wrong. The Heavenly Reservoir is a fasted mind that is every deluded mind, the idle and spacey large consciousness that includes and ultimately is every ‘small consciousness [that] is cramped and circumspect’ (ibid., p. 10). A proper Daoist mindfulness practice then would not only affirm a present-centered nonjudgmental nonconceptual awareness and a past- and future-centered epistemically and morally normatively judgmental awareness, but affirm the former as the latter and the latter as the former. A mindful mind is a mindless mind that is all deluded minds. To exhibit the wisdom of a fasted mind, a mind without any particular conscious intentions, is to have access to and ultimately identify with and as every distinct deluded judgment, every limited perspective, every right and wrong, every dependent and transforming being, every conscious intention. This is true clear comprehension and lucid awareness. The Zhuangzi offers a variety of names or descriptions for this fasted mind—it is ‘the Radiance of Drift and Doubt,’ it involves ‘Walking Two Roads,’ it is a ‘remaining at rest in the middle of Heaven the Potter’s Wheel’ (ibid., pp. 14–15)—but the texts returns in chapter 5, Markers of Full Virtuosity, to a discussion of the Heavenly or ‘Numinous Reservoir’ (ibid., p. 37). Here we read about the joy of having fasted the mind: That is what allows the joy of its harmony to open into all things without thereby losing its fullness, what keeps it flowing on day and night without cease, taking part 180

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everywhere as the springtime of each being. Connecting up with This, your own mind becomes the site of the life-giving time. This is what is called keeping the innate powers whole. (ibid.) We can thus see the therapeutic upshot of the Zhuangzi’s approach to fasting the mind. It is a contemplative or meditative technique that allows one to view all contradictions as true. Daoist mindfulness entails not only a dialetheism in which some contradictions get to be true, but a full-blown trivialism in which all contradictions are true.5 It takes a fasted mind to know this trivialism and one-all monism, and yet it is what all deluded minds already know. And it takes a fasted mind to experience the therapeutic benefits of knowing that trivialism is true, and yet again it is already the experienced condition and nature of all deluded minds. This is the content of the wisdom that is free of being wise. It is also the means by which one can obtain not only certain therapeutic benefits, but reach a kind of impersonal immortality. A fasted mind is the Dao, the constant (cheng) empty center or axis in, through, and as which all things interdependently impermanently exist as so many intensities of the vital energy’s infinitely self-causal and self-destructive natural power. To effectively practice Daoist mindfulness is to become what one is: this vital empty center that is all the deluded, defiled, limited, consciously intentional perspectives that project, create, and ultimately are all beings.

Tiantai Mindfulness Along with classical Daoism, there is another tradition in Chinese philosophy where pathology and therapy are ultimately identical, where mindfulness consists in viewing the world through all its delusions. It is Tiantai Buddhism. The main figures in Tiantai are Tiantai Zhiyi (pp. 538–597), Jingxi Zhanran (pp. 711–782), and Siming Zhili (pp. 960–1028). It is a kind of Mahāyāna, and in particular Mādhyamaka, Buddhism. It can be viewed as both a Daoist-inflected kind of Buddhism and the ‘earliest attempt at a thoroughgoing Sinitic reworking of the Indian Buddhist tradition’ (Ziporyn, 2016, p. ix). Specifically, Tiantai’s main contribution to Mādhyamaka Buddhism was its addition of a third truth to the classic Two Truths doctrine. The point in adding a third truth was to ‘open the provisional to reveal the real’ (Ziporyn, 2009b, p. 62). The third truth was meant as an expansion and exacerbation of the presentation of the Two Truths doctrine by Nāgārjuna (c. 150–c. 250), the Indian Buddhist monk often regarded as the founder of the Mādhyamaka line. According to Nāgārjuna, there is first of all Conventional Truth, which includes most ordinary speech and articulated Buddhist doctrines. Usually excluded from Conventional Truth is what can be regarded as plain or simple error: something like metaphysical views which take ordinary speech much too seriously and assume that its posits actually enjoy some kind of mind-independent, objective existence. Conventional Truth is just our everyday descriptions of ourselves and the world of objects and properties, of phenomena, found in the spatio-temporal manifold of apparent reality as at least existing in some kind of real way. This includes the Buddhist doctrines of the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path, impermanence, suffering, no-self, and so on as well. Ultimate Truth is the view that all the posits of Conventional Truth are merely provisional, that all apparent phenomena are in fact empty (śūnya) of any independent or substantial existence (svabhava). All provisional posits, all conventional entities, are so 181

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mutually interdependent and impermanent (pratītyasamutpāda) that they cannot be ultimately distinguished from their causes and conditions, which in the end are all other equally as empty conventional entities. In truth, things are so empty of their own being that they ultimately only have other being, which is just as emptily interdependent as their own. This includes everything, even the doctrine of emptiness itself and the Ultimate Truth, which brings us to Nāgārjuna’s famous claim of the emptiness of emptiness itself. Emptiness, the Ultimate Truth, is only a conventional truth as well, thereby becoming a sort of ineffable experience of liberation from attachment to the substantial existence of anything whatsoever. At this point, Tiantai Buddhism makes a crucial addition. There is a third truth. Along with the provisional positing of Conventional Truth (jia) and the emptiness of Ultimate Truth (kong), there is the center, the Middle Truth (zhong). The first move Tiantai makes with this notion of the ‘center’ is to note that nothing is a plain or simple error, that no view is just incorrect. All claims are equally conventionally true and ultimately empty. Second, the ‘center’ is the nature of the very identity of Conventional Truth and Ultimate Truth, of the emptiness of emptiness. The Middle Truth is the truth that Conventional Truth is Ultimate Truth and vice versa. But this is so in not some merely reductive sense. So, the third aspect of Tiantai Middle Truth is that the identity of Conventional and Ultimate Truth does not exclude their sustained difference. Indeed, it is precisely by remaining distinct that Conventional Truth and Ultimate Truth are not only ultimately identical but ultimately identical as ultimately distinct and vice versa. Not only are all phenomena both provisional and empty, but all phenomena are provisional by being empty and empty by being provisional. To be provisional is to be empty, and vice versa, which is precisely the Middle Truth. The center is the way in and by which the provisional and ultimate are and are not each other. The center is the ‘as’ of simultaneous ultimate identity and ultimate difference. This can be found in a line that may stand as a slogan for the entire Tiantai approach: ‘The absolute totality encounters the absolute totality, and the result is the arising of the absolute totality’ (Ziporyn, 2022). In a sense, one can read the Tiantai addition of a third truth as a total explosion of the general Mahāyāna identification of saṃsāra with nirvāṇa. For example, Nāgārjuna’s identified saṃsāra with nirvāṇa in pretty clear terms: ‘There is not the slightest difference between cyclical existence and nirvāṇa’ (Garfield, 1995, p.  75). Saṃsāra is the world, the entire permanent, constant, indefinite cycle of emergence and decay, endless creation and destruction. It is the total interdependence of all things in their ceaseless impermanent production and destruction of each other and themselves. And it is precisely this which is emptiness. That all things are so causally and conditionally interdependent that they lack any existence or identity of their own is what makes them ultimately empty. The liberatory experience of this emptiness is nirvāṇa, the release from attachment to phenomena, but nirvāṇa is also nothing but the very nature of all things in their samsaric interdependent totality. So, all things are inherently soteriologically or therapeutically perfect even if they are also impure, imperfect, defiled, finite, limited, conditioned, caused, deluded and so on. That is, all samsaric delusions inherently entail and ultimately are the experience and fact of the Ultimate Truth of emptiness accessed by nirvāṇa, which is precisely what the Middle Truth tells us. Tiantai takes this identification to its fullest possible expression. It emphasizes that through the center each and every deluded or finite thing or phenomenon leads to and ultimately is liberation, therapeutic or soteriological release. That is, every single instance of saṃsāra—every specific claim, statement, proposition, posit, thing, property, and so on—is 182

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ultimately true as the emptiness through and as which all things cyclically, interdependently exist. Each thing is the center of the universe, and each center of the universe is the entire universe. Each thing is all things, the way all things are provisionally posited and ultimately empty and both and both as each other. That all things are distinct even though they are identical is what is meant by Conventional Truth, provisional positing. That all things are identical even though they are distinct is what is meant by Ultimate Truth, emptiness. That Conventional Truth and Ultimate Truth are both conventionally distinct yet ultimately identical and ultimately identical yet conventionally distinct is what is meant by Middle Truth. That each thing, each entity, each phenomenon is an instance of the Middle Truth is the center, the fact each thing is also all other things and is all other things by not being them and is not them by being them. It is as distinct that all things are identical as the one thing that is all things. This is what Tiantai calls the ‘non-exclusive center’ (budan zhong). Ziporyn labels it as ‘intersubsumptive asness’ (Ziporyn, 2009b, p. 64). With respect to accessing and realizing the non-exclusive center oneself, and thereby becoming what one is, realizing one’s inherent therapeutic perfection and total Buddhahood, Tiantai offers a specific meditative or contemplative technique called ‘the contemplation of mind’ (guanxin). It is also sometimes called the ‘contemplation of inherent inclusion’ (guanju) (Ziporyn, 2010, p.  156). It is through the contemplation of mind that one can view ‘each moment of experience as three thousand worlds’ (yiniansanqian). ‘Three thousand worlds’ is a Buddhist way of saying ‘everything.’ The point is to see each moment of experience as all experiences, both all the experiences that can be had of things and all the things so experienced. To contemplate the mind and view each moment as everything would be to have the clear comprehension and lucid awareness of all views as so many delusions and limited perspectives, each of which gives access to the Middle Truth and so serves as the center. Just as with the Zhuangzi’s contemplative approach of ‘fasting the mind,’ this Tiantai ‘contemplation of mind’ can be seen as an example of what I am calling deluded mindfulness. To get clearer about this Tiantai version of deluded mindfulness, it is important to address what certain Tiantai Buddhists meant by concepts like ‘mind’ (xin), ‘thought’ or ‘thinking’ (nian), and ‘nature’ (xing), and how they claimed that the mind ‘creates’ (zao), ‘inherently includes’ (ju), and ‘is identical to’ (ji) all phenomena (ibid.). Another way of discussing the Tiantai approach to contemplation is to discern the nature of the distinction between insentience and sentience, dharma-nature and Buddha-nature, objective and subjective nature, and so on. As Ziporyn declares, for Tiantai, ‘reality means, by definition, phenomenal reality’ (Ziporyn, 2009b, p. 67). Reality is phenomenal because all things result from the projections and divisions of the sentient, experiencing mind (xin), the mind which is indistinct from its activities of thought or thinking (nian), which is the process of making and projecting distinctions. As emphasized by Zhili, mind is the ‘arising and perishing of conditional, determinate ‘thoughts,’ ‘experiences,’ ‘moments of consciousness’—not a pure, true, eternal awareness, but a deluded process of moment-to-moment distinction-making’ (Ziporyn, 2010, p.  158). As Zhanran puts it as well, ‘all dharmas [things] without exception are xinxing,’ literally ‘mind-nature,’ which could be understood to mean that all things are in essence expressions of the nature of the mind, ways in which the mind or mental activity expresses itself, both what the mind experiences and how it experiences and that in, by, and through which it experiences (ibid., p. 157). Mind is that which experiences and what is experienced even though, of course, the non-mental or objective remains at least provisionally posited as objective and distinct by the very distinction-making mind. All of this is 183

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to say that, for Tiantai, all reality is created by, is the changes of, is included within, and is ultimately identical to the deluded mind, the nature of the mind that is constantly producing the distinct, conditioned, impermanent, interpenetrating, and interdependent nature of all things, of reality itself. So far, the Tiantai approach sounds fairly panpsychist, or at least idealist. However, it is by realizing that the ‘True Mind,’ the mindful mind, already is the deluded mind that one sees that the Tiantai view can also easily be labeled as materialist and even eliminativist insofar as the true mind is as much ‘True Matter’ as it is anything else. This is because ‘true’ here means the center of the Middle Truth, the totally reversible and interchangeable identification of each thing, each distinct moment of experience, with each. This is the insight that is to be accessed through the Tiantai practice of ‘contemplation of the mind.’ The Tiantai Buddhist meditative practitioner is to see that the deluded mind’s distinctions of subject/ object, sentient/insentient, awareness/unawareness, this/that, Buddha-nature/dharma-nature, and so on are all in fact so many instances or experiences of the single suchness that is the center, that each side of each distinction and each distinction itself are all the Middle Truth that all the deluded mind’s thoughts are in fact identical to, and the identity of all, that it thinks, that all thoughts are one thought, all deluded minds are one true mind, all true minds are one deluded mind, and so on. This is how the contemplation of mind leads to the realization that one moment of experience is all moments of experiences. Zhili puts this in terms of the ‘contemplation of the deluded mind’ (wangxinguan), which he understood as the practice which ‘manifests the Nature of the Three-Thousand in the aggregate mind’ (ibid., p.  161). Here is the way Zhanran discusses the topic in terms of the distinctions mentioned above: Object means the unaware. Buddha means the aware. Ordinary sentient beings possess the principle of awareness, but lack the wisdom to become aware of the unaware, which is why we temporarily make a distinction between the two, to make them aware of the unaware. But once they are aware of the unaware, it is no longer still unaware. How could the object of unaware be separated from the agent of awareness? … Originally the two are not different, but the ordinary sentient being regards them as separate. Hence we reveal this to sentient beings, to make them aware of the unaware, make awareness and unawareness converge into a single suchness. Hence we know that awareness without unawareness cannot be called the Buddha-nature (subject), and unawareness without awareness cannot be called the dharma-nature (object). If there were no unawareness within awareness, how could it be called the Buddhanature (subject)? Hence the idea of a dharma-nature (object) without the Buddha-nature (subject) belongs to the lesser vehicle, but in the great vehicle, the dharma-nature (object) is precisely the Buddha-nature (subject). (Ziporyn, 2009b, p. 74) To return to the contradictory interpretations of mindfulness we find today, we can apply this Tiantai approach to contemplation, just as with the Zhuangzi’s Daoist ‘fasting of the mind,’ and see how there can be a way of practicing mindfulness that enables the practitioner to affirm all these contradictions as so many opportunities for release and salvific fulfillment. For Tiantai, the single moment of experience accessed through the contemplation of the mind is both entirely the present and all past and future moments, and the present as all pasts and futures and vice versa. Again, this is because, for any given thing or moment 184

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or experience, there is no principled way to distinguish one from another insofar they all depend upon, contain, entail, and ultimately are each other even though they all remain distinct thereby. In other words, for Tiantai, to practice mindfulness by being nonjudgmentally and nonconceptually present-centered and aware is already to practice mindfulness by making (normative) judgments, applying concepts, dwelling on the past and future and being absorbed into the insentience of the objective dharma-nature. The present is already all pasts and all futures and vice versa. Being nonjudgmental is the way all judgments are already made.6 The nonconceptual is already all applied concepts. Each contains and ultimately is each by being so distinct. In terms of who and what are contemplated, and who and what are doing the contemplating, Zhili puts it this way: Thus we can say that all the sentient beings and all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, throughout the ten directions of space, and also their constituent environments, are the object being contemplated, and also that all the sentient beings and all the Buddhas of the past, present, and future, throughout the ten directions of space, and also their constituent environments, are the wisdom as subject doing the contemplating (neng guan zhi). The object and the wisdom are two names for the same entity. Thus subject and object are two and not two. (Ziporyn, 2009b, p. 78) In other words, mindfulness, if practiced properly, will show the practitioner that all the contradictions in the interpretations of mindfulness are true, as are all contradictions. The mindful mind is indeed the deluded mind, but so is the deluded mind, each deluded mind, the one true, pure, eternal mindful, Buddha-mind. That is, the true mind just is each moment of consciousness or experience of the ordinary deluded mind making all its normal, everyday confused and arbitrary distinctions reeking of attachment, defilement, and conventional or provisional interdependence, which is what all of us, all sentient and insentient beings, are doing all the time everywhere anyway. To contemplate and thus know THAT, to experience that, to be that, is to have received the nirvanic therapeutic relief of realizing and becoming the Middle Truth that all things are all things, that every thing is everything, that each moment of experience is distinctly identical to every moment of experience as the center of all experiences. Every moment is an opportunity to become what one is: the Buddha-nature that is the dharma-nature and vice versa. As Zhanran reminds us: Every speck of dust and every mental act anywhere are precisely the nature of the mind of every sentient being and every Buddha. There is no question of any of them belonging to anyone’s own mind alone, since all together create them, all together become them, all share in being the same objects of liberative transformation, and all share in in performing the same acts of liberative transformation. (ibid., p. 76)

Deluded Mindfulness We can thus conclude that there is a structural isomorphism between the way Classical Daoism and Tiantai Buddhism approach contemplation, meditation, or mindfulness practice. Both view the normal, everyday mind as a deluded distinction-making machine. It views and divides up the world from its indefinite plurality of finite, limited perspectives. 185

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However, there are contemplative techniques that can enable one to see the deluded mind for what it really is. Through Daoist fasting of mind and Tiantai contemplation of mind, a therapeutically inclined practitioner can see that all that the distinctions the deluded mind makes, all the projected particular things and properties, are in fact so many interdependent, interpenetrating expressions of a constant indivisible process of emergence and decay. Thus, in both Daoism and Tiantai the realization of the emptiness of things, of emptiness itself, is therapeutically key. It enables one to affirm the ultimate indistinguishability of all that the deluded mind distinguishes, which is obviously everything. Next, for both Daoism and Tiantai, the center emerges, the center that was always the axis in, through, by, and as which all deluded distinctions were made. Through an accessing of the central axis, the axis of centers, the Middle Truth forever thriving in the Heavenly Reservoir, one realizes and thus becomes the trivial truth that one thing is all things, that each distinct thing is that one thing that is all distinct things and so all the ways they are so distinguished. One pure, true, empty, mindless mind is indeed the mind that is all deluded minds and which is each deluded mind is as well. Therefore, through deluded mindfulness contemplation, by combining epistemic global trivialism (where all judgments are true) with metaphysical one-all monism (where each thing is all things), the Daoist-Tiantai adept fulfills her therapeutic goal of becoming truly mindful, of discover the empty, mindless mind as the true nature of every deluded mind, including her own. She realizes her mind is all minds. When applied to the contradictory readings of contemporary mindfulness, Daoist and Tiantai deluded mindfulness can show us that the original Buddhist emphasis on remembrance and recollection and futural normative judgmental projection is in fact nothing but the nonconceptual bare attention and dereifying present-centeredness championed today and vice versa. Daoist and Tiantai deluded mindfulness is thus a meta-mindfulness practice that enables one to see all the contemporary contradictory readings of mindfulness as equally true, as true as all the other contradictory judgments projected by the deluded mind, which is indeed all judgments. Having this realization is meant to be the therapeutic upshot deluded mindfulness has to offer. At this point, the (exasperated) reader may have a couple questions. First of all, they may wonder where deluded mindfulness leaves phenomenology. On the one hand, as Ziporyn has noted, some phenomenologists, such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, got very close to the one-all monism of deluded mindfulness with his notions of the flesh of the world, reversibility, and intertwining chiasms (Ziporyn, 2009b, pp. 61–82). Both Tiantai Buddhism and Merleau-Ponty agree on the ontological primacy of the phenomenal. On the other hand, the absolutist phenomenological realism entailed by deluded mindfulness might simply be too much for even today’s most extreme phenomenological realists, with their emphasis on the intuition of essences and seemingly ardent dedication to good and common sense. This issue will have to be left to the phenomenologists to decide. Another question might be how exactly is the global trivialism of deluded mindfulness supposed to be therapeutically beneficial? To respond to this question, I will let the main defender of trivialism in philosophy today, Paul Kabay, share his answer. He wants to remind us that the outcome of something like deluded mindfulness can be total affirmation and peace that stem from seeing that in the world all things obtain, both good and bad: Why be worried? Because of the misfortune that befalls you? You regret not having taken a different course of action? But necessarily all things obtain—including everything that is bad for you. There is nothing you could have done to prevent this. So 186

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why regret your past actions? Instead, be happy and relaxed. And besides, everything good obtains too—you have missed out on nothing. The conditions for a peaceful, tranquil, and meaningful life are here to enjoy. And there is nothing you need to do in order to ensure that this remains so. Stop your worry, and be happy—and do whatever pleases you. (Kabay, 2010, p. 138)

Notes 1 The Zhuangzi is the name of an ancient Chinese text composed during the late Warring States period (476–221 BCE). Along with the Laozi, or Daodejing, it is one of the two main texts of Classical Daoism. The first seven, or ‘inner,’ chapters are commonly thought to be the work of Zhuang Zhou (ca. 369–286 BCE), who was also called Zhuangzi (‘Master Zhuang’). The authorship of the outer and miscellaneous chapters is usually attributed to other Daoist followers, often trying to add chapters written in the spirit of the inner chapters. 2 A word about Brook Ziporyn: this paper is heavily reliant upon his work considering he is by far the Anglophone world’s leading expert on the Zhuangzi and Tiantai Buddhism. The best or only translations into English of the Zhuangzi and Tiantai texts come from Ziporyn. Therefore, he is my source for all the quotes from original texts in this paper. Also, I mostly follow his interpretations of Daoism and Tiantai. However, there are a few moments where I push his readings a bit further and perhaps end up with conclusions he might not be totally happy with. Thus, the paper could be viewed as an at least partial application of Ziporyn’s interpretations of Daoism and Tiantai to the topic of mindfulness with some added flavor on my part. 3 In Daoism, Dao refers to the condition of possibility or ground for the emergence of concrete particular things. It is what makes things, how things are made, and that out of which they are made. It is that in, by, and through which things emerge as present entities. It is also that to which things return as they decay and disintegrate. In their emergence and decay, things are so produced as to always depend upon and ultimately interpenetrate with each other. Everything is interconnected in and through the Dao. Dao is often translated as either the Way this is so, the Course all things follow. Tian, in the Zhuangzi, is roughly synonymous with the Dao. Originally meaning ‘sky’ or ‘heaven/s,’ it comes to serve as the name for the process of the Dao’s self-creation and -destruction as all things. Tian is the name for whatever happens naturally, spontaneously, unintentionally, which for the Zhuangzi is everything that happens, including all that is human, artificial, contrived, and intentional. Daoist de, when applied to the Dao and tian, is the power by which the Dao or nature does what it does. In things, de is that in virtue of which they do what they do. It is anything’s share of the Dao’s infinite and constant power to self-create and -destroy, to emerge and decay. When one excels at identifying with their nature, they activate and affirm their de, their power to become what they are, their ability to be the expression of the Dao they are. They thereby exhibit virtuosity. 4 The Chinese concept of mind (xin) in the notion of the ‘fasting of the mind’ (xinzhai) is notoriously difficult to translate into English. While ‘mind’ is appropriate insofar as xin is understood in its more cognitive aspects, ‘heart’ is just as appropriate insofar as xin is understood in its more affective aspects. Xin is thus the seat both of consciousness and feeling. Xin is as cerebral as it is sentimental. This is why it is sometimes translated as ‘heart-mind.’ It is important to keep these aspects of xin in mind, or in your heart, going forward. 5 Such trivialism presupposes a kind of monism in which each being is the one being that is all beings, a one-all monism, as I’ll call it, as opposed to the priority and existence monisms on the menu of contemporary global metaphysics where the one is either the whole thing all things, all parts, depend upon as their transcendent source or the total denial of the existence of any parts whatsoever, of anything that is not the one concrete particular ‘blobject’ that is the whole universe (Horgan & Portč, 2008; Schaffer 2010). Tiantai, and I would add Daoist, monism is instead a one-all monism where each thing, each part, is everything, the whole, which means each part is all parts and all parts as the whole. It seems one-all monism would need to obtain for a global trivialism

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Jason Dockstader to be true. After all, if every statement is true, then every thing will need to be every thing else and thus everything. 6 In a different work (Dockstader, 2021), I stressed this Tiantai approach to normative or axiological paradox and applied it to the field of contemporary metaethics to develop a novel view I called ‘moral trivialism,’ the view that all moral, and normative, judgments are true. The discussion was structured around Zhili’s claim that ‘Other than the devil, there is no Buddha; other than the Buddha, there is no devil’ (Ziporyn, 2000, p.  13). I interpreted Zhili as offering a metaethical, and ultimately metanormative view, which said that every normative view (or axiological view depending on whether one reduces the one to the other) is true, including contradictory normative views. With respect to our topic here, we see the relevance of this kind of trivialism. It is what is contemplated by the contemplating mind and ultimately is the contemplating mind, and indeed all minds, as well. Ziporyn summarizes it this way: ‘Good and evil, delusion and enlightenment, Buddhahood and deviltry, are all ‘inherently entailed’ in each and every event. …Both Buddha and devil are always in the world. So every event in the world is always both entirely Buddhahood and entirely deviltry. Every moment of experience is always completely delusion, evil, and pain, through and through, and also completely enlightenment, goodness and joy, through and through’ (Ziporyn, 2022).

Bibliography Baxter, D. (1999). The discernibility of identicals. Journal of Philosophical Research 24, 37–55. Bishop, S., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., Anderson, N., Carmody, J., Segal, Z., Abbey, S., Speca, M., Velting, D. & Devins, G. (2004). Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice 11 (3), 230–241. Bodhi, B. (2011). What does mindfulness really mean? A canonical perspective. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 19–39. Dockstader, J. (2021). Tiantai metaethics. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (2), 215–229. Garfield, J.L. (Ed.) (1995). The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gethin, R. (2011). On some definitions of mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 263–279. Horgan, T. & Portč, M. (2008). Austere Realism: Contextual Semantics Meets Minimal Ontology. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life. London: Piatkus. Kabay, P. (2010). On the Plentitude of Truth: A Defense of Trivialism. Berlin: Lambert Publishing. Lutz, A., Jha, A., Dunne, J., Saron, C., Anderson, N.B. & Kazak, A.E. (2015). Investigating the phenomenological matrix of mindfulness-related practices from a neurocognitive perspective. American Psychologist 70 (7), 632–658. Schaffer, J. (2010). Monism: The priority of the whole. Philosophical Review 119 (1), 31–76. Siderits, M. (2006). Buddhas as zombies: A Buddhist reduction of subjectivity. In M. Siderits (Ed.), Self, No Self? Perspectives From Analytical, Phenomenological, and Indian Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3–4), 158–185. Ziporyn, B. (2000). Evil And/Or/As The Good: Omnicentrism, Intersubjectivity, and Value Paradox in Tiantai Buddhist Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ziporyn, B. (2009a). Zhuangzi: Essential Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing. Ziporyn, B. (2009b). How the tree sees me: Sentience and insentience in Tiantai and Merleau-Ponty. In J.Y. Park & G. Kopf (Eds.), Merleau-Ponty and Buddhism. Lanham, MD: Lexigton. Ziporyn, B. (2010). Mind and its ‘creation’ of all phenomena in Tiantai Buddhism. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37 (2), 156–180. Ziporyn, B. (2016). Emptiness and Omnipresence: An Essential Introduction to Tiantai Buddhism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ziporyn, B. (2022). Tiantai Buddhism, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2022 Edition), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buddhism-tiantai/.

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12 DECONSTRUCTING MINDFULNESS Heidegger, Tanabe, and the Kyoto School Kurt C.M. Mertel and Samuel S. White

Introduction In response to a question on the relation of his work to phenomenology, Michel Foucault stated that, contrary to phenomenology that “attempts to recapture the meaning of everyday experience in order to rediscover the sense in which the subject that I am is indeed responsible, in its transcendental functions, for founding that experience together with its meanings”, what was important to him was “the function of wrenching the subject from itself, of seeing to it that the subject is no longer itself, or that it is brought to its annihilation or its dissolution. This is a project of desubjectivation” (Foucault, 2001, p. 241). Part of a broader trend of mobilizing terminology from phenomenological and contemplative traditions in service of the self-help industry, mindfulness has come to be understood as a technology for self-cultivation in the pursuit of health, wellness, and productivity. Such an understanding and utilization of contemplation reduces its function to a form of productivism designed to generate an ideal subjectivity. In response to this trend, it is worth pursuing an understanding of contemplation that is not reducible to a technology of selfoptimization or rational ordering of subjectivity. Such an undertaking would not consist in either a rescuing of mindfulness for phenomenology or a rescuing of phenomenology itself. Rather, the task of such an emancipatory project must develop from an understanding of the subject and the various technologies of its intensification and optimization as what must be overcome, without collapsing into a facile moralism that understands emancipation as salvation from “evil”. As such, this chapter proposes that an emancipatory understanding of contemplation cannot, on the one hand, be synonymous with a regime of training or subsumed within an idealized, reflective structure of human subjectivity, on the other hand. Tanabe Hajime and Martin Heidegger are two thinkers who broach the larger question of the implications of such contemplation beyond subjective experience and self-control and, therefore, also think of the possibility of freedom as something lying beyond the will to power. They accomplish this through a deconstruction of traditional notions of subjectivity in their own, distinctive ways. As a result, bringing both philosophers into a critical dialogue can positively contribute to an emancipatory understanding of mindfulness and subjectivity. DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-15

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Such dialogue takes place against the background of a general proliferation of Anglophone scholarship on the relationship and interaction between phenomenology and Asian philosophical traditions such as Daoism and Buddhism over the past three decades (e.g., Buchner, 1989; Dallmayr, 1993; Davis, 2013, 2019; Davis et al, 2011; Denker et al., 2013; Heisig, 2016; Maraldo, 2003, 2013; May, 1996; Mayeda, 2006; Wilkinson, 2009). In particular, there has been growing interest in the influence of East Asian thought on Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology. While the influence of Heidegger on one of the most important strands of Asian thought in the 20th century—the Kyoto School—has been well documented through the works of its founding members such as Kitaro Nishida, Tanabe Hajime, Keiji Nishitani, and Kuki Shuzo, it is markedly more difficult to ascertain the influence of the latter, given the paucity of direct references to Asian philosophers in Heidegger’s collected works. For example, despite his decades-long relationship with Tanabe Hajime, Heidegger refers to him only once in his collected works, viz. in the “Conversation on Language”. Nevertheless, it is well known that Heidegger’s dialogue with Asian philosophy began as early as 1922 with the arrival of Tanabe and Kuki in Freiburg and that he was familiar with some of the core texts of the Asian tradition through German translations that were widely available at the turn of the 20th century. The fact that Heidegger was working on his own translation of Zhuangzi, moreover, suggests a deeper philosophical engagement than what can be captured in citations alone. In this context, while much has been written on Heidegger’s relationship to Daoist and Buddhist philosophy and to the Kyoto School, most of the scholarship concerning the latter has focused on Nishitani and Nishida, whereas the relationship to Tanabe has not been explored in sufficient philosophical depth and detail. Indeed, most of the Anglophone scholarship has been largely confined to general comparisons that rarely go beyond historiological analysis. This is even more surprising given Tanabe’s status as the father of the Kyoto School and his very early and lifelong critical engagement with Heidegger’s work, which motivated his distinctive approach to philosophy, viz. metanoetics. This chapter addresses this gap through an analysis framed by the two core themes of this volume, viz. subjectivity and mindfulness, but with an eye to disclosing its social, ethical, and political ramifications. In particular, as alluded above, it will examine this relationship from the perspective of their respective deconstructions of traditional conceptions of subjectivity with an emancipatory intent through their distinctive accounts of mindfulness. First, it will explore Tanabe’s preferred method for “overcoming” subjectivity, viz. mindfulness as metanoetics, a form of “dialectical existentialism”, that he considers to be a superior alternative to Heidegger’s alleged individualistic existentialism.1 Second, it will put Tanabe’s metanoetics into a critical dialogue with Heidegger’s own stand-in for mindfulness, namely Besinnung. As will be shown, while Tanabe’s metanoetics aims to overcome subjectivity by dissolving it into a communal subject or “species”, Heidegger’s Besinnung does so by way of a deconstruction of all such ecological or species-centric modes of thought. The main claim, therefore, will be that Besinnung provides a more compelling basis for an emancipatory project2 by avoiding the core ethical and political problems that plague metanoetics. In the first section of the chapter, we will provide an overview of the secondary literature on Heidegger and Tanabe. In the second, we reconstruct Tanabe’s account of metanoetics, focusing particularly on the role of self-negation and nothingness, to set the stage for a critique from the perspective of Besinnung in the third section, which ultimately yields an ethos of releasement or letting-be [Gelassenheit]. In the epilogue, we briefly situate the 190

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ethical implications of Tanabe and Heidegger’s respective views of mindfulness within the contemporary landscape of emancipatory thought.

Heidegger and Tanabe: An Overview As alluded to above, the secondary literature on the relationship between Heidegger and Tanabe is relatively thin and generally takes a historiological rather than a systematic approach. Tanabe’s engagement with Heidegger began in the Summer semester of 1923, when he attended Heidegger’s “Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity Lectures” and began taking private tutorials with him (Parkes, 1996, p.  85). Tanabe was particularly drawn to Heidegger’s preoccupation with death, finitude, and nothingness and central themes, which in his view, resonated more deeply with the East Asian philosophies than Western ones, in that the latter tended to be predominantly concerned with life and being (ibid.). Indeed, in his contribution to Heidegger’s Festschrift on his 70th birthday, Tanabe retrospectively confesses that “in [Heidegger’s] thinking a meditation on death had become central to philosophy and supported it from the ground up. I could not help feeling that I had found a way to the philosophy I had been seeking” (Tanabe, 1959, pp. 93–94). Hence, as early as his 1924 paper “A New Turn in Phenomenology: Heidegger’s Phenomenology of Life”, the first serious commentary on Heidegger’s thought published in any language, Tanabe thematized the relationship between death and self-understanding in the hermeneutics of factical life (Parkes, 1996, p. 86). As Graham Parkes has noted, there are striking similarities between Heidegger’s openness to or being-toward-death to the way of the Japanese samurai (bushido), which in turn, is influenced by Buddhism (ibid.). He even goes as far as to suggest Heidegger’s encounter with his Japanese interlocutors years before the publication of Being and Time and at a stage where his reflections on death and nothingness were relatively inchoate, could have influenced the ultimate direction of his thought “along somewhat different lines from those he might have otherwise followed” (ibid.). This is due, in large part, to the fact that by the time Tanabe arrived in Freiburg, he was considered the leading expert on Nishida, who had already been elaborating a concept of nothingness since 1911, and, as such, was invited to give lectures on the subject to Heidegger and his German colleagues (ibid., p. 93). It is also worth noting that German-language translations of Daoist classics such as the Dao de jing and Zhuangzi, with which Heidegger was likely already familiar and further exposed to via Kuki’s Pontigny colloquium, had been widely available since 1870 (ibid., p. 100). As will be shown in section two, the notion of “absolute nothingness” (mu) plays a foundational role in Tanabe’s magnum opus Philosophy as Metanoetics, which is the result of his lifelong critical engagement with Heidegger’s thought.3 When we consider Tanabe’s equally lifelong preoccupation with the philosophy of religion, particularly the problem of evil, nihilism, and the possibility of human salvation/redemption from sin, Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology proved useful for bridging his philosophical and personal concerns (Parkes, 1996, p. 89). Hence, as Chin-Ping notes, Tanabe saw Heidegger’s hermeneutical phenomenology as a bridge that enabled a transition from philosophy of science to philosophy of life (Chin-Ping, 2021, p. 24). Nevertheless, Tanabe held that Heidegger cannot adequately account for historicity/world time because it is an essentially individual phenomenon; what is needed is an account of time and space (world) that is not only individual but communal in both a “local” (e.g., family, clan, nation) and “absolute” sense, 191

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that is humankind (a “logic of species”) (ibid., p. 27). Time and space for Tanabe are thus not merely “internal” but “external” and, therefore, the relationship between time and being (existence) must be understood dialectically in terms of their mutual determination (ibid.).4 From this perspective, Heidegger’s existentialism appears insufficiently radical for overcoming subjectivity because it dissolves time and space into the structure of individual human beings thus ignoring the objective dimension that determines individuals “from the outside”. Tanabe’s overcoming of nihilism and the “evil” of subjectivity by way of dissolution into community or “species” and ultimately absolute nothingness (mu) through “metanoesis”, however, represents in our view a radical departure from the spirit of fundamental ontology5 that reproduces rather than overcomes the problem of subjectivity. Indeed, one of Tanabe’s central claims is that Heidegger’s authenticity—resolute facing of death—is a possibility only for an elite few—“sages and heroes”—and not for “ordinary ignorant people” and that his Nichts is a nihilistisches Nichts; this motivates the move from the subject’s “self-power” toward a surrender to “Other-power” that understands death and life as dialectically related (Tanabe, p. 85; Naumann, p. 34). As will be shown, however, Tanabe’s self-described “radical” alternative is motivated by a tendentious, existentialist/individualist reading of fundamental ontology that obscures its deeper, underlying radicality, viz. the deconstruction of all ecological or “species-centric” thinking.6 As such, while Chin-Ping has argued that, “examining how Heidegger’s schematism of time must proceed in relation to Tanabe’s schematism of space and world is the most important research question to show how Heidegger’s philosophy was received and transformed in Japan”, our analysis in what follows will adopt a more systematic approach and focus on the status of mindfulness in both philosophers as linchpins of their respective social ontologies and assess their emancipatory potential (Chin-Ping, 2021, p. 27).

Tanabe Hajime’s Approach to Mindfulness and Subjectivity Species and Individuality In the work of Tanabe Hajime, the individual subject is unthinkable outside of the context within which it exists—what Tanabe calls variously contingency, history, or species. The individual and the species exist in a dialectical relationship of constitutive negation, in which each perpetuates the other while having no distinct existence of its own. The species provides the history into which the individual is born, and the individual constitutes and transforms the species through its will-to-power, or what Tanabe, borrowing from the Buddhist tradition, will call self-power. With regard to the ability of the individual to transform its species via negation, if, for example, the self-power of the individuals of a peaceful community, acting out of selfinterest and against the interests of a foreign community were to be realized, the individuals exerting self-power would transform the community through various levels of social, political, educational, legal, and even religious mediation. The result might be the development of governmental and military policies against the foreign community possibly escalating into an armed confrontation. By the same token, that same community will utilize its mediating forces to produce compliance among both new individuals and those who would otherwise find themselves at odds with the direction of the community. This demonstrates the species’ role in the productive negation of individuals. 192

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Due to the reciprocal relationship between the species and the individual, neither is given a privileged ontological position. Just as species might refer to any community of individuals, an individual might be born into any community. In contradistinction to other thinkers of the Kyoto School, the question of appealing to a natural species does not enter into Tanabe’s thought (Sakai, 1999, p. 33). Indeed, for Tanabe, there is nothing inherently emancipatory about the species or the individual. Rather, this relationship forms the basis of the problem that he wishes to overcome through the introduction of an emancipatory transcendental gesture. The dialectical economy of species and individuals is like a broken machine, a rudderless boat swept adrift by the capricious tide of conflicting self-interests. The engine of selfpower is too chaotic, too inefficient to be left to its own devices. Without an ethics of social responsibility, dangerous individuals have placed the fate of the species at risk. To that end, Tanabe proposes the intervention of what he calls, “Other-power”. Tanabe’s emancipatory gesture, therefore, is not to be identified with any particular world-historical agent or community. As such, only those who have been purified of all self-interest are fit to steer the ship of the species. Not necessarily as rulers but as agents of transformative negation (though this “expediency” is never ruled out in service to a noble end). The relationship between the species and the individual remains unaltered. It is the power driving that economy that has changed.

Self-Negation, Metanoia, and Other-Power In order for Other-power to enter into the dialectical economy of the species and individual, the individual subject must first be vacated of its self-power via self-negation or metanoia. Self-negation differs from the constitutive negation that the species works upon the individual subject in that it is not driven by the will-to-power of other individuals of the species. Self-negation is the transformation of the will-to-power into what Tanabe refers to as the “will to salvation” that takes the form of a confession, in which “one recognizes the evil of the self and abandons its right to exist” (Tanabe, 1986, p. xliii). Though metanoesis is something that must be actively practiced, its accomplishment is not the selfaccomplishment of the contemplative subject, but rather a submission to the Other-power of Absolute Nothingness. Absolute mediation is a transformation of the individual’s self-power into the selflessness of Absolute Nothingness that “makes what is other to itself everything” (Morisato, p. 45). The result of this metanoetic process, in which the individual subject dies and is reborn, is the advent of the universal as “Great Compassion” within the individual. The individual awakens as an “action witness” of Other-power (ibid., p.  lv). Because of the contingent relation between the individual and the species, this affirmation-qua-negation in which the self-power of the individual is replaced by Other-power has definite consequences for the species.

Metanoetics and Historical Realization As an embodiment of universal totality, the awakened individual thus exists to steer the species away from the dangers of its own specificity. In so doing, they recognize the species as the ground of metanoetic mediation. Far from upsetting the equilibrium of the dialectical economy of species and individual, metanoesis utilizes the constitutive negative relation of 193

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the species to the individual in order to produce more awakened individuals. The awakened individual mediates the awakening of the species, which in turn mediates the awakening of more individuals. “In other words, the governments of the kingdoms of man become the mediation for the religious foundation of the kingdom of God” (Tanabe, 1969, p. 276). If Tanabe’s end result sounds similar to the political status quo, it is intentional. His affirmation-qua-negation is not intended to break with what already exists world-historically. Rather, it is the optimization of what is already extant. Through this process of metanoesis, the radical evil of subjective relativity and the specificity of the species are brought closer to the ideal of total universality, referred to variously as the “kingdom of God” or the “pure land”. As this occurs, the mediating institutions of governance as the “highest concrete form of the worldly relative human existence” are essential for realizing the goal of absolute mediation, absolute conversion (ibid., p. 287). Owing to the dialectical logic through which the kingdom of God is realized, one might even venture to say that the conversion of said governing institutions to Other-power is the goal of absolute conversion. From this perspective, the species and the individuals, social relations, and governmental institutions that comprise its constituency appear as a kind of base material or resource who exist to be transmuted for the sake of constituting the kingdom of god on earth. In this light, the problem of the relative subject and its radical evil for Tanabe is a problem of use. The individual that is not useful, is unproductive, is one who is not working toward the perfection of the species. Hence, it is possible to claim that Tanabe’s solution to the problem of subjectivity is its reduction to the status of what Heidegger would call “standing-reserve” [Bestand], to a stock or reserve of beings whose Being is exhausted in advance by the purpose to which it is assigned or for which it is conscripted; this absolute nihilism of the age of technicity [Ge-stell], which for Heidegger is to be overcome through a new beginning that involves Besinnung as a form of inceptual thought, thus acquires the status of the apogee of the species. To avoid an uncharitable reading of Tanabe’s concept of absolute conversion, however, it is important to note that this is not simply reducible to ordinary nationalism. Rather it is a specialized nationalism that owes its allegiance to a transcendental nation and is only obedient to earthly institutions and nations insofar as they are reflective of its transcendental ideals or otherwise expedient for the purpose of producing them. In this light, self-negation becomes the mechanism through which world-historical governance is empowered. Indeed, Tanabe’s mediation functions ethically as the pathologizing of any and all elements that resist subsumption within the prevailing social order. Thus, while coercive force, governance, and national mandate might be justified in Tanabe’s program as an expedient means, it might ideally unfold as the transformation of contingency such that each individual would, of their own accord, submit themselves in obedience to Other-power. Regardless, the goal of absolute conversion remains the same.

Heidegger’s Deconstruction of Subjectivity Through Mindfulness (Besinnung) Subjectivity, Machination, Technicity The rational animal has become subject and has developed reason into ‘history’, whose sway coincides with the sway of technicity. (Heidegger, 2006, p. 21) 194

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Heidegger begins his assessment of the subject and its relation to contingency from a similar premise, but that is the full extent of any similarities between his thinking and that of Tanabe. For Heidegger, the individual subject is not a matter of radical evil. In fact, one might say that the problem of the subject is that its world-historical contingency precludes any possibility of radical inquiry. This is because the reciprocal relation between the subject and its world-historical contingency is one of production (ibid., p. 159). The individual has become a productive subject that produces its own history. In return, history has become the producer of its subjects. The total effect of this is to produce a completed hermeneutic circle of the subject such that one aspect of production grounds the other in a loop of perpetual deferral. What this productive negation-qua-affirmation serves to conceal is the fundamental groundlessness of this relationship. Tanabe’s response to this groundlessness is an appeal to a transcendental negation that functions as a buffering power, strengthening the limit of this hermeneutic circle and transforming all attempts at negating any aspect of this closed ecology into an affirmation of its other parts. In this way, even negation has become a productive force. Heidegger’s response to groundlessness, however, is quite different altogether. In an attempt at negating the very producibility behind the subject-contingency relationship, his thinking leaps into the chasm from whence it originates, only there to overcome it at its root. Such inceptual inquiry seeks to “[shatter] machination of beings”, not by delimiting said inquiry through the establishing of Being as a ground but through “[persevering] in the uncease and cleft of a breakage such that thinking of be-ing never comes to rest in a ‘work’” (ibid., p. 42). Such an inquiry must unflinchingly face the groundlessness that undergirds the economy of beings.

Besinnung as the “unsett[ling of] All Machination” [Besinnung] transports the man of the future into that “between” in which he belongs to Being and yet remains a stranger amid that which is. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 136) The machinational feature of the technicity of world-historical contingency and its subjects is an accordance with producibility (Heidegger, 2013, p. 12). While this producibility evades an analysis at the level of the dialectical economy, when considered phenomenologically, neither the subject nor its contingency is found to be prior and thus capable of giving rise to the economy as a whole. In this respect, machination as producibility cannot, then, be understood as a grasping of things as they arise by a subject but is the entire disposition that interpolates Being into an economy of subject and object—an exclusionary violence or constitutive negation that discriminates an object to grasp and a subject to grasp it, the entire economy of beings to be refined [Bestand] and the power to scrutinize and police them. The economy as a whole is produced, its ground secured, in this singular gesture. Besinnung, Heidegger’s proposed solution to machination, thus differs from Tanabe’s selfnegation in that it attempts a negation of producibility as such. Besinnung is a knowing-awareness of Being as inceptuality (Heidegger, 2006, p.  17). This knowing-awareness is not knowledge, which is a product of securing one’s experience, and in so doing produces both the subject and object, knower and known, of knowledge. Knowing-awareness is an attentive relation to inceptuality, the coming-to-be that has not yet been discriminated into knowledge: “As refusal, be-ing extricates itself from every differentiation [Scheidung] à la discriminated beings…” (ibid., p. 38). As a refusal 195

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of discrimination, the knowing-awareness of Besinnung does not seize the inceptuality of Being as a productive ground in which to anchor and formulate a new subjectivity. Neither does it secure Being as the ground of a preexistent economy of phenomena. It is a refusal of ground, an abyss [Ab-grund], and Besinnung is a perseverance in its “between”. From this perspective, any attempts at reclaiming a metaphysical positionality for Being or securing from Being a population of beings are merely machinational contrivances. As “a ‘no’ that cannot be sublated”, the negativity of Being as Ab-grund makes no allowances for any positive remainder—it is not the affirmation-qua-negation of dialectics (Heidegger, 2013, p. 39). It makes no appeal to a primordial ecology but locates itself in the “nowhere” and “never” of beings (Heidegger, 2006, p. 17). This negativity not only exposes any attempts at reclaiming a metaphysical positionality for Being or securing from Being a population of beings as fundamentally groundless, but also functions to “unsettle all machination” by understanding that affirmation functions as selective discrimination, thus preempting the possibility of machination by persevering in the refusal of this discriminatory production. This, in turn, further functions to preempt second-order discrimination, viz. the technical ordering of what has already been produced and rendered extant through machination.

Radical Historicism or Rendering History Inoperative Metanoetics is philosophy become conscious of the foundations of history. (Tanabe, p. 131) According to Tanabe, “the content of metanoetics itself consists in a ‘radical historicism’” (Morisato, 2021, p. 110). This radical historicism is the formation of history as a closed circuit. The past and the future enter into a dialectical relationship of constitutive negation that functions to create an economy of presence that is defined by the mediation, effectuation, or ordering of the past. The mutual negation of past and future affirms the present as a spatial negation of time as the economy of what has been determined as being extant (Ozaki, 2001, p. 28). If Tanabe’s metanoetics is the absolute mediation or total ordering of historical contingency such that nothing is left unmediated and everything is connected through the flow of power, its result is the transformation of history into eternity, the completion of the hermeneutic circle of the subject within a totalizing ecology. The negation of time into space is a necessary measure for the goal of absolute conversion. With spatialization, history is transformed into a field of locatable bodies. In this way, one might venture to say that the negation of subjects is the production of bodies. The initial production of bodies renders the species (the mass of bodies), available to additional mediation in the form of governance. As Bestand, all bodies are able to be located, placed, and optimized within the spatial economy of eternity, the grid of total visibility. Connecting these bodies into a relation of mutual production and optimal ordering, Other-power is able to circulate without resistance. This, then, is the radical historicism brought about by absolute conversion—the circulation of Other-power realizing its optimal, ordered flow through the overcoming of all resistance—Other-power vivifying the medium of history in order to realize itself as its own end. Absolute conversion is absolute administration. By contrast, Heidegger is unequivocal in his rejection of historicism as a solution to the problem of subjectivity: “The concept of historicism: its “overcoming” only via rendering 196

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“history” inoperative (Heidegger, 2006, p. 159). Through machination, the subject is captured into an either/or of history or its lack. To affirm history, even a new or corrected history, is to set back into motion the machinery of production and the technical procedures of refinement. To choose a lack of history, to deny historical subjectivity in favor of an escape into animality, however, fails to understand that the same instance of the discriminatory will-to-knowledge that produces man as historical animal simultaneously produces the animal as that which is historically impoverished (ibid., p. 160). What it is to be an animal can only be known through machination and thus affirms it. It does not escape it, and there can be no escape, for what escapes mediation is simply the unmediated, a resource for future mediation. As such, if it is not possible to escape the spatially determined economy of all that is extant, then it must be shut down and rendered inoperative. The intervention of Besinnung, by refusing the economic end of producibility, opens the possibility of a beginning. This beginning is not the beginning of a new history to replace the old. Besinnung is not a new ground to be secured in place of history for some new development (ibid., p. 162). The beginning to which Besinnung comports itself is a beginning without end. It is the inceptuality of Being, which is not the productive inception of anything in particular. It is an irruptive negativity in which possibility is left in its fullness. This fullness, not derived from the securing of machination, is an openness that refuses the possibility of enclosure (ibid., p. 81). It is a refusal to be positioned within the grid of intelligibility, to be produced within history.7 Hence, by holding to Being as the Ab-grund that refuses to ground history anew, Besinnung is that comportment which is not made available or intelligible to technicity. For the economy of presence to be actually rendered inoperative and not merely halted, refusal must not, however, stop with the medium of history. Power itself must be rendered inoperative.

Self-Power, Other-Power, and the Refusal of Power …without effect: be-ing sways outside power and powerlessness. (ibid., p. 69) Tanabe’s dialectical logic ably shows that powerlessness never breaks with power. Just as animality as the “history-less” maintains a relation with the machination that produces it, powerlessness is maintained by its relation to power. To be reconstituted as an awakened subject through the negation of self-power does not change one’s relation to power, it only changes the power to which one is made obedient. In that light, the ideal model of non-coercive self-conversion is only the barest of distinctions given the manner in which individuals are dialectically produced and already so largely determined by the species and its mediating institutions. This is to say, when one’s essence has already been machinationally secured and one’s comportment technically administered, governed, and called to order prior to any decision, the difference between a self-power, an Other-power, and even a collective power of the species, loses its distinction. How is it possible for a subject, whether relative, mediate, or absolute, to empower itself against power, let alone distinguish which power is being overpowered? Is it not rather that power legitimates itself through this struggle of power against power? Within the economy of power, the field of total effectuation, the empowering of power to overpower power is already the production of the subject as a threat to power, an enemy. 197

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What recourse is there then except to disengage with power completely? This cannot be a decision born from self-power since by empowering the subject, it would empower the subject as a ground, a medium for power. It is rather nothing short of the refusal of the subject position in its entirety born from the understanding that the rendering inoperative of power is accomplished only through the inoperativity of its medium, that to be free from power requires freedom from the subject position as the ground secured by power— freedom from the machinational production of oneself and others as subjects. This refusal of the subject position is the meaning of “be-ing holds sway as freedom”, “be-ing holds sway as ab-ground”, and “be-ing holds sway as refusal” (ibid., pp.  83–84). Hence, as Heidegger writes: Understood from out of metaphysics (i.e., out of the question of Being, in the form What is it to be?), the concealed essence of Being, denial, unveils itself first of all as absolutely not-having-being, as Noth­ing. But Nothing as that Nothing which pertains to the having-of­being is the keenest opponent of mere negating. Nothing is never nothing; it is just as little a something, in the sense of an object [Gegenstand]; it is Being itself, whose truth will be given over to man when he has overcome himself as subject, and that means when he no longer represents that which is as object [Objekt]. (Heidegger, 1977, p. 154) This negation of the subject position is not an affirmation of some underlying natural essence of the subject as animal, to an inner potential of the subject to be developed (but this time correctly), nor to an immanent power within subjectivity (that only now can be released), all of which seek an intensification and refinement of the subject position and not its destruction. The refusal of the subject position is Being as the refusal of the dialectic of power. Dwelling in the “site-less place”, the “nowhere”, the occupation of what is always “between”, is a disappearance from history into the groundlessness of its discontinuities that unsettles the economy of the subjectum by exposing the rootlessness, the total arbitrariness of power—that what is grounding power is nothing other than more power and that its end is nothing other than the sustained continuity of power. It is a demonstration that what has been rendered extant is not only not inevitable, but it can also be refused. Freedom, in this sense, then, is not to be considered as an essence to be found and developed, but rather is an ethical comportment that rejects all essence as the machinational grasping of power. The knowing-awareness of Besinnung is not a special case of subjectivity or a special experience of a subject but detachment and releasement [Gelassenheit] from being a subject. It is a comportment to the Nothing of Being that refuses to determine beings through the production of limitation and destiny: “The essence of truth reveals itself as freedom. The latter is ek-sistent, disclosive letting-beings be” (Heidegger, 1993, p. 128).

The Ethics of Letting-Be It is not important to the thinking into whose enactment mindfulness must inquire, whether this thinking succeeds in making a statement on what is hitherto unrecognized; it is not important whether this thinking discovers something that [G63] serves “life”, not important whether this thinking achieves a flawless explainability of all beings, not important whether this thinking obtains a cohesive guideline for 198

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self-orientation valuing. Rather, what is solely fundamental is whether be-ing itself en-owns itself in its truth and thus as en-owning throws the ab-ground unto beings and unsettles all machination, that is, the counterpart of the first beginning. (Heidegger, 2006, p. 51) The ethics of mediation, absolute or otherwise, cannot be reduced to institutions, just as governance is not limited to governments. For Tanabe, it is clear. Mediation is a practice, an ethical conduct (Tanabe, 1986, p. 6). Power, whatever its derivation, is a mode of engagement that, through its productive securing for itself of a medium to operate and operating through that medium as its refinement, is both a machinational and technical practice. As the practice of the species, what Tanabe seeks in metanoia/confession is its absolute purification. The Kingdom of God is the total mobilization of the kingdom of man in which every constituent part, every individual, institution, and social relation is empowered toward the production of a more perfect image of its totality. The eradication of all that is specific through the technical ordering of Other-power. Due to the dialectical relation between the species and its constituents, this conduct is only made possible through its practice at the level of the individual subject. As the medium-qua-mediator par excellence the subject position and power function in a reciprocal manner in which the subject is the embodied conduct of power and power is the practice of the subject, its mode of operativity. The subject is not merely a metaphysical postulate but the designation of that which has been produced by and for the sake of the conduct of power. It is the conduct of both securing and being secured, of using and being used. Tanabe’s action-witness is not only produced by power (“reborn”) the action-witness is the embodied mediator of Other-power in the way that the police are the mediators of the law, and just as the founding of law produces both its enforcers and violators, the production of the convert coincides with that of the unrepentant. It is then that the practice of power is able to proceed via its mediators as the refinement, optimization, and purification of its own conductivity and connectivity. “Destruction” is not “destructive” in the sense of annihilating for the sake of annihilation; it is the “laying-free” of the beginning in order to restore its unexhausted fullness and strangeness that is still hardly experienced in the beginning’s earliest inceptuality. (Heidegger, 2006, p. 54) Letting-be is neither a hermitic withdrawal that abandons beings to power nor is it the policing and ordering of conduct such that it conforms to Being. As the ethics of freedom, it is clear that letting-be cannot proceed as an ethics of pathologization. As the unsettling of all machination, it is not a crusade against machinational subjects—itself a machinational enterprise—but the destruction of machinational comportment, the conduct of power via the subject position as that which precludes the possibility of letting beings be. Because power cannot be rendered inoperative through force, its destruction is the releasing of what it had secured into the abyss of its own groundlessness (Heidegger, 2013, pp. 70–71). It is in that way that rendering the subject of power inoperative, power as the conduct of pure effectuation dissolves into its own insubstantiality. For power, Being is the abyss of its own groundlessness. For those who comport themselves to Being through inoperativity, it is the fullness of possibility. The negation of the 199

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subject through inoperativity is not the delimiting deprivation by which power functions. It is the return of possibility that negates the subject as a limited, descriminatory category. Letting-be, then, is the laying-free of possibility that renders power impossible. Possibility, in turn, is not something that exists to be secured. It cannot be found in a correct mode of governance and ordering. It is a perseverance in insecurity and errancy, a grounding in groundlessness, a position of non-positionality, the being of non-being (not being anything in particular). This engaged disengagement is not a passive quietism, when to be so undetermined and unpredictable is, for the normative technical regimes, an absolute danger. Not being anything in particular, for the one who comports themself in this manner, everything remains possible. If freedom is the opening up of possibility, then letting-be as its ethic must be able to take any possible form. Its form must be the undermining/disengagement of power in all of its modalities. Whatever is secured through machination, whatever configuration is ordered by technicity, must be released back into the nothing of its groundlessness, which like the unraveling of a garment is accomplished through an attentive awareness to the threads with which it is woven. Because the contingency into which the subject is thrown is the product of power and as such is permeated by power, letting-be must extend to the banal and mundane, the inner and the intimate. This is not an understanding of letting-be as the intensification of the subject but its unraveling the contours of power in and through thoughts, subjects, institutions, events, and movements. The non-conduct of letting-be is the disruption of world-historical contingency in its most finite moments. In this way, the retrieval of possibility cannot itself be identified with a certain correct path, training, regime, subjectivity, new conduct, or historical event. To identify this negation solely with a particular tradition would reify the engaged non-action of letting-be into a power within history, a reactionary flight back into the securing of what is efficacious or an attempt at resecuring an earlier historical epoch, which “can bring about nothing in itself other than selfdeception and blindness in relation to the historical moment” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 136). Endless paths open out as the undoing of history in all configurations and orderings.

Epilogue Rising up must be practiced, by which I mean one must practice rejecting the subject status in which one finds oneself, the rejection of one’s identity, the rejection of one’s own permanence, the rejection of what one is. It’s the first condition for rejecting the world. (Foucault, 2020, p. 133) To conclude, while the two contrary possibilities for desubjectivation represented by Tanabe and Heidegger find themselves at odds with the current state of affairs, the former offers a lesson in ethical remedialism. For Tanabe, self-negation is not a first step in rejecting the world but a first step in embracing and purifying it—the negation of subjects through their being integrated into the technical armature of governance. In this context, if the logical conclusions of Tanabe’s view appear extreme and even anachronistic, it is worth noting that contemporary emancipatory thought is no stranger to the biologistic/organicist language of pathology: over the last decade “social pathology” has arguably become the most important concept in contemporary Frankfurt School Social Theory, generating a 200

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considerable body of literature.8 Indeed, this should not be surprising considering that the origin of the organicist/biologistic metaphors can be traced back to a common source in both Tanabe and Critical Theory: Hegel. Given that the outline of the emancipatory project of Besinnung developed here is premised upon a rejection of all ecological, biological, or species-centric thinking, it resists subsumption within the burgeoning literature on social pathologies. Giorgio Agamben has written that the paradigm under which dominion we find ourselves, what he calls the “political-ontological machine”, is a splitting of possibility from reality, essence from existence (Agamben, 2023, p. 15). This machine, this machinational productivism is that with which a non-remedial desubjectivation necessarily finds itself at odds. The negation of the subject position is thus the negation of the positioning of possibility as a potential to be realized, as the political-ontological economy of resources and their use. Such a desubjectivation is done not merely to expose the abattoirs concealed within the foundations of power, but to open out an ethos that does not already presuppose the technical apparatus of political ontology within which every ethical decision and all possible praxis have been consigned and determined. But moving outside of the telos of realization—a being-possible that persists as the disruption of the real—necessitates a type of thinking that engages the possible in terms of its unrealizability, which is not the forbidden distance of the impossible but the nearness of Being that needs no affirmation, development, or articulation for its fulfillment.

Notes 1 This is in spite of the fact that in “New Turn in Phenomenology” (1924) and “Epistemology and Phenomenology”, Tanabe observed that German Idealism had been on the decline since Hegel and that phenomenology was better equipped to respond to the challenges of the time by way of a “philosophy of science” (Chin-Ping, 2021, p. 24). For a study of Tanabe’s appropriation of Hegel, see Suares (2011). Chin-Ping argues that Tanabe had not yet developed a critical stance toward Heidegger’s philosophy in these essays but that the negative receptions begins only in the 1930s with his “Synthesis and (1931)”, “The Anthropological Position” (1931), and “From Schematistic Time to Schematistic World” (1932) (Chin-Ping, 2021, p. 26). By contrast, Ryosuke Ohashi argues that these essays mark the beginning of his negative Heidegger-reception (Ohashi, 1989, pp. 23–27). Chin-Ping’s (2021) reconstruction of Heidegger’s reception in Japan via a comparative examination of Heidegger’s schematism of time in the Kant Lectures with Tanabe’s schematism of space and world attests to the strong influence of German Idealism on Tanabe. The label “dialectical existentialism” is borrowed from Chin-Ping (2021). 2 For an elaboration of some of the core features of an emancipatory reading of Heidegger and the “appropriative approach” to social philosophy that informs our approach here, see Mertel (2017a, 2017b, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2023, and forthcoming). 3 As Koichi Tsujimura has argued, Tanabe fostered a “thinking dialogue with Heidegger’s thought until [Tanabe’s] his death in 1962” (Koichi, 1989, p. 159; quoted by Parkes, 1996, p. 112). 4 Chin-Ping thus labels Tanabe’s view “dialectical existentialism” (Chin-Ping 2021: 35). 5 It is worth noting that we are using the term “fundamental ontology” to describe Heidegger’s project as a whole and, as a result, we do not relegate it to a particular (“early”) period of his thought which later gets rejected or superceded in favour of an entirely different project. 6 As Mine Hideki notes, Tanabe’s “logic of species” is a form of social ontology developed through a critique of Heidegger’s alleged individualistic ontology of the “awakening self” (Hideki, 2012, p. 280 quoted in Chin-Ping, 2021, p. 37). 7 In this context, it is worth noting that according to Heinrich Petzet’s report, when a Buddhist monk from Thailand described “nothingness” as “fullness” noting that “No one can name it. But it – nothing and everything – is fulfilment”, Heidegger replied: “That is what I have been saying my whole life long” (Petzet, 1993, p. 180/190).

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Kurt C.M. Mertel and Samuel S. White 8 Särkelä and Laitinen (2019), for example, claim that the task of social philosophy as such is the “diagnosis and therapy of social pathologies”. While the literature on social pathologies is too vast to cite here, for a good overview and assessment of the various accounts of social pathology in the current literature, see Särkelä and Laitinen (2019).

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio (2023). Destituent potentiality and the critique of realization, K. Attell (trans.). The South Atlantic Quarterly 122 (1), 9–17. Buchner, Hartmut (1989). Japan und Heidegger: Gedenktschrift der Stadt Messkirch zum Hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers. Jan Thorbecke Verlag. Chin-Ping, Liao (2021). Reception and transformation of Heidegger’s philosophy in East Asia: From Tanabe Hajime to Hung Yao-Hsün. Journal of Japanese Philosophy 7, 23–28. Dallmayr, Fred (1993). The Other Heidegger. Cornell University Press. Davis, Bret W., Brian Schroeder and Jason M. Wirth (2011). Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations With the Kyoto School. Indiana University Press. Davis, Bret W (2013). Heidegger and Asian philosophy, in F. Raffoul and Eric S. Nelson (eds.), The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, Bloomsbury. Davis, Bret W (2019). The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Philosophy. Oxford University Press. Denker, Alfred et al. (2013). Heidegger-Jahrbuch 7: Heidegger Und Das Ostasiatische Denken, Alber Verlag. Dunaj, L’ubomir, Smith, Jeremy C.A. and Mertel Kurt C.M. Mertel (2023). Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Johann P. Arnason’s Macro-Social Theory. Routledge. Foucault, Michel (2001). Interview with Michel Foucault, translated by R. Hurley, J. Faubion (eds.) Power: The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984 Volume 3, The New Press. ——— (2020). Political spirituality as the will for alterity: An interview with the Nouvel Observateur. Sabina V. Bremner (trans.), Critical Inquiry 47, 121–134. Heidegger, Martin (1977). “The age of the world picture”, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, W. Lovitt (trans.), Garland Publishing. ——— (1993). “On the essence of truth”, translated by John Sallis, in D. F. Krell (ed.) Martin ­Heidegger: Basic Writings Routledge, 1993. ——— (2006). Mindfulness, P. Emad and T. Kalary (trans.), Continuum. ——— (2013). The Event. R. Rojcewicz (trans.): Indiana University Press. Heisig, James W (2016). Much Ado About Nothingness: Essays on Nishida and Tanabe. Chisokudō. Hideki, Mine (2012). Nishida Tetsugaku to Tanabe No Taiketsu. Minverva Shobo. Maraldo, John (2003). Rethinking God: Heidegger in the light of absolute nothingness, Nishida in the shadow of onto-theology, in Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, J. Bloechl (ed.), Indiana University Press. ——— (2013). Japanese Philosophy as a Lens on Greco-European thought. Journal of Japanese ­Philosophy 1, 21–56. May, Reinhard (1996). Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work. Routledge. Mayeda, Graham (2006). Time, Space, and Ethics in the Philosophies of Watsuji Tetsurō, Kuki Shūzō, Martin Heidegger, Routledge. Mertel, Kurt C.M. (2017a). Two ways of being a left-Heideggerian: The crossroads between political and social ontology. Philosophy and Social Criticism 4 (9), 966–984. ——— (2017b). self-appropriation vs. self-constitution: Social philosophical reflections on the self-­relation. Human Affairs: Postdisciplinary Humanities and Social Sciences Quarterly 27 (4), 416–32. ——— (2019). Situando la Seinsgeschichte en el proyecto del heideggerianismo de Izquierda.” Proceedings of the 14th Meeting of the Peruvian Circle of Phenomenology and Hermeneutics: 1–10. ——– (2020). Heidegger, technology and education. Journal of Philosophy of Education 54 (2), 467–486. ——– (2021). Towards a social paradigm of left-Heideggerianism, in B. Smyth and R. Westerman (eds.), Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, Lexington Books. ——– (2023). Situating left-Heideggerianism within Johann P.  Árnason’s civilizational analysis, in L. Dunaj, Jeremy C.A. Smith and Kurt C.M. Mertel (eds.), Civilization, Modernity, and Critique: Engaging Johann P. Arnason’s Macro-Social Theory, Routledge, 96–113.

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Deconstructing Mindfulness ——— (forthcoming). Re-thinking the Sociality of the Self: The Emancipatory Project of Being & Time Volume 1, Palgrave Macmillan. ——– (forthcoming). Authentic Selfhood and the Possibility of an Individualizing Sociality: The Emancipatory Project of Being & Time Volume 2, Palgrave Macmillan. Morisato, Takeshi (2021). Tanabe Hajime and the Kyoto School: Self, World, and Knowledge. Bloomsbury. Naumann, Wolfram (1995). Japan als Gegenstand der Forschung, Einsichten. Forschung an der ­Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität München, 1, 32–35. Neske, Günther (1959). Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag: Festschrift. Neske. Ohashi, Ryozuke (1989). Die frühe Heidegger-Rezepzion in Japan, in H. Buchner (ed.), Japan Und Heidegger: Gedenktschrift der Stadt Messkirch zum Hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers, Jan Thorbecke Verlag. Ozaki, Makoto (2001). Individuum, Society, Humankind: The Triadic Logic of Species According to Tanabe Hajime, Brill, 2001. Parkes, Graham (1996). Rising sun over black forest: Heidegger’s Japanese connections, in Reinhard May, Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Work, 83–122. Routledge. Petzet, Heinrich (1993). Encounters and dialogues with Martin Heidegger, P.  Emad and K. Maly (trans.), University of Chicago Press. Sakai, Naoki (1999). Ethnicity and species: On the philosophy of the multi-ethnic state in Japanese imperialism. Radical Philosophy 95, 33–45. Särkelä Arvi and Laitinen Arto (2019). Four conceptions of social pathologies. European Journal of Social Theory 22 (1), 80–102. Suares, Peter (2011). The Kyoto School’s Takeover of Hegel: Nishida, Nishitani, and Tanabe Remake the Philosophy of Spirit. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Tanabe, Hajime (1959). Todesdialektik, in G. Neske (ed.), Martin Heidegger zum siebzigsten Geburtstag: Festschrift, Neske. ——— (1969). The logic of the species as dialectics. Monumenta Nipponica 24 (3), 273–288. ——— (1986). Philosophy as Metanoetics, T. Yoshinori (trans.), University of California Press. Tsujimura, Koichi (1989). ‘Ereignis und Shoki. Zur Übersetzung eines heideggerschen grundwortes ins Japanische’, in H. Buchner (ed.), Japan und Heidegger: Gedenktschrift der Stadt Messkirch zum Hundertsten Geburtstag Martin Heideggers, Jan Thorbecke Verlag. Wilkinson, Robert (2009). Nishida and Western Philosophy. Ashgate.

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PART III

Mindfulness, Ethics, and Well-Being

13 COULD MINDFULNESS BE SHORT ON MEANING? Luce Irigaray

Nietzsche does not hesitate to consider the classical age of Greek culture to be a period of decline in comparison to the pre-classical age of tragedy (cf. The Birth of Tragedy). According to him, Socrates would be a symptom of this decline. To view him as a decisive figure of the origin of Western philosophy would make the latter a healing discipline against the life decline, against the participation of the people and their passions in the construction of human individuation and thought. In Nietzsche’s words, this can mean opting for the exclusive valorization of a speculative knowledge elaborated by distinguished men, who remain among themselves and stand apart from the people, guarding against the Dionysian transports, which particularly exist in amorous relations between the sexes. Of the ecstacy of pleasure, only the one of theory, of drink and of the lure of the beauty that young bodies similar to theirs can exert over them is left for them. The limitlessness of amorous passion that the mystery of sexuate difference can arouse is excluded from their coterie. Instead of dedicating themselves to the task of elaborating its meaning, following tragedy, they dismiss it from their debates, so reducing human beings to mental aptitudes separated from sensitive life, that is, from the body, its origin, its growth and its flourishing, and from a possibly dialectical relation between sensibility and knowledge. From then on, the additional physiological potential with which humanity is endowed will not be used to cultivate life but to prepare oneself, little by little, to die without tragedy. Indeed, Socrates did not like tragedy and died serenely, philosophically prepared for this event. As for Euripides, his accomplice in the disappearance of Greek tragedy, he committed suicide, testifying to what it costs to intend excluding the Dionysian element instead of trying to cultivate it.

The World of Greek Tragedy Greek tragedy displays what the passage from the whole that the world as cosmos represented to the totality that the world structured by the logos pretends to substitute for it entails. Everything is put together in search of a new economy and a new truth.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-17

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Greek tragedy still takes place in nature, amid the natural elements of which the human being is a part and from which it attempts to differentiate itself. In its circle, tragedy includes nature as environment, humans, and gods. They are all there, present at different places of the circle. And humans themselves are divided between the heroes, who embody the tragic action and the people who listen to, encourage or condemn them. An elder, a soothsayer or a sage, a sort of mediator between humans and gods, sometimes emerges from this people. Heroes themselves are divided into men and women belonging to different natural and/or political-cultural generations. Through their action, they embody a question that remains more or less enigmatic for them but with which their time forces them to face. Under its different masks, this question could be interpreted as follows: How to be and/or become truly human? Therefore, it is an ontological question that is lived tragically – in each one, between each one, between each one and the world – in a struggle between more Dionysian or more Apollonian tendencies, according to Nietzsche. This could also be said: between more natural or more cultural determinations, belonging to a world more cosmic or more dependent on the logos. The gods themselves are sexuate and have, like humans, to deal with carnal or spiritual problems of generations or alliances. They are there, present, and support or condemn the action in which they participate – kinds of divine incarnations of the heroes searching for their own transcendence. Indeed, these are still captive to their genealogical belonging, to blood ties, to a family and somatic destiny and in search of a personal transcendence capable of bringing to their action and their relationships a distance that they can ensure by themselves. They still live in an immediacy which lacks individuation and, notably internalization, which allows them both an opening to the other and to the world, and a return to themselves, in themselves. They perform, more or less blindly, their destiny, in particular their sexuation, without assuming it as such. Their being, their ontology, is acted without being intended or chosen. Hence, their struggle for coming into existence, for to be born to themselves, which takes the form of conflicts between individuals who are still poorly defined, too little differentiated – nature, the gods, the soothsayer, the people, the music constituting the background, and the horizon of the confrontation between the heroic figures who are at the center of the stage. The heroes suffer the pains of their giving birth to themselves. The chorus accompanies them without truly enlightening about the path they must take. As the people’s representative, the chorus also corresponds to a part of themselves, like nature and the gods. Nevertheless, this distress over giving birth to the human as a comprehensive being is not really heard or considered. What secured the link between the body and the spirit, through the inspiration and the courage of a soul or a desire which are unaware as such but expressed themselves in the tragedy: in deeds, in dialogues, even in music, is invited to be silent, especially by Socrates, and his demon of a knowledge which ignores pain. From then on, the human being splits into a body-matter – a corpse – and a theoretical spirit. Suffering and death become the domain of medicine or of the law, with regard to the body as a mere soma and the psyche the domain of sciences, including the philosophical one. And both the body and the spirit henceforth resort to drugs to spare themselves pain: on the one hand, to medicine concerning permissible drugs and, on the other hand, to Socratism with its logic, its dialogical technique, its truth defined among men alone, its serenity in the face of death, its censorship of the passions which are considered popular. The truth arising from the natural belonging to a living body, from the shared passion, a truth born in pain, the truth which expresses itself in the tragedies of Aeschylus, and especially of Sophocles, is 208

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despised by Socrates and his disciples, and their definition of an aseptic knowledge defined by men supposedly learned, standing in a place cut off from nature and away from people, women, and sexuate gods. Hence the unity of the world, present and being built in the Greek tragedies, breaks up. Nature is regarded as a mere environment, a world in which man is situated but to which he no longer belongs as such; he is no longer one element of the cosmos among others but a more or less skillful manager of the natural universe. The gods are sent “to heaven,” out of the terrestrial world where humans live. They are no longer among them, embodying the transcendental part of their destiny, which accompanies them like a kind of shadow or light waiting for its effectuation. The people has become an external and foreign entity to the so-called new heroes who, from their closed circle, intended to regulate the organization of a totality in which the elements are no longer relating to each other and composing a whole – the cosmos. What ensures and animates the whole is no longer the life of each one and the dynamism that unites them all together, according to a more or less immediate material or spiritual, individual or collective necessity. They are human or presumed divine plans which the totality is supposed to obey. The pain of giving birth to each one and to the world is no longer the responsibility of the living in search of their individuation and their way of uniting with each other. All that is projected onto an outside which is considered and managed from its reflection, from its speculative double, from a truth extrapolated from the living that the man pretends to govern thanks to his logos. Music itself is absent, whereas it ensured “the melodic line(s) of the heart” (Nietzsche 2000, 115), uniting the whole, accompanying the heroes’ actions, and preventing passion from sinking into chaos, a lack of differentiation, the “sea,” or an excess of distress in which the Dionysian element dissolves. Music is replaced by words, notions, reasoning, and more or less dialectical confrontations between men who are supposed to master their passions in the name of a knowledge which pretends to free itself from natural sensibility and to take refuge, to retreat, to isolate itself in a theoretical autonomy – as a victory of representation, of image, of forms of the Apollonian visible over the tactile, emotional, moving, relational and musical lived experience of the Dionysian. In Greek tragedy, art, especially music, actively participates in everyone’s search for individuation and in structuring the world in its various dimensions. This art does not exclude passions but exposes them and translates them, with a view to their possible incarnation by the heroes, accompanied by the gods, the wise men and the people. This art speaks to the global and not only to the mind; it is within everyone’s reach and is not contingent upon an aesthetic evaluation carried out only by experts and confined to museums. This art represents a both active and passive way of shaping being itself, contributing to the quest for individuation, a process that cannot be merely individual, but which involves nature, the gods, the sages, and the people, with a view not to their imitation or appropriation but to the composition of a world where each element is faithful to its being. However, the world is now taking shape in different forms isolated from each other, defined by a look that prevents them from merging, but aims at grasping them, remembering them, being able to dispose of them and discussing them according to a logic and a truth which are no longer those, particular and autonomous, of specific lives and existences. The confrontation, which is always partly tragic, between them, is supposedly overcome by theoretical knowledge resorting to dialectics. Hence the purpose of tragedy would be to relieve individuals by freeing them from their passions – its purpose would be cathartic, 209

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according to Aristotle. It would be a question of releasing passions instead of considering and living as a stage in the search for an individual and collective individuation, which cannot be gained without pain. Humans, notably as citizens, are gradually becoming neutered individuals, castrated as living beings, governed by those who are presumed to know what is suitable for their lives. The polis is no longer listening to the people, A PEOPLE ruled by the will of citizens responsible for their fate and that of the world. They have become, at best, spectators but not actors of their fate.

The Oblivion of Being The disclosure of Being, with which Heidegger is concerned, has misjudged an important part of what the living being consists of, especially the human being. The alètheia has maintained in the lethè the sexuate character of the human being, which, then, manifests itself only through genealogy. Man has buried his own truth in the supposedly objective truth of the real. His presence to the world – his Da-sein, Heidegger would say – has become the symptom of a mode of Being’s withdrawal and oblivion at a certain time in History. And this withdrawal became more and more pronounced by privileging the neuter as a condition and expression of being’s truth. For centuries, man’s presence in History corresponds to the fallacious ex-stasis of historical epochès which disconnect not only man but all the beings he constitutes in a world from their own destiny. Only the assumption of a relationship between different living beings, especially between dimorphic human beings differently sexuate, can reopen the circle that holds beings in an ecstatic destiny which dispossesses them of themselves. The world’s breaking up which has followed the Greek tragedy’s disappearance corresponds to the one of the human itself. In it nature, gods, people, wisdom, and passion exist. In it the confrontation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian takes place. By its sexuation, the human being lives the Dionysian, but its relationship to the other as other obliges it also to take account of the Apollonian. Its sexuate determination forces the human being to overcome the opposition between merging into a universal of Dionysian type which lacks differentiation and individualizing itself according to an Apollonian type. From then on, the latter no longer corresponds to a form closed on itself and the former to a dissolution of forms getting lost in a fusional whole. On the contrary, the forms are contributing to the awakening and the support of amorous love. In its relationship to the other as other, this love is both unlimited and limited, which prevents it from merging into a lack of differentiation, from dissolving into nothingness, or from reducing itself to needs. In physiological terms – according to Nietzsche’s intention – it is possible to say that sexual chromosomes have a twofold potential: for the unlimitedness of the desire for a conjunction and its fecundity, and for the limit that their difference and their being incarnate in bodies which are differently sexuate implies. Therefore, the tragic confrontation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian occurs in the living itself, in particular the living which is divided into two genuses such as the human being. Surprisingly, the “non-withdrawal”, to which alètheia corresponds, is not considered by Heidegger to be the emergence or the recognition of a difference. The neuter – particularly the one of the Da-sein – does not appear to him as the covering of a difference, a covering which is not a safeguard but a misjudgment, or even a repression, of the real of life itself and the prevention of a phuein corresponding to the flourishing of the human being. Could it be the possible “agonal” character (Heidegger 1992, 18) of sexuate difference which 210

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leads Heidegger to act in that way? However, does he not claim himself throughout his Parmenides (Heidegger 1992, 18–26) that the emergence of truth as non-withdrawal does not occur without conflict and that “the essence of the truth itself is in itself a conflict” or even a tragedy? Why, then, overlook the one which corresponds to sexuate difference? All the more so since if this difference can give rise to conflicts, it also opens the horizon of a still unknown truth, the one of a conjunction at the origin of our being, which removes it from its attributive logical function to give it back to its ontological destiny. It is true that what or who we are as sexuate beings is generally more acted than consciously lived and difference cannot be put in front of us nor merely represented. And it is not without reason that Hegel asserts that we experience ourselves in the other – which does not allow us to gain our own individuation or a relationship with a being which is differently sexuate and conflict and tragedy that it may entail, particularly when the essence of truth is at stake. Why does our sexuation as such escape our consciousness? Several hypotheses may be viewed. First, because it is a reality that is too intimate and too close to us to be perceived by us – so Hölderlin speaks of God as too close to us for us to perceive Him. It can also come from our culture, from the fact that it privileges seeing and the same to the detriment of touch and difference, especially that of the other. Taboos about sexuality probably also play a role in this unthought aspect of our culture. Our sexuate belonging thus remained in the background – whether it is a withdrawal due to closeness or intimacy or the result of a cultural imposition, restriction, or prejudice. Most probably these causes combine and prevent the “non-withdrawal” of an original dimension of our being, crucial for its becoming and its flourishing. Certainly, what concerns sexuality strictly speaking requires the maintenance of concealment; this is part of its truth. As Odysseus “stayed concealed as he was shedding tears” (Heidegger 1992, 23–59), so it is not out of any concealment that our love embraces can take place. They require a concealment, the preservation of a secret, especially a mystery, which is a halo around the lovers and their union. It is even a double mystery: the one of their breath as living beings and the one of their flesh, more or less awakened and present in love. The fact of “being concealed” is, therefore, part of the amorous relations. But sexuation as a determining element of our personal and collective individuation must be affirmed and considered. The covering of the neuter, whether it is or not wanted and freely assumed, must be removed as what deprives us of an essential facet of existence and prevents us from fulfilling our being – a being of which a halo of breath and flesh preserves the presence and the mystery including in its “not-withdrawing.” Another aspect of our culture which dispossesses this presence, particularly this sexuate presence, of its being is the logic of opposition which replaces the logic of difference. This logic does not correspond, at least initially, to Greek thinking – the world as cosmos is not formed from oppositions. But the progressive privilege of logos in relation to the cosmos makes them gradually necessary, even for Presocratic thinkers. And yet the conflict relating to the emergence of the truth of our being, the one which is staged in Greek tragedy, is still linked to the natural belonging of the heroes – part of which remains outside the field of consciousness but is acted out tragically. And it is true that at least one opposition already is dominant in the tragic giving birth of individuation, the one between life and death, which is akin to that between light and darkness. However, the decisive role that sexuation, especially germen, can play in this regard is misjudged – a germen that is both mortal and immortal, as sexuation itself occurs at the ontical and ontological levels. 211

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The Concealment Operated by The Logos The Logos does not know such properties, but they are signified both from the hupokeimenon of discourse and under the mask of what intends to transcend it. The discourse would be that which replaces the world of appearing – in a way the physical and even the somatic world – in the oblivion of that from which it arises. From this origin, only some lexical or syntactic signs would remain, which testify, while covering it, to what they mean, even without their knowing. At the level of discourse, the giving birth that the Greek tragedy staged is still obscure, except that which is henceforth at stake in the perceived cultural giving birth to only one subject. For example, if the neuter conceals, intentionally or not, what is sexuate difference – if it claims, especially in Heidegger’s words, to ensure a kind of matrix role as a potential of individuation – the articles and possessives, as well as the grammatical agreements, are nonetheless generally gendered, and the choice of the words which are used and their connotation are also not alien to the sex of the speaker. The prevalence of the masculine over the feminine, including under the cover of the neuter, reveals the dominance of the male sex regarding the use of the logos, as is the selection of the words chosen to express the meaning of a sentence or of the speech. So, correspondingly, is the syntactic usage. The privilege of subject-object syntax is owing to a masculine subject and of the object, or “objects,” of his speech. What corresponds to a more feminine truth, a subject-subject syntax, is little developed and usually appears only in the form of a multiple, a multiple in the masculine, whereas the feminine subject prefers a relationship between two sexually different subjects. The relationship between the masculine subject(s) and the feminine subject(s), which is possibly conflictual as far as truth is concerned, is therefore not expressed in the discourse –and it would be expressed with difficulty in the existing language even when they endeavor to hold a dialogue. Indeed, this relationship is variously masked, disguised, or transformed depending on languages. And yet it is the source of an appearaning of the truth, which is thus missed if not repressed. The main issue of the Greek tragedy concerning human individuation is thus partially shifted but also concealed, covered, avoided and forgotten by/in the substitution of logos for the cosmos as the organizing principle of the world. Moreover, the logos acts as a “command” (cf. Heidegger 1992, 45) regarding the individuation process – whether it is as a mainly retroactive effect for the masculine subject who has, to a large extent, worked out this logos, or of a primarily depriving effect for the feminine subject. The logos enjoins to be according to its saying presumed to be truth, either in the passive mode of conformity to it or in a more active mode through its use. Human individuation no longer depends on a relation to the cosmos, in which the dominant determination or injunction concerns the preservation of the existence of all living beings, of their conditions of development and of their interrelations. It now depends on the conscious or unconscious conformity to a logical order established by humans, in most cases by men, supposed to represent and to safeguard a natural order while having mastery of it. And yet the logos cannot be substituted for life, for its growth, nor for what happens in the relationship between the living, and it does not consider sexuation, especially that of the living divided into two genuses like humans. It could be said that the logos imposes a truth which differs from that which corresponds to a natural world, a truth that it covers and transforms so as to make it undisclosable, even imperceptible. Besides, it is not in terms of “true” or “false” that the truth of being in primitive Greek culture, especially in the tragedy, is expressed, but rather in terms of respect 212

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or non respect for the natural order and the role that humans are meant to assume in it. Aeschylus and Sophocles do not really stage a question about truth but rather a problem concerning the management of the world with or without respect for the natural belonging of the living. Sophocles’ Antigone is obviously exemplary from this point of view, and it is not a pure coincidence that the conflict which is staged between a man and a woman who represent two different worlds regarding the respect for life and for its culture. Certainly, the most ontological tragic, the one which potentially exists between a man and a woman, here between Haemon and Antigone, is still concealed, covered up by a conflict between generations. Sexuate difference does not yet appear to be the most radical place not only of the origin but also of the individuation and the becoming of the human being and its fulfillment. It is concealed in its genelogical effects, whether it is a question of the family strictly speaking or of its extension to the polis or the nation and to culture. And it is difficult to deny that the patriarch will gradually impose himself as the one who generates life, governs the city and creates culture. Hence, the real in its truth is controlled by a potential and a power or an authority which differs from its essence, and it is fixed and paralyzed in an inappropriate essence which cuts it off, disjoints it, from the advent of the truth of its own being. So the “there is,” in the sense of “it happens at this moment,” this event-advent of an entering into presence is fixed and frozen by/in the logos, such as that of a supposed presence whose ideal essence would therefore be safeguarded in its permanence. This mutation of the meaning of “being,” or “to be,” has taken away the real from its own truth and its possible coming into presence to put it at the human’s disposal, particularly at man’s disposal, as a kind of effigy immortalized by a representation and a name. The “there is” of “the coming into presence of Being” – or of “to be” – has still something to do with the action staged in the tragedy. It is even a question about the “there is” of the human being in its coming to itself – in his Ereignis. The “he is” or “she is” of the “coming to himself,” or “coming to herself” in the present is not said by/in the logos. Rather, it is covered by a neutered “there is,” which freezes any possibility of the event of the “he is” or “she is,” as the advent of the living to its true being. The “there is” as “he/ that comes to presence” is now supposed to refer to what is once and for all, what must be recognized, and with which one must comply to be faithful to the truth – a truth which is common and sharable by everyone. The mediation of the logos has prevented the advent of the real, in particular of the living, in its own presence, with the tragic that this event can involve. The logos inaugurated an order which imposes an “identity” and “limits” to the coming into presence, thereby avoiding possible conflicts between those who are coming to their own being. The giving birth to the living, with what that implies of immediacy and tragedy, is supposedly mastered, but also concealed, in the apparently serene peace acquired thanks to the logos and its progressive elimination of any upsurging due to the advent of the living to its own being.

The Survival of Tragedy as Destiny Man has wondered too little about his own truth and the advent of the truth of his own being. The logos has served him as a “home,” a shelter against the non withdrawal and the non concealment of his being and against what his truth entails of negative, of what he is not: the totality of the human being. The logos is the territory that man, and in particular Socrates, has allocated to himself to separate himself from the cosmos and from the way of 213

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differing of the living beings that form and cement the whole. Man has concealed and sealed his being by/in language against a lack of differentiation with a pretended mother-nature but also against the partiality of his being, whereas it could ensure his autonomy vis-à-vis the maternal and be in conformity with the division of the human species into two genuses. In other words: against the negative which allows him to find himself, to appear as he is truly and to pursue his individuation. He has established the order of logos, the gateway to his “house of language,” against the non concealement of his being. Hence the various individuations he has adopted or undergone, according to the epochs of history, and their determination by a politico-cultural context even independently of his wishes. Thus, the Roman Empire is not only – contrary to what Heidegger asserts, notably in his Parmenides (Heidegger 1992, 43 et sq.) – that which removes Western man from his Greek origins because he had already confined himself in a being, in a house and a territory that do not correspond to the one he naturally is. Only the rediscovery, the revelation of this being, would allow him to maintain himself as he is, through the periods of history and the diversity of cultures. In the absence of the assumption of a negative in regard to his original being, to his natural belonging, to the male sex, man is subjected to the negativity of historically different incarnations. What may involve of conflicts and tragedies the coming to the truth of his own being, the partiality of his genus, is covered by a logos, pretendedly in the neuter, which reduces the ontology corresponding to sexuate difference to a secondary question situated within the horizon of a truth which is considered more essential and universal. Then, the implicit but also explicit tragic element, which is expressed through the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles, is gradually transformed into a kind of bourgeois drama or comedy of manners, already in Euripides, the only tragedian who was an accomplice of Socrates. The fact remains that the destiny which weighed on the actors of the Greek tragedy continues to weigh, including on later philosophers such as Hegel or Heidegger, as the resurgence of a mystery still concealed. Instead of corresponding to an unconcealment of our being, the truth has become what man’s reason values as such and he expresses by/in the logos. Man is supposed to be able to represent himself and to translate into adequate words what the real is outside of him. Then, access to truth no longer takes place thanks to the appearing by itself of what is, but through the conformity to what is expressed by man’s judgment and discourse about the world and the living. Moreover, to the adherence to the truth stated by man, notably through religion, a necessary submission of the will to what man considers to be true has been added. Whereas the human being tried to conquer its individuation as a living among living beings by coexisting with them in the respect for a cosmic universe and its sharing, it is now assigned to a truth asserted by the human, especially by man. Every living being, including the human being itself, is thus removed from the reality of a singularity that it must discover and embody, and it must conform to a truth granted by man according to his judgment about this being. And such conformity does not concern only the truth itself but also the correctness of the behavior to adopt accordingly. In a way, the circle is closed with regard to the world but also to the man. The fact remains that the modalities of this closure have evolved according to the periods of history, not without conflicts or tragedies. A destiny also continues to weigh on humanity and the world, whose mystery is not elucidated. But the question no longer seems to be above all that of a fate weighing on the individual, as it was the case with the heroes of the Greek tragedy, but on a people or a culture. 214

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According to Hegel, it is at the level of a people, and not of the individual, that the question of destiny and of its possible origin, or even solution, arises in a relationship still underestimated between nature and spirit. If the Greek hero was acted by a sexuate destiny of which he was not really aware, this lack of consideration has increased historically and, from his veiling in and by the genealogical belonging and blood ties, which were determinant to the management of the polis, this sexuate destiny has gradually been concealed and forgotten in a cultural belonging, including a religious, social and political one, which makes it more and more difficult, if not prohibited, its unconcealment and its treatment. And if some “great men,” Hegel would say, can still emerge from the people and evoke heroes of the Greek tragedy– for example, Abraham or even Jesus – it is certainly not in sexuate terms that their destiny is interpreted, except partially, at the genealogical level. Not only the interpretation or disclosure of the tragic that sexuate individuation may involve has not progressed since Aeschylus and Sophocles, but its revelation has gradually been replaced another truth. And it is rather in a connection with a people that the tragic fate of Abraham or Jesus is interpreted, for example by Hegel. Concealed in the social, the political and cultural, the destiny of the individual is also hidden in the history and its evolution, and it is above all there that Heidegger strives to, and invites us to, unseal it by paying attention to a call and obeying what history recommends to us regarding being, including the one who we are. But is not this historical being the result of a sealing that man himself has imposed on the/his truth by ignoring the sexuate determination of the origin of his living being and of his existence? And does not Heidegger redouble this closure until its oblivion when he maintains that the neuter character of Dasein is necessary to correspond to the destiny that history enjoins us to assume? Is it not rightful to object to Heidegger – but not only to him – that the path, the method, that he proposes to man to make his way towards the discovery and the fulfillment of his being, is wrong? And that the transformation of the disclosure of being’s truth corresponding to alètheia into adequacy and certainty is not only due to the intervention of man but has also unveiled what his being already was for lack of assuming his ontological destiny of sexuate? Has this destiny not gradually been buried and forgotten in productions whose transcendence has somehow become at man’s hand? But this cannot be the case for the transcendence of the other as differently sexuate. Does the alienation of the sexuate destiny of man in/through the logos, and the sociopolitical, the cultural and the historical realms which correspond to it, not deprive him of the possibility of being confronted with the destiny, including in its tragic aspect? He has undergone this fate, has become its slave, but he is no longer his possible actor in the present. Hence the question relating to the meaning of this present – in the sense of man’s presence, man’s way of acting, and saying.

Possible Unconcealing of the Tragic at the Individual Level Opposition, alternation or confrontation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian have never been truly considered at the individual level. Yet, it is there that they can and must initially be taken into account when the quest for human individuation is at stake. Sticking to the genealogical level, as is still the case with Freud, remains at the level of the species without really considering individuation at the level of genus, and that leads to the opposition between a mother-nature who lacks differentiaion and a father-legislator who is presumed to give shapes to nature, to individuals, and to the world. 215

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Then the truth regarding the “to be” of every being, of each living being, depends on what the order of the law of the father imposes or superimposes on the natural order; that is, it on an essence elaborated by man which is substituted for the natural order. Therefore, the human being is divided into a natural belonging, which is not cultivated as such, and a cultural belonging, which is foreign to its own being. Overcoming this split could be achieved by agreeing to live anew the Dionysian and the Apollonian at work in Greek tragedy, particularly as an alternation between the absence of limits and the confinement within inappropriate limits. This dilemma can be interpreted as a stage in the quest for individuation from a fusion-confusion with the real mother, the mother nature or the family environment to the adoption of limits imposed by culture and the socio-political environment, limits which are originally dictated by the father. This amounts to forgetting that this passage is equivalent to the passage from an immersion in a natural world to an immersion in a cultural world without reaching the limits of one’s own being. But the human being has within it, already by nature, but also as a possible articulation between nature and culture, a relation to the unlimited and the limited. Indeed, the skin is a limit of the human body, but living skin is porous, and it does not amount to the closure of a form. Besides, the human skin opens both to the outside – to the other, to nature, and to the world – through the senses and sexuation, and to the intside through giving access to the mucous tissues. The lips are perhaps the best example of the opening of the limits of a body towards its outside and its inside. If the human body has something to do with an Apollonian modeling, it is also the possible site of a Dionysian experience, especially through its mucous tissues. Indeed, the touch between the mucous membranes provokes a feeling of infinite – whether it is a touch between the edges of one flesh or a touch between two different fleshes. What is lived through in the touching between two fleshes is a loss of limits, limits which are regained in the return to/in differently sexuate bodies which are capable of both autonomy and reciprocity. If the touch of the mucous membranes between parents and children can make sink into a bad infinite, the one between lovers can lead to the experience of a good infinite. This presupposes that they have assumed their differences, especially their physical differences, and they respect each other while respecting themselves. Then the experience of the infinite, of an absolute infinite, can be attained in an amorous embrace if the otherness between the one to the other is preserved and allows for the return of each to oneself, in oneself, especially in one’s body. Access to the Dionysian can thus withdraw and shelter in Apollonian forms, this return or withdrawal being a moment necessary to open to the other and to the world. The Dionysian itself can therefore serve a personal individuation that remains alive and evolves toward an increasingly absolute flourishing. And this Dionysian can be shared, be communed, while being contained and retained within the limits of a natural body and a natural being. The Dionysian experience that can occur in the touching of the lips opens to a more intimate sharing between mucous membranes which are not bordered by skin, a sharing in which all forms can get lost but also be born anew. In the amorous embrace, each gives up a personal individuation to open to a union with a different individuation which allows him/her to be born or to be born anew to themselves. This relation also concerns the truth of being which is at stake between different living beings. If what is at stake can be the same in all languages and all cultures, this same – or Same – has now to do with differences. It is difference which can unveil, through flashes, something of the historically forgotten Being – or “to be”. In the attraction, but also the confrontation, between two naturally different belonging, something of Being – and of “to be” – and its instantiation in us as living 216

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beings can be remembered. This instance and its relation to a different instance cannot be expressed merely in words. It is often through actions that it reveals itself and resurfaces. And this happens with a tragic tearing of the human being, which never has been truly told – except partially between Antigone and Creon in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone. Indeed, if belonging to a species already questions what is at stake in our being, belonging to a genus – when the species is divided into two genuses – deepens and radicalizes this tearing. There is no longer a mere unique instance or ecstasy with regard to the human being, but a perpetual twofold belonging to the one or the other that the necessary relationship with what or who is naturally different unveils without being ever able to overcome it. What the Greek tragedy staged – and that Nietzsche interprets as a conflict between the Dionysian and the Apollonian – is played out within the human being itself. This tragic confrontation between a Dionysian longing and an Apollonian reserve keeps our being – and “to be” – alive and acting. And there is no opening or disclosing of Being – or even of “to be” – thanks to which it would be apprehended, especially by whatever view. The opening or unconcealing is towards a conjunction in which a being disappears as such for a generation which is not only its own, even if it takes part in it. In this union, and the unity which is then sometimes reached, each gives up what he or she is, to give rise to a being from which they comes and by/for which they generate themselves as a new being. In such a union, productive instances of being, which are never exposed to view including as presences, are assembled. They are the conditions of possibility of the latter, actualizing a potential that belongs to none of them as their its own – whether they take part in the action or remain external to it, trying to seize something of it, such as the philosopher or the seer, that the soothsayer is, and that the philosopher himself must be as the “shepherd of Being” (Heidegger 2002, 262). This has not yet happened if we consider our “to be” as the result of a conjunction between two different beings. This conjunction is elusive as such, and yet it is. But none can be alone the shepherd of it except by safeguarding a waiting that preserves its possible coming to be. This already presupposes being the shepherd of Being – or of “to be” – including of the one which is proper to us, in a tearing expectation. What we are can only happen to us through the unforeseeable and uncontrollable union with a different “to be” – a “to be” which always remains partly foreign to us. Thus, the coming into presence of each other amounts to facing a difference towards a union. The question is, therefore, no longer just a consideration, in a way ethical, for the being, and “to be”, of the other, which requires each to grant the other a time of presence with a harmony between allèlois in mind (Ibid.). Presence no longer corresponds to the opening of each with respect for the other. It first involves a confrontation and a tuning or agreement between beings which are different, as the condition for the blossoming of each one, of the whole world and of the truth of presence itself. However, the “to be” of the other, with which one must first agree, is no longer that of an allos, of an other among others. It is first that of one heteros, an other of two, with whom it is possible to unite through a communion between the most intimate mucous membranes – in a Dionysian immersion between different natural belongings. This union is a step in the becoming of oneself that does not happen without difference, a difference which is also the condition for the emergence of a new being. The coming into presence is towards a union at the origin of becoming. This union is desired, body and soul long for it, but it does not occur without a certain tragedy, without a renunciation to one’s self for the becoming of oneself, but also of the other and of the world. The coming into presence aims at a becoming which needs a kind of death to oneself. However, it is not for the sake 217

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of decline, as Heidegger claimed for a lack of thinking of it as the coming into presence of sexuate living beings. Indeed, in an economy of the same, the decline is the destiny in store for and between beings which are put in the neuter as living and determined from the totality of a world built by man, and not from the whole of their own beings.

By Way of Conclusion: The Initial Saying of Meaning According to Heidegger the “initial saying,” the saying of the beginning, may not yet exist in the ancient Greek culture, even if its necessity is sensed in the tragedy. The initial saying is not a saying about things but a saying of oneself to the other. This saying is the one that those who are attracted to each other by desire or love try to approach. But it can be barely stammered because the explaining and clarifying that a saying, even a poetic one, entails remains foreign to their yearning. This saying only arises thanks to the concealment of each one in a different being that attraction reveals, calling them to a union without unveiling its mystery. The logos mistakenly did not consider the decisive character of this mystery as a source of meaning. It has pretended to say the real without signifying, while reserving or preserving it, the importance of the mystery of the emergence of meaning. What is impossible to say among the living, and especially between human lovers, is also a safeguard against the tragic due to their difference that words may unveil – a tragic that a communion by touching can soothe and even keep for a moment without destroying its essence. Thus this is at which desire aims and why it assents to maintain the lips so that they should touch each other. The Ereignis suitable for the human being would happen through an access to silence as the possibility of a union with the naturally different, a union for which man and woman long as for a condition, always partly tragic, of their blossoming.

Bibliography Heidegger, M. (1992). Parmenides. Translated by Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (2002). “The Word of Anaximander.” In Off the Beaten Track. Translated by Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nietzsche, F. (2000). The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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14 FREEING OURSELVES FROM TECHNOLOGY Rethinking Mindfulness Lisa Foran

Introduction ‘Mindfulness’ has become not only a familiar term but an almost ubiquitous one in the discourse around stress-management and mental health, particularly in our post-COVID world. Many educational institutions like universities now offer their staff and students various ‘mindfulness interventions’ such as ‘Wellness Clinics’, ‘Lunchtime Mindfulness Zooms’, ‘Mindful Communities’, ‘Wellness Toolkits’, and so on. Nor are these offerings restricted to educational institutions; they had become a feature of the corporate workplace long before the pandemic, especially in larger multinational organisations. The rising appeal of mindfulness coincides with its envelopment into the world of mental health management as primarily a means to the end of reducing stress and coping with anxiety. From about the mid-2000s a proliferation of studies from questionnaires to MRI scans, claimed to demonstrate the ‘scientific’ proof of its benefits. Here I am interested not in debating those benefits, but in interrogating the manner in which mindfulness has been taken up by the corporate world as a way to offer its subjects a means to cope with the stress that it—the corporate world itself—induces. ‘Mindfulness’ arrives to our ordinary everyday discourse tangled in a web of associated terms that capture a focus on the self and self-improvement that seems at least somewhat misaligned with its Buddhist origins. Practising mindfulness is meant to make us better at dealing with the stresses of our capitalist and/or heavily technologised epoch. My claim in this chapter is that mindfulness—in this everyday sense—has become part of what Martin Heidegger terms the technological enframing of the world such that, rather than freeing us from such a way of being (or even just revealing such a way of being); mindfulness in this ordinary contemporary sense, in fact acts as a block to such freeing precisely because its practise is used as a way to maintain us in this techno-corporate frame. I begin by describing what mindfulness has come to mean in light of the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn and its envelopment into the corporate world. I then go on in the longest section of the chapter to give a detailed explanation of Heidegger’s account of technology and how this fits with his corresponding accounts of truth, freedom, and the human subject. From here, I move onto Karl Marx’s description of alienated labour and his concerns DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-18

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regarding technology. While these two accounts cannot be mapped too neatly onto each other; the aim here is to demonstrate the parallels between Marx’s dehumanised worker and Heidegger’s technologically enframed subject. To conclude, I argue that ‘mindfulness’ as a term has become so encrusted with its corporate significance of improving the worker’s capacity to work, that it should be abandoned. What might offer the kind of freedom and authenticity that corporate mindfulness feigns to provide is something akin to Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit.

Corporate Mindfulness Two of the larger providers of mindful meditation apps eM Life (formerly ‘emindful’) and Headspace, advertise packages available for corporate purchase and roll out. eM Life claims that uptake allows businesses to: ‘Tackle chronic conditions, rising healthcare costs, stress, turnover, absenteeism, and lack of productivity’ (eM Life, 2023). In perhaps slightly more palatable language, Headspace promises its corporate customers ‘Less stress and burnout’, which means: ‘fewer sick days, better focus, and more effective teamwork’ (Headspace, 2023). eM Life’s clients include life assurance firm Mass Mutual and telecoms company T-Mobile; while Headspace boasts partnerships with Amazon, Google, and Nike amongst other global multinationals. Both promise a range of mindful toolkits such as guided meditations and stress webinars, as well as higher-level packages that provide tailored mindful interventions based on a company’s particular needs, along with ‘dedicated Partner Success and Engagement Teams’ (ibid.). Across the range of services offered, the focus is ostensibly on improving employee mental health (surely a noble goal), but invariably with a view to improved employee productivity, which is evidently less altruistic. This latter aim, of course, is not surprising; it is the corporate customer—Nike, Google, whoever—who is paying the bill and no customer is paying for something that is not to their benefit. Companies exist to make profit and as much of it as they can (Bakan, 2004; Wiist, 2010). If they are offering generous working conditions, including mindfulness training, they are doing it to improve their bottom line. In the words of William Wiist: ‘the primary purpose of the corporation is to increase shareholder value. It has no other obligation to individuals, societies, or the planet’ (2010, p. 6). What then is this ‘mindfulness’ available to make us less stressed, more creative, and ultimately better workers? Mary V. Wrenn dubs it ‘corporate mindfulness’ (2022), a distinct form of mindfulness practice implemented with a view to better corporate productivity. Following Alex CaringLobel (2016), Wrenn argues that the origin of this focus on stress-management has its distant roots in the interventions of Elton Mayo and his study of the Western Electric Company (WEC) in Illinois during the 1930s. Rockefeller-backed Mayo established the Human Relations School at Harvard Business School in the 1920s as post-WWI American industry grappled with the so-called four horsemen of ‘the Red scare, influenza, inflation, and industrial strife’ (O’Connor, 1999, p.  118). Mayo’s work was driven by a desire to limit the democratisation of the workplace that the war period had instigated and to calm the nerves of the CEO’s funding the development of the Harvard Business School (ibid.). His WEC study marked a shift in people management ‘science’ from a concern with the worker’s body (understood as an extension of the factory machine), to a concern with the worker’s mind or psychology. A shift which allowed workers’ collective dissatisfaction with working conditions to be framed in terms of individual ‘emotional reactions’ (Wrenn, 220

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2022, p. 155). In the decades that followed, this corporate focus on the individual worker and their problems as ‘emotional’ rather than situational or ‘real’; was married with the rising spread of what Wrenn terms the New Age movement or spiritualism. While difficult to define in absolute terms, the movement might best be understood as a general zeitgeist in North America and parts of Europe that advocated introspection, self-improvement, individual empowerment, and ‘positive thinking’. It is in this milieu that the work of Jon Kabat-Zinn found fertile ground. In 1979, Kabat-Zinn founded a programme of ‘mindfulness-based stress reduction’ (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre. The initial programme was designed to help alleviate stress and was based on Kabat-Zinn’s own experience of Buddhist meditation as an undergraduate student (Moloney, 2016, p.  270). According to Ronald Purser (2019), following Miles Neale (2011), what happened to the initial programme was akin to the franchising operation of McDonald’s under its founder Ray Kroc. Whereas Kroc was concerned with a standardised burger and fries in any McDonald’s restaurant around the world; Kabat-Zinn franchised an eight-week mindfulness course through instructors certified in his Massachusetts-based centre. ‘He continued to expand the reach of MBSR by identifying new markets such as corporations, schools, government and the military, and endorsing other forms of ‘mindfulness-based interventions’ (MBIs)’ (Purser 2019, see also Neale 2011).1 As these MBIs and MBSR programmes spread across the United States during the 1980s they found their way across the pond where they were taken up by psychology, to produce ‘mindfulness-based cognitive therapy’ (MBCT), led in large part by the British psychologist John Teasdale (Moloney, 2016, p.  270). ‘The incorporation of mindfulness into an established academic discipline complete with quantitative evaluation tools lent mindfulness a scientific credibility that took it from self-help to scientific self-help and a consequent widespread adoption into the health care schemes of Western developed countries like the US health insurance industry and the UK’s National Health Service’ (Wrenn, 2022, p. 156). This scientific endorsement lent credibility to mindfulness that aided its uptake in the corporate world of people management or human relations—now known as Human Resources. These mindfulness tools, whether presented in the guise of self-help YouTube videos or medically approved and even prescribed exercises, are largely removed from their religious, social, and ethical origins in Buddhism. Our practices shift in line with our broader social, political, and economic needs over time; nothing remains eternal, and change does not necessarily mean distortion in a negative sense. However, some commentators have argued that what we are left with in mindfulness in this corporate sense is not merely of dubious value, but dangerous insofar as it removes practitioners from their embedded social and relational existences to create self-driven, self-concerned, and ultimately selfish neoliberal individuals (Purser, 2019; Wrenn, 2022). While mindfulness in this context ‘temporarily cocoons the user against the rootlessness and incessant demands of contemporary life’ (Moloney, 2016, pp. 185–186, my emphasis), ultimately the practitioner must return to the ‘rootlessness’ of the corporate world. The danger is that the practice ‘supports the status quo while using the language of transformation’ by promulgating an idea of unfettered and socially detached or discrete agency, encouraging employees to ‘retreat into their own private worlds and particular identities’ (Purser, 2019). Such an understanding and use of mindfulness is symptomatic, I argue, of a larger corporate-technological enframing of our current world and very far from its ethically charged and socially embedded Buddhist origins. 221

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Heidegger on Truth, Freedom, and the Danger of Enframing Heidegger’s 1954 text Die Frage nach der Technik (2008a), from the earlier Bremen lectures of 1949 (GA79), begins by describing our ordinary understanding of technology as both instrumental—a means to an end—and anthropological—an activity, something that humans do. These two understandings work together: humans posit ends and find the (instrumental) means of achieving them. While such a definition is not wrong, it is indeed ‘correct’ Heidegger tells us—this does not mean that it is true, understood as revealing the essence of technology itself. Technology is not to be thought along these instrumental lines but rather to be understood as a mode of revealing. Revealing, or unconcealing, is how Heidegger defines truth, and he does so quite consistently throughout his work. The processual nature of truth cannot be overemphasised here. Truth is not something that is ascertained through abstract reasoning or the alignment of formulae with states of affairs; rather, truth is something that happens between humans and being itself. Truth has traditionally been understood in terms of correspondence, as adæquatio rei et intellectus. The problem with this definition is that it reduces Dasein, or humans, to one object in the world which must correspond to another object; it fails to recognise the fact that we (humans/Daseins) have a different way of being to that of things. Against such a view, Heidegger argues that in fact truth is the uncovering of being: “Beingtrue and Being-uncovering, is a way of Being for Dasein. […] What is primarily ‘true’—that is, uncovering—is Dasein” (2001, p. 263). What is ‘primarily true’ is Dasein as that being which uncovers (understands) being. What Dasein or we ‘uncover’—the laptop on the table, the Pythagorean theorem, the meaning of a poem—these ‘uncovered’ things are of a second order truth. It is the action of uncovering (recognising the being of something as it is) that is true in the fullest sense. However, Heidegger also claims: “‘Dasein is in the truth’ states equiprimordially that ‘Dasein is in untruth’.[…] It is therefore essential that Dasein should explicitly appropriate what has already been uncovered […] and assure itself of its uncoveredness again and again” (2001, p. 265). Dasein is in the ‘untruth’ along with the truth for three related reasons: (1) because it is ‘falling’; (2) because of how it occupies the hermeneutic circle; and (3) because the nature of uncovering always entails a corresponding covering over. There is a sense here of the phenomenological account of perception as perspectival made ontological: just as one only ever sees one side of an object, while at the same time not seeing its other sides, the being of beings is only ever uncovered through a simultaneous covering. Before moving on to the relationship to freedom, it is worth noting here with this quotation that it is ‘essential’ that Dasein take up what has already been uncovered and uncover it for itself again and again. This is one of very few places in Being and Time that Heidegger offers an imperative to Dasein—this is something Dasein must do, essentially—and the reason of course is that otherwise Dasein might lose itself in the they, might just accept what is passed along in idle chatter.2 There is a kind of ethical demand here to take up a burden of uncovering rather than merely accepting received wisdom. In the later work the danger of losing oneself in the ‘they’ is refashioned as the danger of losing oneself in the technological framing of the world, and there is again an ethical demand to resist such lostness or rootlessness by exercising our freedom to think differently.3 Being-true as uncovering, is not merely a logical concern about accuracy, but is the very thing that constitutes our freedom: ‘Freedom is the essence4 of truth’ (Heidegger,

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2008b, p. 71) and freedom itself ‘receives its own essence from the more original essence of uniquely essential truth [it] reveals itself as letting beings be [Sein-lassen]’ (Heidegger, 2008b, p. 72).5 Our freedom arises from our very capacity to uncover being—this is what makes us different from other things or beings in the world. It is because we make, and indeed must make, a project of our own existence, because we must constantly choose how to be.6 The essence of freedom, then, is our understanding of being which allows us to freely choose our own existence. Freedom reveals itself in letting beings be, that is, in allowing things to be as they are, rather than trying to make them fit into a category that somebody else has passed onto us—rather than viewing them as some resource which we can use for our own project. In holding back from merely using beings—in letting them be—we become aware not only of those beings themselves, but of being in general. But again, there remains something unavailable to thought here: ‘Precisely because letting be always lets beings be in a particular comportment that relates to them and thus discloses them, it conceals beings as a whole. Letting-be is intrinsically at the same time a concealing’ (Heidegger, 2008b, p. 76). In uncovering the being of some beings, beings as a whole fade into the background. The ‘truth of being’ is that existence always unfolds in a play between concealment and unconcealment—we never get, so to speak, the whole thing. This is what Heidegger terms ‘the mystery’—we never quite understand the whole of being itself. This is not a failure of understanding, but a feature of being itself: a necessary play of what we are able to think at any given moment in history. The danger in our current technological era is that what is available to think is always thought in terms of its use for technology, in terms of an endless—in both senses of ceaseless and purposeless—producibility. The production of things, from works of art to technologies themselves, is understood in Heidegger not just as ‘to make’ but rather as ‘to occasion’ as in to bring about or bring forth, or what he also terms poiesis. Under poiesis four ways come together: the matter, aspect, telos, and maker, to bring forth something new into appearance. These four ways, evidently taking the cue from Aristotle’s four causes, are best understood with an example and Heidegger offers that of a sacrificial chalice. Here the silver of the chalice is the matter (hyle) which comes together with the aspect (eidos) of ‘chaliceness’ to bring forth a silver chalice. The chalice is indebted to both the silver and the aspect ‘chalice’. Yet it also owes its existence to certain limits or boundaries which will make it a sacrificial chalice, this circumscribing is how Heidegger describes telos as opposed to its usual translation of ‘purpose’ or ‘aim’. The boundary is necessary not to restrict something, but to circumscribe the space in which something can come forth into existence. Finally, there is the silversmith, the maker, who brings these three ways together. It is tempting and perhaps inevitable in this formulation to privilege the maker—the artist or artisan or even technician—but what is key here is the coming together of these four things in a relation that allows something new to presence. The maker takes the matter, aspect, and telos and brings them together in production, but only because these three are already in some way available to her and to being in relation with her and each other (Heidegger, 2008a, pp. 219–221). The four ways of bringing something forth gather within the broader context of a certain epochal horizon and that horizon itself is but one side of what Heidegger terms the region [die Gegnet or die Gegend aller Gegenden] (Heidegger, 1966, p. 66).7 We will return to the horizon and region further on.

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Poiesis then is bringing something forth into presencing or into appearance. As such it is not restricted to being produced, but is also something being occasioned, as such Heidegger can claim that physis is also a kind of poiesis insofar as it too brings something new into presence: Physis is indeed poiesis in the highest sense. For what presences by means of physis has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, e.g., the bursting of a blossom into bloom, in itself. In contrast what is brought forth by the artisan or the artist, e.g., the silver chalice, has the irruption belonging to bringing-forth, not in itself, but in another, in the craftsman or artist. (Heidegger, 2008a, p. 221) Technology as a mode of revealing, is a relation then between being and humans through which something can be brought forth or produced. There is nothing in and of itself that is dangerous in technology as a way of revealing the producibility (or better ‘occasionability’) of things, as long as we can maintain a mastery of this one mode of revealing without allowing it to become the only way of revealing. In what Heidegger terms the atomic era and what we might term the techno-capitalist era, technology has taken over. Part of how this has happened is due to a deepening relationship between technology and physics (and the natural sciences more generally), whereby they seem to rely more and more on each other furthering each other’s progress, so that the very essence of technology has itself been distorted. Instead of technology being one way of bringing something forth into presence—a kind of poiesis—technology has transformed into a challenging of nature. Our current era is characterised as one under the coercive force of what Heidegger elsewhere calls ‘machination’: ‘Machination means the accordance of everything with producibility, indeed in such a way that the unceasing, unconditioned reckoning of everything is pre-directed’ (2006, p. 12). And not only is everything revealed in terms only of its producibility—what can I make with it?—but also in terms of its ongoing, indeed endless further producibility. We find ourselves in an era of efficiency without end in both senses of that term, techne-poiesis reduced to manufacturing: The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy which can be extracted and stored as such […] This setting upon that challenges the energies of nature is an expediting, and in two ways. It expedites in that it unlocks and exposes. Yet that expediting is always itself directed from the beginning toward furthering something else, i.e. toward driving on to the maximum yield at the minimum expense. (Heidegger, 2008a, pp. 223–224) As an example of how this transforms our engagement with our world, and indeed our world’s engagement with us, Heidegger goes on to give the example of the Rhine river: The hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine River as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is damned up into the power plant. What the river is now, namely, a water-power supplier, derives from the essence of the power station. In order that we might even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that is 224

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spoken in the two titles: “The Rhine”, as damned up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered by the art-work in Hölderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry. (2008a, p. 224) I believe there is a parallel to be drawn here in what the corporatised version of mindfulness has become. As the Rhine is revealed not as it is, but in terms of the power station—a mere object ‘on call’, ready for inspection by a guided tour—so too has mindfulness become a tool understood in terms of the power station or the call centre or the exam hall. Mindfulness is still a practice like the meditative practice of the Buddhist tradition, perhaps, but in these settings at least, only as part of the toolkit of the wellness industry. Mindfulness has become understood in terms of increasing worker productivity. Heidegger names the manner in which what is revealed is revealed as standing-reserve, or ready for production; the Ge-stell or enframing. Crucial to this term is our envelopment within it. It is not the case that we ourselves are at the edge of a frame looking at some kind of picture in which nature appears as a resource for manufacturing. Rather, the Gestell is what gathers us ourselves, sends us on the way, or ‘destines’ us to ordering of the standing reserve. Just as poeisis was described as a gathering together of four ways (matter, aspect, telos, and maker), so too does the Gestell gather us—humans, trees, rivers, mines, all that is—together as resource. We are in some sense always ‘destined’; sent down a certain path of revealing, of finding or uncovering what is actual in a certain way, poeisis too is a destining in this sense. All destining is dangerous in that it makes a certain way of revealing available and in so doing closes off other ways of revealing. However, destining as enframing or as the Gestell is what Heidegger terms the ‘supreme danger’ for a number of reasons (2008a, p. 231). As part of the Gestell what is actual or unconcealed becomes only standing reserve and we become only the orderer of the actual. We arrive, Heidegger warns, at ‘the brink of a precipitous fall’ where we ourselves will be taken as standing-reserve. To quieten the fear of such a fall, we delude ourselves into thinking that we are ‘lords of the earth’ and that all that we find is of our making or for our making. But perhaps the greatest danger of this enframing lies in the manner in which it forecloses ourselves from ourselves. Heidegger writes: Man stands so decisively in subservience to the challenging forth of enframing that he does not grasp enframing as a claim, that he fails to see himself as the one spoken to, and hence also fails in every way to hear in what respect he ek-sists, in terms of his essence, in a realm where he is addressed, so that he can never encounter only himself […] The rule of enframing threatens man with the possibility that it could be denied to him to enter into a more original revealing and hence to experience the call of a more primordial truth. (2008a, p. 232) As to what might save us from such a danger, what might return us to dwelling within our own essence, Heidegger offers the term Gelassenheit, releasement or letting be. I will turn to that in just a moment. But first I would like to draw a parallel between the dangers Heidegger describes of the Gestell and those described by Marx in the account of alienated labour. 225

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Marx and the Danger of Alienation Heidegger and Marx have frequently been thought together, perhaps most notably by Herbert Marcuse.8 According to some commentators, Heidegger’s student Marcuse may have seen in his teacher (and indeed also in György Lukács) a way of rescuing Marx from the more ‘anti-philosophical, mechanistic’ Marxists of the Second International (Wolin, 2005, p. xiv). In this vein, Heidegger’s existential analytic in Being and Time, provides a concrete existential critique of reification that chimes well with Marx’s own concerns. Certainly, Marcuse himself recognises the manner in which the social and economic situation of Dasein is never merely social and economic, but rather existential: The historical situation in which “contemporary” existence finds itself […] is determined in its structure through the structure of capitalist society at the stage of high capitalism (organized capitalism, imperialism). These concepts, which are intended to outline the situation, are by no means meant to refer to merely political or scientific circumstances; rather they seek to address the existential determinations of the present Dasein. In capitalist society, a particular mode of human existing, one that belongs only to that society, has become reality. (Marcuse, 2005, pp. 41–42) Elsewhere, Marcuse sees the marriage of technology and science as part of this broader capitalist framing and as leading to the estrangement of Dasein from itself in ways very close to Heidegger. However, Marcuse radically distanced himself from Heidegger, not only because of the latter’s involvement with National Socialism, but also because of what Marcuse would come to call Heidegger’s ‘phoney, false concreteness’ (Marcuse, 2005, p. 166). Even on the account of historicity—once viewed by Marcuse as a means of weaving Heidegger and Marx together—Heidegger comes up as lacking, as abstracting so much as to reduce our being-historical to nothing real or lived. More interesting still, in terms of our concerns here, Marcuse notes the following in terms of technology: The Frage nach dem Sein recedes before the Frage nach der Technik. I admit that much of these writings I do not understand. […] I have the impression that Heidegger’s concepts of technology and technics are the last in the long series of neutralizations: they are treated as “forces in-themselves,” removed from the context of power relations in which they are constituted and which determine their use and their function. They are reified, hypostatized as Fate. (2005, p. 168) There is not the space to fully explore the rich and complex relationship between Marcuse and Heidegger.9 Certainly many of the former’s criticisms are well-founded. I would, however, like to make some attempt here at countering Marcuse’s rather hasty dismissal of Heidegger’s account of technology. I do not think it is as reified as Marcuse implies, but is rather understood as a way of being that has taken over and that can, and indeed should, be resisted. Marx’s Philosophical Manuscripts describe the modern industrial subject’s alienation according to four related modalities—the worker is alienated from the product, the activity of work, from their species-being, and from others. These four moments are best understood, 226

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as four aspects of the same alienation. For Marx the capitalist subject is cut off from their species-being by being reduced to a mere survival, our essential nature (though Marx would not use this phrase) is to manipulate our material world beyond merely that which is required to survive but towards that which allows us to flourish. Under the distorted frame of capitalism, this free activity is harnessed and put to the use of capitalism itself. What is most human—to make something, or in Heidegger’s terms to bring something forth into presence, a kind of poeisis—is mobilised against the worker, so that their activity is neither free nor transcendent. In Marx’s words: ‘What is animal becomes human and what is human becomes animal’ (1983, p. 137). The worker is not free at work where they must produce a product not of their choosing, in this lack of freedom they lose their humanity. At home, where freedom might be found, there is only the time or energy to accomplish mere animal survival: ‘eating, drinking, procreating’. The relationship with nature has become interrupted and blocked such that access not only to sustenance, but also to the material required to engage in the free activity of making, is prevented. It would be unwise to map too neatly this account of capitalist alienation onto Heidegger’s description of the Gestell induced forgetting. Nonetheless, some points suggest themselves almost too loudly to be ignored. First, Marx’s claim that labour ‘produces itself and the worker as a commodity’ and that the object produced by labour ‘exists outside [the worker] independently as something alien to him, as confronting him as an autonomous power’ (1983, pp. 133–134) holds structural echoes of the description of the Gestell. As with the latter, capitalist political economy for Marx becomes not merely a theory, but a way of being-in-the-world whereby the freedom of human being is lost to us. While Heidegger at times warns that humans are ‘never transformed into mere standing-reserve’ (2008a, p. 226), he later claims that they can in fact come to such a point. The ‘man at the switchboard and the engineer in the drafting room […] each of these in its own way belongs as stockpart, available resource, or executor, within Enframing’ (ibid., p.  234). Equally, Marx’s description of the relationship between labour and machines—‘It replaces labour by machines, but it throws one section of the workers back to barbaric labour, and it turns the remainder into machines’ (1983, p. 135)—resonates with the machination that Heidegger discusses in the Gelassenhiet text of 1939 (2006). While both thinkers broadly claim our salvation from these distorting frameworks lies in becoming aware of them, how such awareness is to come about or what such a salvation would look opens up their vast differences.

Conclusion: The Saving Power of Releasement, Mindfulness Abandoned My claim here is that mindfulness, or at least our contemporary ‘corporate mindfulness’ to borrow Wrenn’s phrase again, has become a feature of our current age of alienation. While it may have become part of the corporate lexicon during a period of shifting understandings of the worker as an emotionally and psychologically complex being rather than a machine on the factory floor, it nonetheless did so as a means of better controlling the worker. Ironically perhaps, Heidegger’s salve for this lostness from ourselves comes in the form of something very close to mindfulness in its Buddhist origins—Gelassenhiet—releasement towards things or letting be. Letting beings be, including our own selves as beings, is to allow them to come forth into presencing as they are in themselves rather than to force them into some use or to take them as a resource. I mentioned earlier the manner in which we are destined or sent on a certain way of revealing (enframing being one such way or destining), which 227

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may lead to connotations of fate and an associated impotence. However, for Heidegger freedom is precisely as that which governs the revealed—in other words, freedom arises or is gifted not in overcoming our destining as such, but rather in recognising that we are destined, in awareness of this, we become open to what Heidegger terms the mystery—the play of concealment and unconcealment that constitutes the truth of being. We become free from the error of thinking being (and our own being) in terms of merely what is unconcealed, this does not mean we arrive at some truth that stands before us, but rather that we can be in truth in a more primordial way. Becoming aware of this destining, involves a releasement or letting be. Being aware of the epochal nature of being, allows us to think not by trying to grasp on to some object within a horizon, or indeed to transcend such an object but rather to remain open to that which is beyond the horizon itself—the region. Heidegger says: Releasement is indeed the release of oneself from transcendental re-presentation and so a relinquishing of the willing of a horizon. Such relinquishing no longer stems from a willing, except that the occasion for releasing oneself to belonging to that which regions requires a trace of willing. This trace, however, vanishes while releasing oneself and is completely extinguished in releasement. (Heidegger, 1966, pp. 79–80) Mindfulness in contemporary discourse has become co-opted by the corporate world and put to work in the service of production, and of maintaining us as productive—it has become a means of blocking our way to genuine meditative thinking, releasement, and openness to the mystery. The corporate version of mindfulness is not about thinking that which is concealed in what is unconcealed, or the mystery of being, but is there to quieten the call that Heidegger thinks we should be listening to, that manifests in our anxiety. As such, the question we are left with is how to name this subterfuge such that we recognise it? Perhaps, we should abandon this term ‘mindfulness’ to its technological incorporation altogether. Perhaps, like the laden language of philosophy as metaphysics, for mindfulness to retain its possible freeing power we require a new language, a new name. And perhaps that name is ‘releasement’ itself understood not merely as a name, but as a practice that must itself be constantly renamed to retain its revelatory power.

Bionote I specialise in Twentieth Century European Philosophy, particularly the relationship between hermeneutics and phenomenology. My first monograph, Derrida, the Subject and the Other: Surviving, Translating and the Impossible, was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2016. My second edited collection, Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (with Rozemund Uljée) was also published in 2016 with Springer as part of their ‘Contributions to Phenomenology’ series. As well as journal articles and book chapters, I have been invited to present my research at numerous international conferences in Europe. I am a founding member of the Translating and Interpretation Research Group at Newcastle University, former editorial assistant for the International Journal of Philosophical Studies, and a former committee member of the Society for Women in Philosophy (Ireland). Before taking up my current position at UCD, I was a lecturer in European Philosophy for four years at Newcastle University, UK and prior to that a Teaching and Research Fellow at UCD. I was awarded my PhD in Philosophy from UCD and conducted part of my doctoral 228

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research at the Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure, Paris. I also hold a Masters in Translation Studies (Dublin City University) and a BA in Philosophy and Greek and Roman Civilisation (UCD). Between my graduate and postgraduate studies I worked as an English language teacher and freelance translator. I have been teaching philosophy at university level since 2010. In 2017, I achieved the Newcastle Teaching Award (a PG qualification in third level education) and in 2018, I achieved full fellowship of the Higher Education Academy, UK.

Notes 1 My focus here is on the corporate use of mindfulness as a cure for workplace-based anxiety. There is of course another, related tale to be told of the corporatisation of mindfulness into an industry, itself driven by profit margins and similar. For more on the history of this see Jeff Wilson (2016). 2 In the later work this lostness is reframed as a lostness in technology (see Heidegger, 2008a). 3 A demand that Marcuse in reading Heidegger will take to be the responsibility of philosophy itself: “Precisely this, however, is the goal: that philosophical investigation once again directs its attention toward the possibilities of appropriation of truth that are available to a given Dasein. If this Dasein is in a situation whose historical structure (the concrete way in which Dasein maintains and shapes itself socially) makes the appropriation of such truths impossible, then it is the task of philosophy to seek out Dasein and to attempt take it out of this situation and ‘bring it into truth’” (Marcuse, 2005, p. 43). 4 Essence (Wesen) in Heidegger is taken in a temporal rather than atemporal or timeless sense – the essence of something is its beingness, its being-in-time, it is enduring. 5 In the German edition (GA9), there is an additional note [Auflage 1943] that says: ‘Sein-lassen: 1. Nicht negative, sondern gewahren – Wahrnis; 2. Nicht als ontisch gerichtes Wirken. Achten, er-achten das Sein als Seyn.’ [‘1.not negative, but as granting truth, 2. Not as some ontical judicial work. Pay attention, attention to Being as Bying’] (GA9, p. 188). 6 See also Heidegger’s 1928 essay ‘Transcendence’: ‘only a free being can be unfree’ (Heidegger, 2009, p. 74) and: ‘Entry into a world has the characteristic of happening, of history. World-entry happens when transcendence happens, that is, when historical Dasein exists’ (ibid., p. 77). 7 See also the translator’s note on this term John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund, Discourse on Thinking, (Gelassenheit), TN p. 66. 8 See also Kostas Axelos (2015) although there is not the space here to address Axelos’ account directly. 9 For more on this relationship see, for example, Richard Wolin’s excellent essay “What is Heideggerian Marxism?” (2005), or Andrew Feenberg’s Heidegger and Marcuse: The Catastrophe and Redemption of History (2005).

References Axelos, K. (2015). Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger (K. Mills, Trans.). Meson Press. Bakan, J (2004). The Corporation. The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Constable and Robinson. Caring-Lobel, A. (2016). Corporate mindfulness and the pathologization of workplace stress. In R.E. Purser, D. Forbes, A. Burke (Eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social ­Engagement. (pp. 195–214). Springer. eM Life. (2023). Businesses. https://wondrhealth.com/businesses-em-life/ Headspace. (2023). Work. https://www.headspace.com/work Heidegger, M. (1966). Discourse on Thinking (J.M. Anderson, E.H. Freund, Trans.). Harper and Row. Heidegger, M. (2001). Being and Time (J. Macquarrie, E. Robinson, Trans.). Blackwell. Heidegger, M. (2006). Mindfulness (P. Emad, T. Kalary, Trans.). Continuum.

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Lisa Foran Heidegger, M. (2008a). The question concerning technology (W. Lovitt, Trans.). In D. Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger Basic Writings. (pp. 217–238). Routledge. Heidegger, M. (2008b). On the essence of truth (J. Sallis, Trans.). In D. Farrell Krell (ed.), Martin Heidegger Basic Writings. (pp. 65–82). Routledge. Heidegger, M. (2009). Transcendence (J. Veith, Trans.). In G. Figal (ed.), The Heidegger Reader. (pp. 68–78). Indiana University Press. Marcuse, H. (2005). In R. Wolin, J. Abromeit, (eds.), Heideggerian Marxism. University of Nebraska Press. Marx, K. (1983). Alienated labour (E. Kamenka, Trans.). In E. Kamenka, (eds.), The Portable Karl Marx. (pp. 131–146). Penguin. Moloney, P.  (2016). Mindfulness: The bottled water of the therapy industry. In R.E. Purser, D. Forbes, A. Burke (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement. (pp. 269–292). Springer. Neale, M. (2011). McMindfulness and frozen yoga: Rediscovering the essential teachings of ethics and wisdom. O’Connor, E. S. (1999). The politics of management thought: A case study of the Harvard Business School and the Human Relations School. The Academy of Management Review 24 (1), 117–131. https://doi.org/10.2307/259040 Purser, R. (2019, June 14). The mindfulness conspiracy. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian. com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/14/the-mindfulness-conspiracy-capitalist-spirituality Wiist, W. H. (2010). The corporation: An overview of what it is, its tactics, and what public health can do. In W.H. Wiist (ed.) The Bottom Line or Public Health. (pp. 3–72). Oxford University Press. Wilson, J. (2016). Selling mindfulness: Commodity lineages and the marketing of mindful products. In R.E. Purser, D. Forbes, A. Burke (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context, and Social Engagement. (pp. 109–120). Springer. Wolin, R. (2005). Introduction. What is Heideggerian Marxism? In R. Wolin, J. Abromeit (eds.), Marcuse, H. Heideggerian Marxism. (pp. xi–xxx). University of Nebraska Press. Wrenn, M. V. (2022). Corporate mindfulness culture and neoliberalism. The Review of Radical Political Economics 54 (2), 153–170. https://doi.org/10.1177/04866134211063521

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15 ‘LET IT BE’ Heidegger and Eckhart on Gelassenheit Dermot Moran

In this chapter, I approach the concept of mindfulness in the phenomenological tradition by analyzing ‘letting-be’ or ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit; Middle High German (MHG): gelâzenheit) in Meister Eckhart1 and Martin Heidegger. I shall first discuss Heidegger’s conception of Gelassenheit,2 and then explicate Eckhart’s related conceptions of gelâzenheit and ‘releasement’ (Abgeschiedenheit; MHG: abgescheidenheit). Although Heidegger was deeply informed by Eckhart, he essentially misread him. I shall provide a corrective reading and underscore that Eckhart’s Gelassenheit needs to be situated within the larger tradition of Christian mysticism that stems from Dionysian negative theology and runs through Johannes Scottus Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa, and into German Idealist thought of the nineteenth century. Mindfulness (German, Achtsamkeit; French ‘pleine conscience’) is a relatively recent catch-all, umbrella term that covers a number of distinct phenomena and is capable of multiple interpretations and embedded in different traditions (see Copelj, 2022; Stone & ­Zahavi, 2021; Ryan, Cresswell & Brown, 2016). Broadly construed, mindfulness, as currently used especially in psychological and self-help literature, connotes alert, focused, yet relaxed, concentrated awareness directed to one’s stream of conscious experiences, while suspending judgment, critical mental assessment, or stance-taking. Mindfulness, in this sense, involves attentiveness, dwelling in the ‘now’, and may include some element of somatic practice, such as a concentration on or counting of one’s breath, or slow repetitive movements or chanting. Mindfulness practice is meant to intensify and foreground one’s immediately present consciousness, with a heightened awareness of what one is doing, without becoming enveloped in or reactive to one’s shifting awareness. Mindfulness practice is promoted to handle stress, lessen chronic pain, and generally to get the most out of one’s everyday life (Kabat-Zinn, 1994). Of course, mindfulness practice is strongly associated with various forms of Buddhism (Wilson, 2014; Hanh, 2008). Here I shall set aside Eastern discussions and concentrate on the long and sui generis tradition of mindfulness found in Medieval Christian Mysticism, associated today mostly with Meister Eckhart. In this tradition, mindfulness is integral to the forms of mysticism stemming from Dionysius the Areopagite (a Christian student of the late Platonism of Proclus), and his translators and commentators, beginning with Dionysius’ Latin translator, DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-19

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Johannes Scottus Eriugena (c. 800–c. 877 CE). It was the Catholic Cardinal Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464), in the fifteenth century, who eventually identified and named this tradition as ‘negative theology’ (theologia negativa, the term in the plural comes from Dionysius).3 This negative theological tradition places emphasis on arriving at a kind of mystical ‘unknowing’, a learned ignorance, Cusanus’s docta ignorantia (Hopkins, 1985). This learned ignorance is a deliberate, methodical exercise involving stripping away and letting go of images and concepts of the divine that are too ‘contentful’ or ‘affirmative’, since all our terms are drawn from the finite and immanent, created order. On this approach, it is not accurate to say ‘God is good’, since all forms of goodness relate to some created goodness. It is ‘truer’ (verius), or ‘higher’ (altius), to say that God is not good than that God is good. This inhibition applies to every affirmative predicate (including names found in the Sacred Scriptures), and even the terms designating the Trinity such as ‘Father’ or ‘Son’. God is more than any of these designations and in fact escapes all naming. God is literally ‘unsayable’. As Cusanus attests in De docta ignorantia Book One Chapter 26: Sacred ignorance has taught us that God is ineffable. He is so because He is infinitely greater than all nameable things. And by virtue of the fact that [this] is most true, we speak of God more truly through removal and negation—as [teaches] the greatest Dionysius, who did not believe that God is either Truth or Understanding or Light or anything which can be spoken of (Rabbi Solomon [Maimonides] and all the wise follow Dionysius.) Hence, in accordance with this negative theology, according to which [God] is only infinite, He is neither Father nor Son nor Holy Spirit. (Hopkins, 1985, p. 84)4 There is, furthermore, in the Dionysian tradition, a characterization of the unnameable divine transcendence as ‘nothingness’. Johannes Eriugena, for instance, very explicitly states that ‘nothing’ (Nihil) is a name for the divine (Moran, 1989, 2021). Associated with this divine nothingness, is the human practice of emptying oneself, or ‘annihilating’ oneself (as Margaret Porette says in her The Mirror of Simple Souls, Porette, 1999). This form of self-emptying is also found extensively in Meister Eckhart and has been interpreted by some Japanese scholars, such as Shizuteru Ueda, as close to Zen Buddhism (Ueda, 1965). This Eckhartian mindfulness, moreover, has a long historical association with phenomenology (Moran, 2013; Moran 2023). From my first publication on John Scottus Eriugena (Moran, 1989), my interest in medieval Christian philosophy has always been informed by the phenomenological horizon (Moran, 2014). Phenomenology involves a method of self-aware scrutiny of the acts and contents of one’s first-personal (‘egoic’) consciousness (as a basis for further exploration of other states such as empathy). Mindfulness, because it is associated with non-judgmental awareness and self-awareness, has been associated also with Husserl’s application of the phenomenological epoché (see Varela, 1996; Depraz, Varela, & Vermersch, 2003). Similarly, mindfulness has become associated with the later Heidegger, and indeed his text Besinnung (Gesamtausgabe 66, Heidegger, 1997), translated as Mindfulness (Heidegger, 2016), although the German term Besinnung is more usually translated as ‘reflection’. To express mindfulness, Meister Eckhart utilizes a number of terms, primarily ‘letting it be’ (Gelassenheit; MHG: gelâzenheit), also called ‘releasement’ or ‘serenity’ (French: sérenité), ‘calmness’ or ‘composure’ (Gemütsruhe). He also uses the term ‘detachment’ or 232

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‘abandonment’ (Abgeschiedenheit; MHG: abgescheidenheit). Werner Beierwaltes has asserted – and here I agree – that the terms Gelassenheit and Abgeschiedenheit are synonymous in Eckhart (Beierwaltes, 1998, p. 20; but see Bundschuh, 1989; Enders, 1996). The German term Gelassenheit comes from the verb ‘lassen’ – which can mean ‘to leave’ or ‘to let’ – as in ‘leave him alone’, ‘let him be’. The English terms ‘let’ or ‘leave’ have the same connotations as ‘lassen’ in German, for example, ‘let him be’, ‘leave him alone’. ‘Gelassen’ as an adjective can mean ‘calm’, ‘care-free’, or, in colloquial terms, even ‘laid back’ or ‘cool’. One can ‘let be’, ‘let go’, ‘let loose’, and so on. Gelassenheit has a long history in German religious thought since the Middle Ages, beginning with Meister Eckhart, but later associated with the Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, with Angelus Silesius (1624–1677), and, finally, entering German Idealism with Schelling in his Die Weltalter (Höfele, 2019), who interprets Gelassenheit as ‘non-willing’ in a manner that would influence Heidegger. In this Christian mystical tradition, there are many parallels to Gelassenheit, including: selfsurrender, self-abandonment, resignation to the divine will, resignation, acceptance, as well as peace, serenity and calmness of mind. Eckhart’s other key term, ‘abgeschieden’, [abgescheiden in MHG] in Modern German means ‘solitary’ or ‘abandoned’. Abegescheidenheit, usually translated ‘detachment’, is an abstract noun formed from a verb meaning to ‘depart’ from or ‘separate’ from (Tobin, 1986, p. 119). Der Abgeschiedene means the dead, the deceased, the departed. Similarly, in Middle High German, being abgescheiden means being separated, detached, departed, gone, and by extension, dead to this world. Eckhart does use the term with precisely this meaning. Thus, in On Detachment (Von abegescheidenheit, DW V 377–437; Walshe & McGinn 2009, pp.  566–575), a treatise possibly dating from Köln years but uncertain, Eckhart says, invoking St. Paul: But the man who stands thus in utter detachment [in ganzer abegescheidenheit] is rapt into eternity in such a way that nothing transient can move him, and that he is aware of nothing corporeal and is said to be dead to the world [und heizet der werlte tôt], for he has no taste for anything earthly. (DW V 411; Walshe, p. 568) There is a great deal of discussion in the medieval tradition concerning achieving a state that is dead to the world, or ‘empty’ of desire and willing, for example, the concept of the soul’s annihilation in Marguerite Porette’s The Mirror of Simple Souls (Robinson, 2001). Detachment and annihilation in this sense mean to be unconcerned with or unattached to created things, including one’s own soul, and thus one becomes ‘naked’ (MHG: blôz), ‘empty’ (MHG: îtel, ledic), and ‘free’ (MHG: vri), in Eckhart’s words. One has to be completely free, and have abandoned all things, to be fully open to the divine love. As Eckhart writes in On Detachment, ‘the pure detached heart stands free of all creatures’ (Nû stât daz lûter abegescheiden herze ledic aller crêatûren, DW V 430; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 573).

Eckhart in the Phenomenological Tradition (Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Oltmanns) Eckhart’s work, largely forgotten in modernity, was revived in the nineteenth century and became popular in the early twentieth, attracting the interest of Paul Natorp, Max Scheler, 233

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Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and others (Moran, 2013; Moran 2023). But, aside from Heidegger, who engaged very seriously with the German Dominican preacher and Master of Arts at Paris, Meister Eckhart of Hochheim, Eckhart had little direct influence on the phenomenological tradition. The classic phenomenologists (in particular: Scheler, Conrad Martius, Stein) were deeply interested in the nature of religious experience. For instance, Husserl’s student, Gerda Walther (1897–1977), published a study, Zur Phänomenologie der Mystik (Walther, 1923; see also the second expanded edition, Walther 1955, where several references to Eckhart are added toward the end of her discussion of Christian mysticism), that treated mystical experience as a sui generis ‘lived experience’ (Erlebnis) with its own form of givenness and intentional fulfillment. Walther, however, mentions Eckhart just once, in discussing how pantheism allows one to experience God as the inflowing of the divine spirit, and as a spiritual power behind all things, ‘as perhaps in Eckhart and in Buddhism’ (Walther, 1923). Heidegger dismissed Walther’s book as an example of the current irrationalism in phenomenology.5 Heidegger’s Marburg student, Käte Oltmanns (1906–1999), wrote her doctoral thesis on Eckhart, published as Die Philosophie des Meister Eckhart (Oltmanns, 1935), utilizing Pfeiffer’s edition of the Middle High German texts.6 She reads Eckhart in terms of the existential categories of Dasein in Being and Time, seeing freedom as the essence of the human (although she claims that the word ‘freedom’ itself plays no role in Eckhart (Oltmanns, 1935, p. 104). Eckhart does talk about the ‘will’). In contrast to his dismissal of Walther, Oltmanns’ book was championed by Heidegger, but it was reviewed somewhat negatively at the time; scholars claiming that she was somewhat cavalier in her acceptance of certain disputed Eckhart manuscripts and ignoring the Latin manuscripts (mostly unpublished at that time).7 Reiner Schürmann (1941–1993),8 a German Dominican, who studied at the Sorbonne in the 1960s and later taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, wrote an important work on Eckhart in French, Maître Eckhart et la joie errante (Schürmann, 1972; English translation, Schürmann, 1978).9 In a later essay from the 1970s, he aptly summarized Heidegger’s use of Eckhart: Whenever Heidegger mentions Meister Eckhart, the context is a development of Heidegger’s own essential thought: Being that lets beings be (Gelassenheit); the thinging of the thing (dinc) understood as the nearing of the world; man’s essence (Wesen) needed by Being to uphold its truth; thinking as thanking (Gedanc); the unspoken speech (ungesprochene Sprache) that bestows a world; and last but not least, life without why (ohne Warum). (Schürmann, 1973, p. 96) While studying in Freiburg with Bernhard Welte in the 1960s, Schürmann wrote to Heidegger, on January 16, 1966, asking him some questions about Eckhart: There are two questions that I particularly wish to ask you. The first one concerns Eckhart’s relevance to the situation in which thinking finds itself today: did he perhaps think being as self-sending, as only eventfully experienceable? Meister Eckhart’s ‘sole thought’ is aimed at the unification of the ‘separated soul’ with God. Insofar as the soul lets all things be, it breaks through to the ground where the Godhead continually creates all things, and which in this breakthrough also becomes my ground. 234

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The unity is a unity of the ‘fabric’ in which God operates and I become - become son, that is. Being is thus thought as course of experience, and not represented as ontic ‘standing reserve’. Closer to the soul than any created thing, the ‘unknown God’ is experienced in the event of words, beyond this and that, and, for that reason, it always remains a ‘nil of all things’. Might not Meister Eckhart’s thinking help us along in a meditation directed at being which always withholds itself and, in this very withholding, addresses itself to us? (Schürmann, 1997, p. 67) Schürmann here is invoking Eckhart’s notion of ‘breakthrough’ (Durchbruch), according to which I emerge out of my own finite existence and realize unity with my ground in the divine.10 Schürmann went on, in his letter to Heidegger, to make the following penetrating observation: I have in mind above all this one word, ‘thou’. The mystery of the gift could be experienced as mystery of the ‘thou’, without thinking’s having to fall into representation (for example, the repetition of a source of being revealed to it), while it remains within the boundaries set to it as thinking. Even in the break through all of God’s titles (such as ‘the good’ or ‘truth’), there still subsists for Meister Eckhart the inkling of the ‘thou’. Might not the proposition ‘being is given’ (Es gibt sein) be expressed in the form ‘thou gives being’ (Du gibst sein) without injury to the mystery? (Schürmann, 1997, p. 68) Schürmann then asks Heidegger whether Eckhart’s experience of Being was really of a ‘Thou’ (Heidegger seems not to have taken up this suggestion, which seems closer to Levinas). Heidegger sent a short reply to Schürmann, on February 4, 1966, inviting him to visit his home, on March 11, 1966. Before his visit, Schürmann had been advised by the theologian Hans Ur Von Balthasar – who said that Heidegger engaged in anti-Christian polemic and could not be relied on to interpret Eckhart. Schürmann’s subsequent two letters to an anonymous correspondent summarize his visit. In his second letter, written just after his visit, Schürmann recalls: In my letter, written nearly two months ago (he was away), I had attempted to formulate two questions, one concerning Meister Eckhart’s conception of being, the other concerning the possibility of saying ‘thou’ to what in some of his texts Heidegger calls ‘gift of being’, a phrase formed after the expression ‘es gibt Sein’ … ‘there is being’. (Schürmann, 1997, p. 70) Unfortunately, Schürmann does not relate what Heidegger had to say about Eckhart. But Schürmann’s letters show his deep consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Eckhart, and Schürmann’s own interpretation of Eckhart is deeply Heideggerian.

Heidegger’s Way to Eckhart It is now well documented that Meister Eckhart was a deep and lasting influence on Heidegger from very early on, around 1911. Heidegger’s connections to Eckhart have been extensively studied by Reiner Schürmann (1973, 1978),11 Werner Beierwaltes (1998), 235

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Bret Davis (2007), John D. Caputo (1986), and, most recently, exhaustively, by Ian Alexander Moore (2019). Moore claims that Eckhart is mentioned more than 100 times by Heidegger (Moore 2019, p. 4). Indeed, Heidegger’s long-time friend Hans-Georg Gadamer has commented: Meister Eckhart played a particularly great role for Heidegger. At that time (1924), the Opus tripartitum, Meister Eckhart’s Latin magnum opus, had just been reedited. Heidegger was completely fascinated by it, evidently because the dissolution of the concept of substance in regards to God pointed in the direction of a temporal and verbal sense of being, when it was said that: ‘Esse est Deus.’ At that time, Heidegger may have suspected an ally in the Christian mystic. (Gadamer, 1986, p. 406; trans. Moore, 2019, pp. 9–10) It is not clear exactly what texts of Eckhart Heidegger read. Certainly, according to Wilhelm Von Hermann (1994), the German sermons and treatises including Die rede der underscheidunge (Counsels of Discernment, early texts written 1294–1298) in the edition of Ernst Diderichs (now DW V). It is not clear what he knew of the Latin texts available in Heinrich Denifle’s edition (his student Oltmanns did have exposure to the Latin texts, although she had her own theories about what was genuine). According to Moore (2019), Heidegger never cites Eckhart’s treatise Von abegescheidenheit directly, but he must have known it from Pfeiffer’s nineteenth-century Middle High German edition (1857). Heidegger’s wife Elfride – herself a great admirer of Eckhart – gave him an inscribed copy of this edition in 1917. It is also likely he read it in Büttner’s (1903) popular modern German translation (it appears as the second text in the one-volume version), although there are no annotations of it in his personal copy of the latter. Heidegger called Eckhart ‘the old master of life and letters’ (Heidegger, 1953, p. 4) and drew quite widely and variously on Eckhart’s central concepts, specifically: ‘Godhead’ (Gottheit), ‘detachment’ (Abgeschiedenheit), ‘letting-be’ or ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit), ‘presencing’ (Wesung, Anwesung), and living ‘without a why’ (ohne Warum). But it is also evident, from the outset, that Heidegger distances himself from Eckhart’s strong sense of the presence of the personal God in the soul and places an unusual emphasis on the so-called ‘willfulness’ of Eckhart’s account of the human being. Heidegger’s own focus is rather on the nature of ground and groundlessness and the capacity of thinking to be open to the event of being. Heidegger then imports Eckhart into a new a-theological context that includes a much more impersonal sense of the breakthrough event. Heidegger’s first exposure to Eckhart came at the University of Freiburg, in the Winter Semester 1910–1911, in the lectures entitled Geschichte der mittelalterlichen Mystik (History of Medieval Mysticism) by the professor of ecclesiastical history, the Catholic Joseph Sauer (1872–1949), who later became Rector of Freiburg University (1932–1933). Heidegger himself later recalled in his Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks): ‘My previous study of Aristotle over the years facilitated my first attempt in 1913–1915 at thinking alongside Meister Eckhart, who belongs in the slim kinship [geringe Verwandtschaft] of the first thinkers’ (GA 97, Heidegger, 2015, p. 436). He records: ‘I learned for myself to read Eckhart’ (Heidegger, 2015, p.  470). Indeed, Heidegger briefly refers to Eckhart in his 1915 Habilitation thesis on the Theory of the Categories in Duns Scotus, where he states: ‘I hope to be able to show on another occasion how Eckhartian mysticism is given its proper philosophical interpretation and assessment 236

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only from this point of view and in connection with the metaphysics of the problem of truth’ (Heidegger, 1978, p. 402 n. 2; see Moore, 2019, p. 5). Much later, in his lecture course, Hölderlins Hymn Germanien und Der Rein (GA 39, Heidegger, 1988a; English trans., 2014), Heidegger presents Eckhart as one of the founders of German philosophy (Unter dieser Macht stand mittelbar im Grunde der Anfang der deutschen Philosophie bei Meister Eckhart, Heidegger, 1988a, p. 133ff), a common trope at the time (also found in Natorp, for instance). Finally, Werner Beierwaltes has underscored the importance of Eckhart’s formulations for Heidegger’s establishment of his own fundamental concepts: ‘I also include Gelassenheit among the basic words of Heidegger’s thought. It means an essential trait of what he calls ‘thinking’ in the emphatic, proper sense’ (Beierwaltes, 1998, p.  3). Beierwaltes connects it with other ‘Ge-’ words in Heidegger, for example, Gestell, Gefahr, Geschick, Geviert, Gebirf des Seins, Gedicht, Gedanc, and Gegend (Beierwaltes, 1998, p. 3 n. 1). There is no doubt, then, that Eckhart was a substantial and permanent influence on Heidegger. In his early Freiburg lectures in 1920/1921 on The Phenomenology of Religious Life, Heidegger has some remarks on the term Abgeschiedenheit (Heidegger, 1995c; Heidegger, 2010b). He sees its original form in the mystics and connects it with Weltzugewandtheit, ‘familiarity with the ways of the world’, as found in Luther (Heidegger, 1995c, p.  308) where it can be identified with humilitas. Heidegger divides Abgeschiedenheit into negative and positive aspects. He writes that Abgeschiedenheit is not theoretical but emotional, a rejection of the world: “Detachment: not a theoretical not-seeing, but emotion, in its original form even religious, corresponding also to the ways and levels it as ‘repulsion’” (Heidegger, 1995c, p. 308).12 There Heidegger asserts: Generally speaking, what we need is a detachment that is not just ‘negative,’ but has a ‘positive’ side, one that is at work even as we direct ourselves to the world. This positive unification through detachment would primarily not be of a theoretical nature, but rather of a lived, ‘emotional,’ ‘religious’ experience. Here is thus something ‘irrational’ about this ‘[c]entral concept: “detach-ment”’. (Heidegger, 1995c, p. 308, p. 314; Heidegger, 2010b, p. 234, p. 239; trans. modified) Eckhart does not feature in Sein und Zeit (1927), but Heidegger subsequently returned to discuss him in more detail in his 1944–1945 Conversations on a Country Path (Feldwegsgespräch, Heidegger, 1995a; English trans., 2010a) and in his 1955 small pamphlet Gelassenheit (Heidegger, 1959; English trans., Heidegger, 1966). Gelassenheit is primarily a memorial address about the composer Conradin Kreutzer, given in Heidegger’s hometown of Messkirch on October 30, 1955 and initially printed privately (now GA 16, Heidegger, 2000, pp. 517–529). Here Heidegger’s engagement with Eckhart occurs in the context of reflections on the nature of the belonging and ‘rootedness’ (Bodenständigkeit, Heidegger, 1959, p. 15, p. 21), technological ‘enframing’ (das Gestell) and the manner in which the meaning of the technological world hides itself (Der Sinn der technischen Welt verbirgt sich, Heidegger, 1959, p. 23), the ‘flight from thinking’ (die Flucht vor dem Denken, Heidegger, 1959, p. 12), and the contrast between the scientifically dominant ‘calculative’ (das rechnende Denken kalkuliert, Heidegger, 1959, p. 12) and ‘meditative thinking (Nachdenken, or Besinnung, Heidegger, 1959, p. 13). 237

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In his Conversations on a Country Path (Feldweggespräch), Heidegger says his recommended letting-be has nothing to do with what he claims is Eckhart’s notion of displacing the human to let in the divine will. Heidegger writes: ‘Certainly; but what we have called releasement [Gelassenheit] evidently does not mean casting off sinful selfishness and letting self-will go in favor of the divine will’ (… nicht das Abwerfen der sündigen Eigensucht und nicht das Fahrenlassen des Eigenwillens zugunsten des göttlichen Willens, Heidegger, 1966, p. 62). Rather it involves a new attitude toward beings in the world, an openness of approach that somehow frees one from the grip of technological enframing. Thus, in his Memorial Address, Gelassenheit, Heidegger says: “I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no,’ [Haltung des gleichseitigen Ja und Nein] by an old word, releasement toward things [die Gelassenheit zu den Dingen]” (Heidegger, 1959, p. 23; Heidegger, 1966, p. 54). For Heidegger, exercising Gelassenheit requires neither actively willing nor passive abstaining (GA 77, Heidegger, 1995a, p. 109), but ‘waiting’ (warten). This is ‘the way’ of meditative thinking (Dieser Weg ist ein Weg von Nachdenkens, Heidegger, 1959, p. 21). We need to combine Gelassenheit zu den Dingen, a ‘letting-be or releasement towards things’, with ‘openness to the mystery’ (die Offenheit für das Geheimnis, Heidegger, 1959, p. 24, p. 25) in order to overcome the dominance of technology with its machination (Machenschaft), the power that dominates being.13 But Heidegger never clearly explains what this openness to mystery involves. Overall, Heidegger deliberately extracts his notion of Gelassenheit from its primarily theological context in Eckhart, and applies his version specially to a new kind of ‘mindfulness’ in relation to our technologically mediated world-experience. Releasement has to be thought of in relation to what Heidegger calls non-calculative, non-representative, insightful ‘thinking’ (Denken). Thus, he opposes his Gelassenheit to what he calls ‘representational thinking’: previously, we had come to see thinking – in the form of transcendental horizonal representing (Heidegger, 1966, p. 63). In his Feldwegsgespräch Heidegger spends his time focusing on the experiences of ‘transcendence’ and ‘horizonality’ that come through our experience of things. For Heidegger, releasement needs a special kind of active effort, a new kind of thinking (akin to Husserl’s bracketing – a breaking-through to a new insight): ‘Yet releasement toward things and openness to the mystery never happen of themselves. They do not befall us accidentally [Zu-fälliges]. Both flourish only through persistent, courageous [herzhaften] thinking’ (Heidegger, 1959, p. 25; Heidegger, 1966, p. 56). To summarize, Heidegger’s Gelassenheit is far from what is to be found historically in Eckhart’s texts. Heidegger’s releasement is a form of non-representational, non-willing, self-aware meditative thinking, that is neither active nor passive, but involves a kind of open calmness and expectation, that, as Werner Beierwaltes acknowledges, is not dissimilar to Stoic ataraxia (Beierwaltes, 1998, p. 11). Indeed, Heidegger’s Gelassenheit is a very complex stance or attitude. It is not clear to the extent it is a kind of meta-scrutiny of one’s intentional commitments. Although it involves ‘renouncing’, Ablassen, ‘discharge, and a kind of passive non-willing, it also has a more active dimension of ‘involving oneself’ (Sich-Einlassen), inserting oneself into a situation through a non-objectifying thinking that is directed toward what Heidegger calls ‘the open’ (Gegend), playing with the notion of ‘object’ (Gegenstand). It is a ‘region’ for which Heidegger chooses an old German word Gegnet. Heidegger writes in his Feldwegsgespräch: ‘You say that the horizon is the openness which surrounds us. But what is this openness as such, if we disregard that it can also appear as the horizon of our representing?’ (Heidegger, 1966, p.  64) In a separate 238

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discussion, Heidegger also is positively disposed to Eckhart’s notion of Istigkeit (isticheit). He writes in his Four Seminars: “Meister Eckhart says ‘Istic-heit’. Being is God, now speculatively understood, means: Being ‘is’ God, i.e., Being lets God be God”.14 Heidegger is deeply aware that Eckhart breaks with ontotheology and thinks of God beyond being. He writes: Meister Eckhart—the only one who sought a solution—says ‘God “is” not at all, because “being” is a finite predicate and absolutely cannot be said of God.’ (This was admittedly only a beginning which disappeared in Eckhart’s later development, although it remained alive in his thinking in another respect.) (Heidegger, 2006, pp. 46–47; Heidegger, 1995b, p. 38)15 It seems to me that there is a significant change in emphasis in the later Heidegger’s engagement with Gelassenheit which marks it out as different from his concerns in the 1920s. In the 1920s, for example, his early Freiburg lectures on religious life, he references Luther and the notion of being absorbed in or occupied with the world (what Eugen Fink terms Weltbefangenheit, ‘world-captivation’), as he developed his notions of ‘care’ and ‘beingin-the-world’ in general. Detachment/releasement here is interpreted by Heidegger as a religious impulse to distance oneself from the world. Later, in his engagement with Eckhart in the 1940s and 1950s, Heidegger is much more preoccupied to propose detachment as a new attitude of thinking, as a form of Nachdenken (literally ‘pondering’), meditative, reflective thinking, that challenges and seeks to overcome the technological, calculative thinking of the age. Heidegger connects Eckhart with the poet Angelus Silesius on ‘living without why’. Heidegger further connects this thinking not with overcoming the human will (and submitting to divine will) but to opening up a space that somehow allows Being to be. This later notion of opening up the soul to the excess of the divine ‘more than being’ is, in fact, closer to Eckhart’s own theological concerns and perhaps Heidegger came to recognize that. But, overall, his engagement with Eckhart, despite his protests, is rather less profound and detailed than one would expect. In fact, as is typical, Heidegger turns more to the Pre-Socratics for enlightening wisdom and he even, strangely, associates Eckhart with Nietzsche (Moore, 2019, p. 19). Heidegger sees Eckhart and Nietzsche as both resisting the willfulness of Western metaphysics. In fact, Ian Alexander Moore claims that even the concept of Gestell has an Eckhartian influence in Heidegger. As Moore writes: ‘Even Gestell (enframing, com-position) has an Eckhartian provenance for Heidegger. In a series of reflections written around 1972–1973 and expanded in the years to follow, Heidegger notes that Eckhart coined the term Gestellnis to translate the Latin forma’ (Moore, 2019, p. 30). Having reviewed Eckhart’s sustained and formative influence on Heidegger’s central concepts and underscored its limitations, I shall now turn to the historical Meister Eckhart’s reflections on letting-be and detachment.

Meister Eckhart’s Concepts of Gelassenheit (Gelâzenheit) and Abgeschiedenheit As Bernard McGinn has observed, detachment is found everywhere in Eckhart, particularly in the vernacular works, especially Sermon [Quint] 52, Beati pauperes spiritu and, of course, in the short but very curious treatise, Von abegescheidenheit (On Detachment), whose date is uncertain (Tobin, 1986, p.  20). Josef Quint accepted it as one of three 239

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genuine vernacular treatises in his edition (Quint, DW V, pp.  377–437; Pfeiffer, 1857, Nr. IX, pp. 483–493), but which some others, including Oliver Davies, have considered suspect.16 Detachment and letting-be are, perhaps, his most central themes and his most enduring contribution.17 Eckhart thought that Gelassenheit and Abgeschiedenheit constituted the very essence of the Christian message. First and foremost, it is God Who is detached. Indeed, God is God only through detachment. According to Eckhart, Christ Himself was detached (at least in his ‘inner man’ or the ‘spiritual man’ who is detached from the five senses, Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 571), and we, as human beings, must learn to be detached or to discover the detachment that is deep within us in so far as we are in the image of God. The authentic human lives in detachment: ‘The inner man remained in unmoved detachment’ (Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 571). Moreover, one can understand detachment only if one is already detached. Discovering the already given, innate, inner detachment in us is achieved by ‘letting-be’ – this is the inner connection between these two notions. As Beierwaltes writes: Gelassenheit, ‘abgescheidenheit’, ‘separateness’ (separating and distinguishing oneself from …, cutting oneself off …) and poverty are different aspects of the one thought – Meister Eckhart’s basic thought: to free oneself from the multiplicity that scatters thought, action, and every experience, free oneself from entanglement [Verflochtenheit] in this and that being (hoc et hoc), disengaging oneself from the ‘nothingness’ of the creature [compared with God], so that one turns into oneself and into the being of God, which, as above-being, is the nothingness of beings: outside of being, transcendent, distinguished from it (distinctum), nevertheless as the grounding Ground [als gründender Grund] in Him (from Him: indistinctum), i.e., intra et extra omnia, at the same time; the ‘rationality’ is to penetrate into this being, ‘sink’ [versinken] into it and accept God as He is purely in Himself. (Beierwaltes, 1998, p. 20) Eckhart himself, as a master of Gelassenheit, often challenges and even provokes his hearers – his recommendation is always to become poor, to cast off imprisoning attitudes – even serious and well-cultivated moral or religious attitudes. Eckhart claims to have encountered detachment and letting-be in the Scriptures, but he is clearly also well aware that the previous tradition of Scriptural commentary had not identified these notions and that his audience of Christians would not identify these virtues as specifically Christian at all – never might the central inner meaning of the Christian message. Thus, in On Detachment, Eckhart begins by saying that he has read the pagan masters, the Old Testament prophets, the New Testament, and has sought himself to discover the highest virtue for human beings. He is thus inclusive in his search for wisdom. He then claims to have discovered the highest virtue as detachment. Similarly, in Sermon Q. 53: Misit dominus manum suam [God placed his hand] Eckhart himself claims that detachment was one of the central things which he preached: When I preach it is my wont to speak about detachment, and of how man should rid himself of self and all things. Secondly, that man should be in-formed back into the simple good which is God. Thirdly, that we should remember the great nobility God has put into the soul, so that man may come miraculously to God. Fourthly, of the 240

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purity of the divine nature, for the splendor of God’s nature is unspeakable. God is a word, an unspoken word. (DW III 437-48; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 152) This list of four themes has rightly been recognized (Woods, 1987, p. 41) as a summary of Eckhart’s teaching: ‘detachment’ (Abegescheidenheit), ‘transformation’ (Wiedereingebildet) into God, the ‘nobility’ (Adel) of the soul, and the ‘simplicity’ (Lauterkeit) of God. Note that Eckhart puts detachment first. In his On Detachment, he interprets Christ’s injunction to Martha: ‘One thing is necessary’ (unum est necessarium, Luke 10:42) as meaning ‘he who would be serene and pure needs but one thing: detachment’ (wer unbetrüebet und lûter welle sîn, der muoz haben einez, daz ist abegescheidenheit, DW V p. 401; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 566). Although Eckhart can always find textual support for his interpretation in the Scriptures, as well as the theologians and philosophers, nevertheless he was also well aware of the revolutionary nature of his message. Moreover, his rhetoric emphasizes originality even to the extent of inventing his own vocabulary. His key concepts of Gelassenheit and Abgeschiedenheit have to be understood in the unique senses with which he endows them. To contextualize Gelassenheit, it is necessary to explore Meister Eckhart’s metaphysical scheme. As a Neoplatonist, Eckhart assumes that the true reality, the all, is a complete and total unity, the transcendent One that is not in any sense a being, but is ‘beyond being’. This One is, in Eckhart’s terms, ‘indistinct’, that is, all things form such an essential unity, that one thing cannot be told from another, there is neither ‘this nor that’, an indiscriminate non-pluralized whole. This unity is devoid of individuating characteristics and thus can be said to be ‘pure’, ‘naked’, a ‘desert’ (die Wüste), a wasteland, transcendent Nothingness, non-being, or superessential being. Furthermore, for Eckhart, as previously for Eriugena, God is beyond all opposition. Eriugena speaks of God as the oppositio oppositorum (Periphyseon Book I.517c), or as Cusanus puts it in De docta ignorantia, ‘opposite of opposites, without opposition’ (oppositio oppositorum sine oppositione, Moran, 1990, cf. De docta ignorantia I.iv.12). For Eriugena, God is the ‘negation of all things’ (negatio omnium, Periphyseon III.686d); similarly, Cusanus will say that God is nihil omnium (De docta ignorantia I.xvi.43). Indeed, Eckhart himself uses the image from the twelfth-century Book of the Twenty-Four Philosophers that God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere (on the ‘circle of eternity, see Sermon Q. 86, Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum, Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 85). Heidegger in fact comments on this: ‘What is going on with the image of a circle whose center is everywhere, yet whose circumference is nowhere—what kind of image of the highest being, of God himself is being used?’ (Heidegger, 2013, p. 712; cited in Moore, 2019, p. 26). Eckhart’s God cannot be named in any way whatsoever. For Eckhart, it is much better to say God is ‘nothing’ at all rather than to fixate on any description of God no matter how theologically well-crafted and how worded to avoid the pitfalls of idolatry or ontotheology. While God is unnamable and beyond all names, nevertheless there is a fundamental affinity between the divine and human natures. Both exemplify oneness, infinity and groundlessness. Following the Dionysian-Eriugenian tradition, also, Eckhart places great stress on the nearness of the human to the divine. This is his reappropriation of the theme of imago dei that is also treated radically by Eriugena: human nature is a direct image of the divine. In On Detachment, Eckhart writes: ‘This immovable detachment brings a man into the greatest likeness with God’ (Disiu unbewegelichiu abegescheidenheit bringet den menschen 241

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in die groeste glîcheit mit gote, DW V p. 412; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 569). Meister Eckhart is intent on emphasizing the unmediated closeness, indeed, identity, of the relation between the divine and the human to the extent that the human soul is the unique place of appearing of the divine.18 John Macquarrie (1993, p. 68) has drawn attention to Eckhart’s sermon on the text ‘a little while and you will no longer see me’ (John 16:16), as indicating a withdrawal of God from the soul. Eckhart is very aware both of this withdrawal and of the absolute necessity of all things to find God. ‘All creatures strive and toil out of their natures to become like God. The heavens would not revolve if they were not striving and searching for God or a likeness of God’ (Colledge & McGinn, 1981, p. 313). The soul that empties itself out fully in detachment becomes filled with the divine, and, ultimately, one with the One. As both Beierwaltes and Schürmann have observed, detachment undoubtedly has parallels with the Stoic notion of apatheia except that Stoicism seeks to achieve this by strengthening the will, whereas Eckhart recommended abandoning the will, letting alone. Nevertheless, Eckhart does have Stoic-sounding recommendations. In On Detachment, Eckhart says: You should know that true detachment [abegescheidenheit] is nothing else but a mind that stands unmoved [unbewegelich] by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honor, shame, or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. (Hie solt dû wizzen, daz rehtiu abegescheidenheit niht anders enist, wan daz der geist alsô unbewegelich stande gegen allen zuovellen liebes und leides, êren, schanden und lasters als ein blîgîn berc unbewegelich ist gegen einem kleinen winde. (DW, V pp. 411–412; Walshe & McGinn 2009, pp. 568–569) Eckhart immediately goes on to say that such impassibility is God-like and divine: This immovable detachment brings a man into the greatest equality with God [in die groeste glîcheit], for the reason why God is God is because of his immovable detachment [von sîner unbewegelichen abegescheidenheit], and from this detachment He has His purity [lûterkeit] and His simplicity and His immutability [unwandelberkeit]. (DW V, p. 412; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 569) Note what Eckhart is saying here. It is precisely this property of detachment that makes God to be God and from this property God derives his other properties or attributes of purity and unchangeability. Abgeschiedenheit, then, is a fundamental principle that is prior to ‘God’; it makes God to be God and it makes us who attain detachment to be equal to God too. Detachment is a kind of prime stasis or immobility: ‘detachment rests within itself’. It does not wish to be above or below any creature; ‘it wants merely to be’. It does not wish either to be this or that. Eckhart is careful to remain within Christian orthodoxy in noting that humans cannot be exactly identical with God but only achieve ‘likeness’ (glîchheit) to God. This can occur only through detachment: ‘Therefore if a man is to be like God as far as a creature can have likeness with God, this must come from detachment’ (sol der mensche gote glîch werden, als verre als ein crêatûre glîcheit mit gote gehaben mac, daz muoz geschehen mit abegescheidenheit. DW V, p. 412; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 569).

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Elsewhere Eckhart is not so careful as we all know, about keeping this separation of God and human. But here Eckhart stresses that attaining detachment is what makes man by grace to be what God is by nature (‘this likeness must occur through grace, for grace [gnäde] draws a man away from all temporal things [von allen zîtlichen dingen]’, DW V, p. 413; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 569). He sees human and God as united before creation came about and through detachment we return to that original nameless and beingless condition. But when humans achieve detachment they become receptive to nothing except or other than God, the open infinite divine itself. Here Eckhart has, in his treatise On Detachment, another ‘proof’ that is based on the principle that ‘whatever is to be received must be received by something’. But if the receiver is a kind of nothing then it can receive nothing, but God is this nothing therefore it can receive only God (Colledge & McGinn, 1981, p. 286).

Detachment, Freedom from Images, Embracing Nothingness Detachment, therefore, for Eckhart, has the status of the fundamental principle, the first principle of reality, a metaphysical principle, as well as being the highest virtue. It is the first virtue, because all other virtues depend on created things but detachment is free of creation: ‘the pure detached heart stands free of all creatures’; ‘Detachment is wholly free of all created things’ (Colledge & McGinn, 1981, p. 286). Eckhart normally expresses detachment as ‘detachment from things’. But he expands the categories from which we should be detached: detachment from the will and ‘free of all images and all works’ (Sermon Q. 104, Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 48); ‘be as free of it as Naught is free, which is neither here nor there’ (Intravit Jesus in templum, Q.1, Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 67). Eckhart many times stresses that we must be free of things, free of all createdness, free of creaturehood. Detachment is ‘free of all creatures’ (so stät abegescheidenheit ledic aller creature, DW V, p. 401, pp. 403–404). ‘to be empty of all creatures is to be full of God’. Thus Eckhart writes: ‘detachment is receptive of nothing but God’ (Da von ist abegescheidenheit nihtes enpfenclich dan gotes, DW V, p. 404; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 567). This frees the human to release itself to its divine origin. The human being must become free and virginal ‘even as Christ is free and virginal and empty in himself’ (Sermon Q. 2 Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum, Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 77). There is undoubtedly a side to Meister Eckhart’s notions of Gelassenheit and Abgeschiedenheit that places them close to a non-imagistic, or, in Heidegger’s terms, a non-representational thinking. Higher thinking is without images, Eckhart says in On Detachment (Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 571, p. 553): ‘So, leave all images and unite with the formless essence’ (ibid., p. 574). We must let go of images because images trap and imprison us in certain ways of thinking which are not liberational. If the heart is to be open to receive the divine, ‘it must rest on absolutely nothing’ (ibid., p. 571) since nothing has the greatest ‘receptivity’. ‘The object of a detached heart is neither this nor that’ (ibid.). Images prevent God from entering the soul: The smallest creaturely image that ever forms in you is as great as God is great. Why? Because it comes between you and the whole of God. As soon as the image comes in, God and all his divinity have to give way. But as the image goes out, God goes in. (Sermon 5b, In hoc apparuit caritas dei in nobis, Colledge & McGinn, 1981, p. 184.)

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If the mind was able to stand formless and free of all accidentals, it becomes one with God. In Sermon 52 Beati pauperes spiritu, he writes: Now pay earnest attention to this! I have often said, and eminent authorities say it too, that a man should be so free of all things and all works [ledic sôl sin aller dinge und aller werke], both inward and outward, that he may be a proper abode for God where God can work. (DW II 499.10–500.3; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 423) The self has to learn and practice thinking and living without property, eigenschaft (DW V c. 10, 218.8–11). The aim is to be ‘empty and free’ (ledic und vri). The detached one possesses God in essence (in wesene, DW V, c. 6, 205.10). He is one with the One (DW V c. 6, 202.7–10, see Flasch, 2015, p. 124). I have sometimes said that there is a power in the soul which alone is free [ein kraft in dem geiste, diu sî aleinen vrî]. Sometimes I have called it the guardian of the spirit, sometimes I have called it a light of the spirit, sometimes I have said that it is a little spark [ein vünkelîn]. But now I say that it is neither this nor that; and yet it is a something that is more exalted over ‘this’ and ‘that’ than are the heavens above the earth. So now I shall name it in nobler fashion than I ever did before, and yet it disowns the nobler name and mode, for it transcends them. It is free of all names and void of all forms, entirely exempt and free, as God is exempt and free in Himself [von allen namen vrî und von allen formen blôz, ledic und vri zemâle, als got ledic und vri ist in im selber]. It is completely one and simple as God is one and simple [ein und einvaltic] … (Q. 2, Intravit Jesus in quoddam castellum. DW I, pp. 39–41; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 80) He writes in another sermon Q. 74, Dilectus deo et hominibus (DW III 271ff) about detachment involving a removal from the temporal domain: That man alone is pleasing to God who is detached and removed from all transient things [von allen zergengklichen dingen abgescheiden vnd abgenommen]. That man who is most detached [der aller abgescheidenest ist] and has most fully forgotten all transient things is the most pleasing to God, and thereby the nearest [nehest] to God. (Q. 74, DW III, p. 279; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 376) In the sermon Q. 12 Qui audit me non confundetur Eckhart explains how the ‘detached’ person has lost his self and is ‘dead to the world’: That man who both has [become] and is detached, and never again glances at what he has abandoned but remains firm, unmoved in himself and unchangeable, that man alone is detached. (Der mensche, der gelâzen hât und gelâzen ist und der niemermê gesihet einen ougenblik ûf daz, daz er gelâzen hât, und blîbet staete, unbeweget in im selber und unwandellîche, der mensche ist aleine gelâzen. (DW I, p. 203, ll. 2-5; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 298, trans. modified)

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Detachment captures the essence of the divine prior to creation. It is the immense open formless infinity of the divine. It is what Eckhart calls ‘nothingness’. God is, for Eckhart, not ‘this or that’ (Quasi stella matutina, Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 342). God in fact is emptiness or nothingness. In On Detachment Eckhart writes that detachment exceeds even love: The teachers greatly praise love, as does St. Paul who says, ‘Whatever things I may do, and have not love, I am nothing [sô enbin ich nihtes niht]’ (cf. 1 Cor. 1 3:1). But I extol detachment above any love. First, because, at best, love constrains me to love God, but detachment compels God to love me [so twinget abegescheidenheit got, daz er mich minne]. Now it is a far nobler thing my constraining God to me than for me to constrain myself to God. That is because God is more readily able to adapt Himself to me, and can more easily unite with me than I could unite with God. That detachment forces God to me [Daz abegescheidenheit twinge got ze mir], I can prove thus: everything wants to be in its natural place. Now God’s natural place is unity and purity, and that comes from detachment. Therefore God is bound to give Himself to a detached heart. (On Detachment, DW V, pp. 402–403; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 566) This is a very bold, almost violent, expression of the human binding the divine to it through detachment. Eckhart makes detachment not just to be a necessary state of the human soul, and higher than all other virtues (including humility and compassion), but claims it is also essential to the nature of the divine: ‘For the reason why God is God is because of His immovable detachment’ (Wan daz got ist got, daz hât er von sîner unbewegelichen abegescheidenheit, DW V, p. 412; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 569). Even the divine simplicity (einvalticheit, DW V 412 l. 6) comes from detachment. Detachment or non-attachment is described by Eckhart a kind of emptiness, non-being, and a distinctness from all created being, effort, and striving.

Detachment and Divine Nothingness One of Eckhart’s most interesting statements in On Detachment is that ‘Detachment wants to be nothing’ (sö enwil abegescheidenheit nihtes niht sin, DW V, p. 406; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 567). Eckhart, following in the tradition of Dionysian mysticism, and especially Eriugena, holds that God is best described as ‘nothing’. The nothingness of the divine ‘beyond being’ is explicated both in his Latin and German works. He speaks of ‘nothingness’ (niht, Welte, 1980), but also of the ‘desert’, ‘wasteland’, or ‘wilderness’ (die wüste).19 In Medieval Latin, he employs the terms nihileitas (LW IV, p. 321; Jung, p. 60), and nulleitas.20 In Sermon Q. 83, Renovamini spiritu, Eckhart says: ‘You should love Him as He is: a nonGod, a non-spirit, a non-person, a non-image [Ein nit-got, Ein nit-geist, Ein nit-persone, Ein nút-bilde]; rather, as He is a sheer pure limpid One [ein luter pur clar Ein], detached from all duality [gesvndert von aller zweiheite]’ (DW III, p. 448; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 465). Similarly, in Sermon Q. 71, commenting on St. Paul, Eckhart declares: ‘I cannot see what is one. He saw nothing, which was God. God is nothing [ein niht] and he is a something. Whatever is something is also nothing’.21

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The topic of ‘nothingness’ (nichil, niht, nitheit) in Eckhart has been much discussed,22 often in relation to Indian Sankara and Japanese Zen Buddhism,23 but it should more correctly be located in the Latin Dionysian tradition stemming from Eriugena. Following Dionysius, Eckhart says God is ‘unknown’ (unbekannt), a ‘hidden darkness of eternal concealment’ (verborgen vinsternisse der êwigen gotheit), where He takes refuge and ‘remains in Himself’.24 Moreover, the divine being is not ‘being’ in the same sense as creatures share being. Eckhart states simply many times that God transcends being: ‘God is God’ (got ist got), and, moreover, God is God ‘without creature’ (êne creature, Q. 38, DW II, p. 241; Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 180). In other words, to think God most properly, one must remove all creaturehood and even the reference to creation (this is akin to Eriugena’s fourth level of nature – that which is neither created nor creates). God is God beyond and independent of all created being and even is independent of the act of creation. This is true transcendent nothingness, Eriugena’s nihil per excellentiam. As with Eriugena, for Eckhart, if creatures have being, then God is not being, and vice versa (see Von abegescheidenheit, DW V, p. 413). Following both St. Augustine and Eriugena, Eckhart asserts that all creatures considered in themselves are nothing, that is, their being is entirely dependent being, from another, and without the support of their divine ground, they are nothing. Eckhart says according to Proposition 26 in the Articles condemned in the Bull of John XXII (Walshe & McGinn 2009, p. 26): ‘All creatures are one pure nothing. I do not say that they are in some way or other, but that they are one pure nothing’ (my translation).25 To think through divine nature and human nature in terms of nothingness is the real challenge of Eckhart’s Gelassenheit.

Concluding Reflections There is no strict univocal definition of ‘mindfulness’ and there are many extant traditions, some of which consist of emptying the mind, some consist in focusing intently on images, mandalas, or on climbing through various stages of contemplation. Indeed, some want to distinguish meditation from contemplation. There has not been sufficient phenomenological discrimination available to distinguish the various forms of mindfulness. But I have argued here for the necessity of understanding concepts like Gelassenheit, letting-be, detachment, or releasement, in their proper historical and intellectual contexts. There are many ways of being ‘unattached’, and there are many levels of increasing separation, for example, the detachment from attachment to detachment that is central to Zen Buddhism (and which Eckhart also promotes in his own way). Mindfulness, for both Heidegger and Eckhart, necessarily involves a kind of openness that is expansive. As Heidegger says: ‘Releasement toward things and openness to the mystery belong together. They grant us the possibility of dwelling in the world in a totally different way’ (Heidegger, 1966, p.  55). But at least part of the connotation of their Gelassenheit is serenity, calmness, emptiness in order to be receptive of transcendent divinity, openness to an infinite nothingness that is somehow prior to everything. In these senses, Eckhart’s reflections on gelâzenheit and abgescheidenheit and Heidegger’s reinterpretation of Gelassenheit in relation to technological thinking contribute very deeply to an overall understanding of different dimensions of mindfulness in Western thought.

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Abbreviated References DW: Meister Eckhart (1986ff). Die Deutschen Werke. Hrsg. im Auftrage der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Hrsg. J. Quint, 5 Bände. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. LW: Meister Eckhart (1986ff), Die Lateinischen Werke, 5 Bände. Hrsg. im Auftrage der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft. Hrsg. E. Benz et al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. GA: Martin Heidegger (1975ff.) Gesamtausgabe. Frankfurt: Klostermann.

Notes 1 DW: Meister Eckhart, Die Deutschen Werke, Hrsg. im Auftrage der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft hrsg. J. Quint, 5 Bande (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1986 ff.); LW: Meister Eckhart, Die Lateinischen Werke, 5 Bände, Hrsg. im Auftrage der deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, hrsg. E. Benz et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1986 ff.). For English translations of Eckhart, I rely primarily on Maurice O’C. Walshe and Bernard McGinn, eds., The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2009). I shall also use Edmund Colledge and B. McGinn, ed., Meister Eckhart. The Essential Sermons, Commentaries, Treatise and Defense (NY: Paulist Press, 1981); Oliver Davies, ed. Meister Eckhart: Selected Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1994); and Armand Maurer, ed. Parisian Questions and Prologues (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1974). The German sermons will be cited using the Quint (= Q) numbering. 2 Bret Davis also criticizes Heidegger for interpreting Eckhart’s Gelassenheit too narrowly and without ‘working out in detail a critique of the limits of the idea in Eckhart’s thought’ (Davis, 2007, p. 126). 3 Haubst, 1980, pp.  75–96. Cusanus later said that at the time of writing De docta ignorantia (1440), he had not yet read Dionysius (Apologia 12, Hopkins, 1988, p. 50). But, in later texts, Cusanus characterizes his Platonism as stemming from Dionysius and his Latin translators and commentators, including Eriugena (‘Johannes Scotigena’), Albertus Magnus’ Commentary on the Divine Names, Robert Grosseteste (whose translations of Dionysius’s Mystical Theology and ­Celestial Hierarchy Cusanus owned in manuscript), Thomas Gallus, and Meister Eckhart. 4 Note that the term ‘infinity’ is considered negative by Cusanus. 5 Heidegger (1988, pp. 73–74; trans. Heidegger, 2008, p. 58), does not even mention Walther by name. Heidegger was possibly upset because Niemeyer, who published Walther, was the renowned publisher of phenomenology. 6 Käte Oltmanns continued to attend Heidegger’s lectures in Freiburg until 1934. Her presentation in Heidegger’s 1927–1928 seminar on Schelling, ‘Wesenheit, Dasein und Grund bei Eckhehart’, in translated in Moore, 2021, 191–194. Oltmanns discusses the problem of ‘ground’ and ‘groundlessness’ (Abgrund) in Eckhart and the fact that as creatures are entirely dependent, their existence is non-being. Esse in the full sense belongs only to God. She goes on to discuss the human soul as image of God and claims that, for Eckhart, the soul and God are one and indistinct in their ground. 7 See, for instance, Gwynn (1937, pp. 105–106). 8 Schürmann (1978) translated just five sermons and commented on them, including ‘Jesus entered’, (Intravit Jesus in Quoddam Castellum); ‘Woman, the Hour is Coming’; and ‘See What Love’. See also Schürmann (1973, pp. 95–119). 9 Schürmann was deeply influenced by Jeanne Ancelet-Hustache (1892–1983), author of Maître Eckhart et la mystique rhénane (Ancelet-Hustache, 1956) and by Bernhard Welte (1906–1983), professor at Freiburg and a personal friend of Heidegger. 10 According to Eckhart’s sermon, Quint # 109 Nolite timēre eos, in the ‘breakthrough’ (Durchbruch) I merge with the divine ground and become one with the Godhead (Walshe, p. 294). 11 See also Hans Ruin (2019) who writes: “Gelassenheit for Heidegger is not something that lies beyond thinking and the exercise of reason. On the contrary, it designates a transformed practice of reason, an exercise in a different kind of thinking”. Heidegger’s focus is the difference between calculative and meditative thinking.

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Dermot Moran 12 Abgeschiedenheit: kein theoretisches Nicht‑Sehen, sondern emotionales, in seiner Urform eben religiös, entsprechend auch die Wege und Stufen zu ihr als >Repulsion< (Heidegger, 1995, p. 308). 13 On Machenschaft, see Frederick Dallmayr (2001, pp. 247–267); and Robert Bernasconi (2021, pp. 475–476). 14 Meister Eckhart sagte: Istic-heit. Das Sein ist Gott, jetzt spekulativ verstanden, bedeutet: das Sein ‘istet’ Gott, das heisst das Sein lasst Gott Gott sein (Heidegger, 1977, p. 63). 15 Cited in Moore (2019, p. 40). 16 See B. McGinn, ‘Theological Summary’ (Colledge & McGinn, 1981, p. 47). In the seventeenth century the tract was attributed to Brother Nicholas. It was first collected in Volume Two, Traktate, of Pfeiffer’s edition of 1857. Its authenticity was challenged by Adolf Spamer (1909). However, Quint (DW V, p. 397) is strongly of the view that it is genuine. 17 For comprehensive documentation of the locations where Eckhart discusses Gelassenheit, see Bundschuh (1990). 18 For Eckhart, God lives in the soul (DW III no. 67). God enters the soul in its depth (DW I, p. 87). God is in the depth of the soul in all his divinity (DW I, p. 162; DW I, p. 360). Ultimately, the soul and God are one. 19 The desert – an area without demarcation or properties – indeed, for early Irish Christians, including Eriugena, the desert is the sea (McGinn, 1994). 20 Eckhart, In Eccl. n. 61, LW II 290; Sermo XV, 2 (In novitate vitae ambulemus) n. 158, LW IV 150. 21 “Ich enmac niht gesehen, daz ein ist. Er sach niht, daz was got. Got ist ein niht, und got ist ein iht. Swaz iht ist, daz ist ouch niht,” Sermon Q. 71, Surrexit autem Saulus; DW III 222-223; Colledge & McGinn 1981, 323). 22 See Mojsisch & Summerell (2011), Mojsisch and Summerell (2011, p. 122ff); see also Mojsisch (1991, pp. 675–693). 23 See Roy (2001), Nambara (1960), Ueda (1965, 1991), and Jung (2014). 24 Sermon Q. 22, Ave gratia plena; DW I, p. 389; Walshe, 2009, p. 281; Colledge & McGinn, 1981, p. 196. 25 Omnes creature sunt unum purum nichil. Non dico, quod sint quid modicum vel aliquid, sed quod sint unum purum nichil, LW V, p. 599.

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Dermot Moran Maurer, Armand, ed. (1974). Meister Eckhart. Parisian Questions and Prologues. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. McGinn, Bernard (1994). “Ocean and Desert as Symbols of Mystical Absorption in the Christian Tradition,” The Journal of Religion vol. 74 no. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 155–181. Mojsisch, Burkhard (1991) “Nichts und Negation. Meister Eckhart und Nikolaus von Kues,” in Historia Philosophiae Medii Aevi. Studien zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, Festschrift für Kurt Flasch, hrsg. B. Mojsisch, O. Pluta, Bd. II (Amsterdam/Philadelphia 1991), pp. 675–693. Mojsisch, Burkhard (2001). Meister Eckhart. Analogy, Univocity and Unity, Trans. Orrin Summerell. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Mojsisch, Burkhard, Orrin F Summerell (2011). “Meister Eckhart,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2011/entries/meister-eckhart/ Moore, Ian Alexander (2019). Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Moran, Dermot (1989). The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena. A Study of Idealism in the Middle Ages. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Moran, Dermot (1990). “Pantheism from John Scottus Eriugena to Nicholas of Cusa,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly vol. LXIV no. 1 (Winter 1990), pp. 131–152. Moran, Dermot (2013). “Meister Eckhart in 20th-Century Philosophy,” in Jeremiah M. Hackett, ed, A Companion to Meister Eckhart. Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition Vol. 36. Leiden/ Boston: Brill, pp. 669–698. Moran, Dermot (2014). “Christian Neoplatonism and the Phenomenological Tradition: The Hidden Influence of John Scottus Eriugena,” in Eriugena and Creation. Proceedings of a Conference to Honor Edouard Jeauneau, XI International Eriugena Conference, 9-12 November 2011, ed. Willemien Otten and Michael Allen. Turnhout: Brepols, 2014, pp. 601–636. Moran, Dermot (2021). “Eriugena on the Five Modes of Being and Non-Being: Reflections on His Sources,” Studia Patristica CXII. Papers Presented at the Eighteenth International Conference on Patristic Studies Held in Oxford 2019. Ed. Markus Vinzent. Volume 19: Eriugena’s Christian Neoplatonism and its Sources in Patristic and Ancient Philosophy, ed. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli. Leuven: Peeters/Brepols, pp. 73–98. Moran, Dermot (2023). “Being and Nothingness in Meister Eckhart and in the Phenomenological Tradition,” Meister Eckhart und die Phänomenologie, Meister-Eckhart-Jahrbuch. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Nambara, Minoru (1960). “Die Idee des absoluten Nichts in der deutschen Mystik und seine Entsprechungen im Buddhismus,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte. Bausteine für eine historische Wörterbuch der Philosophie vol. 6 no. 1960, pp. 143–277. Oltmanns, Käte (1935). Meister Eckhart. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann. Pfeiffer, Franz (1857). Deutsche Mystiker des vierzehnten Jahrhunderts. Leipzig: 1857. Reprinted Aalen 1962. Porette, Margaret (1999). The Mirror of Simple Souls. Trans. Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler and Judith Grant. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Robinson, Joanne Maguire (2001). Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s “Mirror of Simple Souls. SUNY Series in Western Esoteric Traditions. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press. Roy, Louis (2001). “Some Japanese Interpretations of Meister Eckhart,” Studies in Interreligious Dialogue vol. 11, pp. 182–198. Ruin, Hans (2019). “The Inversion of Mysticism—Gelassenheit and the Secret of the Open in Heidegger,” Religions vol. 10, p. 15. Ryan, Richard M., John D. Creswell, Kirk W. Brown (eds), (2015). Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory and Research. Guilford Press. Schürmann, Reiner (1972). Maître Eckhart et la joie errante. Paris: Éditions Planète. Schürmann, Reiner (1973). “Heidegger and Meister Eckhart on Releasement,” Research in Phenomenology vol. 3 no. 1 (1973), pp. 95–119. Schürmann, Reiner (1978). Meister Eckhart. Mystic and Philosopher. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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‘Let It Be’ Schürmann, Reiner (1997). “Reiner Schürmann’s Report of His Visit to Martin Heidegger,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal vol. 19, No. 2-Volume 20, No. 1, pp. 67–72. Spamer, Adolf (1909). “Zur Ueberlieferung der Pfeiffer’schen Eckeharttexte,” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur vol. 34(Halle, 1909), pp. 307–420. Stone, Odysseus, Dan Zahavi (2021). “Phenomenology and Mindfulness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 28 no. 3-4, pp. 158–185. Tobin, Frank (1986). Meister Eckhart. Thought and Language. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press. Ueda, Shizuteru (1965). “Der Zen-Buddhismus als Nicht-Mystik,” in Transparente Welt: Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Jean Gebser, hrsg. Günter Schulz (Bern und. Stuttgart: Hans Huber Verlag, 1965), pp. 291–313. Ueda, Shizuteru (1991). “Nothingness in Meister Eckhart and Zen Buddhism,” in Frederick Frank, ed, The Buddha Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School. New York: Crossroad. Varela, Francisco (1996). “Phenomenology In Consciousness Research,” Journal of Consciousness Studies vol. 3 no. 4, pp. 330–349. von Herrmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm (1994). “Gelassenheit und Ereignis. Zum Verhaltnis von Heidegger und Meister Eckhart”, in Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Wege ins Ereignis, Frankfurt 1994, 371–386. Walshe, Maurice O’C., Bernard McGinn, eds. ( 2009). The Complete Mystical Works of Meister Eckhart. New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company. Walther, Gerda (1923). Zur Phänomenologie der Mystik. Halle: Niemeyer. Walther, Gerda (1955). Zur Phänomenologie der Mystik, second expanded edition, Olten und Freiburg: Walter-Verlag. Welte, Bernhard (1980). Das Licht des Nichts. Von der Möglichkeit neuer religiöser Erfahrung. Düsseldorf: Patmos Verlag. Wilson, Jeff (2014). Mindful America: Meditation and the Mutual Transformation of Buddhism and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Woods, Richard (1987). Eckhart’s Way. London: Darton, Longman and Todd.

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16 MINDFULNESS AS OPEN AND REFLECTIVE ATTENTION A Phenomenological Perspective Diego D’Angelo

Introduction Mindfulness has been seen as an umbrella term that encompasses several different phenomena and perspectives. Even a comprehensive definition of attention in the context of mindfulness is not without difficulties (Chiesa, 2013). Mindfulness, in particular, can be defined as a state of consciousness, an attitude toward the world, a set of meditational exercises, a state, a trait, a capacity, and more. I argue that the term “mindfulness” designates first and foremost a character of experience, and that these experiences can be everyday experiences. The present contribution aims at interpreting everyday mindfulness experiences as experiences of a specific form of attention. In particular, I claim that attention in mindfulness has two basic defining traits: it is open and reflective. This kind of experience can be reached by meditative exercises, but it can also be encountered in simpler contexts and is a common experience. My overall argument is supported by a phenomenological analysis of everyday experiences of mindful states. Let’s start with a quick review of everyday language, before digging deeper into the concept of mindfulness. The adjective “mindful” is often used as a synonym to “aware of” and “attentive to.” In this regard, the Cambridge Dictionary quotes the following example: “In beginning this exploration, we are mindful that the categories we draw upon as we navigate our social world are not neutral” (Cambridge Dictionary n.d.a). The word “mindful” can be here replaced by “aware” without any significant alteration in the meaning of the sentence. As for the second synonym, “attentive to,” again the Cambridge Dictionary quotes the following sentence: “The facilitator is mindful that the discussion should not turn into a complaining or venting session” (Cambridge Dictionary n.d.a). In this case, the adjective “mindful” does not only describe awareness of a particular situation, but also – and more precisely – a form of willful attention involved in reaching a goal – in this case, avoiding a certain turn in the discussion. On the other hand, the noun “mindfulness” shows up mostly in sentences related to meditative practices (as in “my friend Josh started attending mindfulness classes”), although there are some exceptions to this that are worth considering. Take another example 252

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from the Cambridge Dictionary: “For most of the farmers, knowing the customer also includes mindfulness of socio-economic class and income levels” (Cambridge Dictionary n.d.b.). In this sentence, mindfulness can be translated as “taking something into account.” In another example, “mindfulness” could be translated again as paying attention to something: “Mindfulness of strong cultural currents that give preference to youth over age is key to a critical social gerontology” (Cambridge Dictionary n.d.b.). Indeed, this oscillation between the designation of a meditative practice and of a more general state of awareness or attention is to be found also in dictionary definitions. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary offers two definitions for mindfulness: (a) “the quality or state of being mindful,” and by “mindful” is meant a synonym to “aware” or “inclines to be aware”; and (b) “the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis” (Merriam-Webster, 2023). According to the dictionary definitions, therefore, it is possible to distinguish between a state of mindfulness and mindfulness as a meditational praxis. Focusing on the first, the definitions point toward a concept of mindfulness as awareness or attention to oneself and to the surrounding world without judgment. Although there is no clear consensus on the kinds and dimensions that are involved in experiences of mindfulness (Dorjee, 2010), a good illustration of the kind of experiences designated by the term “mindfulness” as a “state” is provided by a literary example included in the very first novel written by Iris Murdoch. As a philosopher, Murdoch puts the concept of attention at the very heart of her ethical considerations. And although her first novel, Under the Net, is still far away (approximately 20 years) from the formulation of her ethics of attention, as outlined in The Sovereignty of Good (Murdoch, 1970), this novel gives fascinating examples of a special kind of attentive experiences. Consider the following situation: Jake, the main figure, goes to a pub and immerses himself in intense brooding about the events of the past days, about his relation to his friend Finn and to Anna, and about what to do next: At last the pubs opened. I had a drink. It occurred to me that I had something to say to Dave after all, which was to ask whether there was any news of Finn. […] My need of Finn began to be very great and I had to force my attention away from it. I had some more drinks. The time passed slowly. During this time I didn’t at first think of anything special. There was too much to think about. I just sat quietly and let things take shape deeply within me. I could just sense the great forms moving in the darkness, beneath the level of my attention and without my aid, until gradually I began to see where I was. My memories of Anna had been completely transformed. Into each one of them a new dimension had been introduced … (Murdoch, 2002, p. 267) The scene depicted with literary mastery by Iris Murdoch describes an experience from the first-person perspective of Jake sitting in the pub and, at first, emptying his mind – well, with the help of a pint of beer – from what occupies him in the first place, that is, the thought of his friend Finn. Jake has to “force” his attention away from that thought. When this happens, time starts to pass slowly, and he is not thinking of “anything special.” He is now able to elude rumination. He is sitting quietly and, we could add to Murdoch’s description, having managed to empty his attention, he is now open for something “beneath the 253

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level of (his) attention.” He is non-judgmentally aware of himself and of his surroundings. Not only metaphorically, but also concretely Jake now realizes “where he is”: that is, in the pub. He is fully mindful to the present moment, to his being in the pub. His attention is open to events and things in the surrounding world. His attention might even be directed at a center of focus, such as the pint of beer in front of him, but this focus would not impede openness for other things and events in the scene. This sense of appreciation for the present moment is connected to a relaxed attitude toward the world, in which Jake is immersed without prejudices and without the need to evaluate the present situation, as we usually do in everyday contexts for instrumental reasons, moral reasons, etc. Moreover, in the depicted scene his attention welcomes self-reflection on what the novel calls “great forms” beneath the level of attentive consciousness. Through this open and reflective attention, Jake comes to realize that he should think of Anna in another, more mature way, in order to save his relationship. In this part (The Concept of Attention in Today’s Debates: An Overview), I will try to describe this kind of experience as mindful. In the first section, I will offer a brief overview of the concept of mindfulness as it is used in different debates across disciplines. Without venturing into an in-depth discussion, which is beyond the scope of this chapter, I will focus on four key equivocations that can be found across debates: the term “mindfulness” designates (1) sets of meditational exercises and practices, (2) a trait and/or a disposition, (3) a capacity, or (4) a character of experience. The second part (On the Way toward an Operative Definition of Mindfulness) will clarify that mindful everyday experiences are not related to meditative practices, are not a trait nor a state, and are not based on an acquired capacity. Rather, phenomenologically understood, mindfulness designates the character of some experiences where attention is nonjudgmentally open to the surrounding world and at the same time reflective. As a result, whereas mindfulness meditation can be identified as a codified set of behavioral patterns and exercises that need to be learned; mindfulness in general is a much broader concept that can be applied to very different contexts in everyday situations. In contrast to mindfulness as a form of meditation, the concept of mindfulness as a state or a character of experience can approximately be described as a general sense of attentional, non-judgmental appreciation for the present moment, that can be achieved in everyday contexts without training, and that is directed at the same time toward the surrounding world and the subject’s inner thoughts and experiences. In the third part (The Phenomenological Character of Mindfulness), I will claim that, based on the analysis of concrete experiences, such as taking a walk in the forest under certain conditions, it can be argued that mindfulness is actually a subclass of attention. This does not imply that every instance of attention is also an instance of mindfulness, but rather that mindfulness always implies attention. In this respect, the type of attention involved in mindfulness can be identified as “open attention”. The section Mindfulness as Open Attention will be devoted to expand on these observations. Unlike other forms of attention, such as the ones involved in writing a paper or watching a movie, where the present and the world are taken in with a particular task in mind alongside judgments and evaluations, mindfulness involves an engagement with the world that is open and receptive. Three phenomenological features of open attention will be spelled out: horizonality, non-judgmentality, and emotional steadiness. Furthermore, as will be shown in the section titled Mindfulness as Reflective Attention, mindful experiences are characterized by a form of self-reflection that makes the subject not only conscious of the experience she is having, 254

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but also of the fact that she is making that very experience: during mindful experiences, the subject experiences her very own being a subject in the world. The reflective stance will be discussed in relation to two main distinctive features: first, as the dissolution of the distinction between inner and outer world, and, second, as a state in which the subject knows about her own mental states. By way of conclusion, I will sum up the main claims of the chapter: mindfulness as an experience is an everyday occurrence with some basic phenomenological features. Mindfulness is an attentive experience – mindful experiences being a subclass of attentive experiences – that is open, that is to say, without focus and judgment, to the world, but at the same time entails a self-reflection of the subject that makes her aware of her own being a subject in the world.

The Concept of Mindfulness in Today’s Debates: An Overview It comes as no surprise that in literature on mindfulness, one finds the very same conceptual oscillation featured by the dictionary definitions. The term refers both, and very prominently, to a state of “being mindful” and to mindful meditation. In the pioneering works of Jon Kabat-Zinn, a display of the same conceptual tension can be found: on the one hand, mindfulness is a state of mind or the character of certain experiences; on the other hand, the term designs a set of meditative practices. Kabat-Zinn does not restrict from the start the concept of mindfulness to designate a set of meditative practices. What Kabat-Zinn is actually interested in are the meditative practices that can help to reach a given state of mind. In a seminal paper from 2003, he claims that mindfulness-based intervention in the clinical praxis and in health care is effective. To this aim, he adopts a definition of mindfulness as meditational praxis: “mindfulness has to do with particular qualities of attention and awareness that can be cultivated and developed through meditation” (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145). But even though the paper is mostly concerned with practical applications in meditation, his working definition of mindfulness still does not make any explicit reference to meditational practices: “An operational working definition of mindfulness is: the awareness that emerges through paying attention on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally to the unfolding of experience moment by moment” (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145). In this respect, Kabat-Zinn holds on to the definition he provides already in 1994: mindfulness as “paying attention in a particular way on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally” (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 4), also avoiding any reference to meditational practices. A recent book by Shauna Shapiro helps sort things out from a conceptual point of view. She points out that even in its original meaning in Pali there is no direct reference to meditative exercises: “Mindfulness, or sampajañña in Pali – one of the major languages of the Buddhist scriptures – means clear comprehension. Its definition aligns with its purpose, to help us see more clearly, respond more effectively to what life throws at us, and ultimately make wiser choices” (Shapiro, 2020, p. 4). Shapiro also distinguishes the original use of “mindfulness” as a noun, which “typically suggests a state of mind: one of calmness, gratitude, and compassion that can have a profound effect on us,” and its use as a verb. “To be mindful” often “points to entering that state, practicing a way of being, a moment-bymoment gentle and nurturing awareness of our emotions, thoughts, and bodily sensations.” Shapiro convincingly shows that in contemporary scientific discourse across disciplines the concept of mindfulness is not always clearly defined and maybe even used in a “confusing 255

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way” (Shapiro, 2020, p. 21). Indeed, Shapiro claims that mindfulness is “not simply a therapeutic practice,” but a “basic human capacity” related to “the primary modes of ­processing” that can be found in human consciousness. It seems that, according to the current state of the art in research, mindful meditation can be defined roughly as a codified set of behavioral patterns and exercises that need to be learned. These behavioral patterns and exercises often have their roots in Buddhist traditions. In many, if not all cases of mindful meditation, exercises and behavioral patterns have their goal in reaching a state of mindfulness. These can be defined as “a set of attention-based, regulatory, and self-inquiry training regimes cultivated for various ends, including well-being and psychological health” (Lutz et al., 2015, p. 632). To be sure, also the definition of mindfulness as sets of exercises is far from univocal (cf., for example, Hartelius, 2015). It is therefore possible to sum up the state of the art in current research on mindfulness by claiming that mindfulness designates both something like a state of mind and specific sets of meditative practices. I propose to reserve the term “mindfulness” to the so-called state of mind and to use “mindfulness meditation” for different kinds of practices aimed at intentionally reaching this state. However, even after separating it from mindfulness meditation, the concept of mindfulness as a state remains equivocal. In recent debates, a further differentiation has been introduced between the state of mindfulness and mindfulness as a trait or disposition. In particular, a debate conducted on Nature Review Neurosciences has contributed to pointing out that mindfulness can also be understood as a trait and as a disposition. Wheeler, Arnkoff, and Glass (2016) pointed out that Tang, Hölzel and Posner (2015) missed out on this differentiation, to which Tang, Hölzel, and Posner in a subsequent response (2016) agreed by stating that mindfulness as a trait is “usually assessed through self-report questionnaires, such as the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, the Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills, or Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire.” Also in this case mindfulness is an equivocal concept: a mindful state is not the same thing as mindfulness as a trait. Just to mention one aspect in order to mark the difference: I possess mindfulness as a trait or disposition even if right now I am frantically engaged in writing my paper before the deadline; I could argue that I am still generally a mindful person. Even if I lost my temper once in a lifetime, I could still possess the disposition of mindfulness. A mindful experience, on the other hand, can occur also to people who wouldn’t count mindfulness among their character traits. Further equivocation can be avoided when mindfulness is understood, as some researchers do, as a capacity. Siegel and colleagues speak, for example, of mindfulness as “the capacity to be fully conscious and aware,” and “the capacity for sustained moment-to-moment awareness” (Siegel et al., 2009, p. 17). One might be tempted to speak of capacity – for example in terms of an attentional capacity – as underlying the very possibility of entering mindful states. However, a clear differentiation between mindfulness as a capacity and mindfulness as a character of experience is conceptually necessary. The main reason for this is that a state of mindfulness can be experienced, but a capacity cannot, and we do indeed speak of experiencing mindfulness as well as of mindful experiences. Even the authors of the paper seem to contradict their own definition when they claim, a few lines later, that “we have to experience it directly” (Siegel et al., 2009, p. 17). In phenomenological terms, avoiding this equivocation is key. Only a clear-cut differentiation of concepts allows one to focus on the experience of mindfulness itself. Therefore, in order to avoid the semantic oscillations so common in today’s debates, I propose to strictly differentiate mindful experiences from meditational 256

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practices, as well as from mindful traits and capacities. The term mindfulness should be reserved first and foremost to a certain feature of experience, the phenomenological attributes of which will be the object of the next section.

On the Way toward an Operative Definition of Mindfulness A state of mindfulness does not need to be reached at the end of a meditative practice – ­although in many situations such a practice can be the best way to reach it. As the example taken from Iris Murdoch’s novel Under the Net shows, from everyday experience we do know situations and states where we have a mindful disposition. Mindfulness seems therefore to be a much broader concept than expected, and one that can be applied to very different contexts in everyday situations. In contrast to mindfulness as a form of meditation, as trait or disposition, and as a capacity, when we speak of mindfulness as a state of mind we usually designate something like an attentional, non-judgmental appreciation for the present moment, free of prejudices and evaluative tendencies, that is at the same time directed to the experiencing person herself and toward the surrounding world. Interestingly enough, classical definitions of mindfulness do not necessarily refer to the concept of attention. Rather, they recur to such concepts as “awareness” (Merriam-Webster dictionary, Shapiro, 2020) or “focusing” (Williams, 2008); Kabat-Zinn merges, in the previously quoted definitions, attention and awareness together (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, 2003). In early mindfulness research, mindfulness as an experience is commonly defined as a particular state of consciousness, in which the subject is aware of her own surrounding world and of what happens in it; this awareness is accompanied by an awareness of the subject’s own presence. For example, already in the early days of mindfulness research, Thera Nyanaponika defined mindfulness as “the clear and single-minded awareness of what actually happens to us and in us at the successive moments of perception” (Nyanaponika, 1974, p. 5). A similar definition is provided by Thich Nhat Hanh, for whom mindfulness is a “keeping [of] one’s consciousness alive to the present reality” (Hanh, 1976, p. 11), where the concept of present reality is supposed to encompass both the reality of the external world and the subject’s own consciousness. Upon a closer look, though, defining mindfulness without using the concept of attention seems to miss a crucial aspect in our experience of mindfulness. The concept of attention encompasses a broad range of phenomena (see D’Angelo, 2018, 2020), and mindfulness always implies a form of attention, mostly toward the surrounding world and toward the attentive subject herself. Awareness is too vague a concept, since it can designate the sheer consciousness that things or thoughts are there, but without paying any direct attention to them: for example, I am aware that there is a cat on the sofa while I am writing this chapter, but my attention is directed only to the chapter. Of course, in mindful states and experiences the subject is aware of her surroundings and of herself. But she is also effectively attentive to them; they are not just in the background of her experience or at her attentional fringes. Mindfulness certainly includes awareness, but also more than that. From a phenomenological point of view, mindful experiences seem to be best captured as experiences of attention. While stressing the attentional nature of mindfulness, one should however beware not to fall into the opposite mistake, that is to say, equating mindfulness with sustained, focused attention. According to Brown and Ryan (2003), for instance, mindfulness “is most commonly defined as the state of being attentive to and aware of what is taking place in the moment,” and is therefore to be equated with heightened attention, with a “willingness to be attentive” and to “sustain attention.” A 257

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clear differentiation needs, however, to be introduced between mindfulness and (the capacity for) sustained attention. Failing to do so would amount to claiming that we are mindful also when we watch a movie or when we frantically write a paper. Concepts of heightened attention and focused attention are, in fact, too restricted to catch the phenomenology of mindfulness. Not every form of attention implies focusing on a singular object. Mindfulness is an attentive openness for the surrounding world and for one’s own thoughts. This openness can be flanked by a specific focus – like the pint of beer in front of Jake, or as in mindful meditation when we focus on particular things or events, like our own breathing or particular regions of the body. But this specific focus that might accompany mindfulness is experienced in a way that is radically different from the complete absorption I experience in focused attention when I, for example, watch a movie and, as people say, I forget myself and my surroundings. The focus in mindfulness is experienced as a point of orientation for me and the world, and I remain open for both without excluding them from my conscious experience as I would do in typical, non-mindful cases of focused, sustained attention. Indeed, this openness of mindful experiences, as emphasized by phenomenological analysis, is also stressed in many canonical definitions of mindfulness. This is the case, for example, for the definition given by Higgins, where mindfulness is understood “as allowing one to dwell in the sensuous density of the present and, through this, remain connected to the social world of open possibilities” (Higgins, 2022). The expression “the sensuous density of the present” is too vague to be able to actually grasp mindful experiences in contrast to other forms of attentional experience, but it goes in the right direction, provided we understand the sensuous density of the present as a holistic attitude toward the surrounding world: mindful experience is not necessarily, and not completely, focused on a single object, but immersed in the whole of the present situation, and this happens without judgment. Even definitions that wrongly suggest mindfulness to be focused attention tend to stress the non-judgmental aspect of mindfulness. Just to quote one example: “Mindfulness is therefore described as a presence of mind, non-forgetfulness, and stability of focus that neither favors nor rejects the object of attention, but instead applies non-judgmental acceptance or equanimity to all experiences” (Olendzki, 2011). Although mindfulness practices can happen through focusing own’s attention to a particular object – such as one’s own body in the so-called body scan meditation (cf. for example, Dambrun et al., 2019) – mindful experiences are holistic and not directed to a singular object: the singular focus can help in reaching the mindful state. Indeed, the definition given by Olendzki brings together the facts that mindfulness is both “stability of focus” and “equanimity to all experiences.” Scott R. Bishop and colleagues propose an operational definition that stresses the attentional aspect of mindfulness without equating it to sustained focused attention. They see mindfulness as a process of regulating attention in order to bring a quality of nonelaborative awareness to current experience and a quality of relating to one’s experience within an orientation of curiosity, experiential openness, and acceptance. We further see mindfulness as a process of gaining insight into the nature of one’s mind and the adoption of a de-centered perspective […] on thoughts and feelings so that they can be experiences in terms of their subjectivity (versus their necessary validity) and transient nature (versus their permanence) (Bishop et al., 2004, p. 234). This definition by Bishop and colleagues is often seen as a landmark in mindfulness research, and for good reasons. They stress that (1) mindfulness is indeed experienced as a form of attention; (2) this form of attention is non-elaborative and non-focused; (3) this attentional experience is marked by openness, acceptance, and curiosity; (4) mindfulness is 258

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not only a particular way of relating to the surrounding world, but also to oneself; (5) this reflection discloses insights about oneself; (6) this gaining of insights happens because of a de-centered perspective. Since in this chapter I am only concerned with a general description of mindful experiences in order to correctly qualify different attentional experiences, I will leave the last two parts of Bishop’s definition aside. What exactly happens in mindful experience would require much more in-depth analysis, which would be beyond the scope of this chapter. Based on what has been laid out so far, the concept of mindfulness can be understood as follows: mindfulness is an attentive experience related both to the external world and to the internal experiences and thoughts, an experience characterized by openness and nonjudgmentality. On this preliminary and indicative basis, we can phenomenologically analyze an everyday experience that satisfies those conditions and is therefore an example of mindfulness. This analysis will bring out the main phenomenological features of mindfulness experience, and help us home in on a comprehensive definition of this phenomenon.

The Phenomenological Characters of Mindfulness In order to start investigating the phenomenological features of mindfulness, we need to leave aside the area of linguistic reflection on everyday and scholarly concepts respectively, and enter phenomenological analysis. To this aim, an example that satisfies the previously outlined criteria can be selected from everyday life. How common are states of open attention to the surrounding world as well as to one’s own inner thoughts and experiences? Helga takes a walk in the forest as a break from everyday stress. She likes the calmness of nature, she likes trees and is happy when she meets a squirrel or a bird. However, she is no botanist or ornithologist. She has no specialist interest in them. When a black bird crosses the street in front of her, Helga smiles because she enjoys seeing the bird, but has no interest in, say, determining its age, its sex or studying its behavior. Her attention is therefore not really focused on single things in her environment. Although she can briefly focus on single elements, Helga is not focusing on anything in particular. Rather, she is taking in the impressions from the forest as a holistic experience. Her attention can therefore be called an open attention. This means that Helga is definitely attentive to her surroundings, primarily and above all for what the landscape has to offer. Helga gets involved with the landscape, and this presupposes that Helga encounters the landscape as it is, without excessively projecting her own expectations and desires into it. Preconceptions and judgment are cleared out of the way. In so doing, a real enjoyment of the landscape can arise: Helga is open to plants and animals that show themselves, is able to enjoy beautiful spots and angles in the forest, although she does not really look for them. Looking for something would already be a kind of construction and expectation of what is to come, instead of being open to the surroundings as a whole. On the contrary, Helga decides to forget about her own everyday problems at work or in the family and to relax by taking this walk. This is possible because Helga’s attention is not already completely taken up by something, but allows her to be responsive (or interested) in what happens around her. That this is an example of mindfulness is also confirmed ex negativo: how many times has it happened to us that we wanted to take a stroll in the park in order to, for example, forget about some personal matter bothering us, or take a break from work, family obligations, and the like, and we find ourselves incapable of really let those thoughts aside and to really be mindful to our own being there in nature? 259

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In Helga’s situation, the subject is completely immersed in the landscape, as evidenced by the fact that she is able to enjoy it. She becomes attuned to the landscape in order to enjoy it, and must also put aside, for example, her own work-related worries or family problems. In such a form of attentiveness, we do not want to experience distractions such as the sound of a passing truck that takes us out of enjoying. However, certain attentive activities do not interfere, such as paying attention to the irregular sidewalk that allows Helga not to slip, or having a pleasant, relaxed conversation with her partner. In order to really relax and enjoy the walk, though, Helga needs not only to be aware of her surroundings, of the trees and plants and of the birds she hears around herself; she is not only open and receptive to everything that happens right here and right now. Indeed, she is enjoying and relaxing herself, and, furthermore, she knows about this. While walking around and taking in the landscape, she is also consciously aware that she is here, that she is having a great time and even if she is not paying attention in a focused way to anything in particular, neither to the forest nor to her own thoughts, a clear awareness of her surrounding and of herself makes it possible that she consciously enjoys her walk. As most of us know, the result of such experiences of everyday mindfulness is not only a general sense of relaxation. They help put things “in perspective,” as the everyday saying goes, and clear the mind in such a way that – just like Jake in Iris Mudorch’s Under the Net – we can have new ideas and new thoughts that are, in some cases, life changing; in the case of our example with Helga, a mindful stroll in the forest can just help her finish that paper that awaited so long for the right idea, or make clear to her that she needs to take a vacation with her family. These relatively commonsensical examples of Helga and Jake show that mindful experiences can be roughly understood as attentive experiences where the subjects are not completely absorbed in something specific – although something specific can lie at the focal point of their experience. These experiences are namely open. More can be added on the openness of attention in mindfulness: it is an openness toward the surrounding world and toward the subject’s own experiences and thoughts, and it is openness featuring a nonjudgmental attitude. In the example of Helga walking in the forest, mindfulness is connected to reflective attention to oneself and to an open attention for the surroundings, but not to any form of heightened focusing. The phenomenon of concentration describes, in fact, experiences in which the subject is “absorbed” by one thing, one person, or one event, and excludes everything else in the actual experience in order not to be distracted. Concentration is experienced as a gathering of oneself on one object. The experiences of Jake and Helga are lived instead as a holistic immersion in a situation. Typical experiences that we would describe, in the everyday use of the concept of attention, as attentive (White, 1964) do not display the same phenomenological characters of mindfulness as the discussed example. My concentrating on writing this chapter, for instance, does not count as an example of mindfulness, since I am entirely focused on a particular thing (the chapter, or maybe the computer screen and keyboard) and I am mostly not consciously aware of my surroundings and of my own sensations, emotions, and feelings. I am also in no way directed at my experience itself. Paying attention to the fact that “I am doing this and that” can, in many cases, disrupt the flow of the task I am pursuing. Rather, in those examples of non-mindful attentive experiences, the subject is not paying attention to her own doing, but does what she does and concentrates on the task itself and on the objects necessary for that task. While writing a paper, I cannot think all the time that I am writing a paper. My attention is directed to what 260

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I need to write, and not to the fact that I am writing. I am thoroughly concentrating on my task. States of mindfulness should therefore be seen as cases of attentional experiences of a particular sort. Indeed, the example with Helga stops being an example about mindfulness when Helga realizes how to end the paper she is writing, or that she needs a vacation, and starts playing around with those ideas in her mind, for example pondering what would be the best destination for a family trip. When this happens, Helga’s attention is not open to the surroundings, but is entirely focused on her own train of thoughts. Moreover, Helga is not experiencing herself as having an experience. Indeed, focusing on the experience of thinking about holiday destinations would stop the actual thinking about holiday, in order to become a second-order attentive thinking. It is now possible to spell out more concretely two phenomenologically essential traits for a mindful experience. First, it must be an experience of what I propose to term “open attention”: a form of immersive attention to our surroundings as a whole, and to what is happening in the world we live in in the present moment, without being focused on a particular object or task. But not every instance of open attention is a form of mindfulness: taking a stroll in the park paying attention to the beauty of nature is not automatically an experience of mindfulness, if we do not add as well the concomitant paying attention to oneself and to one’s own experience of having an experience. This reflexivity constitutes therefore the second essential trait of mindful experiences.

Mindfulness as Open Attention As shown above, in contrast to concepts like heightened focusing and concentration, the kind of attention required in mindful experiences is a unique mix of open, receptive attention. The subject is not experiencing herself as concentrated, focused, or gathered on one single object, even though such an object could lie at the center of the experience; open attention is rather essentially experienced as a horizon of objects and events that can interest us, at least potentially. Open attention shows up in our experience in such situations that we would be ready to describe as marked by a sort of awareness to the things that are around us, living “in the present moment” as a whole. From a phenomenological point of view, this kind of open attention is to be found in a number of everyday experiences, where we are attentive to the whole of the situation we are in, without concentrating exclusively on a single object. Indeed, the lived experience of open attention is characterized precisely by this basic trait: Attention does not wander from one object to another in a frantic and chaotic way, restless and dispersed, like when we are daydreaming, but it is always directed at the whole of the situation. We take in, for example, the park we are strolling in, together with the weather, the people we pass by, the dogs barking in the distance, and the woodpecker pecking at the tree in front of us. This trait of open attention can be characterized as its horizonality: attention walks on the horizon of our experiential field, allowing the subject to take in what happens in the whole field. This does not imply, of course, that everything that happens in her surrounding world is taken in by the subject, but only that the whole of the experiential field can potentially awaken our interest. And, as already pointed out, the horizonality of attention can be structured around a single object, like breathing in meditation. This first trait of open experience, horizonality, discloses a second trait: open attention is non-judgmental and curious. Indeed, the idea that mindfulness is a non-judgmental and receptive experience is omnipresent in research literature. Relating to previous research by 261

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Martin and Deikman, Brown, and Ryan claim that “a core characteristic of mindfulness has been described as open or receptive awareness and attention” (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 822). Several authors interpret this idea of openness in the sense of the non-judgmental and accepting nature of mindfulness. In this regard, besides what has already been pointed out by Bishop (2004) and Kabat-Zinn (2003), we can note that, phenomenologically, the experience of mindfulness implies a suspension of judgment related to the current experience. Value, moral and epistemic judgments are kept out of the current experience in order to embrace one’s own thoughts and the surrounding world with openness and clear-­ mindedness. Helga, while walking in the park, has to clear her thoughts from everyday concerns, just as Jake, in Iris Mudorch’s example, needs to stop thinking frantically about his friends in order to come to see Anna in a new light. Therefore, the suspension of judgments and evaluations constitutes a core moment in the experience of mindfulness. These two phenomenological traits of open attention (horizonality and non-judgmentality) disclose a third one: in order to be openly attentive, our state of mind must be of a certain kind. Certainly, it is not possible to experience mindfulness while in anger, or overwhelmingly sad, etc. Strong emotions demand our complete attention, drawing it away from the horizons of our experience in order to focus it on what is causing the emotion viz. on the emotions themselves. This analysis can be extended to other conditions of possibility for open attention: not only emotionally, but also physically a certain stability and soundness must be given. As a result, three essential marks of open attention can be singled out: (1) open attention is not focused but horizonal; (2) open attention is non-judgmental and curious; (3) emotionally (and physically!), the subject of open attention must be stable and steady.

Mindfulness as Reflective Attention What distinguishes open attention from mindfulness as one of its subclasses is that in mindful experiences the subject is also, and at the same time, reflectively attentive to her own experience. Attention in this sense is not outward-directed, but has a reflective structure, although not one that is constantly, directly, and actively conscious. Siegel et al. (2009) stress that mindfulness is indeed intuitive and preconceptual. What’s more, in mindful experiences the subject is in every moment reflectively aware of what is going on: she knows that she is taking a stroll in the park, enjoying the landscape and the like, even though she is not directly thinking about this. In the very moment in which we are not aware anymore of experiencing this very experience, our mindfulness has already wandered away in order to stop, and thereby focus, on something. This “something” that interrupts open attention can be of different kinds: it can be a sudden thought toward problems we have at work, but it can also be a single object in our surroundings – for example, when our interest in the woodpecker in the forest becomes so intense that we decide to stop and observe it. In all these cases awareness of experiencing the experience is disrupted in order to make place for a direct focus on a single element. The crucial role played by a self-reflective stance is precisely what we see in the example from Iris Murdoch’s novel Under the Net. Jake is at first unable to act out open attention: at best he would just enjoy being in the bar and drinking, looking at the street etc., but he cannot, because he is literally submerged by thoughts. He is thinking about Dave and Finn and is forced by his own trains of thought to keep his attention focused, so much so that he needs to pull his attention away from it, also with the help of alcoholic beverages. 262

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In the time in which he is able to pull his attention away from Finn, he is not thinking “of anything special,” but he is still not able to open up his attention; indeed, as Jake explains, “there was too much to think about.” The sheer quantity of thoughts impedes every real openness. But Jake is able to turn this state of non-focused attention into real open attention. Slowly he is able to pay open attention to the surrounding world: at first things and people in it are “great forms moving in the darkness,” still “beneath the level” of his attention because his attention was still occupied by thoughts. But Jake “gradually began to see” where he is: the non-focused attention that is a result of too much thinking finds a way out, toward the surrounding world. Jake is now in a state of open attention. But this is not the end of the story. Thanks to his open attention to the surroundings, now free from intruding thoughts, Jake’s interests take a completely different shape: suddenly, without any apparent reason, Jake finds his own attitude toward his lover Anne completely changed: into his memories of her “a completely new dimension had been introduced.” Now, this describes aptly the passage from open attention to mindfulness: in open attention directed toward surrounding things we reach a state in which attention is not focused on something specific but is rather free to wonder about in the surrounding world, without any specific interest guiding it. In doing so, it is possible to free one’s mind from intruding thoughts, making the mind open and therefore capable of receiving new ideas, new thoughts and new perspectives on life’s matters. When this actually happens we become mindful: attention is now directed both externally and reflectively at ourselves. In a state of mindfulness, we are both open for the world, but also open for ourselves and the new thoughts that come to us as if they were “from within.” Therefore, it is important to notice that the reflective stance present in mindfulness is not some kind of active thinking about oneself; rather, the reflective properties of mindfulness embody a minimal concept of reflection: consciousness is directed toward itself without thinking explicitly about itself. To sum up, in its directedness to the world, open attention allows freeing the mind from intruding thoughts and therefore makes an open reflective stance possible. In such experiences, the reflective stance is not to be understood as a complete focus on one’s own self. Although self-relation plays a key role, the concept of self remains fairly unclear in contemporary mindfulness research (see Shireen et al., 2022). It is true, instead, that in mindful experiences “the very distinction between external and internal is purely conventional, having no existence apart from words and thoughts” (Wallace, 2012, p. 141). In the state of mindfulness, the subject is at the same time open to the external world and to her own ideas and changes of perspective; the subject is in a state of emotional steadiness and knows reflectively that she is having this kind of experience. Lived phenomena are not necessarily centered on one’s own perspective anymore. We all know mindful experiences where we feel like we see ourselves from the outside. As Wallace convincingly argues, we experience a sort of entanglement of “feelings […] thoughts, emotions, and mental processes” (Wallace, 2012, p. 9). Bitbol adds to this as he argues that the dissolution of “the differentiation of appearances into inner and out” is the product of “the overlay of past habits and present objectification” (Bitbol, 2009). This first phenomenological character of the reflective stance can be therefore termed as the dissolution of the distinction between inner and outer world. This dissolution is accompanied by a second reflective character of mindful experiences that we have already described at length: meta-awareness. “In traditional mindfulness training, […] focused attention is supplemented by meta-awareness (sampajanna). This term has multiple meanings. The simplest meaning is knowing the state of the mind at a given moment, including the quality of one’s attention. A deeper insight or clear seeing into 263

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the nature of the phenomena that are given attention” (Brown and Cordon, 2009, p. 64; for similar ideas, see Hölzel et al., 2011; Tang, Hölzel & Posner, 2015; Vago & Silbersweig, 2012). Therefore, as a second character of the reflective stance we can single out the fact that mindful experiences are states in which the subject knows about one’s own state of mind. What is peculiar to mindfulness states is the status of this knowledge: it is not purely directed inward, as it would be in introspection, but precisely because of the dissolution of the very difference between inner and outer world, the subject of mindful experience knows that she is having this very experience of this very world.

Conclusion In this chapter, I reviewed current research on mindfulness in order to introduce some conceptual distinctions that make a clear-cut phenomenology of mindfulness possible. First, I distinguished mindful experiences from mindfulness meditation; second, I distinguished it from mindfulness as a trait or disposition, and, third, from mindfulness as a capacity. By looking at an example from literature and at one from everyday experience, I spelled out a definition of mindfulness states: an experience can be described as mindful if the subject is openly attentive to her surroundings while taking, at the same time, a reflective stance. Furthermore, I characterized open attention experiences – of which mindfulness is therefore a subclass – along three axes: horizonality, non-judgmentality, and emotional steadiness. The reflective stance has been characterized along two axes: first, as the dissolution of the distinction between inner and outer world, and second as a state in which the subject knows about her own mental states. Of course, this is just a first cartography of mindful experiences and concepts from a phenomenological perspective. Many questions remain to be asked: first of all, questions concerning the exact epistemic status of the knowledge about one’s own experiences, which are in turn about the world, when the distinction between outer and inner is deleted. What exactly means “knowing” in the reflective stance? And how is the dissolution of the inner/ outer world distinction experienced? How can we further analyze phenomenologically the structures of everyday mindful experiences?

References Bishop, S. R., et al. (2004). Mindfulness: A proposed operational definition. Clinical Psychology. ­Science and Practice, 11/3, 230–241. Bitbol, M. (2009). Consciousness, being and life: Phenomenological approaches to mindfulness. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50/2, 127–161, http://doi.org/10.1163/15691624-12341360. Brown, K. W., & Cordon, S. (2009). ‘Toward a phenomenology of mindfulness: Subjective experience and emotional correlates’. In F. Didonna (ed.), Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness (pp. 59–81). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-09593-6_5 Brown, K. W., & Ryan, R. M. (2003). The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in ­psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84 (4), 822–848. Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.a), Mindful. In Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/example/english/mindful Cambridge Dictionary. (n.d.b), Mindfulness. In Cambridge Dictionary. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/example/english/mindfulness Chiesa, A. (2013). The difficulty of defining mindfulness: Current thoughts and critical issues. ­Mindfulness 4, 255–268. D’Angelo, D. (2018). The phenomenology of creative attention. Merleau-Ponty and the philosophy of mind. Phänomenologische Forschungen 2018 (2), 99–116.

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Mindfulness as Open and Reflective Attention D’Angelo, D. (2020). The phenomenology of embodied attention. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 19, 961–978. Dambrun, M., et al. (2019). Unified consciousness and the effect of body scan meditation on happiness: Alteration of inner-body experience and feeling of harmony as Central processes. Mindfulness, 10, 1530–1544. Dorjee, D. (2010). Kind and dimensions of mindfulness: Why is it important to distinguish them. Mindfulness 1, 152–160. Hanh, T. N. (1976). The miracle of mindfulness. Introduction to the practice of Mindfulness. Beacon Press. Hartelius, G. (2015). Body maps of attention: Phenomenal markers for two varieties of mindfulness. Mindfulness 6, 1271–1281. Higgins, J. (2022). Understanding selfhood to elucidate the phenomenology of mindfulness. Philosophia 50, 551–566. Hölzel, B., et al. (2011). How does mindfulness meditation work? Proposing mechanisms of action from a conceptual and neural perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6/6, 537–559. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. Hyperion. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-based intervention in context: Past, present and future. Clinical Psychology. Science and Practice 10 (2), 144–146. Lutz, A., Jha, A. P., Dunne, John D., & Saron, C. D. (2015). Investigating the phenomenological matrix of mindfulness-related practices from a neurocognitive perspective. American Psychologist 70 (7), 632–658. Merriam Webster. (2023). Mindfulness. In Merriam Webster Dictionary. Retrieved February 20, 2023, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mindfulness Murdoch, I. (1970). The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge & Kegan. Murdoch, I. (2002). Under the Net. Vintage Books. Nyanaponika, T. (1974). The Power of Mindfulness. Unity Press. Olendzki, A. (2011). The construction of mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism. An Interdisciplinary Journal 12 (1), 55–70. Shapiro, S. (2020). Rewire Your Mind: Discover the Science + Practice of Mindfulness. Aster. Shireen, H., et al. (2022). Paying attention to the self: A systematic review of the study of the self in mindfulness research. Mindfulness 13/2, http://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-022-01844-4 Siegel, R. D., Germer, C. K., & Olendzki, A. (2009). Mindfulness. What is it? Where did it come from. In F. Dionna (ed.), Clinical Handbook of Mindfulness (pp. 17–35). Springer. Tang, Y. -Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2015). The neuroscience of mindfulness meditation. ­Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16, 213–225. Tang, Y. -Y., Hölzel, B. K., & Posner, M. I. (2016). Traits and states in mindfulness meditation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17, 59. Vago, D. R., & Silbersweig, D. A. (2012). Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): A framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness. ­ ­Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, http://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2012.00296 Wheeler, M. S., Arnkoff, D. B., & Glass, C. R. (2016). What is being studied as mindfulness meditation. Nature Review Neuroscience, http://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2015.6 White, A. R. (1964). Attention. Basil Blackwell. Williams, M. G. J. (2008). Mindfulness, depression, and modes of mind. Cognitive Therapy and Research 32, 721–733. Wallace, A. B. (2012). Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic. A Manifesto for the Mind Sciences and Contemplative Practices. Columbia University Press.

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17 MINDFULNESS AS ETHICAL PRACTICE Lévinas’ Phenomenology and Engaging with the World Nikolaus-Palle Carey Introduction Our experience as living persons is shaped by our human bodies. We are born into our bodies, and our silhouettes mark both the worldspace we inhabit and the form that we take. Moreover, our human body is the instrument by which we interpret and express the interior selfhood of our experience into the shared world; by sensing the body through the body, sensing the world through the body, by sensing the body in the world, what is interior to our selves is made exterior, to be perceived and reflected back, if not understood. To be human is to be embodied, to inhabit a living selfhood, to be alive in a persistent present moment in which our living bodies and conscious minds are situated in a persistent and ever-changing world. While we experience living in embodiment, so too do we experience that embodiment in that world, such that it constitutes a necessarily shared experience. So, as embodied persons in the world, our lived experiences flow each to the next within a frame of reference we tacitly understand as self-oriented. That is, while the lived experience of being embodied in the world is understood to include a world that is beyond our embodiment, that embodiment is the foundation of our personal lived experiences, these being further subject to interactions with numerous forces in our day-to-day lives. The structure and pace of modern human society frequently coerce us into dividing our attention and energy between activities, helpful and otherwise, with enough regularity that they become habitual, even reflexive. When our lived experience seems to pass before our senses, seemingly without our conscious influence and with little apparent significance, it is not hard to see why there are individuals who wish to instill their lived experiences with a greater degree of mindful living, and a corresponding number of commercial undertakings dedicated to being mindful of our momentary situation while living in the world. In what may be its simplest sense, the concept of mindfulness calls upon us to hold an object in mind, to focus our attention upon it and to perhaps safeguard the present object from the distractions that threaten to take that attention away. Mindfulness’ use as a practice, wherein one is “deliberately paying attention” without imposing mental suppositions or judgments about what is happening in the present moment, has found appeal not only among mental health counselors for its therapeutic effects with regard to anxiety and 266

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-21

Mindfulness as Ethical Practice

depression but also with many of the professional class for its apparent ability to reduce work-related stress and promote overall well-being (Rogers, 2019, p. 13). Further, these practices have entered the pop culture milieu, and mobile meditation apps with names such as Balance, Calm, and Headspace are being promoted as personal aids for dealing with trouble managing focus, awareness, insomnia, or unhealthy patterns of behavior (Shonin et al., 2015). Yet, mindfulness in a more robust sense cannot be understood to mean only paying attention, since the experience of living as an embodied person with a mind extends us into the living world. By directing the intention of lived experience within the world, in which one is necessarily immersed, we witness a self in the momentary situation of that world. When I push a glass off of the table, the world responds to my intention when the glass shatters on the floor. When I whistle at my cat, the world responds to my intention when my cat turns her face to me. We are subjects of self-embodiment in a persistent moment of uncertain outcomes as we direct our intention into the world, and this is where mindfulness locates its potential effect: a practice of ethical direction of intention within our lived experience. In this chapter, I will demonstrate that the phenomenology of Emmanuel Lévinas elevates the practice of mindfulness beyond the easily marketable sense of personal well-being to a lived experience of ethical responsibility between the self-embodiment and the unknowable immensity of the moment that is present before us.

A Diachronic View of Mindfulness The modern practices of mindfulness are neither new nor without their own histories. These practices have been transformed to some extent over time, primarily in their conceptual origins but also in alterations (or removal) of cultural markers. Commonly ascribed wellness activities such as meditation, body-mind awareness, intentional mindfulness of breathing and one’s inhabiting of the body, mindfulness of bodily movement (including for instance eating and walking), and mindfulness of the “inner monologue” of thoughts and feelings often used in mindfulness-based interventions share, as practices, a common origin as concepts embedded in spiritual teachings (Parsons et al., 2017, p. 30). According to Buddhist custom and scriptures as described by Dr. Walpola Rahula, Siddhattha Gotama (known later by a number of regional variations as Buddha), reached enlightenment during his ascetic pursuit of a solution to life’s perpetual suffering. Among these teachings are the Four Noble Truths, the first of which holds that life is constituted of suffering, and the fourth which instructs adherents to follow a “middle path” between harmful extremes in order to overcome suffering. Dealing with the Buddhist First Noble Truth, Rahula cautions that “suffering” is not a component in a value judgment about persons or events, but a necessary element of lived experience. Further, the term “suffering” is a simplistic translation that Rahula claims is inadequate to the significance of the original sense, which includes “deeper ideas such as ‘imperfection’, ‘impermanence’, ‘emptiness’, ‘insubstantiality’” (1974, p. 12). Thus, the sense of suffering in the view of this Buddhist tenet includes the uncertainty of the momentary situation of lived experience in the world, not as an aspersion over life and living, but as an objective observation by the subject of the experience. While Rahula’s characterization of the connection between what is “real” and what is “objective” in experience are not central to the mindfulness practices already highlighted, they do share an importance with phenomenological practices. According to Rahula, “Buddha was realistic and objective,” and his teaching is “neither pessimistic nor optimistic” (1974, p. 13). It seems that a crucial element to understanding the lived experience, within this Buddhist 267

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framework, is the objective acknowledgment of the essential unknowability of the enormity of being while simultaneously understanding the momentary impression of subjective experience cannot be extended upon the exterior world if suffering is to be curtailed (Rahula, 1974). This acknowledgment will also provide an important parallel with phenomenological practices discussed further on. Turning to the Fourth Noble Truth in the Buddhist teaching, the “middle path” or Noble Eightfold Path, there are precepts indicating eight aspects of lived experience that direct the adherent toward the most important disciplines of Buddhism, which include ethical conduct in the world (Rahula, 1974, p. 32). They are delineated in order to provide a blueprint by which the adherent might cultivate their own understanding, insights, and wisdom. The seventh among these eight precepts, Right Mindfulness, stipulates that the Buddhist should maintain a diligence in attentiveness to the state of their body and mind, as well as the sensations that flow from one to the other and the resulting thought that arises from that flow (Rahula, 1974, p. 34). Establishing this form of right mindfulness can include such activities as focused breathing, inwardly or outwardly directed observation, and meditation. However, these activities should not be limited to artificially designated times and spaces, but rather should follow us as we direct our attentions and mental energies from one moment to the next in the course of living in the world. As Rahula states, activities toward cultivation of Buddhist disciplines, including meditation, must necessarily rely on mindfulness in our observation of the momentary situation (1974, p. 49). Thus, there is an essential connection between these practices of precepts and the ethical conduct that is conceptually foundational to those same practices. We still see these practices in contemporary interpretations of Buddhist teachings, such as those of Thích Nhất Hạnh, a popular proponent of mindfulness in everyday life. To Hạnh, the concepts that underlay the Buddhist sense of mindfulness are fundamental to a lived experience according to the scripture already highlighted by Rahula. Moreover, for Hạnh, the mindfulness practices reflect the personal adherence to the ethical precepts within the momentary situation of living. Hạnh states, “…the practice of mindfulness is crucial. The Chinese character for mindfulness has two components: heart, or mind, and present moment. To be mindful means to be fully present in the moment…” (1993, p. 33). Included in that present moment of living in the world are the sensations of body, emotion, thoughts, and a relation between the world and a reflective self, embodied and receptive to living influences around us. “Mindfulness makes life real,” Hạnh continues, furthering that it “helps us to be in the here and now where true life can be encountered” (1993, p. 34). This encounter between the embodied self in a momentary present, reflecting upon and responding to an unpredictable world that is unknowably vast in complexity and sensitivity, brings us to what Hạnh refers to as an “engaged” Buddhism wherein the adherent extends the ethical conduct of the Eightfold Path into their lived experience through a conscious enactment. The mutually supportive ethical concept and ethical conduct form the essential pillars of this mindfulness practice according to this tradition. However, much of the breadth of contemporary mindfulness practice does not share the same spiritual framework. For example, the ideas of centeredness as a living body in the moment as a form of meditation, or focusing on one’s intentional breathing to relieve stress or anxiety, are most frequently prescribed as therapeutic practices or as exercises within programs of mindfulness-based interventions (such as mindfulness-based cognitive therapy or mindfulness-based stress reduction) in order to reduce depression, stress, anxiety, or inability to focus (Parsons et al., 2017). In addition to clinically researched applications 268

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of these practices, the social buzz around mindfulness practices is present in the realm of life coaching, lifestyle influencers, and wellness vloggers. This change over time in the senses of what mindfulness means and what constitutes a mindfulness practice are due in large part to societal transformations resulting from political and economic forces. The demands placed on the contemporary individual (particularly on their time and attention) are formidable, and an array of mental and physical difficulties are likely attributable to the long-term imposition of such demands. In response to this, the modern understanding of mindfulness focuses not on spiritual precepts that require extensive tutelage and contemplation, but on the day-to-day practices that are relatively easy to attempt (if not achieve) and still bear a meaningful effect for the lived experience of the practitioner. Mindfulness, then, in a less rarefied sense, is a tool for personal well-being that is frequently used in therapeutic programs in order to help people recognize harmful patterns of thinking and behavior through methods of observation of self. To address this understanding of mindfulness, particularly as a tool of psychological reflection, the connection to phenomenology and phenomenological processes of subjective interpretation of lived experience should be explored. While Edmund Husserl characterized psychology as a “science of facts” (or realities) about human experience, phenomenology’s counterpoint comes from its practice as a methodology for describing lived experience as it happens for the subject in the world (1972, p. 39). Concerned primarily with the temporal condition of the subject in the momentary situation, as opposed to anything “real” in the world, phenomenology and its practices are instead referred to as a science of “essential being,” what is happening for the subject as they experience living in the world (Husserl, 1972, p. 41). Since phenomena are largely considered within this science to be the appearance of events in the human experience, there is in this science the initial indication of limitation within the structure of experience: there is the subject, the object of their intention, and the incomplete yet tacit awareness of the plenitude of circumstances both surrounding and affecting the object. In Husserl’s phenomenology, the subject is not experiencing the object, but rather their own presence in relation to the appearance of the object. The experience is not merely a passive occurrence to which the subject in presence of appearance (either actual or possible) does not or cannot respond. Rather, the subject is an active member of the experience, conscious of the relation between themselves and that which they experience, the experience itself, and of themselves as an embodied self having a conscious experience. Constituting that embodied self in the experience are the possibilities that accompany the relation between a subject and object, being not real but essential, including the ability to direct or not direct the conscious awareness toward the object in relation. To have conscious awareness of a world of objects in relation to an embodied self, in tandem with the capacity to exercise possibility in feeling, thought, and experience of the object’s appearance, generates a subjective intention toward the object (Husserl, 1972, p. 112). The experience, then, is that which occurs between the subject and the object of their directly intended essential being in the world.1 The conscious mind of the subject directs intention in relation to the world and its objects, but it is also present to observe the possibilities of the experience. One such possibility in the world is that of other subjects in the midst of their own being in the world. Within the context of consciousness of the subject given their embodied self in the world, the appearance of the self as present in the world constitutes the foundation of a self-image. Moreover, the appearance of other subjects in the world, largely within the boundary conditions of possibility as the subject, conveys a common origin for each subject in the world, such that one subject might have 269

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the apparent possibility of embodiment in the world as another. The possibilities of embodiment include the temporal and causal qualities of living, so one subject may understand another as having experiences largely like their own, though each of their relations to their own intended objects is individual and their consciousness is each unknowable to the other. Nonetheless, experiences between embodied selves in the world are necessarily intersubjective, their possibilities in part converging into a situation within the present moment as each self is, to some extent, conscious of it. This intersubjective situation between embodied selves (or self and other, within the context of consciousness of each) presents not only apparent evidence that living in the world is a shared experience, but that we are each an experience of the world to one another (Husserl, 1972, p. 95). This, too, we see reflected in the practices of mindfulness that direct attention or consciousness toward our experience of inhabiting our living bodies, such as meditative walking, breathing exercises, intentional sensory intake of the immediate environment, and internal reflection upon the thoughts and feelings that arise through these practices as we become conscious of them. Accompanying this intersubjective situation in the world, as conscious embodiment of self in relation, are additional possibilities such as the capacity for error in apprehensions and the capacity to doubt the appearances of the objects in experience. While error is an element of our vulnerability as embodied persons, doubt (or skepticism) is functionally more versatile as an adjunct to our conscious internal representation of the world. One of Husserl’s proposals in phenomenology is a practical observation of the appearances in our intentional experiences. A process of observation during the suspension of judgment about these appearances, a “bracketing” of suppositions about the present situation of the subject’s immediate experience, would, in Husserl’s view, provide a powerful method for employing consciousness as a means to separate the essential being from the “real” world without invalidating either of them (1972, p. 100). Termed the phenomenological epoché, this process of observation puts aside the affirmation or negation of the truth of existence, opting instead for a pure description of the experience of the world and relation of the subject to the object within it. The subject may direct their intention toward the object in experience of the apparent phenomenon, be aware of that conscious experience as embodied in the world in its presence, and observe their own subjective intentional experience while so embodied in relation (Husserl, 1972, p. 108). The act of description through this epoché does not describe what is “real,” but what comprises the experience of the momentary situation, embodied in relation to an object that is apparent in the world. This description sets aside suppositions about the object of intention, in particular (but not exclusive to) a supposition of apprehending2 the object in a real sense, which can be neither affirmed nor denied. Instead, in describing appearances before the subject – sensory data, emotions, thoughts, and so on – this phenomenological practice reflects the limitations suggested earlier in Husserl’s work with respect to the subjective experience: the intentional object is not necessarily “real” inasmuch as there is no experiencing it outside our subjective relation, so cannot be adequately described.3 Intentional objects reflect a sense of perceivability in relation to the subject, and as embodied subjects in the world, the dimensions of experiences in relation to the world suggest our ability to perceive from different perspectives, all while only able to describe within the limitations of subjectivity (Husserl, 1972, p. 124). If we apply this limitation to the intersubjective experience with the “other” embodied selves in the world, we arrive at what will be a crucial point in Emmanuel Lévinas’ ethics. The “other,” as an embodied exterior self in relation, presents us with an intentional object whose description can only ever approach adequacy, never arriving, and which can never responsibly 270

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be apprehended. Again, there is an apparent contextual overlap between these practices of phenomenology and modern practices of mindfulness, particularly in the methods of directed consciousness that aim to focus perception on apparent phenomena (especially those of the human body) rather than the suppositions or anxieties that the subject might typically project onto those perceptions without adequate perceptual evidence.

Lévinas’ Ethics in Intersubjective Relation Lévinas, through his examination of the philosophical analyses of Husserl, responds with a phenomenology of his own. While Lévinas is at least in part concerned with embodied intentional consciousness as it were, his examination of the momentary situation in embodiment presents a tension between separation and participation while the subject presents to itself as a constituent in the world (Bergo, 2019). Rather than focus primarily on the particulars of intentional consciousness and a prescribed détente between what is experienced and what is “real,” Lévinas directs much of his phenomenological attention to those other embodied selves in the world, who are exterior to the internal embodied selfhood of the subject, within the experience of the momentary situation. More specifically, his phenomenology provides a challenge to presuppositions of individual participation in an objective “real” world through one’s subjective experience, suggesting instead an intersubjective relation between interior and exterior selves, between sameness and otherness, between the subjective “I” and the objective “you,” wherein separation is wholly insurmountable (Lévinas, 1969, p. 58).4 The concern of the intersubjective situation is, in Lévinas’ philosophy, a concern of ethical engagement with the object of our intention, in particular with the “face” that is presented by embodied others we encounter in the world. As Lisbeth Lipari characterizes it, “…an absolutely and infinite exteriority, the face can never be grasped or possessed or absorbed into what Lévinas calls ‘the same’” (2012, p. 230). The encounter with the absolute other (“Other”) and its face creates a complication for Husserl’s notions of perception and apperception that Lévinas seeks to address (Bergo, 2015, p. 16). In the encounter, the moment of intersubjective presentation of the exterior self as intentional object before the subject, the face of the Other reveals a constituent humanity within its exterior self but also conceals the interiority of that embodied person’s experience, as well as their essential nature (Beyer, 2022). Just as the subject’s own interiority is constituted through the moment-to-moment lived experience of embodiment, there is, in the encounter, a resolved understanding (through Husserl’s apperception) that the face’s presentation also bears a representation of an interiority, like that of the subject (Husserl, 1972, p. 150). The apperception of the exterior self that accompanies the exposure of the subject to the face of the Other carries with it a tacit historicity to which Lévinas objects, not only with respect to Husserl but also to Merleau-Ponty.5 That the other is an embodied self in the world is not in question; rather, it is that the lived experience of the embodied exterior self can be understood as a correlate to the interior self of the embodied subject – that lived experience of the other is a reflection of the subject themselves in the intersubjective situation. However, the “face” of the Other bears in its presentation of exteriority a reminder that there is always a self behind it that will never be seen and known (Lipari, 2012, p. 232). To Lévinas, this is an element of the crucial ethical transgression performed by participation in ontologies that seek to present the Other as “real,” an object in the world to be apprehended as easily as perceived. Instead, Lévinas’ separation frames the relation (not correlation) of the subject “I” to the intentional object “you” in total asymmetry and 271

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irreversibility (Lévinas, 1969, p. 39). In the intersubjective encounter of between the interior self and the Other, the subject recognizes the face as an exterior self in relation, wholly separated from their experience and with an experience beyond the subject’s capacity to consciously apprehend. Once the Other is recognized as an exterior self in the midst of lived experience of the world, Lévinas’ separation exposes the subjective familiarity (or sameness) in the intersubjective encounter with the Other as an intentional object of apprehension (Bergo, 2015, p. 18). In this situation, phenomenological reduction of this “stranger” before the subject into the familiar, taking the “otherness” of the person, present in their face, and reducing it to the sameness of our interior experience, perpetrates what Lévinas calls a tyranny of ontological imperialism (Lévinas, 1969, p. 47). By contrast, the intersubjective relation that preserves the alterity (otherness) of the Other in the encounter permits no such injustice. Thus, the encounter of the face of the Other calls the subject to justice, in the sense that the subject is presented with a singular humanity, in its hunger and fragility, that compels a responsibility upon the subject. When we engage with the Other in the intersubjective situation, that engagement bears with it an ethical necessity that precedes our attempt to know what is objectively “real” about the person within the face, as with an ontology. In the momentary intersubjective situation, the intentional object of the Other contains, to borrow from Husserl, conditions of possibility that are, in Lévinas’ argument, infinitely unknowable (Lévinas, 1969, p. 51). When he refers to the infinity of the Other, it is in their alterity, their fundamental otherness, characterized by an infinite unknowability of the lived experience of the exterior self in the world, that the earlier noted limitation of perception of experience confronts us as the subject. As Krzysztof Ziarek puts it succinctly in his semantic discussion of proximity and Lévinas’ Autrui, “the absolutely other […] is indifferent to representation and the annulment of alterity that results from it” (1989, p. 215). The very unfamiliarity of this stranger’s face, all that is within it that can never be apprehended interior to we as the subject, resists an engagement in participation, and, at the same time, reveals the separation between the subject and the intentional other in the world. The separation with the Other comes not from disengaging in a totalizing practice, but from the subject’s proximity in engagement – the face of the Other presents an irreducible plenitude of possibilities (Ricoeur & Escobar, 2004, p. 87). To engage with the world within this ethics is to see the subjective lived experience as part of the world and only ever part, an “I” dwarfed by the expanse of unknowable “yous” who are also part, but comprise the whole of what is not “I.” By experiencing the alterity of the exterior embodiment of the Other, the subject apprehends their own presence in the world as a possible respondent to the call for justice – when we see the face of the Other in the world, we see it seeing us. Participation, then, in the sense of ontology and phenomenological reduction, is a disengagement with the world, in so much that it rejects the infinity of the Other in the encounter. It seeks to reverse separation and make interior to the subject what is interior to the intentional object. Participation in this sense extends the subjective intentional consciousness to the totality of the Other in the encounter, denying the otherness in the world, otherness that is reflected in the appearance of the face. As an intentional practice of selfhood in the world, it seeks to correlate the experience of the interior self with the experience of other exterior selves in the world, to forego the limitations of apperception in spite of the opacity of the face. It is this absence of phenomenological restraint that produces Lévinas’ bemoaned ethical transgression. Perceiving the face of the Other does not necessarily grant an objective apperceiving; we cannot merely understand as “real” for the world that which 272

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is also a subjective intentional consciousness, else a given moment in our experience (or its representation in thought) could never contain surprise or doubt. Then, coming back to doubt and the phenomenological “bracketing” of epoché, an additional purpose emerges in the practice: that of directing attention to the ethical element in the intersubjective situation. In an ethical practice of this kind, one may enkindle an awareness of the conditions of possibility for exterior selves in the world whose separation and alterity remain in relation to the subjective lived experience. Not only is this ethical in its bracketed perception of the Other as it is presented in its face, it is an ethical practice that directs intention toward a momentary situation in relation to another in all their possibility and vulnerability. The embodied self in encounter with the absolutely other not only brings one into proximity with alterity, but the separation that occurs as a result of this proximity is a separation out of the wholly subjective and into the intersubjective lived experience. It imbues intention with responsibility within the relation between interior and exterior selves in the momentary situation. In an ethical practice of this mindful intention, the responsibility conveyed in the appearance of the face of the Other is enacted through our volition in the intersubjective lived experience. It is a practice that develops as a result from a conceptual underpinning that directs mindfulness toward ethics.

Mindfulness as an Ethical Practice Considering Lévinas’ phenomenology in earnest, ethics is shown to be its essential element. Rather than phenomenological practices that seek to envelop otherness into totalizing sameness, to capture certainty from infinite unknowability, Lévinas shows that it is in approaching alterity that our own limitations are exposed. Presented with the “face” of the Other, we engage with human fallibility and vulnerability in embodiment in the world. From this encounter, the ethical underpinning of lived experience is an apparent phenomena for the subject in such engagement. Phenomenological practices of directing subjective intention (and intentional consciousness) can likewise be directed toward an ethical engagement with otherness, whether it is reflected in the face which turns to us or in proximity to the infinite. The call to responsibility in the intersubjective situation is, through such ethical practices, conveyed into enacted responsibility in the world. In Lévinas’ argument, phenomenological practices of enacted responsibility stand in contrast to participation as a practice of self that attempts to fully grasp and contain the alterity of the other lived experience in the world, and here we see a parallel between phenomenological practices that forego suppositions of representation of the objective (or “real”) and mindfulness practices that direct the subject’s intentional consciousness, not toward participation, but toward separation in the lived experience. Lévinas’ philosophy and phenomenology each provide components of perceiving the momentary present wherein the subjective intention may be directed into an enactment of responsibility in an ethical practice of engaging in the intersubjective situation. What’s more, this argument forms a framework by which mindfulness can be understood to contain an essential ethical element. When one observes (or further, “brackets” the perceptions of) the interior self-reflected in a situation in the world, one does not include what is objectively “real.” Likewise, mindfulness practices most often turn observations of embodied selves to the perceptions of the body itself – the feeling of cool air filling the lungs with each breath (not of the atmosphere’s chemical composition or the oxygenation of blood), the feeling of soft dirt under the soles of the feet with each step (not of the repulsion between 273

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negatively charged particles at the threshold between our body and the ground) – that validate the separation between the subject and the infinite conditions of possibility which, in Lévinas, are never apprehended. Representation, too, is beyond totalizing, when mindfulness practices direct the subjective intention not toward the thought and feeling of memory, or to the certainty and dread of past and future, but instead call the subject to fully inhabit the present moment. Compare this to Lévinas’ criticism of the thematizing or totalizing practice of “manifestation,” with its focus on bringing (through representation) presence from ungraspable pasts and futures (AT 13). When contrasted with the fourteen precepts of engaged Buddhism espoused by Thích Nhất Hạnh, there are additional parallels to this phenomenology apparent in those mindfulness practices, with prohibitions for adherents to impose their subjective interpretations and judgments upon other people, or to remaining indifferent toward the hunger and vulnerability of those “others’’ who present themselves to the subject in the world (Lévinas, 1999, p. 17). Similarly, these spiritual precepts instruct adherents to engage in mindfulness practices in order to be conscious of the present momentary situation, particularly as one inhabits one’s body in the living world, and to avoid distractions from imagined situations, or situations in memory that turn intentional consciousness away from the present. Modern mindfulness practices (including the aforementioned meditations, intentional breathing exercises, body-mind awareness through movements such as yoga, and directed attention toward internal thoughts and feelings), much like those of phenomenology, can resonate intellectually or emotionally with embodied persons who benefit from therapeutic processes of observation that engage with the present situation in the world, both subjective and intersubjective (Crane et al., 2014). These practices direct the intention of the subject to the temporal qualities of lived experience – to the limitations of perception, the finite nature of our biological presence. They direct the intention to the vulnerability of lived experience – to the forces of harm that cause our fears and anxieties. Like phenomenological observations, these mindfulness practices place subjective intention in an asymmetrical situation of embodiment in the world. They also go beyond this, as we develop the argument of separation that Lévinas makes. They are instilled with the suspension of our personal judgments. They do not seek to affirm or deny perception or apperception that are not present in the momentary situation, but rather put them aside as inconsequential. Their purpose is not the grasping, controlling effect of participation. Instead, these practices enable the subject to reflect on the moment-to-moment lived experience of interior selfhood, engaging in a world through intersubjective experiences with exterior selves, accepting circumstances in all their uncertainty. Welcoming the infinite – unknowable – in these practices can be connected to Lévinas’ argument for an ethical principle by which to direct our intentional consciousness toward an experience of responsibility.

Conclusion Mindfulness practices, as they are presently employed in contemporary culture, are largely divested of their spiritual context. The concepts (religious and philosophical) that formed the foundation of many of these practices were grounded on the lived experience of embodiment in the world, not as a solitary interior self, but in the presence of exterior selves. The Buddhist religious and philosophical concepts discussed by Rahula and Hạnh, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, which were foundational to many of these mindfulness practices, were developed as a result of the lived experiences of embodied persons in 274

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the world, vulnerable and uncertain. Moreover, those experiences arose not in a solitary, subjective consciousness of apparent phenomena, but in relation to a world of exterior selves present to one another. That these exterior selves were embodied as we in the world had a profound effect on the lived experience of those who adopted such spiritual practices. Embodied persons were vulnerable to many worldly harms, and the intersubjective relation between persons in this situation of embodiment revealed what Siddhattha Gotama had taught: when we see the face of another person in their suffering, we must not look away, must not alter the apparent perception, lest the inadequate representation of life without pain increase our own anxieties and fears. Lévinas’ analysis of Husserl’s phenomenological practices transformed the limitations of apperception into an alterity that was not only beyond the subject’s capacity to overcome, but also into an ethics of intersubjective responsibility in a situation of uncertainty and human vulnerability. A practice of mindfulness exercised with an understanding of Lévinas is both secular and ethical, echoing the conceptual origins of mindfulness practices, even in the absence of their original religious context. Our embodiment imbues us with the means of engaging with the living world, as it is before us in the moment, unfettered by fantasies that we impose upon its unknowability. Through Lévinas’ phenomenology, mindfulness can enact responsibility within intersubjective embodiment.

Notes 1 Lévinas would come to disagree (at least in part) with both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty on this subject-object interaction. Merleau-Ponty, for his part, frequently characterizes the body as “flesh” and as constituting the extent of subjective temporal experience in relation to the “flesh” of the world. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty states, “...the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to my flesh, that I ‘am of the world’ and that I am not it” (1968, p. 127). In this view, the subject themself is validated in their experience in the relation. While the experience in this account is a relation between the perceiving subject and an undeniable object “pressed” into proximity (or contact), Merleau-Ponty would go on to develop the idea of the écart, or divergence, with which Lévinas would also take issue later. 2 To be apprehended in this sense is to be recognized as significant. In Husserl’s concept of the “lifeworld,” the objects of intentional consciousness appear in an environment in which their presence may be accompanied by a “force” resulting from meaning. For instance, as I look at my desk and see a red pencil, the significance of the pencil as an instrument that I can use to annotate or edit a written document is a phenomenon in the relation between subject and object (Beyer, 2022). 3 In this case, Husserl’s adequacy is not a reflection of whether or not an experienced perception is veridical – whether or not there is an external object that is represented in relation to the subject in their perception. Rather, adequacy of phenomenological description relies on a noematic content in the perceptual experience which renders the experience the same for the subject whether or not the object is external. For instance, I can imagine a conversation between myself and a person I have previously met (and relate that experience through phenomenological description), but I cannot adequately describe the phenomenon between myself in conversation with a person whom I cannot imagine, since there is no perceptual content (Beyer, 2022). 4 While Lévinas and Merleau-Ponty did not agree on ideas of separation, proximity, and divergence, the disagreements were at times subtle. For Lévinas, separation was produced in the subject’s proximity to alterity; responsibility comes from recognizing alterity in the face of the Other. For Merleau-Ponty the écart (divergence) which proves the subject is separate from the world (as different) is, at the same time, part of a reversible relation of reciprocity between sameness and otherness. This reversibility would be a key component of Lévinas’ disagreement (Reynolds 2002, p. 68). 5 In Lévinas’ view, Merleau-Ponty’s conception of alterity tolerates the integration of subject and difference, a necessarily totalizing act. Merleau-Ponty, for his part, argued that this integration is

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Nikolaus-Palle Carey a shifting, mutually negotiated “encroachment” in intersubjective relation in which the boundary of the subjective is both self-derived and other-derived. For Lévinas, this could not be understood as alterity, regardless of reciprocity or parity between subject and object – it is a presupposition imposed upon the absolutely (infinite) other (Reynolds 2002, p. 71).

References Bergo, B. (2015). Reading Levinas as a Husserlian (might do). Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 36 (2), 295–345. Bergo, B. (2019). Notes to Emmanuel Levinas. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/notes.html#note-9 Beyer, C. (2022). ‘Edmund Husserl’. In Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford ­Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/husserl Crane, C., Crane, R. S., Eames, C., Fennell, M. J. V., Silverton, S., Williams, J. M., & Barnhofer, T. (2014). The effects of amount of home meditation practice in mindfulness based cognitive therapy on hazard of relapse to depression in the staying well after depression trial. Behaviour Research and Therapy 63, 17–24. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2014.08.015 Husserl, E. (1972). Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Collier-Macmillan. Lévinas, E. (1969). Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority (A. Lingis, Trans.). Duquesne ­University Press. Lévinas, E. (1999). Alterity and Transcendence (M. Smith, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Lipari, L. (2012). Rhetoric’s other: Levinas, listening, and the ethical response. Philosophy & Rhetoric 45 (3), 227–245. https://doi.org/10.5325/philrhet.45.3.0227 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible (C. Lefort, Trans.). Northwestern University Press. Nhất Hạnh, T. (1993). Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism (F. Eppsteiner, Ed.). Parallax Press. Parsons, C. E., Crane, C., Parsons, L. J., Fjorback, L. O., & Kuyken, W. (2017). Home practice in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy and mindfulness-based stress reduction: A systematic review and meta-analysis of participants’ mindfulness practice and its association with outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy 95, 29–41. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2017.05.004 Rahula, W. (1974). What the Buddha Taught. Grove Press. Reynolds, J. (2002). Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and the alterity of the other. Symposium 6 (1), 63–78. https://doi.org/10.5840/SYMPOSIUM2002616 Ricoeur, P., & Escobar, M. (2004). Otherwise: A Reading of Emmanuel Levinas’s “Otherwise than Being or beyond Essence.” Yale French Studies 104, 82–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3182506 Rogers, S. L. (2019). Mindfulness, mental health, and wellness. GPSolo 36 (3), 12–17. https://www. jstor.org/stable/27044610 Shonin, E., Van Gordon, W., & Griffiths, M. D. (2015). Does mindfulness work? BMJ: British Medical Journal, 351. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26523903 Ziarek, K. (1989). Semantics of proximity: Language and the other in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Research in Phenomenology 19 (1), 213–247. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24658650

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PART IV

Mindfulness, Time and Attention

18 CONTRASTING EMOTIONS AND NOTIONS OF TEMPORALITY IN MINDFULNESS PRACTICE AND IN HEIDEGGER’S PHENOMENOLOGY Evie Filea Overview What life could be like if only we were aware of death, if only we knew how brief and transient life is. […] The fact is, if you see the present tense, boy, do you see it! And boy, can you celebrate it!1

Mindfulness is a secularised Buddhist practice, which has recently gained enormous popularity in the West through the influential work of clinical psychologists and Buddhism practitioners such Jon Kabat-Zinn, Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chödrön, Mark Williams, John Teasdale, Zindel Segal, and many others.2 The phenomenology movement in philosophy first appeared in Continental Europe at the beginning of the previous century with Edmund Husserl, who was looking for a method to access the origin of ideas in the concrete lived experience, and not in an impersonal objectivism of a narrow scientific attitude. Husserl inspired a whole generation of philosophers who changed the focus and limits of the phenomenology method, such as Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Ricoeur and others (e.g., see Kearney, 1994). In recent years, there have been many philosophically enriching attempts to draw similarities between mindfulness and the method of phenomenology (e.g., see Bitbol, 2019; Depraz, 2019; Lundh, 2020; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991, and others). Below I compare several shared themes between Mindfulness’ theory and Heidegger’s early conceptualisation of phenomenology. I examine in particular (i) the similarities in the description ofordinary perception in the two accounts, according to which we can’t confront ‘things’ as they truly are, and (ii) the process of detachment from the everyday way of living one’s life to be able to see things anew. In particular, I am comparing the descriptions of the ‘authentic’ mode of experiencing the world and experiencing the world in ‘mindfulness awareness’, respectively, focusing on the contrasting emotions associated with them. I agree with other scholars who have argued that Mindfulness practice cannot be isolated from the metaphysical, epistemological, and soteriological proposals of Buddhism (such as DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-23

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Stone & Zahavi, 2021) and even though my own paper does not attempt an in-depth comparison of the affiliations of Heidegger’s thought with East Asian philosophical traditions (e.g., Chung-yuan, 1975; Heim, 1984; Parkes, 1987; Zimmerman, 2006), it nonetheless examines how the two different notions of temporality emphasise the gap between the two accounts. In the first part of my chapter, I introduce some of the common points between Heidegger’s ‘average everydayness, and what the Mindfulness practitioners call living on autopilot’. I argue that the emotions associated with these two ways of living your life, are similarly described in the two accounts, as one experiencing daydreaming, being numb, asleep, or unconscious. In the second part, I compare the motivation drive, the process of breaking free from this ordinary automated way of experiencing the world, and the implications of the authentic mode of resoluteness and the mindful awareness, respectively. My aim is to demonstrate that whereas in both accounts our ordinary perception of the environment is described similarly, breaking free from is associated with radically different emotions for the two traditions. On the one hand, the moment of detachment from the everyday, inauthentic, and irresolute way of existing, the moment of vision (Augenblick), is always linked to anxiety (Angst) in the face of owning our mortal existence. Heidegger saw that one’s awareness of one’s own death somehow shakes off the veil of one’s own thrownness in the world, making them realise that oneself alone is responsible for the way one exists. This moment is described as a sudden almost violent event that forces Dasein to confront its own potential for selfhood, revealing that its most basic temporary dimension is the future. It can be understood as a moment of great intensity, put in high contrast to the passive tranquillity of Dasein’s everyday involvement within the ‘they-self’. This view is, however, in direct contrast to how Mindfulness practitioners describe the interruption from the everyday dealing with things in our environment which typically absorb us. Mindfulness practitioners suggest that this shift of awareness happens through residing in stillness. When shifting our attention to what is happening to our body at this present moment, we abandon the unfounded worrying or planning about the future which for Mindfulness practitioners is considered to be completely out of our control. What is more, the shift from the everyday mode of experiencing the world to a mindful way of living one’s life is associated with peacefulness and a sense calmness, in opposition to the preoccupation by our daily encountering with the world which for Mindfulness practitioners is seen as an always stressful and overwhelming experience. I finally conclude that despite the shared themes and similar descriptions of everyday experience, the two accounts have unbridged metaphysical, ontological, and existential differences. Heidegger’s ideal of the individual taking responsibility and freedom to own and create a life as a work of art resonates with the existential vision of the 50s and the 60s but it is very different to the ideal of ‘letting go’, radical acceptance, receptivity and surrender in the present moment that Mindfulness as a secular Buddhist practice stands for.

Living on Autopilot The Wandering Mind Mindfulness strategies have recently gained enormous popularity in the West especially in places where increased productivity, focus, and competitive results are expected, such as the workplace, higher education, and the fitness industry (e.g., Bush, 2011; Kersemaekers 280

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et al., 2018; Stanley et al., 2011). Mindfulness is used as a science-based strategy to reduce stress, increase productivity, ease symptoms of anxiety, depression, and divided attention, as well as a therapeutic tool to cope with physical pain, disease, and death (e.g., Anālayo 2016, 2017; Kabat-Zinn, 1994, 2005a, 2005b; Williams, Teasdale, Segal, & Kabat-Zinn, 2007). It has also been vastly integrated in psychotherapeutic programs, some of which use it as their main therapeutic strategy, called Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBIs), such as Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness-based stress reduction program (MBSR). There are diverse definitions of what Mindfulness practice really refers to, not only among its variant clinical employments in the West, but also among the several Buddhist traditions (Anālayo, 2017, 2018; Williams & Kabat-Zinn, 2013). In most cases, secular Mindfulness theory begins with the observation that we have an inherent tendency towards getting so absorbed with everyday mundane tasks that we lose sense of space and time, or we can’t explain how we ended up doing what we were doing. In the same way we can drive for very long distances without realising it, Mindfulness’ main claim is that we are not really present moment-by-moment for much of our lives, a phenomenon also colloquially known as the ‘pilot brain’ or the ‘wandering mind’. Life on autopilot is a life of indifference, and dullness. When mindlessly jumping from one task to the other, we take unconscious automatic decisions, avoiding reflecting on how we want to live our lives. When we can’t really pay attention to what is happening right now, because we are lost daydreaming, thinking about things that haven’t happened yet, planning the future, or going over the past, we do not appreciate our life nor live it to the fullest. Failing to experience life phenomena in the vividness of the moment they arise, will eventually lead to a chronic feeling of absent-mindedness and forgetfulness. Jack Kornfield, one of the teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West once said; ‘when we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another – and ourselves’. Constantly being caught up in everyday tasks, creates a sense of loss of self-awareness, and a sense of having no-responsibility over your life. The ‘autopilot mode’ of daily life, the experience that one merely exists rather than lives their life, is the opposite to experiencing life ‘mindfully’ or in ‘full awareness’. For the Eastern philosophical tradition, the human tendency towards escapism and daydreaming when one is not ‘grounded in the present moment’, is considered to be the main source of emotional reactivity, which is understood as the main cause of suffering. Living your life on autopilot, failing to meaningfully connect with your environment and yourself, will eventually generate negative feelings, stress, anxiety or worry. The pain and suffering associated with our tendency not to see things as they truly are right now, choosing to distract ourselves with what needs to be next, wishing things to be different, or clinging to past memories, are all symptoms of what the Eastern tradition considers as human resistance towards accepting the impermanence which characterises the phenomenal world (Anālayo, 2018; Chödrön, 2012). A key principle of Buddhism is that whatever is experienced is a manifestation of change and there is nothing we humans can do about it; bodies will grow old, we lose loved ones, we fall sick, we get disappointed, we experience physical pain (Anālayo, 2018). Even positive situations are thought as going to eventually cause some suffering because of the human tendency to cling to the positive things, which as everything else will last only temporarily. Any attempt to halt, prevent or resist the fundamental uncertainty of the human situation, clinging to the past, or cultivating expectations about the future, generates suffering. The main task of mindfulness practice is thus to cultivate the awareness that our life is 281

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manifested as impermanence. The tendency to get caught into an autopilot mode when we focus on what needs to be done next to achieve this or the other is basically a result of our predisposition to denying the flux of experience. This knowledge is supposed to liberate us from our tendency to control it and make us less vulnerable to time-related stress, disappointment, grief, and worry. Pema Chödrön writes; ‘When we resist change, it’s called suffering. But when we can completely let go and not struggle against it, when we can embrace the groundlessness of our situation and relax into its dynamic quality, that’s called enlightenment’ (2012, p. 12). Also, somewhere else she adds: ‘We have a choice. We can spend our whole life suffering because we can’t relax with how things really are, or we can relax and embrace the open-endedness of the human situation, which is fresh, unfixated, unbiased’ (Chödrön, 2012, p. 20). Mindfulness or awareness, two terms that are often used interchangeably in the bibliography, is therefore a mental quality that has to be learned and cultivated through the constant practice of returning to the present moment to ‘know what is happening right now and proceed accordingly’ (Anālayo, 2018, p. 2). Some scholars explain that mindfulness should not be confused with consciousness, since whether we are mindful of a meditation object or caught up in a dream or fantasy, the flow of consciousness is always there. What marks the difference between mindfulness and consciousness is that the second is a continuously present process of knowing whereas the first is a quality that is not present in any type of experience (Anālayo, 2017, 2018). Embracing life’s impermanence, is not supposed to be experienced as scary or threatening but as refreshing, liberating, and inspiring. Cultivating the mental skill to shift your awareness to the present moment, is thought to help one to become not just ‘more focused, more productive’, but also to ‘feel more deeply, think more clearly, act more fully’ (Maitreyabandhu, 2009). Awareness of the body holds a key role in this process. As the sense of impermanence is felt in our own body, mindfulness strategies typically begin with focusing the attention on basic bodily functions, such as breathing, and the experience of feelings that naturally occur in the body. This practice might even mean giving attention to the very essence of impermanence, to the fact that this very body will sooner or later pass away (Anālayo, 2017, 2018). Learning to shift the attention to the ‘constant arising and passing away of the breath’ one soon might realise that ‘the continuity of the body, which so easily is just taken for granted, entirely depends on the constant arising and passing away of the breath. And the breath itself is so palpably impermanent, it is nothing but a changing flow’ (Anālayo, 2018, p. 92).

The Average Everydayness In the period of writing Being and Time (1962), Heidegger claimed that the task of his philosophy was to interpret human life in its ‘Being-character’ on the ground, theme, and condition of possibility of factical life. He writes that Dasein, Heidegger’s term for human being, an ordinary German term which translates both as ‘presence’ and ‘existence’, understands its Being as constituted and manifested as Being-in-the-world as a ‘fact’. Dasein is essentially a being who is always ‘there’, always embedded within a world that is not distinct from it having its existence already bound up ‘with the Being of those entities which it encounters within its own world’ (p. 82/SZ, p. 56). For Heidegger, our social embeddedness is ‘something factical’. The phenomenon of care (Sorge) describes Dasein’s own way of existing which is to be fundamentally related to or concerned with its environment (Umwelt), 282

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not in the sense of space-time only, but also in the sense of belonging, relating, manipulating, and caring about its surroundings. Heidegger characterises Dasein as ‘thrown’ in the world, in the sense that it is always situated within a shared historical and cultural context that has not chosen to be born at, yet it is definitive of its possibilities for action as well as for self-understanding. The a priori participation in a social context, a direct consequence of Dasein fundamentally understood as being-in-the-world, is an enabling condition that first opens us onto a world and gives us the resources for being human. However, if human agents can only understand themselves against the backdrop of a shared medium of intelligibility, what Heidegger calls the ‘They’ (Das Man), it means that all its concrete possibilities are drawn by a pool of interpretations within the range of familiarity in which they find themselves. Therefore, whereas the participation in the ‘They’ gives Dasein the resources for selfunderstanding and possibilities for action, it also threatens ‘the possible options of choice to what lies within the range of the familiar, the attainable, the respectable -that which is fitting and proper’ (p. 195/SZ, p. 239). Thrownness in the world, one of Dasein’s fundamental structures that make up the temporal dimension of Dasein, can level down Dasein’s possibilities. Heidegger argues that in the ordinary busyness of handling daily affairs, one tends to fall into mundane activities, becoming so mired down in ordinary chores satisfying the easily handled rules and public norms of the ‘they’, that tears the possibility of taking hold of their existence and take responsibility for themselves. Heidegger describes that when in the state of everydayness, Dasein avoids confronting its own existence as it is ruled by the anonymous They – which means it is basically no one. Dasein’s falling tendency aims to describe our tendency towards forgetting our existence at issue for us. The German term verfallen has the meaning of falling into the power of something from which you cannot escape. Getting absorbed in everyday life, which is how Dasein ‘proximally and for the most part’ exists and which is inauthentic, means that Dasein ordinarily fails to own up to its truth. In Heidegger’s words: ‘in existing as thrownDasein constantly lags behind its possibilities’ (p. 330/SZ, p. 285). The falling absorption in the They ultimately creates a disjointed alienated way of living from an authentic self, which for Heidegger refers to a condition in which Dasein is not properly its own Being. Falling is associated with ‘forgetfulness’, a sense of futility and indifference which distract us from getting in contact with our unique and whole self. Inauthentic Dasein ‘dwells with things, gets entangled in its own self, and lets itself be drawn along by things’, with the result that it ‘loses itself within itself, so that the past becomes a forgetting and the future a mere expecting of what is just coming on’ (p. 333/SZ, p. 287). Maintaining a somewhat consistency with the Mindfulness position that was introduced earlier, Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time is that humans ordinarily find themselves preoccupied with everyday tasks, always attending to something, expecting something to happen in the future, or reckoning something that happened in the past. Heidegger shares with Mindfulness the view that humans have a tendency to become so preoccupied with their lived realities, enacting socially approved roles or becoming so busy with dealing with entities, that are essentially instruments ‘in-order-to’ do everyday things, so that they eventually lose sight of the background conditions (‘worldhood’) that first make it possible to encounter anything at all. The state of the average everydayness is emotionally described with very similar colours to living a life on autopilot in Mindfulness practice. It is a dull, boring, unquestioned, and automated way of existing. In the state of average everydayness, we enact socially approved roles and get lost in the mundane chores chosen by the others for us. We 283

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fail to see what life is all about, because we throw ourselves into what we do. Heidegger writes: ‘the self must forget itself’. As a result, we no longer see our own existence being a question for us. We feel assured that everything is in place as long as we do what ‘one does’. Our dispersal in everyday preoccupations and the ‘anonymous’ roles we play aggravate our tendency towards forgetfulness that at some point our lives will be completed (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001).

Two Ways of Escaping the Autopilot Whereas the description of living on autopilot shares several common elements between the two accounts, the motivating power, the process of shifting out of it to see things anew as well as the emotions associated with it, are described very differently. I will try to demonstrate why I believe this is a result of two very different concepts of temporality associated with each account. To begin with, in Mindfulness practice, what awakens us from the auto-pilot mode, including emotional autopilot, is to train ourselves to reside in stillness, pausing the automated responses to how we habitually engage with the world. The felt physical presence of the body is often used as an ‘anchor of awareness of the present moment’, since during normal daily life this felt sense of physical presence tends to be remained unnoticed.3 In many Mindfulness programs, one of the most common introductory exercises is to start noticing the body in all possible kinds of everyday situation (e.g., brushing your teeth, eating lunch, walking to work, wearing your clothes). That’s because Mindfulness practice encourages to cultivate the skill to deliberately bring moment-to-moment attention to every single mundane activity, in order to create some sort of ‘gap’ between me and the world. That will allow space and time for reflection, as well as a sense of mastery, and ownership over my body, my time, and my surrounding space. For the Buddhist tradition, feelings and emotions are ephemeral, and each of them is a messenger of impermanence. Mindfulness practice encourages not to identify with them, positive, or negative, but to take a step back instead and simply become aware that ‘there is a feeling’. Some practitioners encourage observing where the feeling is located in the body. Feeling impermanence makes it clear that neither pleasure nor pain last forever. And that’s why Mindfulness can be so comforting, so soothing when in a moment of crisis, worry or in the face of a disease or even death. The message is that it is futile to cling to feelings that are so ephemeral and constantly changing. As long as we stay rooted in awareness of the whole body in the present moment and attuned to this directly felt sense of change, without getting identified with it, the thoughts and worries will gradually lose their power to carry the mind away from the present moment. Eventually emotions and feelings can just come to be part of a comprehensive experience of impermanence. When one manages to cultivate awareness in the present moment, they let themselves free from overwhelming intense worldly thoughts and emotions, and gradually learn to establish a constant mode of subtle joy even during the most challenging or intense moments. Letting go means just it says. It’s an invitation to cease clinging to anything – whether it be an idea, a thing, an event, a particular time, or a view, or desire. It is a conscious decision to release with full acceptance into the stream of present moments as they are unfolding. To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to 284

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be as they are without getting caught up in you attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking. It’s akin to letting your palm open to unhand something you have been holding on to. (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 48) On the other hand, for Heidegger, what can free us from the tranquilisation of our complacent absorption in everydayness, is a profound affective experience. To gain access to the authentic situation of understanding, to get into the right way of seeing, demands passion as a counterweight to the indifference of the everyday attitude. The fundamental mood of anxiety or dread (Angst) is what can shake off the sense of functioning on autopilot, which is an inauthentic way of existing. The state of anxiety plays an incredibly significant role as it provides ‘the phenomenal basis for explicitly grasping Dasein’s primordial totality of Being’ (p. 227/SZ, p.182). The experience of anxiety is described as an ‘uncanny feeling’, as a feeling of ‘not-being-at-home’. When one is faced with anxiety, the world appears to have lost its usual significance and everyday familiarity collapses into insignificance. For Heidegger, this means that to be able to become aware of our existence and the lostness in the They to be revealed, violence needs to be done to the everyday way of living. This is a high contrast to the Buddhist/Mindfulness tradition according to which the transition out of the autopilot happens gradually, systematically, ‘yet not in a forceful manner’ (Anālayo, p. 6) and it is the result of ‘acceptance’ and ‘kindness’ towards ourselves, others, and whatever is experienced. However, Heidegger sees only the marginal experiences of anxiety and death as being able to evoke a certain mood that can function as a countermovement to the falling tendency of factical life. He has no method or system in place on how to submit to what the mood of anxiety wants to reveal to us and become authentic, as in the Mindfulness practice. The genuine situation of understanding and turning around life’s falling tendency can only come about through a resolute decision. For Heidegger, we take over our situatedness with resoluteness – a decisive dedication to what we want to accomplish for our lives. The ­German term Entschlossenheit for resoluteness literally means ‘openness’ or the state of being ‘unlocked’. Resoluteness is to be authentically oneself escaping the slavery of the They. The moment of detachment from the everyday inauthentic way of existing, Heidegger calls the moment of vision (Augenblick). It can be understood as a moment of great intensity which forces Dasein to reflect upon its role, put in high contrast to the passive tranquillity of Dasein’s everyday involvement within the ‘they-self’. It is a terrifying and shattering event, characterised by the absence of a taken-for-granted basis for assessment and inspiration (Guignon & Pereboom, 2001). Standing face-to-face with our ‘being-toward-death’, the feeling of anxiety comes as the result of confronting an ‘abyss of meaninglessness’. The break from living on autopilot for Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is marked by the brutal realisation that there are no underlying grounds to legitimate our existence and to define the aim of our life. We find ourselves ‘abandoned’, ‘thrown’ into a world with no fixed foundations for our beliefs and practices. Standing face to face with our own ‘beingtoward-death’, we come to realise we are basically isolated individuals, devoid of built-in design or purpose, who have to make sense of the world and find meaning for our lives on our own. Alienated from the things that are happening around us, and removed from our everyday concern with the world, anxiety brings us face to face with what we have been avoiding confronting in our everyday dealing with things: our own terrifying existence, or the fact that its Being is primordially dominated by nullity. For Heidegger, death awareness 285

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somehow shakes off the veil of my own thrownness and I realise that myself alone am I responsible for the way I exist. In anxiety, ‘Dasein finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence’ (p. 310/SZ, p. 266). Heidegger thought that when we are faced up to our ‘Being-toward-death’, we realise our freedom to exist authentically or inauthentically, in the sense of owning up to our lives or not. In the face of the fact that I am going to die, I confront myself. So, the process of anticipating the finality and finitude of existence is liberating in the sense that it breaks the hold of any previous identification with some previously attained or expected possibilities. Gelven (1970) describes it as follows; ‘Plucked out of the stream of our daily concerns, we seem forced to reflect upon our existence as if it were a totally new revelation. We observe ourselves, suspended from the concerns that occupy our consciousness, almost aware of ourselves as something independent of our daily concerns’ (p. 115). Anxiety is what makes Dasein realise that the lostness in the They is a form of fleeing the existential choice to be oneself. Anxiety tears us out of everyday absorption in things, merely revealing that we are not fixed entities. Being authentic means becoming free to transform your practices in the light of the realisation of you utter groundlessness ­(Zimmerman, 2006). For Heidegger, there is no pre-given ‘human nature’ that has been lost and needs to be found or re-discovered, for Dasein’s essence lies in its existence. The self is an unfolding event or a happening, or in his words, the ‘moment’ of a life course ‘stretched out between birth and death’. However, for the Buddhist/Mindfulness tradition, the key notions of nothingness and groundlessness are associated with the radical absence of anything stable or certain, including the notion of self, in the face of the-ever changing phenomenon world. Therefore, in the case of Mindfulness, freedom from all restraints is associated with something much more radical than what Heidegger attempted to describe. All phenomena are empty whatsoever, and since there is no hierarchy of phenomenal reality, every phenomenon is of equal worth: ‘when real and unreal both are absent from the mind, nothing else remains for mind to do but rest in perfect peace, from concept free’ (Shantideva, as cited in Chödrön, 2012, p. 131; also see Zimmerman, 2006). Another key difference between the two accounts is that for Heidegger authenticity is characterised by a distinctive temporal structure. Authentic existence is to become fully aware of one’s ability-to-be in a certain set of circumstances. In Heidegger’s words: ‘the resolution is precisely the disclosive projection and determination of what is factically possibly at the time’ (p. 345/SZ, p. 299). Where inauthentic existence is lost in the dispersal of making-present, instrumentalist means-end living actions are done in order to get something. An authentic life is lived as a unified flow characterised by ‘anticipation’, and ‘forward-directedness’ into a finite range of possibilities that give coherence, cohesiveness and integrity to a life course. On the other hand, for the Mindfulness tradition, facing nothingness is more like a call for no-identification with any situation, feeling, or thought, including identification with our own bodies which are as ephemeral as everything else in this world. For Mindfulness, liberation from everydayness is the acceptance that change is fundamentally out of our control, and the emotional reactions of stress, pain, distraction, anxiety are merely the result of our resistance to accepting this principle. In other words, whereas the essential groundlessness and emptiness of human existence for Heidegger means that one should own and shape their life as they wish to, for the Mindfulness tradition, it suggests that one should learn to let go of the worldly attachment in this thought or expectation. 286

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What is more, where Mindfulness sees that only the present exists, Heidegger primordially understands Dasein essentially as a projection into the future, as being-ahead-of-itself. The future as a way of existing, turns out to be the ultimate presupposition of authentic existence. To have a future means to expect, to anticipate, to look forward to. Second in importance to the future is the past. The present is the least significant of the three ekstases. Authentic temporality means that Dasein actually ‘temporalises’ itself ‘in the way of the future and having been united in the Present’ (p. 449/SZ, p. 398). Whereas in its everyday existence it is fragmented into a series of means-ends strategies, when confronted with its being-towards-death, the authentic Dasein is ‘snatched back from the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer themselves as closest to one’ and focuses itself into a range of possibilities ‘which are determined by the end and so are understood as finite’ (p. 435/SZ, p. 308). In both accounts, to achieve this freedom from living on autopilot or from existing inauthentically, is to adopt a certain orientation towards our own lived experience which is characterised by curiosity, openness and freedom from conditioned perceptions and reactions about their past and future. Yet, the driving force behind this shift is again very different. Mindfulness is viewed as providing the necessary space and time for the individual to stop worrying about what needs to be done next, and experience life phenomena with full awareness, mental clarity, and curiosity. The mental tools of mindfulness practice which have been mostly developed for therapeutic purposes by contemporary psychologists with a Buddhist background, aim to establish a sense of tranquillity and stability even in the middle of the ‘full catastrophe’ (Kabat-Zinn, 1994, p. 53). That might suggest though that leading a mindful life can have some sort of instrumental value, as it is too often associated with productivity, best results, and concentration in a fast-paced, technologically overstimulated environment. On the contrary, for early Heidegger it is the absorption in everyday mundane tasks that is associated with a sense of tranquillity in the sense that ‘everything is ‘in the best of order’ (p. 222/SZ, p. 222). The motivating drive to stop living on autopilot for Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is the ‘existential guilt’ in the face of having failed to carry out the mandate to fulfil all their life possibilities, and not a more comfortable and manageable lifestyle. His ideal is of an ‘authentic individual’ who is ‘no longer caught in the narroweddown mentality of an anonymous, inauthentic ‘everybody’’ (Guignon, 2006). The opposite mode of ‘inauthentic’ existence is therefore, not to stop defining one’s identity as a ‘beingtoward’ the realisation of a final configuration of possibilities, but to stop experiencing life as ‘techne’ or a matter of production which has its end outside itself (Guignon, 2006, p. 24). If we can view Mindfulness as a science-based secular step-by-step system towards slowing down and coping with an overwhelming lifestyle, Heidegger’s existential phenomenology is a call for turning your life to a work of art, living with decisiveness, intensity, openness and passion.

Conclusion This chapter aimed to demonstrate that despite the several common themes between Mindfulness practice and early Heidegger’s phenomenology, the two accounts have significant differences as revealed by the contrasting emotions associated with the moment of ‘breaking free’ from living on autopilot. The different notions of temporality emphasise the gap between the two accounts. Mindfulness practice ultimately aims to bring us back to the 287

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present moment, to the felt sense of the body, to the liberating simplicity of the breath against the overwhelming weight of possibilities. It teaches us how to cope with the existential terror and cultivate resilience against marginal emotions. It promotes an ideal of receptivity, acceptance, and living a slow-paced life which allows time and space to experience phenomena in the vividness they first occur. It is no surprise that it has received great popularity in the 21st century, promoting mental strategies against the overwhelmingly fast paced, and technologically over-stimulated lifestyle of our era. On the other hand, Heidegger’s phenomenology, which was written during the rise of modernity, echoes more the existential call to be free from social constraints that narrow down one’s possibilities and to embrace our responsibility for self-fashioning with integrity and courage. Heidegger’s commitment was towards the future. He saw humans as a duality consisting of both facticity and transcendence, being capable of breaking from their mere factual giveness by taking a stand on it and creating their lives as they could or should be.

Notes 1 Extract from a 1994 interview of writer Dennis Potter who was dying of cancer by Melvyn Bragg. In his interview Potter was talking about how the presence of death had enabled him to see things that he hadn’t properly seen before, flying with intellectual energy and characteristic defiance. 2 Several scholars have recently attempted to throw light to the history of the mindfulness movement in the West and Buddhism’s confrontation with modernity in the face of postcolonialism, for instance, see Thompson (2020) and McMahan (2008). 3 This might remind Heidegger’s own claim that when preoccupied with everyday activities, there is no ‘gap’ between Dasein and the ready-to-hand (zuhanden) entities of its environment which present themselves as available to use for certain sort of tasks ‘in-order-to’.

References Anālayo (2016) Mindfully Facing Disease and Death, Compassionate Advice from Early Buddhist Texts, Cambridge: Windhorse Publications. Anālayo (2017) The Luminous Mind in Theravada and Dharmaguptaka Discourses, Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 13, pp. 9–49. Anālayo (2018) Sati paṭṭhāna Meditation: A Practice Guide, Cambridge: Windhorse Publications. Bitbol, M. (2019) Consciousness, Being & Life: Phenomenological Approaches to Mindfulness, Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 50, pp. 127–161. Bush, M. (2011) Mindfulness in Higher Education, Contemporary Buddhism, 12 (1), pp. 183–197. Chödrön, P. (2012) Living Beautifully With Uncertainty and Change, Boston: Shambhala Publications. Chung-yuan, C. (1975) Heideggerian Translation of Tao Te Ching, New York: Harper & Row. Depraz, N. (2019) Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassanā Meditation, Journal of Consciousness ­Studies, 26 (7–8), pp. 49–69. Gelven, M. (1970) A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, USA: Harper & Row. Guignon, C. (2006) Authenticity, moral values, and psychotherapy in C. Guignon (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 268–292. Guignon, C. & Pereboom, D. (2001) Existentialism: Basic Writings. Second Edition. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time. Trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson. New York: Harper & Row. Heim, M. (1984) A Philosophy of Comparison: Heidegger and Lao Tsu, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 11, pp. 307–335. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994) Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life, London: Piatkus.

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Contrasting Emotions and Notions of Temporality Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005a) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, New York: Delta Trade. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005b) Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World Through Mindfulness, New York: Hyperion. Kearney, R.(ed) (1994) Routledge History of Philosophy, Volume VIII: Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy, London: Routledge. Kersemaekers, W, Rupprecht, S, Wittmann, M, Tamdjidi, C, Falke, P, Donders, R, Speckens, A & Kohls, N (2018) A Workplace Mindfulness Intervention May Be Associated With Improved Psychological Well-Being and Productivity. A Preliminary Field Study in a Company Setting, Frontiers in Psychology, 9, p. 195. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00195 Lundh, L.G. (2020) Experimental Phenomenology in Mindfulness Research, Mindfulness, 11, pp. 493–506. Maitreyabandhu (2009) Life With Full Attention: A Practical Course in Mindfulness, Cambridge: Windhorse Publications. McMahan, M. (2008) The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parkes, G. (1987) Heidegger and Asian Thought, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Stanley, E., Schaldach, J., Kiyonaga, A. & Jha, A. (2011) Mindfulness-Based Mind Fitness Training: A Case Study of a High-Stress Predeployment Military Cohort, Cognitive and Behavioral Practice, 18 (November 4), pp. 566–576. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021) Phenomenology and Mindfulness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (3–4), pp. 158–185. Thompson, E. (2020) Why I Am Not a Buddhist, London: Yale University Press. Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991) The Embodied Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Williams, M. & Kabat-Zinn, J. (eds) (2013) Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on Its Meaning, Origins and Applications, London: Routledge. Williams, M., Teasdale, J, Segal, Z. & Kabat-Zinn, J. (2007) The Mindful Way Through Depression, London: Guilford Press. Zimmerman, M. (2006) Heidegger, Buddhism and deep ecology in C. Guignon (ed) The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 293–325.

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19 VARIETIES OF SELFCONSCIOUSNESS IN MINDFULNESS MEDITATION Odysseus Stone

Introduction What is the nature of the kind of self-awareness we have in mindfulness meditation? Any answer to this question will, of course, depend on how one understands mindfulness. Unfortunately, there is no single, agreed up definition or meaning of the word mindfulness. However, on some accounts, at least, one thing is clear: certain forms of mindfulness meditation are not supposed to involve a detached or distanced self-observation but rather immersion in and intimacy with conscious life.1 For this reason, it might be thought that standard philosophical and psychological concepts intended to capture the garden-variety ways in which we can be aware of our own minds—introspection, reflection, and meta-cognition— are ill-suited when it comes to understanding this sort of mindful self-consciousness. Insofar as these terms imply a ‘stepping-back,’ self-division, or reification of consciousness, they seem incompatible with immersion and intimacy. In this chapter, I explore the issue of how to think about self-consciousness in mindfulness meditation from a phenomenological perspective in dialogue with other traditions.2 As is well known, philosophers working in the phenomenological tradition distinguish between reflective and pre-reflective forms of self-consciousness. Whereas reflective selfconsciousness involves inter alia taking one’s mental and bodily states or processes as intentional objects in higher-order or founded acts, pre-reflective self-consciousness has been described as an intrinsic, non-intentional (i.e., non-object-directed) feature of first-order experiences, a primitive form of self-acquaintance or self-presence built-into conscious life. On this view, conscious experiences are complex wholes which both a) present (or re-­ present) their intentional object while also being b) self-presenting. As Sartre puts it, [T]he object with its characteristic opacity is before consciousness, but consciousness is purely and simply consciousness of being consciousness of that object… We should add that this consciousness of consciousness—except in the case of reflective consciousness…is not positional, which is to say that consciousness is not for itself its own object. (Sartre, 1991, pp. 40–41) 290

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In a remarkable case of cross-cultural philosophical convergence, a number of comparative philosophers have found similar ideas in Buddhist philosophy (Coseru, 2012, §8; ­MacKenzie, 2007, 2017, 2022, §2; Finnigan, 2017; Garfield, 2015; Siderits, Thompson & Zahavi, 2011, §5).3 Pre-reflective self-consciousness looks like a promising candidate for the beginnings of an understanding of self-consciousness in mindfulness meditation. According to the Buddhist scholar John Dunne, pre-reflective self-consciousness—or, rather, its Buddhist equivalent, reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana)4—plays an important role in what he calls ‘nondual’ Buddhist styles of mindfulness (Dunne, 2011, 2015). More specifically, nondual mindfulness involves, in part, cultivating an ‘enhanced’ or ‘intensified’ form of pre-reflective selfconsciousness (Dunne, 2018, p. 95, p. 101; Dunne, 2015, pp. 261–62; cf. Dreyfus, 2019; Lutz et al., 2007, 2015). Interestingly, a similar view has been defended by a number of contemporary phenomenological philosophers, some with Buddhist influences (Thompson, Cosmelli, & Lutz, 2005; Gallagher & Ilundáin-Agurruza, 2020; Legrand, 2007; Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009; Zahavi, 2011; cf. Colombetti, 2011, 2014). To expand on a classical metaphor from I­ ndian philosophy (MacKenzie, 2007, 2017): if experiences involve not only other-luminosity (object-directed intentionality) but also self-luminosity (pre-reflective self-consciousness), perhaps we could think of experiences as coming with differing degrees of self-luminosity, and mindfulness as the act of cranking up the lights on such self-consciousness.5 In this chapter, I discuss this proposal and raise some difficulties for it. I then conclude with another, more positive suggestion: rather than thinking of mindfulness as involving a higher degree of pre-reflective self-consciousness, I argue that much would be gained theoretically by shifting focus onto another kind or mode of self-awareness operative in consciousness, one closely tied to the agentive character of active attending (Husserl 2001, 2012, 1973; Watzl 2017, 2018).

Mindfulness A problem anyone approaching the topic of mindfulness is immediately confronted with is that the term has a broad semantic range. Consequently, it is not particularly informative to speak in general terms of ‘mindfulness’; it really depends on what one means. For example, mindfulness has recently been popularized as a kind of psychotherapeutic technique, where it has been characterized as an open, receptive, nonjudgmental awareness of present moment experience accompanied by an attitude of curiosity and acceptance (Bishop et al., 2004; Kabat-Zinn, 1990). How this definition relates to more traditional Buddhist understandings of mindfulness is a matter of ongoing scholarly debate, which debate is made more complex by the fact that there is a variety of different, sometimes incompatible, approaches to and definitions of mindfulness within the Buddhist tradition (Dunne, 2011, 2015; Gethin, 2015; Husgafvel, 2016; Shaw, 2020).6 In what follows, I will restrict the scope of the discussion by focusing on a particular aspect of traditional Buddhist accounts of mindfulness that has been taken up in recent research in the cognitive sciences (Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019; Lutz et al., 2007, 2008, 2015). The English word mindfulness translates the Pāli word sati or the Sanskrit smṛti, which originally meant ‘memory,’ but when used in connection with Buddhist meditation has the sense to ‘bear in mind,’ ‘retain in awareness’ or ‘hold in the ken of attention’ without 291

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distraction (Dreyfus, 2013). Mindfulness in this sense is an aspect of mind (or ‘mental factor’: cetasika/caitasika) closely related to attention. In the context of mindfulness meditation (i.e., contemplative practice which applies mindfulness (sati/smṛti)), mindfulness is said to work in conjunction with sampajañña/saṃprajanya. Like sati/smṛti, these terms have different meanings in Buddhist literature, but in Sanskrit sources, especially as those sources are interpreted in Tibetan Buddhism, saṃprajanya has been viewed as a kind of ‘introspective vigilance’ (Apple, 2015; Garfield, 2017) or ‘meta-awareness’ (Dunne, 2011, 2015, 2020; Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019).7 Dunne characterizes saṃprajanya as the aspect of a mediative awareness that monitors the quality of one’s attention, along with other mental and physical aspects of an ongoing meditative experience. For example, if one were stabilizing one’s attention on the breath, samprajanya [metaawareness] is what enables one to notice that one has become distracted, such that instead of attending to the sensations of breath, one is now thinking about a beach vacation. In other words, samprajanya [meta-awareness] is what enables one to n ­ otice that mindfulness (in the technical sense described above [smrti]) has been lost. (Dunne, 2020, pp. 361–62) Similarly, Lutz et al. (2007) claim that saṃprajanya is ‘a type of meta-awareness that is not focused on an object per se, but rather is an awareness of that [attentive] intentional ­relation itself’ (Lutz et al., 2007, p. 504). A classical metaphor given here is that of a ‘watchman’ (Dreyfus 2013, p. 50) or ‘spy’ (Dunne, 2011, p. 83) who checks—as if out the corner of its eye—to see whether mindfulness (smṛti) remains on target. The conceptual distinction between smṛti and saṃprajanya implies a distinction between two ways mindfulness meditation might involve self-awareness. Firstly, it might involve selfawareness insofar as smṛti (i.e., attentive holding) is applied to one’s own mental or bodily processes. Secondly, it might involve self-awareness insofar as it involves saṃprajanya (i.e., meta-awareness), that is, an awareness of one’s ongoing meditative activity, especially of smṛti. As we will see, it is vis-à-vis the latter that the connection between mindfulness meditation and pre-reflective self-consciousness is most apparent. However, we must first introduce yet another dispute within the Buddhist tradition, this time concerning the notion of meta-awareness itself. There are divergent Buddhist accounts of meta-awareness.8 A canonical example of one type of meta-awareness is evident in the example just given: noticing that, in lieu of focusing on the breath, one has been mind-wandering. In such cases, there is a moment of explicit reflection as one notices what has happened—‘Aha, my mind has wandered!’—thus allowing one to refocus on the breath. Here we stand at a reflective distance from our attention; such meta-awareness has been characterized as ‘intermittent and propositional’ (Dunne, Thomson, and Schooler, 2019). On some Buddhist approaches to mindfulness, metaawareness is conceived along these lines. On this view, if one engages in meta-awareness while focused on the breath, such awareness will disturb, rather than support, the process of attending. However, in ‘nondual’ Buddhist styles of mindfulness (Dunne, 2011, 2015), such as Tibetan Mahāmudrā, which are influenced by the notion of reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana), thinking of meta-awareness along these lines would be problematic. The nondual approach instead holds that there is a type of ‘nonpropositional’ meta-awareness (saṃprajanya) which can be ‘sustained’ while attention remains focused on the breath 292

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(Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019). For example, simultaneously with the attentive holding of the meditation object, the practitioner is said to also be attuned to subtle fluctuations of affect—’excitation’ (audhatya) and ‘laxity’ (laya)—which mark the on-set of a distraction, thus allowing them to appropriately adjust their practice prior to actually losing attentive contact with the object (Dunne, 2020, p. 362). The ability to notice potential distractions in this way is said to be a function of saṃprajanya. The Buddhist nondual traditions also recommend a form of ‘objectless’ mindfulness meditation, in which the aim of the practice is to remain in a nondistracted state lacking any element of act-object intentionality (Dunne, 2011, 2015).9 So, to briefly summarize: Buddhists discussions of mindfulness meditation distinguish between 1. a form of meditation which remains focused on an object and 2. a form of objectless meditation. Furthermore, when it comes to 1., a distinction is made between a) smṛti (attentional holding) and b) saṃprajanya (meta-awareness). And when it comes to b) a distinction is made between i. an ‘intermittent, propositional’ and ii. a ‘sustained nonpropositional’ form of meta-awareness. In several publications, Dunne has linked ‘sustained, nonpropositional’ meta-awareness to pre-reflective self-consciousness (Dunne, 2015, 2011, 2018; Lutz et al., 2007). Dunne is not alone in making the connection between pre-reflective self-consciousness and mindfulness. Let us therefore now turn to examine these claims.

Cranking up the Lights on Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness In a several important publications, Dunne has argued for the significance of the Buddhist concept of reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) for understanding nondual styles of Buddhist mindfulness (Dunne, 2011, 2015, 2018; cf. Lutz et al., 2007, pp. 513–17). The term reflexive awareness as used by Dunne is close to the phenomenological notion of prereflective self-consciousness (thus, it is important not to confuse reflexive awareness with reflective awareness) (Dunne 2018, pp. 88–90).10 Drawing on the work of the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakīrti (circa 600 CE), Dunne claims that nondual mindfulness practices involve (among other things) ‘enhancing’ or ‘intensifying’ reflexive awareness, such that one gets ‘a stronger ‘signal,’ so to speak, from the subjective side of an experience, and this thus provides greater opportunities for becoming aware of emotions, expectations, and other features that may require regulation’ (Dunne, 2018, p. 101). As he puts it, from the Dharmakīrtian perspective, the various features of subjectivity are always implicitly presented in any moment of cognition… Thus, on this model, if one wishes to monitor one’s affective states, it is not necessary for one to somehow engage in a constant introspective turn so as to inwardly observe one’s emotions and such. Instead, information about one’s affective states (and other aspects of one’s sense of being a perceiving subject) are constantly presented reflexively. An increased capacity for monitoring affect would thus not come from turning inward; instead, it would be developed by intensifying reflexive awareness. (Dunne, 2018, p. 95) Dunne further suggests that the idea of ‘intensified’ pre-reflective self-consciousness can help elucidate saṃprajanya—the meta-awareness of mindful attention (smṛti) that takes 293

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place while that attention remains focused upon its object (Dunne, 2015, p. 261; cf. Dunne 2011; Lutz et al., 2007, pp. 83–84; Dreyfus, 2019; Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019). What should we make of this suggestion? Interestingly, a number of related claims can be found in the phenomenological literature (Zahavi, 1999/2020, 2011; Petitmengin & Bitbol, 2009; Thompson, Lutz, & Cosmelli, 2005; Colombetti, 2011, 2014; Gallagher & Ilundáin-Agurruza, 2020; Legrand, 2007). Before discussing the merits of the proposal, let us first turn to consider some examples from the phenomenological camp. In several places, Dan Zahavi entertains the possibility that there might a form of selfconsciousness—perhaps akin to Sartre’s notion of pure reflection (Sartre, 2003)—that is really ‘nothing but a higher form of wakefulness,’, i.e., a simple ‘intensification’ of the primary experience (Zahavi, 1999/2020, p. 190-191, cf. 2005, p. 88, 2011, 2015)’. Zahavi’s formulation varies in different places, but in one place he wonders (and this especially relevant for our purposes) Is there a form of self-consciousness that rather than involving a relation between two distinct experiences (a reflecting and a reflected) amounts to an intensification, amplification or illumination of the primary experience? Is it possible, through practice, say, to acquire a higher level of ‘wakefulness’, or ‘mindfulness’, one that provides us with a stronger and richer and fully immersed self-familiarity with our experiential life?. (Zahavi, 2011, p. 12)11 Dorothée Legrand has made similar claims vis-à-vis pre-reflective bodily self-consciousness (Legrand, 2007; cf. Colombetti, 2011, 2014). Legrand writes (against phenomenological orthodoxy): ‘body expertise like dance is associated with a particularly sharp pre-reflective experience of the “performative body” [whereby] bodily pre-reflective experience is “at the front” of dancers’ experience’ (Legrand, 2007, p. 505). She further suggests (albeit in passing) that we might understand the self-consciousness of meditators along similar lines: ‘Expertise (with one’s body as in dance, or with one’s mind as in some meditative states)… can put this subjective character of experience “at the front” of one’s experience without turning it into a mere intentional object’ (ibid., p. 512). Now, an immediate weakness of these proposals is that the view isn’t really explained. Prima facie, it is unclear how we could make sense of the idea that pre-reflective selfconsciousness can come in degrees of intensity or be enhanced through practice. Consider that pre-reflective self-consciousness is sometimes described as a formal, structural feature of consciousness (e.g., Zahavi, 1999/2020, pp. 169-70). The question is how a formal, structural feature of consciousness could come in degrees of intensity. One option here might involve appealing to a nuance in the notion of pre-reflective self-consciousness. For although it is sometimes described in formal, structural terms, prereflective self-consciousness is sometimes said to (also) involve an affective dimension, a ‘feeling… which permeates the experiential life and imbues the first-person perspective with a sense of self-presence’ (Henriksen, 2016; Zahavi, 1999/2020, §7). This notion of ‘selfaffection’ (cf. Henry, 1973) could perhaps be drawn upon in developing an account of enhanced pre-reflective self-consciousness. There is after all no problem thinking of affect as coming in degrees of intensity. Another possibility might involve making sense of enhanced pre-reflective self-consciousness in terms of attention. More specifically, one could argue that the a) pre-reflective vs. reflective

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self-consciousness distinction doesn’t co-ordinate with the b) focal vs. marginal or the foreground vs. background awareness distinction (Colombetti, 2011, 2014; Legrand, 2007; cf. Zahavi, 2005, 2015, 1999/2020). To explain this a little: notice that ordinally what is given to pre-reflective self-consciousness is in the background or margin of consciousness. We do not normally focus our attention on our own experiential life; rather it tends to recede in favor of the intentional object. Of course, we can also reflect on our experiences and take them as objects. But insofar as experiences are pre-reflectively self-conscious, they are not themselves in focus. However, one could argue that this is not an essential feature of consciousness. For example, Legrand claims that the subjective character of experience is ‘not necessarily peripheral or marginal’ (Legrand, 2007, p. 512). Colombetti similarly distinguishes foreground and background bodily feelings and argues that this distinction does not map neatly onto the distinction between reflective and pre-reflective bodily selfconsciousness. For although background bodily feelings are pre-reflective, and foreground bodily feelings can be reflective: the body in emotion experience is often… in the foreground of awareness, without being an intentional object of experience… We can elaborate this thought further by appealing to the metaphor of the ‘self-luminosity’ of consciousness, and suggest that the prereflective, subjectively lived body can come in different degrees of self-luminosity. (Colombetti, 2014, p. 121; cf. Colombetti, 2011) A similar idea can be gleaned from something Zahavi says: ‘the relation between pre-­ reflective and [a form of] reflective consciousness could be structurally comparable to the relation between marginal and thematic consciousness. In both cases, the transition from one to the other can be understood in terms of an attentional modification’ (Zahavi, 2005, pp. 89–90).12 One problem with these claims is that the notion of attention is itself left unanalyzed, which means the issue is only in the end deferred. A more general worry is as follows. Whether one seeks to account for enhanced pre-reflective self-consciousness in terms of attention or whether one seeks to do so in terms of increased self-affection, a challenge is to do so without collapsing pre-reflective self-consciousness into a form of object-directed intentionality. For example, a view that clearly must be rejected is one on which the experience which is unattended, or which has a low degree of self-affection, has ‘hidden’ sides or profiles, which come to be revealed when attended to or when self-affection is increased. This would be a case of object-directedness (in the phenomenologists’ sense), not pre-­reflective self-consciousness. In order to avoid this problem, it would appear necessary to hold that the antecedent experience, rather than being revealed or disclosed through the change in self-consciousness, is altered or transformed as one mode of experiencing replaces another. It must then be argued that ‘There need not be any inconsistency between altering or transforming experience (in the way envisaged) and gaining insight into experience through such transformation’ (Thompson, Lutz, and Cosmelli, 2005, p. 72).

Self-Consciousness and the Agentive Character of Active Attention Let us now leave to one side the question of cranking up the lights of pre-reflective self-­ consciousness. There is a closely related—though importantly distinct—question raised by our discussion of mindfulness meditation above, namely, the kind of self-consciousness 295

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we have of our attention. In the section entitled ‘Mindfulness’ above, we distinguished between an a) an attentive holding of object in awareness (smṛti) and b) a type metaawareness of that attentive intentional relation to the object (saṃprajanya). As we also saw, a central claim in the mindfulness literature is that there is a ‘sustained, nonpropositional’ form of the latter. This raises the question of the sort of self-awareness we have of our own attention. In this section, I will argue that having a firmer grasp on the ordinary mode of self-awareness we have of attention will put us in better position to understand this particular aspect of mindfulness meditation. The discussion in the preceding section might give the impression that there are only really two options available when it comes to understanding self-awareness of attention. On the one hand, we can reflect on our attention, and take it as an object of consciousness. On the other hand, as with other aspects of our mental life, the attentive process is itself consciously lived through, and hence pre-reflectively self-given. According to a number of recent proposals that have been gaining traction in the philosophical and psychological literature on mindfulness, there is, however, a further possibility, one not (or at least not obviously) reflected in the above taxonomy. The proposals differ in important respects, but they have a shared emphasis on the idea that a) meditative attention is a (mental) activity or action of some kind, and that b) the kind of self-awareness we have in meditative attention is distinctive of our awareness of our own (mental) activities or actions (Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019; Zawidzki, 2018; Watzl, 2017). Specifically, it is a kind of ‘agentive awareness’ (Watzl, 2017) or, alternately, a form of ‘know-how’ (Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019). So, for example, Dunne, Thompson, and Schooler suggest that ‘sustained, nonpropostional meta-awareness’ in mindfulness is not focused on mental contents or processes themselves as the objects of propositional judgments. As noted above, intermittent meta-awareness involves conscious (usually verbal) judgments, whose contents are explicit objects in a process of ‘knowing that’ something is the case (e.g. “my mind is wandering”). In contrast, this form of meta-awareness involves ‘knowing how,’ as when one is aware of how one is attending affectively to an object. (Dunne, Thompson, & Schooler, 2019, p. 309) The authors refer to Joelle Proust’s work on what she calls ‘procedural meta-cognition’ or ‘meta-cognitive know-how’ (Proust, 2013, 2010). According to Proust, we have a nonrepresentational and nonobservational awareness of our own mental actions, which is grounded in what she calls ‘noetic feelings.’13 Noetic feelings constitute implicit, embodied felt evaluations of one’s ongoing performance as one engages in a (first order) cognitive activity. Examples include feelings of certainty and familiarity, tip of the tongue phenomena, and feelings of knowing. Noetic feelings constitute felt evaluations of both a) the feasibility of engaging in a given mental action in a particular context, and of b) the relative success or failure of such an action (Proust, 2013, p. 223). For example, the tip of the tongue phenomenon constitutes an awareness both that one is failing in one’s cognitive activity of recollecting something (b), and that it is worth keeping on trying (a) (Proust, 2013, p. 224). According to Proust, such feelings do not involve meta-representation (thinking about thinking), a definition which ‘misses the engaged character of self-evaluation: when evaluating one’s performance in a cognitive task, one is thinking ‘with’ thinking, rather than ‘about’ it’ (Proust, 2013, p. 62). Dunne, Thompson, and Schooler are particularly 296

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interested in Proust’s idea that ‘noetic feelings… are presented as implicit yet conscious features of one’s explicit focus’ (Dunne, Thompson, and Schooler, p. 309). A related proposal has been made by Watzl (2017, §11, 2018) in the context of his philosophical account of attention. According to Watzl, attention is the ongoing, dynamic process of structuring (and restructuring) consciousness into a center and a periphery. On his account, the process can either be actively guided by the subject or passively guided by what Watzl calls phenomenal salience—a kind of (mental) solicitation (cf. Watzl, 2014). Watzl further argues that our basic awareness of our own attention is to be understood neither in terms of introspection, nor in terms of what we above called pre-reflective self-consciousness, but rather in terms of what he calls ‘agentive awareness’ (Watzl, 2017, §11, cf. O’Brien, 2007; Peacocke, 2007). According to Watzl, we have agentive awareness especially of active attention (cf. Chaturvedi, 2022). On his view, agentive awareness is a pre-cognitive (independent of belief and judgment), non-observational form of selfconsciousness. The agentive awareness we have of active attending is an awareness of being actively engaged in the process of structuring the stream of consciousness into a center and a periphery. Watzl offers as an example certain forms of mindfulness meditation, which are centrally concerned with an active form of awareness of our own attention. Lutz et al. … for example, suggest that Buddhist meditation is interested in ‘samprajanya, [which] involves a type of meta-awareness that is not focused on an object per se, but rather is an awareness of that intentional relation itself’ (quoting Lutz et al.). (Watzl, 2017, p. 233) How might phenomenology further elucidate these issues? Although Watzl acknowledges a number of affinities between his account and views in phenomenology (Watzl, 2017, pp. 101–2, pp. 198–202, pp. 208–10), he neglects to mention that the idea that attention involves (or can involve) agentive awareness has precursors in the phenomenological tradition. In Ideas I, Husserl famously argues that attention exhibits the ‘character of subjectivity’ (Husserl, 2012, §92). Consider cases such as concentrating on a task, struggling to recall a name, or, indeed, attentively focusing on the breath. On Husserl’s view, it is impossible to capture what is going on in these kinds of experiences without appealing to their active or agentive character. As he puts it in one of his later writings on attention, ‘The turning-toward [of attention] itself is characterized by an “I do”; and the wandering of the rays of the attentive regard, or regard in the mode of turning-toward, is likewise an “I do”’(Husserl, 1973, p. 85). As a number of Husserl’s commentators have noted, it would be a mistake to conflate the kind of self-consciousness Husserl has in mind when he speaks of the ‘I do’ of attention with the kind of pre-reflective self-consciousness that characterizes our lived experiences as such (Jansen, 2016; Jardine, 2022, p. 31; Jacobs, 2021). What is important is the specifically agentive dimension that pertains to the former but not to the latter. As Julia Jansen puts it, for Husserl, attention is part of ‘agentive cognitive phenomenology’ (Jansen, 2016).14 The claim that attention has an agentive dimension must, however, immediately be qualified by the claim that there are clearly passive moments and/or instances of attention. In his mature, genetic phenomenology, Husserl increasingly emphasizes the interplay between activity and passivity within experience (Husserl, 2001, 1973). Eventually he concludes that every activity of the subject is dependent upon a prior passive affection (Zahavi, 1999/2020, 297

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p. 119). The active turning-toward of the subject in attention is necessarily dependent upon an affection issuing from the side of the object (or, more precisely, a pre-given ‘object-like’ configuration in the background). Husserl describes such affections as an ‘allure (Reiz) given to consciousness: the peculiar pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns toward it attentively’ (Husserl, 2001, p. 96). Thus, like Watzl, Husserl makes room for the idea that our attention can be solicited (see also especially Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 70, p. 275). Importantly for Husserl, however, one and the same episode of attention will have both passive and active moments. In other words, attention involves the transformation of a passive tendency toward an object into an active turning-towards and contemplation thereof: the subject ‘complies’ with the affective tendency (solicitation) issuing from the object (Husserl, 2001, p. 276). In such cases, attention can be thought of as a ‘response’ or perhaps as ‘lying at the very threshold of activity and passivity’ (Jansen, 2016, p. 167; cf., e.g., Husserl, 2001, p. 276).15 For example, in the case of mindfulness meditation on the breath, I may experience myself as both solicited by the breath and as continuously ‘answering’ its solicitation, so to speak. There is also an important connection between Husserl’s account of attention and Joelle Proust’s account of the role of noetic feelings in nonobservational awareness of mental action. Consider again mindfulness meditation on an object for illustration. When such meditation is going well, the object has become my ‘theme’ (in the ‘specific’ or ‘pregnant’ sense) (Husserl, 1973, p. 86), which means that my ‘interest’ in it has been minimally ‘awakened’ (ibid., 82). As Husserl points out, interest here is an affective phenomenon. Such interest implies I am continuously affected and solicited by the object to take up and maintain an active (attentive) conscious relationship to it: I ‘execute uninterrupted consciousness,’ and thus have a ‘firm orientation on the object’ (ibid., 82). Husserl also describes cases which take us beyond merely actively holding an object in attention in this way. For example, in cases of attentive perception of an object in my environment, I may become teleologically oriented toward gaining a more complete, enriched, and differentiated view of it. In such cases, I ‘strive’ to uncover more and more of the object through my ongoing attentive perceptual engagement, which, of course, requires embodied movement (kinaesthesis).16 As Husserl notes, a feeling goes hand in hand with this striving, indeed a positive feeling, which, however, is not to be confused with a pleasure taken in the object. To be sure, it can also be that the object itself touches our feelings, that it has value for us, and that for this reason we turn to it and linger over it. But it can just as well be that it is disvaluable and awakens our interest just because of its abhorrent qualities. (Husserl, 1973, p. 85; cf. 2001, p. 289) In this kind of case, there is ‘a feeling of satisfaction’ (Husserl, 1973, p. 85), which attaches to the enrichment of the sense of the object as I attentively perceive it. Conversely, there can be feelings of dissatisfaction, corresponding to the felt disparity between my current ‘hold’ of the object and the more complete hold towards which I strive. As Husserl perceptively notes, the kind of affects he is highlighting here have an ‘entirely peculiar direction’ (Husserl, 1973, p. 85). That is, they are not intentionally directed at, and thus do not contribute to the sense of, the experienced object in the way in which emotions like happiness, fear, or anger do. When we feel fear, the feared object is experienced as having a certain value for us—for example, it is given as threatening or dangerous (for us). However, the 298

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‘joy’ and ‘satisfaction’ we experience in progressively attentively perceiving something need not be in tension with our experience of its disvalue for us, according to Husserl. More generally stated, perceptual consciousness is, on Husserl’s view, saturated by and integrated with affective phenomena—moments of unease/ease, displeasure/pleasure, tension/resolution, dissatisfaction/satisfaction—which are importantly unlike emotions directed at the objects attended to. The structured interplay of such affects guides and modulates attentional activity. Needless to say, these affects bear obvious similarities to Proust’s noetic feelings. That is, although Husserl does not himself put it this way, they amount to felt evaluations of our own ongoing cognitive (attentive) engagement with a theme. For example, the feeling of satisfaction I experience as I bring an object into focus, and, from there, disclose more and more of it through my attentive perceptual engagement, is a positive felt evaluation of my own enactment of the relevant object-involving cognitive activity, rather than, say, a positive feeling intentionally directed toward the object. At the same time, however, we aren’t dealing with self-directed emotions here either; rather, as Husserl says, such affects are ‘part of the essence of normal perception’ (Husserl, 1973, p. 85).

Conclusion How might these insights from phenomenology be drawn upon and developed in order to elucidate mindfulness meditation? From the Husserl-inspired phenomenological perspective I have been articulating, a full account of mindfulness as the joint functioning of smṛti (attentional holding) and saṃprajanya (introspective vigilance/meta-awareness), where the latter is understood as ‘sustained and nonpropositional’, requires a more fine-grained analysis than is provided by the standard distinction between reflective and pre-reflective forms of self-consciousness. In particular, what must be emphasized is the active character of certain forms of meditative attention, and the distinctive agentive awareness we have such activity. A key question that remains, however, is what if anything is distinctive about this kind of self-consciousness. According to Dunne, ‘nonpropositional’ saṃprajanya (meta-awareness) can be trained, such that it can eventually be ‘sustained’ throughout one’s meditative practice. However, as mentioned, according to Husserl the kind of self-consciousness we have been discussing ‘belongs to the essence of normal perception’ (Husserl, 1973, p. 85). How should we square these two thoughts? Answering this question in full is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of the present chapter. However, Dunne’s suggestion that the skillful or accomplished mindfulness practitioner is better attuned to the subtle fluctuations of affect (‘excitation’ (audhatya) and ‘laxity’ (laya)) that mark the onset of a distraction prior to actually becoming distracted is suggestive of an answer (Dunne, 2020, p. 362). Although, of course, this takes us well beyond Husserl, the idea that there are more or less skillful ways of attending, and that a constituent part of the exercise of such skill is a sensitivity to and mastery of the affects that pervade attentive conscious life, is congenial to the account I have outlined. Importantly, the picture here is not one on which the practitioner is illuminating hidden sides or profiles of an antecedently existing conscious episode (cf. ‘Cranking Up the Lights of Pre-reflective Self-conscious’). Rather, because the affects which ground this kind of agentive self-awareness are so intimately related to the dynamics of the activity of attending itself, a change in the activity involves a change in this kind of self-consciousness (and vice versa). 299

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Finally, let me conclude with a brief remark on terminology. We have been following the terminology of Dunne in speaking of meta-awareness. However, insofar as this terminological choice implies a distinction between two mental states or processes, it is not clear that is inappropriate here. Though, as mentioned, spelling out in full detail the precise relationship between our ordinary mode of agentive awareness of attention and that had in mindfulness is a topic for future work.17

Notes 1 See Dunne (2011, 2015). 2 I will not directly address the question of whether phenomenology is, or is importantly similar to, mindfulness meditation (or vice versa) ( Varela & Shear, 1999; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 2017; Depraz, Varela, & Vermersch, 2003), an idea about which have expressed skepticism elsewhere (Stone & Zahavi, 2021). 3 Cf. The 5th century Buddhist philosopher Dignāga: ‘Every cognition is produced with a twofold appearance, namely that of itself (svābhāsa) and that of the object (viṣayābhāsa)’ (PS(V) 1.9a; Dignāga and Hattori, 1968, p. 28). 4 It should be noted that reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) is understood in different ways by different Buddhist philosophers, not all of which accord with the phenomenological notion of prereflective self-consciousness (cf. Garfield, 2015, §5; Thompson, 2018). 5 The phrase ‘degrees of self-luminosity’ comes from Colombetti (2014, p. 121, p. 131, p. 204, and 2011), though in a slightly different context. 6 One important distinction is that between what Dunne calls ‘classical’ (e.g., Theravada Vipassanā) and ‘nondual’ (e.g., Tibetan Dzogchen and Mahāmudrā, Japanese Zen) styles of Buddhist mindfulness (Dunne, 2015, 2011). Importantly, rather different philosophical frameworks inform these different styles of mindfulness practice. One difference is that nondual mindfulness is influenced by the philosophical idea of reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) mentioned in the introduction, whereas classical mindfulness is not. The contemporary notion of mindfulness is something else again. On the one hand, it is ‘a deliberate hybrid of modern Zen, vipassanā, and Tibetan Buddhist practices, [thus cross-cutting the classical-nondual divide], not to mention other influences, such as Sufism. In this sense, [contemporary mindfulness practices are]… “Buddhism-derived,” but they do not map back to any particular Buddhist tradition as their source’ (Dunne, 2022, p. 617). Furthermore, contemporary mindfulness is shaped by what Buddhist scholars and historians call Buddhism Modernism—a form of Buddhism practiced today globally which downplays traditional religious aspects of Asian Buddhism, while emphasizing the continuity between Buddhism and a modern, scientific worldview (McMahan, 2008; Gleig, 2019). 7 In Pali sources, sampajañña is usually translated as ‘clear comprehension.’ 8 This paragraph is indebted to Dunne, Thompson, and Schooler (2019). See Apple (2015) for an alternative Tibetan Buddhist view. 9 Here smṛti and saṃprajanya are conceived in slightly different ways (Dunne, Thompson, and Schooler 2019). 10 It should, however, be noted that reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) is given different interpretations in the Buddhist literature. Other authors who align reflexive awareness closely with prereflective self-consciousness are Coseru (2012), Thompson (2011), and MacKenzie (2007). See Finnigan (2017) for a helpful discussion. 11 Zahavi is open to the proposal, although he expresses doubt about whether it would make sense to call such self-consciousness a form of reflection, since, following Husserl, he thinks reflection necessarily involves a distinction between two experiences (ibid.). 12 In the end, Zahavi rejects this proposal as an account of reflection. However, suppose we set to one side the question of reflection for the moment (which may be a terminological dispute anyway). The remaining issue, in line with Zahavi’s suggestion in the 2011 article quoted above, is whether there is a form of intensified or enhanced pre-reflective self-consciousness that we could make sense of in terms of an attentional modification.

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Varieties of Self-Consciousness in Mindfulness Meditation 13 Note that term ‘noetic’ here is not identical to the technical Husserlian notion. Proust occasionally also speaks alternatively speaks of ‘epistemic’ feelings and ‘meta-cognitive’ feelings. 14 Consequently, it could be argued that experiences come not only with a minimal sense of ownership but also, when actively attending, with sense of agency. 15 What about cases where attention is manifestly not a response, however, but is best described simply as caught or captured? Such cases are hard to deny. Furthermore, presumably certain forms of meditative attention are passive in this sense. A complication here is that Husserl argues that attention is always in a certain sense active insofar as it is ‘receptive.’ And, as he puts it, (seemingly paradoxically) receptivity is not passivity but is rather the lowest level of activity. When receptive, the subject ‘consents to what is coming and takes it in’ (Husserl, 1973, p. 79). How to understand Husserl’s notion of receptivity is controversial. Hanne Jacobs finds in Husserl the view that ‘the receptivity that is characteristic of our attentive experiences is active in that when I attend to something, I am receptive to it in the sense that I accept how something appears to me (or not)… Receptivity is here characterized as an accepting, taking on, or taking up, which is in turn characterized as a doing (Verhalten) that is already a form of spontaneity’ (Jacobs, 2020, p. 288). This would imply distinguishing between a) the sense in which we are active—because receptive—even when our attention is caught, and b) the sense in which we are active when we dynamically orient or ‘steer’ our attention—even if we do so in response to solicitations issuing from the object (Jacobs, 2021, p. 288; Jansen, 2016, p. 167; Jardine, 2022, pp. 40–44). I set aside Jacobs' rich discussion of attention as a ‘receptive action’ here. 16 This raises a complex issue about the relationship between the activity of attending, and the ­kinaesthesis. For a recent view on this issue in Husserl scholarship see Jardine (2022, pp. 32–48). 17 I would like to thank Dan Zahavi, Jelle Bruineberg, Julia Zaenker, and Tristan Hedges for invaluable feedback on earlier versions of this chapter, as well as the audience at the 2022 Phenomenology and Mindfulness conference at the University of Cyprus. I would also like to acknowledge Lucy Osler and James Jardine for a number of helpful conversations.

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Varieties of Self-Consciousness in Mindfulness Meditation MacKenzie, M. (2017) Luminous Mind: Self-Suminosity Versus Other-Luminosity in Indian Philosophy of Mind, in (ed.) J. Tuske (pp. 335–54). The Bloomsbury Research Handbook to Indian Epistemology and Metaphysics, London: Bloomsbury Publishing. MacKenzie, M. (2022) Buddhist Philosophy and the Embodied Mind: A Constructive Engagement, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. McMahan, M. (2008) The Making of Buddhist Modernism, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012) The Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge. O’Brien, L. (2007) Self-Knowing Agents, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Peacocke, C. (2007) Mental Action and Self-Awareness (I), in (eds.) B. McLaughlin & J. Cohen (pp. 356–76). Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Blackwell. Petitmengin, C. & Bitbol, M. (2009) The Validity of First-Person Descriptions as Authenticity and Coherence, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16 (10–12), pp. 363–404. Proust, J. (2010) Metacognition, Philosophy Compass, 5 (11), pp. 989–98. Proust, J. (2013) The Philosophy of Meta-Cognition: Mental Agency and Self-Awareness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sartre, J. (2003) Being and Nothingness, London: Routledge. Sartre, J. P. (1991). The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, Translated by F. Williams & R. Kirkpatrick. New York: Hill and Wang. Shaw, S (2020) Mindfulness: Where It Comes From, and What It Means, Colorado: Shambhala. Siderits, M., Thompson, E., & Zahavi, D. eds. (2011) Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, & Indian Traditions, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021) Phenomenology and Mindfulness, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28 (3–4), pp. 158–85. Thompson, E. (2011) Self, No Self? Memory and Reflexive Awareness, in Siderits, M., Thompson, E., & Zahavi, D. (eds.). Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, & Indian Traditions, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 157–175. Thompson, E. (2018) Sellarsian Buddhism: Comments on Jay Garfield, Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy, Sophia, 57, pp. 565–79. Thompson, E., Lutz, A. and Cosmelli, D. (2005). Neurophenomenology: An Introduction for Neurophilosophers. In Brook A. and Akins K. (eds.) Cognition and the Brain: The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement. Cambridge: Cambidge University Press. Varela, F. & Shear, J. (1999) First-Person Methodologies: What, Why, How? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6 (2–3), pp. 1–14. Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (2017) The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge: MIT Press. Watzl, S. (2014) Perceptual Guidance, Ratio, 27 (4), pp. 414–38. Watzl, S. (2017) Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and How It Shapes Consciousness, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watzl, S. (2018) Consciousness and No Self, Ratio, 31 (4), pp. 363–75. Zahavi, D. (2005) Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zahavi, D. (2011) Varieties of Reflection, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18 (2), pp. 9–19. Zahavi, D. (2015) Phenomenology of Reflection, in (ed.) A. Staiti (pp. 177–93). Commentary on Husserl’s Ideas I, Berlin: De Gruyter. Zahavi, D. (1999/2020). Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation. A New Edition, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Zawidzki, T. (2018). What is Meta-cognitive Skill? Kindling a Conversation Between Culadasa and Contemporary Philosophy of Psychology, Contemporary Buddhism, 19 (2), pp. 476–492.

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20 HUSSERL ON EMOTIONAL EXPECTATIONS AND EMOTIONAL DISPOSITIONS TOWARDS THE FUTURE A Contribution to Mindfulness Debates on Present Moment Awareness and Emotional Regulation Celia Cabrera Introduction The possibility of focusing on the present is one of the key aspects emphasized in standard characterizations of mindfulness (e.g., Bishop, 2004; Kabat-Zinn, 1990). According to this, limiting attention to the present is fundamental to fully experiencing what arises in the field of consciousness without further elaboration. Intrusive negative emotions are one of the main threats to present awareness. In fact, the success of Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy has been related to the possibility of regulating one’s emotions (Wheeler, Arnkoff, & Glass, 2017). This implies regulating the tendency to anticipate the future, especially, so as to regulate those expectations that push us away from the present in a harmful way. The topic of expectation in the sphere of emotions is relevant in many respects. On the one hand, emotional expectations are involved in single anticipatory emotions, that is, emotions concerning the anticipation of a specific future event. On the other hand, they may also go beyond particular events and configure a general habit of anticipating what the future will bring. In this case, emotional expectations can be understood as dispositions. For that reason, even if we are not expecting something in particular, we could say that there is always at play an emotional horizon of expecting. In this context, the question arises whether emotional dispositions toward the future and emotions in general can be modulated. Research in the field of psychology suggests that emotional regulation, which has been defined as “the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express their emotions” (Gross, 1998, p. 275), may be achieved. Even though mindfulness is not considered in itself an emotional management technique (Bishop et al., 2004, p.  231), it has been applied in therapies to reduce emotional distress. Now then, the development of strategies to regulate future-directed 304

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Husserl on Emotional Expectations and Emotional Dispositions

negative emotions presupposes a deep understanding of the connection between the temporal phases of consciousness and a fine-grained analysis on the interconnection of the intellectual and emotional dimensions (for instance, on the possibility of attending to emotions as they are ongoing). These topics are not only significant for empirical psychologists but also for philosophers, especially phenomenologists, who are specially interested in the methodological matter of “shifts of attitudes”. As I will show, the analysis of the temporal dimension of emotions has been prominent in classic Husserlian phenomenology. For this reason, although the idea of mindfulness cannot be found in Husserl’s phenomenology, his descriptions can contribute to clarifying some conceptual distinctions underlying mindfulness debates. Against this background, in what follows I analyze the possibility of focusing on the present and the anticipatory character of experience from the viewpoint of Husserlian phenomenology. I do this by analyzing in particular the emotional dimension of expectations. In the framework of Husserlian phenomenology, emotional expectations (Gemütserwartungen) describe a subject’s orientation toward what is coming as an affective tension or pull. The general aim of the chapter is thus to explore the possible contributions of Husserl’s analyses of the relation between different temporal phases of consciousness to the debate in the context of mindfulness about the possibility of focusing on the now moment and observing and regulating emotions. First, I will present the concept of emotional expectation and the anticipatory dimension of time-consciousness in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology. This requires clarifying the specific emotional character of expectations, that is, how are expectations to be understood in the emotional sphere, in terms of how they both differ from and intertwine with intellectual expectations. Second, I will provide an overview of the sedimentation of feelings in emotional dispositions. Finally, I will refer to the possibility of regulating emotional dispositions, by analyzing the role of attention in redirecting consciousness to the now, and in the observation of emotions. In general terms, I will try to briefly describe the passive genesis of disposition that predelineates present experience and expectations, and also to explore the possibility of actively intervening in the present to reconfigure this passive predelineation. Since Husserl’s reflections on the proposed topic are not systematically developed in any one work, in my presentation, I will draw upon texts from different periods and contexts. For his analyses of time-consciousness and attention, I will focus on volumes X, XI, and XXXVIII of Husserliana. With respect to his analyses of emotions, I will focus mainly on the lectures published in volumes XXVIII and XXXVII, and on the research manuscripts published in volumes XLIII/2 and XLIII/3.

Husserl on Emotional Expectations and the Anticipatory Character of Experience According to Husserl, all our present experiences incorporate an anticipation of the future, as well as a retention of the recent past. Consciousness in each of its phases “reaches out beyond the now” (1969, p.  234). In the Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness (1904–05), Husserl describes the triple intentionality involved in time consciousness as follows: the “primal perception” intends what is actually given in the present; the “primary recollection” (or retention) holds what has just passed, and the “primary expectation” (or protention) intends what has not yet appeared; it corresponds to a primordial way of being directed to the future. 305

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The openness of the future represents a special challenge for phenomenological descriptions. The question arises of what kind of giveness corresponds to an intention directed to the future, how does the future present itself to us? Can the consciousness of the future be considered as analogous to the consciousness of the past? It has been pointed out that, compared to the extensive analyses devoted by Husserl to retention, protention has received “minor treatment” (Lohmar, 2002, p. 154). However, in recent years scholars have developed insights into his overlooked contribution to the analysis of the future dimension of time-consciousness (e.g., De Roo, 2008; Mensch, 1999; Rodemeyer, 2003; Soueltzis, 2021). Husserl addresses the anticipation of the future on two levels: (a) the original awareness of the future in protentions (Protentionen), which is a rigid and passive process, and (b) the expectations (Erwartungen) that depend on our past experience, and are “movable” insofar as they depend on the changes of our experiences. Expectations do not have the form of an explicit judgment. In Husserl’s terminology, they are “presentifications” (Vergegenwärtigungen) intertwined with presentations such as perceptions, and motivated by them. Husserl describes protention as that which constitutes in an “empty” way what is coming (1969, p. 52). The difference between protentions and expectations concerns the difference between an immediate “empty” awareness of what is coming and a secondary actual presentification. Protentions, as a tendency toward fulfillment, open the present to the future, but they do, as said, in an “empty” way, while expectations “make the future present”, as recollections “make the past present”. Importantly, expectations tend to anticipate the future following the style of the past. As Husserl shows in the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis, what is expected is anticipated “in accordance with what has just been” (1966, p. 186). Moreover, the “force” of expectations can increase “with the number of ‘instances’, that is, with the frequency of what has occurred under similar circumstances” (1966, p.  189). When the fresh experience confirms the expectation, the expectation is fulfilled, otherwise, it is disappointed. This anticipatory structure of consciousness is inseparable from every experience. Expectations are involved not only when I perceive an aspect of an object and expect the hidden aspects to be the same, but also when I feel joy or sadness, and when I set a practical goal. That is, they are not only involved in mere perception but also in emotional and willing consciousness. This is due to the fact that the structure primal-perception, retention, protention is the purely formal temporal structure of every experience. However, expectations are not exactly the same in perception as they are in the case of emotions and practical intentions. If we consider, for example, the anticipation of an emotion like joy, it is difficult to deny that it differs from the anticipation of an aspect of an object, inasmuch as the former involves an enthusiasm and an engagement that in the case of mere perception is mainly absent. In other words, while many perceptual processes can be emotionally indifferent, it is difficult to remain indifferent to the anticipation of an emotion or to the setting of a practical goal. Husserl referred to the specific emotional character of expectations and described how they differ from non-emotional expectations. In the Notes on the Doctrine of Attention and Interest, he described emotional expectations as “the emotionally being tensed toward what is coming” (das gefühlsmässige Gespanntsein auf das Kommende) (2005, p.  106). Further, in a text recently published in the third volume of the Studies on the Structure of Consciousness, he explicitly distinguishes between (1) intellectual expectations (intellektuelle Erwartungen), as the simple foreseeing of the future, and (2) emotional expectations (Gemütserwartungen). This understanding of expectation as a “tension” (Spannung) seems 306

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to correspond to a specific emotional form of being oriented toward the future. Husserl describes it as follows: I expect something, e.g. a disjunction. I don’t know which of the “possibilities” will occur, but “one of them” will occur, I can anticipate that, I “know” that, e.g. in playing dice, and I am just tensed (gespannt) towards what will come, about “how it turns out to be”. The tension, this emotional state, finds its release.//But also when I am certain of what will occur, I am eventually anxious. The lover will surely arrive “I cannot wait for it”, which means, I cannot bear at all the sweet agony of expecting, I am in a feverish expectation. The expectation is an “intention” in the special sense of a beingtensed-towards, that is, a tension, and only the second is an emotional expectation. (2021b, p. 387) According to this text, expectations can be more or less determined; sometimes I only know within certain margins what will occur and sometimes the expectation is more determined: I know exactly what will happen and, nevertheless, I am “tensed” toward. Expectations move in a field of relative determination and indeterminacy and the degree of its affective tension depends on this degree of determination or indeterminacy. The analysis of the role of the indeterminacy of the consciousness of the future in the feeling of anxiety can serve as a concrete example. Anxiety would increase or decrease depending on the uncertainty of the consciousness of the future (on this issue see Micali, 2022). As I understand it, in the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology we can speak of “emotional expectations” in two senses. On the one hand, when the expectation is related to a present emotional experience: a present feeling, valuation, or willing act gives place to an expectation that is emotional because the act at stake belongs to the sphere of Gemüt. In Husserl’s terminology, feeling, valuing and willing are “emotional experiences” (Gemütserlebnisse), which belong to the non-theoretical dimension of consciousness. On the other hand, the expectation can be emotionally “colored”, regardless of what kind of act is at stake. I can anticipate something perceptually and, on the grounds of the same perceptual intention, an emotional expectation can arise. An example of an emotional expectation based on a perception will make it clear: I see a door and a person behind the door and I anticipate that the door will open and that the person will enter the room. In this case, my expectation is not only “doxical”, because I also want the person behind the door to enter the room. Besides the presentification of what will happen, emotionally, my expectation is not oriented toward this purely “objectual” aspect (“door”, “person behind the door”, “person entering”) but to the value of the door opening and the person entering the room. Regarding this aspect, emotional expectations are very close to desires. Husserl’s reflections on expectations based on emotional and practical intentions show that they are very complex phenomena. For instance, the expectation involved in a willing resolution has the character of an anticipation of the fulfillment of the will: when I resolve to act I expect that every singular phase of the action will be fulfilled. The expectation at play here is not neutral, it is emotional because it is founded on my will. For its part, expectations involved in proper emotional experiences, such as joy or sadness, are interesting because every emotion regarding a future event has at its base the belief in the existence of the event. Husserl gives the example of the anticipation of a joy regarding a future trip (1988, p. 107). But this could also apply to negative emotions. For instance, I suffer in the present because I expect suffering to come and I conceive this as inevitable. This is a common 307

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phenomenon, especially for people suffering from chronic pain (which can even worsen with the diagnosis of a disease, that leads the person to interpret any corporal change as a warning sign of the imminent and inevitable coming suffering). To sum up, we can speak of “emotional expectation” (1) in terms of expectations bound to proper emotional experiences: for example, the present joy motivates the expectation of a future joy (2) and in terms of “colored” expectations that accompany every kind of act, as mere perceptions. In both cases, there is no doubt that the emotional character differs from the phenomenon addressed by Husserl in his lectures on time consciousness. But, how exactly do they differ? The analysis of emotional expectations faces Husserl with the question of whether there is a specific phenomenon of expectation in the emotional sphere (2021b, pp. 285–286), and with the broader question of how the complex relationship between the intellectual and emotional dimensions of consciousness should be understood. Without going in depth into Husserl’s complex analyses of these questions, I will only point out some aspects of emotional expectations that can be drawn from his reflections: 1 One of the main features that comes to the fore when examining the relation between intellectual and emotional expectations is that the latter have an emotional “color”. Husserl uses different expressions to describe the emotional character of an experience: “feeling-color” (Gefühlsfarbung), “colored intention” (tingierte Intention) and shimmer (Schimmer), among others.1 Husserl’s attempts to explain the “color” of experience go back to even before the Logical Investigations. In an early manuscript he writes that “an intellectual state is perhaps never free from emotional coloring and vice versa” (2005, p. 164). According to Husserl, the color of experience is given by an evaluative intention which he calls “valueception” (Wertnehmung), which is an emotional act. This Wertnehmung constitutes the value of an object and this value is the fundament of the emotion linked to it. In this way, what is evaluative apprehends motivates an emotion that colors the objects. To sum up: the emotional character of the expectation can be understood as a color added to the perceptual grasping of the object by means of an evaluation. 2 Husserl exploes the possibility of understanding both forms of expectation in a relation of analogy (2021b, p. 284 ff.). The analogy is grounded in the idea that both forms of expectations have the structure intention––fulfillment.2 Whether I expect something perceptually or emotionally, in both cases my expectation can be fulfilled or disappointed. However, fulfillment is not exactly the same in each case. While perceptual intentions are fulfilled through intuition (in this case, the fulfillment has the form of a confirmation), emotional expectations are only fulfilled when the affective tension is “released” (entspannt). In this case, the fulfillment could be described as having the character of satisfaction (Befriedigung) (see Scanziani, 2021, p. 148). This means that the satisfaction of an emotion is independent of the confirmation of the intention of the founding act, as a perception. For instance, if the perception of an object arouses a state of relaxation, perceiving every side of this object does not decrease or increase my relaxation. The intention of the founding act can be confirmed but I still have pleasure, that is, the pleasure is not immediately exhausted when the intention of the founding act is confirmed. Thus, although emotional expectations are founded on doxic intentions in a way that makes them dependent, in other respects they are relatively independent. 3 Another important feature of emotional expectations is that their affective tension is related to the contents of the experience. In this sense, in order to understand the specific emotional character of expectations we have to move beyond the structural form of 308

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time (i.e., the mere fact that primal-impressions are given, retained, and that retentions continuously “sink down”) and consider time contents, which are related to the experience of particular objects. As Husserl writes: “Time offers a universal form of ordering and a form of coexistence of immanent data. But form is nothing without content” (1939, p. 76). It is the affective pull of a given content which draws us emotionally into the future. We project not only the chain of retentions but also the contents retained with their particular features. Husserl’s deeper analyses on the drawing power of the contents are found in the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. There, he analyzes the relation between primal impression, retention and protention with regard to affection. Affection is “the allure given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that an object given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when the ego turns towards it attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-giving intuition” (2001, p. 96). This allure is neither a psychological phenomenon nor a contextless power: the single datum is dependent upon the others for its affective force. The relations between contents are relations of association and motivation. Regarding the temporal flow, Husserl considers that the source of affection lies in the primal impression. In the orientation to the past, retended contents become less and less affective in a steady progress of “fading away”. With regard to the direction of propagation, affection possesses a unitary tendency toward the future. The affective pull is experienced in the present, since it is connected to the primal impression, but its force goes beyond the now, it directs us toward the future with a certain emotional orientation.

The Emergence of Emotional Dispositions Within the framework of Husserl’s phenomenology, emotional expectations are connected to the phenomena of “dispositions” (Gesinnungen), “moods” (Stimmungen), and, more generally, to the “horizonality” (Horizonthaftigkeit) of experience. The husserlian concept of horizon-consciousness refers to the system of implications at play in our experience of the world. One the one hand, there is always an horizon as a stratified background of inactual experience within which every actual experience has its place. On the other, there is an horizon as an anticipation of the sense of the contents given, which has its roots in our habitualities. For this reason, genetically, emotional expectations have their origin in the sedimentation and typification that rules every experience. That is, feeling do not escape from the process of habitualization. As Husserl writes, “also here everything is incorporated to the habitual” (2004, p. 292). Further, as a correlate of the feeling-habituality and the feeling-disposition there is a typification of feelings. Feelings and value characters are incorporated into the habitual experience, in such a way that “from now on we grasp the habitual value-character (Wertcharakter) of an object” (2004, p. 293). A “resonance” (Resonanz) or “transmission” (Übertragung) of a feeling gives place to the configuration of a total “Gefühlsmilieu”. Husserl speaks of “habitual feeling orientations” (habituelle Gefühlsrichtungen), “habitual emotional properties” (habituelle Gemütseigenschaften), and “permanent emotional dispositions” (2004, p. 8). Husserl’s examples concern positive emotional dispositions that can color our present experiences, for instance, he speaks of a practical confidence that has to accompany human action. Some of the most interesting reflections on this topic can be found in his texts on ethics, where he speaks of a rational belief (Vernunftglaube) in the sense of the world and in the meaning of human action as a necessary condition to act rationally (2014, p. 317). 309

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But he also refers to “the obscure horizon of senselessness” that threatens human attempts to act rationally (2014, p. 309). In this case, the sense of senselessness can extend and cover everything that is connected to the present experience. The same happens with emotions such as sadness: To a sad person everything appears in a sad light; but the objects, that appear illuminated in that way, are not the objects of the sadness, at least not the primary. The sad person knows what she is sad about; her feeling is specifically determined through this object. She is not sad about the objects that she now looks at, although she is inclined to recognize in them a displeasure and, in general, something that has the capacity to bring her sadness closer. (2005, p. 176) Affective “colors” can extend over everything, even over the things that do not have an axiological color by themselves; they somehow “borrow” the color, until it finally becomes an emotional background of the world. We anticipate an “emotional and volitional sense of the world” (Husserl, 2014, p. 241), that has a totalizing character. So, while sometimes emotions may refer to a given content, in some cases, the emotion originally bound to a content is transferred over others through passive association3. In this vein, Husserl introduces the difference between actual and dispositional contents: What we call the content of an act is the content that grounds the act, that to which the act is eventually directed. Every joy is directed to something, to the joyfull, to what grounds the joy and that to which it is directed; similarly, every sadness for something (…) every willing something, what one wants, etcetera. But it must be considered that this content of consciousness does not need to be during the whole duration of the act, but might also become a disposition. (2005, p. 176) Generally considered, Husserl’s analyses comprehend emotional life as a gradual process that goes from the most primary passive levels of affection toward proper emotional acts, which can, in turn, sink into passivity. In this way, there is a backward and forward movement of emotions. Affectivity pre-delineates our experience from the beginning (in this case, we can speak of an emotional background) but also gives place to proper acts which sediment, transfer their color to other experiences through associative synthesis, and become a secondary passivity, a secondary habituality (in this case, we can speak of emotive projection in virtue of sedimentation). Between the two poles of passivity (emotional passivity as primary and emotional passivity as a product of sedimentation) the possibility of activity arises. In the present the attention and the will can intervene.

Attending to Emotions and Attending to the Present: A Husserlian Contribution to Mindfulness Debates Let me briefly return to the dynamic between the temporal phases of consciousness. As mentioned, expectations are based on passive associations that predelineate the future according to the style of the past. In this regard, to a great extent, expectations depend upon recollections. In fact, our everyday experience shows that we are not entirely free to determine what 310

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we expect. In many cases, a past experience just invades abruptly the present, regardless of our attempts to leave it behind. Are we then just resigned to the motivational dynamic of the phases of consciousness? Are we prisoners of our habitual dispositions? If the answer were positive, in the case of negative or traumatic past experiences we could not avoid constantly projecting a disturbing emotion into the future. This would not only negatively color our present experience (because the “call” from the past oriented toward the future certainly impacts on the present), but would also prevent us from focusing on the present moment by drawing us away from it, throwing us into a painful future that torments us. Besides its connection with negative past experiences, a situation in which the present is overwhelmed by a negative expectation of the future can be described as follows: on the one hand, in such situation, the consciousness of the future is either excessively determined in its content (I am certain that X will happen) or excessively undetermined (I do not know what will happen in the coming moment and this uncertainty fills me with fear and anxiety). On the other hand, it can be affirmed that in such a situation the future is granted a special relevance. As S. Micali has insightfully observed, in such cases “the future situation is assumed to be more significant and critical than the present one. Otherwise the very raison d’être of anxiety would be unjustified, that is, it would not be legitimate to consent to that future situation’s obscuring and occupation of the present” (Micali, 2022, p. 131). This negative horizon that colors our consciousness of the future impacts on our present wellbeing and undermines the possibility of something “new” emerging, an experience that does not hold onto the past and thus project it into the future. The important question then is if there is a way to actively intervene in order to reconfigure the passive dimension of the habitualities that ground and predelineates future activity, that is, if it is possible to influence the future from the present. The practice of mindfulness aims precisely at achieving this in our everyday life. As it has been described by J. Kabat-Zinn, “Mindfulness is moment-to-moment awareness (…) It is a systematic approach to developing new kinds of control and wisdom in our lives, based on our inner capacities for relaxation, paying attention, awareness and insight” (1990, p. 2). What is at stake here is the possibility of changing the flow of inner experience itself, in a way that makes it possible to inhabit the present moment with “full awareness”. Bishop et al. provide a more specific insight into the procedures involved in the praxis of mindfulness. In their operational definition of mindfulness, they consider two components: “The first component involves self-regulation of attention, so that it is maintained on immediate experience, thereby allowing for increased recognition of mental states in the present moment. The second component involves adopting a particular orientation toward one’s experiences in the present moment, an orientation that is characterized by curiosity, openness and acceptance” (2004, p. 232). Against this background, I would like to present some aspects of Husserl’s phenomenology that could contribute to answering these questions. These could be understood as covering, in the particular domain of emotions, the two axes considered in the abovementioned definition: regulation of attention and particular orientation to the present experience (in this case, emotional experiences). Concerning the first aspect, it is important to recall that, according to Husserl, the now “is always and essentially a border-point of an extent of time” (1969, p. 72). Any approach to the relation between Husserl’s phenomenology and mindfulness should not overlook the husserlian notion of an “extended present” (the present with its triple intentionality) as one of his main contributions to the analysis of time consciousness. Hence, when we speak of the “present” we should consider the difference between the present as “extended” and the present as “punctual” (as a “border-point” in the continuum of time). For Husserl, the 311

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temporal phases of consciousness are not punctual and are not a disconnected succession. Every now phase has a halo of retentions and protentions, otherwise the experience of temporal objects could not be explained. In this sense, the now conceived in isolation is an ideal limit. This does not mean that focusing on present moment experience is not possible. Even if structurally the data that is given in the now is necessarily followed by a chain of retentions and stretches toward the future in protentions, we can concentrate on the present as the originary instance of giveness. As I understand, Husserl’s main contributions to conceptualizing this possibility comes hand in hand with his understanding of attention as a modification that can favor what is given in the now and turn the now experience clear and distinct.

Making the Now Experience “Patent”: The Reflective Function of Attention According to Husserl, every experience is an interplay of actuality and potentiality. While some elements come to the foreground in the field of perception, others remain in the background. With its “turning towards” (Zuwendung), attention privileges some objects and rejects others. Husserlian phenomenology tries to account for two dimensions that converge in attentive consciousness: its reactive character and its voluntary directionality. In other words, attention can be understood as a reaction to a stimulus (in this case, the “turning towards” is passively conditioned) and also as a voluntary orientation of consciousness (if I am interested in something given in the broad field of perception, I can voluntarily make it the object of my intention). In its voluntary form, attention can also operate after a “turning towards” established by a stimulus: I can keep my attention grasping the object that stimulated me or I can “let it go”, if I am not interested. Further, attention can make something given in the broader field of “noticing” (Bemerken) that has not yet stimulated me, become stimulating. Summing up, attentive consciousness involves both the “stimulation” and “participation” of the ego. As mentioned above, an aspect of attention that can be taken into consideration with regard to the possibility of focusing on the present is the reflective “turning towards” of attention. This reflexive function of attention is a modification that can make an experience a “phenomenon” for the ego without adding a second act. When directed to the now phase of consciousness, reflective attention can make the now become patent as now. As observed, the now moment has its past and future temporal horizons, but reflective attention can focus on the now phase and turn the phase and what is given in it into a “lived experience”. In this respect, Husserl distinguishes the “pre-phenomenal” character of an experience and its “being a phenomenon” for the ego (1969, p. 129; see Scanziani, p. 154). Importantly, this function does not objectify the experience (as proper reflection). It is an act of “bringing out” (herausheben) or “segregating”, an original modification by virtue of which I can vividly “live” in the now experience. An experience that previously was just there is now lived as “my” experience, for instance, as my emotion.

The Possibility of Observing Emotions Intrusive emotions are one of the main threats to present awareness. For this reason, the possibility of observing emotions is one of the underlying issues in mindfulness debates. The methodological questions that arise are how feelings can be at our disposal to be observed, or if they are accessible to self-inspection at all. Are feelings observable as they are happening? Or is it only possible to inspect them retrospectively, in recollection? 312

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Some of Husserl’s earliest reflections on this topic can be found in the already mentioned Notes on the Doctrine of Attention and Interest. Husserl analyzes the difference between the situation in which we experience something attending to its emotional “color” and the theoretical consideration of the same object. He refers to emotional and theoretical stances as different kinds of “habits”: “If we are in the habit of the affect, if the torrent of delight, of rage, runs through our soul, then every spiritual experience has a determinate colour, in the same way that the same trees look different in sunlight and clear sky and in the thunderstorm. If we take a theoretical stance then it is a pure part-taking in the things that move us; but specifically the acts are the same, just as in the landscape the trees are trees, only with different colours, with a different illumination” (2005, p. 166). Now then, in spite of their differences, emotional and theoretical dimensions are not merely added one to the other: “an emotional state (…) is rather a fusion, in which both sides penetrate each other and mutually determine their character” (2005, p. 164). This fusion, however, does not undermine the possibility of making the “color” of the object of (theoretical) interest. We can consider (betrachten) the color, even if that implies provisionally suspending it: “If I am angry about something, the joining reflection, the meditation, might decrease the anger, I feel it immediately as a contrary force, but the anger is not immediately gone. I still feel very well that the anger continues, although, so to say, in another stage, in another form of being” (2005, p. 164). The outcome of this is that we can “redirect” our interest and orient it to the emotion. However, this requires detaching ourselves from the emotion, in order to observe it. The remaining question is if it is possible to think about an emotion and feel an emotion at the same time. In the a text on the consciousness of feelings from 1911 (2021a pp. 143–183), we find some clues which help us to answer this question. There, Husserl expresses his reaction to Moritz Geiger’s work on the same topic. Contrary to Geiger, Husserl holds that feelings are not immune to observation. The view that feelings cannot be observed is based on the idea that consciousness cannot focus neutrally on feelings because they “contaminate” the observation in a way that makes it impossible for consciousness to maintain the object orientation (see Averchi 2015, p.  77). According to this, we couldn’t observe the feeling without losing sight of what motivates it. If I focus on my present sadness I will be absorbed by it and I will not be able to analyze it. In short: emotions are elusive when we try to grasp them, and we cannot directly attend to them without losing the possibility of examining them. Challenging this view, Husserl considers that we can be aware of emotions and that we can observe them in such a way that they can possibly gain clarity and distinction, without losing their emotional quality and without “reframing consciousness”. It is important to notice that Husserl is only referring to emotions as joy and sadness, not to experiences such as pain or pleasure, which are for him sensations. In this case, a “shift” in attention can make the emotion move to the foreground. We can still shift and look into the object of the feeling; it is there only in a modified manner. In Husserl’s terms, it is actual but non-thematic. The key for understanding this is that unthematic acts are also included in the actual phase of consciousness, which as said before, is “extended” (includes retentions and protentions). For this reason, we can shift the attention toward them. The discussion between Husserl and Geiger concerns some fundamental issues of phenomenology which are beyond the scope of this chapter. Without going deeper into this, my aim is to show that Husserlian analyses offer important hints as to what being mindful to emotions could possibly mean, whether it is an intellectual observation, a feeling kind of observation or a different attitude which is at stake. A relevant question posed by Husserl is how 313

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to differentiate between the focus on an object and the focus on a feeling aroused by an object. As mentioned, Husserl’s answer emphasizes the difference between thematic and unthematic consciousness to describe this shift.

Approval of Emotions: The Possibility of Assessing the “Adequation” of an Emotion with Respect to a Given Situation Once the function of the observation of emotions is established, we can approve of or disapprove of an emotion as being “adequate” or “inadequate” in a given situation. This is possible because “valueceptions”, which are the fundament of an emotion, can undergo a process of clarification by virtue of which their adequation can be confirmed or not. Just as perceptual intentions can be adequate or inadequate, also valueceptions can be adequate or not. We approve of an emotion if we recognize that a given situation is worth feeling this emotion and the underlying evaluation is justified. Approval involves a normative consciousness in which we move from the subjective consideration of something as, for example, joyful, toward the objective stance in which we confirm that it is worth feeling joy. While sometimes we cannot avoid experiencing an emotion, like sadness, we do not necessarily have to agree with it. We can take a position toward our emotion and ask for its grounding. According to Husserl, the only emotions that should be approved are those which have at their base an evident insight into value, and those are the emotions that we should take responsibility for. This opens the interesting question concerning those valueceptions that are motivated by authority, tradition, or by some standard regarding how we should value a state of affairs (2021a, p. 278). Ultimately, approval is a teleological process, and we can educate ourselves in order to develop the ability to feel on the grounds of evidence and grounded valueceptions. Interestingly, Husserl describes this approval of feelings as a “secondary feeling”, as a feeling directed to a primary feeling (2021a, 262–263). According to this perspective, the correspondence (Zugehörigkeit) of a valuation regarding a situation could be primarily felt. It is important to take this idea of an emotional position taking into consideration in order to explore the convergence of emotion and intellect in assessing the justification of valuations, and to think of how emotions can be modulated according to cognitive insights.

The Possibility of Regulating the Emergence of Negative Emotional Expectations As already mentioned, attention can be turned to the now moment and to the emotions that arise in the now. How does this affect the emergence of expectations? According to the mentioned dynamic of sedimentation, emotional expectations can be reinforced by each “instance”. Turning our attention to a particular kind of emotion reinforces repetitive patterns or habitualities: Every time I actively attend to an emotion a chain of intentions connected to it -including expectations- is triggered. Although this cannot be found in an explicit form in Husserl’s work, there are descriptive elements to substantiate the claim that by actively privileging a particular kind of emotion in the present, a new dynamic of habitualities can arise, a dynamic that could give way to the emergence of new expectations in the future, and regarding the future. As I understand it, commitment to values is a central moment of this reconfiguration: I must acknowledge the value of an emotion and acknowledge it as (more) positive, approve of it and commit to it, in order to engage in 314

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the process of self-reconfiguration. Husserl’s reflections on renewal tend in this direction (Husserls, 1989). The notion of “renewal” means that human beings can regulate their life according to evidence, that they do not have to simply follow blind tendencies, but can act on the basis of their own motivations and insights. A responsible life is able to strive for justification. Renewal involves the possibility of working on and self-shaping not only our cognitive insights but also our emotional dispositions toward the world.4 The above-sketched themes refer to some of the conditions for a reconfiguration of passivity from activity: (1) making the present a phenomenon in which we can focus is (2) a condition for observing the emotions that arise in the now, which, in turn, (3) allows us to take a position toward them, that (4) could eventually favor the development of new habitualities. In this way, with the tools offered by Husserlian phenomenology, a possible stratification of levels toward conscious waking experience has been outlined. It was not my aim to argue that phenomenology necessarily involves or is any kind of meditative praxis. Concrete empirical aspects have not yet been taken into account. This “top down” path from the highest levels of active life into the lower levels of passive life is a possibility motivated by how the acts involved are described by Husserl. That is, these are essential possibilities based on the essence of acts, not a necessary matter of a concrete praxis. By analyzing the emotional dimension, I have tried to show that, in the framework of Husserlian phenomenology, although passivity is the necessary condition of activity, activity can reconfigure the passive dimension that pre-delineates present and future activity. In my view, these considerations are not only relevant for debates about mindfulness but also for a fuller understanding of Husserlian phenomenology itself as a philosophy of renewal.

Concluding Remarks I close the chapter with some historical remarks. Since the beginning of the phenomenological movement, the consciousness of emotions and the relation to the future have been important issues. Emotional experiences and the problem of the awareness of emotions have been a topic of debate for first-generation phenomenologists, such as A. Pfänder, M. Geiger, and D. von Hildebrandt. In this respect, the work of M. Scheler, who has deeply explored the stratification of emotions and has even privileged the role of emotions above cognitive reason, must be granted a special place. For its part, in Post-Husserlian phenomenology, the relation to the future and the topic of anticipation have been considered by M. Heidegger, both in Being and Time and in his later work, for example, in The Age of The World Image, in the latter case in relation to the critique of era of technology. Finally, in the second part of Totality and Infinity, “Interiority and Economy”, E. Levinas presented an original approach to the future in relation to the issue of nourishment. These works have influenced 20th century philosophy in many respects, both inside and outside of the phenomenological tradition.5

Notes 1 On Husserl’s use of the metaphor of coloration, see Zirión (2018). 2 Husserl hesitates about the justification of this analogy (2021b, p. 285) 3 On resonance and passive association, see Husserl, 1966, p. 406). 4 It should be mentioned that “renewal” is a concept related to ethical self-improvement. The telos of renewal is not personal well-being (although it is not contrary to it) but the development of ethical consciousness and self-responsibility, which is strongly linked to responsibility for the others.

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Celia Cabrera Moreover, even if the process of renewal begins with individual self-transformation it does not imply any kind of individualism or self-isolation. 5 I would like to thank Andrea Scanziani for his knowledge on Husserl’s phenomenology of attention and to Andrés Osswald for his feedback and for calling to my attention Levinas’ thoughts on the topic of the future.

References Averchi, M., (2015). ‘Husserl and Geiger on feeling and intentionality’. In M. Wehrle & M. Ubiali (eds.), Feeling and Value, Willing and Action. (pp. 71–91). Dordrecht: Springer Bishop, S. et al. (2004). Mindfulness. A proposed definition. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 11, 230–241. De Roo, N. (2008). The future matters. Protention as more than inverse retention. Bulletin D’Analyse Phénomenologique 4 (7), 1–18. Gross, J (1998). The emerging field of emotional regulation. An integrative review. Review of General Psychology 2 (3), 271–299. Husserl, E. (1939). Erfahrung und Urteil. Prague. Prague: Academia Verlag. Husserl, E. (1966). Analysen zur passiven Synthesis, ed. M. Fleischer Hua XI. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1969). Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins 1893–1917. ed. R. Boehm Hua X. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1988). Vorlesungen über Ethik und Wertlehre 1908–1914, ed. U. Melle Hua XXVIII. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer. Husserl, E. (1989). Aufsätze und Vorträge (1922–1937). eds. T. Nenon & H.R. Sepp, Hua XXVII. Dordrecht/Boston/London: Kluwer. Husserl, E. (2001). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. (A. Steinbock trad.). Dordrecht/ Boston/London: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2004). Einleitung in die Ethik. Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920–1924, ed. H. Peucker Hua XXXVII. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl E. (2005). Wahrnehmung und Aufmerksamkeit. Texte aus dem Nachlass. 1893–1912, ed. T. Vongehr & R. Giuliani Hua XVIII. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. (2014). Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie. Texte aus dem Nachlass 1908–1937, ed. R. Sowa Hua XLII. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. (2021a) Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Teilband II: Gefühl und Wert, ed. U. Melle Hua XLIII/2. Cham: Springer Husserl, E. (2021b) Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins. Teilband III: Wille und Handlung, ed. U. Melle Hua XLIII/3. Cham: Springer. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain and Illness. New York: Delta. Lohmar, D. (2002). What does protentions protend? Remarks on Husserl’s analyses on protention in the Bernau manuscripts on time consciousness. Philosophy Today 46 (5), 154–167. Mensch, J. (1999). Husserl’s concept of the future. Husserl Studies 16 (1), 41–64. Micali, S. (2022). Phenomenology of Anxiety. Dordrecht: Springer. Rodemeyer, L. (2003). ‘Developments in the theory of time-consciousness. An analysis of protention’. In D. Welton (ed.), The New Husserl (pp. 125–156). Bloomington: Indiana. Scanziani, A. (2021). ‘Interés y sentimiento. Los análisis husserlianos sobre el interés en relación con el placer, el instintos y la afección’. In: C. Cabrera & M. Szeftel (eds.), Fenomenología de la vida afectiva. (pp. 141–166). Buenos Aires: SB. Soueltzis, N. (2021). Protention in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Springer. Wheeler, M., Arnkoff, D., & Glass, C. (2017). The neuroscience of mindfulness: How mindfulness alters the brain and facilitates emotional regulation. Mindfulness 8 (6), 1471–1487. Zirión, A. (2018). ‘Colorations and moods in Husserl’s studien zur struktur des bewusstseins’. In: R. Parker, B. Hopkins, I. Quepons, J. Drummond (eds), The New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy. London: Routledge.

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21 BEING MINDFUL ABOUT NOTHING Mahon O’Brien

In this chapter, I try to unpack the rationale behind Heidegger’s frequent invocation of Besinnung/Mindfulness and meditative thinking as opposed to calculative thinking. Owing to the nature of the enterprise, it will involve shortcuts and painting with broad strokes. The pay off, however, is an opportunity to try again (hopefully with some success) to state clearly what ultimately is at stake in Heidegger’s thought. We will begin by examining what Heidegger might have had to say in response to Rudolf Carnap (1959) and whether there is something interesting to be worked out in their ‘dispute’.1 Carnap’s polemic against Heidegger is, ostensibly, a direct response to Heidegger’s 1929 inaugural lecture in Freiburg (‘What is Metaphysics?’). Heidegger himself explicitly responds, in unpublished drafts of a 1935 lecture course, to Carnap’s paper2 (and is clearly alluding to Carnap’s views in the published version). To reconstruct their ‘exchange’, if one can call it as much, is a useful way of illustrating the continuity of Heidegger’s thinking from beginning to end along with the enduring relevance of the basic impulse behind all of his philosophical inquiry. What remains less clear is what the implications of Heidegger’s challenge to the tradition of Western philosophy are. Beyond a diagnosis of the ‘symptoms’ of calculative thinking (as opposed to what he favours – Besinnung – mindfulness and meditative thinking) – what changes would issue from the attempt to return to the inception of the Western philosophical tradition – not least in terms of the ramifications of managing to think meditatively rather than calculatively? **** Heidegger famously opens his most famous and influential work (Being and Time) by posing a question concerning the meaning of being (i.e., what do we mean when we use the word ‘being’?). He is already convinced that there is a kind of privileging of presence at work in our sense of what being means which obfuscates and/or distorts the nature of our experiences and indeed our own self-understanding. Heidegger is further convinced that the history of Western metaphysics is dominated by a tendency to privilege presence and to ignore or suppress the absence which is the self-concealing concomitant of any sense or experience of presence. This in part explains Heidegger’s efforts to underline the DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-25

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importance of absence or nothingness in some of his texts from the late 1920s and 1930s. It is, furthermore, very clearly something which he is looking to foreground repeatedly in the text which is directly relevant to the theme of this Handbook – Besinnung (translated as Mindfulness). In a 1935 lecture course, Heidegger revisits Leibniz’s famous question: ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’3 It is typically assumed that this is the ‘first’ question for metaphysics. However, when we pose this question of being and nothing, we do not, Heidegger believes, have an adequate understanding of the word ‘being’. There is a prior question that needs to be addressed before we can address Leibniz’s question. What do we mean by this word ‘being’ – what does this word, so commonly invoked, actually mean? Of course, one obvious answer is what is constantly present, extant, and, for this reason, Leibniz’s own question focuses on the simple issue of presence versus absence and takes it as a given that it reduces to or is synonymous with the question of being versus nothingness – nothingness understood as the negation of being.4 It takes being to already be determined as constant presence, the constancy of what appears in the appearance which can then be represented and correctly judged or understood. In the question – why are there beings and not nothing – the focus should be on what we mean there by the term ‘are’ – the cognate of the verb ‘to be’; instead, we assume that we can restate the question as though all we meant was ‘why being and not nothing?’ as though ‘nothing’ was the negation of ‘being’ where being is like a thing and refers to the constancy of its presence.5 Heidegger locates this problem at the very inception of Western metaphysics, where a decisive move is made in terms of what we mean by ‘being’ in the direction of the constancy of what appears in the appearance, which in turn is judged (according to the strictures of correctness) and represented: Since the superficialization of the first beginning of Occidental thinking, the most traversed and traversable path towards determination of being is marked by the opposition of being to ‘becoming’. In this way the interpretation of being as ‘not-becoming’ in the sense of permanence immediately comes to light. Being means constancy and presence. (Heidegger, 2016, p. 241) Being is thereby understood as the being of beings understood as constantly, continuously present, extant. The gaze that fastens on what remains and stands before us as unconcealed then forgets that there was initially concealedness (Lethe); before something was unconcealed (aletheia – understood as truth and thus the truth of being) it was concealed. Heidegger will even try to show that there are hints and clues of our own awareness of this self-effacing, occluded concealedness (i.e., what is not revealed as actualised or present in that sense) in our most immediate experience of anything. In Being and Time, he scavenges through our everyday experience looking for the traces of this concealed backdrop to disclosure that hides the explicit co-ordinates we use to navigate our way around the world.6 For Heidegger, our most basic dispositional capacity for interpretation is such that we are fundamentally attuned to the absence which surrounds all presence as a condition for the possibility of anything that we can then turn towards as meaningfully present. This nothingness stalks us as the uncanny shadow of all of our directed experience of things taken to be present. Furthermore, according to Heidegger, this is the most basic form of nothingness from which negation itself is derived.7,8 318

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Heidegger repeatedly challenges what he takes to be stock objections to his philosophy which rely on the principle of non-contradiction, since that approach, for Heidegger, has already conflated being with actuality. The principle of non-contradiction then is routinely invoked to dismiss all talk of the Nothing as simply wrong-headed. After all, to talk of Nothing as ‘being’ in any way is to treat it as a present ‘thing’, to treat it as ‘something’, which is, of course, contradictory.9 Again, for Heidegger, this is already to have decided in advance that being is present in the way that an ordinary object is present, or that it is itself a being and not nothing. What Heidegger is trying to show is that when we begin to think philosophically, we often don’t realise that we have already accepted certain fairly significant presuppositions which have major implications for philosophy and the way it has unfolded. It began, at least this is what Heidegger argues, with the Ancient Greeks who, when thinking through some basic, fundamental questions, took the ‘being’ of things as referring to their constant presence, their availability to view, their constancy as actually present. Being came to be understood as constant presence and, as a consequence, everything revolved around our ‘correct’ apprehension and judgments concerning that which was constantly present there before us. However, Heidegger is convinced that even if we consider our own experience, we can detect that something else is at work. Our basic affective states suggest that we are already somehow aware of more than what appears to be continuously present. Before we turn towards the actuality of what is present, Heidegger thinks there is an antecedent awareness of what that presence emerges out of – what everything that emerges stamped with meaning is surrounded by – and that is absence, or nothingness, in effect – meaninglessness. It is not itself a thing, of course, it is no-thing and thus speaking about ‘nothing’ can appear to tie us up in knots since it can instantly look as though we have tried to substantivize ‘nothing’, to hypostatise it, to treat is as a ‘thing’ rather than no-thing. But this is only because we tend to speak in a language which has already assumed that when we speak of the being of anything, when we say that anything ‘is’, that we are substantivizing it, claiming that it is ‘present’ in the manner of a ‘thing’, or that we have, as Carnap suggests, treated nothing as though it were a noun, as though it can be substantive, that it is ‘present’ as an actual thing. Heidegger wants instead to advert to a kind of aboriginal experience which is the context against which we should understand each instance and occasion of things emerging as meaningfully present. In short, we should recall that uncanny experience we have of the utter meaninglessness, the finitude (and thus not eternally present, unchanging conditions), the Abgrund/abyss which hovers in the background of all our efforts to establish meaning, to make sense. Our lives are directed by background influences which attest to that awareness of our own finitude and thus the limits to ‘world’ (understood as a meaningful horizon). It is not as though underlying everything is something permanently present.10 Rather, what lies behind everything is nothingness and the fact that meaning happens continually against this ‘Abgrund’, this abyss, the meaningless backdrop to all meaningful presence. The authentic Augenblick is a jarring moment, a jolt that we can all instantly relate to where the reality of the utter lack of meaningfulness which sits at the edge of our meaningful world suddenly looms up before us (Thomson). This moment allows us to see briefly how the very structure of our meaningful world is itself expressive of the way meaningful presence is constantly run through with absence, that the being of anything, understood as meaningful presence is a kind of pres-ab-sence. And, crucially, sense and meaningfulness has happened against this backdrop; contrary to what we might have been led to believe through discussions of the absurd, when faced with the challenge of nothingness and the historical context against which our own lives are structured, we end 319

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up in meaningful rather than meaningless lives. This is a thought that Heidegger struggles to make clear throughout his career and his continuing attempts to find a way to express the same thought leads to ever more involved and experimental attempts to clarify his fundamental claim, which relates to our experience of the abyss which stands as the counterpoint to all that we take to be meaningful, that is, the ultimate self-effacing ground of all meaningfulness.11 The irony here is that Carnap identifies Heidegger as the archetypical metaphysical philosopher when Heidegger’s philosophical raison d’etre is to question and challenge Western metaphysics. Indeed, from Heidegger’s point of view, it is Carnap himself who is operating with unwarranted metaphysical assumptions which prop up his own logical approach to philosophical problems.12 The belief that this notion of ‘Nothing’ (or any discussion of it) is self-contradictory rests ‘on a misunderstanding’, or, more to the point, on an unquestioned presupposition. The question of nothingness has always gone hand in hand with the question of being, but Heidegger wants to challenge the assumption that nothingness (and any understanding we can have of it) is derived from the ‘not’ of negation (as Carnap assumes). We normally begin with ‘beings’ – they are immediately interrogated as to their ground. The question advances directly toward a ground. Such a method just broadens and enlarges, as it were, a procedure that is practised every day. Somewhere in the vineyard, for example, an infestation turns up, something indisputably present at hand. One asks: where does this come from, where and what is its ground? Similarly, as a whole, beings are present at hand. One asks: where and what is the ground? This kind of questioning is represented in the simple formula: Why are there beings? Where and what is their ground? Tacitly one is asking after another, higher being. But there the question does not pertain at all to beings as a whole and as such. (IM, p. 30) We begin with things that are there for us and immediately begin to wonder as to why they are there, what is the cause of these beings. And traditionally – one closed off that line of questioning with the idea of a higher being that caused all the other beings.13 But this misses something for Heidegger since it glosses over the question as to what we mean by ‘being’ and simply asks for the cause (the why) of things that are present, that are ‘caused’ or ‘created’, that are extant. This is to assume that what ‘being’ means when we say that beings ‘are’ reduces to ‘presence’ understood as full actualisation, and thus we have taken for granted precisely the issues that Heidegger thinks are open to further questioning. Heidegger restates this view in Mindfulness: ‘Man’s ownmost increasingly and securely advances towards animality, and the godhead of gods becomes divinity, understood as the prime cause and as that which conditions, that is, that which explains and includes all calculating’ (Heidegger, 2016, p. 170). In his 1935 lecture course, in order to illustrate his point with respect to the role of the nothing in terms of what it means for anything ‘to be’, Heidegger takes an immediate example from the lecture hall: The piece of chalk here is an extended, relatively stable, definitely formed, grayishwhite thing, and furthermore, a thing for writing. As certainly as it belongs precisely to this thing to lie here, the capacity not to be here and not to be so big also belongs to it. The possibility of being drawn along the blackboard and used up is not something 320

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that we merely add onto the thing with our thought. The chalk itself, as this being, is in this possibility; otherwise it would not be chalk as a writing implement. Every being, in turn, has this Possible in it, in a different way in each case. This possible belongs to the chalk. (IM, p. 32) In other words, what the chalk ‘is’, what we mean when we say that the chalk ‘is’ in various ways, goes beyond simply stating that the chalk is statically present in full actuality and thereby exhausted in terms of what it means. Granted, the piece of chalk is ‘actually’ there in various ways, but it can also be understood in all manner of ‘possible’ ways that involve more than what is merely present or actualised/extant at any given moment, ways that could be actualised, but are not yet. Moreover, this is a fundamental part of what it means for things to be. Heidegger is interested in ‘meaningful presence’, and the way things emerge as meaningfully present involves a constant interplay of presence and absence – their meaning is not exhausted in actuality; part of what is present, is/are absence(s). The ‘thinghood’ of the chalk is not exhausted in its actuality but rather it ‘is’ a piece of chalk in virtue of it being a thing as a thing, as a piece of chalk, which involves its possibilities, its past and future uses, its in-order-to structure, the many and various facets of its thinghood which are not exhausted in its actuality.14 The historical character of things and Dasein is what first gives us a glimpse of the role that absence plays in terms of the meaningful disclosure of things. The emergence of a thing as present is already expressive of its time-character which is already indicative and suggestive of absence through its transience, temporal limits, past existence and future uses. Heidegger goes on to ask How are we even supposed to inquire into the ground for the Being of beings, let alone be able to find it out, if we have not adequately conceived, understood and grasped Being itself?…So it turns out that the question ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ forces us to the prior question: ‘How does it stand with Being?’ (IM, p. 34)15 We have inherited a philosophical tradition, which, for all its variety, variance, and breadth, took its impetus (so Heidegger claims) from an underlying prejudice, namely, that ‘being’ means ‘constant presence’, and that we only have access to or can think about what is unconcealed and forget entirely (Seinsvergessenheit) the concealedness which occludes itself in the appearing of the unconcealed.16

Carnap Carnap completely dismisses Heidegger’s philosophy on the basis of a rather uncharitable reading of a series of lines in Heidegger’s 1929 Inaugural Lecture in Freiburg. When we begin to examine Carnap’s criticisms closely, it’s clear that he is operating with a reductionist caricature of Heidegger’s view. Michael Friedman reports that Carnap repeatedly claimed to have studied Being and Time closely; however, there seems to be little evidence of this careful study in his assessment of the 1929 lecture.17 Carnap argues that Heidegger’s prose trades in a metaphysical nonsense which one finds in a good deal of post-Kantian German philosophy. And, once one clears up the linguistic confusion 321

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cluttering the scene of that kind of thinking, the residue of the ensuing pseudo problems washes away. Carnap defines things thus: In the strict sense…a sequence of words is meaningless if it does not, within a specified language, constitute a statement. It may happen that such a sequence of words looks like a statement at first glance; in that case we call it a pseudostatement. Our thesis, now, is that logical analysis reveals the alleged statements of metaphysics to be pseudo-statements. (Carnap, 1959, p. 61) Carnap next seeks to define language: A language consists of a vocabulary and a syntax, i.e. a set of words which have meanings and rules of sentence formation. These rules indicate how sentences may be formed out of various sorts of words. Accordingly, there are two kinds of pseudostatements: either they contain a word which is erroneously believed to have meaning, or the constituent words are meaningful, yet are put together in a counter-syntactical way, so that they do not yield a meaningful statement. (ibid.) Carnap ultimately wants to show that ‘metaphysics in its entirety consists of such pseudostatements’ (ibid.). He proceeds to analyse a series of statements from Heidegger’s 1929 inaugural lecture and characterises them as the example par excellence of a metaphysician deceived by the surface grammar of their prose and reproducing, ultimately, nonsense: What is to be investigated is being only and-nothing else; being alone and furthernothing; solely being, and beyond being- nothing. What about this Nothing? … Does the Nothing exist only because the Not, i.e. the Negation, exists? Or is it the other way around? Does Negation and the Not exist only because the Nothing exists? … We assert: the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation…. Where do we seek the Nothing? How do we find the Nothing…. We know the Nothing…. Anxiety reveals the Nothing. … That for which and because of which we were anxious, was ‘really’-nothing. Indeed: the Nothing itself-as such-was present…. What about this Nothing?-The Nothing itself nothings. (Quoted from Carnap, 1959 p. 69. Emphasis Added) When Heidegger says that the nothing nihilates or that the nothing nothings in the passage above he is explicitly rejecting the idea that the nothing and negation have the meaning that Carnap wishes to confer on them. He had already insisted that ‘the nothing’ did not have the orthodox meaning, as Carnap charges; he says after all that ‘the Nothing is prior to the Not and the Negation’. This already forestalls any variation on the claim that the issue neatly dissolves if we rewrite any of the offending statements by translating them into other statements that appear to have the same meaning, which can, for example, be expressed using existential quantifiers. Under something like this formulation, one might be tempted to conclude that there is no problem at all and that, in a sufficiently 322

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philosophically respectable language that conforms to the rules of logical syntax, one does not have to posit the presence of absence in the first place. Heidegger is deeply dissatisfied with this kind of approach. For Heidegger, even to properly understand the true nature of the thing as thing involves an interplay of presence and absence. This is part of what we mean when we make certain statements or experience things as things. Even when it comes to being of the human being (Heidegger was constantly trying to underline the phenomenological testimony for this in Being and Time through his analysis of Dasein), part of what it means for us to be and to understand and interpret at any given moment is to have a sense of something constantly outstanding, that there is absence. He describes us as the null basis of a nullity. We exist, in some sense, as a lack and experience absence during every moment of our existence. Carnap, however, assumes that nothingness is equivalent to the negation of ‘being’ when that is precisely what Heidegger wants to challenge. With this much assumed (and without warrant), and, according to the rules of logical syntax as Carnap defines them, some of Heidegger’s statements appear syntactically problematic [but again, this is only once one has accepted Carnap’s presuppositions concerning the meaning of being and nothingness – and Heidegger himself openly draws attention to this].18 Carnap further insists that Heidegger uses the word ‘nothing’ in an entirely conventional way. Granted, Heidegger’s first use of the word ‘nothing’ appears to be conventional. However, it is manifestly false to suggest that the word nothing, in the rest of the passage, is only used in such a way as to betoken the standard and logically respectable invocation of negation, as Carnap contends. Jim Conant summarises the fundamental problem with Carnap’s analysis as follows: Carnap’s elaborate analysis of the different contexts in which the term ‘nothing’ can occur in ordinary language is scarcely credible as an account of how Heidegger is led to employ the word ‘nothing’ as he does here. It won’t do to say of Heidegger’s sentences that ‘the fact that the rules of grammatical syntax of ordinary language are not violated [is what] seduces one into the erroneous opinion that one still has to do with a statement’. Such a diagnosis would be blind to the stunningly virtuosic character of Heidegger’s employment of the word, even when judged by the allegedly comparatively permissive lights of ordinary grammatical syntax. This virtuosity renders Heidegger’s text utterly unsuitable as an example of that of which it was allegedly introduced as an example: the surreptitious misuse of language…Heidegger is evidently speaking here in an unusual way: openly forcing his reader to reflect on how his words are meant. (Conant, 2001, p. 31. Emphasis Added) Conant charges Carnap then with a certain disingenuousness in singling out the statements in question as a perfect example of the kind of nonsensical metaphysical statements which he suggests that metaphysicians have unwittingly made in the past. As Conant observes Carnap’s analysis clings to the supposition that Heidegger’s words are employed by him in nothing other than their usual senses. The problem then becomes one of seeing how it is that the author could imagine that he [Heidegger] was employing words in their usual senses. (ibid.) 323

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Conant zeros in on a specific passage from Carnap’s paper which ostensibly addresses this difficulty. The passage in question reads: In view of the gross logical errors we find [in Heidegger’s text]… we might be led to the conjecture that perhaps the word ‘nothing’ has in Heidegger’s treatise a meaning entirely different from the customary one. And this presumption is further strengthened as we go on to read that anxiety reveals the Nothing, that the Nothing itself is present as such in anxiety. For here the word ‘nothing’ seems to refer to a certain emotional constitution, possibly of a religious sort, or something or other that underlies such emotions. If such were the case, then the mentioned logical errors…would not pertain. But the first sentence of the quotation at the beginning of this section proves that this interpretation is not possible. The combination of ‘only’ and ‘nothing else’ shows unmistakably that the word ‘nothing’ here has the usual meaning of a logical particle that serves for the formulation of a negative existential statement. (As quoted in Conant, 2001, pp. 31–32) Conant insists however that Carnap is clearly wrong to insist that Heidegger employs the term ‘nothing’ in only one way, which is crucial to the latter’s claim that Heidegger is ‘unwittingly’ guilty of lapsing into nonsensical statements as a result of his being deceived by the surface grammar of his prose. Heidegger clearly states that the notion of negation is itself derived from a prior experience of nothingness. In other words, we must, Heidegger believes, already have a sense or understanding of nothingness from which the act of negation itself is derived. Heidegger has gone to some pains to establish that if being is not itself a thing, then the notion of being is not ‘some thing’ to be distinguished from ‘nothingness’ in view of its extantness/actuality/substantiality. Heidegger reminds us in the same passage that this prior experience of the nothing is disclosed in anxiety. In other words, all meaningful presence, every kind of disclosure available to us, is already prefigured by the absence which precedes and awaits it – our experience of meaningful presence is run through with absence, which is part of how it is disclosed as meaningful in the first place. The very notion of presence, understood as unconcealedness, carries the trace of the concealed out of which it emerged. Being understood as the unconcealed and as meaningfully present is not itself a thing; ‘to be’ in that sense is not to be extant (even if we tend to speak of it thus) and thus nothingness cannot be understood as simply the negation of what is unconcealed since concealedness comes before the unconcealed and constitutes part of what the unconcealed ‘means’. Moreover, in neither case are we talking about a thing – so no-thing cannot be the negation of being as though it [being] were ‘some-thing’.19,20

Mindfulness If we were to usher in an age where meditative thinking and mindfulness as opposed to calculative thinking reigned supreme, would Carnap’s concerns simply vanish or dissolve as pseudo problems in their own right? Would we be able to think outside of the strictures, for example, of the law of non-contradiction? We must exercise some caution when formulating and thinking about these questions. After all, it would be a mistake to conflate Heidegger’s views on truth (unconcealedness) and untruth (concealedness) with those of a dialetheist. After all, Heidegger doesn’t think that his views on being and nothingness involve any kind of contradiction – unless one adheres to a particular understanding of being 324

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such that nothingness must be understood as the negation of being in the conventional sense. The principle of non-contradiction might have its uses, but it has no place yet in Heidegger’s problematic when one has failed to determine what being means.21 What of the notions of ‘mindfulness’ and ‘meditative thinking’ in the context of Heidegger’s overall project? Of course, mindfulness, as a translation of ‘Besinnung’, is a key term for Heidegger. However, it’s not clear that Heidegger himself would wholeheartedly endorse what the term, which enjoys such wide-spread currency today, has come to represent over the last few decades. Granted, there are passages in the ‘Memorial Address’ where he outlines the posture of Gelassenheit (Releasement) which probably resonate. Consider the following, uncharacteristically sanguine passage from Heidegger’s speech to the residents of Messkirch: But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent upon something higher. I would call this comportment toward technology which expresses ‘yes’ and at the same time ‘no,’ by an old word, releasement toward things. (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 53–54) Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to suppose that what Heidegger has in mind here is a call for a period of therapeutic meditation. He is not looking to offer a self-help manual, a panacea for those overwrought with the pressures of contemporary life. Indeed, the very fact that there are Mindfulness apps for our smartphones suggests that the links between that kind of mindfulness and Heidegger’s attempts to challenge calculative thinking with meditative thinking are extremely tenuous at best.22 Notwithstanding, Heidegger takes the trouble to write a rather long, sprawling and often unwieldy collection of notes and fragments on the notion of Besinnung. Heidegger is, again and again, desperately trying to explain the basic impulse behind his thinking concerning the obscured meaning of ‘being’, the concomitant question of nothingness, the interplay of presence and absence, and the idea of ‘rewinding’ back through the tradition of metaphysics to its inception. In order to think through these various issues, something like mindfulness or meditative thinking is needed. To an extent mindfulness, for Heidegger, is the reflective questioning of a thinking which has not already conflated being with actuality and thereby distinguished it from absence understood as its negation, that is, as the opposite of being. Instead, it would be a thinking that understands the enormity of the implications of thinking through the ontological difference, that being is not itself a being (and therefore that ‘nothing’ cannot be the negation of ‘being’), and that the being of something, it’s emergence as meaningfully present, frequently involves an interplay of presence and absence. If we think back to the chalk example, the chalk ‘is’ in terms of possibilities that are not yet actualised, but they are part of what it means for that chalk ‘to be’ the chalk it currently is. In thinking carefully about the nature of thing as a thing – one can free oneself to an extent from the idea that what we mean by any ‘thing’ that we intend, a jug that we see – for instance, is the constancy of what appears as present in the appearance, since part of what we ‘mean’/intend are facets and aspects and possibilities that are not actualised at that moment. The jug is a jug that is like one I have seen before and which I plan to use as a vessel for wine (this was the point of 325

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the discussion of the in-order-to structure and the ready to hand nature of our everyday engagement with things in SZ). It will be filled shortly. It will then be empty again later. There is a historical dimension to the way it is disclosed to me as present which involves the constant interplay of presence and absence. Calculative thinking, however, has emerged from a tradition which fastened on the disclosed part of disclosure and fixated on the idea of what appears as constantly present in the appearance as though it were constantly, statically present and thus overlooks or forgets the historical nature of the thing that we experience as that thing. It can then focus on the properties and the fabric, the material constitution, and the causal considerations relevant to that thing – which is to think calculatively, which can allow it to be reckoned and positioned in various ways.23 What would Heidegger think of the other key notion, associated with Mindfulness, that is, of being in the moment? I take it that it goes without saying that this is already something of a fool’s errand if one remains hidebound to the chronological sense of time without really thinking through what Heidegger refers to as the ‘time-character’ of our experience of presence, which already contains traces of the absence which is part of the meaningful presence/disclosure of things? Indeed, if one has not tracked what Heidegger means in terms of the constant interplay of presence and absence, then the idea of staying in the ‘moment’ degenerates into something as preposterous as the impossible aspiration of freezing oneself statically in the now.24 If our lives are lived and understood meaningfully as always in process, as a kind of movement, then we can only be present in any moment as pres-ab-sent beings, as the ‘null basis of a nullity’ (Sein und Zeit). We are ‘no-thing’ at every moment of our existence, the only way we could be as ‘things’ is as bio-anthropological things – which is not a way that ‘we’ (Dasein) can be – we can only ever be (mis)interpreted in such ways by others. This is only something, as Heidegger repeatedly states, that human Dasein can be.25 The human being, understood as Dasein, is exempt ‘from any comparison with the animal and with the merely living’ – ‘the ownmost of man is removed from animality’ (Mindfulness, p. 90). Earlier in the text Heidegger writes: The more fundamentally man’s ownmost is wrested free of animality and spirituality, the more he is allotted unto the inabiding, understood as the intimate persevering in the grounding of the truth of be-ing. ‘Letting-beings-be’ must be kept furthest removed from any cajoling of what is presently actual, effective and successful. (Mindfulness, p. 81)

Technological Age What would it mean to overcome calculative thinking in the technological age? In what ways would the current dominion of technology over our lives shift or change? Or, are Heidegger’s views so impoverished in terms of his understanding of economics and politics, for example, as to be risible in their own right? What would the notion of Gelassenheit discussed, for example, in his famous ‘Memorial Address’ actually entail? If we are to say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to technology in the era of high-speed internet, smart phones, smart rooms, smart houses, smart boards in the classroom, smart televisions, 5G, Wi-Fi…what would saying ‘no’ amount to? Once we have recognised the ‘saving power’, do we in some ways automatically impede the very force that technological development needs to sustain itself and thereby begin to resist the ‘hopeless frenzy of unchained technology’ (IM, p. 41); and 326

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do we only manage this by understanding again Heidegger’s exhaustive attempts to return to the beginning of Western metaphysics? Consider the question put to Heidegger concerning the technological age by interviewers from Der Spiegel in 1966: (S): One could make the following quite naïve rejoinder: what is to be overcome here? Everything is functioning. More and more power plants are being built. We have peak production. People in the highly technological parts of the world are well provided for. We live in prosperity. What is really missing here? (Heidegger, 1993, p. 105. Translation modified) What they are challenging in a way is the idea that we should be so swayed by all of the harbingers of doom, prognosticators of some futuristic dystopian nightmare.26 Heidegger’s response is more nuanced than one might suppose at first glance; it would be a mistake to dismiss it as so much grandiloquent posturing: (H): Everything is functioning. This is exactly what is so uncanny, that everything is functioning and that the functioning drives us more and more to even further functioning, and that technology tears people loose from the earth and uproots them. I do not know whether you were frightened, but I at any rate was when I saw pictures coming from the moon to the earth. We don’t need any atom bomb. The uprooting of human beings has already taken place. The only thing we have left are purely technological relationships. This is no longer the earth on which human beings live. As you know, I recently had a long conversation with Rene Char of the Provence, the poet and resistance fighter. Rocket bases are being built in the Provence and the country is being devastated in an incredible way. This poet, who certainly cannot be suspected of sentimentality and of the glorification of the idyllic, tells me that the uprooting of human beings which is taking place there will be the end, if poetry and thought do not once more succeed to a position of might without force. (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 105–106. Translation modified) Heidegger responds by deploying the notion of uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) – that is to say, that it is this very functionality, the collapsing of distance and difficulty, and the burgeoning of convenience culture that is so uncanny. Heidegger alludes here to the very heart of his theoretical analysis of the essence of the technological age and his gestures towards the possibility of a ‘saving power’ through his invocation of a different, poetic/poietic form of revealing, concurring with Char’s suggestion that poetry and thinking must once more ascend to ‘a position of might without force’. Heidegger’s interviewers represent a certain point of view, we hear it again in the responses of critics who rejoin ‘how is this anything more than the typical sentimentality of a curmudgeonly crank?’ After all, has it not always been the case that human beings can misappropriate or misuse or corrupt any important discovery? Airplanes can be used to deliver weapons of devastation to far flung regions of the planet; the issue is hardly the airplane itself. Heidegger repeatedly anticipates these kinds of responses and explains that they don’t touch on what is relevant to his concerns. Rather, Heidegger’s issue is with the way the world is revealed to people in an age where airplanes have shrunk the planet such that a trip between distant countries is no more than the onetime excursion into town for the country-dweller of a hundred years hence.27 Can we begin to imagine what might happen if we were not yoked to the revelatory ordinances of 327

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the technological age? How might things be otherwise? After all, have we not seen the most extraordinary breakthroughs in science? Surely what we are witnessing everywhere is progress. Things are ‘better’, are they not? But do we actually have a ‘better’ understanding of everything now? Think about education for a moment – something many of us are heavily invested in. For all of our online platforms, accessibility, lectures recorded for convenience, writing resources, learning resources, every conceivable aid or tool to make the student’s life ‘easier’, everything simply there, on hand, instantaneously – is it the case that we are seeing ‘better’ students? Better essays? More articulate students? More learned and erudite students than ever before? If things have improved so much, uniformly – across all areas of existence, then why is Mindfulness in more and more demand in an age which appears to be crippled with mental health issues, with a planet on the brink of an apocalyptic climate disaster, and much of the world locked in protracted military conflicts? Despite the many and various confident proclamations of progress and advancement, what if what we are really describing is ever and greater mastery over realms that we continue to shrink, where we keep narrowing the scope of our view, from the view of the naked eye, to the magnifying glass, to the microscope – until we arrive at the atom, but from there to the subatomic, and at each stage a triumphalist declaration of further progress as though we are getting closer and closer to the thing as it is in itself. What if the increase in ‘mastery’ is, in some ways, blocking our ability to notice something else? We simply, in accord with a tendency that began with the understanding of being as constant presence, keep looking for more and further exactitude by fastening (with an asphyxiating grip) on the more precise, what can be taken to be more ‘correct’, understood with even greater ‘exactitude’ (because even more constant and fixable under this laser like gaze), as we zero in relentlessly on what we can grasp with even more control and certainty. We are dealing with what is even narrower and less changeable, what is most constant and fixable/fixed, within the most constant and penetrating and focused of gazes. And, within these tiniest of arenas, where we appear to be able to control and predict with unprecedented levels of success and accuracy, where we bestride these miniscule stages as giants, we declare that we have a better understanding of what we purport to be masters of than anyone has enjoyed hitherto. And, not only that, this narrowest and most focused of gazes renders every other ‘view’ obsolete. I sometimes think of it as being like the action of a vice grip – as the teeth of the vice tighten and squeeze more and more, one has greater and greater purchase over the piece of wood one is gripping. Suppose however that one was sitting on a branch attached to a tree swaying in a storm, would one say that one controlled the tree just because one had tightened the vice’s grip on the branch? The analogy is a little forced, and of course it is not the end of the argument; we could say plenty against this way of thinking about things28 – but we are trying here to understand what Heidegger’s alternative to calculative thinking might be and why he is worried by what was/is widely touted as scientific and technological progress. If his concerns are not just those of an agrarian eccentric or a ‘German mandarin’29– then how should we understand the nature of his challenge to a way of understanding and thinking about reality that begins with the Ancient Greeks and culminates in the technological age? Ultimately, one can only think about these questions as part of Heidegger’s central project concerning the meaning of the term ‘being’ and the concomitant attempt to call into question the history of the metaphysics of presence. Meditative thinking pitted against calculative thinking must be understood in this context of his attempt to return to the very inception of the Western metaphysical tradition. And, it is only in this way that one can begin to properly understand what is most problematic about the technological age – which 328

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is nothing technological. It is too simplistic to suppose that Heidegger is advocating the adoption of something like an Amish lifestyle. Heidegger makes it very clear that this is not his aim. Computers, airplanes, trains, automobiles, life-saving medical treatment – these are not things to ‘sniff’ at. Heidegger is adamant that there is no demonry of technology, that we cannot suddenly eliminate technology from our lives: For all of us, the arrangements, devices, and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them. Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them that we may let go of them any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature. (Heidegger, 1996, pp. 53–54) It is not technology per se, but the eliminative character of the essence of technology that concerns Heidegger. As he makes clear again at the beginning of the Bremen lectures, we must learn to let things ‘be’ as things, and that involves more than reducing them through the ordinances of Gestell but to see them as things that emerge as meaningfully present for us within a historical context which involves the making present of what is absent as part of what it is for a thing to be a thing. He uses the example of a jug: the jug is currently empty, but we understand and experience it as a jug that will, for example, be filled with wine for an evening meal with friends and family. The emptiness of the jug is not there in the sense of being part of what is materially present in our immediate perception of the jug. Neither are the ‘possibilities’ of the jug or the memories of its past uses there as constantly actually present. As Heidegger expands on this in the Bremen lectures: he [the potter] forms the emptiness. For this emptiness, within it, and from out of it, he shapes the clay into a figure. The potter grasps first and constantly what is ungraspable in the empty and produces it as what holds the form of a vessel. The empty of the jug determines every grip of the production. The thinghood of the vessel by no means rests in the material of which it consists, but instead in the emptiness that holds. But is the jug really empty? The physical sciences assure us that the jug is filled with air and with all that constitutes the compound mixture of air…as soon as [we] investigate the actual jug scientifically and in regards to its actuality, then another state of affairs shows itself. If we pour wine into the jug we merely force out the air that already fills the jug and replace it with a fluid. Viewed scientifically, to fill the jug means to exchange one filling for another. These suppositions of physics are correct. By means of them science represents something actual, according to which it objectively judges. But–is this actual something the jug? No. Science only ever encounters that which its manner of representation 329

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has previously admitted as a possible object for itself… [instead of a] jug filled with wine [science] put[s] in its place a cavity in which a fluid expands. Science makes the jug-thing into something negligible, insofar as the thing [as the thing that is meant] is not admitted as the standard. Within its purview, that of objects, the compelling knowledge of science has already annihilated the thing as thing long before the atomic bomb exploded. The explosion of the atomic bomb is only the crudest of all crude confirmations of an annihilation of things that occurred long ago: confirmation that the thing as thing remains nullified. (Heidegger, 2012, pp. 8–9) As Wrathall has argued, the attempt to insist exclusively on the scientific understanding of things confuses different realms of understanding and meaningfulness.30 In other words, one substitutes what we mean when we experience or invoke a thing as a thing for a causal, material account that explains how (scientifically) certain processes work. That is to dismiss the semantic sense of the phenomenological experience of the intentional object in favour of the scientific account of what materially constitutes certain objects. But, of course, when I see a jug on the kitchen table, I don’t ‘see’ the material composition of a vessel filled with air, air now understood as a combination of Nitrogen (N2), Oxygen (O2), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), Water (H2O) that fills the jug – rather, I see the empty jug that we drank wine from last night. This relates to what Heidegger writes in ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ to the effect that we never experience bare auditory or ocular sensations: We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things—as this thing-concept alleges; rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the Volkswagen. Much closer to us than all sensations are the things themselves. We hear the door shut in the house and never hear acoustical sensations or even mere sounds. In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e., listen abstractly. (Heidegger, 1993, pp. 151–152) One can anticipate another potential rejoinder here (and understand it to an extent): we are required to make hypotheses in order to get a grip on reality and make sense of it. We make certain presuppositions, and we judge things according to how well they enhance our capacity to predict. We secure what we can hold on to. We judge things according to the explanatory success or poverty of these hypotheses and the ensuing chain of inferences or deductions. And it is very hard to see how we can convince ourselves that anything other than necessity or a portal into the nature of things as they essentially are, is behind the discovery of the combustion engine, nuclear fusion, quantum physics and so on. We seem to understand more, and science is sometimes taken then to be in a state of constant, cumulative, linear progress. But is it? Do we understand things more accurately through a specific kind of interpretive lens or simply with a clearer and less obstructed view of how things really are? Do we understood trees better than the wood turner or amateur gardener simply because we have better methods of growing, harvesting and processing timber? We might be hard pressed to convince someone who had recovered from serious illness today that their doctors and the extraordinary research and breakthroughs that facilitated their treatment are doing anything other than proceeding with a better understanding of the body and 330

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disease than previous generations. But again, why should this understanding and research require us to overlook other types of understanding and interpretation? Why should everything else be eliminated or deemed obsolete, ‘unscientific’? The criteria for what counts as relevant grow tighter, more exact, and less inclusive all the time. Our hypotheses and presuppositions, which perhaps have never fundamentally changed in terms of the underlying metaphysical presumptions (or better – a deepening of the basic prejudice that underlies all of them – that is the reliance on a metaphysics of presence), are, Heidegger argues, more problematic and loaded than one might suppose. It would be rather foolish to suggest that the extraordinary advances in computing are anything other than advances. However, is it possible that we have inadvertently and unnecessarily come to believe that the speed with which a computer can process any number of combinations of 1,0 (think truth tables – the principle of non-contradiction) in a split second, and identify an ‘answer’, is the preeminent way to approach all problems or questions? Are we enslaved, to an extent, to the algorithm? Or are we even aware that the algorithmic approach often prevails only at the expense of other kinds of interpretation – that it excludes whatever cannot be translated into its formulas? Must we of necessity accede to the scientific insistence that what we experience is what the scientist describes, which has emerged from out of a narrowing and intensification of scrutiny concerning what was taken as constantly present and available to correct perception and judgment 2,500 years ago? Or, can we retrieve the thing as thing from out of glimpses of what we experience phenomenologically, which indicate something more (as meant by us) in terms of things ‘being’, that is, emerging as, things? Moreover, is it really the case that we simply try out hypotheses on the basis of all that is given to us in experience? Is it not rather the case that we begin with certain laws of thought (that assume the necessity of constant presence), which we don’t take as hypothetical, but rather as strictly necessary? We then apply these laws to what is taken to appear as constantly present. And yet, the laws of thought in question themselves derive from and depend on this notion of constant presence. What is more, it simply is not the case that all we have access to in our experience is constant presence.31 What would mindfulness and meditative thinking, which is, in the text with the same title, characterised as the appropriate philosophical disposition, bring to the party? How might we begin to see things differently – what would the saving power entail? How might things have been otherwise (if we had not begun with the first beginning)? If absence was part of how we understood things to be meaningfully present, or better, if our metaphysical presuppositions had not already conflated being with actuality, with being extant, with being understood as constant presence, how might things have turned out differently? Well, perhaps we might finally begin to let things be as things. Perhaps that is where we need to start.32

Notes 1 It might seem to some as though we are flogging a dead horse – so much appears to have been written on the topic of Carnap’s critique of Heidegger after all. However, few commentators (in my view) manage to spell out the substantive response that is clearly available to Heidegger. Most of what I have read in the literature involves a clear summary of Carnap’s argument and almost a shrug to the effect that Heidegger would laugh off Carnap’s critique and embrace the claim that he is an irrationalist, committed to illogical poetry. To my mind, Heidegger’s position is far more interesting and nuanced than that, and I’m convinced that he has the resources within his thought to offer a substantive and compelling response to Carnap. In short, there are simply not enough attempts to reconstruct an argument for Heidegger contra Carnap. An interesting exception to this

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Friedman (2000) provides some historical background and offers an account of how the situation escalated and contributed to a split between analytic and continental philosophy. I’m inclined to agree with Friedman that it owed as much to political and ideological forces percolating in the background as anything else. Nelson (2013) glosses Heidegger’s position quite nicely in an introductory entry for a volume of essays on Heidegger, but, understandably, he doesn’t really get into the nuts and bolts of the argument. Friedlander’s essay (Friedlander, 1998) again fails to really reconstruct Heidegger’s own position and offers Carnap’s claims concerning metaphysicians as musicians without musical ability as a more compelling critique of Heidegger’s view than it is – since it largely concedes the point to Carnap that Heidegger is effectively abandoning philosophy in favour of badly written poetry. Many commentators see Heidegger as doubling down on the necessity of an irrationalist type of poetic thinking despite Carnap’s critique and without actually seeing that Heidegger has a much more robust and substantive response against Carnap available to him. Another interesting exception to this is Voltolini’s 2015 paper – ‘Heidegger’s Logico-Semantic Strikeback’. However, it seems to me that Voltolini’s basic thesis is already precluded if one is looking to reconstruct what Heidegger himself is trying to say. That is to say, that whilst many would agree with the claim that Carnap’s criticisms fail, the idea that Heidegger is trying (when discussing how the nothing itself nothings, for example) to say something in a way that Carnap would endorse as logically acceptable, that is that he ‘may be read in a logically correct way’ and that ‘such a way is its suggested reading’, just seems obviously wrong. What’s more, Heidegger seems to clearly signal his resistance to Carnap’s basic approach and wants to call into question the latter’s insistence on thinking of nothing in a particular way, which has already begged the question, and of then applying the principle of non-contradiction in what also amounts to a question begging fashion. 2 For a discussion of this see Friedman (2000, pp. 21–23). 3 Heidegger (2000, p. 1) (Hereafter IM). 4 This raises an interesting question as to what we might mean by ‘non-being’. Being and nothingness are not ‘opposites’ ultimately, but the privative indicates that non-being implies the opposite of being. But, of course, being is not itself a ‘being’; if it is not a being and/or a thing (i.e. it is no-thing), then nothing is not the negation of being and, therefore, non-being is not equivalent to nothing. 5 ‘In the domain of the first beginning the “what-question” inceptually gained a preeminence over the “why-question” indeed so that this “why-question” could not at all determine the actual thoughtful thinking of beings as such. However, the “what-question”, “What is being?” becomes in fact the guiding-question of the entire subsequent metaphysics, but the response to this question is attempted by way of explanation from out of causes or out of conditions for the representability of beings that are pre-determined as objects’ Heidegger (2016, p. 233). 6 That is the point of his various discussions of the in-order-to, ready-to-hand nature of our day-today activities, the notion of possibility, the for-the-sake-of nature of activity, being-towards-death – they all serve to illustrate the interplay of presence and absence in our everyday experience. 7 After all negation here is parasitic on the realm of continuous presence, which, in turn, can only emerge in the context of coming from out of concealedness into unconcealedness, from what is not continuously present to what then emerges as meaningfully present but is misrepresented as though what we experience is only ever the continuously present and as though it is not shot through itself with absence. In order for P&-P to be an impossible state of affairs, P must be understood as continuously present rather than pres-ab-sent. Part of Heidegger’s key insight is that many things which we might be tempted to represent as ‘P’ are only artificially rendered as continually present.

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Being Mindful about Nothing 8 This is the claim that Carnap should have contested (and it would be interesting to see how that argument might unfold) rather than the somewhat less interesting argument which presupposes that nothingness and negation only have the meanings which Carnap has already ascribed to them as part of a logical language. 9 Heidegger offers another version of his views in Mindfulness: “The traditionally disputed question is this: is the incapability of our thinking the consequence of the necessity of the being that is thought or is this necessity only a projection [Projektion] of our “subjective” incapability? Or, is this either-or itself insufficient and, if yes, to what extent? To the extent that “thinking” as νοῦς provides the horizon for the truth of being, being is grasped as constant presence. And the principle of contradiction is valid for this “being”. But for this very same reason, this principle is not “subjective” and is not just the expression of an “incapacity”. [G396] Had not then Hegel elevated, preserved and cancelled the validity of this principle? No! He had only broadened this validity by correspondingly positioning beingness as absolute idea. In this way it is possible, indeed even necessary, to think everything that is to be thought and every “being” in several respects (“in itself”, “for itself”, “in and for itself”), which means to think what is contradictory as necessary. With the help of this principle the transformation of the finite thought into in-finite thought is simply enacted. Hegel’s metaphysics is the supreme confirmation of the principle of contradiction as the basic principle of metaphysics, that is, as the basic principle of the interpretation of beingness as constant presence and as objectness of representing’ (Heidegger, 2016, p. 339). 10 A sempiternal substance, for example. One could argue that Heidegger appears to rely on transcendental conditions of a sort himself in Being and Time – but that is another very long and complicated story. 11 ‘Why, however, should such an overcoming of metaphysics be necessary? Is the point merely to underpin that discipline of philosophy which was the root hitherto and to supplant it with a yet more original discipline? Is it a question of changing the philosophic system of instruction? No. Or are we trying to go back into the ground of metaphysics in order to uncover a hitherto overlooked presupposition of philosophy, and thereby to show that philosophy does not yet stand on an unshakable foundation [i.e. something else that could be taken to be constantly, eternally present – as opposed to the utter indeterminacy of nothingness which is the ultimate non-grounded ground] and therefore cannot yet be the absolute science? No.   It is something else that is at stake with the arrival of the truth of Being or its failure to arrive: it is neither the state of philosophy nor philosophy itself alone, but rather the proximity or remoteness of that from which philosophy, insofar as it means the representation of beings as such, receives its essence and its necessity. What is to be decided is whether Being itself, out of its own proper truth, can come to pass in a relation appropriate to the essence of human beings; or whether metaphysics, in turning away from its ground, continue to prevent the relation of Being to man from lighting up, out of the essence of this very relation, in such a way as to bring human beings into a belonging to Being’ (Heidegger, 1998, pp. 279–280). 12 Heidegger characterises what he takes to be Carnap’s position, targeting the principle of noncontradiction in particular:   ‘Whoever talks about Nothing does not know what he is doing. In speaking about Nothing, he makes it into a something. By speaking this way, he speaks against what he means. He contradicts himself. But self-contradictory speech is an offense against the fundamental rule of speech (logos), against ‘logic’. Talking about Nothing is illogical. Whoever talks and thinks illogically is an unscientific person. Now whoever goes so far as to talk about Nothing within philosophy, which after all is the home of logic, deserves all the more to be accused of offending against the fundamental rule of all thinking. Such talk about Nothing consists in utterly senseless propositions’ (IM, pp. 25–26).   Heidegger would diagnose Carnap’s own response to his concerns as indicative of a philosophical outlook/approach which is itself locked within the confines of the metaphysics of presence and the concomitant idea that being reduces to actuality and or constant, static presence and thus as though it itself is the opposite of nothingness – nothingness here understood as the negation of being. 13 As Heidegger explains in his ‘Introduction to “What is Metaphysics?”’, he is interested in a different question to Leibniz: ‘Does the lecture [“What is Metaphysics?”] end up by asking with Leibniz the metaphysical question about the supreme cause of all that is? Why, then, is Leibniz’s name not mentioned, as would seem appropriate?

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Mahon O’Brien   Or is the question asked in an altogether different sense? If it does not concern itself with beings and inquire about their first cause among all beings, then the question must begin from that which is not a being. And this is precisely what the question names, and it capitalizes the word: the Nothing’ (Heidegger, 1998, pp. 289–290). 14 Part of what it means for the chalk to be a particular piece of chalk is its possibility of being used up when drawn along the blackboard and thus to no longer be – this is part of what it means for the chalk to be: it ‘is’ in this possibility. But, Heidegger goes on to argue   ‘Of course, when we look for this Possible in the chalk, we are accustomed and inclined to say that we do not see it and do not grasp it. But that is a prejudice. The elimination of this prejudice is part of the unfolding of our question. For now, this question should just open up beings, in their wavering between not-Being and Being. Insofar as beings stand up against the extreme possibility of not-Being, they themselves stand in Being, and yet they have never thereby overtaken and overcome the possibility of not-Being.’ (IM, pp. 32–33). 15 See also Heidegger (1998, pp. 317–318). 16 Heidegger is interested in truth understood as unconcealedness, since the capacity to emerge as meaningful is to emerge from a condition of ‘concealedness’ where truth understood as correctness limits our inquiry to the representation of what is already unconcealed, taking what is unconcealed as what is constantly, statically present. However, traditional metaphysics overlooks this – ‘its own ground withdraws from it because in the rise of unconcealedness its essential core, namely, concealedness, remains absent in favor of that which is unconcealed, which can thereby first appear as beings’ (Heidegger, 1998, pp. 280–281). 17 Indeed, the closer one looks at this essay, the harder it is to conclude anything other than that Carnap’s paper is politically motivated and philosophically disingenuous. 18 See Fay, pp. 42–43. 19 Toward the end of Mindfulness Heidegger offers a crucial summary: ‘Rather, the sameness of being with the “nothing” confirms that be-ing can never be a “nihilated something” [ein “nichtiges”] prior to all beings, because be-ing is the ab-ground of the swaying of that which any being as such grounds. However, the ab-ground is not a being that is “absolute”, “detached” and “constant” by itself but the en-owning [Ereignis] of the arrival. This ab-ground certainly should not be named “finitude” – a word that is metaphysically all too burdened – except when thinking and pondering free themselves beforehand from the familiar trajectories of representation and become a detached co-enacting of a question’ (Heidegger, 2016, p. 338). See also Heidegger (1998, p. 311). In ‘Introduction to “What is Metaphysics?”’ Heidegger writes: ‘How does it come about that beings take precedence everywhere and lay claim to every “is,” while that which is not a being – namely, the Nothing thus understood as Being itself – remains forgotten? How does it come about that with Being It is really nothing and that the Nothing does not properly prevail?’ (Heidegger, 1998, p. 290). 20 In a withering review of Hermann Philipse’s famous critique of Heidegger, Taylor Carman also addresses some of the issues which we have been dealing with in the foregoing:   ‘Philipse distances himself, but only very slightly, from the uncomprehending objections of the positivists by admitting the obvious, namely, that ‘Carnap’s critique of the lecture is uncharitable’. He nevertheless goes on to reiterate the central points of that critique. Heidegger’s insistence that our idea of a totality of entities – and – its counterpart, nothing-offers food for philosophical thought, Philipse concludes, ‘is meaningless because it violates the rules of logical syntax’; indeed, ‘Heidegger’s question of being and nothingness is nonsensical because it is ruled out by the principle of noncontradiction’ (Carman, 2001, p. 567). 21 This raises another question as to whether Heidegger would ever see the law of non-contradiction as more than the consequence of a thinking that reduces being to constant presence and actuality and generates related notions such as ‘substance’ and ‘identity’ and requires the law in that context. 22 There are of course people who think that there are more interesting parallels to be drawn between Heidegger’s notion and less superficial forms of Mindfulness – though Heidegger himself typically rules any such comparisons out. 23 Besinnung (along with besinnliche nachdenken) is frequently characterised as the appropriate disposition for the thinker. Heidegger’s notion of Besinnung is also clearly linked to the notion of Gelassenheit. Hence, one might wonder again as to whether Gelassenheit itself is an appeal to a serene, zen like state – a moment of quiet releasement where one simply ‘stays in the moment’? Is

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Being Mindful about Nothing there a connection, if somewhat debased, that’s worth exploring? Is mindfulness in the 21st century essentially the posture of Gelassenheit, understood as a way of remaining not in thrall to the ordinances of Gestell? Clearly, in the text with the title Gelassenheit, Gelassenheit is introduced directly in the context of Besinnung, in the context, that is, of meditative thinking as opposed to calculative thinking. Here one feels compelled to sound a note of caution when considering Heidegger’s idiosyncratic use of terms which we often understand in more conventional contexts. When Heidegger is thinking of ‘angst’ for example, and in his meditation on the notion of Befindlichkeit, he is adamant that he is not thinking of psychic phenomena and so, despite the temptation to do so, we do something of a disservice to those discussions if we immediately marshal them for a discussion of anxiety as a psychological phenomenon. See Mahon O’Brien (2019) for further discussion of this. He reiterates this stance in the context of Besinnung: ‘In accord with Da-sein, attunement is neither psychological nor biological nor “existential”’ (Heidegger, 2016, p. 78). See also Heidegger (2016, p. 363). We need to exercise a similar level of caution then with respect to the notion of Besinnung. Of course, one can appreciate a possible rejoinder here to the effect that we need to free ourselves from the procrustean admonitions of the hermeneutically scrupulous, risk averse scholar and forge ahead, breaking new ground in a spirit of intellectual adventure. Alas, all too often, those good intentions lose their bearings, drifting into territories governed by a new set of co-ordinates, and we suddenly find ourselves embroiled in arguments as to what Heidegger ‘really’ meant. We also have to endure the vanity projects of those less well intentioned; we find scholars, for example, looking to describe an almost religious mysticism which they then proclaim to be the beating heart of Heidegger’s work. Of course, irrespective of my own scant regard for such enterprises – I would defend everyone’s right to appropriate Heidegger in whatever direction they wish. That stops short of having to agree that this kind of work should be acknowledged as legitimate interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking. The fact that we have appropriated Heidegger in the service of our own intellectual enterprises can all too often be forgotten or obscured and we begin to hear claims to the effect that this is what Heidegger himself was concerned with. You’ll forgive me if these reservations sound like the cranky admonitions of a curmudgeon – but for all that, I don’t think I’ve ever been accused of being a purist and certainly not by my many and various ‘enemies’, a considerable number of whom pen their castigatory polemics under the same dreadful sobriquet – ‘Reviewer Two’. Nor am I aware of any such accusations being levelled against me by my Heideggerian ‘friends’. The cautionary note is simply to remind ourselves that to appropriate Heidegger is not to interpret Heidegger, and we would do well to remember as much in our various philosophical endeavours and expeditions so as to forestall any future confusion. 24 Heidegger struggled ceaselessly against the grip that the metaphysics behind that notion of the ‘now’ and the concomitant notion of constant, static presence had on our thinking. However, could the idea of a moment be re-conceived, and in ways that Heidegger might endorse? Perhaps! We could begin to speak in the language of the event (what Emad, Maly and Malary persist in translating as ‘enowning’) – to occupy that ever moving, dynamic process of awareness that suddenly realises how something has emerged as meaningfully present. ‘Every kind of presence and of presentation stems from the event [Ereignis] of presence.’ ‘On the Question of Being’ (Heidegger, 1998, p. 302). 25 For further discussion of these issues, see Mahon O’Brien (2022). 26 It is interesting to note here that no mention is made of the wanton exploitation of other parts of the planet and its peoples to sustain the relatively lavish lifestyle of the technocratic West. This does not appear to be something that Heidegger considers either, even as he recoils in horror from the growing dominion of Gestell. One wonders indeed if the ahistorical ‘primitive peoples’ he refers to in other texts might not have a more authentic historical sense of things and a historical world within which they emerge and abide than anything to be found in the West? 27 ‘Places that a person previously reached after weeks and months on the road are now reached by airplane overnight’ (Heidegger, 2012, p. 3). 28 For example, someone might argue that the hypothetical approach is the only way we can proceed, and the representation of what appears is the only grip/foothold we have on reality from which we can lever our way to further advances – how else could we proceed? What are the alternatives? Is this not what the character of Socrates suggests (albeit in a way that I believe Plato is looking to subvert) in Meno? These may appear to be reasonable retorts – but, even if we understand the motivation for such responses – should we also be so quick to concede that what began as

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Mahon O’Brien a hypothesis (that is – a partial, perspectival representation) is the only ‘way’ of thinking about things? Why do we insist on the eliminative strategy that goes with it if we can in fact begin to imagine another or different way of thinking about things? 29 Adorno and Habermas both characterise Heidegger’s views in this way. 30 Wrathall makes a similar point in an introductory book on Heidegger. However, he charges the physicist with confusing the causal realm with the experiential realm without explicitly emphasising the importance of intentionality and meaningfulness here. We experience things as things (see Wrathall 2005, p. 9, p. 10). 31 See Heidegger (2012, pp. 87–89). 32 There is a sense in which Heidegger never gets much further than this. He diagnoses this problem with the tradition (and indeed the technological age), but never actually gets as far as outlining how things might change, how they might have turned out differently. Maybe this is why he characterises his work as an attempt to pave the way for future thinkers? The enormity and extent of his task was, effectively, to try to finally make clear what he was, ultimately, looking to accomplish from at least as early as Being and Time.

References Carman, T (2001) “On Making Sense (And Nonsense) of Heidegger,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research vol. 63 no. 3,pp. 561–572. Carnap, R (1959) “On the Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language,” in A.J. Ayer, ed, Translated by Arthur Pap. Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press. Conant, J (2001) “Die Überwindung Der Metaphysik,” in T. McCarthy and S.C. Stidd, eds, Wittgenstein in America. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fay, T (1976) Heidegger: The Critique of Logic. Netherlands: M. Nijhoff, The Hague. Friedlander, E (1998) “Heidegger, Carnap, Wittgenstein: Much Ado About Nothing,” in A. Biletzki and A. Matar, eds, The Story of Analytic Philosophy. London & New York: Routledge. Friedman, M (2000) A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Illinois: Open Court, Chicago and La Salle. Heidegger, M (1996) “Memorial Address”. Discourse on Thinking. Translated by John M. Anderson and E. Hans Freund. New York: Harper & Row. Heidegger, M (1998) Pathmarks. Edited by W. McNeill. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heidegger, M (2000) Introduction to Metaphysics. Translated by Gregory Fried and Richard Polt. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Heidegger, M (2012) Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking. Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M (2016) Mindfulness. Translated by Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary. Bloomsbury, London. Kaufer, S (2005) “Logic,” in H.L. Dreyfus and M.A. Wrathall, eds, A Companion to Heidegger. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Luchte, J (2007). “Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Carnap: Radical Phenomenology, Logical Positivism and the Roots of the Continental/Analytic Divide,” Philosophy Today vol. 51 no. 3. Nelson, E. S (2013) “Heidegger and Carnap: Disagreeing About Nothing?,” in F. Raffoul and E.S. Nelson, eds, The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger. London & New York: Bloomsbury. O’Brien, Mahon (2019) “Being, Nothingness and Anxiety,” in C. Hadjioannou, ed, Heidegger on Affect. Palgrave. O’Brien, Mahon (2022). “Death, Politics, and Heidegger’s Bremen Remarks,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy vol. 60 no. 2, pp. 249–276. Voltolini, A (2015) “Heidegger’s Logico-Semantic Strikeback,” Organon vol. 22 no. Supplementary Issue, pp. 19–38. Wrathall, M (2005) How to Read Heidegger. London: Granta Books.

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22 THE RESPIRATORY CONTEXT OF DUKKHA AND NIRVANA The Buddha’s Mindful Phenomenology of Breathing Petri Berndtson Introduction In this chapter, I explore the Buddha’s mindfulness of breathing within the context of phenomenology. In my view, the whole of the Buddha’s philosophy and teachings are based on his mindful experience of breathing which can be interpreted as a certain kind of mindful phenomenology of breathing and for this reason, I suggest that also his philosophy, for example, his four noble truths need to be reinterpreted within the phenomenological atmosphere of breathing.

The Buddha’s Respiratory Quest and Irigaray’s Respiratory Difference In her book Between East and West: From Singularity to Community, Luce Irigaray (2002) makes a fundamental distinction between “forgetting of breathing” and “cultivation of breathing”. With Lenart Škof I have named this distinction a “respiratory difference” (Škof & Berndtson, 2018, xvi). There is a respiratory difference between “forgetting of breathing” and “cultivation of breathing”. The respiratory difference is a fundamental difference that determines our being-in-the-world. According to Irigaray (2002, 77), “[t]he forgetting of breathing in our [Western] tradition is almost universal”. A great example of this Western forgetting of breathing is that academic philosophy in the West does not understand the phenomenon of breathing as an important philosophical question. Another clear example of this almost universal forgetting is that in our educational and cultural system cultivation of breathing does not play any kind of important, nor even semi-important, role in our ideals and values of how a human being could grow and develop into one’s full potential ethically, socially, individually, artistically, epistemologically, politically, religiously and spiritually. On the other hand, in philosophies and wisdom traditions of the East “cultivation of breathing” and “practice of respiration” have played an essential role in human development and spiritual growth. In the Eastern traditions cultivation of breathing, according to Irigaray (2002, 6–8, 76), means “learning again to breathe”, understanding experientially the essential relation between the soul and the breath and “becoming spiritual” through the breath. This means, for example, that “the masters of the East” (2002, 7) DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-27

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have learned themselves and guided others how to breathe again “in the service of the heart, of thought, of speech and not only in the service of physiological survival” (2006, 76). In the Western tradition as the tradition of forgetting of breathing, we mostly breathe “only in the service of physiological survival”. So, according to “the masters of the East”, the cultivation of breathing will in a deep manner transform how and what we feel, love, think and speak. One of the greatest “masters of the East” is Siddharta Gautama, or better known, the Buddha. According to Irigaray (2000, 131), the Buddha “shows that one can be born again through breathing”, that is, one can transform one’s way of being and thus determine in a new respiratory manner the meaning of being-in-the-world. To achieve the total transformation of being-in-the-world is the “quest of the Buddha”. Irigaray (2002, 35–36) interprets this respiratory quest of the Buddha as follows: The quest of the Buddha seems to me to correspond to the search for a continuous communion with the respiration of the macrocosm. In order to attain such fluidity, the Buddha renounces the punctuality, the discontinuity, of objects and, moreover, of discourses. He tries to become pure subject but on a model forgotten by us: pure subject means here breathing in tune with the breathing of the entire living universe. In this chapter, I take truly seriously the respiratory difference between “forgetting of breathing” and “cultivation of breathing” as I investigate phenomenologically the Buddha’s philosophy of the Four Noble Truths and his experience of nirvana within the atmosphere of mindful cultivation of breathing. At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that within Buddhist scholarship the forgetting of breathing runs rampant as it is very rare to find a study of the Buddha’s philosophy which would interrogate it within the atmosphere of mindful breathing (anapanasati). Irigaray is one of the very few interpreters of the Buddha’s philosophy who emphasizes the essential respiratory atmosphere of his work and of his spiritual quest.

Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing as a Background for Interpreting the Buddha’s Mindful Phenomenology of Breathing Before we begin to interpret the Buddha’s philosophy within the phenomenological atmosphere of mindful breathing, let us open the atmospheric background that makes my respiratory phenomenological interrogation possible. My book Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Respiratory Primacy of Being came out earlier this year 2023. This book is the first monograph length study on phenomenological ontology of breathing. The theoretical background of my book is especially Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s cryptic remarks on breathing that he himself never elaborates and which have not been studied by the community of Merleau-Ponty scholars before my book except very briefly by David KleinbergLevin. These studies of Kleinberg-Levin have been important sources of inspiration for my book. His article “Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing” that was originally published in 1984 (and republished with some changes in the anthology Atmospheres of Breathing in 2018) is a pioneer text in phenomenological ontology of breathing. The following three ontologico-respiratory formulations by Kleinberg-Levin have laid the groundwork for my book (Berndtson, 2023, 83–85). The first formulation states: “Breathing … is our first and most primordial openness to elemental being … [to] a sphere of air, i.e., 338

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an elemental atmosphere” (Levin, 1984, 124; Kleinberg-Levin, 2018, 6). The second one states: “Breathing is our most fundamental openness, our most fundamental experience of non-duality” (Levin, 1984, 129; Kleinberg-Levin, 2018, 10). And finally the third formulation says: “Breathing is our body’s first openness to Being” (Levin, 1984, 126; KleinbergLevin, 2018, 8). In these formulations, Kleinberg-Levin gives a respiratory interpretation to Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s ontological formulation “openness to Being” or “openness to the world” which states the very essence of human being and the point of departure for philosophy as phenomenological ontology (Berndtson, 2023, 34–98). To exist as a human being is to be openness to Being. In the Merleau-Pontian context of “the primacy of perception” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007, 89–118), the ontological openness to Being receives a perceptual interpretation in the form of “the perceptual openness to the world” (MerleauPonty, 1968, 212). In his phenomenology of perception, Merleau-Ponty (1945, xvi; 2012, lxxxv; 1968, 103) emphasizes especially the phenomenon of seeing as a way of being-in-theworld which he essentially intertwines with the essence of philosophizing as he writes: “true philosophy is to relearn to see the world”. In his emphasis of seeing and relearning to see, Merleau-Ponty is following the phenomenological tradition as Edmund Husserl (1983, xix) understands that learning to do phenomenology is a project where one needs “to learn to see, distinguish, and describe what lies within view”. In this sense phenomenology is part of the whole Western ocularcentric philosophical tradition that began with Plato and Aristotle. I mentioned earlier that what is highly interesting from the perspective of cultivation of breathing is that within Merleau-Ponty’s oeuvre there are few of fragmentary cryptic remarks on breathing that have the potentiality, if one is able to interpret them in a proper manner, to challenge his own thesis of the primacy of perception and his idea of the “true philosophy” as a project of relearning to see the world (Berndtson, 2023, 46–65). Especially here I want to emphasize that his brief descriptions about the process of falling asleep and the phenomenon of sleep could clear the way, if they would be taken truly seriously, toward a deeper level of being-in-the-world than what occurs within the atmosphere of the primacy of perception as within these remarks on falling asleep the perceptual way of being is almost entirely abolished. One of the most interesting of these Merleau-Ponty’s respiratory remarks can be found from his magnum opus Phenomenology of Perception. This remark airs: [S]leep arrives when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from the outside the very confirmation that it was expecting. I was breathing slowly and deeply to call forth sleep, and suddenly, one might say, my mouth communicates with some immense exterior lung that calls my breath forth and forces it back, a certain respiratory rhythm desired by me just a moment ago, becomes my very being, and sleep intended until then as a signification, suddenly turns into a situation. (2012, 219) When one tries to fall asleep one of the first acts one does in one’s path toward sleep is closing one’s eyes and thus one withdraws oneself immediately from the Merleau-Pontian project of true philosophy as relearning to see the world anew. In a somewhat similar manner before the event of falling asleep may occur one tries to withdraw oneself from almost all relations (perceptual, social, practical, theoretical, personal, professional, etc.) to the world. The more effectively one is able to close all the carnal and mental doors or channels to the world (or close them as thoroughly as possible), the more likely it is that one could 339

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fall asleep. The only door that is kept wide open to the world is the door of breathing as, according to Merleau-Ponty, one calls forth sleep by imitating the slow and deep breathing of the sleeper. One falls asleep when one’s mimicry of sleep turns into real sleep. At that sudden moment, according to Merleau-Ponty, a respiratory transformation takes place in which “some immense exterior lung” takes over the sleeper’s breathing by creating “a certain respiratory rhythm” which becomes the sleeper’s very being. This means that in this respiratory relation some form of immensity enters within the sleeper and constitutes in a transformative manner the sleeper’s way of being. In my book, I suggest that through this respiratory description of falling asleep Merleau-Ponty’s famous thesis on the primacy of perception is challenged and a deeper level of openness to Being is revealed. I call this deeper level the primacy of breathing (Berndtson, 2023, 62–63, 125–129). If this respiratory transformation is taken seriously, then one could begin to think also about the essence of philosophy anew. If it is that with open eyes Merleau-Ponty understands true philosophy as relearning to see the world anew, then what happens to “true philosophy” when we close our eyes and keep them closed, for example, the moment we fall asleep. Could it be that philosophy would be reborn if one would relearn to breathe in collaboration with “some immense exterior lung”? If “some immense exterior lung” would take over philosophy in a similar manner as it takes hold of the sleeper during sleep, could it be that philosophy’s very being could go through a total transformation and be reborn as new respiratory philosophy?

The Buddha’s Respiratory Phenomenology of Dukkha and Nirvana According to D.T Suzuki (1993, 6), “[the] Buddha’s teachings all start from his enlightenment experience”. Very similarly to Suzuki, in her book Early Buddhism: A New Approach, Sue Hamilton (2000, 50) writes the following about the Buddha and his experience of Enlightenment: I have come to think that it is by starting with an attempt to understand what the [Buddha’s] experience of Enlightenment involved, and what it meant, that one can best understand what he subsequently taught. This is partly because it was not until after he had had the experience that he taught anything at all, and partly because he himself said that everything he taught was intended to help others have the same experience, and only that. The Buddha himself calls the experience of Enlightenment the experience of nirvana. In this chapter, I follow Hamilton’s suggestions that we ought to “attempt to understand what the [Buddha’s] experience of Enlightenment involved, and what it meant”. This means that I will try to understand what the Buddha’s fundamental experience of nirvana is, how he attained it, how it guides him, how he speaks of it, and how he guides others to attain this same fundamental experience. According to the Buddhist Pali canon, the Buddha attained the experience of Enlightenment, that is, the awakened state of nirvana as the highest ethical and spiritual way of beingin-the-world through a committed and ardent long-term training of the meditative method of mindfulness of breathing (the method of anapanasati) (Bodhi, 2000, 1770; Bodhi 2005, 264; Ditrich 2018, 101–102). Tamara Ditrich (2018, 101) writes of this: “as narrated in the Pali canon, the Buddha attained awakening (bodhi) though mindfulness of breathing and continues to practice it thenceforth” till the end of his life (Bodhi, 2000, 1779). 340

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If the Buddha attained the experience of nirvana through long-term practice of mindfulness of breathing and continued practicing it regularly also after his enlightenment experience and taught to his disciples this respiratory method telling to his disciples that it will be highly beneficial to them if they themselves wish to experience nirvana, then I would suggest that this means that the experience of nirvana or the experience of Enlightenment is itself in some essential manner a respiratory experience based on the mindful experience of breathing. In addition to this, if it is true what Suzuki says that the Buddha’s “teachings all start from” his experience of nirvana and if attainment of nirvana is some sort of respiratory experience, then I would argue that the Buddha somehow learnt partially or wholly his teachings from the breath itself. In other words, it was the experience of breathing that was the teacher of the Buddha. Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013, 41; 2012, 11–12) has suggested something very similar as he has said that “[b]reathing is an incredibly powerful … teacher in the work of [mindfulness] meditation” and that “the Buddha himself taught that the breath has within it everything [we] would ever need for cultivating the full range of [our] humanity”. These are very strong and promising words from Kabat-Zinn and they go also together with Irigaray’s interpretation of the quest of the Buddha that I quoted earlier. Irigaray phrased this respiratory quest of the Buddha as “the search for a continuous communion with the respiration of the macrocosm”. According to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, the essence of human existence and beingin-the-world is openness to Being or openness to the world. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the primacy of perception, this essence receives a perceptual emphasis as “the perceptual openness to the world” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, 212). As I mentioned earlier, Kleinberg-Levin gives this essence of human existence a respiratory radicalization as he states: “Breathing is our body’s openness to Being”. The notion of respiratory openness to Being is a highly important phenomenological notion if we wish to interpret in a new way what could be the meaning of the Buddha’s most basic and fundamental teaching: the four noble truths. I suggest that in a similar manner as Merleau-Ponty learned his phenomenological ontology from the “fundamental experience” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007, 110) of perception that the Buddha learned his philosophy from the fundamental experience of breathing that he then wanted to reveal to his disciples. In the Buddha’s case, it was, in my interpretation, the long-term committed devotion to the practice of mindfulness of breathing that taught him all the important dimensions of his philosophy including the root of it, that is, the four noble truths. Merleau-Ponty (2003, 40) says that “perception teaches us an ontology that it alone can reveal to us”. I suggest that the Buddha could say something similar in relation to breathing. I would formulate it as follows: breathing teaches us a philosophy of the four noble truths that it alone can reveal to us. Let us find out what this could mean. The most fundamental teaching of the Buddha (the foundation of his whole philosophy), that is, the point of departure of his philosophical teaching is called the four noble truths. As my hypothesis is that it was the breath that taught these truths to the Buddha, then my duty is to interpret these truths within the atmosphere of mindfulness of breathing and respiratory openness to Being. The Buddha states the four noble truths as follows: You should know that there are these four truths. What are the four? They are the truth of dukkha, the truth of the arising of dukkha, the truth of the cessation of dukkha, and the truth of the way out of dukkha. (Harvey, 2004, 3–4; Holder, 2006, xiii-xvii; Ditrich, 2018, 102) 341

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The meaning of the first truth as the truth of dukkha is that our normal and common everyday way of life and existence is dukkha. The word dukkha is a Pali word and its equivalent in Sanskrit is duhkha. In his book Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy, Jay L. Garfield (2015, 9) writes in phenomenological context about the dukkha as a way of being the following: “dukkha is the fundamental structure of our lives, what Heidegger would have called our existentiale. To be human is to live in dukkha”. If the essence of human being is, according to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, “openness to Being” or “openness to the world”, what would this mean within the context of dukkha? It means that dukkha is a fundamental dimension or structure of our openness to Being or our openness to the world. But what does the word “dukkha” mean? The most common and traditional translation of the word dukkha is “suffering”. Other quite common ways to translate this word have been either “sorrow”, “unsatisfactoriness”, “pain”, “stress”, or “unhappiness” (Keown, 2000, 141). Instead of these traditional and common interpretations, let us dive deeper into the meaning of this word dukkha or duhkha. What could it mean if we would listen to the meaning of this word more carefully and mindfully? In this word the stem of the word is kha and the prefix is dus-: dukkha (dus-kha). The prefix dus- means, for example, “bad, evil, wicked, difficult, with difficulty, hard, slight” (Williams, 1872, 424). According to Thomas William Rhys Davids and William Stede (1993, 324), the prefix dus- also means “asunder, apart, away from = opposite or wrong”. What does the Sanskrit word “kha” mean? The word kha has multiple meanings. This word means, for example, “cavity, hollow, cave, aperture, orifice” (Williams, 1872, 271). If one would take these meanings of kha into account, then the Buddha’s dukkha could be interpreted to mean, for example, “a bad cavity, a difficult hollow or a slight aperture”. In the sense of “aperture”, one meaning of kha is, according to Williams (1872, 271), “an aperture of the human body (of which there are nine, as the mouth, the two ears, the two eyes, the two nostrils, and the organs of excretion and generation); the glottis (in anatomy); an organ of sense”. This could be interpreted in a phenomenological context to include something that Merleau-Ponty (1968, 212) calls “the perceptual openness to the world”, when he, for example, says: perceptual organs open onto things (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, 54). In the sense of dukkha, this could mean that the aperture of the body is bad, wrong, difficult or slight, for example, the aperture of the eyes or ears. In addition to these meanings already mentioned, the word kha has also the following meanings “opening, gap, vacuity, open space, empty space, air, ether, sky, heaven, the character in arithmetic which expresses nothing, a cypher” (Bussanich, 1983, 213n9; Williams, 1872, 271). Dukkha could then also mean, for example, “bad, wrong, difficult or slight opening, gap, open space, air and ether”. One possible meaning could be “the opposite of opening, gap, open space, air or ether” as one meaning of dus- is “opposite” of something. Would dukkha then mean something which closes more than it opens? Even if the translation options are multiple, at this point of my text I choose to interpret kha as “an aperture of the human body”, as “an organ of sense” and as “an opening”. I will especially emphasize the meaning of “opening” as “openness”. My suggestion is that if we interpret the lived experience of dukkha in this kind of manner as the lived experience of bad, wrong, difficult or slight opening or openness, then phenomenologically in relation to Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s “openness to Being” as the essence of human existence the word dukkha becomes highly interesting. In a Merleau-Pontian sense, this bad, wrong or narrow openness could be understood as a narrow opening of the human body or a narrow opening of the organ of sense. Within this phenomenological context, we could say that dukkha as bad, wrong, slight or unsatisfactory openness is the fundamental structure 342

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of our lives as being-in-the-world and that to be human is to live in dukkha as bad, wrong, slight or unsatisfactory openness to Being.1 I would thus suggest that the Buddha’s noble truth about dukkha is about our narrow, wrong or bad openness to Being. The Buddha summarizes the noble truth of dukkha as a narrow and bad way of being-in-the-world in the following manner: “the five skandhas are dukkha” (Bodhi, 2000, 842). What does the term skandha mean? The word can be translated as “multitude”, “quantity”, “aggregate” or “compilation”. The skandhas are our multiple ways to relate with objects and things and to be open to them. According to the Buddha, human beings are a compilation or aggregate of five attachments or clingings to the world of objects and things. These five compilations, multitudes or aggregates of how human beings cling to the world are (1) rupa (form, body and material/physical form), (2) vedana (feeling or sensation), (3) samjna (perception), (4) samskara (volitional formations) and (5) vijnana (consciousness) (Bodhi, 2005, 305; Harvey, 2004, 4; Holder, 2006, xvii). Rupa is the material form of our being-in-the-world which includes both the material/physical body and the external material/physical objects. All material bodies including our own bodies and external material objects have their limits, borders, surfaces and shapes and thus when we open ourselves to them they limit and narrow us as openness to Being. To have a form is to have a limit and a border. To have a form is to be a narrow being, a narrow opening (dukkha). Rupa is the foundation of all the other four skandhas (feeling/sensation, perception, volitional formations and consciousness). All of these multiple (skandhas) ways of relating with material objects and forms as well as non-material objects are ways of clinging or being attached to the world of objects (rupa) as limitations. For example, perception as it perceives material forms (material objects) is constantly clinging to these objects. In Garfield’s (2015, 13) words “[d]ukkha is caused by a perceptual process”. In other words, perception is narrow, wrong or bad openness to the world as it is openness to something which itself is not open, but limited by its contours, form and size. It is opposite (dus-) to pure opening. Perception attaches itself to the object. Perceptual openness is stopped with its openness to the thing or object as it is its end point. In relation to this Merleau-Ponty (1968, 7) writes: “the thing is at the end of my gaze”. When translated to phenomenological vocabulary of the openness to Being vedana as feeling or sensation is emotional or affective openness to limited objects, samjna as perception is perceptual openness to limited objects, samskara as volitional formations is willful/ volitional openness to limited objects and vijnana as consciousness is cognizant openness to limited objects. The Buddha’s idea of the narrow, wrong, bad or unsatisfactory openness includes all object- and thing-oriented relations, for example, physical/material, affective, emotional, perceptual, social, practical, scientific, religious, ethical, aesthetical, epistemological, voluntary, linguistic and theoretical ways of being-in-the-world. This would mean, for example, that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the primacy of perception as interrogation of perceptual openness to the world is phenomenological interrogation of dukkha as narrow, wrong or bad openness. The reason for this is that perception is openness that has its ending in the object or the thing: “the thing is at the end of my gaze”. The second noble truth as the truth of the arising of the lived experience of dukkha tells us what is the cause of dukkha or how it arises. Dukkha as narrow or bad openness to the world of objects causes suffering, sorrow and unsatisfactoriness as the five skandhas (the compilation of object-relations) are conjoined with craving or desiring of the world of objects. In Irigaray’s (2002, 36) words, as the objects are “always … partial, nonabsolute” they are the “cause of conflicts, sorrows”. Objects have limits, borders, forms and measurements. They are scarce which means that there are not enough certain kinds of objects 343

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for everybody. For this reason, there are, for example, conflicts, competitions, disputes and wars over who owns or has power to use various objects and finite resources. People desire, crave, exchange, borrow, give, sell, steal, possess, create, collect, manipulate, use and destroy objects. Objects also hinder and block our movements as we cannot move through them. We cannot see or hear through them. They give us all kinds of challenges. In all of these senses objects are also opposite of openness. Openness, for example, does not block our movements. In our everyday reality as dukkha, we are in constant perceptual, practical, social and theoretical relation with the objects that we desire, lust and crave after. Human beings cling to and crave after this narrow world of multiple objects, because it seems that all the worth of the being-in-the-world is in this objective world. But there is another kind of possibility that is not openness to the world of objects and this something else is intertwined with the third truth of the Buddha as the truth of the cessation (nirodha) of dukkha. This truth is all about abandoning and destruction of clinging and craving. Of this third truth, the Buddha says: “It is the utter cessation and extinction of [the] craving, its renunciation, its forsaking, release from it, and non-attachment to it. … Whatever in the world is an enticing and agreeable thing, here this craving is abandoned when it is abandoned, and here it is destroyed when it is stopped” (Holder, 2006, 54). The person, who has been able to cease dukkha (all levels of one’s narrow, wrong, bad or unsatisfactory openness to the objects and things), “lives unattached and grasps after nothing in the world” (Holder, 2006, 44). Irigaray speaks of the Buddha’s renunciation from the narrow world of dukkha as follows: “the Buddha renounces every object, the object always being partial, nonabsolute, a cause of conflicts, sorrows”. This renouncing of every object of one’s life means truly all objects, including all physical, perceptual, emotional, volitional, scientific, religious and epistemological objects. It is a total experiential destruction of these objects. This is possible only if I detach myself from “my subjective desires” which relate me to these “objects of desire” (Irigaray, 2002, 35). This subject-object relation of desires or cravings, in Irigaray’s (2002, 35) words, “oppose[s] harmony with the universal breath”, that is, harmony between our respiratory openness and what Irigaray here calls “the universal breath”. This third noble truth is “the cessation of dukkha”. In relation to this, the Buddha says: “nirvana is the cessation [nirodha] of dukkha” (Hamilton, 2000, 97). The Buddha often describes the experience of nirvana in negative terms by just saying what it is not. This means that nirvana is a totally different way of being-in-the-world than dukkha. But does the Buddha ever speak of nirvana in positive terms? Yes, he does, for example, in Dhammapada where he says: “nibbanam paramam sukham” which can be translated, for example, as “Nirvana is the greatest joy” (Mascaró, 2015, 26) or “Nibbana is the highest bliss” (Sharan, 2005, 140). In this sentence, the word that is translated as “joy” or “bliss” is sukha. The word sukha (the same word in Sanskrit and Pali) is the opposite of dukkha. So the experience of nirvana is the experience of the greatest sukha. The word sukha is traditionally translated either as “joy”, “bliss” or “happiness” as we can see from the above translations. But in the same way as we did with dukkha we are going to dig deeper than the traditional translations of sukha. The word sukha has the opposite meaning of dukkha. It is built in a similar way as the word dukkha as it also has as its stem the word kha and as its prefix su- (su- + kha). The meaning of the prefix su- is opposite to dus- as it means “good”, “well”, “excellent”, “beautiful”, “excessive”, “honourable”, “worthy of respect or reverence” and “with ease” (Williams, 1872, 1118). At this point of my text, I will interpret the lived experience of sukha as the experience of good or excessive opening or openness in a similar manner as I read dukkha as bad, wrong 344

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or narrow opening or openness. Sukha can also be interpreted to mean “openness that is worthy of respect”. The word parama in the phrase “nibbanam paramam sukham” can be translated as “greatest” or “highest” as we saw from the translations above. In addition to these translations, it can be translated also, for example, as “first, best, chief, primary, superior, principal” (Williams, 1872, 535). This means that the Buddha’s lived experience of nirvana could be interpreted as the experience of “the greatest or highest good openness”, “the greatest excessive openness”, “the primary or first openness that is worthy of respect” and if we read nirvana as the greatest or the primary sukha similarly in the phenomenological context as “openness to Being”, then we could say that nirvana is the lived experience of the greatest excessive openness to Being or the primary/first openness to Being worthy of one’s respect. If the third noble truth is the truth of the cessation of dukkha, that is, the truth of nirvana as the greatest sukha, then the fourth noble truth is the truth of the way out of dukkha, that is, the truth of the path of liberation from dukkha (the narrow or bad openness to the world of objects) to nirvana as the greatest possible openness. Earlier in the chapter I wrote: if the Buddha attained the experience of nirvana through long-term practice of mindfulness of breathing (anapanasati), then I would suggest that this means that the experience of nirvana is itself in some essential manner a respiratory experience based on the experience of breathing. In addition to this, Irigaray’s interpretation of the Buddha’s quest is that it is in the first place a respiratory quest in which he strives for “a continuous communion with respiration of the macrocosm”, that is, a perpetual “harmony with the universal breath”. This can become possible, according to Irigaray, if one is able “to become pure subject” which means “breathing in tune with the breathing of the entire living universe”. In the very beginning of this chapter I also wrote that the respiratory difference between the forgetting of breathing and the cultivation of breathing determines our being-in-the-world as they are two fundamentally different ways of being. Now we can understand how this is in a deep sense true in connection to the Buddha’s four noble truths. In my interpretation, the truth of dukkha equals the forgetting of breathing as in this way of being-in-the-world we are bad openness (e.g. perceptual openness) to the limited and narrow world of objects. The truth of the cessation of dukkha equals the cultivation of breathing as in this way of being-inthe-world we are good respiratory openness (respiratory sukha) to the open, free, unlimited and unbounded atmosphere of air. Here it is important to remember that kha did not mean only “opening/openness”, but also, for example, “open space or air”. Instead of objects or things, air does not have limits, boundaries nor form. Merleau-Ponty said “in perception … the thing is at the end of my gaze”. Air is not a limited thing or object, but pure openness. In the practice of the Buddha’s method of cultivation of breathing as mindfulness of breathing one begins, in Irigaray’s words, to “become pure subject” as mindfulness of breathing is always cessation of subject-object relation. The simple reason for this is that the experience of breathing is not an object-oriented, but atmosphere-oriented way of being-in-the-world.2 When Irigaray speaks of the “pure subject”, she means, first of all, that the Buddha tries to become a subject who is pure from all objects, that is, unmixed with them, free of all contamination with them, and untainted by them. To breathe mindfully is to “renounce every object” (Irigaray, 2002, 36; see also Bodhi, 2000, 1768). The practice of mindfulness of breathing is itself an event of renouncement of all objects. Of this untaintedness in relation to mindfulness of breathing the Buddha himself says: “concentration by mindfulness of breathing, when developed and cultivated, leads to the destruction of the taints … [and a person] whose taints are destroyed … leads to a pleasant dwelling in this very life 345

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and to mindfulness and clear comprehension” (Bodhi, 2000, 1778–1779). This “pleasant dwelling” that is gained through development and cultivation of the meditative method of mindfulness of breathing in which all object relations as tainted relations are destroyed is also called by the Buddha “a noble dwelling, a divine dwelling, the Tathāgata’s dwelling” (Bodhi, 2000, 1778–1779). This means that in phenomenologico-ontological terms, according to the Buddha, “a noble” and “a divine” way to be is to practice and cultivate in a mindful manner breathing as a respiratory openness to Being. In this way one purifies oneself from dukkha as a narrow and bad openness to the objects as breathing is not an object-relation, but a relation to the atmosphere of open air. To concentrate oneself in the practice of mindfulness of breathing is not only “a noble” and “a divine dwelling”, but also something that the Buddha calls “the Tathāgata’s dwelling”. What could this mean? According to Peter Harvey (2004, 25), the Buddha uses the term tathāgata to “refer to an enlightened being, one who is ‘deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom as is the great ocean’”. As an enlightened being tathāgata has discovered and attained the experience of nirvana through the practice of mindful breathing as the respiratory openness to Being. When one cultivates and develops in long-term practice mindful respiratory openness, one at the same time cultivates mindful experience of objectlessness and formlessness as the atmosphere of air is not an object and it does not have a form. It is important to remember that in normal everydayness, our way of being-in-the-world is dwelt as the five skandhas (1. form/ material, 2. feeling/sensation, 3. perception, 4. volitional formations and 5. consciousness) that are constant relatedness to forms and objects, that is, to dukkha as the forgetting of breathing. As an opposite to dukkha, the experience of nirvana is an experience of formlessness and of objectlessness (Harvey, 2004, 208, 227). This kind of respiratory practice as mindful dwelling makes one, in the Buddha’s words, “aware that ‘space is infinite’” (Bodhi, 2000, 1771). With this enormous insight that occurs during the cultivated mindfulness of breathing, one can “enter and dwell in the base of the infinity of space” (Bodhi, 2000, 1772). When this respiratory experience of the infiniteness of space as objectless and formless space is deepened, then the practitioner of the mindfulness of breathing can become “aware that ‘consciousness is infinite’” and this makes it possible, according to the Buddha, that one can “enter and dwell in the base of the infinity of consciousness” (Bodhi, 2000, 1772). In our everyday existence as dukkha (in the world of narrow openness), our consciousness is ceaselessly object-oriented consciousness, that is, consciousness narrowed by the objects. These objects are material, emotional, perceptual, volitional and mental objects. This means that consciousness is constantly limited as its attention is focused on limited and narrow beings. With a long-term practice of mindfulness of breathing, consciousness can in a true experiential manner become little by little, breath by breath as infinite as the space itself is. In my interpretation, this infinite space is the aerial space which does not have form and which is not an object. All of this is in an essential manner intertwined with the attainment of the experience of nirvana as the experience of the greatest respiratory sukha. All of this leads to what the Buddha calls “the Tathāgata’s dwelling” as the most noble and divine way of being-in-the-world. In Harvey’s (2004, 25–26) words, “the Buddha often used the word ‘tathāgata’ in place of ‘I’ or ‘me’, to refer to himself inasmuch as he was enlightened”. So if, according to the Buddha, a “tathāgata is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom as is the great ocean” (Harvey, 2004, 227), then the subjectivity, selfhood or being of the Buddha as his way of being-in-the-world is deep as the great ocean and immense, infinite or vast (immeasurable). 346

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The Respiratory Intertwining of The Buddha’s Nirvana and Merleau-Ponty’s “Some Immense Exterior Lung” In the beginning part of this chapter, I introduced some crucial theoretical backgrounds from my book Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing that have made it possible for me to examine the Buddha’s philosophy within the atmosphere of phenomenology of breathing. One of these important respiratory themes is Merleau-Ponty’s idea of falling asleep as a respiratory event. Let me quote Merleau-Ponty’s words again about this idea in order to show how his respiratory words on sleeping can possibly help us to understand the Buddha’s respiratory experience of nirvana and “the Tathāgata’s dwelling”. [S]leep arrives when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from the outside the very confirmation that it was expecting. I was breathing slowly and deeply to call forth sleep, and suddenly, one might say, my mouth communicates with some immense exterior lung that calls my breath forth and forces it back, a certain respiratory rhythm desired by me just a moment ago, becomes my very being, and sleep intended until then as a signification, suddenly turns into a situation. (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, 219) I suggest the following thought-experiment: let us change in this Merleau-Ponty-quotation the word “sleep” to the word “nirvana” and otherwise we keep the quotation as it stands. With this thought-experiment Merleau-Ponty’s words would say the following: Nirvana arrives when a certain voluntary attitude suddenly receives from the outside the very confirmation that it was expecting. I was breathing slowly and deeply to call forth nirvana, and suddenly, one might say, my mouth communicates with some immense exterior lung that calls my breath forth and forces it back, a certain respiratory rhythm desired by me just a moment ago, becomes my very being, and nirvana intended until then as a signification, suddenly turns into a situation. In Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing, I interpret “some immense exterior lung” as “a pure depth”, as “a spatiality without things”, as “the root or the source of the world” and as “the immense lung of the world” (Berndtson, 2023, 58, 62). In relation to the Buddha, “some immense exterior lung” could be interpreted as the “infinite space” that is formless and objectless air and of which one becomes aware during mindfulness of breathing. Merleau-Ponty’s “some immense exterior lung” as the root of the world could be understood as the equal of what Irigaray calls “the respiration of the macrocosm” when she speaks of “the quest of the Buddha”. If this would be so, we could say that the experience of nirvana as the greatest respiratory openness arrives when the practice of mindfulness of breathing as a certain voluntary attitude suddenly in a surprising manner receives from the outside as the infinite respiratory space of open air, as the respiration of the macrocosm or as some immense exterior lung the very confirmation that the practitioner was expecting (the experience of nirvana). The practitioner breathes slowly and deeply3 in a mindful manner in order to call forth the experience of nirvana and suddenly the practitioner experiences that his breath communicates with some immense exterior lung as a spatiality without things, with the infinite respiratory space without objects and forms or with the respiration of the macrocosm. In this respiratory communication of the breather and the

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immense exterior lung, to use Merleau-Ponty’s (2007, 358; 1968, 264) vocabulary of reversibility, “the roles between” the breather and the breathed “switch” as “one no longer knows who/what” breathes and “who/what is” breathed. It is not anymore the practitioner of mindfulness practice who breathes, but the outside as the infinite aerial space, the respiration of the macrocosm or the immense exterior lung as the source of the world creating a certain kind of respiratory rhythm that now becomes the practitioner’s very being. The infinite space (sukha as space of excessively open air = su- as excessive and kha as space, opening and air) or the immense exterior lung “penetrates” (Merleau-Ponty, 2007, 358) the subject or the self with its immensity transforming the subject or the self to become in an experiential manner an infinite subject or immense self. This is what Irigaray, in my interpretation, means when she writes that the Buddha “tries to become pure subject” which “means here breathing in tune with the breathing of the entire living universe”. The immense exterior lung transforms the Buddha’s self in the event of respiratory reversibility into a Tathāgata’s self as the immense self that is not anymore in any manner openness to objects or forms, but openness to the pure immense or infinite aerial atmosphere as the immense lung of the world. In the Buddha’s words, when this event takes place one becomes “aware that ‘consciousness is infinite’”. The consciousness is here equal with the subjectivity or the selfhood. It is the immense lung of the world or the infinite space that transforms in the reversible manner the subject or the consciousness to become an immense subject (“the subject as breath” (Irigaray, 2002, 36)) or an infinite consciousness. This is now “the Tathāgata’s dwelling” in which the self or the subject, in the Buddha’s words, “is deep, immeasurable, hard to fathom as is the great ocean”. This is the ultimate reversible step of the mindful path of cessation of dukkha as the Buddha’s quest, that is, the path of how nirvana as the intended goal of the practitioner “suddenly turns into a situation”.

Concluding Words In this chapter, I have interrogated the Buddha’s four noble truths within the atmosphere of phenomenology of breathing. I suggested that if we do not take seriously in our examination of these truths the fact that the Buddha attained the experience of nirvana through regular and diligent practice of anapanasati, then the essence of his philosophy is lost as he learned his thinking including these four noble truths through the practice of mindfulness of breathing and the respiratory experience of nirvana. Instead of travelling on the respiratory path of interpretation of the Buddha’s thinking, the reality is that most of the Buddhist scholarship investigates his thinking within the atmosphere of forgetting of breathing. I hope that my chapter will be part of the process that helps to develop a new culture as “a culture of respiration” (Irigaray, 2000, 179) in which we instead of forgetting of breathing would be perpetually living the task of cultivation of breathing.

Notes 1 In this text, I am not interrogating what this could possibly mean in the Heideggerian context of authentic and inauthentic being-in-the-world. See Being and Time (Heidegger, 1962). 2 For example, Jon Kabat-Zinn (2013, 51) calls the breath a “a very special object of attention” (51) and “a primary object of attention” (51). This idea of breath as an object of attention is a total misunderstanding of what experientially breathing is as the primary openness to the atmosphere of open and free air. But this misunderstanding becomes possible, because Kabat-Zinn (2012, 13; 2013, 39–40) conceptualizes the breath in the first place either as a physiological object or as an important tool for meditative cultivation. His work is missing the phenomenological concept of breathing.

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The Respiratory Context of Dukkha and Nirvana 3 In his book Yoga, Ernest Wood (1959, 81) writes of the respiratory relation between sleep and meditation as follows: “The breathing desirable during meditation is somewhat similar to that during sleep, in which the movement is slower and deeper and quieter than during ordinary wakeful activity”.

References Berndtson, P. (2018). The Possibility of a New Respiratory Ontology. In L. Škof & P. Berndtson (eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Berndtson, P. (2023). Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Respiratory Primacy of Being. London & New York: Routledge. Bodhi, B. (ed.) (2000). The Connected Discourse of the Buddha: A Translation of the Samyutta Nikaya. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Bodhi, B. (ed.) (2005). In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon. Boston: Wisdom Publications. Bussanich, J. (1983). A Theoretical Interpretation of Hesiod’s Chaos. Classical Philology, 78: 212–219. Ditrich, T. (2018). Mindfulness of Breathing in Early Buddhism. In L. Škof & P. Berndtson (eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Garfield, J.L. (2015). Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hamilton, S. (2000). Early Buddhism: A New Approach. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press. Harvey, P. (2004). The Selfless Mind: Personality, Consciousness and Nirvāna in Early Buddhism. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon. Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time. Oxford/Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers. Holder, J.J. (ed.) ( 2006). Early Buddhist Discourses. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Husserl, E. (1983). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Irigaray, L. (2000). Why Different?: A Culture of Two Subjects. Interviews With Luce Irigaray. New York: Semiotext(e). Irigaray, L. (2002). Between East and West: From Singularity to Community. New York: Columbia University Press. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2012). Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment – and Your Life. Boulder: Sounds True. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Revised and Updated Edition. New York: Bantam Books. Keown, D. (2000). Buddhism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kleinberg-Levin, D. (2018). Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing. In L. Škof & P. Berndtson (eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Levin, D.M. (1984). Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing. Research in Phenomenology 14: 121–147. Mascaró, J.(ed.) (2015). The Dhammapada. London: Penguin Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Les Éditions Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2003). Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2007). The Merleau-Ponty Reader. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. London & New York: Routledge. Rhys Davids, T.W. & W. Stede (1993). Pali-English Dictionary. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas. Sharan, M.K.(ed.) (2005). Dhammapada. New Delhi: Abhinav Publications. Škof, L. & P. Berndtson (2018). Introduction. In L. Škof & P. Berndtson (eds.), Atmospheres of Breathing. Albany: State University of New York Press. Suzuki, D.T. (1993). Zen and Japanese Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williams, M. (1872). A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Wood, E. (1959). Yoga. Baltimore: Penguin Books.

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PART V

Mindfulness and Embodiment

23 BETWEEN PHENOMENOLOGY AND MINDFULNESS The Role of Presence in the Clinical and Therapeutic Context Anya Daly and Chris McCaw Introduction: Commonalities between Meditation Practice and Phenomenological Methodology The points of intersection and confrontation between Western philosophy and Asian philosophy have long been referenced in historical writings.1 However, it is only in recent years that the convergences and divergences between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ philosophy have garnered close scholarly and philosophical attention, revealing some of the earlier engagements as culturally and politically motivated. Interestingly, the western thinkers influenced by the phenomenological tradition are not merely interested in a comparative analysis but are concerned with how eastern philosophy can challenge assumptions and advance philosophical debates.2 The most obvious divergence between the two traditions (East and West) is that phenomenology emerges from the domain of philosophy whereas eastern philosophy originates from religious traditions such as Buddhism and, as both a philosophy and a path, has clear soteriological aims – in the case of Buddhism – enlightenment. Nonetheless, phenomenology has been found to be very adaptable to spiritual projects and there is a distinct and renowned ‘theological turn’ within phenomenology which, its merits notwithstanding, remains contentious to today. For example, we have the philosophers Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Louis Chrétien, Michel Henry and more recently Richard Kearney, Dermot Moran, Natalie Depraz, Claire ­Petitmengin, Michel Bitbol, Shaun Gallagher and Emmanuel de Saint Aubert who have applied phenomenology to distinctly theological and spiritual questions. And then there is Dominique Janicaud who advanced critiques of both Heidegger and this ‘theological turn’ within phenomenology. Phenomenology and spiritual traditions are thus not necessarily antithetical. There is also the recent scholarship that is revealing many previously unacknowledged or hidden threads of influence from Asian thought into phenomenology and arguably in the other direction.3 Here we can include Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Scheler, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Some authors in this edited volume have drawn on Martin Heidegger, and his notion of ‘Gelassenheit’ – calmness, serenity, letting be – (Moran, 2023) as reflecting closely the aims of mindfulness practice. We now know that there has been a lot of ‘borrowing’ of DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-29

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ideas from Asian thought within Heidegger’s writings and some of these borrowings are acknowledged and some are not. Scholars have noted that on their first encounters with the philosophy of Heidegger they could only make sense of his philosophical vision in the terms of Daoism and Zen Buddhism. In recent years, these hidden sources in Heidegger’s philosophy have been revealed (May 1996; Nelson, 2011, 2017, 2019, 2020; Chai, 2014, 2020). Sometimes he has outrageously ‘borrowed’ word-for-word without acknowledgement, as he sometimes did with Husserl as well. Despite these scholarly failings, Heidegger is without question one of the key thinkers of 20th-century philosophy who was able to synthesise various threads of thought into a provocative philosophical vision. And so, we can see clearly there is a legitimate basis for investigations into the commonalities between phenomenology and Asian thought, and the practice of mindfulness in particular. A number of significant philosophical intersections are immediately apparent: firstly, both the philosophical tradition of phenomenology and the Buddhist contemplative tradition begin with lived experience; secondly, they both seek to reveal and transform experience via specific practices, rather than simply providing conceptual or theoretical descriptions; and thirdly, they are interrogating the same world and both discover this world is fundamentally defined by interdependence and radical contingency. Since the seminal work of Jaspers in the early 20th century, phenomenology has proven immensely valuable in the therapeutic context to better understand anomalous experience and psychopathology. Now in the 21st century, ‘mindfulness’ is firmly established as one of the key treatment methods to bring more balance and insight into the lives of individuals challenged with mental health issues. Phenomenology and Buddhist mindfulness come together in the foregrounding of sensation, bodily awareness and fine-tuned attention to experience; attentive perception is thus the methodological meeting point between the two traditions. This chapter asks the question – how can the successes of mindfulness in the therapeutic context be accounted for? We know it is of benefit, but why is this the case? And so, in a ‘reverse-engineering’ move we consider specifically the role of presence and propose that some mental health issues can be viewed as either a failure of presence or a refusal of presence; for example, with presence to self (depersonalisation) and with presence in the world (derealisation). Symptoms then can be understood as not only giving evidence of the breakdown in presence, but they may also be understood as sustaining the lack of presence as a coping strategy to avoid confronting suffering. While the psychiatric patient may struggle to maintain the sense of presence, it is crucial to the processes of understanding and healing that the psychiatrist/therapist brings a robust attentive presence to the encounter with the individual experiencing mental health challenges. How is this attentive presence, a presence for an-other, achieved and sustained in this encounter? Key to answering this question is consideration of the nature and role of attentive perception and mindfulness in establishing presence. And this is where phenomenology intersects in interesting ways with Buddhist meditational practices. We will be aiming to join-the-dots, so to speak, of some key notions that we propose can usefully illuminate the relevance of ‘attentive presence’ beyond the religious applications in meditational practices towards situations requiring understanding and empathy such as in clinical and therapeutic contexts. Having established some context to the chapter, we would now like to present some of the methodological alignments between the practice of mindfulness and phenomenology. It is important to note that the term mindfulness sits within a broader practice known as Samatha-Vipassanã; this is more holistic and reconnects mindfulness practice to its 354

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metaphysical and ethical foundations.4 We thus locate our discussion of mindfulness with respect to the Buddhist tradition and acknowledge the wide variety of forms in which mindfulness has now become woven into public and scholarly discourses. Positive applications notwithstanding, both mindfulness and phenomenology have been co-opted for purposes beyond their own aims, sometimes leading to reductionism and distortion, and even to destructive purposes (Purser, 2019). And there has been ‘push back’ to reclaim the fundamental metaphysical, epistemological and ethical purposes of both methodologies (Stone & Zahavi, 2021, 2022; Kachru, 2022).

Merleau-Ponty’s Hyper-Reflection – Surréflexion Hyper-reflection5 is not discussed extensively in Merleau-Ponty’s writings. However, it became key to understanding aspects of his later thought and for the completion of his philosophical vision. Hyper-reflection is not just a philosophical idea, it is crucial to the very practice of philosophy; it is something a philosopher actively engages in. Merleau-Ponty proposed that this philosophical practice of hyper-reflection would enable us to move beyond our tendencies to see the world through a veil of concepts, which Kant first identified,6 and to reveal the otherwise obscured brute reality underlying our everyday engagements with the world. We can see the beginnings of this idea in the preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, in which he prefigures his later elucidations of the concept-practice of hyperreflection. He writes: Although it [phenomenology] is a transcendental philosophy that suspends affirmations of the natural attitude in order to understand them, it is also a philosophy for which the world is ‘already there’ prior to reflection - like an inalienable presence and whose entire effort is to rediscover this naïve contact with the world in order to finally raise it to a philosophical status. (PP, p. lxx, p. 7) Over the centuries the stories of a ‘primordial’ contact with the world have been recounted in many ancient and indigenous cultures. In Daoism and Buddhism, primordial contact is achieved through the practices of wu wei (non-doing), bare attention, ordinary mind, mindfulness, shamatha (calm abiding), vipassana (insight meditation) and dzog chen or mahamudra. We wish to stress the aspects of discovery and recognition, that it is a matter of non-doing, of letting-be to see what appears. And this aligns with the practice of phenomenology as Merleau-Ponty writes: … phenomenology allows itself to be practiced and recognized as a manner or as a style, or that it exists as a movement, prior to having reached a full philosophical consciousness…. It is less a question of counting up citations than of determining and expressing this phenomenology for us, which has caused - upon their reading of Husserl or Heidegger - many of our contemporaries to have had the feeling much less of encountering a new philosophy than of recognizing what they had been waiting for. (PP, p. lxxi, p. 8) While, in the Asian traditions the view and method are more programmatic than in phenomenology, nonetheless, we get a sense of these in phenomenology through the evocative 355

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writings of both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. It then seems no accident that MerleauPonty as the philosopher of the perceiving body recognises the potential in the practice of hyper-reflection, of reflection mindful of its situatedness – situated in a body and in a world. Attentive perception thus brings us back to the first level of awareness in mindfulness of the body, and relatedly, to the breath, that which sustains the body. In seeking to interrogate this capacity Merleau-Ponty sees himself as shedding light on something that was incomplete in Husserl’s philosophy; he proposes that hyper-reflection goes beyond Husserl’s eidetic reduction.7 Merleau-Ponty writes: ‘In recognising that every reflection is eidetic and, as such, it leaves untouched the problem of our unreflected (irréfléchi) being and that of the world’ (VI, p. 46, p. 70). Merleau-Ponty’s hyper-reflection seeks to address this task of our unreflected being, the accomplishment of which was elusive for Husserl. Here we have some articulations of this idea: what is needed is a radical reflection that recognises its own contingency and dependence on the pre-reflective givenness of the world (PP, pp. 61–63, pp. 88–91). Hyper-reflection reveals the double genesis of the existent world – ‘what is thought’ and the genesis of reflection – ‘what thinks’ (VI, p. 46, p. 71), being and thought, objectivity and subjectivity. Merleau-Ponty’s purpose here is not to reject reflection tout court, but rather to bring reflection down to earth, to resist its absolutist and totalising tendencies. In this way, hyper-reflection exposes the blind-spot of reflection, hyper-reflection is reflection mindful of its situated character, and of its fundamental interdependence and contingency; it brings the mind back to the present, to the brute perception or to the emotion stripped of the story. The fields of phenomenal and intersubjective awareness that hyper-reflection exposes are marked by contingency and interdependence. As situated beings without a ‘God’s-eyeview’, we are defined by contingency, by our interdependent relations with others and our shared world. So we could say that hyper-reflection is a radically reflexive practice of thought that returns to the temporal present, and also exposes the interdependency of self and world, thereby re-problematising the notion of the self as a separate, bounded (id)entity (McCaw, 2021). Hyper-reflection, thus, acts as a corrective to reflection – to being always caught up in thought, concepts and stories – and returns us to the brute primordial experience, its spontaneity, its dynamism, its freedom, so that once again the world appears as ‘strange and paradoxical’ (PP, p. lxxvii, p. 14). In this way hyper-reflection dissolves the totalising and reductive tendencies of reflection not only in the epistemic domain but also with regard to our relations with others; it resists those tendencies to objectify others, to reduce them to our pre-conceptions and our agendas; and herein lies its potential for not only transformative and therapeutic purposes, but also for ethical engagement.

Presence and Attentive Perception Let’s move onto the next piece in the puzzle – presence – and the role of attentive perception in establishing this presence. Is presence just that – attentive perception? Or is it more than that? We propose that attentive perception can address the requirements of presence in that it brings the whole embodied person to the encounter, including affect, personal history and their manner of being in the world; and this is what is most relevant to our purposes in this chapter focused on the therapeutic encounter. Perception inherently depends on the body and vice versa. In virtue of being perceiving bodies we are situated spatially and temporally in the phenomenal domain, as well as 356

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culturally and socially in the intersubjective domain. Our perceiving bodies represent a point-of-view on the world. Merleau-Ponty articulates these ideas beginning with the simple but immensely significant insight that there are no isolated sense-data; “the perceptual ‘something’ is always in the middle of some other thing, it always belongs to a ‘field’” (PP, p. 4, p. 26). These are not only unfindable in experience they are inconceivable; objects necessarily exist within a field, whether visual, auditory, tactile, etc. Furthermore, in virtue of embodiment and perception, disembodied, solitary, worldless, subjects are also unfindable and inconceivable. Subjects exist relationally within the shared world comprising both the phenomenal field and the intersubjective field. It is clear that the role of attention in perception demands a closer analysis and Merleau-Ponty is unsurprisingly instructive in this endeavour; he begins with offering critical appraisals of the two main contenders in these historical investigations – empiricism and rationalism (in his writings this is referred to as intellectualism). They both promote accounts of ‘attention as searchlight’ which presupposes an objective reality and perception then illuminates objects which might otherwise remain hidden or obscure (PP, p. 28, p. 50). What is of importance to our current investigations is that these accounts present attention as a disinterested and neutral function. The objects identified are entirely exterior to the function of attention which just scans and happens to pick up some objects and not others. This is an entirely inadequate and erroneous account of attention on the part of both empiricism and rationalism as Merleau-Ponty demonstrates. We could ask – where does consciousness come into this account? And why are some objects picked out by attention and others ignored? Merleau-Ponty proposes it would be necessary to demonstrate the power of ‘perception to awaken attention, and then how attention develops and enriches this perception’ (PP, p. 29, p. 51). Because empiricism depends on entirely external causes and connections, it cannot adequately address these issues. With regard to his critique of rationalism (intellectualism), Merleau-Ponty draws on Descartes’ analyses of the piece of wax; either consciousness is able to grasp the object with clarity or with degrees of confusion. Merleau-Ponty asserts that the form of the wax, as with the geometric circle of a plate, can be apprehended only because consciousness was already anticipating them as such. He rejects both the accounts of empiricism and intellectualism thus: What was lacking for empiricism was an internal connection between the object and the act it triggers. What intellectualism lacks is the contingency of the opportunities for thought. Consciousness is too poor in the first case and too rich in the second for any phenomenon to be able to solicit it. Empiricism does not see that we need to know what we are looking for, otherwise we would not go looking for it; intellectualism does not see that we need to be ignorant of what we are looking for, or again we would not go looking for it. (PP, p. 30, p. 52) A pre-existing objective world is the presupposition on which both empiricism and rationalism depend. And attention supposedly provides disinterested and neutral access to this objective world through the empiricist’s reliance on sensations and on the rationalist’s reliance on representations. What is significant in Merleau-Ponty’s account is that he rejects disinterestedness and neutrality, and rather he proposes that attention transforms the experience; attention is a ‘new way for consciousness to be present toward its object….’ How 357

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can attention achieve this – it does so by creating a perceptual field attuned specifically to the exploratory perceptual organ that is activated in the encounter (PP, p. 31, p. 53). If light, colour and form are experienced, then it is the visual field that is galvanised; if tone, rhythm and sound are on offer, then the auditory field is galvanised; and so on with the other sense fields. Up until the moment when attention apprehends the object within a given sensory field, both object and field remain indeterminate. The perceiving subject is until that moment of attention unable to make sense of the percept, the perceived object. Keeping in mind the ‘double genesis’ of the existent world described above, we could even say that the perceiving subject itself remains indeterminate until the moment of perception, when the triad of subject/object/field emerges simultaneously into clarity. Once attention is in play, then both the object and the field can be grasped; and there is importantly an oscillation in attention from object/figure to the field/ground. This insight, which Merleau-Ponty took from Gestalt theory, is significant in that it reveals the dynamism inherent in the perception of an object and its field. It is also significant in that, as Merleau-Ponty recognised, there is a normative power in the relation of figure to ground, perceived object to field. The field’s normative power is active in the perceptual encounter and the percept includes both figure and ground (PP, p. 33, p. 55); the field is not a mere neutral context, it prescribes how the percept is perceived (Kelly, 2005; Daly, 2019, 2020) and moreover gives meaning to the perceptual givens (PP, p. 38, p. 61).8 This is the basis for the phenomenological claim that attention transforms experience. Heidegger expressed a similar insight in the idea that phenomena always arise as intelligible in relation to an a priori framework of meaning, or ‘totality of relevance’ (Heidegger, 1927/2010, p. 145). That is, things and persons are experienced, immediately, as what they are in relation to the affairs of getting by – not as isolated objective, pre-given entities that are then made meaningful via subsequent interpretation or analysis: “Interpretation does not, so to speak, throw a ‘significance’ over what is nakedly objectively present and does not stick a value on it, but what is encountered in the world is always already in a relevance which is made explicit by interpretation” (Heidegger, 1927/2010, p. 145). The operation of attention, and what attention reveals, are always circumscribed by purposes, projects and tasks imbued with normative value and relevance. However intimately bound-up in the nature of perception, the perceptual field, or likewise the totality of relevance, tends to remain tacit in experience. Even as the condition of possibility for whatever appears, the world (as ground) does not ‘announce itself’ (Heidegger, 1927/2010, p. 75). Even when explicitly identified and interpreted, ‘it recedes again into an undifferentiated understanding’ (p. 145). To hold an appreciation of figure and ground in experience, to be present to and in a situation as a whole, therefore, requires a particular transformative attentional capacity which may be cultivated in meditation practice.

Presence with Objects and Presence with Other Subjects Attention is transformative for Merleau-Ponty in that it gives the subject ‘a new way for consciousness to be present toward its objects’ (PP, p. 31, p. 53). In the interpersonal context, attentive perception is transformative in three ways: … in giving simultaneously a new way to be present to the subject’s sense of self and the sense of other subjects and the sense of self of that other subject. Perceptual

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attentiveness, therefore, transforms the experience of the one perceiving attentively and the experience of the recipient of the attention simultaneously. Presence is not the outcome of attention, nor attention the outcome of presence – they are co-arising; and attentive presence is transformative. More broadly, we can say that intersubjective attentive presence is a reversible relation, and this is why it serves to both underwrite and illuminate the authenticity of the therapeutic encounter. (Daly, 2022) John P.  Miller, a philosopher of holistic education, puts forward the idea of an affective component of presence: characterised by ‘openness, by a sense of relatedness, and by awe and wonder’ (Miller, 1994, p. 26). At its best, attentive presence may open a space of possibility where new, unanticipated and non-routine ways of responding arise; it ‘inspires a way of relating with our consciousness and our students [clients], which stands apart from our more automatic and conditioned ways of being that obscure creative engagement’ (Gunnlaugson, 2011, p. 7). As articulated by Solloway (2000), ‘presence, as the intention of non-judgment clears the clutter of preconceived notions, draws back the curtains of habitual visions, inviting imagination to move in, among, and through what was unthinkable before’ (pp. 35–36). An important component of therapeutic presence involves its relationship to the outcomes of action. Presence involves letting go of the attachment to specific outcomes of action, even if preferable outcomes are, indeed, the result. In this way, somewhat paradoxically, ‘we should not expect a specific outcome from being present. Although we can hope that presence can improve a relationship, the focus should be on simply being there without expectations’ (Miller, 1994, p. 12). This presents a challenge to the clinician who, of course, desires a positive outcome for their client. The counter-intuitive proposal of presence is that the space for transformation may open up precisely when the attachment to improvement, or the particular shape that improvement might or ‘should’ take, is let go. Rather than grasping for improvement, this form of therapeutic practice ‘tends the spaces in which grace, accident, the new and another future might be able to appear’ (Pont, 2016, p. 207).

Symptoms as a Failure of Presence or Refusal of Presence Descartes’ famous formula ‘cogito ergo sum’ (I think therefore I am), his Archimedean point, his foundation for certainty in the face of radical scepticism, Jaspers notes, is conspicuously undermined in schizophrenia and while it ‘may still be superficially cogitated, it is no longer a valid experience’ (Jaspers, 1997, p.  122). Psychiatrist Josef Parnas and philosopher of psychiatry Mads Gram Henriksen stress that it is this validity of experience that is pertinent to understanding the disordered self-experience of schizophrenia, not self as a ‘theoretical construct, a metaphor, or a metacognitive locus in cognitive science’ (2014, p. 252). The disturbed sense of self-presence while most commonly associated with schizophrenia spectrum conditions, we propose nonetheless, is also in evidence in the first-person narratives of those suffering depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety, paranoia, various forms of dysmorphia, etc. The lived-experiential themes extracted from the firstperson reports across these disorders and others indicate there is much overlap, and thus adds further emphasis to the problems of comorbidities and the challenges of trying to

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‘fit’ an individual’s anomalous experiences into a fixed diagnostic category. Here are some ­representative examples from some of these reports: Feeling one’s experience is absolutely private and self-alienating; not recognizing the stranger in the mirror; hyper-reflectivity that intervenes in and interrupts the simple experiences of senses, thoughts and feelings - endless scrutiny and self-objectification; feelings of disembodiment; feelings of being situated in front of, behind, or just elsewhere than where the body is located; feeling the body is heavier or lighter than it is; feeling as though the body is at an angle; the body is smaller or larger than in reality; the body is transparent or parts of it are dissolving; obsessions with appearance and perceived flaws - my nose is exceptionally huge; obsessions with checking and rechecking - not trusting the efficacity of one’s actions - multiple times questioning and checking, did I lock the car before entering the house?; not trusting one’s recall of actions or speech; not trusting that others have heard you - you are inaudible; a loss of footing in the world; feeling of not belonging, not fitting into the social situation or the world; things and surroundings experienced as less salient; things and surroundings experienced as threatening or uncanny - it is not safe to be present – ‘good things of day begin to droop and drowse, while night’s black agents to their preys do rouse’ (Macbeth, Act III, scene iii, lines 52–53); diminished engagement with the world - degrees of absence; loss of sense of belonging or fitting in place whether home or work - I belong elsewhere, but where?; a general sense of malaise - not caring - affective absence; loss of sense of value; ethical scepticism; moral indifference; social, cultural and moral obligations lack motivational power. There has been much valuable work in phenomenological psychopathology concerning what is termed disorders of ipseity, revealed in the various experiences of depersonalisation and derealisation. Ipseity is the most basic pre-reflective sense of self experienced in the ‘mineness’ of experience in terms of self-ownership and self-agency (Sass & Parnas, 2003; Parnas et al, 2005; Zahavi, 2005; Nelson & Sass, 2009; Ratcliffe, 2013; Parnas & Henriksen, 2014; Gallagher, 2023). Psychologist Barnaby Nelson and psychiatrist Louis Sass in their 2009 paper propose that five key aspects in the disturbed basic self-experience can be distinguished; these include presence, corporeality, stream of consciousness, selfdemarcation and existential reorientation (2009, pp.  490–491). Nonetheless, while the distinctions may be a useful heuristic, all of these could be understood under the broader aspect of presence, of ‘inhabiting’ the self and world in an unproblematic pre-reflective manner. And so we could understand the other four aspects under the rubric ‘presence’: corporeality as presence to one’s body, inhabiting one’s body – perceptions and bodily agency belong to the self; stream of consciousness as presence to the mental content as one’s own, that the mental contents are situated within one’s field of self-ownership and self-agency; self-demarcation as relational presence, a healthy and workable distinction between self and other – there are no unbridgeable gaps nor is there a collapse into the other; existential reorientation as presence or situatedness within a broad metaphysical view whether secular or spiritual. The point we wish to highlight is that presence is fundamental, and this is why it is possible through a closer examination of presence to understand and explain the therapeutic benefits of the contemplative practices of mindfulness, and any other therapeutic intervention that supports presence. 360

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We have suggested that symptoms need to be rethought as not merely evidence of a disorder, but also as coping strategies to avoid the suffering that may come with returning to self-presence. The treatment pathways towards presence thus need to take into account the readiness of the patient to be present, to confront their sufferings by relinquishing the symptoms. If the therapeutic approach is too forceful or not timely this may lead to a regression or escalation of symptoms. This is why hermeneutic justice plays a key role in any successful intervention. As psychiatrist Rita Ritunanno (2022) has proposed hermeneutical marginalisation may arise with individuals affected by psychiatric disorders due a number of factors: first, the assumption that the disorder itself is fundamentally unintelligible, that meaning for the patient is outside the shared world of intelligibility; second, that the epistemic practices within the clinical setting cannot furnish the necessary hermeneutical resources; and third, Ritunanno flags the idea that structural inequalities within psychiatric practice precludes a praxis of freedom which would support participatory meaning-making.9

Reversibility within Attentive Presence … Just as perception of a thing opens me up to being, by realizing the paradoxical synthesis of an infinity of perceptual aspects, in the same way, the perception of the other founds morality by realizing the paradox of an alter ego of a common situation, by placing my perspectives and my incommunicable solitude in the visual field of another and all the others. (PriP, p. 26, p. 70)14 It is this reversibility within attentive presence with another subject that facilitates a transformative and therapeutic outcome. That, for example, with a person suffering anomalous experience, the attentive presence of the psychiatrist or therapist offers the possibility of transformation in the sense of self – a door is opened to a new way of being – whether the individual steps through the door is another question. The patient’s experiences and once incommunicable solitude are seen by the therapist, and by extension are now potentially ‘see-able’ by all the others that comprise the world of the patient. Pathological experiences of isolation must, in some sense, be actively constructed, produced and maintained conceptually to remain in place, even if they are experienced subjectively by the patient as inevitable states due to their psychological disorder. The clinician, rather than having to actively construct connection and trust, need only create a safe context whereby the patient’s ‘efforts’ of maintaining the sense of isolation can be relaxed. The creation of such a context may be facilitated through the refinement of the therapist’s attention and the achievement of presence. There is a saying in French – ‘to be comfortable in one’s own skin’. This is exactly what is at issue with the individual suffering anomalous experiences and mental health issues; they are not comfortable in their own skin, and they are sometimes not even in their own skin; they have been hijacked by delusions, obsessions, compulsions, fears and anxieties and so being present in their own skin is a fraught endeavour. Very likely many of us have had this experience to varying extents. And so, to have someone else hold the situation, with an attentive caring presence opens up the space of possibilities again and one is no longer overwhelmingly hostage to the fears, the self-recriminations, the obsessions, etc. One is able to move towards self-presence which had previously been too confusing, too threatening and 361

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too painful; and on the everyday level, one is able to drop the bundle of anxieties and gloom and just ‘be’ with a kindly attitude towards oneself. The role of the psychotherapist or the psychiatrist, then, is to open up the space of attentive presence; as described in Buddhist teachings, the teacher is like a spacious fenced field for the wild horse mind of the student to gallop around until it finally settles.

Presence and Absence in the Clinical Setting and the Potential for Transformation There are now numerous empirical studies demonstrating the sometimes powerful transformative effects that mindfulness and other contemplative practices can have for those suffering from mental health issues (Goldberg et al., 2018). And we can say that the techniques as such have been in use already for some time – as a simple reminder to the suffering person to bring their attention to their breath – perhaps agitated breathing, shallow breathing, breath-holding, etc. a gentle prompt: What is happening for you at this moment? What does this mean for you? In the beginning of the chapter, we presented the claim that disordered states or disruptive symptoms could be viewed as a failure or rejection of presence on the part of the patient; that these states and symptoms were not merely an indication of ill-health or lack of functionality, but actually served as coping strategies to avoid being present to the unbearable suffering that would otherwise overwhelm the patient. We also presented some excerpts from the narratives of patients which support our claim that symptoms demonstrate various levels of failure of presence, and also by sustaining or even amplifying the symptomatology served to keep presence at bay. And so given this view that the patient may not have the capacity or resilience to sustain their own sense of presence, the presence or absence of the clinician/therapist takes on heightened significance within the therapeutic encounter; it is vital that the clinician/therapist hold the space of shared presence for the patient. There are, of course, many prosaic ways in which the clinician/therapist might fail to obtain presence in the therapeutic setting: absent-mindedness, day-dreaming, running on ‘automatic-pilot’. There are at least two other more specific barriers to presence that a clinician must tackle. First, there are their own theoretical commitments which, however useful in framing the therapeutic encounter, may operate in an automatic manner, obscuring or limiting awareness of the present experience of the patient. The psychiatrist may be caught up in the theory he is looking to see instantiated in the discourse of the patient, preoccupied with ticking-off the categorical checklist. As Ritunanno, Stanghellini et al., state, what is needed is an attitude that supports patients through ‘the process of unfolding and making sense of their experience in their own terms, rather than imposing an external conceptual framework that may mischaracterise it in key respects’ (2022, p. 3).10 And so, explicitly seeking to ‘bracket’ these theoretical commitments, as a parallel to the phenomenological reduction or epoché, may serve to support the possibility of unexpected interpretations, authenticity, surprise or novelty in the unfolding therapeutic dialogue. Second, especially when working with patients in distress, the clinicians own reactive emotional responses, and associated habits of thinking, may derail attentive perception and close down presence. Indeed, absence, as a falling away from presence, can be understood as an over-identification with the ‘chatter’ of the habitual ego, which Miller (1994, p.  29) identifies as ‘the main barrier to presence’. Buddhist philosophy observes, usefully, that the 362

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operations of mind are deeply riven with automatic responses of craving and aversion: as we seek to cling to preferable experiences, and flee from unpleasant ones. This clinging and fleeing from experience is clearly incompatible with the calm, attentive presence required in the therapeutic setting. However, the desire to rid oneself of clinging or aversion itself constitutes another form of craving, of course. The cessation of these, therefore, can only be achieved (maybe paradoxically) through practices of non-doing, of release, relaxation, or letting-be (McCaw & Quay, 2022). Dynamic practices of noticing arising of craving, aversion or other strong embodied emotion, and using breath release, imagery or other meditative methods to let-go, and avoid amplifying or becoming captured by that emotion are thus critical skills in maintaining therapeutic presence. The practice of presence is, therefore, as much about noticing lack of presence as about inhabiting presence itself; they are two sides of the same coin. Although presence is sometimes characterised by a feeling of effortlessness and freedom, it nonetheless arises from the cultivation of meditative discipline: ‘Although spontaneity opens the doors to freedom, a truly spontaneous approach can’t take place without discipline. We might think that there is a contradiction between the two, but in fact, spontaneity and discipline go together. Spontaneity itself is possible because you are there—which is the discipline’ (Trungpa, 2015, p. 83). And so we could say that the training of a psychiatrist or therapist beyond learning the canon and the methodologies, is as much about the development of their own character, their personal resilience, authenticity, emotional intelligence and their capacities of attentive presence, to hold the space in the therapeutic encounter without judgement and without leaping hastily to diagnosis and a treatment pathway. The aim becomes then to allow the patient to ‘be’ as they reveal themselves with a mindful co-presence so that the casehistory grows into a narrative which both respects the multifaceted roots of the psychological disorder and indicates a negotiated way forward.

Conclusion The chapter began with a question – how can the successes of mindfulness and other contemplative practices in the clinical and therapeutic context be accounted for? We suggested that by ‘reverse-engineering’ from the positive impacts of these practices to a rethinking of the role that symptoms play may offer clarification. And so we made the claim that symptoms themselves can be understood as either a failure of presence or a refusal of presence such as in the well-known phenomena of depersonalisation (lack of presence to self) and derealisation (lack of presence to the world). In this way, symptoms not only demonstrate a breakdown in presence, but may also sustain the lack of presence as a coping strategy to avoid confronting the suffering of past experience or the suffering that may come with insight. The role of the therapist/psychiatrist then can be defined not only by his/her knowledge of the domain of mental health but most crucially as the holder of the space of shared presence; a kindly and robust attentive presence. Psychopathology is limited in that there can be no final analysis of human beings as such, since the more we reduce them to what is typical and normative the more we realize that there is something hidden in every individual that defies recognition. We have to be content with partial knowledge of an infinity which we cannot exhaust. (Jaspers, 1913, 1997, p. 1) 363

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Notes 1 See Lau (2010) for a survey of these in which he identifies historical philosophers who have responded to eastern philosophy, giving both positive and sometimes dismissive accounts: Malebranche, Leibniz, Wolff, Voltaire, Hume, Herder, Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, Buber, Heidegger. 2 Some other key thinkers who have engaged with eastern philosophy – Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Whitehead, Parfit, Legrand (2007), Petitmengin and Bitbol (2009), Siderits (2011), Moran (2016), Depraz (2019), Gallagher (2020), Garfield (2021). It is important to note that Husserl whose influence on subsequent phenomenologists is immense, was initially enamoured of Buddhist philosophy, describing Buddha as the eastern Socrates. However, his enthusiasm seemed to wane with The Crisis of European Sciences (1936/ 1954) first published in German during the xenophobic predominance of National Socialism/ Nazism in Germany (Lau, 2010). 3 One of the most outstanding Asian philosophers who engaged with Western thought, particularly phenomenology, was Nishida Kitarō – see Axtell (1991), Fennberg and Arisaka (1999), Davis (2006), Wilkenson (2009), Loughnane (2017, 2019). 4 The purpose of samatha (quiescence, calm abiding) is to achieve states of samadhi (dhyana or meditative concentration). The first dhyana gives rise to bliss, luminosity and non-conceptuality, and the five hindrances of “(1) sensual craving, (2) malice, (3) drowsiness and lethargy, (4) excitation and remorse, and (5) doubt” are all allayed (Wallace, 2009). “In both practices [phenomenology and mindfulness] the goal is well-being meant as renewal of who we really are from an ethical and existential point of view” (Ferrarello, 2023). 5 It is important to note that Merleau-Ponty’s use of the term ‘hyper-reflection’ has a specific meaning within his philosophy and is not equivalent to the more general use of the term as ‘overthinking’ or ‘excessive thinking’. 6 ‘… L’une des découvertes de Kant, don’t on n’a pas fini de tirer les consequences, n’est-elle pas que notre expérience du monde est tout entière tissée de concepts….’ (Merleau-Ponty, 1996, p. 54) translated as ‘One of the discoveries of Kant, of which we have yet to fully grasp the significance, is that all our experience of the world is entirely woven through with concepts’ (my translation, see also – Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 18). 7 The eidetic reduction aims to discover the essences of things, by eliminating all that is contingent to reveal the invariable eidos (shape) of a thing. 8 One of the examples Merleau-Ponty uses to demonstrate this dynamic is the perception of a landscape (the object, the figure) on a misty day (the environment, the ground, the context); the mist prescribes that the landscape will be perceived as hazy, but once the mist disperses, then the landscape can be seen more precisely. It is in this way that the ground context has a normative, prescriptive effect on the perception of an object. And this prescriptive, normativity transfers to perceptions within the intersubjective context (Daly, 2020, p. 149). 9 Philosopher Lisa Guenther writes: “a praxis of freedom … seeks not only to interpret the meaning of lived experience, but also to change the conditions under which horizons of possibility for meaning, action, and relationship are wrongfully limited or foreclosed” (2021). 10 For an insightful analysis of the role of phenomenology in the understanding of psychopathology that takes account not only the internal states of the patient but also the external cultural and socio-political context, see Ritunanno (2022).

References Axtell, G. S. (1991). Comparative Dialectics: Nishida Kitarō’s Logic of Place and Western Dialectical Thought. Philosophy East and West 41 (2): 163–184. Chai, D. (2014). Nothingness and the Clearing: Heidegger Daoism and the Quest for Primal Clarity. The Review of Metaphysics 67 (3): pp. 583–601. Chai, D. (2020). Daoist Encounters With Phenomenology: Thinking Interculturally About Human Existence. London: Bloomsbury Publishing Inc. Daly, A. (2019). ‘A Phenomenological Grounding of Feminist Ethics’. Society of the British Journal for Phenomenology. 50 (1): 1–18. (accepted 11 April, 2018, published online 27 June, 2018). https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2018.1487195

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Phenomenology and Mindfulness Daly, A. (2020). The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts; The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds. In A. Daly, D. Moran, F. Cummins, and J. Jardine (Eds.), Perception and the Inhuman Gaze: Perspectives from Philosophy, Phenomenology and the Sciences (pp. 143–157). New York: Routledge. Daly, A. (2022). Ontology and Attention: Addressing the Challenge of the Amoralist Through Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology and Care Ethics. Special Issue: Feminist Care Ethics Confronts Mainstream Philosophy. Philosophies. Open Access. https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/7/3/67 Davis, B. W. (2006). Toward a World of Worlds: Nishida, the Kyoto School, and the Place of CrossCultural Dialogue. In J. W. Heisig (Ed.), Frontiers in Japanese Philosophy 1. Nagoya: Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture. Depraz, N. (2019). Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassanã Meditation. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (7–8): 49–69. Fennberg, A. & Arisaka, Y. (1999). Experience and Culture: Nishida’s Path ‘To The Things Themselves’. Philosophy East and West 49 (1): 28–44. Ferrarello, S. (2023). Husserl and Mindfulness. In S. Ferrarello and C. Hadjioannou (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Routledge. Gallagher, S. (2020). Mindful Performance. In A. Pennisi, A. Falzone (Eds.), The Extended Theory of Cognitive Creativity. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 23. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22090-7_3 Gallagher, S. (2023). The Self and Its Disorders. New York: Oxford University Press. Garfield, J. (2021). Buddhist Ethics: A Philosophical Exploration. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, S. B., Tucker, R. P., Greene, P. A., Davidson, R. J., Wampold, B. E., Kearney, D. J. & Simpson, T. L. (2018). Mindfulness-Based Interventions for Psychiatric Disorders: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Clinical Psychology Review 59: 52–60. Guenther, L. (2021). Six Senses of Critique for Critical Phenomenology. Journal of Critical Phenomenology 4 (2): 5–23. Gunnlaugson, O. (2011). Advancing a Second-Person Contemplative Approach for Collective Wisdom and Leadership Development. Journal of Transformative Education 9(1): 3–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541344610397034 Jaspers, K. (1997). General Psychopathology. In J. Hoenig and M.W. Hamilton (trans). (7th ed.). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Kachru, S. (2022). Engaging Metacognitive Practices: On the Uses (and Possible Abuse) of Meditation in Philosophy. In Routledge Handbook on Philosophy of Meditation. London: Routledge Kelly, S. D. (2005). ‘Seeing Things in Merleau-Ponty’. In T. Carman and B.N. Hansen (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty (pp. 74–110). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lau, K. -Y. (2010). Husserl, Buddhism and the Problematic of the Crisis of European Sciences. In K. -Y. Lau, C. -F. Cheung, and T.-W. Kwan (Eds.), Identity and Alterity. Phenomenology and Cultural Traditions. Würzburg, Germany: Verlag Konigshausen & Neumann. Legrand, D. (2007). Pre-Reflective Self-Consciousness: On Being Bodily in the World. Janus Head 9: 493–519. Loughnane, A. (2017). Interexpression as Motor-Perceptual Faith. Philosophy East and West 67 (3): 710–737. Loughnane, A. (2019). Merleau-Ponty and Nishida: Artistic Expression as Motor-Perceptual Faith. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. May, R. (1996) Heidegger’s Hidden Sources: East Asian Influences on His Works. Graham Parkes (trans). Abingdon, Oxon, New York: Routledge. McCaw, C. T. (2021). Beyond Deliberation—Radical Reflexivity, Contemplative Practices and Teacher Change. Journal of Educational Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10833-021-09432-4 McCaw, C. T. & Quay, J. (2022). Meditative Inquiry in Dialogue With Heideggarian, Deweyan, and Buddhist Praxis. In A. Kumar (Ed.), The Transformative Potential of Curriculum as Meditative Inquiry (pp. 139–153). Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Le visible et l’invisible (VI). Paris: Editions Gallimard. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). The Primacy of Perception. James. M. Edie (trans.). Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1996). Le primat de la perception et ses conséquences philosophiques. In J. Prunair (Ed.), tome XLI, no.4. octobre-écembre 1947, First Published in dans le Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie. Paris: Éditions Verdier.

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Anya Daly and Chris McCaw Miller, J. P.  (1994). The Contemplative Practitioner: Meditation in Education and the Workplace (2nd ed.). Westport CT: Bergin & Garvey. Moran, D. (2016). A Western Thinker of Nothingness: John Scottus Erigena. World Philosophy 6: 52–57. Moran, D. (2023). Let It Be: Heidegger and Eckhart on Gelassenheit. In S. Ferrarello and C. Hadjioannou (Eds.).. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Routledge. Nelson, E. S. (2011). The Yijing and Philosophy: From Leibniz to Derrida. Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell Publishing Inc. Nelson, E. S. (2017). Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth German Thought. London: Bloomsbury. Nelson, E. S. (2019). Heidegger’s Taoist Turn. Research in Phenomenology. 49 (3). Nelson, E. S. (2020). Martin Buber’s Phenomenological Interpretation of Laozi’s Daodejing. In Daoist Encounters With Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury. Nelson, B. & Sass, L. A. (2009). Medusa’s Stare: A Case Study of Working With Self-Disturbance in the Early Phase of Schizophrenia. Clinical Case Studies 8 (6): 489–504. Parnas, J., Handest, P., Jansson, L. & Saebye, D. (2005). Anomalous Subjective Experience Among First-Admitted Schizophrenia spectrum Patients; Empirical Investigation. Psychopathology 38: 259–267. Parnas, J. & Henriksen, M. G. (2014). Disordered Self in the Schizophrenia Spectrum: A Clinical and Research Perspective. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 251–265. Petitmengin, C. & Bitbol, M. (2009). The Validity of First-Person Descriptions as Authenticity and Coherence. Journal of Consciousness Studies 16 (10–12): 363–404. Pont, A. (2016). An Exemplary Operation: Shikantaza and Articulating Practice via Deleuze. In N. Brown and W. Franke (Eds.), Transcendence, Immanence, and Intercultural Philosophy (pp. 207–236). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-43092-8_9 Purser, R. E. (2019). McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater Books/Random House. Ratcliffe, M. (2013). Delusional Atmosphere and the Sense of Unreality. Vol. 1. London: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780199609253.003.0015 Ritunanno, R. (2022). Overcoming Hermeneutical Injustice in Mental Health: A Role for Critical Phenomenology. Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 53 (3): 243–260. Ritunanno, R., Stanghellini, G., Fernandez, A. V., Feyaerts, J. & Broome, M. R. (2022). Applied Ontology for Phenomenological Psychiatry? A Cautionary Tale. The Lancet Psychiatry. Sass, L. A. & Parnas, J. (2003). Schizophrenia, Consciousness, and the Self. Schizophrenia Bulletin 29: 427–444. Siderits, M., Thompson, E. & Zahavi, D. (Eds.). (2011). Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological and Indian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Solloway, S. G. (2000). Contemplative Practitioners: Presence or the Project of Thinking Gaze Differently. Encounter: Education for Meaning and Social Justice 13 (3): 30–42. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2022). Bare Attention, Dereification and Metawareness in Mindfulness: A Phenomenological Critique. In Routledge Handbook on the Philosophy of Meditation. London: Routledge. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3–4): 158–185. Trungpa, C. (2015). Spontaneous Discipline. Mindfulness in Action: Making Friends With Yourself Through Meditation and Everyday Awareness (1st ed., pp. 83–90; C. R. Gimian, Ed.). Boston: Shambhala. Wallace, A. B. (2009). Within You Without You. Tricycle Magazine. https://tricycle.org/magazine/ within-you-without-you/ Wilkenson, R. (2009). Nishida and Western Philosophy. Surrey, UK: Ashgate. Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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24 HEIDEGGER’S GELASSENHEIT AS EMBODIED MINDFULNESS Tomás Lally

Introduction What Is Mindfulness? When I think about mindfulness, I first of all reach a point of self-awareness where I am aware of what I am thinking: I am thinking about mindfulness. I may also be aware of what is happening in my body, I’m feeling full after eating my dinner. I may be actively aware of what I am doing, I am typing this sentence. I may be aware that it is after 7 pm on a September evening, the sun is setting, and daylight is fading outside my window. I may be actively or passively aware of things in my surroundings. I become aware of the ticking clock when I attend to it but more often than not, I am passively aware of it. All these levels of awareness bring me into an awareness of the present moment. In a real sense I am being mindful, as in being aware of what I am experiencing right now. I am aware of my thoughts, my actions or my remaining still. I am mindful in the sense that I have awareness of my active and passive presence both cognitively and bodily in my present. I am engaging with my awareness, I am not on autopilot as in being involved in a series of experiences which are happening to me but at the same time I am not acting to change or alter these experiences, I am attending to them. I am actively attending but passively present, occupying my present now. We could characterize mindfulness as a type of contemplation as in a deep reflective way of thinking where the thought about an object or oneself becomes the object of thought, thereby achieving a certain distance or perspective on one’s thinking. However, this appears to bring us to a certain qualified level of releasement where the radical releasement envisaged by Heidegger does not seem fully possible. One is still caught up in the passive and active dichotomy, one is still cognitively engaged. In these cognitive models of mindfulness there is a type of narration taking place albeit at times subconsciously so. The subject is narrating its experience and its presence. It appears that thinking is incapable of bringing the subject to a stage of radical releasement. Is there a further possibility? Is there a type of mindfulness that is bodily anchored in attentiveness and awareness that is only minimally or passively cognitive, where a more radical releasement is possible?

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-30

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Mindfulness and Phenomenology A phenomenological approach is best suited to answering this question because there is a clear connection and relationality between phenomenology and mindfulness. A phenomenological approach attempts to engage with experience in its essential givenness. Givenness can be suggestive of a giver, so it is better characterised as an attempt to engage with the essential structure of consciousness, to approach the phenomena as it appears. Mindfulness in its broadest and most basic sense is a manner of engagement with consciousness or awareness that is already phenomenologically reduced, one approaches one’s awareness openly in a non-evaluative way. As will become clearer later, this is exactly what mindfulness aims to achieve so there is a very clear sense in which the practice of mindfulness itself demonstrates a phenomenological approach.

Mindfulness – Cognitive and Noncognitive Approaches A review of the literature on mindfulness clearly reveals differing approaches: the Stoic cognitive approach urges reflectiveness, self-examination and self-mastery while the Buddhist/ Western Mindfulness tradition in general urges paying non-judgemental attention to one’s presence in the present moment. There is a focus on awareness and presence in the present. The Buddhist notion includes concepts of non-attachment and non-self, the strong claim that the self has no intrinsic existence. I will now take a closer look at these differing accounts.

The Stoic Account The Stoics linked philosophy to life and urged followers to achieve self-mastery and contentment by use of logic and rationality, thereby overcoming desires and emotions. The Stoic approach bears many similarities to modern Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and these similarities have been written about at length by many including psychotherapist Donald Robertson (2010) who has examined the relationship between philosophy, psychology and self-improvement. Mindfulness in the Stoic account is achieved at a cognitive level by being in control of one’s desires and emotions and their cognitive elements. It is an active, focussed type of attending with the aim of achieving control and self-mastery. Perhaps the Stoic version of mindfulness is the only one that merits the label mindfulness in the literal sense, that is, a state where one is fully mentally aware of one’s emotions, beliefs and judgments. The Stoic recommends analysis, use of reason to clarify and gain mastery over one’s desires and emotions, rationalizing their genesis, existence, and purchase, understanding their sway and swagger and putting them in their place, freeing oneself from bodily desires. It emphasizes heightened cognitive awareness and views the body, its appetites, and emotions as things to be controlled. It recommends a detached view where the subject is urged to see how miniscule his significance, pursuits and desires are in the context of a cosmic perspective. Boethius (1999) echoes this idea when discussing the pursuit of fame: “So however protracted the life of your fame, when compared with unending eternity it is shown to be not just little, but nothing at all…. if the mind stays conscious when it is freed from the earthly prison and seeks out heaven in freedom, surely it will despise every earthly affair” (1999, Book 2, VII, pp. 42–43). According to the Stoic approach, mindfulness is a cognitive activity with the body present but silent, the body being the object acted upon rather than a contributor to the process. 368

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The body and its appetites are viewed as of lesser value, a view powerfully communicated in Marcus Aurelius’s (2001) description of sex: “So for coitus, it is but the attrition of an ordinary base entrail, and the excretion of a little vile snivel, with a certain kind of convulsion” (2001, Book 6, XI). Mindfulness in this approach is a supremely rational philosophical tool, similar in many respects to the approach outlined by Boethius where a rational engagement with philosophy as midwife delivers the prisoner from sickness, restores him to health and brings enlightenment. Stoic mindfulness is about cognitive mastery where one supplies oneself with a rationalistic narrative. But is this what we understand by mindfulness? Is mindfulness solely a cognitive achievement? Are emotions and desires always amenable to cognitive control? If they are not always amenable to cognitive control as I claim then there may be something significant missing in the Stoic account.

The Buddhist Account The Buddhist approach conceives of mindfulness as a way of paying attention, maintaining a heightened sense of alertness. Lama and Cutler describe this state of alertness as follows: …a state in which your consciousness is not afflicted by thoughts of the past, the things that have happened, your memories, and remembrances; nor is it afflicted by thoughts of the future, like your future plans, anticipations, fears and hopes. … When you are able to stop your mind from chasing sensory objects and thinking about the past and future and so on, and when you can free your mind from being totally “blanked out” as well, then you will begin to see underneath this turbulence of the thought processes. There is an underlying stillness, an underlying clarity of the mind. You should try to observe and experience this…. (1999, p. 264) The Buddhist notion focuses on non-attachment and what we might describe as an unselfing. It also strongly suggests, as described above, a type of time consciousness that is different to the retentive-protentive experience of now which Husserl writes about. I will return to the temporality of mindfulness later.

Bottom-up and Top-down Approaches Bassam Khoury (2017) provides a comprehensive analysis of differing approaches and conceptualizations of mindfulness in both western and Buddhist traditions. He writes about the use of top-down and bottom-up approaches in meditation and self-regulation. Top-down approaches focus on cognitive awareness whereas bottom-up approaches focus on sensory awareness. He quotes extensive research which found: evidence for a larger use of top–down emotion regulation strategies (e.g., via cognitive reappraisal) among novice meditators…[while]……. experienced meditators were found to mainly regulate their emotions using a bottom–up approach (e.g., directly reducing activation in emotion-generative brain regions such as the amygdala and the striatum).” (2017, pp. 1166–1167) 369

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Commenting on the effectiveness of these approaches he writes: Cultivation of top– down concept formation, without the cultivation of direct awareness, can lead to increased judgment, which is related to ignorance and suffering in Buddhism). Bottom–up processes, such as awareness of bodily signals (called interoceptive awareness), are also crucial in regulating emotions. In fact, interoceptive awareness was shown to facilitate awareness and identification of one’s emotional state, and thus the regulation of negative affect. Additionally, sustained non-evaluative attention to interoceptive sensations was suggested to disengage individuals from dysfunctional cognitive patterns (e.g., negative rumination and self-appraisal) that perpetuate negative moods. (2017, pp. 1166–1167) In the top-down and bottom-up approach discussed by Khoury, there is a tendency towards mind–body separation. The cognitive model emphasizes active reflection and self-mastery whereas the Buddhist model focuses on awareness and what we might characterize following Merleau-Ponty (2014) as an open non-judgmental passive configuring of perceptual space, rather than cognitive self-mastery. The idea of mindfulness being to minimize configuration to a passive presence.

Mindfulness as Gelassenheit or Releasement Heidegger writes at length about Gelassenheit or releasement. He references Meister Eckhart’s original use of the concept to describe the releasement from self-will to an acceptance of the will of God. For Heidegger, it is the releasement from self-will which is of interest rather than an acceptance of the will of God. According to Heidegger, Gelassenheit is a type of authentic thinking characterized by non-willing or releasement. What Heidegger means by non-willing is a manner of thinking outside willing. Bret Davis characterizes Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit as follows: This non-willful thinking involves what we might call a participatory and responsive belonging, rather than a passivity in regard to some external being or foreign force. It is said to involve a “resolute openness [Entschlossenheit]” (143/93) and even a courageous “surmising” (148/97; also 165/106–7). Indeed, this “indwelling in releasement to the open-region” is said to be “the genuine essence of the spontaneity of thinking” (145/94). (2014, p. 377) There are tensions in this characterization, for example, the use of words like “resolute” to describe openness and “courageous” to describe “surmising” are strongly suggestive of a willing component in thought. These adjectives are no doubt used to emphasize the degree of openness in this releasement, to emphasize the utter difference between wilful and nonwilful thinking. We might be tempted to label this type of thinking as contemplation as in contemplative thinking, which retains a directedness and a wilfulness, but this does not appear to be the type of non-wilful thinking envisaged by Heidegger. But what are thoughts devoid of will and appetite? Are these thoughts at all? How does the idea of the intentionality of thought sit with the idea of non-wilful thinking? Is the releasement envisaged by Heidegger possible in thought? 370

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In the foreword to Country Path Conversations (2010) Davis writes about Heidegger’s attempts to avoid the active/passive dichotomy as in the move from actively willing to a nonwilling receptivity: “…[Heidegger] is attempting to twist free of this very dichotomy, and indeed to think “outside the [very] distinction between activity and passivity” (2010, p. xi). But is it helpful to conceive of this releasement on the level of thought? My claim is that this “non wilfulness” as characterized by Heidegger is not achievable in thought but rather in a conscious shift from thought to awareness, to a being-there in presence where thought is suspended. In fact, according to Davis (2010), Heidegger appears to appreciate this reality and conceives of Gelassenheit as a process: Gelassenheit as releasing oneself from transcendental representation, is in fact a refraining from the willing of a horizon. This refraining also no longer comes from a willing, unless a trace of willing is required to occasion the letting-oneself-into a belonging to the open region- a trace which, however, vanishes in the letting-oneselfinto and is completely extinguished in authentic releasement. (2010, p. 176) The radical notion of authentic releasement described by Heidegger does not appear to be found within thought but rather in a manner of attending outside thought. What is missing in Heidegger’s account is an engagement with the embodied dimension of mindfulness which grounds this attending as presence and makes releasement possible. The embodiment of Dasein is not dealt with in Being and Time but Søren Overgaard (2004) interprets this avoidance by Heidegger as deliberate, as a way of emphasising the unity of Dasein and refusing to see Dasein as composed of different components, that is, mind and body. I experience myself as one entity, not as two or three interconnected ones - but an entity with a peculiar manner of being. Much is thus lost if we adopt an analytic conception. We lose sight of the way we actually experience things: it is simply incorrect to claim that we experience each other as composed of a number of different entities, according to Heidegger. (2004, p. 125) But surely the point is not that an engagement with embodiment is going to break up the subject but is a way of providing a more complete account of the experience which is unified, an experience that has bodily and mental elements. The experiences of infants in the prelinguistic space are sensory, bodily experiences with minimal cognition, acknowledging this and letting the predominance of the bodily inform our reflections on infant development in no way breaks up the subject. Overgaard goes on to claim: One cannot accuse Heidegger of lapsing into a mentalistic conception of subjectivity, because such a criticism takes for granted the analytic conception of the human being - precisely the conception Heidegger is trying to overcome. It is only when one sees the human being as composed of a “bodily” and a “mental” side, that the refusal to deal with the former may legitimately be seen as an inappropriate elevation of the latter. Heidegger rejects this way of conceiving the entity that we ourselves are altogether…. As he puts it in volume eighteen of the collected works, the being of the human being “must be grasped as the corporeal being-in-the-world” (GA 18, p. 199) (2004, p. 125) 371

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Yes, it is important not to break up the unified nature of Dasein and appreciate that the human being “must be grasped as the corporeal being in the world.” In the end Overgaard’s analysis raises a different but more telling question, namely, given Heidegger’s view of Dasein as a unified subject, why he neglected to grasp Gelassenheit or releasement as embodied mindfulness and why sensory awareness does not receive appropriate attention. Heidegger’s account is vastly different to the Stoic account which urges control and self mastery. We might want to characterize Heidegger’s Gelassenheit as a minimally cognitive model of thinking but as long as we remain within even a minimally cognitive model it appears we cannot achieve the level of releasement indicated. Notwithstanding the clarity offered by Heidegger regarding what authentic releasement is, his description appears to still focus on a type of disembodied reflection where mind is privileged over body, where one remains cognitively attentive and effects a releasement through a cognitive operation. My claim is that such a radical releasement can only be effected through an embodied mindfulness.

Towards an Understanding of Embodied Mindfulness Unselfing So how does embodied mindfulness differ from mindfulness understood as a cognitive activity? To answer this question, I want to explore two themes already identified in the Buddhist approach to mindfulness, which is the idea of unselfing and the notion that mindfulness does not possess a retentive-protentive type of temporality. This exploration will, I believe, help to better characterize the radical releasement which Heidegger writes about. Iris Murdoch uses the concept of unselfing in an ethical context, but I want to use this concept in an ontological way to characterise the subject’s engagement in mindfulness. This I claim is close to the Buddhist notion of non-self, as in ridding oneself from the preoccupations with self. It is in an embodied mindfulness that an ontological unselfing or releasement can occur. If we understand mindfulness as a manner of attending rather than a thought process, then thoughts, emotions, physiological states, bodily sensations all form part of that awareness, we are not confined to what solely occurs in thought. It is an attending that is characterized by a detachment from its possible objects. Murdoch (2014) describes a moment of unselfing when she sees a kestrel outside her window: “I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared.” (2014, p. 82) Was Murdoch’s experience merely an experience of being distracted or was it something more? Looking out her window she becomes lost in the flight of the kestrel. The flight of the kestrel brought her out of herself and into an awareness of something else happening in the present in her surroundings. She was distracted from her current woes, became unselfed from an ongoing narrative and got lost as it were in the majestic flight of the kestrel, she was drawn into a releasement. We could characterize her state as a state of openness to rather than a conscious willing of a self-detachment. However, is that what we mean by mindfulness? She becomes sensuously aware in the present with minimal conceptual deployment. She sidestepped negative self-destructive 372

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thought trains that were impatient to keep moving and hungry for her attention. The kestrel served as a distraction, a releasement from present turmoil effected by a type of awareness directed to the external world. In her awareness she becomes object focused. But is there another type of mindfulness which is not externally focussed but involves a bodily presencing to self in awareness.

Mindfulness and Bodyfulness Christine Caldwell (2018) urges a body centred contemplative life through breathing, sensing, movement and relating which she labels as bodyfulness. Bodyfulness involves a joint engagement between mind and body. The mind attends to what is happening in the body: to breathing, movement and the subject’s full sensory awareness. The mind as it were tunes “out of itself” and into the body. In his book The Power of Now Eckhart Tolle (2001) writes about freeing oneself from one’s mind albeit that when he uses the word mind, he includes emotions as well as thoughts. He writes about how the mind resists the now, how the mind seeks to control and interpret each situation and how thought processes can become an addiction. In a section titled Enlightenment: Rising above thought he writes as follows: “The present moment holds the key to liberation. But you cannot find the present moment as long as you are your mind…Thinking and consciousness are not synonymous. Thinking is only a small aspect of consciousness. Thought cannot exist without consciousness, but consciousness doesn’t need thought” (2001, p. 19). It would take far greater space than I have in this chapter to fully elaborate and defend the above statements but suffice it to say for my purposes here that I accept the distinction between consciousness and thought, namely that consciousness can exist independently of the activity of thinking. In the activity of thinking we display our powerful instinct to interpret and continually narrate our experience, dovetailing our current experience into a continuous narrative between what has already occurred and what might occur in the future. Is it possible to release oneself from this narrativizing instinct to greet the present in openness through an embodied attentiveness in the present, to let go, to resist a narrative? In mindfulness and bodyfulness there is a joint engagement between mind and body. The mind attunes itself to the body, in a sense it is a journeying back to a beginning, the pre-linguistic awareness as the infant who is flesh before word. It is a reengagement with minimal cognitive import. I actively attend to my sensory experience and use this as a stepping stone to a stillness, I am being, I have switched off my incessant thoughts. Murdoch’s concept of unselfing and the understanding of mindfulness in terms of embodied mindfulness helps us clarify the non-cognitive aspect of mindfulness which is overlooked by an understanding of mindfulness as reflection in the Stoic approach and to a far lesser extent in Heidegger’s approach. Shifting the focus from thought to awareness allows us to treat the experience holistically, to include both cognitive, physiological and sensory bodily elements. Embodied mindfulness as in a mindfulness anchored in the body avoids treating mindfulness as an intellectual operation and sets it in the broader context of lived embodied experience.

Mindfulness and Temporality I can occupy now in a reflective mode where I reconsider past events and experiences, I consider them and try to understand them, to see them as part of the unfolding narrative that I 373

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consider to be my life. We seem to have a deep sense that a story is what emerges from my life. But am I open to a “non-teleological” story or is it not the case that I will inevitably see my story as leading to here where I am now. The backward glance is a view purified of situational contamination at one level and at another level it is abstract as in missing the sensory experiential component of past experience. It is a space where one can cast a cool eye as it were. But the perspective gained will not of itself lead to transformation, merely a mindful, reflective occupation of now which is past-focused. I can also occupy now expectantly where my now is filled with thoughts of the future. The future fills my present awareness, my now is preoccupied with thoughts of later and thoughts of tomorrow. As already indicated the awareness which mindfulness tries to achieve is not the retentive-protentive experience of now which Husserl writes about. Mindfulness aims at a different type of temporal consciousness. But how might we conceive of this type of temporal consciousness? Hannah Arendt provides us with a way of doing this, a way in which we can recover and open up the present as a gap between past and future, a way of rethinking this gap, lest it become a space drowned and obliterated with retention and protention, lest it become thought out of existence as it were and have its possibility eclipsed in a temporal momentum where every clock tick awaits a tock and each tock begets another tick. Our awareness need not be hypnotized by this pendulous motion, we can take time out, recover the gap as a clearing, a space of possibility for thought and action. Arendt writes about a “non-time space in the very heart of time.” This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew. (1993, p. 13) This non-time-space becomes the ground for possibility, the space of recovery, the space where the possibility of action resides. It is the present, the now of possibility. The temporality of embodied mindfulness is a type of non-time-space at the very heart of time. This is to step out of the Husserlian notion of the retentive and protentive present, into a now consciousness. The stoic’s approach is to exert self-mastery by rational reflection but an embodied mindfulness approach seeks not so much to change what is there by reframing it and undermining it, but by accepting its thereness and switching awareness to regulate the mind and the body to become aware of oneself as possibility, as a conscious potentiality. In this context, the idea of “unselfing” is about undermining one’s preoccupation with self. It is not a sense of getting rid of the self but a reduction to a minimal sense of self as in a passive awareness of oneself as subject. Mindfulness in a real sense is bodyfulness, a stepping out of the narrativizing habit and a greeting of the present in openness. The unexamined or unreflective life may not be worth living, but mindfulness is different to reflection. Mindfulness is an atelic type of activity when compared with reflection. Bodyfulness is not about control or power over emotions or thought, it is about an awareness of your entire physical being in the present, it is a letting be rather than a controlling. The body is key, it is the anchor that grounds me in sentient present awareness, I focus on my breathing, become aware of touch, my body 374

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sinking into the chair, I sit still and view the window framed picture still outside my window. In embodied mindfulness I am connected to the world. I am in the world not separated from it, I am in relation rather than seeing myself as separated, alone and a distanced pure consciousness. Embodied mindfulness brings me into relationality, rather than effecting a detachment from reality. The Stoic account suggests that emotions and desires can be transformed purely on a cognitive level. This is based on a cognitive account of emotion. But any phenomenological analysis of emotion has to acknowledge the pre-linguistic sensory reality where bodily sensations and emotions first arise before becoming sedimented into habit. By the time the infant arrives in language it has learned to stand up, to have some sense of distance and perspective. It has also experienced the other and the physical world initially through touch, taste, sound and smell and then subsequently through vision. In the context of emotion, we need to do justice to this pre-linguistic inheritance which grounds and informs gestures and emotions. By the time we reach language we have learned so much about the world, we are grounded by our bodies in the world, equipped with basic knowledge about proximity, color, sound, touch, we are familiar with a world which when touched, touches us back, yields information about itself and the qualities it possesses in a relationship of co-presence. This is our beginning which we belatedly access through language as we begin again in a consciousness outside sensory awareness (see Hatab, 2017, 2020). We are flesh before word and in word we attempt to conceptualize flesh, but at its most authentic this is not a reduction or a translation but as Carbone (2004, pp. 39–40) describes it “a metamorphosis of the flesh of the sensible into the flesh of language.” Touch brings mind and body together and the body has primacy as the feeling medium in that the body feels the feeling, exhibits a learned reaction to a situation, the mind contributes a cognitive assessment, but habit may trump a cognitive assessment and emotions may persist despite the cognitive re-evaluation which assures me that, for example, most spiders are harmless. Attempting to control emotions solely through a cognitive approach often fails, sometimes spectacularly so. Body memory plays a constitutive role in emotion just like judgment, but sensations reside in the body. While the mind perceives a bodily sensation and plays a constitutive role in it, it is not simply a case of the mind moving the body, the body has its own experience as body, perhaps this provides some understanding as to why bodily addictions, habits are so difficult to overcome, even when the subject exerts great will power. However there is also a sense of a full occupation of now which is not a preoccupation, it is not a deep contemplative engagement but a gentler attending. The image we can use here is one of listening. If I fill my mind with the concept of now and presence this brings me into now, all that is now for me, about and within at the level of awareness. This is a non-wilful attending; it is an embodied mindfulness.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have reflected on Heidegger’s concept of Gelassenheit or releasement in the context of an embodied mindfulness. I have noted how non-wilful thinking remains on the level of a cognitive achievement albeit minimally so and how this non wilfulness is not explicitly grounded by Heidegger in embodiment. By remaining within even a minimally cognitive model of releasement a more radical releasement is prevented. By shifting the focus to awareness rather than thinking I claim we can achieve an embodied groundedness 375

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in the now. A groundedness whose temporality is best characterized following Arendt as a type of atemporality, outside Husserlian protentive-retentive time consciousness. This groundedness in embodiment mirrors and echoes my initial pre-linguistic groundedness and presence as an infant in sensory awareness - an awareness which precedes cognitive processing. Embodied mindfulness could be characterized as a sensuous connectedness gaining the upper hand on the distancing power of thought. Murdoch’s kestrel serves as a distraction from my cognitive processing and acts as a catalyst to draw me out of my cognitive awareness into the flight of the kestrel initially and subsequently my present self-presence. The kestrel is the medium through which I regain my bodily, sensory self-presence to myself. My awareness becomes attuned to my surroundings, my presence in the present. Cognition serves to disconnect me and separate me from this awareness in a retentive-protentive temporality. Murdoch’s kestrel is a catalyst that achieves a shift in self-awareness. Understanding mindfulness as a manner of attending ensures that thoughts, emotions, behaviors, physiological states, bodily sensations can all form part of that awareness. We are not confined by what occurs in thought as in the restrictive cognitive model. Attending always happens in the present and focuses on present awareness whereas thought has no necessary connection with what is happening in my present. Attending is characterized by a detachment from its possible objects whereas thought is enmeshed with its object. My claim is that it is in this model of embodied mindfulness that the subject can achieve the radical releasement, the non-willing state which Heidegger writes about. It is within this framework that an unselfing can occur and one can challenge one’s persistent narrating self and encounter oneself as an experiencing subject. By shifting the focus from thought to attending we can understand human experience holistically and avoid the tendency towards mind/body separation evident in the top-down cognitive model. In the end it is not a choice between a cognitive, minimally cognitive, or sensory model. Both the Stoic approach and the Buddhist/Western approach seem to form a continuum. Khoury’s research which reveals a difference in approach between experienced and lessexperienced practitioners is important. Cognitive mindfulness as an active and focused attending is I suggest the starting point. Reflection and a mind-presencing where the subject engages cognitively in a free and open manner with the experience is essential in the attempt to understand the experience. This activity can bring the subject to a point at which he or she is ready to engage in a more bodyful attending. On the other hand, it is difficult to see how a bodyful presencing could by itself, without the reflective approach, achieve any enduring sense of releasement. It would merely be a temporary respite but make little progress in transforming the experience. Heidegger’s characterization of releasement as beyond the dichotomy of active and passive is also key. Mindfulness as an activity is an act of focused attending, a heightening of present awareness free from the external and internal distractions which proceeds to a more passive attending or self-presencing. We might characterize it as initially a releasement from which develops into a releasement to, or a letting be. It is mindfulness understood as embodied mindfulness which better grounds Heidegger’s concept of releasement and avoids the artificial separation of mind and body, or indeed the separation of cognitive approaches from bodyful approaches. In the Stoic model, the mindfulness is achieved by a cognitive engagement, a top-down approach. In the bodyful approach, unselfing is achieved by bodyful awareness which emphasizes presencing, relationality and groundedness. In the embodied mindfulness model this unselfing is not in the end about separation, or control but about a rediscovery of the connectedness of mind and body. It is an acknowledgement of the reality of the unified, embodied, grounded experiencing subject. 376

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References Arendt, Hannah (1993). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Penguin. Aurelius, Marcus (2001). Meditations, e-Book, (M. Casaubon, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. Boethius (1999). The Consolation of Philosophy. Penguin. Caldwell, Christine (2018). Bodyfulness: Somatic Practices for Presence, Empowerment, and Waking Up in This Life. Shambhala. Carbone, Mauro (2004). The Thinking of The Sensible: Merleau-Ponty’s a-Philosophy. Northwestern University Press. Davis, Bret. W. (2010). ‘Will and gelassenheit’. In B.W. Davis (ed.), Martin Heidegger Key Concepts. (pp. 168–182). Acumen. Davis, Bret. W. (2014). Returning the world to nature: Heidegger’s turn from a transcendentalhorizonal projection of world to an indwelling releasement to the open-region. Continental Philosophy Review 47, 373–397. Hatab, Lawrence J. (2017). Proto-Phenomenology and the Nature of Language: Dwelling in Speech, Vol 1. Rowman & Littlefield. Hatab, Lawrence J. (2020). Proto-Phenomenology, Language Acquisition, Orality and Literacy, Vol 2. Rowman & Littlefield. Heidegger, Martin. (2010). Country Path Conversations. (B.W. Davis, Trans.). Indiana University Press. Khoury, Bassam et al. (2017). Embodied mindfulness. Mindfulness 8, 1160–1171. Lama, Dalai, Cutler, Howard C. (1999). The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. Coronet. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (2014). The Phenomenology of Perception. (D.A. Landes, Trans.). Routledge. Murdoch, Iris (2014). The Sovereignty of Good. Routledge. Overgaard, Søren (2004). Heidegger on embodiment. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 35 (2), 116–131. Robertson, Donald (2010). The Philosophy of Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Stoic Philosophy as Rational and Cognitive Psychotherapy. Routledge. Tolle, Eckhart (2001). The Power of Now. Hodder & Stoughton.

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25 PARALLEL LIVES OF BUDDHA AND SOCRATES On Epoché as Transcendental Transformation Carlos Lobo

Introduction Husserl’s texts on the words of the Buddha1 as well as on Socrates have been commented on in such detail by Husserl’s editors that one cannot fail to feel some scruples, in proposing to return to them. Despite the attempts to bring together this or that aspect of Indian or Oriental thought or philosophy, the commentators are fairly unanimous in admitting the one-sided nature of Husserl’s considerations on Indian or Buddhist thought. From these texts and comments, we get convinced that the idea of parallels is central. First, there is the parallel between Buddha and Socrates, which is like the figure or the symbol of a series of other parallels: between Buddhism and phenomenology, which shelters several others, among which those, suggested by Fink2 or Mohanty,3 between the forms and degrees of phenomenological reduction and epoché and the levels of meditative asceticism, be it Hindu or Buddhist. Then there is the parallel, internal to phenomenology, which occupies Husserl well before his two writings on the Buddha, and develops from the Logical Investigations (Husserl, 1989) into a real method of “parallelization” between the theoretical and the practical, or between science and ethics. Husserl’s reflections on Buddhism are explicitly part of this topicality of parallels. In order to approach with rigor the delicate problem of the applications of phenomenology to existential or therapeutic contexts, according to the various meanings that the term mindfulness takes (Gethin, 2011; Dreyfus, 2011; Ferrarello, 2023), it is necessary to be interested in the meaning of the transfers that are played out in these parallels. These transfers concern, on the one hand, forms of ascetic and meditative practices stemming from Hinduism or Buddhism, whose common base is undoubtedly to be found in the multisecular practices of yoga (Sinari, 1965; Puliganda, 1970; Weber, 2003, p. 290ff.); they concern, on the other hand, the operations of phenomenology understood as “theoretical practice” and their conversion or application to broader or existential practical contexts. Now the transfers in question, and other possible ones, in great numbers, suppose each time the establishment of parallels, in the sense that Plutarch gave it, but renewed by the phenomenological method of parallelization. For Husserl’s meditations on the Buddha do not only belong in the perspective of an exercise of edifying admiration or of a translatio studiorum, 378

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but they aimed at a resolution of a problem posed by the method of parallelization proper to phenomenology. The latter, as we know, hyperbolically establishes a multitude of parallels to the forms of consciousness or objectivizing intentionality (perception, imagination, judgment, inference, reasoning, etc.), namely all the forms of non-objectivizing, affective and volitional intentionality (feelings, pleasures, decisions, choices, etc.). Developing it into a parallel between phenomenological critique of logical reason and that of a practical and axiological reason, Husserl came up against a problem whose solution is suggested by Buddhism. In so doing we enter into phenomenological considerations central to Husserl’s work and yet obscured or, at best, undervalued. What is this problem? The one that insists under the species of ethical skepticism that Husserl confronts as early as his lessons on ethics and the philosophy of law of 1897, and that will not cease to insist until the Krisis. Ethical skepticism in its various forms supposes indeed an epoché of the will, the forms of which Husserl tries to reconstruct in order to better refute them. In its purest and most radical form, ethical skepticism takes the form of an absolute epoché of the will, which constitutes the exact parallel of radical logical skepticism. But the difficulty lies in the fact that transcendental phenomenology, if it really wants to become a professional practice which engages the existence of the one who dedicates his life to it, requires a universal transcendental epoché, which affects any position of validities, including those which are proper to the will and the affectivity in the form of values or goods of various orders; but even though it supposes, as a theoretical and methodical activity, a voluntary practice. How to implement this universal epoché without which the practicability of the transcendental epoché remains itself in suspense, and this without falling into the untenable position of the absolute practical epoché of the skeptical type? The solution of this difficulty leads Husserl to turn again, with increased interest, to Indian thought and Buddhism, to find there the expression whose effectiveness is not to be demonstrated, since it has spread throughout the Eastern world, and which has its roots in the most ancient ascetic practices of the Indian world. This hypothesis takes us back to the heart of Buddhism and Hinduism, and of the yogic discipline that is common to them, and to that of Husserlian phenomenology. Let us formulate it: the substance of consciousness as well as that of our existence is reduced to an incessant flow, from which we extricate ourselves only by a wrenching out, a stop, which, in order to be radical, does not occur once and for all, but must be tirelessly repeated on the individual level, in the form of a self-meditative asceticism. This uprooting, which can take multiple forms, is what Husserl calls epoché, taking the term from the Pyrrhonians who would have borrowed it themselves from the Hindu tradition (see Held, 2000; Petropoulos, 2023). The effect of this tearing away is to reveal this incessant flow as a flow of modalizations, whose inner manifestation is what the yogis call vritis (Patanjali, 1974, 1991; Yoga-Sutra, III, p. 7; Tara, 2017).4 The effect of this first wrench is, on the level of the general “consideration” of the world, to reduce the world to a flow of modifications whose substratum is an activity of a non-empirical, pre-worldly subjectivity of the atman appearing before the eye of the apathetic supra-individual and non-worldly principle called brahman. This could be paralleled to the distinction proposed by Husserl between the two forms of transcendental subjectivity: spectator and constituting. This flow of lived experience, because it is an incessant flow of modalizations, and because these modalizations are not only doxic but also affective and volitional, is only revealed as such by a theoretical epoché. But the latter remains a simple desideratum, unattainable and impracticable if it is satisfied with putting between brackets the doxa alone, 379

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and the base of the natural attitude that is the belief in the world, without voluntarily attacking the will, and the modalities of the feeling that provide its buttresses. This led Husserl to revisit his previous position and, under the pressure of circumstances, to re-evaluate the nature and the meaning of an epoché of the will and desire. A clue: the period of Husserlian reflections on the Buddha coincides with an increased interest in the existential dimension of phenomenological practice, as well as repeated reflections on the practical modalities of the conversion required by transcendental phenomenology, and consequently, the practical modalities of its diffusion that Husserl, in a grandiose view, saw as the salvation of the European culture, in his Krisis. These reflections could not fail to lead Husserl to the central difficulties touched upon, that is, that of the will at work in phenomenological practice and that of the meaning, scope and limits of a universal ethical reduction. As I suggested elsewhere (Lobo, 2008), this universal ethical reduction institutes a new form of praxis, the possibility of which is prefigured by Socrates and Buddha. We find an indication of this change of position and of this practical deepening of the phenomenological reduction in Husserl’s change of attitude toward Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Sources of Husserlian Meditation on Buddhist Meditation Husserl’s Entourage The influence of Mazaryk on Husserl’s intellectual and spiritual development is well known (Schuhmann, 2004, pp. 138–142). Although we do not have formal proof, it is undoubtedly through the latter that Husserl had one of his first contacts with Buddhism and Indian thought, strongly mediated, it is true, even in this eventuality, by the reading and interpretation of Schopenhauer. To these mediations, we must add those of Husserl’s family circle, whose son Wolfgang was an Indianist, and professional, with the works of Grassmann’s father or of his colleague Oldenberg (Schuhmann, 2004).5 All this is sufficiently documented and studied to dispense with insisting on it (ibid.).6 The conclusions of these analyses are also convergent on the unilateral character (and thus the limits) of the Husserlian interest for Indian thought. The nature of this borrowing or reading is confirmed by Husserl’s two most developed writings on the subject, namely the review of the Neumann translation and the texts on the Socrates/Buddha parallel. Correctly evaluated, we can conclude that Husserl would simply read in these texts, including in the words of the Buddha, another expression of the parenthesis of the world (Schuhmann, 2004, p. 147). The practical dimension of Indian thought, as opposed to the theoretical orientation of European thought after Plato, is another recurrent motif, and quite right, it seems to us, in these comments.7 But the meaning of this parallel and of its replicas in that of Buddha and Socrates, of Buddhism and Christianity, of Indian philosophy and Greek philosophy has not been satisfactorily fixed. This is due to the fact that not enough attention has been paid to the meaning of the double universality, theoretical and practical, which is at stake and their articulation. The transfer of the analogon of reduction implemented by Buddhism is indeed “logicized” by Socrates to a certain point, but it keeps a practical character, since Socrates remains the figure of the great practical reformer. Conversely, there is indeed an epoché at work in Buddhism, but it never reaches the level of a science in accordance with the norm of scientificity of what Husserl calls the new episteme, and not even with that of the old episteme. The epoché remains in this very unilateral vision purely practical in the Indians and thus volitional.8 Schuhmann underlines 380

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the humanistic motivation of this vision: struggle of the transcendentalism against the objectivism of the modern science, unilateral orientation toward the object and occultation of the operating subjectivity; but he condemns without appeal the (Germanic) idealism of the vision, little concerned with the empirical facts. A history dominated by reason in which philosophy becomes the main actor, and which leads to an Eurocentric and finally imperialist vision, in relation to which Indian philosophy could only occupy a secondary, preparatory place, and would be, in this aprioristic history, written from the historical point of view, insignificant. Even if we stick to this poetic and a priori vision of the history of thought and spirituality, it is possible to arrive at a fairer evaluation and, above all, a better understanding of Husserl’s theoretical motivations. This would allow us to grasp the meaning of the parallels we have drawn and to weight or even suspend the severe judgment to which we are thus most often led.9 A common thread is offered to us in Husserl’s reversals with respect to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is associated with a form of amoralism, which does not, however, mean ethical skepticism (the same is not true of Nietzsche, who is held to be one of the modern representatives of ethical skepticism). In spite of his “a-moralism”, or partial ethical skepticism, Schopenhauer is indeed the bearer of a solution to the problem that obsesses Husserl: that of the compatibility between transcendental epoché and an ethical epoché that does not make us fall into skepticism. But this solution is, as we know, in Schopenhauer associated with “pessimism”. Beyond the drama of the crisis of the sciences, Husserl’s objective remains optimistic and inscribes itself in the perspective of a renewed Enlightenment, rid of its naturalism, and thus to show that phenomenology can be practically the vector of a practical reform of great magnitude and not limited the theory of knowledge and of science.

Schopenhauer and the Possibility of a Negation of the Will That Is Not Skeptical Schopenhauer represents a singularity in the typology of ethical systems: an immoralism which admits however norms, and consequently a supreme norm, that of the abdication of all will. But how can we escape from ethical skepticism, such as that of Nietzsche, held by Husserl for one of its modern representatives.10 In the perspective of the Prolegomena, while dissociating “pure logic” from its normative dimension and its practical and technological dimension, Husserl confronts the distinction between practical and normative disciplines. Schopenhauer’s position illustrates in this context the possibility and legitimacy of this dissociation, since he provides the prototype of an ethics “which rejects any practical foundation of morality”, because of his “fatalism” (i.e., his theory of innate character) and consequently of “any technology”, but retains nonetheless a normative dimension; for, “he does not in any way renounce moral differences of value” (Hua 28, Husserl, 1988, p. 47). For this reason, he is not a radical ethical skeptic, that is, an axiological and normative relativism, which proclaims that “there are absolutely no universally valid and absolutely binding ethical prescriptions and that they are therefore all of relative value” (ibid., 382). Nietzsche embodies one of the most eloquent forms of this skepticism which “impregnates ethics to its deepest roots”: under the cover of resisting the flattening and the ethical decay, he contributes to nourish axiological relativism and to eradicate the spring of a hierarchy of values, and he is led to deny any practical rationality, and with it, the resources of an unarbitrary and unrelative 381

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hierarchy of the norms. The same is true of the theories that flourished at the time in Germany concerning the State and law, in the wake of Hegelianism as well as of the defenders of historical law, where one tries to extirpate “natural law” – that is to say, rational law – like a weed.11 The critique of the logical reason is doubled in Husserl by a critique of the axiological and practical reason (Lobo, 2023). For the first time, Husserl tries to give a formally rigorous formulation of this skepticism in order to refute it in forma and, in so doing, to ground a science of ethics. These reflections contain the seeds of the hypotheses that will constitute the central axes of the theory of norms outlined in the Prolegomena and developed later. In this context, the normative ideal proposed by Schopenhauer appears ambivalent. He has nourished currents hostile to the very idea of practical reason, but he is also the bearer of a solution to the problem that the Husserl’s critique of reason faces, because of its method. This problem tackles the compatibility between transcendental epoché and reduction and an ethical epoché that is not skeptical. As we said, the solution offered by Schopenhauer is associated with a “pessimism”: the innate moral character (analogon of karma) is a given over which the will has no control (see Weber, 2003, p. 349ff.). The fact remains that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not reduced to such a dissociation of the practical and the normative dimension, but it proposes, theoretically, an analysis of the practical modalities of a suspension of praxis, in the form of a voluntary negation of the will to live. Husserl insists on the practical dimension of this suspension: Certainly, it is only a very abstract, very general, and yet very cold painting, the one I made above of the negation of the will to live, in other words of the conduct of a beautiful soul, of a saint who resigns himself and who spontaneously atones. But as the knowledge from which the negation of the will results is intuitive and not abstract, so it is not in abstract concepts that it finds its perfect expression; it is only in action, in our conduct. (Schopenhauer, 1966, p. 481; 1969, p. 383) This negation itself escapes the paradox only insofar as it is coupled with this moment of deliverance, which Schopenhauer analyzes in the famous pages of his magnum opus, and in which we find sketched out the parallels that we will find in Husserl, between Buddhism and the perennial vein of Christianity, between an abstract and gnoseological version of this negation of the will-to-live and a practical version, and finally a parallel between Socrates and Buddha, who both promote, against a literal asceticism and for this very reason equivocal, a more purified and speculative form of asceticism. Thus, as in these two illustrious examples, the literal negation of life (suicide) is considered as a tragi-comic metaphor, or even a contradiction of what it is. The will to live continues to assert itself in suicide and is only a deceptive negation, whereas the true ascetic, like the mystic, because he has lifted the veil of Maya, that is, has had the intuition of the principle of individuation, achieves the true negation of the will to live. Schopenhauer insists strongly on this point, this negation of the will to live escapes contradiction, insofar as it coincides with this knowledge of the individuation principle. But it remains practical. This is where Schopenhauer’s “moral innatism” and “pessimistic” attitude comes in, and where he takes up one of the central myths of Hinduism: that of the cycle of reincarnations, which makes life a curse. The transcendental character of philosophical negation is then illustrated by the myth of “rebirths”, which is equivalent to the affirmation of the innateness of moral characters and thus of the 382

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difference between the normative dimension presupposed by ascetic practice and morality, which postulates a voluntary ego-subject ultimately responsible for his acts. This presupposition remains central in Husserl, and even finds a radicalization in the form of a phenomenology of the will that draws out its creative and even cosmologic-creative character. In the perspective of innatism, the only free act is the renunciation of life in the form of the negation of the will-to-live, which Schopenhauer raises to the rank of “transcendental transformation” (§69).

Phenomenological Reformulation of the Problem of the Negation of the “Will to Live” The first objective of Husserl’s ethical research is to build a real parallel to logical skepticism and its diverse variants, in order to arrive at a refutation of the same power and relevance. But what could be considered as an existential “turn” of Husserl (Lobo, 2022), incites him to consider knowledge and the phenomenological method from a practical point of view. The personal motivations of this turn are multiple, but they lead to consider pure reflection under the perspective of praxis as a profession and vocation, and to ask the question of its practical and ethical (political and moral) scope. We thus come to the problem that the lessons of First Philosophy try to bring a solution. But the theoretical motivation lies in the problem we have already presented. It is this problem that prompts Husserl to re-examine the old propositions he encountered in his readings and the parallels they suggested, in particular the Socrates/Buddha one.

The Problem Let us formulate this problem: How can transcendental epoché neutralize the “natural thesis” including its “affective and volitional theses” without falling into the affective and practical contradiction of radical ethical skepticism? The dilemma is redoubled if we take into account that the transcendental phenomenological epoché is itself, as a methodical act, a voluntary activity and a theoretical practice. The solution of this second dilemma is more traditional, and it has found in ancient philosophy a beginning of solution by the promotion of a sui generis way of life, the bios theoretikos. But given the peculiar character of the phenomenological transcendental theory, this epoché must be universal and thus envelop the doxic and axiological theses in a universal way. What Buddhism proposes, according to Schopenhauer, is precisely a practical version of epoché, a voluntary negation of the will. Schopenhauer’s formula is as follows: “The Will then detaches itself from life: it sees enjoyment as an affirmation of life, and it abhors it. Man arrives at a state of voluntary self-denial, resignation, true calm and absolute cessation of will”. But precisely this stop is interpreted by Schopenhauer as negation, that is to say as a modalization of life, which consequently maintains the thetic vector of affectivity and will, even though that of belief is suspended. Because it is a modalization, the negation advocated by Schopenhauer is not the right candidate for this office, but the way in which he exposes it couples it with a “sublime” moment, that of the stop, which indicates the true nature of the required operation: epoché. If we correctly interpret this epoché as neutralization, imposing a stop to the flow of the thetic modalizations (doxic or axiological), another problem arises. How to practice this stop and the subsequent phenomenological work without getting entangled in a ridiculous contradiction? It remains to show how 383

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ethical epoché differs from skeptical epoché, which leads not to a paralysis of the will, but to its own cancellation – which is simply untenable from a phenomenological point of view.

The Objection of Ethical Skepticism Ethical skepticism is not a theoretical abstention from ethical principles, but a suspension of the validity of the very values of any order, in particular those which determine action and will. Husserl manages in the lessons of 1911 to propose several variants of ethical skepticism, and corresponding refutations. Let us mention the following: absolute immoralism; ethical inconsequence; and finally radical ethical epoché. Immoralism consists in theoretically and practically rejecting any ethical principle and acting accordingly. Such a position is not a complete skepticism and is not self-sabotaging. The second is close to the form of theoretical skepsis and its refutation proceeds in the same way. It is suggested by a student of Husserl, Münsterberg, who “sought to construct an ethical argumentation parallel to the Platonic argumentation” and to establish a “formal counterargument” by which the skeptic presupposes or admits what he denies in thesi” (Hua 28, Husserl, 1988, pp.  24–26). One is entitled, concludes Münsterberg, to doubt the sincerity and the truthfulness of the skeptic’s statements. But this does not constitute a contradiction of a practical or axiological type, Husserl objects. The way to obtain a pure analogue of ethical skepticism consists in moving to the field of norms and rules of conduct. To this absolute epoché, we must oppose the universal ethical epoché which is required by the transcendental epoché itself. But the latter is itself parallel to the universal phenomenological epoché. It is on this point that Husserl’s position will move toward a solution, in the lessons of First Philosophy, a solution of which he will find an example in the Buddhist practice of samadhi.12

Toward a Solution of the Problem The radical ethical skeptic does not say: “there are no unconditioned rules”; or “there is no good in itself”; for we are then faced with practical statements in a logical form, quite compatible with an ethical conduct. It is however possible to do so for a restricted sphere of values. But what is the universal and radical form of axiological and practical skepsis? It will consist in challenging the most general and formal possibilities of action and evaluation themselves. This presupposes that there are formal principles proper to action and will, and more broadly to feeling and evaluation. In the framework of a “meticulously parallelist reflection” (Hua 28, Husserl, 1998, p. 237), Husserl comes to the production of the skeleton of such a skepticism: it consists in the statement of the prescription or norm or rule: “Don’t follow any rule!”. This impossible norm prescribes a complete stop of the will and the feeling while soliciting them, and that it thus destroys itself eo ipso. Consequently, an absolute epoché that would affect the will is an absurdity: “such an epoché is a manifest contradiction, an axiological contradiction”. However, we can ask ourselves if and to what extent it is possible to distinguish between several forms of abstention from the will: “if it were perhaps better for us to want nothing at all and that nothing be wanted in general”, the consequence “would thus be to exercise an absolute epoché, to want nothing at all”. The objection is then obvious: “Not to will is also a will, and an absolute epoché is in the volitional sense an absurdity… it is a volitional nonsense” (ibid., p. 353); which is a case of axiological non-sense.13 To stick to the volitional case: “the only absolutely right decision 384

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would be to decide on nothing” but it “is obviously an authentic skeptical counter-sense”. Against Schopenhauer, Husserl concludes that suicide escapes such an absurdity: “a total abstention of will directed toward the future would naturally be something totally different (for, because of this very restriction, it is no longer an absolute epoché), thus, for example, a suppression of will that results as a consequence of suicide. If the suicidal [subject] imagines that his life is completely useless, that his whole life and his whole will do not increase the value of the world, but decrease it, such a negation of the will is naturally no longer an absurdity. The will directed toward such a suppression of the will is even accomplished on the basis of a consideration of the supreme practical good, even if it is false” (ibid.)

The Parallelism of Universal Ethical Epoché and Transcendental Epoché Here a strange reversal occurs, so much so that one wonders which of the transcendental epoché or the universal ethical epoché requires the other. The two even seem, at a certain stage, to merge. We cannot engage here in a detailed study of this analytic of universal epoché. But we must however mark the essential milestones. Having begun with phenomenological psychological epoché, Husserl tackles the delicate problem of the “conditions of possibility” of an extension of epoché that makes the leap proposed by the Cartesian way less abrupt. It is then that the problem of a universal reflection encompassing the whole of life arises, and with it that of an ethical epoché which occurs in the moments of fundamental ethical decisions, those which decide on a vocation or a choice of way of life. The universal epoché must also include an ethical dimension for the phenomenologizing subject who gains a “global view of my life in its universality and I am continuously conscious of it as a whole”. But this subjective life has two essential dimensions: horizontality and positionality. Without the horizon structure a universal decision or a reflection on “my life” would have no meaning (Hua 8, Husserl, 1959, p. 156). But precisely, because consciousness comprises this structure of horizon, we discover a limit of the universal ethical epoché, if at least this one is not coupled to the transcendental epoché, namely that the co-posed validities, whether they are of ontological (worldly or ideal) or axiological order, are part of the external horizon that the ethical epoché, as universal as it is, does not touch. We come here to the second dimension, that of positionality, on which we cannot insist too much (ibid., p. 157). This is why, if a transcendental transformation is to take place, as Schopenhauer wants, it must proceed from transcendental epoché (ibid., p. 161). Let us resume. The universal transcendental epoché is backed up by an ethical epoché whose objective is to inhibit all interests and correlatively, all validity built on the basis of the natural attitude. This epoché is itself voluntary, since it takes the form of a “universal decision of the will” which poses as an existential and ethical vocation, a theoretical activity that engages the whole life and produces its transformation in depth. The tasks that are offered to me are henceforth in accordance with this decision. But the paradox is thus only reinforced, since this ethical epoché, apparently required, keeps unchanged the essential structure of my life” (ibid., pp. 143–144). Can this be reduced to a relationship of the type foreground-background consciousness, and, consequently, to a horizon structure? This is what Husserl suggests. Except that it is a structure of horizon situated at another level than the one that concerns the usual thematic fields. It reveals in return a “deeper” dimension at work in the other forms of horizontality: that of positionality (Hua 8, Husserl, 1959, pp. 145–146). 385

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Such is the trajectory of the lessons of First Philosophy (specifically Hua 8, lessons 49 to 52). Such is also the fundamental distinction between two types of universality to which Husserl returns in an afterthought. Talking about the “universal ethical epoché”, Husserl notices that he had neglected, but by no means neglected it afterwards the difference between the universality of ethical epochè and that of phenomenological epoché, since in the former the natural thesis is not tackled, but restricted to the sphere of axiological validities: “it originally concerns all acts related to absolute duty and what is relevant in this respect in the universal practical field”, but “always presupposes the world given in advance, the surrounding world as that to which my personal actions and passions relate” (see Lobo, 2008, pp. 147–155). Indeed, transcendental epoché must be universal and absolute (Hua 8, Husserl, 1959, p. 153). Because it encompasses all positional modifications and validities (ontic and axiological), it takes the form of an “absolute inhibition of all positionality”. Correlatively, this “putting out of action of all validities” takes place all at once. (ibid.) On the other hand, the global recapitulation of “my life” that takes place in a universal ethical epoché may well touch all axiological and some ontological validities, but it does not generally go as far as a questioning of the validity of the world, and consequently the set of values that it promotes remains worldly. To put it in Schopenhauerian terms, they remain trapped in the veil of Maya and its principle of individuation. Husserl is categorical on this point, the universal ethical epoché can never inhibit all validities; but it does shed light on the possibility of an ethical universality.

Analysis and Resources of Epoché as “Transcendental Transformation” This “transcendental transformation” that Schopenhauer places at the heart of the various forms of Indian meditation (Buddhist or Hindu) is thus what Husserl is looking for in the texts we have followed so far. It remains for us to understand more precisely how. It supposes, among other things, that the intentional dimension of naive experience becomes a permanent element of the thematizing activity of consciousness. Husserl thus discovers the functional and operative aspect of epoché. The lessons of First Philosophy (especially 50 and 51) try to recapture the functioning of epoché within the natural attitude and the reflections that one carries out voluntarily or not. This means that we see at work the forms of functional reductions and epochai that Husserl will later thematize. The transcendental epochai can thus be held to be a universalization and radicalization of these functional epochai, but it is nevertheless important to distinguish, although strongly interdependent: the transcendental epochai and the universal ethical epochai. These practical universal epochai are coupled to psychological reductions. Again, it is in the form of an analogy with the reductions operated in acts of reflection on acts and their determined correlates (individual objects, regions of objects, if any), “but in no case oriented on the universal environment and the universal life that is correlative of it”. It remains to ask how such a universalization of the epoché can be obtained, “how does it reach a result that exceeds any particular psychological reduction”.14 We have insisted above on the positional dimension and on the modal content of the acts performed in the natural attitude. In the absence of this extension and application of the reduction and of the epoché to the background of the world of life and of the subjective life of which it forms the ultimate correlate, the psychological reduction preserves a local character, and each epoché carried out piecemeal preserves at the same time an abstract 386

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character (it is limited to the psychic) and a partial character: it leaves intact the positional background (of positionality) (Hua 8, p. 159). What is at stake in the universalization of the epoché is thus the tipping of the modal content of the background, and it is thus necessary to understand in the modal, that is, positional sense the “co-position” of the background. But here we are again faced with a difficulty: how can a radical inhibition, that is to say universal and absolute, of any positionality escape the pitfall of absolute skepticism? This question is inescapable, because the background is not only that of the ontological validities which continue to prevail, but also that of the axiological validities, which include the goals of the will, including those of a methodical will. The solution and the lifting of the objection occur as soon as we notice that epoché is also a constitutive moment of the activity of consciousness, that epoché is itself operative, or cooperative, that is to say, constitutive and meaning-producing. Not only is it voluntary (as Ideen I already suggested) (Hua 3/1, Husserl, 1976, p. 353; Lobo, 2012, p. 180), but it is a central functional element of the constitution of acts of consciousness, and of the self-constitution of subjectivity. The flow of experiences (and the constitution of their correlates) is a composition of modalizations and stops of modalizations, of modifications of the doxic and axiological thetical content. The epoché is not only what comes to counter positionality to produce neutralized “avatars” of the elements of position, but a component of positionality and of the synthetic composition of acts, of their syntax. This point is explicitly addressed by Husserl, for example in two notes dating, respectively, from 1924 (Hua 8, Husserl, 1959, pp. 451–452) and 1925 (Hua 34, Husserl, 2002, pp. 25–32). To stick to the second one, the horizon structure and the thematic perspective are clearly approached under the angle of positionality and validities. The flow of universal experience then appears as a flow of modalizations, for “the paths to new thematic assets, to new validities, pass through modalizations” (ibid., p. 25). Because the “will to live” is fundamentally this aspiration to certainty, life must suffer from incessant modalizations. This is the transcendental root of suffering: “Natural life also unfolds as a pursuit, as an aspiration to enlargement on the one hand and to the safeguarding of acquired certainties on the other”; but “certainties often suffer in the course of life, they cannot remain intact; they are transformed into doubts; there is therefore a modalization, eventually ending in a negation”, which transforms these validities into “invalidities”, and the certainties into “crossed-out certainties”, “nullities”. The fundamental vector of life is positional, and even more profoundly thetical (doxic and axiological). If we engage now in the levels of possible neutralization, we have to count the doubt that inhibits a certainty and thus arises as a modalization. Then comes the critical epoché which has a provisional and conservative character, it is an integral part of life, because its questioning of the absolute validity of what is posed and of the related position, does not go until the end. It remains that it is no longer a modalization, since it neutralizes more firmly than an ordinary doubt. The criterion is, here as in the Ideas I (Hua 3/1, Husserl, 1976, pp. 247–249, pp. 252–254), that of iterability or redoubling of act. A modalization can be redoubled, I can doubt a being-doubtful. But a redoubled critical bracketing is idempotent to a simple “putting out of play” (Hua 34, Husserl, 2002, p. 26). But in doing so, the vector of the naive “will to live” can very well continue to function. The constitutive temporal flow of consciousness has protention as its vector, and this protention prolongs the fundamental belief of the self, and this beyond and through the self of the critic. “As the critical self, I am oriented toward a well-founded decision, that is, toward 387

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(following) or not (following) the imposition with reason” (Husserl, 2002, p. 29). A generalization of critical epoché affects only those thematic fields that are alone concerned, it may concern a group of “theses of my overall thematic field”, while the background theses and stances “remain in place and then acquire a function for my new stances”; or it may concern the thematic field as a whole; “a universal critique” submits “this universal epoché to allow me to freely construct a new thematic universe” (ibid., p. 30). However universal it may be, a critical epoché always involuntarily reconducts a thematic field of positionality, either as a new field or as a thematic background. As for transcendental epoché, it must be universal and radical, that is, it leaves no positional background untouched. But can it do so? Can it avoid involuntarily reconducting, insists Husserl, “a ground for arriving at positions”? The difference is that the former maintains a theoretical and practical “interest” in what is in question: “I aim at finding a thesis of the same content [as the previous thesis], or modalized”, I keep “thus a practical interest for a thematic sphere with theses proper to this sphere”. The transcendental epoché, on the other hand, suspends this interest and therefore produces a “disinterested spectator”. I continue by another means to be this same I, taken in the agitation of the life, engaged in multiple tasks, with their “natural theses”, but they are already modified: “not by interest for the knowledge of the world etc., but by interest for the conscience and its knowledge” (ibid., p. 31). These theses are “propositions”, a term that must be understood, as we have already said (Lobo, 2012, p. 179 sq.), in a non-logical sense, but as “noemes”, that is, specific correlates of each type of position (Setzung). A new thematic field emerges but which has nothing in common with the old one: that of transcendental consciousness. Husserl argues: “In the case of transcendental epoché, I put out of play, but I am disinterested. I am, therefore, a non-interested spectator.” In the practice of phenomenology, one is constantly led to describe parts of the experiencing and constituting subjectivity. If I accomplish a fragment of natural life as a way to know consciousness, I have indeed natural theses, but already modified: not by interest in the knowledge of the world etc., but by interest in consciousness and its knowledge etc. This is precisely what it is: a) to fulfill a thesis par excellence and thus to gain the thesis (as “proposition”) (Satz) and to have it permanently; b) to fulfill (a) thesis without ending up in having, but to study the having of a having – both at the same time. In the present life, we are always directed toward some end, toward “propositions”, at all, objects, at all, but we can also, in the meantime, carry out positions in a modified way, in order to consider the position.” The difference with a reflection carried out within this experience, in the natural attitude, lies in particular in the basic practical orientation: “This is already the case in natural life, in psychology. But in the transcendental attitude, the whole thematic universe with all its theses is put out of play and all interest in it is inhibited. This gives a new thematic universe which can have nothing in common with the old one, the consciousness” (Hua 34, Husserl, 2002, p. 31). A new thematic interest also arises that has for object “the subjectivity and what it has conscious in it, what it identifies in it, what it finds as identities and what it demonstrates in infinitum”, but also “ideas of intentional units of consequent probation”, but these are not posed. Ideas are itself thematized in a mode that lifts the traditional reticence toward Platonism and the existence of “ideas” on a separate plane, for “the ‘ideas’ that it contains are ideas of intentional units of consequent probation. I do not posit ideal and real realities as such, but I posit transcendental subjectivity, real and possible subjectivities, intersubjectivities as constituting in themselves possible worlds, or I posit factual transcendental 388

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subjectivity as valuing a world in its conscious life (and thus carry, in the consequential way of the probation scheme, the world as legitimately being and as idea)” (ibid.). The epoché at stake here is neither skeptical nor in the service of a natural critique, because it is turned exclusively toward the exploration of transcendental subjectivity, an interest that prevents any definitive return to the natural attitude, and the reminiscence of my “previous lives”, that is, phenomenologically speaking, my actual and factual real former life, my potential future or motivated and accessible future lives, or simply my purely and possible (imaginary) lives. “My change of interest, my exclusion of natural theses and natural thematics and all natural interests is not a skeptical epoché, nor does it want to serve natural criticism, but only to serve to take in hand the universe of transcendental subjectivity” (ibid.). Again, it is necessary to distinguish between the disinterested transcendental spectator consciousness and the self-forgetful transcendental consciousness, of the transcendental ego at work in the life of the empirical subject that is one of its by-products. The world of my former attitude continues to appear to me, but as a “transcendental formation”, not of the reflecting and spectating self, but of the self that was already there and that transcendental epoché only reveals. To establish a parallel with one of the formulations of the pivotal moment of Indian thought: it is then that samadhi occurs as the union of the atman and the brahman. The spectator I instituted by transcendental epoché is like the eye instituted by samadhi,15 in front of which the transitory and inconsistent nature of the world is revealed, as well as the stream of modalizations of the thetic activity of the subjectivity that poses it. Selbstbesinnung consists in this realization that this death of empirical subjectivity is in reality the “life in which positivity is given and posited” and “that what is posited is nothing outside of this life”. In this consists the “transcendental transformation”, and the rememorating of my former actual, potential and merely possible lives, that I can explore through a free process of self-variation (Lobo, 2014), which is not (only) a scholastic game that is played before the impassible eye of the uninterested spectator, but an operation that extends my freedom beyond the most optimistic view of any rational and critical reflection: If I remember my former naive conception of the world and the propositions I found and uttered, and if I switch back to the transcendental attitude and back again, I see that the natural world, the positively existing one, and the world as an idea of transcendental subjectivity are identical, and that what I naturally have as a world is in reality nothing but a transcendental formation. It is not a formation of the transcendental reflective as such, but the latter merely reveals the life in which positivity is given and posited, and shows that what is posited is nothing outside this life. (ibid.)

Parallel Lives: Socrates/Buddha; Plato/Husserl We can now come back to the text on Buddha and Socrates which completes the initial review published in the Piperbote, and to place them in the perspective of the analyses, which occupy Husserl elsewhere, of the relationship between Socrates and Plato, such as Husserl re-evaluates them starting from his existential “turn” (Lobo, 2022). This reminder of the figure of Socrates is part of Husserl’s constant demand to give the Platonic revolution its full epistemological and practical scope. To speak in figures, we have to consider a fully Socratic Plato, a practical reformer based on the new episteme of which he was the bearer. 389

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Since most of Husserl’s analysis dedicated to these parallels are not yet accessible in English, I shall quote and translate them somehow extensively.

Socrates vs Plato, Practical Reformer vs Epistemological Reformer This distinction is developed by Husserl in the framework of an opposition between practical relation vs theoretical relation to knowledge and truth. The “meaning of the Socratic and Platonic life work lies in their main decisive teachings” (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 8). Socrates appears as a practical reformer, reforming life by imposing on ethical skeptics a distinction between two modes of living (opining and evaluating); whereas Plato is a scientific-theoretical reformer, imposing a clear distinction within knowledge through a reflection on the method and knowledge postulated by Socrates. Since Socrates was not a “systematic philosopher”, but a practical reformer, the method to interpret phenomenologically his essential assertions (“not theorems”)16 consists in “interpreting them in the perspective of the Platonic philosophy”, where we find their “exact conceptual version and scientific justification” (Hua 37, Husserl, 2004, p. 37). From a phenomenological point of view, we find in Socrates and Plato the first intuitions of what is a true knowledge and a true rational humanity. Correlatively, both discovered in subjectivity the decisive divisions without which this perspective remains an inconsistent dream. We refer here to Husserl’s interpretation of Socratic and Platonic khorismôs in terms of modalities of belief, as well as to the division between rational and non-rational modes of “holding-for-truth”, and their correlative modes of being. Socrates is the first to recognize the “problems of human destiny on the way to true humanity”, but he approaches this problem “only as a practical reformer”. The main features of this “ethical reform of life” are as follows: (1) the promotion of rationality in action; (2) the methodological elaboration of this rationality, thus a critical and responsible rationality; (3) the rejection of the simple linguistic (logical) understanding of this responsibility as an argumentation in favor of a responsibility and a criticality (Rechenschaftsabgabe und Kritik) understood as “a methodical return to the original source of all right”, that is, in Husserl’s words, “by a return to perfect clarity” “to the ‘Evidenz’”.17 (4) A reformed ethics is rational insofar as evaluation and action are mediated by such knowledge,18 “originally generated by perfect evidence, which Socrates teaches, that makes man truly virtuous” and constitutes “the necessary condition (and according to Socrates also the sufficient condition) of a reasonable or ethical life.”19 (5) The decisive opposition is that between true knowledge and opinion. But Socrates encounters a difficulty he cannot overcome: the fact that what is required as authentic, that is, “non-relative” knowledge, must be applied in a practical context, where “all action is driven by opinions, convictions” (bewegt von Meinungen, Überzeugungen): Opinions of being (Seinsmeinungen), related to actual environmental realities, but also opinions of value (Wertmeinungen), opinions about what is beautiful and what is detestable, what is good and what is bad, what is usable or useless, etc. Most of the time, these opinions are completely vague, far from any original clarity. (6) But the essential thing in Socrates’ teaching is “the methodical reference to the proper meaning content of the supposed values and the evaluation of their unclear intention in view of the essence”, that is, “the method of elaborating the normative idea by reducing it to exemplary views and what turns out to be the authenticity of practical requirements” (Hua 37, Husserl, 2004, p. 43).

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The Socratic method of perfect clarification is thus a method of eidetic variation, consequently a method which introduces a division within the notion of the individual: individual as exemplary and individual as non-exemplary (empirically random, contingent), both in the eidetic sense and in the ethical and normative sense, the latter being based on the former. “Each such clarification quickly acquires an exemplary meaning. What reveals itself in the individual case of life, history, or myth as the true or real thing itself and as the measure of a simple unclear opinion, easily presents itself as an example for a general. In the pure intuition of the naturally occurring essence – in which everything empirically random takes on the character of the non-essential and freely variable – it is regarded as essentially genuine in general.” This is the eidetic postulate that transforms, so to speak, the individual wandering being whatever it is into a pure eidetic singularization. “In this pure (or a priori) generality, it functions as a valid norm for all conceivable individual cases of such a being in general…”20; “then it becomes generally evident that goals and ways of this kind are in general genuine, or, if not, that they are in general false, unreasonable”, and “in the latter case, of course, when the beautiful and good themselves, which appear in the clarification, manifestly contradict what was previously believed to be true, and thus nullify the opinion as being without rights” (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 8). This division is based on that between mere opinion and intellectual intuition (noesis) (taken as intellectual intention). The modal content of the truth of such knowledge as “perfect intuition of the essence”, correlatively, the essence or the essential is “something indubitable” (Hua 37, Husserl, 2004, p. 37). Reformulated in phenomenological terms, doxa is an intention, and the distinction between doxa and gnosis is interpreted in the context of the dynamic process of filling the intention: “intellection is something quite different from an empty opinion, even if it is a ‘spiritual opinion’ [geistreiches Meinen]”. This applies to affective intentionality and correlatively to “goods or values” (ibid.). The achievements of Socrates will have been “to placed at the center of interest …the fundamental opposition … between confused opinion and evidence”, to recognize “for the first time the necessity of a universal method of reason … as an intuitive and a priori critique of reason” and “as the original source of all purpose”; to see “the existence of pure and general entities as an absolute self-donation of a general and pure intuition” and “with reference to this discovery, the radical responsibility…for the ethical life” and the “norming or justification of the active life according to the general ideas of reason produced by pure intuition” (ibid., p. 43). The limitations are not all due to his practical orientation, nor even to his “repressed hedonism”, but to a lack of understanding of episteme. 1) Even his “ethics is only a germ ethics, scientifically undeveloped”; 2) therefore “science had to come first, to bring these values to their final logical form”; 3) “the problem of the relation between the knowledge of the mind and the will, and the mind in general” is not approached in methodological terms, nor that of the relation between reason and feelings “which is first suggested by the above-mentioned sentences and which, subsequently, is explained and fought in the great battles between the morality based on understanding and the morality based on feelings, in modern times” (ibid., pp.  38–39; see also Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p.  241). The same limits are indicated elsewhere, when Husserl evokes “the lack of theoretical intentions of Socrates”: the latter surely introduced “the germinal form of the fundamental critical ideas of reason”, but their “theoretical and technological shaping and their highly fruitful further development is the imperishable glory of Plato” (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 206 or p. 328).

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Plato transferred the Socratic principle of radical responsibility to science; he then “shifted the emphasis of this reaction to science and became a reformer of science-theory” (ibid., 206) and opened the way to an “autonomous human development, in the sense of its development into a rational humanity, first by science, by science reformed in the new spirit of the radical understanding of method that Plato has transmitted to us” (ibid., p. 8). He raised the understanding of true being above and beyond the form of knowledge accessible to Socrates. Insofar as practice and daily life concern “empirical phenomena”, this knowledge remains linked to the doxa, thus, in contradiction with the wisdom of Socrates, Plato considers that the being of the phenomena “is not a being”, and that “the human truth valid in the daily life is not a ‘real’ truth”; beyond “the empirical seeing, there is the seeing of the epistèmè” (Hua 39, Husserl, 2008, p. 732). Plato elevated knowledge to the rank of true science “above the accidental fact of each of these persons and situations” and established “an absolute, eternal truth, valid for all conceivable persons, and therefore a new type of cognitive faculty, that of ‘episteme’” (ibid., p. 731), and opened new horizons to humanity: “should it not go further and allow us, who until now have been banished to the dark cave of sensibility with its oscillating and cloudy shadows, to see that which is in itself, of which it is the sensible shadow?” The divisions of the line in the sixth book of the Republic is the schema and symbol of the ancient “sharp distinctions between sensibility and reason [that] broke through into the various forms and stages of education (paideia)” and, it marks the starting point of all scientific philosophy and exact science, which “has continued to determine all subsequent periods and all the sciences that have developed in the ramification of philosophy with essentially the same fundamental meaning” (ibid., p. 732). The so often misunderstood theory of ideas concentrates this epistemological revolution, repeatedly confirmed by the subsequent history of science (ibid. Starting with mathematics (see, e.g., Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, pp. 327–328)). But at the same time he produced “a ‘metaphysical’ substructure,” which affected all subsequent science and philosophy. What escaped Plato and affected the Platonic institution of science is the fact that rationality in its highest forms as well as all relative knowledge grew on the same ground, that of doxa understood as intentionality (Hua 39, Husserl, 2008, pp. 731–732). Plato’s impact has been so profound, that even “the subjectivist turn in modern philosophy” which is supposed to “deprive scientific truth in itself of its metaphysical character” “does so in favor of new metaphysical substructures” (ibid., p.  732). But consequently, all knowledge that would not take the form of an exact science, the “descriptive disciplines” “only prepare what can only be approached by the exact sciences for a knowledge of the true being – a metaphysical own being (eines metaphysischen An-sich)”. “This substructure conveys a ‘feeling of being’, as being in the world and for the world, and the world has kept the very meaning of this metaphysical being itself confusedly” (Ibid.). Such has been through, according to Husserl, the reversals and the disputes of the philosophical systems, the sense of the scientific theorization: it keeps the substructure that always guides it internally: The world in it “in itself” is self-evident; to it belong the true elements and their legal order inaccessible to the simple sensible experience, that this one is teleological and that its principle has an absolute motor as absolute principle that animates the world teleologically, or that it is mechanical and therefore exact, including also into that exactness that regularly renders the elementary event in the form of objective probabilities. (ibid., pp. 731–732) 392

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Both science and modern philosophy, including Kantian transcendental philosophy, have not succeeded in getting rid of this metaphysical substructure. Kant in particular tried to neutralize it but could not understand the very nature and the source of the split interpreted according to the same absurd prejudice and the same “old episteme” (ibid., p. 733).

Socrates and Buddha As the question that opens this meditation indicates, the parallel between Socrates and Buddha is proposed from an epistemological point of view, as a complement to the Plato that serves as its counterpoint. The question is, in effect, “How is knowledge situated within Indian thought?” (Husserl, 2010, p. 5) In view of what Husserl says about the figure of Socrates, it is essential to confront the position of Buddha with that of Socrates. But in order to do so, it is first of all necessary to recapture the essential contributions of the Greeks (Hua 8, Husserl, 1959, pp. 203–205). They come down to the questions of the totality of the ontological and practical and axiological validities forming the pre-given world constituted and transmitted “traditionally”; and in doing so to install a “disinterested spectator’ (Husserl, 2010, p. 6). This presupposes a detachment that immediately institutes a new form of life (with its aspirations, tendencies, feelings and worries); but this theoretical life or by whatever other name it is called presupposes a liberation from the needs of life. All this corresponds to a more or less clearly known picture of the anthropological history of ancient Greece and of the sociology to which Husserl had access in his time (ibid., p. 7. Via Weber and Schütz). But one element is not considered. A more precise definition of the traditionality of life. We know the multiple conflicts that can arise between individual aspirations, whether they are more or less anchored in a tradition, and the “supraindividual duty” that comes from the tradition, that is, from the community (Antigone, the Sophists, Socrates). All the activities developed in this liberation toward inherited social duties take a radically new form because of the autonomization of knowledge – even if this one is only an aim, an idea of which one finds only drafts and pre-figurations in the cultural forms developed at the time. It is thus that the art and the science reinsert themselves in the practical and community life. The further emancipation of science from tradition occurs through a critique whose stages are as follows: (1) science becomes a supranational reality whatever the cultural starting point of the individual scientific activity; (2) science frees itself from any particular humanity and from any tradition. This second stage is the one aimed at by the “phenomenological reduction” which frees us from what constitutes the central form of any tradition. The “core-form” (ibid., p. 10) of any tradition consists of ontic and gnoseological as well as axiological (correspondingly affective) validities (values), of which we must acquire a general knowledge. For this, the help of the imagination is absolutely indispensable, so that we also have a vision of the possible forms of combination of these validities and of the possible forms of liberation. Phenomenology with its historical-poetic variations works thus to the systematic exploration “of the essential possibilities of liberation” (ibid., p. 11). This philosophical consideration implies “an inhibition of any taking of position” and of decision. It is in this context that we find a formulation of the problem which we approached: “One cannot free oneself from the will or from the reflection of the will; one cannot free oneself from the function of effort and will in general” (ibid.). It is a question of extending the current inhibition which occurs in the course of the action in a universal inhibition, to “inhibit this universal aspiration in order to obtain for the first time a purely 393

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cognitive universal vision of the world in general, and of its possibilities obtained by imaginary variation” and to be able, on these bases, to obtain the vastest field of practical and axiological possibilities. It is thus that one obtains a vision of what is the supreme good. “This is the path that Indian philosophy has taken” (ibid., p. 12). In order to understand the difference between Western and Indian philosophy, or else, between Socrates and Buddha, we have to consider two practical conversions of the scientific interest for truth. The misfortune of European philosophy is to have thought a teleology of autonomous knowledge and to have been unable to put it at the service of practical values also freed from the limits of traditional cultures (see Hua 6, Husserl, 1950, pp. 73–74, pp. 140–142, pp. 320–322, pp. 325–329, p. 330 passim). Husserl distinguishes then between (1) positing science as being at the service of a superior absolute value and (2) making science itself the supreme value and then asking how this “will-to-know” is put into practice. The first is the Indian way, which posits science from the outset as an activity, a vocation at the service of a value other than truth. The second is the Greek and European way, which establishes a scientific activity cut off from any practical concern (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 291 passim). In one case, the “volitional foundation” is internal to the institution of science. In the other, it is external to it. Hence the misfortune of the European who manages to be theoretically autonomous, without being practically so, where the Indian is “practically autonomous” (Husserl, 2010, p. 13). The rest of the analysis explicitly takes up the main lines of the Schopenhauerian conception of Hinduism and Buddhism. The will to live as the pursuit of happiness is the source of universal suffering, so salvation can only consist in the negation of this will. Husserl here explicitly follows Schopenhauer: “The restlessness of the life of the will is in itself unhappiness; there is always the open possibility of chance, of unfavorable fate, of death, of disease, and there is always something unfulfilled, and as long as this is so, the man who strives is unhappy (Schopenhauer)” (ibid., p. 14). Such is the strength of Indian philosophy, to have kept its eyes open to the essential incompleteness and irrationality of practical life. The Greek conceived alongside the teleology of scientific knowledge as a “life of continuous theoretical consistency” which is methodically possible and attainable, a “life of continuous practical consistency”. He was led, consequently, to pose absolute practical values to which all relative values are suspended. Hence the idea of two parallel forms of rationality, theoretical and practical, logical and axiological, and the idea of formal principles analogous to the principle of contradiction and the principle of excluded third.21 But from there also the difficulty to think about the specificity of the practice. Indian thought, which from the outset places knowledge on the field of practice, does not see in this “rationality of the will” a means of salvation, because it cannot overcome the irrationalities of the will, unless the will is not limited to containing them, but proposes to go beyond them. To do this, it is necessary not to lose sight of the irrational; in doing so, it is transcendentalism that offers the way out and the salvation. Indian thought is thus credited with the invention of transcendental epoché from a practical perspective (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 291 passim). Failing to be able to stop the course of modalizations that form the substance of phenomena, of “appearances”, the individual subject can at least hold it as such, that is, for “a simple phenomenon of subjectivity” and “he can inhibit the absolute being of the world, he can abstain from standing on its ground”,22 in short inhibit any absolute position of the world, so that it ceases to be the Procrustean bed in which any search for happiness comes fatally to be inscribed, and fails. By the “practice of the epoché”, on 394

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a mode not only theoretical, but also practical, it is “the whole of the oppositions between rationality and irrationality which disappear”, and “the ego, folded up on itself, lives in the absence of will, in the theoretical and practical renunciation of the world” (in theoretischer und praktischer Weltentsagung) (Husserl, 2010, p. 16).

Conclusion The ethical universality of transcendental phenomenology leads to a transcendental transformation which is similar to that of Buddhist deliverance, in that it de-indexes ideals and practical values from the world thesis. At the end of this self-transformation, I become a spectator of myself and of all that is involved in the universal horizon of “my life”. It is a universality that places the final ends of human action on the plane of a transcendental universal intersubjectivity that each ego carries within itself, and that it is in a way, and in which the finite ends and the life of human and animal subjects are taken in charge and transformed. Life understood in this way is “a limit idea, situated in a distance that is forever inaccessible, an idea that in turn implies an infinity of limit figures and infinitely distant points”, but which opens the field of an infinite freedom situated on the ground of an experience of a new kind “that was unknown to humanity in natural human life”. Such is the religious and teleological dimension that allows us to hope for a renewal of the same magnitude as that produced by Buddhism on the cultural and religious substratum that tended to collapse into a short-sighted pragmatism. The duration of the penetration of phenomenological ideas cannot be measured by the yardstick of the accelerator of vital upheavals that is technological progress and its cohort of induced innovations, but by that of a civilizational transformation. From this point of view, the hundred years that separate us from the advent of phenomenology are too short a period of time to judge whether such a hope is well-founded or unfounded.

Notes 1 See Husserl (1989) and Husserl (2010), commented by Schuhmann and Luft, respectively. See also Hanna (1995). 2 Conversation between Fink and Cairns, February 27, 1931 (Cairns, 1976, p.  49). It is indeed in the context of a discussion with Fink on Husserlian ethics that the problem of indifference to the world is tackled, and, in relation to this, that the parallel between the phases of detachment practiced by Buddhism and the different phases of phenomenological reduction is posed. But an ambiguity remains because of Fink’s reluctance, not only to evoke the subject, but to admit the intrinsically phenomenological character of Husserlian investigations on ethics, all the more so as they go hand in hand, according to him, with an optimism that he does not share. Is it a parallel that he establishes himself, or is it a parallel that he attributes to Husserl? 3 See also Mohanty (1988), and more recently Stone and Zahavi (2021), and Depraz (2019). 4 Vritis are not just impressions, but “modifications”, modalizations (cf. Sinari, p. 225; and Puligandla, p. 30). 5 Cf. On Oldenberg (1915); see M. Weber (2003, pp. 349–359); see Oldenberg’s letter to Husserl’s Briefwechsel (IV, Husserl, 1994, p. 201). The proximity with Oldenberg is confirmed by the letter of Malvine and E. Husserl M. und E. Husserl and E. Jensen, 5. IX. 1930 (Briefwechsel, VIII, Husserl, 1994, pp. 320, 348, 396, 444). 6 See on this point the work of S. Luft who corrects Schuhmann’s assessment, p. 148. Or in this very volume. 7 Cf. Schuhmann (2004, p. 149), supporting his commentary on the famous analyses of Krisis (Hua 6) (Husserl, 1950).

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Carlos Lobo 8 See Schuhmann (2004, pp. 152–153), and in particular notes 63 and 64. See also Mohanty (1988, pp. 269–270), on the one-sidedness of this interpretation. See also the extensively quoted passages from the Krisis (Hua 6) (Husserl, 1950). 9 On the “difficulties of the Husserlian conception”, see Schuhmann (2004, p. 158). 10 Husserl’s position with regard to Nietzsche is different in his genetic investigations on the passive forms of striving, and the formation of upper values. See Husserl’s considerations on ascetic ideals, which entail a deeper interpretation of the role of affective inhibition and neutralization (Hua 42, Husserl, 2014, p. 112 Supplement XIV on “Eingeklammerte Affekte – Askese”). 11 In Ethik und Rechtsphilosophie. Summer semester course 1897, Hua 28, pp. 382–383. 12 Yoga-Sutra, III, 7. Patanjali (1991, Hatha-Yoga Pradiptika, III, pp. 2–7. The three levels (dharana, dhyana, samadhi) of meditation lead to samyama which, according to Patanjali, frees the subject “from brain-bound intellect and acquires intuition, known as buddhi or prajna” (Puligandla, p. 25). The opposition to rationality (p. 26) is, according to the authors, anti-Husserlian. But the “noemas” are also the “noumenes” as long as we free the consciousness from its deepest thematic background, the thesis of the world. About the role of rationality in “enlightenment”, in ancient Buddhism (see Weber, 2003, p. 359). 13 About such an extension to axiological non-sense see my reflections about “affective fallacy” in Lobo (2016). 14 “And now we make the transition to the universal Epoché and reduction. It is analogous to those individual psychological reductions that we practiced earlier, reductions relating to reflexive acts, which were directed towards limited objects – individual objects or object-regions – but, in any case, [they were] not [directed] towards the universal environment and its correlative total life. Let us now see how this universal reduction operates and to what extent it actually attains a particular fulfillment which, in principle, transcends all these previous psychological reductions” (Hua 8, p. 158). This applies to all recent attempts at limiting the reduction to a strict psychological and empirical frame, such as Finlay (2008). Beyond more conventional objections, this applies also to neuro-cognitive approaches such as Varela (2004). 15 Yoga in Buddhism (Samyutta-Nikaya, p. 28) according to Feuga and Tara (1998, pp. 26–27) and about its supreme stage Samadhi. This translates into an “interruption” (a cessation) of all egotic intentionality, which is not necessarily opposed to the “disinterestedness” of the transcendental spectator I, which disassociates itself from the empirical I (i.e., the transcendental I working oblivious of its own transcendence). Sinari (1965) is confirmed here according to Puligandla (1970, p. 30). It is only necessary to insist on what “seeing the world through transcendental subjectivity” means. About the possibility of reconciliation between the “dissolution” of the individuated and fluctuating Self, belonging to the world and the permanence of a spectatorial Selfhood, see Weber (2003, p.  357, 359), respectively, including notes referred to La Vallée Poussin and Neumann (1922), respectively. 16 “Virtue is teachable. Right knowledge necessarily entails right action. Conversely, all moral wrongdoing is based on moral error, on a lack of knowledge. According to his nature, Socrates says, everyone strives for what he considers to be good. Nobody is voluntarily bad” (Hua 37, Husserl, 2004, p. 37). 17 “Such accountability and criticism (Rechenschaftsabgabe und Kritik) take place as a process of knowledge, and, according to Socrates, as a methodical return to the original source of all right and its knowledge: – expressed in our language – by a return to perfect clarity, ‘insight’, ‘evidence’” (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 9). 18 Husserl: “he interprets the truly satisfying life as a life of pure reason” = “a life in which man, in untiring self-contemplation and radical accountability, criticizes - ultimately evaluates - his life’s goals and then, of course, and through them, mediates his life’s paths, his respective means” (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959, p. 8). 19 Same interpretation is developed further: “whoever carefully interprets such sayings from the Socrates of Platonic dialogues and understands them in spirit will soon recognize the deeper opinion: whoever, guided by the νόησις, the insight of reason, chooses the truly good, will at the same time gain the only true and final satisfaction, that is, true happiness. True happiness does not come from outside, does not fall from the sky as a gift of the gods. The source of all true happiness lies in us, in our reason, in the self-activity of pure insight and the practical direction that follows it towards the truly good, in moral work” (Hua 37, Husserl, 2004, pp. 38–39).

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Parallel Lives of Buddha and Socrates 20 “In dieser reinen (oder apriorischen) Allgemeinheit fungiert es als gültige Norm für alle erdenklichen Einzelfalle von solchem Wesen überhaupt” (Hua 7, Husserl, 1959a, p. 8). 21 About the “law of the excluded fourth for the fundamental values”, see Hua 28, Husserl, 1988, pp. 86–89. 22 Such is the radicalization that transcendental epokhé in psychological self-transformation (cf. H. Jacobs, 2013).

References Cairns, D. In R. M. Zaner, Phaenomenologica. Conversations With Husserl and Fink. Springer, vol. 66. Depraz, N. (2019). Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassana Meditation, Chögyam Trungpa’s Buddist Teaching Facing Husserl’s Phenomenology. Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (7–8): 49–69. Georges Dreyfus (2011). Is mindfulness present-centred and non-judgmental? A discussion of the cognitive dimensions of mindfulness,  Contemporary Buddhism, 12:1,41–54, DOI: 10. 1080/14639947.2011.564815 Ferrarello, S. (2023). Husserl and Mindfulness. In S. Ferrarello and C. Hadjioannou. Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Routledge. Feuga, P. & Tara, M. (1998). Le Yoga. Que sais-je? 643: 1998. Finlay, L. (2008). A Dance Between the Reduction and Reflexivity: Explaining the “Phenomenological Psychological Attitude. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 39: 1–32. Gethin, R. (2011). On Some Definitions of Mindfulness, Contemporary Buddhism, 12 (1): 263–279. Hanna, F. J. (1995). Husserl on Teaching the Buddha. The Humanistic Psychologist 23: 365–372. Held, K. (2000). The Controversy Concerning Truth: Towards a Prehistory of Phenomenology. Husserl Studies 17: 35–48. Husserl, E. (1950). (= Hua 6). In Ed. Walter Biemel. die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phänomenologie: Eine Einleitung in die phänomenologische Philosophie. Hua 6. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. 1950–2014. Gesammelte Werke or Husserliana (henceforth: Hua), vols. I- XLII. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950–1987/Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1988–2004/ Dordrecht: Springer, 2004–2014. Husserl, E. (1959a). (= Hua 7). In Rudolf Boehm. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Erster Teil:…. Hua 7. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1959b). (= Hua 8)). In Ed. Rudolf Boehm. Erste Philosophie (1923/24). Zweiter Teil: Theorie der phänomenologischen Reduktion. Hua 8. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Husserl, E. (1976.) (= Hua 3/1) In Karl Schuhmann.Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, Erstes Buch: Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie, 1. Halbband: Text der 1.-3. Auflage. Hua 3/1. The Haag: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1988). (= Hua 28). In Ullrich Melle. Vorlesungen über Ethik Und Wertlehre (1908–1914). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (1989). (= Hua 27) Uber die Reden Gotamo Buddhos. In T. Nenon, H. R. Sepp. Aufsätze und Vorträge: 1922–1937. Hua 24. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Press. Husserl, E. (1994). (= Briefwechsel). In K. Schuhmann and E. Schuhmann. vols. I–X. Husserliana, Dokumente, Band III: Briefwechsel. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2002). (= Hua 34). In Sebastian Luft. Zur phänomenologischeb Reduktion. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1926–1935). Dordrecht: SPrringer. Husserl, E. (2004). (= Hua 37). In Henning Peucker. Einleitung in die Ethik: Vorlesungen Sommersemester 1920/1924. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl, E. (2008). (= Hua 39). In Rochus Sowa. Die Lebenswelt. auslegungen der vorgegebenen Welt und ihrer Konstitution. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1916–1937). Hua 39. Dordrecht: Springer. Husserl, E. (2010). Luft (2010). Soktrates-Buddha. An unpublished manuscript from the archives, In Sebastian Luft. Husserl Studies. Springer, vol. 26, pp. 1–17. Husserl, E. (2014). (= Hua 41). In Rochus Sowa and Thomas Vongehr. Grenzprobleme der Phänomenologie: Analysen des Unbewusstseins und der Instinkte, Metaphysik, Späte Ethik. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1908–1937). Hua 42. Dordrecht: Springer.

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Carlos Lobo Jacobs, H. (2013). Phenomenology as a Way of Life? Husserl on Phenomenological Reflection and Self-Transformation. Continental Philosophical Review 46: 349–369. Lobo, C. (2008). Le temps de vouloir, la phénoménologie de la volonté, Annales de Phénoménologie, 2008. Lobo, C. (2012). L’idée platonicienne d’eidos selon Husserl. In Antonio Mazzu and Sylvain Delcomminette. Les interprétations des Idées platoniciennes dans la philosophie contemporaine. Paris: Vrin, pp. 161–186. Lobo, C. (2014). Self-Variation and Self-Modification. (Dir. Dermot Moran et Rasmus T. Jensen). The Phenomenology of Embodied Subjectivity, (Collection, Contributions to Phenomenology). Springer, pp. 263–284. Lobo, C. (2016). Digging out the Roots of Affective Fallacy, Eikasia; Revisit de Filosofia, Numero 72, Septiembre, 2016; pp. 329–357. https://old.revistadefilosofia.org/numero72.htm Lobo, C. (2022). A Phenomenological and Logical Clarification of Individual Existence. In Cavallaro, M., Heffernan, G. The Existential Husserl. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 120. Cham: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05095-4_6 Lobo, C. (2023). The Role of Empathy in the Affective Twist of Husserl’s Critique of an Axiological and Practical Reason. In Magnus Englander and Susi Ferrarello. Empathy and Ethics. Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 111–143. Mohanty, J. N. (1988). Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy: The Concept of Rationality. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 19 (3): 269–28. Neumann, K. E. (1922). Reden des Gautamos Buddhos, Aus der Mittleren Sammlung Majhimanikayo des Pali-Kanons zum ersten Mal übersetzt von K. E. NeumannErster Band, Erstes Halbhundert. München: R. Piper & Co. Oldenberg, H. (1915). Die Lehre der Upanishaden und die Anfänge des Buddhismus. Göttingen. Patanjali. (1974). In Trad. Tara Michaël. Hatha-Yoga-Pradîpikâ, Traité de Hatha-Yoga. Fayard. Patanjali. (1991). Yoga-Sutra. Espaces Libres: Albin Michel. Petropoulos, G. (2023). Pyrrhonian Epoché, Mindfulness and Being-in-the-World. In S. Ferrarello and C. Hadjioannou. The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness. Routledge. Puliganda, R. (1970). Phenomenological Reduction and Yogic Meditation. Philosophy East and West 20 (1): pp. 19–33. Schopenhauer (1966). A. Le monde comme volonté et comme représentation, trans. Fr. A. Burdeau, PUF, Paris. The World as Will and Representation, Eng. Transl. E.F.J. Payne. New York: Dover, 1969. Schuhmann, K. In Cees Leijenhorst and Piet Steenbakkers. Husserl and Indian Thought, Selected Papers on Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 137–162. Originally published in; D.P. Chattopadhyaya, Lester Embree, Jitendranath Mohanty (eds), Phenomenology and Indian Philosophy, New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical research and Motital Banarsidass, 1992, pp. 20–43. Sinari, R. (1965). The Method of Phenomenological Reduction and Yoga. Philosophy East and West 15: pp. 217–228. Stone, O. & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3–4): 158–185. Tara, M. (2017). Introductions aux voies du Yoga. Paris: DDB. Varela, F. J. (2004). La réduction phénoménologique à l’écoute de l’expérience: Réponse à F.-D. Sebbah. Intellectica. Revue de l’Association pour la Recherche Cognitive 39, (2): 189–197. Weber, M. (2003). Trad. I. Kalinowski et R. Lardinois. Hindouisme et Bouddhisme. Paris: Champ Flammarion.

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26 BEING MINDFUL OF THE OTHER Magnus Englander

Introduction Within the Western world, we have seen the adoption of mindfulness meditation by several disciplines within the human services, that is, as a method toward facilitating psychological self-treatment. Recently, there has been a development within modern psychology, referred to as social mindfulness (SoMi), conceptualized as associated with prosocial behavior (e.g., Kirkland et al., 2022; Van Doesum et al., 2013, 2021; Van Lange and Van Doesum, 2015). SoMi has been approached as representing an unselfish stance that has been formalized into a construct that can be empirically proven through experiments and that has been operationally defined as leaving another person (i.e., a hypothetical stranger) with a choice (see, e.g., Kirkland et al., 2022; Van Doesum et al., 2013). In other words, in this type of psychological research, the researchers assume that a person leaving a stranger with a choice has also been attending to the needs and interests of the other, indicating prosocial behavior. Such researchers work exclusively from a natural scientific paradigm seeking to statistically correlate their experimental results with other psychological tests and measurements, thus seeking to infer the connection between SoMi and psychological traits. The purpose of such research is therefore to seek a psychological explanation for cooperation and community. Nevertheless, the operational definition of SoMi presupposes that leaving the other with a choice is equal to following the needs of the other and to know what is in the interest of the other. When providing an indication for how one would know how to be mindful of others, these researchers turn to several psychological theories that have tried to prove our relation to others (e.g., Van Doesum et al., 2013, p. 87). What is still missing is the phenomenology preceding SoMi, as in disclosing how one is experiencing the needs of others and how one knows what is in the interest of the other. In an attempt to address such critical questions, I will focus on the phenomenology of the interpersonal context and the elucidation of second-person access, as in the phenomenology of empathy, and how it relates to the we-relation within the mutual tuning in relationship. In addition, I will suggest that the interpersonal context needs to be more fully elucidated in order for the idea of a psychology of SoMi to be possible in the first place. The background for my reasoning has been predominantly delimited DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-32

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to the meaning of mindfulness and social mindfulness as understood within the Western interpretation of such terms. In addition, I have refrained from a specific critique of the psychological explanations relating to empathy, as this has already been extensively covered in the contemporary phenomenological literature (e.g., Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008; Zahavi, 2014). Instead, the focus has been toward a phenomenological clarification of what precedes SoMi.

Background Mindfulness meditation, as it was adopted into the Western world, has been more prone to be associated with such practices as relating to psychological healing (Kabat-Zinn, 2013). However, meditation techniques have also been adopted within an applied phenomenology and part of research in the cognitive sciences (e.g., Varela, Thompson, Rosch, 1991). As Thompson (2015) has indicated, According to Indian and Tibetan Buddhist philosophy, the definition of consciousness is that which is luminous and knowing. Luminosity means the ability of consciousness to reveal or disclose. Knowing refers to the ability of consciousness to perceive or apprehend what appears. (p. xxi) In other words, the strive toward some type of elucidation and to recognize the role of consciousness in relation to knowledge might not be straight forward comparable to an applied phenomenology, but in terms of the meaning of such expressions, there is little doubt that we can suggest that the two might be analogous or perhaps parallel. For example, in meditating one might practice an awareness of one’s breathing, which could lead to the recognition of one’s lived body, an elucidation of one’s experiential sense of self, and even to one’s primordial intentionality toward a human life in the world with others. Lately, we have seen fruitful collaborations between micro-phenomenology and meditation practices (Petitmengin, 2006). For instance, Petitmengin and others (2019) have made a micro-phenomenological investigation into meditation, which actually helped the participating meditators to improve on their practice. Meditation has also been helpful as a methodological tool in the study of enaction, neurophenomenology (Varela, 1996; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991; Thompson, 2007), and, again, specifically within the interpersonal context in a micro-phenomenology (Petitmengin, 2006; Bitbol & Petitmengin, 2013). However, and as Batchelor (1997) emphasized, While Buddhism has tended to become reductively identified with its religious forms, today it is in further danger of being reductively identified with its forms of meditation. If these trends continue, it is liable to become increasingly marginalized and lose its potential to be realized as a culture: an internally consistent set of values and practices that creatively animates all aspects of human life. (p. 20) In other words, there is more to Buddha’s original teachings than meditation techniques. Nonetheless, even though the self and the first-person access seem to be the primary focus 400

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of mindfulness as self-help within the Western world, Kabat-Zinn (2013) also points to relationships as being a key aspect of the practice of mindfulness, as he writes, Meaning and relationships are strands of connectedness and interconnectedness. They weave your life as an individual into a larger tapestry, a larger whole, which, you might say, actually gives your life its individuality. (p. 271) In going back to the heritage of Shantideva one also finds a quality of unselfishness in relating to others (Batchelor, 1997, p. 84). In addition, we have also witnessed the movement of Engaged Buddhism associated with Thích Nhất Hạnh with The Fourteen Precepts toward social awareness. Even though the original practice of Buddha’s teachings might be worlds apart from the Western interpretation of mindfulness, the overall idea of cooperation and community seems to be of ultimate concern.

The Psychology of Social Mindfulness A recent research program closely associated with a research group at the University of Amsterdam has utilized an experimental design as a way to identify and measure SoMi (e.g., Van Doesum et al, 2013). In a recent article by Kirkland et al. (2022), the experimental research design has been made comprehensible for everyday understanding in the following way, Imagine you are the second last person in line at a breakfast buffet, and you’re about to choose a condiment for your toast – there is one peanut butter and two marmalade sachets left. If you choose peanut butter, the stranger behind you will be forced to have marmalade, but if you instead choose marmalade, the person behind you will be left with both options. This one example of the simple choices people makes every day that are mindful to the needs of others – known as social mindfulness (SoMi). (p. 2) In a controlled experimental situation, a person had to choose from one of three items thus leaving the next person a choice of two items. Two of the three items were identical items but in which the third item was different. Leaving the next person in line the choice of two different items was thus operationally defined as a person being prosocial and thus socially mindful. But how did the person know that the other person wanted to make a choice between two different items? What if the different item was something that the stranger did not care for anyway? In what sense is such an act interpersonal? In other words, how did the person know the need and interest of the other? Still, Van Doesum, et al. (2013) articulated SoMi as: “Other than the prevalent inward awareness and inner dialogue of modern mindfulness, social mindfulness doubles back to its roots by incorporating a benevolent focus on the needs and interest of others” (p. 86, my emphasis). In an attempt to find psychological explanations to SoMi, Van Doesum et al. (2013) found positive statistical correlations with psychological tests measuring personality characteristics such as Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness (HEXACO Personality InventoryRevised), Empathy (Interpersonal Reactivity Index), and prosocial value orientation (SVO). As an interpretation of their overall findings and a conclusion of their studies, these 401

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psychologists suggested that certain psychological qualities correlate with SoMi, enabling an individual to be in a better position to orient oneself in the social world. In other words, to be a person that sacrifices something to the benefit of other’s well-being and choice, as in having a personality that is unselfish and less egoistic, will help one to be part of a community. In a study by Kirkland et al. (2022), researchers also found a relationship between SoMi and more complex forms of community participation. In a sense, one could say that the psychologists studying SoMi have tried to empirically prove that selfish personality traits do not indicate the possibility for a cooperative community. These psychologists have also tried to explain SoMi based on theories such as theory of mind (ToM), mentalization, affective perspective taking, and interdependence theory (e.g., Van Doesum, et al., 2013, p. 87). As the existential phenomenologists would have emphasized, such attempts try to prove our relation to others instead of disclosing how we already are in relation to others (e.g., Merleau-Ponty, 1962).1 Let us now turn to a phenomenological approach in order to address questions such as how we know others and how we relate with others.

Empathy as Second-Person Access From a phenomenological perspective, empathy has been described by Husserl (2006), Scheler (2008), Stein (1964, p. 11) as an “act of perception,” and recently by Zahavi (2011) as a type of “direct social perception,” in which one is present to another minded creature, or more radically, present to another lived body. Edith Stein (1964) once wrote, The subject of the empathized experience, however, is not the subject empathizing, but another. And this is the fundamentally new in contrast with the memory, expectation, or the fancy of our own experiences. These two subjects are separate and not joined together, as previously, by a consciousness of sameness or a continuity of experience. And while I am living in the other’s joy, I do not feel primordial joy. It does not issue live from my “I.” Neither does it have the character of once having lived like remembered joy. But still much less is it merely fancied without actual life. This other subject is primordial although I do not experience its primordiality; his joy is primordial although I do not experience it as primordial. In my non-primordial experience I feel, as it were, led by a primordial one not experienced by me but still there, manifesting itself in my non-primordial experience. (p. 11) In other words, empathy is a way to describe the intentionality when one is present to others, although there is also a taken-for-grantedness of empathy as a perceptual, intentional act, in that I am directed toward the other’s expression in a second-person type of access or perspective (Churchill, 2006; Zahavi, 2010). As Stein (1964) indicated above, there is a “paradox” in that I do not have the primordial experience of the other, yet I am present to meanings being expressed that I do experience and participate in. To go back to our critical question following the psychology of SoMi, as in what precedes being mindful of the other, we need to first reflect on our empathizing perception (Husserl, 2006); that is, so that we can become aware of how such a direct presence of otherness elucidates intersubjectivity (Zahavi, 2001). In fact, becoming aware of one’s empathy through reflection could be seen as a prerequisite for being able to meditate on the meaning of the other’s expression. To meditate on the other’s meaning expression, I mean to have an exclusive focus on the 402

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other, as in a second-person access and to remain within that particular focus or attitude (Einstellung). Second-person access then becomes the prerequisite for acting unselfishly and being mindful of the other. In other words, if I did not practice reflection of my empathizing perception, I might just take-it-for-granted. Consequently, I would not be able to remain within the mode of empathy as second-person access and to meditate on the meaning expressed by the other. Instead, I risk acting on my judgment that directly followed my empathizing perception, and instead act on my presuppositions such as my assumption of what must or ought to be of interest of the other and what the other’s needs must or ought to be. As pointed out recently, the reflection of empathy actually makes ethics possible (Englander & Ferrarello, 2023). To understand how second-person-based SoMi, as an unselfish stance toward others, is possible, it seems reasonable to probe more deeply into the phenomenology of empathy. To reiterate, perception is a term used here to refer to how this experience is a priori to judgment, and in that it is experientially direct as a second-person access or perspective (Churchill, 2006; Zahavi, 2010), that is, a direct presence of following the meanings expressed by another living, minded creature (Stein, 1964). Husserl (2006, p. 93) stated in his empathy lectures from the winter semester 1910–1911, …in perception or any other sense-perception we also posit lived bodies and grasp them as bearers of consciousness. This we can do without taking the features of the bearer in a psychophysical manner. Rather the positing of the thing, being achieved in the perception of the other “lived body,” motivates the positing of the “other I-consciousness,” namely by way of the not easy to describe mode of “empathy.” In addition, in their translator’s preface to Husserl’s empathy lectures, Farin & Hart (2006, p. XXVI) summarized Husserl’s take on “empathy” (Einfühlung) as follows, For Husserl, “empathy” is a unique kind of intentionality that discloses the “other” I. What is manifested is a being that is conscious and possibly a who. When such a being appears as a human, empathy makes present a being that is self-aware, enjoying a first-person perspective, and is capable of referring to herself as “I.” Thus, empathy reveals for essential reasons what forever eludes me because I can make the other person present as you, she or he, never as “I,” as she is “I” for herself only. In empathy, the “self,” being immediately present to the other in her first-person experience, is made present at a distance and in a comparatively empty way. In other words, empathy must be understood as second-person access (Churchill, 2006; Zahavi, 2010), meaning that we could never claim to have first-person access to the other, yet we are able to follow the meanings (constituted by intentionality) within the other’s expression. Husserl’s (2006) elucidation of empathy as the perception of a lived body and Stein’s (1964, p. 11) description that “…empathy is kind of an act of perceiving…Empathy is…the experience of foreign consciousness…” and thus phenomenology help us to see how empathy is how we gain knowledge of others and how an awareness of empathy can help us to remain and to meditate within our mode of empathy. Let us consider an example, in a professional help context or research interview context, in which we were present to a person providing us with a narrative about a situation in which the person experienced a particular phenomenon in a situation. As the person 403

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remembers and talks about a past event, let us say that the person suddenly became angry in the here-and-now. The double intentionality of remembering enables the person to direct themselves to the past and also enables the person to re-live the intentional acts inherent with the past situation in the present moment. Even if we are exploring a past event, we are as professionals in the here-and-now present to the other person experiencing something in the present moment, as in for example, being angry about something. How is such direct knowledge of the other’s state of mind possible? When I, as a professional, am perceiving the other’s expression, it is clear to me that it is not “I” who is angry. As Husserl (2006, p. 83) states, “For when I feel empathy with your anger, I am myself not angry, not at all.” Therefore, in an interpersonal situation, I do not have to wonder what it would be like for myself to be in the shoes of the other. The meaning of the expression is given to me and can be seen as empathy as elucidating intersubjectivity (Zahavi, 2001). Stein (1964, p. 22) writes, Experience and expression are so closely associated that when one occurs it pulls the other after it. Thus we participate in the experience of the gesture together with this gesture. But, since the experience is experienced “in” the foreign gesture, it does not seem to me to be mine, but another’s. Stein here also points to the paradox of empathy in that we cannot have the other’s experience as theirs, but that we are following the intersubjectively constituted meanings expressed by them. As Merleau-Ponty (1962, p. 186) emphasized, “One can see what there is in common between the gesture and its meaning, for example in the case of emotional expression and the emotions themselves: the smile, the relaxed face, gaiety of gesture really have in them the rhythm of action, the mode of being in the world which are joy itself.” “In other words, in empathy there seems to be a sense of here-and-now even if we are present to experiences that originally took place within a past event.”

The We-Relation In our above example, we have already noted the double intentionality of memory, so let us here turn to the intentionality of the professional attempting to understand the other in a further attempt to be able to meditate on the meanings expressed by the other. According to Schutz (1962, p. 172), in the everyday lifeworld we are directed toward the world and to others as we live in our acts. It takes a shift in attitude for us to reflect back as to see the meaning of our doings. As such we are faced with two different time-structures belonging to these two attitudes. Schutz (ibid.) clarifies, Living in our acts means living in our specious present or, as we may call it, in our vivid present…[I]n living thus we are not aware of our ego and of the stream of our thought. We cannot approach the realm of our Self without an act of reflective turning. But what we grasp by the reflective act is never the present of our stream of thought and also not its specious present; it is always its past. Just now the grasped experience pertained to my present, but in grasping it I know it is not present any more. And, even if it continues, I am aware only by an afterthought that my reflective turning towards its starting phases has been simultaneous with its continuation. The whole present, therefore, and also the vivid present of our Self, is inaccessible for the 404

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reflective attitude. We can only turn to the stream of our thought as if it had stopped with the last grasped experience. In other words, self-consciousness can only be experienced [modo praeterito,] in the past tense. (pp. 172–173) In other words, there is a change in time-structure when one stops and reflects on one’s own experience (i.e., past tense). However, as we could see in our previous section on empathy, second-person access allowed us to be present to meanings in the vivid presence. Schutz (1962) provides us with the following example, In listening to a lecturer, for instance, we seem to participate immediately in the development of his stream of thought. But - and this point is obviously a decisive one our attitude in doing so is quite different from that we adopt in turning to our own stream of thought by reflection. We catch the Other’s thought in its vivid presence and not modo praeterito; that is, we catch it as a “Now” and not as a “Just Now.” The Other’s speech and our listening are experienced as a vivid simultaneity…Now he starts a new sentence, he attaches word to word; we do not know how the sentence will end, and before its end we are uncertain what it means. The next sentence joins the first, paragraph follows paragraph; now he has expressed a thought and passes to another, and the whole is a lecture among other lectures and so on. It depends on circumstances how far we want to follow the development of his thought. But as long as we do so, we participate in the immediate present of the Other’s thought. (p. 173) As we can see, in the vivid presence, as a professional following the expression of a client or research participant re-living a past event in an interpersonal encounter, we could say, following Schutz (1967), that we are following the client’s in-order-to motives as these unfolds in front of us, even if the other is remembering a past experience; that is, in the sense that the other is now re-living the intentional acts inherent within the original situation. If the professional would begin to reflect during the encounter with the client, the professional might lose the present moment, the vivid presence, and the two would no longer share the same time-structure. The question is though, if it is possible for us to claim that the professional meditates on the meanings expressed as in remaining in an empathic presence within the vivid presence? In other words, the attitude demanded of the professional becomes vital in order to sustain the task of following the other and participating within the world of the other, which seems important for maintaining second-person access within a we-relation. In participation one does not have to break the empathic attitude, because there is the possibility of being directed toward something together within the vividness of the situation. Schutz (1951), in his study on making music together, calls this “the mutual tuning in” relationship and claims that it is the ground for any communication. He writes, “It is precisely this mutual tuning-in relationship by which the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou’ are experienced by both participants as a ‘We’ in vivid presence” (ibid., pp. 78–79). As Schutz (1945, p. 543) seems to reiterate in most of his writings, within the we-relation – “we grow older together.” The time-structure of following the other in the vivid present allows us to interact with the other and to refrain from breaking the we-relation by reflecting on our own experience. Can we then claim that we have been meditating together on the same meanings or could we claim that some sense of meaning has already intersubjectively been present for us both? How 405

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else would we be able to mutually tune-in and to explore a phenomenon together? In addition, at the spontaneous level within the mutual tuning in relationship, there seems to be a minimal awareness of oneself and one’s psychological movement within the we-relation. Musicians improvising together know this, but it is not exclusive for the musicians, but as Schutz (1951) points out, it is what makes any communication possible in the first place. As should be evident by now, the situation referred to as being mindful of the other as in attending to the need and interest of the other is not possible unless it is preceded by a second-person access contextualized within a we-relation. This type of presence is somewhat similar to what goes on in the ethnographic methodology in anthropology known as participant observation. In Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (Vol. 1), von Eckartsberg (1971) wrote, He [Schutz] characterizes dyadic interpersonal relationships––of which the researchersubject relation is a special case––as being of two types: “thou-relations” or “werelations” depending upon whether we have a one or two-sided reciprocal focus of attention. In the thou-relation we have a one-way focus––I attend to you but you are otherwise engaged whereas in the we-relation we have a reciprocal form of attending to one another. The thou-orientation is typical of an observer orientation whereas the we-relationship is characteristic of a participant stance. We must remember, however, that in either case the researcher is a co-constitutive member of the situation. His presence has an effect on the situation and the experience and action of the person studied, and he is also, in turn, affected by the situation and the person studied. (p. 74) There is thus reason enough to train both professionals or researchers (Englander, 2014, 2019) in how to remain within empathy, as in an empathic attitude (Einstellung), required to be engaged in a second-person access and one’s ability to navigate within an explorative mode within the we-relation; and to gain more insight into the interpersonal context. In other words, the participant observer is quite distinct from the independent observer as used by the natural scientific paradigm in psychology, the latter representing the research approach toward SoMi.

The Phenomenological Approach to Empathy Training Prior to engaging oneself in the practice of SoMi, as in being mindful of the other, I would suggest being trained within a phenomenological approach to empathy training (Englander, 2014, 2019). In this training, participants (usually students, professionals, and researchers) are trained to reflect on their empathy as it comes through in recorded dialogues to disclose their empathic perception within communicative interaction, which are often found retrospectively in their own replies within the recorded dialogues (as part of the training). This training helps them to elucidate their empathizing perception as well as how their presence is contextualized within the we-relation, both which they have more often than not been taken-for-granted (in their attempt to head directly to questions, explanations, interventions, problem solving, etc.). The participants in the training are then asked to attempt to remain within the mode of empathy and situate themselves with the context of the werelationship when conducting the following recorded conversations or interviews in preparation for the following training sessions. In a Schutzian sense of the epoché, the participants 406

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are encouraged to turn away from, or bracket, their first-person perspective (first-person as in seeking to understand the other by imitating or simulating the other) or their thirdperson perspective (third-person as in understanding others using psychological theory). The empathic attitude enables them to remain within a second-person perspective, by reflexively recognizing their initial point of departure in being present to the other. In Schutzian (1962, 1967) terms, the participant’s here is now over there, in a thou-orientation, that is, a second-person perspective, but without losing their grounding in the we-relation – as in being-situated-within-the-we-relation. The phenomenological psychological approach has more of a focus on how the interpersonal interaction drives the encounter and can be seen as compatible with the how questions that drives interviewing in a micro-phenomenology (Petitmengin, 2006). The phenomenological approach to empathy training (Englander, 2014, 2019) and phenomenological psychological interviewing (Englander, 2020) can also provide for the basic training preceding being mindful of others. What I have seen in developing this training (over the last 20 years) have been the participants’ (i.e., professionals, students, researchers) ability to learn how to remain within the mode of following the other’s meaning expression and to remain explorative, as in adopting an empathic attitude operating spontaneously in the vivid presence within the context of an interpersonal situation. Consequently, the encounters following the training have shown to be more in-depth and accepting in relation to the other’s expression, allowing the other to remain explorative in the vivid presence to their lived experience (as in, e.g., being allowed to re-live a past situation). 2 Hence, the professional or research interviewer adopting the second-person, empathic attitude do so as a means to drive the interaction, enabling the interpersonal situation to become a “psychological safe place” to re-live, communicate, and to allow for an exploration of past events and meanings. Being mindful of the other thus depends on a second-person access contextualized within a we-relation, fostering a sense of trust and interpersonal understanding engaging both in a mutually tuning in relationship that discloses reciprocal exploration. As such, the phenomenological approach to empathy training elucidates the possibility of remaining within the a priori active mode of empathy (which is already initially engaged in one’s presence to a lived body) and by spontaneously extending empathy into a secondperson or empathic attitude so as to situate one’s “mutual tuning in” within the we-relation in which the interaction and communication is taking place.

Conclusion I have tried to show that the recent development in SoMi within modern psychology seems to be lacking a phenomenological clarification of its own prerequisite; that is, in how we come to know others’ needs and how we know what is in their own best interest. Even though there are attempts by psychologists, in developing their idea of SoMi, to explain how SoMi is possible, such attempts have relied on psychological explanations. Above, I refrained from a specific critique of such explanations, mostly because the core arguments against such theories have already been extensively discussed within the contemporary phenomenological literature (e.g., Gallagher & Zahavi, 2008; Zahavi, 2014). Instead, I have provided a phenomenological account of what precedes SoMi as in how such acts relate to a sense of unselfishness and cooperation. Finally, I suggested a phenomenological approach to empathy training as to clarify how to remain within the mode of empathy and to extend this presence into an empathic attitude while being situated within the we-relation and the 407

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mutual tuning in relationship. In sum, if SoMi is to be possible as acts of unselfishness, that means that one must begin with a focus on the other and not on oneself.

Notes 1 Apart from building their study on the basis of assumptions relating to ideal morals representing prosocial life, one of the aspects of social mindfulness that was identified by Van Doesum, Van Lange, and Van Lange (2013) was empathy. However, empathy is often interpreted in mainstream, modern psychology as a personality characteristic empirically located inside a person, and as indicated in their study, something that can be measured by a psychological test. As MerleauPonty (1962) would have pointed out, such attempts are ways to prove our relation to the world instead of disclosing our already situatedness in being-in-the world and in being with others. In addition, we have recently seen a critical reply to empathy theories in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, such as simulation theory and theory-theory, by contemporary phenomenologists, most notable by Zahavi (2014) and Gallagher and Zahavi (2008). As part of a phenomenological approach to empathy training, I have discussed this critique elsewhere (Englander, 2014, 2019), as well as how empathy relates to ethics (see Englander & Ferrarello, 2023). Hence, I will refrain from reiterating this phenomenological critique. 2 It seems important to note that empathy is not equal to acting with good intentions. As Zahavi (2014) has consistently pointed out, to understand somebody also means that one would know how to better hurt them. Hence empathy is not equal to being mindful of the other, but yet a prerequisite for it.

References Batchelor, S. (1997). Buddhism Without Beliefs. London: Bloomsbury. Bitbol, M., & Petitmengin, C. (2013). A defense of introspection from within. Constructivist Foundations 8 (3), 269–279. Churchill, S. D. (2006). Encountering the animal other: Reflections on moments of empathic seeing. The Indo-Pacific Journal of Phenomenology: Special Issue on Methodology 6, 1–13. Englander, M. (2014). Empathy training from a phenomenological perspective. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 45 (1), 5–26. Englander, M. (2019). The practice of phenomenological empathy training. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50 (1), 42–59. Englander, M. (2020). Phenomenological psychological interviewing. The Humanistic Psychologist 48 (1), 54–73. Englander, M., & Ferrarello, S. (2023). On the problem of the idealization of empathy and ethics. In M. Englander, S. Ferrarello Empathy and Ethics (pp. 259–284). London: Rowman & Littlefield. Farin, I., & Hart, J.G. (2006). ‘Translator’s introduction’. In E. Husserl (ed.), The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911 (I. Farin and J. G. Hart, Trans.) (pp. XIII–XXXVI). Dordrecht: Springer. Gallagher, S., & Zahavi, D. (2008). The Phenomenological Mind. London: Routledge. Husserl, E. (2006). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910–1911. Dordrecht: Springer. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2013). Full Catastrophe Living. New York, NY: Bantam Books. Kirkland, K., Van Lange, P. A. M., Van Doesum, N. J., Acevedo-Triana, C., Amiot, C. E., Ausmees, L., Baguma, P., Barry, O., Becker, M., Bilewicz, M., Boonyasiriwat, W., Castelain, T., Costantini, G., Dimdins, G., Espinosa, A., Finchilescu, G., Fischer, R., Friese, M., Ángel Gómez, A., González, R., Goto, N., Halama, P., Ilustrisimo, R. D., Jiga-Boy, G. M., Kuppens, P., Steve Loughnan, S., Markovik, M., Mastor, K. A., McLatchie, N., Novak, L. M., Onyishi, I. E., Peker, M., Rizwan, M., Schaller, M., Suh, E. M., Swann, Jr., W. B., Tong, E. M. W., Torres, A., Turner, R. N., Vauclair, C-M., Vinogradov, A., Wang, Z., Wai Lan Yeung, V., & Bastian, B. (2022). Social mindfulness predicts concern for nature and immigrants across 36 nations. Scientific Reports, 12, 22102. https:// doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-25538-y Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, Trans.). London: Routledge.

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Being Mindful of the Other Petitmengin, C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5, 229–269. Petitmengin, C., van Beek, M., Bitbol, M., Nissou, J-. M., & Roepstorff, A. (2019). Studying the experience of meditation through micro-phenomenology. Current Opinion in Psychology, 28, 54–59. Scheler, M. (2008). The Nature of Sympathy. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Schutz, A. (1945). On multiple realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 5(4), 533–576. Schutz, A. (1951). Making music together: A study in social relationship. Social Research, 18(1), 76–97. Schutz, A. (1962). Collected Papers I: The Problem of Social Reality. The Hague, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff. Schutz, A. (1967). The Phenomenology of the Social World. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press. Stein, E. (1964). On the Problem of Empathy. Dordrecht: Springer. Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in Life. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Thompson, E. (2015). Waking, Dreaming, Being. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Van Doesum, N. J., Murphy, R. O., Gallucci, M., Aharonov-Majar, E., Athenstaedt, U., Au, W. T., Bai, L., Böhm, R., Bovina, I., Buchan, N. R., Chen, X-P., Dumont, K. B., Engelmann, J. B., Eriksson, K., Euh, H., Fiedler, S., Friesen, J., Gächter, S., Garcia, C., González, R., Graf, S., Growiec, K., Guimond, S., Hrebícková, M., Immer-Bernold, E., Joireman, J., Karagonlar, G., Kawakami, K., Kiyonari, T., Kou, Y., Kuhlman, D. M., Kyrtsis, A-A., Lay, S., Leonardelli, G. J., Li, N. P., Li, Y., Maciejovsky, B., Manesi, Z., Mashuri, A., Mok, A., Moser, K. S., Moták, L., Netedu, A., Pammi, C., Platow, M. J., Raczka-Winkler, K., Reinders Folmer, C. P., Reyna, C., Romano, A., Shalvi, S., Simão, C., Stivers, A. W., Strimling, P., Tsirbas, Y., Utz, S., van der Meij, L., Waldzus, S., Wang, Y., Weber, B., Weisel, O., Wildschut, T., Winter, F., Wu, J., Yong, J. C., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2021). Social mindfulness and prosociality vary across the globe. PNAS, 118(35), e2023846118. Van Doesum, N.J., Van Lange, P.A.M., & Van Lange, D.A.W. (2013). Social mindfulness: Skill and will to navigate the social world. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(1), 86–103. Van Lange, P. A. M., & Van Doesum, N. J. (2015). Social mindfulness and social hostility. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 3, 18–24. Varela, F. J. (1996). Neurophenomenology: A methodological remedy for the hard problem. Journal of Consciousness Studies 3(4):330–5. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT press. von Eckartsberg, R. (1971). ‘On experiential methodology’. In A. Giorgi, W. Fischer, R. von Eckartsberg (Eds.), Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology, Vol. 1 (pp. 66–79). Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press. Zahavi, D. (2001). Beyond empathy: Phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(5–7), 151–167. Zahavi, D. (2010). Empathy, embodiment and interpersonal understanding: From Lipps to Schutz. Inquiry, 53, 285–306. Zahavi, D. (2011). Empathy as direct social perception: A phenomenological proposal. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2, 541–558. Zahavi, D. (2014). Self and Other. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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PART VI

Applications: Mindfulness in Life

27 MINDFULNESS AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF AESTHETICS Reappraising Dufrenne and Merleau-Ponty Colleen Fitzpatrick Introduction Phenomenological philosophy mirrors mindful approaches to the world, emphasizing embodiment, lived experience and perception. This is most evident in the phenomenology of aesthetics. When aesthetic experience, especially painting, is understood through the lens of phenomenology, it echoes mindfulness practice. Both Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, unwittingly, describe how mindfulness theory meets the phenomenology of aesthetics at the juncture of perception. This chapter begins with an examination of the relevant aspects of the philosophy of phenomenologists, Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne, respectively, before discussing the cognitive structure of mindfulness and highlighting how the phenomenology of aesthetic experience corresponds to it. These philosophers do not refer directly to a mindful attitude, but their emphasis on the significance of the lived experience of aesthetic engagement point to the possibility that the creation and appreciation of art, particularly painting, are mindfulness-based interventions. Before concluding the chapter as a whole the different roles of the artist and the spectator will be clarified respectively in context of the overall discussion.

Merleau-Ponty Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting utilizes a number of concepts that correspond to the mindful attitude. For the purposes of this chapter, we limit ourselves to his views on perception and painting as an access to heightened vision. These ideas are especially developed in the essays Eye & Mind (1993c, pp. 121–149), Cezanne’s Doubt (1993b, pp. 59–75) and his unfinished work The Visible and the Invisible (1968). For Merleau-Ponty, aesthetics is concerned with getting closer to present and living reality (2014, p. 25). This is achieved through perception which is achieved through embodiment. Merleau-Ponty increasingly foregrounded visual perception (2014, p. xvii) and how it is an aide to achieving primal contact with the world (2014, p. xx). DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-34

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This philosophy is one of integration – of mind and body and of body and world. The interaction of embodied subject and environment informed Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy throughout his life. The emphasis which he placed on perception heralds his theory of painting. If his goal was to define a method for getting closer to present and living reality, this method was perception. Merleau-Ponty (1964b) tells us time and again perception opens us up to being. Hence, paintings qua visuals take on a special significance. To perceive is not only to have inner mental states but also to be familiar with, deal with, and find our way around an environment. Perceiving means having a body, which in turn means inhabiting a world (2014, p. x). He stated that “my body is a thing among things; it is one of them. It is caught in the fabric of the world” (1993c, p. 125). Embodiment and perception, which are shared by all human beings, are at the root of all paintings. In Eye & Mind, Merleau-Ponty states that things and the body are made of the same stuff. It is within this milieu that he coined the term “flesh” to describe how the body and environment are one flesh and “chiasm” to illustrate this intertwining. The “other” for Merleau-Ponty is a reflection of the self (1968, pp. 130–155). Merleau-Ponty was particularly impressed with Cezanne’s paintings and published Cezanne’s Doubt in 1945 (Johnson, 1993, pp. 50–75). He claimed that Cezanne wished to return to the things themselves (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 62). Cezanne stated that we exist through nature and that “nature is on the inside’ (ibid.). He would say that “the landscape thinks itself through me and I am its consciousness” (ibid., p. 67). For Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne “made visible how the world touches us” (ibid., p. 70). In this way, the work of art reveals the world in a new way. Painting absorbs meaning from the world rather than trying to make sense of it -this suggests a non-judgemental awareness which we will also find in mindfulness. According to Merleau-Ponty, painting is an access to being. It achieves this not just through vision, but heightened vision: “It gives visible extension to what profane vision believes to be invisible” (ibid., p. 127). The painter brings our awareness to actually seeing the world (ibid.). For what we see is always incomplete. The painter earns the gift of seeing through continuous practice and this cannot be done in isolation but by going out into the world (ibid.). Klee’s experience signified this for Merleau-Ponty when he declared that he felt that the trees were looking at him and speaking to him. He is not describing a mystical experience, this is a practical aspect of the work of painting, as can be seen in Klee’s statement, “I think the painter must be penetrated by the universe” (Merleau-Ponty, 1993, p. 129). MerleauPonty asserts that the artist is not a genius but an ordinary person trained in the art of perception, who works at his/her craft and perfects it (Merleau-Ponty 1993a). The notion of heightened vision is a central aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s theory of painting because it introduces his contention that painting makes visible what is invisible. But what exactly does he mean by this? In everyday life, we ignore details. We attend to the overall picture because that is the path of least resistance to the busy mind. This type of inattentive attitude to the world leaves us with only partial engagement to it. We are left not only unenriched but also disconnected to much of the world, life and therefore our own being because our existence is dependent on an ecological state with our environment. Hence painting provides a pause and points to the visual world, to aspects that are already there only we did not notice them. Otherwise we exist in a constricted state. Entering into a more expanded state where we can actually see more, and hence experience more, provides the opportunity for greater consciousness. Therefore, being becomes more authentic because we can begin to engage with what (else) is really there. This is not a luxury but a necessity to a life fully lived. 414

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The painter extracts what seems to be invisible by going out into the world and not just looking but participating. Klee referred to this when he said that the trees were talking to him. He was a participant in their world. The painter brings our attention to this world and our being is expanded through heightened awareness. It is, as Johnson describes, how phenomenology and painting exhibit “the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness” (Johnson, 1993, p. 4). The viewer who chooses to pause at a painting and look at what has been set aside for contemplation will also witness the normally hidden aspects of the visible. In this respect, the painting is a shared experience. For how often do people ignore the sunset until presented with a painting of a sunset, which calls to mind the existence of the actual sunset. The next time the sun sets they look more closely, and engage. According to Merleau-Ponty (1993, p. 142) an image can reveal the world to us and awaken powers of dormant vision. He states: Painting thrusts us again into the presence of the world of lived experience. In the work of Cézanne, Juan Gris, Braque and Picasso, in different ways, we encounter objects – lemons, mandolins, bunches of grapes, pouches of tobacco – that do not quickly pass before our eyes in the guise of objects we “know well” but, on the contrary, hold our gaze, ask questions of it… (Merleau-Ponty, 2008, p. 69)

Dufrenne Dufrenne (1973) develops his ideas in this area in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. He echoes the point made by Merleau-Ponty, that painting brings a new awareness of our world, in the following statement: We believe that art repeats what we have seen because we can identify what art represents…But in fact we have not seen any of these things before. We had not yet seen the writhing power of the human torso before seeing Michelangelo’s slaves or the tortured form of the iris before seeing Van Gogh’s bouquet… We could almost say that perception begins with art. (Dufrenne, 1973, p. 543) According to Dufrenne, the aesthetic object possesses a depth which roots us from our comfort zone in order to bring us face to face with a new world, which demands a new outlook (ibid., p. 408). Art shows us things we have not seen before because it opens up new worlds; our sense perception is sharpened by the experience of engagement. Similarly, mindfulness opens up powers of perception and subsequently we can engage and participate in the world rather than simply pass through it. Dufrenne’s phenomenology of aesthetic experience is very much about being present, focused and non-judgemental (ibid., p. 467). These dispositions also characterize the mindful attitude. Dufrenne’s repeated references to “being not doing”, attention and being present to the aesthetic object in order to realize its signification harken Eastern philosophies and psychological theories of mindfulness. Like Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne begins with the moment of perception. The perceiver is a witness to the artwork (ibid., p. 59). For Dufrenne, the witness penetrates the world of the work through a “connivance” (ibid., p. 352). In this respect, we see that although 415

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the person is an observer, he/she is also engaged through a communication which occurs through “solitary and meditative consciousness…for the sake of its metamorphosis into an aesthetic object” (ibid., p. 51). Hence the perceiver must be simultaneously inside and outside the work, in order to do this he/she must adopt the attitude of a witness who is at one with the perception and “who is an accomplice rather than a judge” (ibid., p. 55). This is achieved through the body being wholly present to the work of art through a corporeal complicity (ibid., p. 340). Equally there should be no excessive striving on the part of the artist. Dufrenne (ibid., p. 500) argues that for the artist, being and doing are the same thing. In the same vein, Dufrenne repeatedly articulates that the spectator is invited to be, not to do (ibid., p. 65, p. 66, pp. 85–86, p. 352, p. 376). It is not an activity but an experience. The work of contemplation transpires existentially. Dufrenne (ibid., p. 405) makes reference to “participation” which suggests active involvement. He infers that the viewer must put some effort into the job of feeling: “Authentic feeling must be earned just as perception must be gradually gained. The aesthetic object must be fully present… We have insisted that perception is a task” (ibid., p. 419). This requires some skill. The skills necessary are the ability to focus and give one’s undivided attention to the aesthetic object. This is the means to opening oneself up to the work: “I came to open myself up to the work, to be present…to experience an apotheosis of the present” (ibid., p. 11). Dufrenne goes as far as to say that the work of art is an “education in attention” (ibid., p. 63) and that a process of training is required in order to cleanse one’s mind by eliminating every prejudice (ibid., p. 428). This results in being sensitized to the work of art and it demands effort. We are left in no doubt that there is work involved in aesthetic appreciation. Dufrenne has stated several times, in various ways, that the subject must be capable of receiving the aesthetic object, must be intelligent enough, willing and interested. The incapable person even “degrades” the aesthetic experience and this can be due to selfishness and self-absorption (ibid., p. 431). For Dufrenne, although aesthetic appreciation begins with feeling, it must be combined with reflection to bring us into the presence of knowledge – therefore the artwork must stimulate the mind as well (ibid., p. 391). Furthermore, the observer is not solitary but part of a public. The singular is pregnant with the universal (ibid., p. 503). Even in singularity each human being is a delegate of humanity. Aesthetic contemplation is a social act where individuals feel themselves to be interdependent (ibid., p. 68). Dufrenne (ibid., p. 111) asserts that “the most authentic subjectivity is that which rejoins the universal”. It is worth noting in this context that, although mindfulness practice is executed through an initial withdrawing wherein the practitioner focuses in a solitary way, for example on the breath in meditation, the goal is to re-join the universal and feel connected to others and the environment. For Dufrenne (ibid., p. 500) humanity is never totally transparent to itself: “Men are continually blind to some aspect of men”. Following from this it is clear that something(s) need to be uncovered, or discovered, in order to reveal truth.

Mindfulness and Phenomenology Mindfulness has been defined by psychologists although it has its roots in traditional Buddhism. For psychologists, this is an area of scientific endeavour, for Buddhists, it is part of a spiritual dimension. For aestheticians and philosophers the concept of mindfulness can inform our inquiry into the nature of lived experience in relation to the significance of art. 416

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In psychological terms, mindfulness has been described as a kind of non-elaborative, non-judgemental, present-centred awareness in which, as far as possible, each thought, feeling and sensation that arises in the attentional field is acknowledged and accepted as it is – this means dwelling on the multi-aspectuality of its presence instead of dealing with it as a mere component in our practical involvements with things. It has been shown to lead to greater curiosity and enhanced self-reflection (Bishop et al., 2004). It is a state of presence of mind, a clear awareness of one’s inner and outer worlds (Chiesa, Calati & Serretti, 2011). This mental state is characterized by full attention to internal and external experiences as they occur in the present moment, therefore, in mindfulness-based interventions the mind is trained to be anchored in the present moment (Kapleau, 1965). This definition may be extended to include alertness to distinction, context and multiple perspectives as well as openness to novelty and orientation to the present (Langer, 1997). This requires focus on an object such that when the mind wanders, attention is brought back to the object. Mindful perception should be differentiated from passive reception. For example, the mindful person pays attention to, and hence, actively participates in the life of the perceived object. There is focus and concentration. In contrast, consider a person staring into space for hours, seemingly staring at an object, such as an elderly person left sitting in a nursing home. Here the person is looking in a certain direction, but is not actively attending to the particularities of any object. He/she is absorbed, or more accurately, lost in the directedness of perception, without arriving at the destination of what his/her perception is directed towards. Even if the act is sustained over a period of time there is no active involvement and no benefit whatsoever to this passivity. The introduction of mindful behaviour has multiple benefits. Individuals who have cultivated this approach to experience exhibit increased flexibility, fluency and originality in responses (Capurso, Fabbro, & Crescentini, 2014). People who practised mindfulness meditation showed a marked advantage over others on these activities (Colzato et al. 2012). This suggests that mindfulness-based interventions have implications for opening the mind; rather than responding to life in a mechanical way, the mindful individual embraces the unexpected and the unusual. The mindful individual perceives more clearly and the individual sees him/herself as an integral part of the world rather than being set apart from the world and experiencing alienation. In systematic reviews of neuropsychological findings, researchers have found that mindfulness training improves cognitive abilities, including attention and memory (Chiesa, Calati & Serretti, 2011). Mindfulness, above all, is about perceptual awareness and this is why it relates to phenomenological theories of aesthetics. High mindful individuals have been characterized as more attuned to sensations and perceptions. These individuals demonstrate superior perceptual abilities in visual work, memory and temporal tasks (Anicha et al., 2012). Mindfulness has its roots in contemplative Buddhist practices and philosophy (Kalupahana, 1987). Through meditation practice the Buddhist practitioner learns to control attention to greater extents and to better perceive events as they occur (Wallace & Shapiro, 2006). Furthermore, this is thought to facilitate a mode of living in the world that is less egoistic as well as being associated with less suffering. This is due to seeing life for what it really is and accepting it. A veil of obscurity is apparently lifted and truth is revealed. This unveiling which is thought to come about brings us to our first point of commonality between mindfulness and aesthetics. 417

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As previously discussed, for Merleau-Ponty, perception is always incomplete, painting helps to bridge the gap between the invisible and the visible and perception becomes more complete. Similarly Dufrenne asserted that the truth remained to be uncovered and this can be achieved through the aesthetic experience. Dufrenne maintains that aesthetic objects reveal worlds by liberating dormant emotions – this is the affective a priori (Dufrenne, 1973, p. 445). According to Dreyfus, in traditional Buddhism, mindfulness is related to the reduction of suffering because suffering comes from the fundamental problem of the mistaken interpretation of reality: “The world is given to us through our senses but rather than stick to what we experience from moment to moment, we remain prisoner of our constructions” (Dreyfus, 2011, pp. 41–54). Buddhism recommends that we “stop living in this self-centred universe and start living in the real world of momentary experience” (ibid., p. 4). Otherwise the mind is a prisoner of its unbridled discursivity (ibid., p. 5). It can be deduced from this statement that mindfulness liberates the practitioner by removing misconceptions through the improved utilization of sense perception. The mistaken interpretation of reality is a product of ignoring what is actually presented to us through our senses and rather, attending to a false conception of the mind which we hold onto out of an ill-serving habit. There are many studies in psychology illustrating this, for example, a white person who is racist and believes that black people are inferior to white people will quickly filter out the intelligent black doctor that they dealt with and choose to only remember any black people that s/he had problems with in the past, or if this doctor is remembered, s/he will be remembered with false memories of incompetence (Sinclair & Kunda, 1999, pp. 885–904). A person with low self-esteem will only remember their failures (Baumeister, 2013, p. 50). The aforementioned examples are psychological in nature, but in Buddhist terms this may be understood as the “prison of our construction”. Contemporary psychological science has been aware of these tendencies for some time and has conducted research in the field of cognitive and social psychology to try to find answers to alleviate this problem: People who hold strong opinions on complex social issues are likely to examine relevant empirical evidence in a biased manner. They are apt to accept “confirming” evidence at face value while subjecting “disconfirming” evidence to critical evaluation, and, as a result, draw undue support for their initial positions from mixed or random empirical findings. Thus, the result of exposing contending factions in a social dispute to an identical body of relevant empirical evidence may be not a narrowing of disagreement but rather an increase in polarization. (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979, p. 2098). This type of behaviour is replicated in studies of various different contexts (Schneider, 2005). Although various solutions can be discussed through contemporary psychological research, the practice of mindfulness, from its beginnings, has been very much about “correcting” this “distorted thinking”. Mindfulness-based interventions have been designed to foster clarity of mind through bodily practice. What is shared by phenomenological aesthetics and mindfulness theory is that our perception of the world is lacking; the world remains to be uncovered in order to fully engage with life and there are methods and interventions which facilitate this process.

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According to Goldstein, “bare attention”, which is constitutive of mindfulness practice, is one such method which recommends observing without evaluating, including singleminded insight at successive moments of perception (Nyanaponika, 1962). This is conducive to the uncovering of truth. This description could equally apply to aesthetic e­ xperience when it is understood phenomenologically. Kabat-Zinn describes mindfulness as paying attention to present perceptions and experience in a non-judgemental and non-reactive manner (Anicha et al., 2012, p. 265). This entails controlling the attention in a purposeful way in the context of open-minded acceptance (Bishop et al., 2004). We know that Dufrenne considered aesthetic experience to be an “education in attention” and recommended that the mind undergo training in order to be up for the task. The goal of mindfulness-based interventions is to improve the individual’s abilities to observe what is occurring while it is occurring. This results in a mind that is more perceptually observant (Carmody, 2009, pp. 270–280). Sense perception is at the centre of both Merleau-Ponty’s and Dufrenne’s theories of aesthetics. Dufrenne in particular uses the words “being present” and being a witness in a non-judgemental way. Merleau-Ponty spoke specifically about the benefit of heightened visual perception, which is one aspect of mindful perception. When Merleau-Ponty said that Cezanne made visible how the world touches us, he was really saying that Cezanne makes us more visually mindful of the world. It should be noted that in mindfulness meditation practice, it is said there are no actions to perform (Lau et al., 2006, pp. 1445–1467). However, the person is actively engaged in the practice. This directly echoes Dufrenne’s numerous assertions that aesthetic appreciation should involve being and not doing although there is work involved in proper appreciation. It is a task, almost a practice, like other forms of mindfulness-based interventions. Similarly, for the artist being and doing are one. As Elbert Hubbard stated, “Art is not a thing. It is a way” (Hubbard, 2009). Dreyfus reminds us that the central feature of mindfulness is to hold an object with sustained attention. His ultimate argument is that this temporal aspect accounts for the cognitive significance of mindfulness, as it is crucially connected to memory. In this regard, Dreyfus points out that “when we are presented with an object… we integrate it within a temporal flow so that it is given as making sense” (Dreyfus, 2011, p. 8). This temporal aspect of mindfulness is echoed in phenomenological aesthetic theories. For example, Dufrenne asserts that aesthetic experience involves not just feeling but also subsequent reflective ability of the mind to make sense of the affective experience. Dufrenne (1973, p. 391) states that “no one really comes to grips with feeling who has not undergone the experience of reflection. The work of art provokes the intelligence as well”. This process has a chronology. The shared belief in universality is another common feature. “Right” mindfulness as it is termed, has implications for ethics, awareness of others and being of service in the world. This is an important point as mindfulness interventions are often confused with being disassociated from others because they can involve solitary meditation. It is true that the mindfulness practitioner usually practises in solitude, or part of a group in silence – focusing the attention on a point, often the breath, however this training cultivates attention to detail, hence expanding consciousness of the self, others and the environment. It should be clear at this point that this practice has wider ramifications for experience outside of the mindfulness practice itself. The element of universality and expanding our empathies to others is

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key in Buddhist thought, which recognizes that all things are connected and empathizing with others sets us free. Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne both embrace a dimension of universality and concept of the other. For Dufrenne, the recognition of an emotion in a work of art involves more than spectating. Feeling means participating in Dufrenne’s terms – it is an identification through participation (1973, p. 482). This bears the hallmark of empathy – being able to not only recognize but also respond and live specific emotions, through perception of self and the other. Dufrenne argues in The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience that aesthetic space is a place which conveys affective meaning. He also suggests the artist gives us a new standpoint from which to view the world, i.e. we enter the perspective of the artist. These dispositions are constituent of the empathic process, and incorporate the attitude of acceptance previously discussed. The central role of the artist’s style involves seeing-with – an aesthetic empathy embodying a psychological identification with the artist’s way of seeing the visual world. As Crowther highlights, the pictorial nature of the painting allows the viewer to share in the artist’s view without the pressure associated with face-to-face interactions (Crowther, 2013, pp. 118–119). Without the pressure of these “face to face interactions”, the engaged viewer learns a mode of living in another’s shoes through the painting, which is brought to bear ultimately on real life experiences. This aesthetic empathy is not entirely different from the universal connections which are realized through mindfulness practice. Dufrenne does not, it should be noted, emphasize aesthetic empathy, although it is implicated in this way throughout his writings. Merleau-Ponty has written at length on the other being a mirror reflection of the self. In this regard, reciprocity is an indispensable consideration to his philosophy. MerleauPonty (1993, p. 70) asserted that “when a painting is successful, it will have united these separate lives, it will no longer exist in only one of them” Merleau-Ponty (2012, pts. 1 and 2) believed that the subject and object are the one flesh. All things, including ourselves, are interwoven into this “flesh”. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty (2012) asserts that the pre-reflective relationship with the world is already given. Equally, Dufrenne champions the universal, whereby each individual is a delegate of humanity (1973, p. 488); the relationship between subject and object is not a private one. The observer is not solitary but part of a public. The spectator is part of a cultural milieu and the public forms a real community. Finally, perceptual attention to the present moment as it is occurring through embodiment is at the centre of both mindfulness and the aesthetic theories discussed. Points of commonality between mindfulness and the phenomenology of aesthetic experience are summarized as follows: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Perception and Embodiment at the root of both practices; Perception of the world is incomplete – the intervention completes it; Being, not doing – must be fully engaged in the task but in an experiential way; Temporal aspect – chronology and cognition are involved. Reflection follows feeling; Universality – self-others-environment – interdependence; Attention to present moment as it’s occurring; Grounded in theory that emphasizes subjective experience over intellectual knowledge; A new way of looking at the world is revealed – out of comfort zone; This facilitates a more fully engaged life. 420

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The Artist and the Spectator Throughout, we have not differentiated clearly between the artist and the viewer. It is important to acknowledge that the respective experiences are different but also that they are not entirely exclusive. Wollheim (1990) reminded us that the artist is also a spectator of his/her own work. Let us begin with the artist. It can be justifiably argued that the artist, engaged in the work, is practising a mindful task, akin to meditative breath-work. Any practising artist will recognize that time spent creating feels, in fact, like temporality is suspended, because focus becomes so concentrated that all else is excluded and time becomes meaningless. This is truly a mindful experience and one that is easier to enter than breath-work whereby one has to force oneself to focus on the breath. Artist, McNiff (1998, p. 2) articulates the artistic process accurately: “The discipline of creation is a mixture of surrender and initiative. We let go of inhibitions which breed rigidity and we cultivate responsiveness to what is taking shape in the immediate situation”. The creation of art is an effortless mindfulness experience because it happens by itself at a certain point in the creative process. This is what artists term “the zone”. This state is characterized largely by what psychologist Abraham Maslow (Maslow, 1998, pp.  113–126) termed, “peak experiences”. This is, apparently, connected to affectivity, just as Dufrenne philosophized: neuroscientists and psychologists have found that emotions affect the body in various ways (Damasio, 2000, 2005) and that emotional and brain activity work together to produce transformative effects on the experience of embodiment (Nummenmaa et al., 2014, pp. 113–126). Although the creation of art is an intentional action and requires much effort, this zone which is entered is actually entered unintentionally. In mindfulness practice, this zone is a similar place and this is why it is commonly said that yoga happens to you. In this case, it is considered a “spiritual” zone. With regard to art, where does this leave the spectator, who did not engage in the creative process and merely spectates? This is where we would make use of the notion that aesthetic appreciation is a task; otherwise viewing a painting can lead a viewer to nothing; hard work is in order. Although it is equally true that the artist must put in hard work, the artist is motivated by a vocational pull that is rewarding and at some point in the creative process, effort ceases. This is similar to “asana-jaya” in yoga, which is the point at which the practitioner masters the posture and effort ceases, although, of course, the practice continues and deepens. Similarly, when an artist masters his/her style, the work improves all the more and the real work begins. Essentially, for the spectator to gain anything from the aesthetic experience, the word “spectator”, to begin with, is itself a misnomer. In order to enter into the aesthetic process and experience aesthetic space, Dufrenne is correct, the subject must do more than “spectate”, they must participate. Dufrenne focuses most of his attention on the “spectators” but perhaps this is because their task is the more challenging – to enter into a process not of one’s making. In order for the spectator to experience a painting as a mindfulness-based intervention, he/she does indeed have to engage in deliberate focus, attention, presence of mind, and the benefits will come only after much intentional action. The appreciation of paintings can, for many people, be a challenge in this way Other art forms such as music, literature and performance art all seem to envelop the subject with an organic ease. This same stance which the spectator must adopt in order to reap the benefits of the aesthetic experience is the one which is inherently present during the creative process for the artist. Interestingly, this same disposition is exactly what the Buddhists advocate in order 421

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to achieve the mindful state, which ultimately frees the subject from the egotistical self. It is also of interest that during the creative process, and I can perhaps only speak for myself as an artist, there is no sense of egotistical self – because one is lost in, absorbed in, and one with the process. However, if the ego does enter the process, it causes a craving sensation, i.e. a critical attitude, a wanting to be better, a judgement, and then the work is ruined. This is in direct opposition to the open-minded acceptance which has been recommended in relation to the viewer; in this case I am highlighting a point which is rarely emphasized: the artist also needs to adopt this stance of open-minded acceptance in relation to his/her own work in order to create. The non-judgemental stance is crucial to creativity. It is the egotistical self which is the critical voice, whether offering praise or criticism, it is an unwelcome interference. The artist must apply the disinterested attitude to the egotistical voice which judges both the work and the self. Similarly, in mindfulness practice, the practitioner is encouraged not to judge the self if the mind wanders when it should be focusing. The practitioner must let it be what it is, keep practising and the desired state will come of its own accord – just like the zone that the artist enters when the egotistical voice is ignored or accepted with disinterest. In all cases, analysis and assessment of what is occurring must be discarded in favour of the phenomenology of lived experience.

Conclusion Mindfulness practice and the phenomenology of aesthetic experience do not correlate directly; mindfulness practice recommends focused attention where possible to any and all aspects of the world. In contrast, the aesthetic object is the unique focal for contemplation and the object of use is disregarded. With regard to painting, visual mindfulness is the main focus. And what of the ultimate goal of both these interventions? In Buddhism, mindfulness is not an end in itself. Its goal is to end suffering. Happiness can only come about when perception is cleansed of its misconceptions. Is this where theories of aesthetics and mindfulness part ways? Not necessarily. For Dufrenne, being present to the aesthetic object is not an end in itself. This state activates the affective a priori, in other words, categories of emotional feeling, which were dormant, are liberated. This expands our being and engagement with ourselves and the world. Dufrenne does not mention the elimination of suffering but presumably liberation of emotional categories is of benefit to the development of self-consciousness and therefore well-being and happiness. Merleau-Ponty, similarly, regards the ultimate significance of painting as opening us up to the world, living in a reciprocal nature with others and the environment. Hence, we live more fully engaged lives. Surely, this would also reduce suffering and increase satisfaction. Phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy have a shared heritage. Philosophers such as Merleau-Ponty and Dufrenne were reacting against Cartesian dualism and science, which celebrated rationality and observable experience. Consider this statement from Dreyfus (2011, pp. 8–9): Western medical and psychological science has historically emphasized intellectual knowledge and concrete experience as the main stream of human knowledge. The concept of mindfulness derives from a culture that places higher emphasis upon subjective experience as a source of inquiry and understanding. 422

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According to phenomenological thought, aesthetic experience is, by its nature, a mindfulnessbased intervention which when practised through creation or appreciation sharpens perceptual skills and brings greater awareness of the environment, others and ultimately ourselves. Viewing a painting provides opportunities to engage with the perspective of others. Merleau-Ponty (1993, p. 112) contends that culture allows us to dwell in the lives of others. Dufrenne reminds us that this life is our life also. As Crowther (2013, p. 123) states: Through making pictures, the visual imagination in general becomes autonomous, and invites both creator and viewer to inhabit the imaginative style – the artist’s way of articulating the visible world. Pictures complete a striving to understand and inhabit the world that the generation of mental images tends towards.

References Anicha, C.L., Ode, S., Moeller, S. K., & Robinson, M. D. (2012). Toward a cognitive view of trait mindfulness: Distinct cognitive predict its observing & nonreactivity facets. Journal of Personality 80 (2), 255–285. Baumeister, R. F. (Ed.). (2013). Self-Esteem, The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard. Case Western Reserve University, New York: Plenum Press. Bishop, S.R., Lau, M., Shapiro, S., Carlson, L., Anderson, N.D., Carmody, J. Segel, Z.V. Abbey, S., Speca, M., Velting, D., & Devins, G. (2004). Mindfulness as a proposed operational definition. Clinical Psychology: Science & Practice 11 (3), 230–241. Capurso, V., Fabbro, F., & Crescentini, C. (2014). Mindfulness creativity: The influence of mindfulness meditation on creative thinking. Frontiers in Psychology 3(116), 1–2, http://doi.org/10.3389/ fpsyg.2013.01020 Carmody, J. (2009). Evolving conceptions of mindfulness in clinical settings. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy 23, 270–280. Chiesa, A., Calati, R., & Serretti, A. (2011). Does mindfulness training improve cognitive abilities? A systematic review of neurological Findings. Clinical Psychology Review 31, 449–464. Colzato, L. S., Ozturk, A., & Hommel, B. (2012). Meditate to create: The impact of focused-attention and open-monitoring training on convergent and divergent thinking. Frontiers in Psychology 3, 116. Crowther, P. (2013). How images create us, imagination & the unity of self-consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 20 (11–12), 101–123. http://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-010-0016-3 Damasio, A. (2000). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. Orlando: Mariner Books. Damasio, A. (2005). Descartes Error: Reason, Emotion and the Human Brain. London: Penguin Books. Dreyfus, G. (2011). Is mindfulness present-centred & nonjudgemental? A discussion of the cognitive dimensions of mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (1), 41–54. Dufrenne, M. (1973). Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Hubbard, E. (2009). Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Teachers: Thomas Arnold 1908. New York: Cornell University Press. Johnson, G. A. (1993). Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader. Evanston: Northwestern University Press Kalupahana, D. J. (1987) The Principles of Buddhist Psychology. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kapleau, P. (1965). The Three Pillars of Zen, Teaching Practice & Enlightenment. Boston: Bacon Press. Langer, E.J. (1997). The Power of Mindful Learning. MA: Addison Wesley. Lau, M.A., Bishop, S.R. Segal, Z.V. Buis, T., Shapiro, S. Calrson, L. Anderson, N.D., & Carmody, J. (2006) The Toronto Mindfulness Scale: Development and validation. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(12), 1445–1467.

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Colleen Fitzpatrick Lord, C. G., Ross, L., & Lepper, M. R. (1979). Biased assimilation and attitude polarization: The effects of prior theories on subsequently considered evidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37 (11), 2098–2109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.37.11.2098 Maslow, A. (1998). Toward a Psychology of Being (3rd ed.). New York: Wiley. McNiff, S. (1998). Trust the Process: An Artist’s Guide to Letting Go. Boston: Shambhala Publications. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964a). Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (Trans.) New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964b) ‘The primacy of perception’ in J.M. Edie (Ed.). The Primacy of Perception & Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, The Philosophy of Art, History & Politics, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The visible and the invisible, Claude Lefort (Ed.), Alphonso Lingis (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993a). ‘Indirect language and the voices of silence’ in G. A. Johnson MerleauPonty Aesthetics Reader (pp. 76–120). M. B. Smith (Trans.), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993b). ‘Cezanne’s doubt’ in G.A. Johnson Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (pp. 59–75) M. B. Smith (Trans.), Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993c). ‘Eye & mind’ in G. A. Johnson Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader (pp. 121–149.) M. B. Smith (Trans.) Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2008). The World of Perception. New York: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon: Routledge. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2014). Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge. Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari. R., & Hietanen, J.K. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2), 646–651. Nyanaponika, T. (1962). The Heart of Buddhist Meditation. London: Rider & Co. Schneider, D.J. (2005). The Psychology of Stereotyping. New York: Guilford Press. Sinclair, L., & Kunda, Z. (1999). Reactions to a Black professional: Motivated inhibition and activation of conflicting stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (5), 885–904. Wallace, B. A., & Shapiro, S. (2006). Mental balance and well-being: Building bridges between Buddhism and Western psychology. American Psychologist 61, 690–701. Wollheim, R. (1990). Painting as Art. London: Thames & Hudson.

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28 MINDFULNESS AND CREATIVITY The Impact of Michel Henry and Otto Rank on Psychoanalysis Max Schaefer Introduction This chapter draws out the ramifications of the work of French phenomenologist Michel Henry and Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Rank on psychoanalysis or psychoanalytic therapy. I will show that Henry and Rank provide psychoanalysis with newfound insight into the nature and role of mindfulness and creativity in allowing psychoanalytic therapy to realize its goal of enhancing the functioning of the subject. In the opening section of this chapter, I outline Freud’s account of the goal of psychoanalysis and the role that mindfulness plays in realizing this end. I then address Henry’s critical reading of Freudian psychoanalysis. I spotlight three critical insights that can be gleaned from Henry’s phenomenological study of Freud: (i) that although Freud comes close to identifying the positive phenomenological reality of the subject with an unconscious, affective layer of life that forever escapes objectification, he in fact falls short of providing an adequate treatment of the nature and role of affectivity in psychoanalysis; (ii) despite this being the case, Freud’s analyses implicitly suggest that patients are, at heart, trying to flee from the pathos associated with certain experiences; and (iii) as a result, there is a very real need for a different reading of psychoanalysis, one which sufficiently acknowledges the nature and role of affectivity in personality formation and in the development and alleviation of neuroses. After laying out Henry’s account of the affective life of the subject, I point out some of the practical implications that his phenomenological analysis of life calls for in psychoanalytic therapy. I highlight three such implications: (i) that the life of the subject functions as an original imagination that is creative in nature; (ii) that such creativity is crucial to psychoanalysis in its treatment of the patient; and (iii) that the use of life’s creativity in psychoanalysis does in some way need the world of intentional consciousness and the mindfulness that can be cultivated therein. As I show, by failing to adequately account for the relation between the creativity of life and the mindfulness of the world, Henry fails to sufficiently account for the intersubjective character of these processes. Following this, I demonstrate how the psychoanalysis of Rank and the phenomenology Henry can be brought together to further refine our understanding of the intersubjective DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-35

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character of creativity and mindfulness and their role in psychoanalytic therapy. For where Henry highlights the strict closure of individual lives from one another, Rank sheds light on the mutual dynamic relationships that obtain between them. Taken together, I maintain that what comes forward is that mindfulness and creativity are relationships that can both reinforce and hinder one another, and which always involve degrees of separation and union. Consequently, I contend that mindfulness and creativity can play a pivotal role in empowering psychoanalysis to realize its goal of enhancing the well-being of its patients. Finally, toward the end of the chapter, I spotlight the influence that the work of Henry and Rank have had on contemporary developments in phenomenology and psychoanalytic therapy.

Henry’s Critical Reading of Freudian Psychoanalysis The psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud draws attention to the fact that the thinking and behavior of human beings is affected by their dynamic unconscious, which is to say, by the anxiety-provoking thoughts, desires, impulses, and feelings that the subject, through various defense mechanisms — e.g., repression, suppression, dissociation, destructive thinking patterns — refuses to let rise to conscious awareness. In his view, various mental health disorders (i.e., neuroses) result from the tension between the unconscious and the conscious beliefs of the subject, as well as the norms and values of society. To assist the patient in undoing her neurosis and in thereby advancing her mental health, Freud famously founds psychoanalysis as a technique centered upon talk therapy. Through rigorous conversations, which oftentimes rely on strategies, such as transference analysis, dream analysis, and free association, analysts help their patients to uncover and heal unconscious contents and defenses that have caused them psychological trauma in the past by bringing them to the clear light of conscious awareness. Importantly, there is an implicit form of mindfulness at work in Freud’s approach to psychoanalytic therapy. Freud maintains that analysts should practice an “evenly-suspended attention,” meaning they should give an “impartial attention to everything there is to observe” (Freud, 1912a, p.  111; Freud, 1909, p.  23). The implication here is that a nonjudgmental attention to and acceptance of the thoughts and feelings being shared by the patient is crucial to cultivating the self-knowledge that, ever since the time of Socrates, Western civilization has believed to be inherently healing. By practicing this mindfulness, the analyst may develop a heightened awareness of patterns and regularities in the thoughts and feelings of the patient that seem to cause her psychological distress. Despite this latent role of mindfulness in Freudian psychotherapy, the French phenomenologist Michel Henry maintains that Freud himself does not sufficiently practice what he preaches. According to Henry, rather than bringing his attention to the unconscious life (i.e., affectivity) of the subject in a non-judgmental manner and attempt to articulate the subject’s actual experience of her unconscious impulses and feelings, Freud lays a manufactured theoretical scheme on top of it. By doing so, Freud misses the positive phenomenological material or reality of the unconscious. In Henry’s view, what prompts this oversight on Freud’s part is an unquestioned assumption he inherits from the history of Western philosophy. More specifically, it is the belief that there is only one mode of appearing, that of the world, understood as the ecstatic horizon of intentional consciousness. Henry refers to this belief as ontological monism (Henry, 1973, p. 89). On this view, appearing is always the appearing of an object to a conscious 426

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subject (i.e., object-manifestation), such that something is if and only if it can at least in principle appear within the subject’s field of representation. Subjectivity is thus tantamount to representativity. According to Henry, nearly all the history of Western philosophy has operated on the basis of this metaphysics of representation. Far from overturning this long-standing bias, it can be seen at work in Freud’s association of appearing with consciousness, and, conversely, in his conception of the unconscious, affective layer of life as a region that falls outside the realm of representation. As Freud writes, we know for certain that they [unconscious processes] have abundant points of contact with conscious mental processes; with the help of a certain amount of work they can be transformed into, or replaced by, conscious mental processes, and all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions and so on, can be applied to them. Indeed, we are obliged to say of some of these latent states that the only respect in which they differ from conscious ones is precisely in the absence of consciousness. (Freud, 1915a, p. 168) As this passage indicates, Freud fails to see the positive phenomenological reality of the unconscious because he has already foreseen it as the negative image of consciousness (i.e., as the realm of what isn’t represented). That is, the essence of the unconscious is assumed to consist in representativity; it is assumed to possess the same laws and structure as consciousness, only it functions as its obverse side (Henry, 1993, p. 298). Consequently, the unconscious is merely a function of consciousness. In positing the existence of an unconscious, Freud acknowledges that there are undoubtedly elements of psychical experience that one cannot entirely represent at every moment — e.g., certain memories — but he does not contest the primacy of consciousness. In fact, just the opposite: as the negative image of consciousness, the unconscious always attests to the former’s primacy. Thus, while it is true that Freud does take steps toward contesting the primacy of consciousness within the metaphysics of representation by acknowledging that “unconscious activity” (e.g., drives, emotions), which takes place outside all representativity, determines consciousness in its entirety, he retreats from this position immediately and insists that this affective layer of life acquires psychical reality only through its representations (Freud, 1912b, pp. 262–64). As he states, I am in fact of the opinion that the antithesis of conscious and unconscious is not applicable to instincts. An instinct can never become an object of consciousness — only the idea that represents the instinct can. Even in the unconscious, moreover, an instinct cannot be represented otherwise than by an idea. If the instinct did not attach itself to an idea […] we could know nothing about it. (Freud, 1915a, p. 177) Thus, while Freud initially aligns subjectivity with an unconscious, affective life that always escapes objectification, Henry concludes that, in the end, he fails to provide an adequate treatment of its own positive phenomenological reality. As far as Henry is concerned, this misconception of the unconscious has significant ramifications for Freud’s approach to psychoanalytic therapy. Because unconscious drives and 427

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feelings can only come into being through their ideal representations, that is to say, through the language and symptoms that arise in the patient, the genuine object of psychoanalysis is not unconscious drives and feelings but the patient’s symptoms and general talk. For example, when a patient describes an occurrence that left her feeling shocked and dismayed, the analyst will focus on the patient’s talk about her feelings, not her feelings themselves (Welten, 2022, p. 96). Freudian psychoanalysis thus lives off of images. It largely downplays and ignores the patient’s feelings for their representations, as if the latter can live on their own. However, what Henry highlights is the fundamental contradictions and incoherencies in this position. As we have observed, Freud ultimately joins the reality of the unconscious to the laws and structure of representation. More specifically, this means that Freud regards the unconscious as operating according to representation’s “process of exteriorization [i.e., transcendence]” (Henry, 1993, p. 301). The unconscious functions as an ecstatic mode of appearing that harbors “unconscious representations,” which, as such, present “something other than themselves” (ibid., p. 298). Yet, as Henry goes on to observe, if the unconscious operates in this way, as a presentation of something that it is not, then this leads to an infinite regress, which fails to grasp the drive that makes representation possible in the first place (Henry, 1993, p. 298; Welten, 2022, p. 93). For example, using the psychoanalytic technique of free association, the analyst prompts the patient to talk in a stream-of-conscious manner in hopes that this may help reveal any past trauma on her part. As Freud observes, when the patient’s talk brings her close to any such trauma, the patient invariably adopts various forms of oppositional behavior toward the process (Freud, 1912c, pp.  101–03). According to Henry, what this reveals is that it is the unconscious feeling of discomfort, and not the representation of this feeling, that causes the patient to feel anxious or uncomfortable, and which leads her to resist the therapeutic process (Henry, 1993, pp. 312–13). In fact, as Freud himself notes, “the motive and purpose of repression [is] nothing else than the avoidance of unpleasure” (Freud, 1915b, p. 153). Therefore, were it not for this affective dimension of the subject, the process of free association would be interminable and would fail to provide any insight into the neurosis of the patient (Welten, 2022, p. 93). Freudian psychoanalysis is thus riddled by internal inconsistencies: on the one hand, it acknowledges the affect of the unconscious life of the subject on its conscious thinking and behavior; and yet, on the other hand, by denying this unconscious life its own mode of being and instead conflating it with that of consciousness, its fails to provide an adequate account of the role of the pathological material that is at the foundation of the patient’s neurosis and mistakenly centers itself around an analysis of the patient’s language and symptoms. For this reason, Henry boldly proposes that we need a fresh reading of psychoanalysis, one which untangles these contradictions and clarifies the nature and role of affectivity in psychoanalysis.

The Implications of Henry’s Phenomenology of Life on Psychoanalysis To begin to set psychoanalysis straight, Henry contends that we first need to determine the unique and independent mode of being proper to the affectivity of life. Despite the fact that he was well aware of the affective life of subjectivity, Freud does not provide an extended, or even consistent, account of the matter. As we have seen, the issue Henry takes with Freud’s account of the pathic life of the subject is that he conflates it with the structure and laws of consciousness. Freud assumes that life, like consciousness, is an ecstatic mode of 428

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appearing that harbors representations, and that the unconscious representations of life, as the negative image of consciousness, can win their phenomenal reality only by rising to the level of consciousness. Owing to this unquestioned prejudice, Henry contends that what Freud and much of the history of Western thought have overlooked is the fact that life is not first and foremost experienced (i.e., known) through the intermediary of a representation, or even through the intentionality of one’s bodily senses, which open the subject to the world. Instead, Henry insists that life is first known in itself, in its own immediate selfembrace, outside all exteriority. Thus, life is not a latent representation or objectivity; it has its own unique and independent mode of being, which consists in the radically immanent, singular, non-intentional, and non-objectifying movement by which it comes into and affects itself as the flesh of the living subject, or what Henry refers to as a subjective body, understood as “a body before sensation, and before the world” (Henry, 2015, p. 148). In this case, the phenomenological reality of the subject consists in nothing other than an immanent and affective self-givenness that forever escapes language and representation, but which each subject nevertheless feels and knows with complete certainty (i.e., an archintelligibility). Henry holds up our experience of pain and hunger as prime examples of this structure and law of life. In the experience of hunger, for instance, I find that I am unable to separate myself from this hunger-impression. As Henry writes, to be sure, I can indeed represent my hunger to myself and consider it in various ways, as something “purely psychological,” as “bulimia,” or even as an “injustice” or a “scandal.” But these way of envisaging hunger, of interpreting it, understanding it, and “thinking” about it […] do not change anything about the pure impression of hunger. (Henry, 2014, p. 23) The reason for this, Henry says, is that we do not have the hunger or pain as a property or object of sensation. The hunger does not come to me from an outside. Rather, I am this hunger, this pain, sorrow, fatigue, or joy. I am riveted to the hunger in my immediate selfgivenness to myself that is refractory to all representation. Consequently, no manner of representation or objective action can ever capture or relieve me from the reality of my pathos. In this sense, the truth of affectivity remains forever invisible. In turn, this means that no objectifying act of consciousness can ever help me understand the truth of life. As Henry writes, “[p]ain itself teaches me about pain and not some kind of intentional consciousness that would aim at its presence, its being there now” (Henry, 2008, p. 23). Not surprisingly, given the predominance of ontological monism in the history of Western thought, Henry’s account of life’s unique and independent way of being presents us with some counterintuitive findings. For one, it requires us to realize that affectivity does not refer to anything outside itself. As an immediate self-givenness, without distance or outside, there is a perfect “identity between the affectivity and the affected” (ibid., p. 121). As Henry writes, “[e]ach tonality is what it is […], the stuff of which it is made is its phenomenality” (Henry, 1973, p. 554). If Henry is correct, then, as Sébastien Laoureux points out, contrary to our customary way of thinking of the matter, the feeling of, say, pain, does not in any way refer to “the object in the presence of which the feeling occurs” (Laoureux, 2009, p. 396). Affectivity only ever arises from and refers to itself, independently of intentionality and the objects to which it relates. Indeed, on Henry’s account, it is only because life first takes hold of itself in this immediate way that we can explain how intentional consciousness is given to itself and can thus 429

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transcend itself and relate to something else (Henry, 2008, p. 117). Life is thus the transcendental condition of possibility for intentional consciousness. More concretely, this means that it is affectivity that determines our field of possibilities. It is affectivity that determines what events we can experience, such that “[w]hen intentionality arises, affectivity has already completed its work” (Laoureux, 2009, p. 396). Intentionality, on this account, is but the unreal translation of the inner reality of life that each of us undergo within our flesh. Thus, it is necessary to acknowledge that, as part of its mode of being, affectivity is essentially creative. By continuously coming into itself, the non-objectifying drive of life produces its own content independently of consciousness. As Henry writes, life continuously “brings into being what has not yet taken place in being: hitherto inexperienced tones, impressions, emotions, feelings and forces” (Henry, 2009, p. 108). Henry thus describes the generative movement of life as a transcendental imagination. As he writes, “[t]he imagination is indeed creative, even in a radical sense that gives it a positivity that was not glimpsed by classical thought” (ibid.). Henry regards the creative movement of life as driven by a need for self-growth. This need gives the subject an energy she feels compelled to deploy. By doing so, life’s need for self-growth is not fulfilled and diminished but given “free reign” and allowed to feed on itself and to grow (Henry, 2012, p. 100). On Henry’s account, life produces culture in order to release its energy and to thereby grow. In his view, culture does not primarily have to do with intentionality and its objective works, but with the inner, affective movement or action of life itself. As he writes, “‘[c]ulture’ refers to the self-transformation of life, the movement by which it continually changes itself in order to arrive at higher forms of realization and completeness, in order to grow” (ibid., p. 5). For Henry, it is primarily by engaging in high culture — i.e., in art, ethics, and religion — that life’s energy is able to grow and to forge a healthy personality on the part of the subject. For example, Henry contends that each affective movement within life finds an immediate equivalent within the forms and colors we experience in the world. Thus, by creating or observing a fine work of art, the subject is said to experience a creative arousal of new affective tonalities and movements within her flesh that appease life’s need for self-growth. Conversely, Henry acknowledges that it is possible for life’s energy to go unused and, out of a mounting sense of malaise and frustration, to turn against itself in a destructive manner (i.e., acts of barbarism) (ibid., p.  66). In his eyes, this occurs when the subject forgets that she is driven by life’s need for self-growth, and instead comes to regard her own intentional acts and its objectivity as the sole mode of appearing and knowing. For instance, Henry claims that Galileo’s science of nature (i.e., modern science) revolutionizes the European way of thinking by convincing its people to reject life’s immediate self-sensing and original know-how as illusory and to instead regard geometric-mathematical knowledge as the only type of knowledge worth taking seriously (ibid., p. 75). In this way, modern science sets the stage for the decoupling of technology and the political economy from life’s most essential needs. It encourages, for example, the shift away from an economy that is primarily concerned with serving the needs of life toward one that is increasingly insensitive to those needs for the sake of generating greater profits. In so doing, it contributes to the rise of ways of life that no longer satisfy life’s energy and which ultimately leave more and more people to feel increasingly disconnected from and hostile toward themselves and the world of life as a whole, and to develop a gamut of neurotic or otherwise destructive forms of behavior. 430

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This account of the nature of subjectivity and its well-being holds significant implications for the psychoanalysis. First, by disentangling life’s mode of being from that of intentional consciousness, and by showing how the former determines the subject’s reality and course of action, Henry’s phenomenology of life (or material phenomenology) establishes that the patient’s affective life must be the true object of psychoanalysis. On the basis of Henry’s phenomenological findings, it can be said that affectivity is essential to personality formation and to the development and alleviation of neuroses. More specifically still, it can be said that life’s need for creative self-expression is essential to each of these matters. In particular, Henry’s analyses reveal that, in contrast to Freud’s tendency to regard neurosis as a result of the patient’s failure to distribute the physiological or psychic energy of her sexual urges in some way, neurosis is in fact the result of a thwarted creativity. In turn, his analyses suggest that such neuroses can only be effectively addressed, not by objectifying them and by thereby providing the patient with a clearer understanding of them, but by cultivating the subject’s creative capacity. The analyst must therefore seek to determine what the patient’s language and general behavior reveal about her feelings. On the basis of this, the analyst must then seek to provide the patient with vital experiences that serve to remind her of her belonging to life, and which provide her impressional life with the growth it needs. Henry leaves us with some rough suggestions as to how this can be accomplished. To begin with, given the singular nature of each subject’s self-experience, the analyst should keep in mind that each patient’s need for growth, and thus each patient’s therapy, will, as a matter of necessity, be different. The patient’s growth, on this view, does not consist in meeting pre-established, objective conditions, which is precisely what so much modern psychoanalytic therapy strives to achieve. As Welten rightly notes, in modern psychiatry, “[l]ife becomes an object that must meet objective preconditions. Patients are then like cars being called back to the workplace. They must again become well-functioning people, according to scientific standards” (Welten, 2022, p. 105). Instead, a Henryian psychoanalysis would be one that pays due attention to the singular needs of each subject. Furthermore, in order to do precisely this, Henry’s work indicates that psychoanalysis should forgo its concentration on uncovering past psychological trauma and instead focus on attending to the patient in what Henry regards as her primal Now or living present. Since, on Henry’s account, the subjective body is experienced before the world and its ecstatic temporality, and is instead characterized by an immanent temporality without past, present, or future, it follows that the analyst should not try to draw the patient back to past pain or future concerns, but should instead seek to remind her of her immediate present and of what she is feeling and of what she needs here and now (Henry, 2012, p. 109). As our study suggests, this process is one whose techniques can include various forms of creative endeavor, including the creation and appreciation of art. In fact, Henry’s work can be seen as providing phenomenological justification for the use of creative techniques such as painting, sculpting, and drawing to release one’s energy and to grow. Finally, in contrast to his conclusions, Henry’s analyses indicate that the development of the subject’s life does in some ways depend upon intentionality and its attendant mindfulness. Despite his insistence that the life of the subject is entirely independent from intentionality, it is hard to ignore the fact that, in his account of life’s various transformations, intentionality plays an essential role in all of them. Henry’s analysis of the vital experiences involved in life’s growth (e.g., engagement with art, analytic transference (Henry, 2008, p.  129)) and decline (Galilean science, techno-capitalism) all require an intentional component. 431

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In fact, in his account of the role of his material phenomenology in the rediscovery of life, Henry does acknowledge some limited role for this theoretical inquiry. As he writes, “it suffices that it be conscious of the basic obscurity which in principle belongs to the essence [of life], not for the purpose of surmounting it, it is true, but in order to live it as such, in mystery” (Henry, 1973, p. 18). Thus, while Henry makes it clear that theoretical inquiry cannot in and of itself surmount the forgetting of life, this, alongside Henry’s study of culture in general, suggests that it can serve as a potential propaedeutic for life’s rediscovery. This has consequences for our understanding of the role of mindfulness and creativity in the psychoanalytic process. First, it deepens our understanding of the nature and limitations of the mindfulness of which Freud spoke. It opens the door to the possibility that the well-being of the patient may benefit from both analyst and patient practicing mindfulness. At the same time, in keeping with the foregoing study, it should be acknowledged that although mindfulness can potentially prepare the patient for her rebirth to life (i.e., a second birth), it cannot do so on its own. Indeed, as Henry’s study of culture suggests, there may be occasions when the practice of mindfulness may impede the exploration of one’s affective life, or when, in any case, it may simply prove unnecessary. Thus, mindfulness and creativity can enter into both productive and destructive exchanges in psychoanalysis and in general. In light of this, apart from involving an impartial attention to everything there is to perceive in the world, mindfulness should also involve an attentiveness to the limitations of one’s consciousness and to the invisible and sometimes uncontrollable force of the life that undergirds it. Being truly mindful requires that the subject impartially acknowledge her thoughts and feelings as they come while always remaining attentive to her own limitations and to the fact that the creative capacity of life exceeds our cognitive ability to grasp and control it. Thus, a crucial component in mindfulness is its vulnerability, its ability to be open to the unpredictable movement of life and to let it be. By practicing this newfound sense of mindfulness, the patient will find herself in a better position to liberate herself from her mental blockages and assumptions and to allow life’s creativity to have a dynamic role in her actions. Yet if life determines our field of possibilities and all of our actions, such that intentionality is merely its unreal translation, then it is not at all clear how intentionality can have these effects on life. In the end, despite his clarification of the role of life’s non-objectifying drives in the development of the subject, Henry’s strict separation of life from intentionality, of the transcendental condition of subjectivity from that which it conditions, is highly problematic. It is problematic not only because of its internal inconsistencies, but because, in denying intentionality any reality or causal efficacy of its own, and in thereby reducing life to a solipsistic self-enclosure, Henry fails to provide an adequate account of the intersubjective character of creativity and its connection with the mindfulness of consciousness. To further our understanding of the intersubjective character of creativity and mindfulness, and their role in psychoanalysis, it will be helpful to reconsider Henry’s insights in light of the work of Otto Rank.

Otto Rank and Michel Henry: A Missed Meeting Though Henry engages in a study of the history of psychoanalysis, he does not address the work of Rank. This is unfortunate, given the fact that, despite his differences with Henry, Rank stands very much in line with several key concerns and themes in his own 432

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phenomenological project. In line with Henry, Rank takes issue with Freudian psychoanalysis as a rational science of knowing, which is to say, as a dispassionate attempt on the part of the analyst to disregard the suffering of the patient in order to better analyze her language and symptoms and to improve her livelihood by furnishing her with intellectual knowledge (i.e., understanding of her childhood). In Rank’s view, Freud neglects the emotional character of human experience because, “[f]rom the point of view of [his] rational [and decidedly masculine] psychology, ‘feminine’ traits of emotionalism appear ‘irrational,’ whereas in reality they represent human qualities of a positive nature” (Rank, 1958, p. 241). Thus, where Freud views emotion as a problematic, hysterical derivate of sexual energy, Rank, like Henry, comes to regard it as central to human life and to psychoanalytic therapy (Rank, 1978, p. 8). Where Rank diverges from Henry is in his account of the will. In Rank’s account, the will is “the temporal representative of the cosmic primal force,” the energy or will-to-live of the cosmos expressed within us (ibid., p. 4). Thus, as Robert Kramer notes, Rank contends that “[w]illing puts us in touch with cosmic forces beyond our rational understanding” (Kramer, 2012, p. 344). The will, which, in Rank’s view, is always shot through with the spontaneous intelligence of the emotions, accomplishes this by giving us a subjective felt sense of life. Rank’s work suggests that this felt sense of life occurs on two levels: (i) as an involuntary, non-objectifying and pre-reflective will, and (ii) as a voluntary, objectifying and reflective (i.e., conscious) will. With this in mind, it must be said that Henry makes a significant oversight when he equates the transcendence of the world with object-manifestation. As Rank’s work helps demonstrate, even though, on his account, the will always involves an element of phenomenological distance or transcendence, it furnishes the subject with both a non-objectifying and an objectifying felt sense of life. Importantly, on both of these levels, Rank regards the will as a “positive guiding organization and integration of self which utilizes creatively, as well as inhibits and controls the instinctual drives” (Rank, 1981, p. 112). While putting us in touch with our instinctual drives and the force of the cosmos, the will thus provides each subject with a felt sense of agency or power. Throughout his work, Rank is adamant that the will is essentially dialectical in nature in that it is an expression of the subject’s drive for individuality (i.e., separation and selfassertion) and collectivity (i.e., union and self-renunciation). Consequently, in order to best satisfy life’s drive for self-assertion and growth, Rank maintains that the subject must strive to achieve a sense of balance amid the tension that is brought about by the dualities of life. It is out of a need to manage this tension and thus assert itself, Rank contends, that the will develops a creative urge for production, for novelty and difference. In his eyes, the development and well-being of the subject depends on how she manages the tension in her will. In his theory of personality, Rank identifies three basic personality types that represent three basic ways in which human beings tend to deal with the tension inherent to willing: the adapted type, the neurotic type, and the creative (or artistic) type. The adapted type is the everyday person. It is the person who mostly subordinates him or herself to the world by willing its prevailing norms and values and little else besides. Meanwhile, the neurotic is one whose will is stronger than that of the average person (Rank, 1989, p. 41). As a result, the neurotic tends to glorify herself and to place overly high demands on herself. When she invariably fails to meet those demands, she becomes highly critical of 433

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herself and is beset by feelings of inferiority and guilt. This leads the neurotic to develop an especially pronounced inner conflict. On Rank’s account, each subject is characterized by a fear of life, meaning a fear of separation, alienation, and loneliness, and a fear of death, meaning a fear of getting absorbed in the whole and of losing one’s individuality. Owing to her tendency to idealize herself, the neurotic is deathly afraid of losing her individuality, and yet, on account of her feeling of inferiority, she also fears separation and so is generally unwilling to relinquish past emotional bonds. Caught in this precarious situation, the neurotic continuously tries to restrict her experience by repressing her will and the will of her culture. In so doing, she tries to save and accumulate life as much as possible. Accordingly, as in Henry, Rank maintains that the neurotic is a result of a “failure in creativity” (Rank, 1958, p. 50). The neurotic is a “failed artist.” Finally, as the model of self-expression and growth, Rank views the creative type as a self-aware person who accepts herself and who utilizes her creativity to recreate herself and the world. She does this by creating an ideal that serves to center her will, and which enables her to creatively affirm her difference while maintaining new and ever-developing relations with the traditions of her culture (Rank, 1989, p. 41). It follows that psychotherapy is not about acquiring an intellectual knowledge that would allow one to overcome past trauma, but about learning “to will” and to feel in the here and now on both voluntary and involuntary levels (Rank, 1981, p. 9). In other words, the goal of therapy is to learn “how to lead one’s own self and, in the process, learning how to accept full responsibility for one’s own feelings rather than projecting them onto others” (Kramer, 2012, p. 336). In a therapeutic setting, it is the feeling relationship between analyst and patient that is the crux of such a transformation (Rank, 1926, p. 7). Through this caring relationship, the analyst should be mindful of the patient in her particularity – like Henry, Rank insists that the case of every patient is different – and, as something of a Socratic midwife, try to help her by assisting her in learning who she is and who she wants to become, in unlearning defunct ways of thinking (e.g., outmoded ideologies, beliefs, expectations) and feeling (e.g., exhausted emotional ties, such as one’s mother fixation) that have heretofore gone unquestioned and which have hindered her self-growth in the past, and in relearning how to creatively will her own individuality in relation to others in as healthy a way as possible (Rank, 1981, p. 105). It is important to keep in mind that, for Rank, the process of learning, unlearning (i.e., letting go), and relearning (i.e., letting come) is always an intersubjective one – hence his tendency to refer to his work as a “Thou-Psychology” (Rank, 1996, p. 153). As Kramer explains, “[t]he therapist’s feelings influence the patient every minute of every session. There are two hearts and two minds, plus a host of internal ‘objects,’ engaged in every analysis. Two ‘wills’ encounter, test, resist, trust, hate, love, heal and transform each other” (Kramer, 2012, p. 340). Creative willing thus requires an interplay, a willing and counterwilling. Speaking to this matter, Rank notes that when the analyst encourages the patient to begin considering what she desires and how she might be preventing herself from obtaining it, the “negative reaction of the patient represents the actual therapeutic value, the expression of will as such.” Vital to the differentiation of self from non-self, and to furthering self-leadership, resistance is “proof, however negative, of the strength of will on which therapeutic success ultimately depends.” (Kramer, 2012, p. 341; Rank, 1981, p. 13, p. 6) 434

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As an expression of the subject’s independence, the patient’s resistance to her treatment is a step toward a sense of her freedom and of her ability to creatively become who she wants to be in the world. As this indicates, in contrast to Henry, creativity is an intersubjective process. As evidenced in the patient-analyst relationship, creativity develops in the interplay between the two parties and the world at large. Creativity, it might be said, has to do with one’s felt sense of one’s ambiguous condition, and with choosing to let go of the dominant ways of thinking and feeling and to let one’s individuality come and forge new and ever-developing relations with the traditions of the world. For example, while an artist always draws on her cultural traditions (e.g., techniques and styles of painting), she does not strictly repeat them but recreates them and herself by forging unique and ever-developing relations with them. As a part of this process, Rank makes it clear that the patient also develops a more expansive and non-judgmental awareness of herself and the cosmos. The more the subject accepts and creatively affirms herself and the world, the larger and more inclusive view of life she develops, and the more dynamic, open, receptive, and accepting of life she becomes. We find here a clear sense of mindfulness at work in Rank. As our description indicates, this mindfulness is a dynamic and yet open and receptive state, in which the subject opens herself to others, the world and the cosmos as much as she can with as little presumption as possible and experiences herself and life in general in new ways. Therefore, mindfulness and creativity are interrelated. The more one’s creativity develops, the more mindful one becomes and vice versa. However, there remains the question as to why it is that, as Rank himself acknowledges, any balance that may be achieved between the will of the subject and that of her culture is difficult to achieve and ultimately temporary? Rank himself contends that the will can negate the instinctual drives. In his view, as we have seen, it is the will, and not any temporary conflict between the drives of the subject and the norms of her culture, that determines human behavior. Yet, if this is the case, then how do we explain the fact that, even after having made significant progress in the learning, unlearning, and relearning process, human beings still, despite their newfound will-power, engage in behavior that diverges significantly from their sense of who they are and of who they want to become? Is it simply that they have not yet developed their will sufficiently? Conversely, how might we explain moments of epiphany that come as a free and undeserved gift to those with little self-awareness or willingness to let go of outmoded attachments, and which have significant effects on the course of their lives? The unpredictable and widely varying experience of human beings, filled with unspeakable moments of destructiveness and epiphany, suggests that there is something more at play, and I believe that Henry’s phenomenological findings remain pertinent on this point. Henry’s work helps fill this explanatory gap by suggesting that the private, self-enclosed drives have a permanent and significant bearing on human conduct. While it is true that, as Rank suggests, creativity and mindfulness develop through our interactions with others, Henry is not wrong in his insistence that there is a part of these processes that always remains closed upon itself. It is this secret and mysterious life of the subject that helps explain the aforementioned moments of destructiveness and revelation that characterize human existence, and which ultimately make creativity and mindfulness the less than predictable and mysterious phenomena that they are. Though, as we have seen, creativity and mindfulness can be developed through our interrelations with others, they can also come like lightning from within the secret depths of life. 435

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Conclusion Taken together, then, the work of Henry and Rank reveals that creativity and mindfulness involve separation from and union with others. Both creativity and mindfulness can spring from the self-enclosed drives and from the interaction between human beings. In the latter case, creativity and mindfulness can develop together through those feeling relationships that attune the subject to her felt sense of her ambiguous condition, and which help her let go of the prevailing ways of thinking and feeling of her cultural tradition(s), and which help her individuality come forward and establish new and ever-developing relations with the traditions of the world. As established in the work of Rank, creativity and mindfulness are interrelated and can mutually benefit one another. As the subject accepts and affirms her difference in relation to the cultural traditions of the world, her creativity and mindfulness develop in tandem and can strengthen one another in mutual dynamic exchanges. At the same time, as we noted in our study of Henry, there are times when the practice of mindfulness can inhibit the development of the subject’s creativity and self-growth. However, in the end, the work of Henry and Rank reveals the crucial role of creativity and mindfulness in psychoanalysis. In fact, since, as both of these figures acknowledge, the case of every patient is different, there should be innumerable ways of developing the patient’s creativity and mindfulness. In particular, as we have seen, Henry’s work provides phenomenological justification for the use of various forms of art in therapy. Despite that being the case, perhaps owing to the severity of his critique of Freudian psychoanalysis, the implications of Henry’s work on psychoanalysis have yet to receive much attention. In fact, Ruud Welten’s “Freud After Henry,” and my article “A Psychoanalysis of Individuation: The Affective Heart of Repression in Michel Henry,” are some of the few works on the matter (Welten, 2022; Schaefer, 2020). On the other hand, Henry’s study of culture has received more consideration. Prominent works on this front include Michel Henry et l’affect de l’art: Recherches sur l’esthétique de la phénoménologie matérielle, and The Michel Henry Reader (Aden and Kühn, 2012; Davidson and Seyler, 2019). Meanwhile, the writings of Rank were a considerable inspiration on Rollo May in his development of existential psychotherapy, and figures such as Carl Rogers have credited Rank with having a significant role in laying the groundwork for modern-day clientcentered therapy. Prominent works on Rank’s approach to psychoanalysis are Separation, Will and Creativity: The wisdom of Otto Rank, and The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (Menaker, 1996; Progoff, 1973). For all that, as this chapter indicates, the work of both Henry and Rank harbor significant and still largely unexplored ramifications for psychoanalysis and for human life in general.

References Aden, J., & Kühn, R. (Eds.). (2012) Michel Henry et l’affect de l’art: Recherches sur l’esthétique de la phénoménologie matérielle, Leiden: Brill. Davidson, S. & Seyler, F. (Eds.). (2019) The Michel Henry Reader, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Freud, S. (1915a) The Unconscious. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition (Vol. 14) (pp. 159–215). London: Hogarth. ———. (1915b) Repression. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition (Vol. 14) (pp.  141–158). London: Hogarth.

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Mindfulness and Creativity ———. (1912a) Recommendations to Physicians Practicing Psycho-Analysis. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition (Vol. 12) (pp. 109–120). London: Hogarth. ———. (1912b) A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition (Vol. 12) (pp. 255–266). London: Hogarth. ———. (1912c) The Dynamics of Transference. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition (Vol. 12) (pp. 97–108). London: Hogarth. ———. (1909) Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy. In J. Strachey (Ed.), The Standard Edition (Vol. 10) (pp. 3–149). London: Hogarth. Henry, M. (2012) Barbarism. Trans. S. Davidson. New York: Continuum. ———. (2014) From Communism to Capitalism: Theory of a Catastrophe. Trans. Davidson, S. London: Bloomsbury. ———. (2015) Incarnation: A Philosophy of Flesh. Trans. Hefty, K. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. ———. (2008) Material Phenomenology. Trans. Davidson, S. New York: Fordham University Press. ———. (1973) The Essence of Manifestation. Trans. Etzkorn, G. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ———. (1993) The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Brick, D. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. (2009) Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky. Trans. Davidson, S. New York: Continuum. Kramer, R. (2012) Rank on Emotional Intelligence, Unlearning, and Self-Leadership, The American Journal of Psychoanalysis, 72 (4), 326–351. Laoureux, S. (2009) Hyper-Transcendentalism and Intentionality: On the Specificity of the ‘Transcendental’ in Material Phenomenology, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 17 (3), 389–400. Menaker, E. (1996) Separation, Will and Creativity: The Wisdom of Otto Rank, New Jersey: Claude Barbre. Progoff, I (1973) The Death and Rebirth of Psychology, New York: McGraw-Hill. Rank, O. (1989) Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development. Trans. C. F. Atkinson. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. (1958) Beyond Psychology, New York: Dover Publications. ———. (1996) A Psychology of Difference (Kramer, R., Ed.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. (1926) Technik der Psychoanalyse I: Die analytische Situation, Leipzig und Wien: Franz Deuticke. ———. (1978) Truth and Reality. Trans. Taft, J. New York: W. W. Norton. ———. (1981) Will Therapy. Trans. Taft, J. New York: W. W. Norton. Schaefer, M. (2020) A Psychoanalysis of Individuation: The Affective Heart of Repression in Michel Henry. In D. Popa & C. Bodea (Eds.), Describing the Unconscious: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Subject of Psychoanalysis (pp. 273–286). Bucharest: Zeta Books. Welten, R. (2022) Freud After Henry. In J. Hanson, B. Harding & M. Kelly (Eds.), Michel Henry’s Practical Philosophy (pp. 88–109). London: Bloomsbury.

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29 THE MINDFULNESS OF SACRIFICE Towards a “Phenomenology” of History Joseph Cohen

According to which Law, how and why, has History, its meaning and essence, questioned and continue to interrogate our thinking by incessantly problematizing our “being-inthe-world” indissociable from our “being-with-others”? The following will endeavour to approach this question and engage a philosophical investigation into the idea of History by deploying the conditions of possibility for a phenomenology of historical events, and thus engage our thinking into the analysis of singularity in History. How are we to approach singularity in History? In which sense are we to think the singularity of historical events and their “effects” on the very possibility of comprehending our historical past, understanding our historical present and projecting ourselves towards our historical future? How are we to enter into this preliminary investigation which seeks firstly to express the question of History, that is, its inherent philosophical problematization? It is through and from this problematic question that we will attempt to approach and indeed establish a possible meaning for the mindfulness of our historical being. Preliminarily, we ought to advance the task of this investigation and thus deploy in which manner and according to which Law History questions both our thinking and our action and thereby problematize our “being-in-the-world” indissociable from our “being-with-others” as always and already in History. That is, and otherwise formulated, in which manner can a reflection on History, and in this sense, on the singularity of historical events, open to the possibility of deploying a novel problematization of our “being-in-the-world” and “being-with-others” in History? The manner we are introducing our investigation certainly recalls Husserl’s “Project of the Investigations” in the opening pages of the Crisis: What is clearly necessary (what else could be of help here?) is that we reflect back, in a thorough historical and critical fashion, in order to provide, before all decisions, for a radical self-understanding: we must inquire back into what was originally and always sought in philosophy, what was continuously sought by all philosophers and philosophies that have communicated with one another historically. (Husserl, 1970, pp. 17–18) 438

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-36

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In the development of Husserl’s phenomenological method we can certainly mark several “phases” which are inscribed within various “turning points” or “shifts”. Indeed, if Husserl was always particularly concerned and attentive to the various manners by which one can enter into the phenomenological method, at the time of the Crisis it appears to the same Husserl how and why historical reflection is seen as a necessary and unavoidable constituent of philosophical investigation. In this sense, and following David Carr’s excellent suggestive interpretation, we can speak of a “historical turn” in Husserl’s phenomenology (cf. Carr, 1974, pp. 45–67). The question however remains: what constitutes this “historical turn” in phenomenology? How is phenomenology resolutely inscribed within a historical reflection and furthermore through a questioning of History? In which manner can the original phenomenological question – according to which structure of donation is the world given to our knowledge? – itself remain constituted by the question of History? Husserl’s “Project of the Investigations” marks a capital and important point, namely how and why the question of History remains irreducible to an epistemological understanding. Indeed, Husserl insists on the necessity for a “historical and critical” step back and therefore marks the requisite for a certain bracketing of the epistemological determination of History. This phenomenological insistence and prerequisite was certainly already at work in the Cartesian Meditations where Husserl had marked how and why static phenomenology needed to be supplemented and extended by a genetic analysis. The Crisis however furthers this need by posing that what remains to be explicated and indeed uncovered before the epistemological determination of the meaning of History is the manner in which History is given as meant to our “radical self-understanding” (Husserl, 1970, p. 17). In other words, how and why, according to which law, from which horizon of donation and signification, are historical events given as meant to our consciousness? In this sense, although never dissociated nor detached from the possibility of inscribing historical events within an epistemic and normative narrative of signification, the question of History also calls onto another modality of thinking, one which, “before all decisions” (ibid., pp. 17–18), also suspends and brackets this epistemic and normative determination in order to engage in a reflection on who we are in History and consequently, who are we who are so thoroughly historical? Who are we who acknowledge our History as meant and furthermore as meant in the relation between our present and our past and from this relation can project ourselves towards a future? In which sense and according to which horizon of signification is the meaning of this alliance, relation, bridge between our historical past and our lived present given and furthermore how are we to understand ourselves within this exposition to the meaning of our historical being through which we mean our responsibility in the name of our future? The need for this other modality of thinking History certainly befell on Husserlian phenomenology. Indeed, if Husserl’s point of departure in the very inception of the phenomenological method was to mark the distinction, revealed through the “reduction”, between the “natural attitude” and the “transcendental ego”, headed by the directing question – which is the regime of donation through which, from which, according to which the world is given as meant? – and furthermore aimed at describing and deploying the pregivenness of “what there is” in view or in order to question how beings are given as meant to consciousness and why these are depicted through an act of constituting types of relations and syntheses between intention and fulfilment, the Cartesian Meditations insist on the necessity, within the work of this “reduction”, of a further distinction. Indeed, Husserl calls onto for a certain supplement which, without abandoning the static phenomenological reduction 439

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which “concern particular types” in order to arrange these in a “systematic order”, engages a genetic analysis of meant-givens. This further distinction between “static phenomenology” and “genetic phenomenology”, what we are here calling a supplement from “static phenomenology” to “genetic phenomenology”, is certainly prompted and spurred by the inherent complexity and intricacy of the act of constitution itself which intentionally fulfils the synthetic unification of the multiplicity of the meant-givens in a temporal present. But, as Husserl depicts and explicates the intentional movement within the act of constitution – that act which “meaningfully fulfils its meant [Meinung seines Gemeinte]” (Husserl, 1960, p. 46)1 – he also furthers the depiction and explication of this act by adding how its “meant [Vermeinte]” is more than what is meant at that moment “explicitly” (ibid.). This proposition indicates how the act of constitution is never reducible to a static ordering of phenomenality. It also supposes and engages a supplement of meaning for each meant in each act, a supplement through which each meant given remains irreducibly indebted to more than what is “explicitly” given as meant. For Husserl, indeed, this supplement marks nothing less than a temporal structure irreducible to the simple sequencing of events within consciousness itself. That is, this supplement marks the recognition in and by the intentional consciousness of a modality of temporality irreducible to the chronological sequencing of meant-givens and thereby distinguishes the intentional act of consciousness from the inscription of events in a string of temporal “nows”. Husserl points here to what we could call the actualisation of potentialities which remain contained and concealed in each meant given. In this movement, consciousness deploys itself as the incessant and perpetual actualizations of possibilities contained in each meant given within a temporal flux whereby what is given as meant always and already implies and supposes the double movement of retention and protention – retention of past meant-givens and their protention into actualizable possibilities of meaning – which institutes a continuous intentional modification in which meant-givens always presuppose a suppletive genesis, that is a suppletive dimensionality as an essential feature of consciousness oriented not solely by factuality or objectivity, but also by and through what Husserl calls its “pure possibilities”. However, this genetic turn in phenomenology marks not only the process of retention and protention in each constitutive act, but it also, and perhaps more fundamentally so, institutes an extension beyond the sphere of reference for each meant-given. That is: it institutes an original temporal horizon and background which stretches outside the sphere of the given to manifest how it always and already contains “sedimented prominences” (Husserl, 1969, p.  319) wholly and entirely directed towards the transfer of the given to either it being, by consciousness, confirmed or disconfirmed. Always and already a given stretches beyond its givenness to signify for consciousness an “abiding possession” (Husserl, 1960, p. 60), that is, a retained acquisition which is to be “seen” not solely as it occurred in its past occurrences, but also from the novel, differing, varying perspectives and possibilities of its givenness as meaningful. Each given can, by consciousness, be retrieved and rememorated and, through this retrieval and rememoration and whilst always remaining the same meant-given, shows itself again to consciousness as the possibility of revealing different significations of itself. In this sense, Husserl introduces a novel hypothesis. Indeed, Husserl marks how the present re-occurrence of a meant-given incessantly “influences” its past occurrence for a consciousness in its lived-present. The meant-given is not only remembered as past, it also contains the possibility of re-occurring as altered for a consciousness in its lived-present. Certainly, this “alteration”, this “change” or this “shift” in the re-occurrence 440

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of a past meant-given is concentrated in the very unity of consciousness, that is consigned within its “time-constituting flux”. Indeed, for Husserl, the auto-constitution of consciousness, the deployment of its “unity-in-multiplicity” from which and according to which the multiplicity of its acts of constitution are predicated stands correlatively on the stock of sedimented potentialities, revived acquisitions which form and institute a “substrate of potentialities” (ibid., p 66) within the original temporality of consciousness itself. It would be here important, and necessary, to carefully and meticulously trace the relation between the impetus of genetic phenomenology and the problem of intersubjectivity, and furthermore demonstrate how this relation informs the very question of History beyond Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and most particularly in the Crisis. This analysis would be too lengthy for the space here allotted2, but we ought at least indicate here, and following the question of History we are here appproaching phenomenologically, the manner in which, for Husserl, the lived-present of consciousness is always exposed to yet undiscovered and concealed possibilizations of other meanings erupting from and through the re-occurrence in its lived-present of its past meant-givens. Consciousness indeed relives its past meant givens in and within the novel possibilities which can show themselves in its life-world through the re-occurrence of its past meant-givens. And it is through this incessant and possible alteration of the past in its present that consciousness recognizes its past as its own temporal genesis, that is, as its own history. Certainly, Husserl stresses most particularly how and why the act of remembrance always supposes a certain recognition of that which was once actually present to our consciousness. Indeed, Husserl marks how remembering means firstly and foremostly that a past meant-given returns to our livedpresent as once “having-been-perceived” by consciousness. And in this sense, and always following Husserl, remembrance means the act by which a memorial object is re-given to consciousness in its lived-present on the basis of the reproduction of the original act of perception and consequently as having once been experienced by consciousness. To remember, means, for consciousness, that its past experience is reproduced as a present lived experience, and furthermore in remembering its past, consciousness is always and already engaged in recalling its having experienced its past into the immanent consciousness of its lived-present. And yet, at the same time and simultaneously, the act of remembering a historical event is also projecting a past meant-given for a consciousness where the givenness of its meaning is always rethought and indeed re-membered through the novel possibilities of encountering it anew in the actuality of its present life-world. A historical event is thus never simply a past consigned to the past for a recollecting, commemorating or memorializing consciousness – it is in a past where its past is always and already possibilized anew in its remembrance, re-possibilized otherwise and re-enacted wholly differently than as it appeared in its original occurrence in the present life-world of our historical consciousness. In this sense, a historical event is never as such only historically past. It is historical insofar as its past is always returning otherwise to the present and indeed the future of consciousness, re-lived and given-again to its lived-present and for its futurity distinctly than how it occurred to the same consciousness.3 We can see here at work what we would be tempted to call a certain double-bind within the “historical turn” of Husserlian phenomenology. A certain irremediable tension works through the very life-world and lived-present of our historical consciousness. This aporia could perhaps be expressed in the following question: from whence can our historical consciousness pretend recover its own-most presence if, in its remembrance, each past meant-given returns to it always otherwise than where it could contain it within historical 441

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consciousness? From where can our historical consciousness recognize its history as the genesis of its historical consciousness when the possibility of the retention of its past returns already otherwise than where it would suppose or presuppose the recognition of our time-consciousness? Always and already projecting other and indeterminate multiple meanings rupturing the “extended present” and the confluence of pretension and retention constituting the acts of our historical remembrance? Always and already projecting other and indeterminate multiple meanings than the unifying meaning which could refer these to the recognition of our own-most time-consciousness? And furthermore, or stretching these questions to a certain limit of intentionality, from where can our historical consciousness recognize its own history, and itself through its own history, if to remember is to always witness historical singularities which remains each time irreducible to their remembrance? According to which Law can our historical consciousness rethink its past when testimony means to project memory towards that which returns from the past as an unretrievable, unrecognizable, unthematizable futural singularity? Here thus lies the question of History we wished to approach: what is sacrificed of History within the movement of its retrieval and rememoration for an intentional consciousness always capable of referring its past meant-givens to the possibilities of its lived-present and thereby reconduct each act of the remembrance of its past within its original time consciousness? What is sacrificed in the remembrance of our History for the lived-present of our intentional consciousness? Are historical events not also marking in and for an intentional consciousness that which remains singularly outside the possible translation of any retrieval and remembering, rememorating or recollection, beyond or outside the anamnesis of an intentional consciousness? Are historical events not also returning to our historical consciousness each time singularly, re-occurring as the singular caesura of the very possibility of a phenomenology of history, something as a suppletive epoche of the phenomenology of history? Husserl, to our knowledge, never has recourse to the word or indeed the idea of sacrifice, its logic or its inherent theological signification. But although Husserl never refers, again to our knowledge, to the logic of sacrifice in the development of the phenomenological method, from what we named static phenomenology to genetic phenomenology, are we not also justified in suspecting in the modality of remembrance, in the movement where past meant-givens are rethought within the possibilities of a lived-present for an intentional consciousness, a certain sacrificial operation? A certain sacrificial operation which, far from forgetting or obliterating the past, has nonetheless established the possibility for our historical consciousness to ensure the present recognition of our past as ours and in this sense of commemorating our past as our history. In other words, and to further our question: is the commemoration of our past as our history within our lived-present not also imply the sacrifice of the historical singularities in each singular historical event in the name of our mindfulness of history? And furthermore, according to which Law are we justified in this sacrificial operation in the name of our historical consciousness? Ought our consciousness not also confront our past by incessantly remaining mindful of how and why, where and to which end it sacrifices the historical singularities in each singular historical event in the name of the possibility of historical remembrance and commemoration? Ought our historical consciousness not also confront the past by refusing to settle for its commemoration? And thus, project itself towards a historical trauma perpetually mindful of the sacrifices in our history and, by the same gesture, incessantly refusing to sacrifice once more these very sacrifices in the name of our historical and commemorative consciousness? 442

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These questions remain preliminary. They seek to open towards a thinking where the unretrievable or unmemorable, the un-commemorable not only cannot find a discourse or a logos, a reference or a reconduction, but also where the unrecognizable historical singularities in each singular historical event express singularly their impossible predicate? That is, and in other words, can phenomenology show the suspension of its own intentionality and let historical singularities express themselves in our historical consciousness beyond recollection, remembrance and commemoration? And could we speak or think this beyond where the phenomenological shows itself, avows to itself, confesses to be wholly and entirely misplacing, and ultimately sacrificing, the historical singularities in each singular historical event it seeks, at the same time, to express? These questions are preliminary also in that they point towards a phenomenality incessantly differing and deferring its possible phenomenality – that is, they point towards that which, in history, incessantly voids and dismantles phenomenality itself. And this: in the name of a wholly other thinking of history. These questions point towards that which in history returns to our lived-present not simply as a past inscribable in our time-consciousness, and therefore, not solely as a past meant-given in waiting to be recalled and retrieved in and within our historical intentional consciousness, but as that which returns as if it never previously occurred and thus as that which is always and already futural, diachronically de-structuring the foundational and original temporal presence of transcendental subjectivity. These questions already point, beyond or outside the phenomenological task of remembrance, to that which in history returns from our singular pasts to our lived-present as singularly futural. As a past which does not pass into the past of a recognized livedpresent, but incessantly returning as occurring each time singularly from an un-passing future. Indeed, these questions point towards the spectres of history. Can phenomenology think the spectralities of history, that which remains at once and simultaneously occurrence and non-occurrence, that which occurs before phenomenality and non-phenomenality, presence and absence, past and future, retention and protention? Can phenomenology speak to the spectralities of our history which each time singularly both resist their remembrance and thereby incessantly haunting our lived-present? And which response, which idea of justice, if any – that is which responsibility can be endorsed in the face of that which precedes appearance and non-appearance, which occurs as non-appearing and whose nonappearance is also a form of its appearance – can our historical subjectivity give to the each time singular spectres returning from our history to haunt our history? What can it mean to be mindful, to fill our minds or fulfil our minds, with the each time singular spectres in our history and who, as spectres, occur without remembrance and without recognition, breaking and splicing our lived-present, our time-consciousness, our historical consciousness and yet command a singular justice for the unnameable, for the multiplicity of the unnamed, in our history?

Notes 1 Cf. Husserl (1960, p.  46): “is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant [Meinung seines Gemeinte]”. 2 Cf. on this very point, the excellent and already quoted study Carr (1974), and most particularly chapters III and IV, pp. 68–109. 3 We are here profoundly indebted to N. de Warren who, in Husserl and the Promise of Time. Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009), provocatively whilst remaining wholly faithful to Husserl’s analysis of remembrance, marks the

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Joseph Cohen intentional duality of memory, that is, the double movement of the remembering consciousness as both suspending and transcending itself in the reproduction of its past self. N. de Warren indeed indicates how intentionality is doubled in the act of remembrance and furthermore marks why “these two branches of intentionality do not refer in the same manner. The intentionality directed towards my past perception is not of the same character as the intentionality directed towards the past object. The intentionality directed towards my past consciousness should not be conflated with an act of reflection, in which an act of consciousness becomes ‘thematized’ and ‘objectified’.” (p. 166). This extraordinary interpretation of the act of remembrance and thus of the retention of the past in our historical consciousness is not only stated and affirmed. N. de Warren brings it to its radical limit in and within Husserl’s phenomenology by furthering it to the point of situating the act of remembrance and the very possibility of witnessing or “giving testimony” as that point where “to remember something of the past is automatically to betray my own presence as having once been there in the past. In recalling a past perception, memory must also reproduce the elapsed portion of time-consciousness in which the perception was originally constituted” (p. 167). After marking what we could here call a certain deconstruction of presence in and within the presence of the phenomenological subject – deconstruction of presence in and within the very presential temporality of the phenomenological subject and thus its presential identity (which in no means would entail a negation of its unity-in-multiplicity – N. de Warren risks the following: “The past returns to us as a ghost; it continues as an ‘after-life’ that inserts its own time within my actual experience” (ibid.). Perhaps violently, we interrupt here our reading of this extraordinary analysis which N. de Warren pursues admirably throughout the quoted work. We interrupt our reading in order to remain haunted by this reading which suggests nothing less than the hauntology of our past: “The past returns to us as a ghost…” Who ‘is’ this “ghost”, our past, incessantly returning to our historical consciousness? What ‘is’ this “ghost”, our past, haunting our lived-present and which we name “our” history? And from where in our past and how from our past does this “ghost” return to haunt – and in which sense, if the question of sense and signification can still be here authoritative? – our lived-present? And furthermore, which logos can be here convoked to speak to this “ghost”, our past? From where in phenomenology can our historical consciousness ever pretend to approach this “ghost”, our past, this simultaneously and indeterminately “present” and “absent” event, this both and undistinguishable past and futural occurrence, this at once appearing and non-appearing rupture and caesura of the dichotomy between presence and absence? Are we not here facing an event, an occurrence, a rupture and a caesura forcing our historical consciousness to suspend itself and abandon both its consciousness and its historicity? These questions, which may perhaps seem inappropriate – out of place, misplaced or “décallées” as these most likely mark a break with Husserl’s model of doubleintentionality, since this ghost, our past, can only be – for Husserl – oneself as past and never that which haunts from within and without, from before and beyond our historical consciousness – allow us here to dedicate them to N. de Warren before all in testimony of philosophical friendship.

References Carr, D. (1974). Phenomenology and the Problem of History. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. de Warren, N. (2009). Husserl and the Promise of Time. Subjectivity in Transcendental Phenomenology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. Trans. D. Carr, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl, E. (1969). Formal and Transcendental Logic. Trans. D. Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Husserl, E. (1960). Cartesian Meditations. Trans. D. Cairns, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

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30 ENGAGING WITH LIFE MINDFULLY Gerhard Thonhauser

Introduction The phenomenological method, both in its initial formulation by Husserl and in its modification by Heidegger, suggests that there are three distinct modes of comportment. With Husserl (1982), we might call them attitudes towards the world, and in the terminology of Heidegger (1996), we might call them modes of being-in-the-world. A particularly lucid and illuminating formulation of this distinction can be found in the preface of MerleauPonty’s (2012) Phenomenology of Perception, in which Merleau-Ponty presents his take on the phenomenological method. The first attitude or mode is that of distant observation. Phenomenologists associate this with the paradigm of modern natural science, which aims to generate objective knowledge about the world. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty label this the objective attitude, Heidegger discusses it in terms of knowing (Erkennen) entities given as present-at-hand (Vorhandenes). Against the proliferation of the objective attitude into more and more areas of life, phenomenologists stress the importance of a second mode of comportment, that of skillful absorption. Our everyday life does not take place in a world of abstract entities, but in an environment that consists of invitations to engage in meaningful and relevant activities. Accordingly, we are first and foremost not related to the world in terms of knowledge about it, but in terms of knowing how to find one’s way around it. Husserl and Merleau-Ponty call this mode of comportment the natural attitude, Heidegger refers to it as taking care of (Besorgen) entities given as ready-to-hand (Zuhandenes). The third mode of comportment is the phenomenological attitude. The phenomenological attitude sets itself apart from being absorbed into everyday activities, but it does not leap into the distanced observer perspective of the objective attitude. It remains engaged with the meaningfulness of everyday life, but no longer takes it for granted. For Husserl, the crucial step towards the phenomenological attitude is the epoché, meaning the bracketing of the taken-for-grantedness of a given world, which is characteristic of the natural attitude. Heidegger discusses the phenomenological attitude in various terms throughout his oeuvre, among them Entschlossenheit, Besinnung, and Gelassenheit. The phenomenological attitude as a third mode of comportment has been picked up by philosophers (Bitbol, 2014) and cognitive scientists (Varela et al., 1993) with an interest DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-37

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in Buddhism. However, it is very much an issue of debate whether the phenomenological attitude and Buddhist mindfulness are in fact all that similar as many assume (Stone & Zahavi, 2021). Unrelated to this connection between the phenomenological attitude and mindfulness practices, the phenomenological attitude has also received attention in phenomenological approaches to critical theory (Alcoff, 2006; Aldea et al., 2022). This chapter bears upon both developments, but it primarily explores the phenomenological attitude in Heidegger’s work. The aim is to contribute to our understanding of what it means to engage with life mindfully.

Phenomenology as Ontology There is a widespread preconception of phenomenology which associates it with the firstperson perspective and subjective experience. Given the descent of Husserl’s phenomenology from Brentano’s (1874) psychology, Husserlian phenomenology might rightfully be identified with the study of structures of consciousness, bringing it in close proximity to descriptive psychology. But the understanding of phenomenology that Heidegger endorses is quite different. He repudiates the link between phenomenology and consciousness and identifies phenomenology instead with universal ontology. In fact, he makes the even bolder claim that phenomenology is the only suitable method for the formulation of a universal ontology. The most condensed formulation of this claim can be found in §7 of Being and Time, in which Heidegger elaborates on his understanding of phenomenology: “Phenomenology is the way of access to, and the demonstrative manner of determination of, what is to become the theme of ontology. Ontology is possible only as phenomenology” (SZ, p. 35). Heidegger makes it clear that he understands neither phenomenology nor ontology as subdisciplines of philosophy (besides, for instance, epistemology or ethics), but as the proper names of philosophy itself: “Ontology and phenomenology are not two different disciplines which among others belong to philosophy. Both terms characterize philosophy itself, its object and procedure. Philosophy is universal phenomenological ontology …” (SZ, p. 38). Hence, when we reflect with Heidegger on the phenomenological method, we are reflecting on how philosophy in general is possible. And for Heidegger, reflecting on the possibility of philosophy is not about some peculiar profession, but about the very foundations of ourselves and our world: What makes us the beings who we are? How does the world come about as it is? To understand why Heidegger grants phenomenology such a pivotal position, we need to understand the core of his methodological approach. A cornerstone of Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology is that “nothing else stands ‘behind’ the phenomena of phenomenology” (SZ, p. 36). With this statement Heidegger opposes a Kantian framework which assumes a thing-in-itself (which is independent of our observation and which we can know nothing about) behind the appearances (which are the manifest objects of our engagements). For Heidegger, how things show themselves to a phenomenological analysis discloses what they truly are: “With the guiding question of the meaning of being the investigation arrives at the fundamental question of philosophy in general. The treatment of this question is phenomenological” (SZ, p. 27). However, Heidegger’s approach is far from a naïve realism in which we simply need to look at things to know what they truly are. Instead, the other key assumption of his methodological approach is that things usually and for the most part do not show themselves as what they truly are. He states that, “what is to become a phenomenon can be concealed” (SZ, p. 36). When things do not present 446

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themselves as what they actually are, we encounter them inauthentically. Authenticity, by contrast, means that we encounter things as what they really are. Authenticity and inauthenticity are misleading translations of Eigentlichkeit and Uneigentlichkeit. It is important to note that these terms “are terminologically chosen in the strictest sense of the word” (SZ, p. 43). But at the same time, how Heidegger uses these terms is closely related to the everyday usage of the adjective “eigentlich” (Käufer, 2015). The question: “What is something eigentlich?,” is best translated as: “What is it truly, actually, or really?” Hence, being authentic means that something shows itself as what it really is, whereas being inauthentic means that something shows itself differently from what it really is. Hence, authenticity and inauthenticity are methodological terms that are closely related to the phenomenological method. When Heidegger states that we first and foremost exist inauthentically, he means that in everyday live, we do not encounter things as what they truly are. For that exact reason, “because phenomena are initially and for the most part not given[,] phenomenology is needed” (SZ, p. 36). In other words, the phenomenological attitude is needed to allow the phenomena to reveal themselves as what they truly are. Hence, Heidegger’s definition of phenomenology: “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself” (SZ p. 34). We have seen that doing phenomenology means to let things show themselves as what they actually are. To make phenomenology possible, we need to transition from the natural attitude of everyday life or the objective attitude of modern natural sciences to the phenomenological attitude. Heidegger, however, says little about how to exercise the phenomenological method in practice. By contrast, he says a lot about what a phenomenological ontology reveals. What it reveals is a rather surprising twist, given Heidegger’s emphasis on letting things show themselves as what they truly are. If we engage things within a phenomenological attitude, Heidegger claims, we do not find some true nature of things which we might positively describe. Rather, we are confronted with a radical groundlessness that befalls mind and world alike. This is the point in which Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology might have the closest similarities with Buddhist philosophy (Varela et al., 1993). Both Heideggerian phenomenology and Buddhism teach that the groundlessness of mind and world is what we find when we engage in the practice of phenomenology respectively mindfulness. Thus, it is worth diving into the details of what Heidegger has to say about groundlessness.

Groundless Minds Let us first take a look at the issue of the self. Heidegger addresses this issue throughout Being and Time, but most prominently in §27 and §64. §27 is one of the most discussed segments of Being and Time, but usually not in relation to the issue of the self, but regarding the social ontology provided by Heidegger’s notion of das Man, usually translated as the They or the Anyone (cf. the debate between Olafson (1994a, 1994b) and the Dreyfus camp (Carman, 1994; Dreyfus, 1995). Although mostly ignored by those commentators, this paragraph includes an interesting take on the issue of the self. To understand the perspective on the self developed in §27, we need to briefly contextualize this paragraph within Division One of Being and Time. Division One of Being and Time presents an analysis of Dasein’s being-in-the-world in its everydayness. Heidegger emphasizes that being-in-the-world is a holistic structure, which means that all aspects of being-in-the-world need to be understood against the background of the entire structure. 447

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But for the purpose of explication, we can analytically focus on elements of the whole. Following common wisdom, we might start either from the direction of the “object” or from the direction of the “subject.” In the words of Being and Time, the questions concern the worldliness of the world and who it is who is in the world. In Being and Time, Heidegger discusses the issue of the world first and then moves to the question of the self. Matters are presented the other way round here, discussing chapter 4 of Division One first which deals with the issue of the self. The key question of this chapter is: Who is Dasein in its everydayness? (SZ, p. 114). Heidegger provides his answer in §27 in which he discusses “everyday being one’s self” (SZ, p. 126). Heidegger presents a twofold analysis through which he reveals how the perspective of the natural attitude and the perspective of the phenomenological attitude diverge from and contradict each other. Confronted with the question “Who is Dasein?,” the natural attitude in its skillful absorption into everyday matters states the seemingly obvious answer: “I.” It appears self-evident that, in the case of each Dasein, it is an “I” or a “self” who is in the world. However, against this taken-for-grantedness of a self at the core of Dasein, Heidegger suggests that Dasein in its everydayness is actually “nobody”: “The Anyone, which supplies the answer to the who of everyday Dasein, is the nobody to whom every Dasein has always already surrendered itself, in its being-among-one-another” (SZ, p. 128). On the one hand, Dasein in its everydayness cares about its uniqueness. There is a genuine care about being a unique self. For that reason, what Heidegger calls “distantiality” in all its modalities is of crucial importance for everyday comportment (SZ, p. 126). Dasein’s care about its self is cultivated by constant concerns about one’s status in comparison to others. On the other hand, phenomenological analysis reveals that “the ‘who’ is the neuter, the Anyone” (SZ, p. 126). The care for one’s uniqueness is actually just a sign of one’s subjection under the norms governing how one goes about everyday life. Heidegger’s twofold analysis of the role of the self in everyday existence has striking similarities with Buddhist approaches to the self. In the words of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1993, p. 62): “Just as the mindfulness meditator is amazed to discover how mindless he is in daily life, so the first insights of the meditator who begins to question the self are normally not egolessness but the discovery of total egomania.” Here we also see the twofold analysis of everydayness: On the one hand, the analysis reveals that we do care about our selves. But upon closer inspection, we become aware that everydayness is lived in the mode of the Anyone-self. It is driven by habitualizations, following norms and routines, and there is no strong sense of self to be found: “The tension between the ongoing sense of self in ordinary experience and the failure to find that self in reflection is of central importance in Buddhism” (Varela et al., 1993, p. 61). Before pursuing this matter further with reference to §64, let me add some remarks about the sociocultural and intellectual context of Heidegger’s analysis. The everyday lifeworld Heidegger encountered in the 1920s was that of a nascent mass society which is usually associated with Fordist industrial organization, mass media communication, and a tendency towards cultural conformity. This development was broadly reflected in the intellectual scene of the Weimar Republic. The critique of mass society was in vogue in the 1920s and thus, Heidegger could build on and add to a broad trend of sociocultural critique when formulating his analysis of mass society in terms of the Anyone (das Man). In 1923, for instance, György Lukács published his book History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, introducing key concepts like reification that became a cornerstone of a critical theory of modern, capitalist, mass society (Lukács, 1923). But of 448

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course, in sharp contrast to Lukács, Heidegger’s critique of mass society was not motivated by a Marxist background. Rather, it is more adequately seen as a contribution to a broad trend in the Weimar Republic that was later labeled the conservative revolution. However, one should be cautious about the label “conservative revolution,” as it was only introduced later to summarize a very heterogeneous intellectual field into a seemingly coherent movement. The label was introduced by Armin Mohler in 1949 and is until today an important historical reference for movements of the New Right in the German-speaking countries of central Europe (Mohler & Weissmann, 2005). But the critique of mass society resonated in the entire political spectrum, not only in the period between the world wars, but also in the post-war era. Two key examples of this broader appeal of a critique of mass society, which are both from a phenomenological background with some resonance of Heidegger, but also quite critical of Heidegger’s own political take on matters, are Marcuse’s (1964) One-Dimensional Man and Natanson’s (1986) Anonymity. Now, what has all of that to do with the issue of the self? A great deal, because it shapes how the matter of the self becomes salient in the lifeworld. If the sociocultural setting is one of perceived anonymization and one-dimensionality of existence based on the development of mass society, it seems obvious that the aim of one’s existence should be to find and defend one’s self against the powerful forces of society which aim to level all selves into cultural conformity. Nowadays, we can see this discourse about the oppression of the self in mass society from a distance. The late-capitalist societies in which we live today are no longer driven by a trend of generalization towards a common standard. Rather, as Reckwitz (2017) has labeled it, we live in a Society of Singularities. In such a society, the presentation of one’s self in its uniqueness has become a key commodity. Following this trend towards the valorization of “doing singularity,” as Reckwitz calls it, we have become self-entrepreneurs that are constantly engaged in measures of self-tracking and selfoptimization. As part of this New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2017), even mindfulness practices have not been immune to commercial appropriation. This trend has been criticized under the catchy label McMindfulness: “Mindfulness is sold and marketed as a vehicle for personal gain and gratification. Self-optimization is the name of the game. I want to reduce my stress. I want to enhance my concentration. I want to improve my productivity and performance. One invests in mindfulness as one would invest in a stock hoping to receive a handsome dividend” (Purser, 2019, pp. 10–11). Of course, the commercial appropriation of mindfulness into the latest spirit of capitalism is far removed from the original Buddhist teachings. But still, it is a cultural trend to be reckoned with. Similarly, self-entrepreneurship is incompatible with Heidegger’s phenomenological outlook on the issue of the self. But nevertheless, Heidegger’s work has been interpreted as promoting the task of expressing one’s true self. At this point, it is useful to discuss §64 of Being and Time to get a better grasp of Heidegger’s take on the matter. This paragraph has received little attention in the reception of Heidegger’s work. One can also note that the remarks in §64 are rather sketchy, and it seems fair to say that it allows to reconstruct only rough contours of Heidegger’s take on the issue of the self. However, the few things that are obvious about Heidegger’s take on the self in §64 are very important, as they allow to correct a common misinterpretation of Being and Time. This common interpretation goes as follows: On the one hand, Division One describes the everyday self, which Heidegger calls the Anyone-self (Man-selbst), a self that is characterized by its conformity to the standards established by the Anyone (das Man). On the other hand, Division Two is concerned about the authentic self (eigentliches 449

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Selbst), in which each Dasein exists according to its uniqueness as a single individual. This reading can be found in many established and much-received interpretations of Being and Time. For instance, Mulhall (2013) understands authentic selfhood in terms of authentically expressing one’s individuality, and Crowell (2013) understands it in terms of authentically confirming a practical identity. Such interpretations are in line with mainstream discourse of High Modernity, which was about establishing and maintaining one’s self against the anonymity and conformity of mass society. Hence, an understanding of the authentic self in terms of individuality is, in fact, a reconstruction of the dominant view in the natural attitude of a specific period in history, the period to which Heidegger’s Being and Time also belongs. If this were all that Being and Time had to say, we would need to conclude that it is, first, a rather mainstream take on the self, and second, outdated in light of today’s late-modern society. In a society in which the exhibition of an optimized self has become the new das Man, one cannot maintain that expressing one’s individuality is the authentic mode of being a self, unless one wants to argue that we live in an exceptionally authentic society. Fortunately, this is not what Heidegger had to say. Quite the contrary: The core claim of §64 is that an authentic understanding of Dasein, i.e., an understanding that grasps the actual or true characteristics of Dasein, realizes that there is no such thing as an authentic self. The key statement is that care (Sorge), which is the basic structure of Dasein, does not need a grounding in a self. Instead, it is care that enacts a self (SZ, p. 323). In other words, Heidegger claims that a phenomenological analysis of the phenomenon which is addressed as “the self” within the natural attitude, reveals that the actual phenomenon shows itself as nothing but a dynamical process. Heidegger uses the term “Selbstsein” (being a self) to signify this process, with the emphasis being on “sein” (being). Heidegger stresses the dynamical nature of being a self. Dasein enacts a self in and through its thrown projections. Zooming out of the details of how to interpret Heidegger, the key takeaway is the following: There are meaningful ways to speak about the self. For instance, there is a fundamental sense in which all my experiences are my experiences, a key phenomenological finding that Dan Zahavi (2005) has defended persistently and compellingly under the term minimal self. Heidegger acknowledges this uncircumventable mineness of experience, calling it Jemeinigkeit (SZ, p.  42). But this is not the notion of “self” that the everyday discourse about the self is about. The everyday discourse strives towards something more substantial. Responding to this demand for a genuine self within the natural attitude, Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology is in line with Buddhist no-self approaches when claiming that what we understand as “self” in everyday discourse turns out to be nothing but a temporary stabilization of some self-understanding established within our comportment. In the words of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1993, p. 71), if the “self” is anything at all, it is a process. Hence, the reference to the self does not provide any stable ground. By contrast, when engaging the issue of the self mindfully, we encounter the groundless dynamics of care through which a self is enacted.

Groundless World Let us now address the issue of groundlessness starting from the other aspect of beingin-the-world, the question of the worldliness of the world. In §14 of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes four meanings of the term “world.” Those four meanings can be grouped in two pairs. One pair corresponds to the distant observation of the objective attitude in which entities show themselves as present-at-hand (Vorhandenes). In this sense, 450

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the world is the sum of everything there is to be known. Heidegger writes “world” in quotation marks when referring to this meaning of world. The second pair corresponds to the skillful absorption of the natural attitude in which entities make themselves available as ready-to-hand (Zuhandenes). Here, the world consists of all possibilities for action available to a specific Dasein. Heidegger uses world without quotation marks when referring to this meaning of the term. The important point is that each notion of world corresponds to specific mode of comportment. The “world” (with quotation marks) corresponds to the knowing (Erkennen) of entities given as present-at-hand. Hence, it correlates with the mode of distant observation. The world (without quotation marks) corresponds to the taking care of (Besorgen) entities given as ready-to-hand. Hence, it correlates with the mode of skillful absorption. Both modes take the world respectively the “world” for granted. The phenomenological attitude breaks with the taken-for-grantedness of the world in both senses. In this context, it is important to note that Heidegger does not introduce the phenomenological attitude as a theoretical endeavor. Rather, he introduces it in terms of basic attunements (Grundbefindlichkeiten). In Being and Time, the paradigmatic example for such a basic attunement is anxiety. When anxiety overcomes us, Heidegger states, “the world has the character of complete insignificance” (SZ, p. 186). In other words, anxiety confronts us with the groundlessness of the world. “Everyday familiarity collapses. […] Being-in enters the existential ‘mode’ of not-being-at-home. The talk about ‘uncanniness’ means nothing other than this” (SZ, p. 189). But this collapse of familiarity is not a fatal breakdown––it is not some clinical condition. On the contrary, it bears genuine ontological insight. When the taken-for-grantedness of the world collapses, it makes manifest the ontological status of the world, which it has had all along, but which was misconceived in the natural and the objective attitude. What we realize in the basic attunement of anxiety is that it is our taking care of entities that enacts a world of meaningful entities that provides us with possibilities for action. Similarly, it is our knowing of entities present-at-hand that allows a “world” to appear. Now, there is an important difference between the world and the “world.” As Heidegger elaborates in §69 (another paragraph from Division Two which is usually not taken serious in its relevance for understanding the overall project of Being and Time), the two key modes of comportment discussed in Being and Time––taking care of and knowing––entail different claims about the reality of the entities they encounter. Whereas it is trivial to assume that entities ready-to-hand are enacted by our taking care of them and are thus ontologically dependent on Dasein, knowing something about entities present-at-hand implies the claim that those entities are independent of our existence. Whereas a tool like a screwdriver only exists if there are agents to whom the possibility of using them is available, knowing something about the chemical structure of the metal out of which the screwdriver is made implies the assumption that the metal exists independent of our knowledge of it. But as Heidegger emphasizes in § 40, the world of possibilities ready-to-hand and the “world” of entities present-at-hand are equally affected by the collapse of familiarity experienced in anxiety. Anxiety puts in doubt the significance of the world and the “world” (SZ, p. 186). In both cases, anxiety makes us realize that it is us who make claims about the ontological status of entities. Hence, we can no longer take for granted what we ontologically assumed but need to advance towards a genuine ontological reflection on the status of the world. In this context, it is important to reiterate that Heideggerian anxiety does not refer to a psychological occurrence, much less a pathological episode. Instead, Heideggerian anxiety corresponds to the epoché in Husserlian phenomenology. Both fulfill a “basic 451

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methodological function” (SZ, p. 190), namely the bracketing of the taken-for-grantedness of a given world, which makes the worldliness of the world an object of genuine ontological investigation. But why does Heidegger speak of anxiety instead of the epoché? The key difference is that speaking of an epoché makes it appear as if the bracketing of the takenfor-grantedness of the world can be achieved by an act of the will. Speaking of a basic attunement instead suggests that an act of the will is not sufficient for that achievement. It is something that needs to overcome us. The groundlessness of the world needs to strike us, not just as a theoretical possibility to be entertained in some philosophical thought experiment, but in its existential depth, to throw us into the phenomenological attitude. Heidegger later realized that his take in Being and Time, in particular his neat distinction between entities ready-to-hand and entities present-at-hand, between world and “world,” is not sustainable upon closer inspection. One key finding of the later Heidegger is that being ready-to-hand and being present-at-hand are both aspects of an epistemic-technological mode of revealing that can be traced back to classic Greek philosophy and in particular Aristotle, and which has become dominant in Modernity. This line of thought begins to evolve in Heidegger’s thinking of the 1930s and can be found, for instance, in The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger, 2002, pp.  1–56). Heidegger’s work on technology as a mode of revealing, for instance in The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger, 1977, pp. 283–318), contains the most elaborate formulation of that claim. The key assumption in the background of Heidegger’s reflections on technology is that we need to account for the fact that being itself has a history. Entities reveal themselves differently in different epochs, corresponding to epochal transformations in the leading understanding of being (Schürmann, 1987). This implies that all ontologies, including the ontology of entities ready-to-hand and entities present-at-hand developed in Being and Time, are finite in a twofold sense. First, they are finite in the synchronic sense of being selective: the way in which entities reveal themselves to us now excludes other possible ways of revealing. Second, they are finite in a diachronic sense, referring to their historical variability: Our guiding understanding of entities has changed over time, and we should expect future changes (Beinsteiner, 2021). The gist of this revelation is already present in Being and Time. But it is hard to identify this claim about the selectivity and historical variability of the leading understanding of being––of underlying ontologies––among the complicated and sometimes abstruse elaborations in Division Two. However, this insight is the core of Heidegger’s understanding of the phenomenological attitude, to which Heidegger alludes throughout Being and Time. Rephrasing it in terms of mindfulness, we might reconstruct the gist of Heidegger’s account as follows. Existing mindfully means to exist with an awareness of the above-mentioned core ontological insight. In short, it means to exist with an awareness that being itself has a history, i.e., an awareness that all ontologies are finite in the twofold sense of being selective in how they allow entities to reveal themselves and historically variable in their mode of revealing. Such an awareness does not imply that one should stop engaging with the world, as if one ever could do so. Instead, Heidegger remarks on authenticity suggest that it is impossible to stop being engaged in current affairs, also for those who have become aware of the groundlessness of the world. But it is possible to engage with the world mindfully. In formal terms, engaging with the world mindfully means acting based on an awareness of the groundlessness of self and world. A radical acceptance of groundlessness leads one to realize that nothing needs to be the way things currently are. Consequently, engaging with the world mindfully implies that one is open for things to show themselves in unexpected ways and be ready to revoke one’s current understanding in light of new encounters with 452

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entities. For Heidegger, mindfulness implies a striving for truth which goes hand in hand with a readiness for self-transformation and world-transformation. When the situation requires it, we need to be open to the transformation of ourselves and the world. This is expressed in the following key passage from Being and Time: “[Resoluteness] simply cannot become rigid about the situation, but must understand that the resolution must be kept free and open for the actual factical possibility in accordance with its own meaning as a disclosure. The certainty of the resolution means keeping oneself free for the possibility of taking it back, a possibility that is always factically necessary” (SZ, pp. 307–308). Heidegger term here is “Entschlossenheit,” which is usually translated as “resoluteness.” However, both the German term and the English translation can easily be misleading. Heidegger uses a rhetorical strategy here that we find throughout Being and Time. He takes an established term from everyday language and uses it in a way that transforms its meaning into the opposite of what it usually means. Let me give a few examples.1 The first is “Entfernung” (SZ, p. 105), which might be translated as “distancing.” In everyday usage, if we distance something, we put it further away from ourselves. But Heidegger reads the term us “Ent-fernung,” i.e., the elimination of distance. Accordingly, Heidegger uses distancing to refer to Dasein’s ability to let things come close to itself. A second example is “Gewissen,” straightforwardly translated as “conscience.” In chapter 2 of Division Two Heidegger first reconstructs the common understanding of “bad conscience,” which he associates with a violation of societal norms. By contrast, having conscience in Heidegger’s sense consists in the insight into the groundlessness of societal norms, which implies Dasein’s radical responsibility for the norms guiding its actions. Similarly, in §74 Heidegger adopts the term “destiny” (Schicksal), which usually refers to unavoidable or uncontrollable happenings, and uses it to signify that it is up to each Dasein to decide about the possibilities it inherits. Hence, in both instances, Heidegger takes a term that signifies a form of heteronomy in everyday language and uses it to express Dasein’s radical freedom and responsibility. Now, regarding “Entschlossenheit” this rhetoric strategy gets a noteworthy twist. According to the everyday understanding of resoluteness, one would expect it to refer to the determination of Dasein in its choices. This appears to fit with Heidegger’s emphasis on freedom and responsibility displayed in how he turns the everyday understandings of “conscience” and “destiny” on their head. However, resoluteness for Heidegger does not signify the determination of Dasein’s choices, but rather the dependence of those choices on how things show themselves. When Dasein is resolute, according to Heidegger, it is open for things to show themselves in unexpected ways and to modify its choices accordingly. At this point, there is a difference between Being and Time and Heidegger’s later position. Being and Time follows the phenomenological maxim “To the things themselves!” (SZ, p. 28) and understands it in terms of an epistemic measure. The aim of the phenomenological method is to do justice to the phenomena. Within the framework of Being and Time this aim is understood as the task of getting it right considering how things show themselves. In other words, being authentic means to strive for an understanding of how things authentically, i.e., truly or actually, are. The understanding of resolution as “keeping oneself free for the possibility of taking it back” (SZ, p.  308) follows this core orientation towards doing justice to the phenomena by following the epistemic measure of truth provided by how things show themselves. Heidegger’s later thought is much more focused on the fact that speaking of truth is only possible within an established mode of revealing. Within a given mode of revealing, truth and falsehood can be established. But modes of revealing are historically variable. They have had a history that can be traced and 453

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reconstructed. Consequently, truth needs to also be seen in its historical givenness. In the words of Schürmann (1987, p. 25): “Ultimate reasons are unquestionable, but only temporarily so. They have their genealogy and their necrology. They are epochal. They establish themselves without a blueprint and collapse without warning.” Heidegger’s later thought circles around the dynamical unfolding of modes of revealing in their epochal succession. This is also the context of Heidegger’s use of the term “releasement” (Gelassenheit). When speaking of the “releasement toward things and openness to the mystery” (Heidegger, 1966, p. 56), he refers to a readiness that things might show themselves in unexpected ways and an awareness that the mode of revealing that shapes our epoch may crumble and ultimately vanish. Hence, releasement is a sensibility for the cracks and fissures in how things are presently able to show themselves.

A Phenomenological Practice of Mindfulness In his comparison of phenomenology and mindfulness, Bitbol (2019, p. [14]) diagnoses “a difference of emphasis on method. Buddhist practice and mindfulness as well are very rich in methodological prescriptions about how to go through each step of the path. By contrast, the phenomenological literature is very discreet about methodological issues.” Overall, it is a fair assessment that phenomenologists offer less in terms of a practical guide of how to do phenomenology in comparison to practitioners of mindfulness. However, let me add a few caveats based on Heidegger’s approach. Most importantly, a Heideggerian approach to the phenomenological method suggests that the phenomenological attitude is not achievable through an act of the will. As we have seen, Heidegger suggests that the phenomenological attitude only becomes a salient option when one is struck by certain basic attunements that make groundlessness existentially felt. In this context, we also need to consider the power of epochal modes of revealing, discussed in the previous section, which make certain modes of comportment salient. Hence, it is reasonable to assume that there are limits of what practical guidelines can achieve. These limits are assumed based on general reflections of what it means to be mindful, but they also depend on sociocultural trends to which mindfulness practices are not immune. This is where we need to take a critical look at how mindfulness practices have been coopted into the latest spirit of capitalism. Purser has criticized this development under the label McMindfulness: “The neoliberal order has imposed itself by stealth in the past few decades, widening inequality in pursuit of corporate wealth. People are expected to adapt to what this model demands of them. Stress has been pathologized and privatized, and the burden of managing it outsourced to individuals. Hence the peddlers of mindfulness step in to save the day” (Purser, 2019, pp. 7–8). When mindfulness practices are utilized to make agents more resilient and to manage stress better, this turns the deficiencies of the current mode of revealing into a private matter that each needs to deal with on her own. This depoliticization through individualization not only helps stabilize the established socioeconomic order, it might also be detrimental to people’s mental health and well-being: “Anything that offers success in our unjust society without trying to change it is not revolutionary — it just helps people cope. However, it could also be making things worse. Instead of encouraging radical action, it says the causes of suffering are disproportionately inside us, not in the political and economic frameworks that shape how we live. And yet mindfulness zealots believe that paying closer attention to the present moment without passing judgment has the revolutionary power to transform the whole world. It’s magical thinking on steroids” (Purser, 2019, pp. 6–7). 454

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Connected to this critique of the capitalist appropriations of mindfulness, we need to also critically address the alleged apoliticality of phenomenology and mindfulness. For instance, Bitbol (2019, p.  [13]) suggests that “the epochè and mindfulness may trigger a feeling of meaninglessness … But this feeling of meaninglessness is still an intermediate stage on the path towards a complete suspension of judgment and meaning-ascription … A truly mindful stance is thus one of full acceptance, of axiological neutrality.” Against this understanding of the phenomenological attitude respectively mindfulness as a suspension of judgment in a state of full acceptance, one can emphasize the revolutionary spirit that has driven the phenomenological movement. The aim of classic phenomenologists like Husserl and Heidegger, but also of contemporary phenomenologists, for instance those who label themselves as critical phenomenologists (Weiss et al., 2020), has never been a state of full acceptance, but to see things differently in order to contribute to transforming the world. Revolutions are not always good, of course, and Heidegger is a case in point for that. The revolutionary spirit of his philosophy was surely one of the elements that led him to support National Socialism. But whatever the political orientation of the phenomenologist, the key point is this: Phenomenology was never a (primarily) therapeutic enterprise, and for many phenomenologists, adopting the phenomenological method is also not (solely) about advancing one’s understanding of the world, but always (at least also) about transforming it.

Conclusion The practical consequences of mindfulness are a question that is very much discussed within contemporary mindfulness literature. The position of Bitbol (2019, p. [13]), according to whom “a truly mindful stance is thus one of full acceptance, of axiological neutrality,” has been criticized by other Western philosophers influenced by Buddhist thought for its introspective and tranquilizing orientation. For instance, Thompson (2016, p. xxiv) critically assesses that “Buddhist-cognitive science encounter continues to be influenced by the idea of Buddhist mindfulness practice as offering a special kind of introspection that can serve the purpose of the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness.” By contrast, Thompson supports “another, better conception of mindfulness” according to which “mindfulness practice should be understood as skillful ways of enacting certain kinds of embodied states and behavior in the world.” If the interpretation of Heidegger’s philosophy presented in this chapter is tenable, then it is reasonable to connect a Heideggerian understanding of the phenomenological attitude with an understanding of mindfulness as a third mode of comportment besides absorption and observation. In the words of Alcoff (2006, p. 94), this is the mind that is “still close to our engaged relation with” entities in the world, but is “forced to become more reflectively aware of it but as it exists in the context of our world.” Or in the words of Rosch (2016, pp. xl–xli), it “is the mind that can actually know firsthand the groundlessness of the enacted edifice in which humans live […], thereby clearing the way for a transformative wisdom to emerge.” To sum up, engaging with life mindfully means facing the groundlessness of self and world, not as a theoretical possibility, but as an existentially salient reality, and being open to the transformative potential this might imply.

Note 1 Those examples are discussed in detail in my book on Being and Time (Thonhauser, 2022).

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References Alcoff, L.M. (2006). Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self. Oxford University Press. Aldea, A.S., Carr, D., & Heinämaa, S. (eds.) (2022). Phenomenology as Critique: Why Method Matters. Routledge. Beinsteiner, A. (2021). Heideggers Philosophie der Medialität. Klostermann. Bitbol, M. (2014). Hat das Bewusstsein einen Ursprung? Für eine achtsame Neurowissenschaft. Fink. Bitbol, M. (2019). Consciousness, being and life: Phenomenological approaches to mindfulness. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50, 127–161. Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, E. (2017). The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso. Brentano, F. (1874). Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkte. Duncker & Humblot. Carman, T. (1994). On being social: A reply to Olafson. Inquiry 37, 203–223. Crowell, S. (2013). Normativity and Phenomenology in Husserl and Heidegger. Cambridge University Press. Dreyfus, H.L. (1995). Interpreting Heidegger on Das Man. Inquiry 38, 423–430. Heidegger, M. (1966). Discourse on Thinking. A Translation of Gelassenheit (J. M. Anderson & E. H. Freund, Trans.). Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1977). Basic Writings (D. F. Krell, Trans.). Harper & Row. Heidegger, M. (1996). Being and Time (J. Stambaugh, Trans.). SUNY Press. Heidegger, M. (2002). Off the Beaten Track (J. Young & K. Haynes, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Husserl, E. (1982). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (F. Kersten, Trans.). Kluwer. Käufer, S. (2015). Jaspers, limit-situations, and the methodological function of authenticity. In D. McManus (Ed.), Heidegger, Authenticity and the Self: Themes from Division Two of Being and Time (pp. 95–115). Routledge. Lukács, G. (1923). Geschichte und Klassenbewusstsein. Studien über marxistische Dialektik. Malik. Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of Perception. Routledge. Mohler, A., & Weissmann, K. (2005). Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932: Ein Handbuch (6th ed.). Ares. Mulhall, S. (2013). The Routledge Guidebook to Heidegger’s Being and Time (2nd ed.). Routledge. Natanson, M. (1986). Anonymity: A Study in the Philosophy of Alfred Schutz. Indiana University Press. Olafson, F. (1994a). Heidegger a` la Wittgenstein or ‘Coping’ with Professor Dreyfus. Inquiry 37, 45–64. Olafson, F. (1994b). Individualism, subjectivity, and presence: A response to Taylor Carman. Inquiry 37, 331–337. Purser, R. (2019). McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Repeater. Reckwitz, A. (2017). Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Suhrkamp. Rosch, E. (2016). Introduction to the revised edition. In F. J. Varela, E. T. Thompson, & E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Revised edition (pp. xxxv–lvi). The MIT Press. Schürmann, R. (1987). Heidegger on Being and Acting: From Principles to Anarchy (C.-M. Gros, Trans.). Indiana UP. Stone O., & Zahavi, D. (2021) Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28, 158–185. Thompson, E. (2016). Introduction to the revised edition. In F. J. Varela, E. T. Thompson, & E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Revised edition (pp. xvii–xxxiv). The MIT Press. Thonhauser, G. (2022). Heideggers “Sein und Zeit”. Einführung und Kommentar. Metzler. Varela, F.J., Thompson, E.T., & Rosch, E. (1993). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. The MIT Press. Weiss, G., Murphy, A.V., & Salamon, G. (eds.) (2020). 50 Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology. Northwestern University Press. Zahavi, D. (2005). Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. MIT Press.

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31 MEDITATION, LUCIDITY, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF DAYDREAMING James Morley

Introduction: Phenomenology and the Indian Meditation Traditions Despite their remarkable methodological similarities across history and culture,1 phenomenology and mindfulness could be distinguished by what are supposedly different ends or purposes. One could argue that phenomenology has evidently been a scientific, philosophically based epistemic project within the Western academy, and mindfulness supposedly began more like an applied practical clinical prescription for the alleviation of psychic suffering. But this dichotomy is tenuous. Certainly, Husserl’s appeals to us in the Crisis went beyond mere academic epistemology when he cried against “the downfall of Europe in its estrangement from its own rational sense of life [and] its fall into hostility toward the spirit and into barbarity…” (1970). Or his call to do battle against the “the destructive blaze of lack of faith…” regarding “…the West’s mission to humanity…” (Vienna lecture, 1970, p. 299) or when Merleau-Ponty warns of the decadence of scientism as “a nightmare from which there is no awakening” (2004, p.160) we can see that phenomenology is also the evocation of a moral and cultural mission that has far wider implications than an academic epistemic project. So, while it is true that phenomenology, starting with Husserl, is the application of kind of reflective epistemic attitude toward our understanding of world in its givenness, it is also true that enfolded within this attitude is an applied project to salvage this world from the nihilism inherent to industrialized modernity. It is in this way that phenomenology has always contained a project for worldly social change. Phenomenology’s interdisciplinary influence beyond philosophy on professional and applied fields such as nursing, social work, psychology, and psychiatry abound; and its influence on social theory is unquestionable – as, for example, with Fanon, Sartre, Foucault, de Beauvoir, Marcuse, and the Frankfurt school generally. So, the engaged worldly project of alleviating suffering, spanning the personal to the political, is not detachable from phenomenology. Such a demarcation, in terms of ends or goals, simply does not hold up to scrutiny. It is also true that contemplative techniques and practices in South Asia were applied, not just to alleviate suffering, but to also understand nature and the world – in the epistemic manner of a ‘science.’ The work of David Gordon White (1996) and the field of tantric studies, reveals how there has always been a steady stream of tantric alchemists DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-38

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across medieval South Asia who sought to explore nature and even achieve control over nature and other people through what could be called a yogic science. This was not unlike Europe’s own alchemical tradition motivated by many interests (beyond the alleviation of suffering) that combined meditative practices and rituals with the use of plant medicines and physical austerities – to achieve instrumental power, wealth, and knowledge. Martial arts offer a clear example of how contemplative practices could be technically employed for political and military ends. We have ample instances of this approach in the Indian literary genre where warriors would retreat into contemplative solitude to practice meditative austerities to cultivate yogic powers which would then be used to vanquish enemies. So not unlike the physical or social sciences, meditation practices could be detached from religious or healing ends to be applied as a kind of a technology with neutral or ambiguous moral purposes. It is even true that because of their powers of control and domination, yogis were held with apprehension as much as they were also sought for medicinal and spiritual purposes. Furthermore, the scholars of ancient Indian universities, informed by yogic contemplative approaches, practiced philosophy not very differently from our current academic understating of ‘pure research.’ Across the ancient and medieval periods there is a trove of Buddhist philosophical literature that has yet to be translated. So again, the dichotomy between pure science or philosophy and practical techniques for the alleviation of suffering does not offer an orderly delineation between mindfulness and phenomenology. The point just needs to be made that, across the medieval alchemical traditions, meditation has also been applied as a specific manner of scientific method – though certainly not in the current naturalistic sense of the term. So having said this, we might celebrate the consonance between twentieth century phenomenology and yogic meditation practices as we have here two remarkably comparable traditions that occurred independently across history and culture. However, a skeptical critic could still argue that because one is historically rooted in the Greco-Roman philosophical tradition and the other is historically embedded within Asian yogic thought, that the comparison is ill-conceived and futile because these are such radically severed and dissimilar cultural and philosophical traditions. One is European and Western, and the other is Asian and Eastern. Therefore, as the Kipling quote goes: “Oh East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Ahead, we shall see how this conventional boundary-line also does not hold up. During the colonial era there was a strongly held conviction on the part of the colonizers that European technological dominance was matched with a cultural superiority. This required the corollary belief that “the twain shall never meet” or that the two cultures had no historical relation to one another. In stark contrast to this colonial myth, there was much more cultural diffusion between ancient India and the classical Mediterranean world than most European scholarship has wanted to acknowledge. It seems the territory of the Persian empire served as an active cultural conduit between the Greek speaking and Sanskrit speaking peoples. In fact, it is well known that South Asia and Europe share, not only a common cultural heritage, but also a common linguistic heritage as the ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and Pali languages were all rooted in the same Indro-European root language. There is strong archeological evidence of vigorous trade in luxury goods between ancient India and the post-Alexandrian Hellenic kingdoms as well as the later Roman and Byzantine Empires. Using archeological evidence, American art historian Thomas McEvilley (1981, 1993, 2003) makes a persuasive case for how ancient Indian thought (Tantrism, Vedantism, and Buddhism), during and after the Hellenic period, was strongly influenced by the idealism 458

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of Plato and Aristotle. In fact, there were fusion or hybridized Greco-Buddhist kingdoms in Bactria (present day Pakistan and Afghanistan) and these kingdoms, via the silk road system, greatly impacted the intellectual life of ancient India. He also demonstrates how, prior to the Hellenic period, there was considerable cultural diffusion between tantric Indian yoga and certain Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Orphic-Dionysian Greek spiritualities – even eventually diffusing much later into medieval Christian mysticism, Jewish Kabbalism, and Islamic Sufism. It seems the wind blew both ways and McEvilly’s corrections to the false orthodox narrative of Eastern versus Western culture, has profound implications for mutual understanding. Specifically, he points out how, before the Macedonian invasion, the wind blew west from India to Greece. Then, after Alexander and the Hellenistic period, the winds blew West to East. Hence, from the long historical view there was always already a robust cultural interchange, and it is possible to find traces of Europe in India and India in Europe. Therefore, any narrative of a purely European culture is more than open for questioning as it appears that our cultures have always been hybridized with one another despite the ongoing mythology of ‘superiority and separateness’ from the colonial period that refused any cultural commonality. This corrected understanding, as outlined above, opens the door to an entirely compatible and mutual relationship between ‘European’ phenomenology and ‘Indian’ contemplative thought. In sum, there are no obstacles wide enough to inhibit the development of a contemplative phenomenology. Both traditions (1) reveal the intentional nature of consciousness, (2) name the mundane ego or ordinary self as necessary but inhibitory to our full awareness, (3) emphasize the primacy of lived experience over intellectualization. Phenomenology and the Indian contemplative traditions reveal themselves as not only kindred systems of thought, but systems of thought that are also different enough to mutually illuminate one another. Indian contemplative thought helps us see the cultural predecessors of European phenomenology while contributing new techniques to the practice of phenomenology. In turn, phenomenology may offer a contemporary and appropriately descriptive nomenclature for many meditative experiences – Asian or European.

Modernity and Contemporary Mindfulness Despite what I have just argued, there is one valid distinction between European consciousness and the rest of the world. Europe was the first culture to not only industrialize and thus enter modernity, but to culturally embrace the attitude of metaphysical materialism that came with these new powerful technologies. This is a utilitarian attitude that famously takes little interest in contemplative thinking. As Newtonian and Copernican metaphysics intellectually swept the European continent, Europeans dropped Aristotelian formal and final causes having to do with intelligent purposefulness or futural causality (Burtt,1954; Collingwood, 1976). This left in place only the two metaphysical causes of energy and matter. It was from this point onward that Europe increasingly ignored or even devalued its own contemplative traditions. In this calculating, objectified worldview that metaphysically reduces existence to matter and energy, all things and beings became construed as res extensa, as objects in cause-effect relationships. Consequently, intelligence or mind was banished to the domain of speculative philosophizing – irrelevant to the enterprise of economically viable science and, in experimental practice, even considered an extraneous confounding variable. Where mind was addressed, it was diminished to a psychologized subjective object – the excruciatingly contradictory emblem of contemporary psychology. 459

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Though Europeans have, until recently, effectively distinguished themselves from nonEuropeans through their embrace of this instrumental thinking, this embrace came with the price of the decline of their own spiritual and contemplative traditions. So profound has this decline been that many have associated this emotional or psychological impoverishment with the rising surge of mental health issues that appear to accompany entry into modernity, as stemming from exactly this process (Narváez, 2014; Narváez et al. 2014; Narváez et al. 2022). There is a contemporary resurgence of interest in meditation practices that seeks to repair this historical circumstance, for the reasons alluded to above. It also needs mentioning that before our contemporary mindfulness movement, there were previous attempts to reintroduce meditation practices to the European world. The Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1968) and the radically unconventional philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1968) offered examples of two different ways of initiating a recovery of our indigenous European meditation traditions. It is no accident that both thinkers were influenced by phenomenology. Merton was a keen reader of French existential philosophy, specifically Merleau-Ponty. Steiner, an Austrian contemporary of Husserl, was an enthusiastic lifelong student of Franz Brentano (Husserl’s teacher) and it is easy to see many parallels in their academic works. Certainly, in the 19th and 20th centuries, contemplation existed in isolated pockets of the Christian monastic world. But both authors offered what one could call a ‘grafting model’ for the recovery of indigenous European contemplative life. Like the metaphor of a dying branch of a plant that can be brought back to life by joining it to a thriving branch, their work suggested that the living Asian meditation traditions could resuscitate Europe’s waned and wilted meditation traditions. So, their counsel was that Europeans should learn the living Asian traditions, but not in a way that negates or downplays the rich but dormant European contemplative heritage. Again, they suggest we should learn Asian contemplative thought to resuscitate our own desiccated traditions – not denigrate or bypass them. While it is true that many of these practices are culture specific, it is equally true that they are rarely without some level of cross-cultural application. So, in Steiner and Merton there is a precedent to this project of revitalizing our own European traditions and, in these authors, phenomenology has already been designated as the most appropriate medium for this task of, not just bridging but grafting these traditions. This project of cultural sifting and grafting could well be one of the many tasks of a contemplative phenomenology. There are more reasons for a phenomenologically based approach to contemplative studies. The current danger in contemplative studies is to scientize mediation. It is, of course, important to apply naturalistic methods to study the meditating brain. It is undeniable that there is much utility to this important information. But we need to remember that the brain is not the things themselves. The objectified brain does not supplant the primacy of directly lived experience itself – most especially when it comes to experientially based contemplative practices. To complement naturalistic research on meditation, we need a theoretical approach and, of equal importance, a methodology that is in keeping with its subject matter – a contemplative methodology for contemplative phenomena. In the case of contemplative studies, phenomenology offers a unity of approach, method, and subject matter that cannot be matched by the physical sciences.2 To close these introductory comments, I would propose that we respect and honor the contemplative traditions of our Asian and European predecessors – as well as modern experimental research. But let us also take caution to not be mentally hijacked by any of these traditions. Cult-like pietisms toward any tradition is an impediment to the radical 460

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open-mindedness that phenomenologists strive to cultivate. This is what I would call the core mission of contemplative phenomenology: to forward a science that does not do violence to the subject matter of contemplative practices while advancing our knowledge of meditative experience in a way that is respectfully independent of past approaches and helpful to our contemporary social conditions. The idea here is to make new innovative contributions to knowledge, relevant to our current needs, and to not just reiterate past approaches or practices.

Toward a Phenomenology of Meditation Now I wish to move closer to the heart of my argument. My conclusion will be that ordinary mundane consciousness, when elucidated phenomenologically, can reveal a mindfulness that is inherent to all of us. This, of course, is not at all to say that we always behave and function in a lucidly mindful way. But I want to suggest that, like empathy, mindful lucidity is intrinsic to us though it is too rarely accessed and even more rarely applied to our concrete lives. As with empathy where we don’t have to make any effort to intuitively grasp the inherent subjectivity of others, I similarly propose that we are all already lucid. But our socialization, like the natural attitude itself, strips this clarity from us. It could be that unlike basic empathy, we lose our lucidity in the course of our practical engagements with the world and one can’t help but wonder if there may have been a certain truth to Plato’s theory of anamnesis that claims we are born with a full awareness that is diminished as we leave infancy to become immersed into the habituality of the social and sensory world. By mindfulness I mean lucidity, being fully awake and present. I do not mean ‘cognition’ in the sense of rational problem solving. Nor do I mean ‘attention’ in the sense of being focused on a task. Instead, I mean a global affective awareness of my life, and even life itself, in its totality. With the term lucidity there is the obvious association with the metaphor of light. Like luminosity, the Latin root lucidas is about shining, clarity, and transparency in a way that is close to the yogic Sanskrit notion of sattva which is a clarity or lightness that exists in the form of a qualitative elemental force – not just physical light as we moderns think of it. Light does not necessarily mean the negation of darkness, but it foregrounds the possibility of darkness. It makes darkness possible. Here I would like to phenomenologically reappropriate the illumination theory of light posed by Goethe, and updated by Arthur Zjanoc (1995), that posits light as the medium for bringing forth, not just the visible, but the entirety of the experiential world itself. This phenomenological approach to light, or lucidity, would challenge the separation of light into subjective and objective categories. I suggest that this lucidity is a modality of consciousness that is more available to us than we normally believe. We all understand how in lucid dreams one wakes up to realize that you are dreaming and thus become aware that you are dreaming. Well, by lucidity I propose a similar awareness – but while one is awake. I want to suggest that the purpose of meditation, within any nomenclature or cultural system, is to become lucidly awake. This is also how I read Merleau-Ponty’s metaphysical ambitions in The visible and invisible (1968). I believe the entirety of his final work proposed a reflective awareness of our consciousness as constituting the world and, reversibly, constituted by the world. This foundational figure-ground circle that he called reversibility, chiasm, or ‘transcendental immanence’ is, to my understanding, an appropriately contemporary way of articulating what most historical meditation traditions have been seeking to articulate. While space does not permit a full scholarly exegesis of this understanding, I can only offer here a preliminary sketch of this notion 461

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through a concrete example of how this nascent lucid consciousness is revealed though the phenomenological psychological elucidation of descriptions of ordinary daydreaming.

Modalities of Meditation Before presenting my main points, I want to review what we mean by the cognate term’s mindfulness, contemplation, or meditation. Here, I follow Arthur Zajonc’s authoritative summation (2008) of this vast literature where he encapsulates two essential aspects or motifs in meditation practices across history and culture. The first of these two styles of practice is often called ‘single-pointed focus’ or more simply ‘focused attention.’ This is what we are most familiar with in terms of what is called ‘mindfulness’ in the general culture that has been so successfully and widely advocated by Jon Kabat-Zinn. This is rooted in many traditions (Asian and European) that promote the relaxed focus on just one thing – most commonly the breath, but also the tip of one’s nose, an image, a sound, a prayer, one’s heart, and so on. If one enters a fantasy, during meditation, the instructions are to nonjudgmentally acknowledge the fantasy, but carefully redirect attention back to the single point of focus (we will return to this issue later in the chapter). One could metaphorically call this the strengthening of one’s attentional skills and the benefits are measurable. However, one could critically question what actual wisdom one achieves by only focusing on one thing. This practice, by itself, could appear simplistic and perhaps even the very definition of ‘narrow-mindedness.’ In contrast, the second category of meditation is what one could call ‘open monitoring.’ This approach to meditation is not unlike the psychedelic mantra of the Beatles song: “relax your mind and let it flow downstream.” This is about ‘letting be,’ allowing experience to just unfold without interrupting it with judgments or reactions. In many systems of meditation this second modality is only advocated for advanced students who have already achieved the attentional skills mentioned above. In this training, one abides or rests in place. In open attention meditation ones’ existential position is sustained to assume the role of witness to the streaming phantasmagoria of one’s personal mind. The critical issue with this second ‘openness’ practice is that if one becomes too relaxed then one risks falling asleep or becoming passively swept up into fantasies and daydreams (also to be developed later) and thus one stops consciously meditating. So, it is easy to see how the key to meditation practice would be to skillfully practice the paradoxical engagement of both ‘focused’ and ‘open’ attentional modalities. Here it is through ‘skillful means’ that one learns to proficiently surf or pilot one’s way through the unfolding kaleidoscopic dehiscence of one’s immediate stream of experience. Here the discoveries, psychological breakthroughs, and all-around interpersonal growth can be immeasurable. But are these ancient meditation techniques appropriate for contemporary industrialized humanity that is endlessly bombarded with sensations and images and stressed to no end by the contingencies of abstract linear time? One could speculate that, in contrast to the more agrarian lifestyles of premodern life, it could be the case that contemporary industrialized humanity experiences more demands to exercise an autonomous and rational personality. Our expanded sense of selfhood, or personality, may be requisite for coping with the complex, fast moving, and stress inducing, hyper-rationalized modern social world pressured by the measured linear time of the clock. In other words, contemporary people are psychologically different from the monastics of previous periods of history. If this is the case, then significant amendments need to be incorporated into meditation instruction. Ironically, 462

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while the need for meditation could not be greater in lieu of our problematically stressful, competitive, and even aggressively self-oriented culture, meditation practices, and teaching techniques are oriented toward people from a long-gone culture who had a different kind of psychology. We may have a problem here. So, considering the kind of culture we live within and its corresponding emphasis on ego and identity it is no wonder that modern people find it difficult to learn how to meditate. For newcomers to meditation this can be a highly negative experience – especially when unreflective boredom transitions into unwelcomed experiences of fear, anxiety, and anger. These emotions are often linked to repressed, even traumatic, memories which, depending on the person, can range in many levels of intensity. So, not unlike a psychotherapeutic process, beginning meditators may find themselves performing the hard psychological task of ‘working though’ what unexpectedly arises – and here is the significance of pedagogy. Traditional strategies for meditation instruction do not address these psychological issues confronting contemporary meditation students. Not all meditation teachers are trained or prepared to assist students at this difficult initial stage of meditation. Thus, many beginners have difficult negative experiences and find meditation to be boring at best, or an excruciating ‘bad trip’ at worst – not unlike the entrapment of solitary confinement. Newcomers to meditation need to be coached to not evade their difficult or negative experiences – but to let them happen with an observing attitude that allows beginning meditators to come to terms with their own negativity by stepping back and assuming a witness position toward it, letting the difficult feelings express themselves imaginatively, come to a calm integrative understanding of these imaginary experiences, and then letting them pass. This is the crucial importance of assuming the attitude of a curiously observing interest in this inevitable part of meditation experience. It is for these reasons that contemporary mediation teachers have begun to question our blind allegiance to ancient and medieval proscriptions for how to meditate. These meditation instructions nearly always teach that one should turn away from daydreams and fantasies and redirect one’s attention to the breath or the present moment. I wonder if these instructions are always appropriate for contemporary students of meditation and want to make the case that daydreaming can be an incredibly rich and rewarding aspect of meditation practice – depending on the pedagogical set and setting.

The Phenomenology of Daydreaming Ahead, I will report some constituents of what I have learned from studying descriptions of people’s daydreams (Morley, 1998). I will then apply these descriptions to the phenomenology of meditation practice. I can only briefly describe my methodology, which is spelled out in full detail in other publications (Giorgi et al., 2017; Englander & Morley, 2023; Morley, 2010), but I can offer the following general summary of the approach. The phenomenological psychological method I have used was originally developed by Amedeo Giorgi at Duquesne University in the late 1960s. Like most of the qualitative methods that have appeared over the past two decades, this involves collecting descriptions via interviews, which are then carefully interrogated for fuller psychological meanings. The major distinction of this method is that it assumes a phenomenological epistemic disposition toward the descriptions from the very onset. Instead of assuming the pervasive epistemic position of empiricism that bases knowledge on sensory measurables, applied phenomenological psychological research is based on the premise of the epistemic primacy of directly lived experience that is inclusive of both sensory and non-sensory dimensions of experience. 463

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From this wider and broadened disposition of striving to comprehend the phenomenon in its fullness, one assumes the radially open-minded perspective of what is technically called the phenomenological psychological epoché and reduction. One proceeds to perform a close, line-by-line, explication of the participant’s description in a way that does not do violence to the person’s experience by imposing physical causes (the unquestioned naturalistic prejudice of the physical sciences) and over-interpreting with theories. More radially, I also try to see the phenomenon in a way that considers the research participant, and oneself as researcher, as mutually intentional agents. In this way, I attempt to see how both my own intentions and those of the participant are at play in the elucidation process. By means of this process of phenomenological psychological elucidation, one’s goal is to carefully avoid abstract interpretations that go beyond the participants expressed meanings, while at the same time articulating nascent, tacit, or implicit psychological meanings that may not even be fully available to the participant. Finally, and importantly, one applies intuitive imagination to compose a new generalized description of the essential meaning of the experience of daydreaming for most people. This elucidation process is carefully documented, each step of the way, to allow other phenomenological researchers the opportunity to challenge the legitimacy of my data analysis or knowledge claims. For the sake of brevity, I here offer the following temporal outline of the practical application of the method. 1 Circumscribe the phenomenon from other cognate phenomena through pilot studies to ensure conceptual clarity and descriptive feasibility. 2 Without offering any pre-given definitions of daydreaming to the participant, the researcher requests a brief written description of a concrete experience of daydreaming. 3 Follow-up interview dedicated to the participants’ written description and their specific use of language. This begins with a focus on what was most significant to the participant about this experience. This is followed up, in an informal way, with questions based on the researcher’s phenomenological agenda, for example: sense of reality, time, space, emotions and feelings, embodiment, relations with others, and self-awareness. 4 The written description and transcribed interview are then elucidated from within the phenomenological psychological attitude (briefly described above). It is read as a whole and then divided into parts (or meaning units). Each part is carefully elucidated in relation to the whole of the description. 5 The researcher eidetically composes a new whole or ‘situated structural narration’ of the participant’s entire description in terms of what is most psychologically relevant and essential to this person’s experience of a daydream. This is not unlike an individualized idiographic case study. 6 A ‘general structure’ of the phenomenon is composed. This final generalized description is achieved by reviewing multiple daydream descriptions. Then, by means of eidetic imaginary variation, the researcher strives to explicate what is general, or essential, to most experiences of daydreaming. Usually, this final general structural description takes the form of a temporally sequential narrative. 7 Discussion of results with both naturalistic and phenomenological literature. What follows is a narrative summary of some of the results of this research that highlights the relevance of daydreaming to meditation practice. From most of my interviews, I have learned that daydreaming begins as an emotion that cannot be fully expressed in

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the context of the moment. Here, as an example, is a typical first-person description that most readers will be familiar with. A person is driving the car on a well-known route and becomes bored, disengages from the familiar landscape, and experiences passive mind wandering. But the wandering coalesces and settles upon a current political issue that evokes feelings of agitation and anger. “It’s on my mind, it’s bugging me but I’m driving the car. There’s nothing to do. I’m bored and I go into a fantasy where I’m giving a brilliant impassioned political speech and enjoying the approving applause I’m receiving. Suddenly, I’ve parked the car and find myself in the parking lot at work. I had gone through seven traffic lights, and navigated the car through several crossroads and intersections, but I’m not aware of how I got here – I was so intensely daydreaming!” Here in this typical depiction, the person is not able to express, or act out, the arising emotion, but goes into a daydream that successfully expresses the emotion through an imaginary narrative. Participants use the passive language of mind-wandering that precedes their eventual gestalt switch into another imaginary subject-world scenario where the emotion can be more fully expressed. They then actively live within, or existentially occupy, this subject-world narrative in an embodied and affectively charged way (see Figure 31.1). What is interesting for purposes of the phenomenology of meditation is that when participants are asked in the follow-up interview to give more full descriptive detail about what is going on for them at the moment of the daydream, we often receive the most intriguing descriptions. Many people report experiencing themselves, during the daydream, as living within three subjective standpoints (Morley, 1998). One standpoint, that should be intuitively clear for most readers, is what I call the habitual subject-world standpoint. This is often described through the metaphor of being in auto-pilot mode. This standpoint is not emotionally charged and is experienced as an almost mindless, vacant, and even mechanically automatic mindset. Here, people tacitly know they are driving the car, but only in a way that is marginal to their awareness. Their awareness is ‘just enough’ to keep the car going on the road without an accident. The next concurrent standpoint described by participants is the imaginary subject-world scenario of the daydream itself. Here, the person is fully living out and expressing the pressing emotion that is important to them at that moment, through the means of an imaginary storyline. They experience themselves as fully present within this imaginary scenario. Importantly, when asked which standpoint feels ‘most real,’ at the moment of the daydream, they will usually say, with varying degrees of startled amusement, that it is the imaginary daydreamed scenario that feels most real to them. Finally, there is the standpoint that is of most interest in terms of its cognate status with meditation. This is the standpoint that participants find most difficult to describe and

Figure 31.1  Synchronic structure of daydreaming.

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therefore requires a very intimate interview relationship, as well as a resoluteness and patience on the part of the interviewer to prompt this level of description – in a non-leading way. This is the standpoint of what I have called the directing spectator. Here, participants will describe an awareness of oneself as the author or creator of the daydream narrative. People will here describe themselves as in a god-like or puppet-master relation to their own daydreamed character as it plays out its dramatic role within the staged daydream scenario. The other side to this egological standpoint is the ambiguously coinciding role of witness or audience to the imagined daydream scenario. Here, the person is somewhat detached or uncoupled from the emotional drama of the imaginary scenario while also fully aware of themselves as imaginatively generating this scenario. This reveals an ironic fusion of both passive and active modalities, I have termed this the ‘directing spectator’ standpoint. Further, the participants not only describe actively creating the daydream scenario but also actively sustaining the imaginary scenario while also observing and watching the event as if on a movie screen. The constituent of sustaining the daydream is also very important. Participants describe this standpoint as protecting or prolonging the life of the daydream. For example, from this standpoint they are aware of the traffic signals and vehicles that must be functionally avoided to ensure that they do not have to snap out of the daydream. So, in this way they are also spectating and directing the habitual subject-world relation. In other words, they are sustaining the continuity of the habitual subject-world relationship in order to maintain the continuity of the imaginary subject-world daydream scenario. The directing spectator is aware of the other two standpoints (the imaginary subject-world standpoint and the habitual subject-world standpoint) but these other two standpoints are unaware of each other as much as they are unaware of the directing spectator.3 Furthermore, the directing spectator maintains the non-lucidity of the other two standpoints, again, to sustain the continuity of the daydream. This is where the phenomenon of lucidity comes to play (see Figure 31.2).

Figure 31.2  Diachronic structure of daydreaming.

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From this close phenomenological examination of these descriptions of mundane daydreaming we find a complex, rich, and even wondrous, aspect of imaginary consciousness. There is a global multi-dimensionality to this lucid aspect of daydream consciousness where we find a circuitous multiplicity of perspectives that could be metaphorically associated to a cinematic continuum of: audience/film-screen/film projector/actors/director/scriptwriter/ author.

Lucidity in the Phenomenological Literature A parallel in the phenomenological literature to these daydream depictions can be found in Husserl’s account of time consciousness (1964), where he discusses the ego splitting that happens in the ‘dual intentionality’ that arises in the retention of memories as well as our protentional projections into the future. In other words, he describes how, in the retentional mode of memory, we call back or summon the previous experience, but this is performed in a way where we are also living within that past experience as active intentional agents of that earlier event. Put another way, this is an alternative ‘now’ point, and corresponding ego-world relation, that coincides with the ‘current now point’ of the ego of the remembering person. So, we encounter this paradoxical, but phenomenologically valid, phenomenon of multiple intentionality. This comes even closer to daydreaming when we take up the issue of protentional projections into the future. Most daydreams are affective phenomena and therefore about desire – i.e. the future that we want to make happen. Certainly, pathological daydreaming may involve the repetition of past events or even just benign nostalgic reveries of pleasant memories. But for the most part, daydreams appear to involve future possibilities, and this is exactly why they are so psychologically important. Daydreaming is where we ‘work through’ our matters of greatest existential importance. My research has indicated that most daydreams, when questioned and examined in full, will reveal the most relevant and pertinent issues in that person’s life. In Sartre’s terms, daydreams are usually, at their core, about our existential projects – i.e. who we want to be (Sartre, 1948, 1956, 1966). Even the most mundane, lackluster, and seemingly dull daydreams, when interrogated in full, will, as with the depictions in a Rorschach card, open-up into the most intimate and existentially critical issues in one’s life. Much the same has been said about nightdreaming, but unlike nightdreaming, we have with daydreaming the constituent of waking consciousness where the lucidity of the directing spectator is so much more available.4 We also find a congruence in Aaron Gurwitsch’s (1978) gestalt-phenomenological explication of what he called ‘marginal consciousness.’ Drawing on the profound implications of the figure-ground dynamic in Gestalt theory, Gurwitsch wrote that every possible experience is universally structured by three dimensions: the theme, field, and margin. The theme was the explicit object of focal awareness (the figure), the field was the context surrounding the object of focal awareness (the ground) and hence inseparable from its significance. But the margin is what is outside of explicit awareness – and yet co-present with the theme and field. Here, marginal consciousness fits very closely Merleau-Ponty’s articulation of what he calls the tacit cogito (see Figures 31.3–31.5). Merleau-Ponty’s existential restoration of the Cartesian cogito in the Phenomenology of Perception (1962) offers us needed insights into the nature of this ‘directing spectator’ – and our concern with contemplative lucidity. In contrast to the impersonal, disembodied, and atemporal cogito postulated by Descartes, Merleau-Ponty seeks to restore the cogito in 467

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Figure 31.3  Gurwitsch’s field of consciousness.

its ‘temporal thickness.’ This phenomenologically renovated cogito is described as a more subtly ‘tacit’ cogito that, unlike the abstract Cartesian cogito, is ‘weighted’ with affectivity and hence, it is a carnal cogito. In a sense, this is a more psychological than philosophical cogito as it is contingent on one’s individual life-history, embodied affectivity, and personal identity. He writes of this as: “myself experienced as myself.” (1962, p. 403) and “the presence of oneself to oneself.” Furthermore, he expresses this as: “… one single experience inseparable from itself, one single living cohesion, one single temporality which is engaged, from birth, in making itself progressively explicit, and in confirming that cohesion in each successive present.” (ibid., p. 407). Clearly, this is a personal cogito that is far from the universal cogito of Descartes and the many similar accounts found in idealistic philosophy and even occult spiritualism. But it is a tacit cogito that is ineffably ephemeral in its all-pervasive yet obscure presence across the entire arc of one’s life. Merleau-Ponty comments on how

Figure 31.4  Daydreaming as dual intentionality.

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Figure 31.5  Directing spectator as marginal consciousness.

this tacit cogito only becomes accessible to ordinary awareness in unique moments of life, such as when an extraordinary event snaps us out of the habituality of the mundane natural attitude of ordinary living. This unique awareness “…knows itself only in those extreme situations in which it is under threat: for example, in the dread of death or of another’s gaze upon me.” (ibid., p. 404). It is important to reiterate that the lucidity of the tacit cogito is temporally all-present across the course of one’s life as much as it is itself the cognizance of one’s life in its totality as “one single living cohesion.” These are moments of life-historical self-awareness, not unlike Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s depiction of the Augenblick or ‘the moment of truth’ that breaks open in flashes of awesome cognizance, or even lucid moments of meditation, that can be life-changing. I would also propose this notion as a means for understanding the lucidity of the directing spectator as revealed by our participants in their descriptions of what they experienced at the moment of their daydream.

Lucidity, Meditation, and Daydreaming When we recall instances of betrayal, or falling out of love, we often encounter the hard and humbling truth that we knew all along. In the case of betrayal, we see how we did not perform the due diligence of taking notice of the other person’s reluctance to show sympathy, subtle sarcastic slights, disappearances during times of need – all behavioral indications of disinterest in what was only a feigned ‘act’ of colleagueship. Too often we realize we knew all along, but did not either trust our own lucidity, or were too lazy to do the hard work of dealing with the reality of the difficult situation. So, we denied our own lucidity. In instances of broken love affairs, after the end of the relationship, when we review the hard truths of what actually happened, too often we come to see that we knew all along that this relationship was inappropriate, and terminally wrong. But, for various reasons, we did not want to admit this hard truth and colluded with ourselves into self-deception. People often report that during their wedding ceremony, walking down the aisle to the altar, they

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were flooded with the full cognizance that this marriage was a mistake. We seem to have this lucidity, but we are not trained to access it, trust it, and act on it. My obvious point here is that, of course, all of our lives could be greatly improved by more lucidity. So, the question is: can lucidity be taught? I would venture to say, yes, it can – and that this could be an appropriate approach to meditation for many people. Putting aside the theologies, the neuroscience, the big psychological theories, we all just want to learn how to live our lives in a more globally alert manner, and less restricted by self-deception. Most meditation experiences are about ‘trying to meditate.’ We appear to be calmly sitting still, but instead we are usually encountering the riot of our subjective phantasmagoria of emotionally unfinished business. Fighting these emotions, we struggle to follow the instructions to ‘stay with the present moment.’ But in fact, the actual present moment is often the emotional upsurge that is seeking expression. Is it useful to be following instructions to ignore these feelings? So, based on what my participants have taught me about daydreaming, I propose that we should question the ancient conventional admonition against daydreaming – especially when meditating. I propose that meditation teachers and practitioners should consider giving more careful attention to their emotions and the subjective structures of the daydreaming we are doing during meditation. This is especially significant, as we shall soon see, in light of the lucidity that we can access, through skillful means, in our daydreams. This perspective on carefully incorporating daydreaming into meditation practice is shared with the contemporary meditation teacher, Jason Siff. In his book, Thoughts are not the enemy (2014), Siff writes of how for decades he, himself, denied attention to his daydreams during meditation until one day he thought: “Some of your thoughts may show you what is missing or lacking in your life right now. Going into the future in this way will inevitably engender reflection on your life as it is now. So why not let yourself go there?” (Siff, 2014, p. 135). He goes on to describe how, after abandoning the classical prohibition against daydreaming, he allowed his fantasies of ‘becoming a widely read author’ to manifest in his meditation practice. These contemplative reflections, through the vehicle of his daydreaming, eventually led him to a lucid perspective on the direction of his life. He came to realize a deeply founded desire to expand his love for teaching meditation to a wider audience through publishing novels and instruction books about meditation – which, thankfully, is exactly what he did. His first meditation guidebook titled: Unlearning meditation: what to do when instructions get in the way (2010), expresses exactly the approach to the past meditation traditions that I am advocating here – to take them seriously, but not literally. He suggests an inquisitive, trial by error, and individualized approach for what ultimately works for each unique personality. Such corroboration from an experienced meditation teacher, such as Siff, supports an entirely new and innovative way of conceiving these practices. In short, the twin but cognate phenomena of meditation practice, and daydreaming, take on a new light within a phenomenological approach that radically eschews presumptions or any settled knowledge in favor of a perpetual search for new beginnings. Such would be the hope for a phenomenology of contemplative experiences – as much as a contemplative phenomenology. For example, if one stops to compare this discussion with the current interest in psychedelic therapeutics, one can’t help but wonder: could daydreaming and meditation be understood as a psychedelic experience without drugs? When we close our eyes and sit in the dark in quiet solitude, things happen. But unlike psychedelics, we can open our eyes at any time and end the daydreaming or meditation experience. Psychedelic therapists have learned that it is necessary to council, train, and prepare 470

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patients for months before therapeutically introducing them to the day-long psychedelic drug session. This psychedelic experience is then followed-up with weeks of integrating therapy. (Miller, 2017) I propose that we consider taking a similar approach teaching meditation. Also, the means for preparing students for day-long meditation retreats could be advanced training in how to lucidly daydream. This is just one example of the possibilities for eclectically mixing therapeutic and pedagogical practices for teaching lucidity. To close, this is only a preliminary exploration of several very complex issues that require follow-up inquiry. But I hope I have at least offered a serviceable sketch of the benefits of a cross-disciplinary application of phenomenological thought to both mediation practice and ordinary daydreaming. Bearing in mind these prospects for teaching lucidity, much more can be said about the contribution of these ideas to, not only psychological healing practices, but also childhood pedagogy. This would also be followed up with a social commentary on our culture’s denigration of daydreaming and its corollary – free unstructured childhood play. (Gray, 2013) This next level of inquiry would address the inescapably interlocked issue of our cultural devaluation of productive imaginary experiences while we are simultaneously bombarded with the imaginary experiences other people want us to passively receive – via social media. I end on this note to indicate the ultimately wide-ranging and radically social emancipatory implications to this phenomenological endeavor.

Notes 1 I have discussed the radial commonality between the phenomenological practice of the epoché and the classical yogic contemplative practice of nirodaha in other publications (Morley, 2001, 2008, 2010). Both terms refer to a parallel usage in the practice of both fields of knowledge – one ancient and Indian, the other contemporary and European. But there is a fulsome and developing literature on this convergence. See Michel Bitbol (2019) and Claire Petitmengin (2021) for recent and detailed explications of this congruence. There are many others who have generously contributed to this momentum in comparative scholarship. See Paranjpe and Hanson (1988), Puligandla (1970), and Sinari (1965). 2 This is exactly what has been advanced by our colleagues Natalie Depraz, Michel Bitbol, and Claire Petitmengin. And I would again direct readers to their scholarship. Further, the notion of disciplinary unity between approach, methodology, and subject matter is exactly Giorgi’s (1970) critique of mainstream naturalistic psychology. While naturalism can’t be ignored, we had best not forget that naturalism is a method and ideology designed for the physical sciences – not the study of persons. Let’s not make the same mistake with contemplative studies as well. 3 It is interesting to associate these constituents of non-pathological daydreaming consciousness with pathological cases of dissociative identity disorder where the role of the ‘host’ personality may be lucid in relation to the other ‘alter’ personalities that are not lucid. 4 Freud writes of the ‘dream censor’ that assumes a dynamic that is very similar to what I am describing as the directing spectator. (Freud, 1900) However, this night dream censor is hypothesized as definitively unconscious and unavailable to any explicit description. Thus, we only know of the dream censor though its hypothesized effects. This is not the case with waking daydreaming.

References Bitbol, M. (2019). Consciousness, being and life: Phenomenological approaches to mindfulness. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 50 (2), 127–161. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691624-12341360 Burtt, E.A. (1954). The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science: A Historical and Critical Essay. New York: Doubleday. Originally published in 1925. Collingwood, R.G. (1976). The Idea of Nature. London: Oxford University Press.

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James Morley Englander, M., & Morley, J. (2023). Phenomenological psychology and qualitative research. Phenomenology and Cognitive Science 22, 25–53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-021-09781-8 Freud S. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. New York NY: Avon books Giorgi, A. (1970). Psychology as a Human Science: A Phenomenologically Based Approach. New York: Harper and Row. Giorgi, A., Giorgi, B., & Morley, J. (2017). ‘The descriptive phenomenological psychological method’. In C. Willig & W. Staiton-Rogers (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research in Psychology (pp. 176–192). Sage Press. Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books. Gurwitsch, A. (1978). The Field of Consciousness. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Husserl, E. (1964). The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness. J. S. Churchill (Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. D. Carr (Trans.). Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. McEvilley, T. (1993). The spinal serpent. Anthropology and Aesthetics 24, 67–77. McEvilley, T. (1981). An archeology of yoga. Anthropology and Aesthetics 1, 44–77. McEvilley, T. (2003). The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies of Greek and Indian Philosophies. New York: Alworth Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of Perception, C. Smith (Trans.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. A. Lingis (Trans.). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2004). ‘Eye and Mind’. In T. Baldwin (ed.), Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Basic Writings. New York: Routledge. Merton, T. (1968). The Asian Journals of Thomas Merton. New York: New Directions. Miller R.L. (2017). Psychedelic Medicine. Rochester VT: Park Street Press. Morley, J. (1998). The private theatre: A phenomenological investigation of daydreaming. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 29, 116–134. Morley, J. (1999). The sleeping subject: Merleau-Ponty on dreaming. Theory and Psychology 9 (1), 89–101. Morley, J. (2001). Inspiration and expiration: Yoga practice through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment Philosophy East and West, 51 (1), 73–82. Morley, J. (2008). Embodied consciousness in tantric yoga and the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. Religion and the Arts, 12(1-3), 144–163. Morley, J. (2010). ‘It’s always about the epoche: On phenomenological methodology’. In T. Cloonan (ed.), The Redirection of Psychology: Essays in Honor of Amedeo Giorgi. Montreal: University of Quebec Press. Narváez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom. New York: W.W. Norton. Narváez, D., Moore, D.S., Witherington, D.C., Vandiver, T.I., & Lickliter, R. (2022). Evolving evolutionary psychology. American Psychologist 77 (3), 424–438. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000849 Narváez, D., Valentino, K., Fuentes, A., McKenna, J.J., & Gray, P. (eds.). (2014). Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing. Oxford University Press. Paranjpe, A., & Hanson, K. (1988). ‘On dealing with the stream of consciousness: A comparison of Husserl and yoga’. In A. Paranjpe, D. Ho, & R. Rieber (eds.), Asian Contributions to Psychology (pp. 215–231). New York: Praeger Publishers. Petitmengin, C. (2021). On the veiling and unveiling of experience: A comparison between the microphenomenological method and the practice of meditation. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 52 (1), 36–77. https://doi.org/10.1163/15691624-12341383 Puligandla, R. (1970). Phenomenological reduction and yogic meditation. Philosophy East and West, 20, 19–33. Sartre, J.-P.  (1948). The Emotions: Outline for a Theory. B. Frechtman (Trans.). New York, NY: Philosophical Library. (Original work published 1939)

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32 THINKING BEING The Educational Scope of a Fruitful Convergence between Phenomenology and Mindfulness Eduardo Caianiello That which directs us to think, gives us directions in such a way that we first become capable of thinking, and thus are as thinkers, only by virtue of its directive. (Heidegger, What is called thinking?) Let’s make as accessible as we can to little children in all parts of the Empire that open gateway to the Unseen. (Mary Everest Boole, 1904, The preparation of the child for science)

The Problem “What is it that calls us into thinking?” Heidegger asked himself in 1952.1 Answer in 2022: especially not an administration – however public and republican – of Kantian (high) functionaries who loyally “obey!” (Kant, 1784) the “enlightened” Sovereign (be it Prince or People), and at the same time always ready to “resign from their functions” (ibid.) – and from their social prestige, their salaries, their pensions, their paid vacations, and so on – if only they realize that they are no longer available to embody its doctrines (otherwise known as ministerial programs) before the learners. As for the possibility of “enlightening the people” the idealistic Utopia of the Enlightenment has failed in the face of the functionaryteacher – not detachable from his or her function – and Pinocchio his pupil, who after having supported the Power of Imagination at the expense of any rigorous thought, has long demanded that same functioning functionary should simply transmit a function: an Effective Technique, to the detriment (again) of any thought that can be called such. The State School – National Education – is therefore everywhere on the planet a place where thinking is forbidden (hence the adjective “too scholastic” to mean: too rigid and limited). Consequence: the rationalistic “Dare to think!” if you want to be free, which two centuries of Idealism and positivist-materialist-scientist Ideologies have espoused as a motto for a (post)revolutionary Education of the People, has generated a wave of reflux springing from a fiery heart throbbing at present synchronously in the chest of Mindfulness and Phenomenology: no freedom without a full awakening of Consciousness from within! Who can deny it? This expression – Full Consciousness – nevertheless signifying a 474

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(well Heideggerian) “way of being” that necessarily lies “beyond technique, and above all beyond thought” (Kabat-Zinn, 1996). The problem then arises: on this basis, is it possible – since it seems absolutely necessary – to teach in an ordinary classroom a school subject such as mathematics – eminent example, for Heidegger, and rightly so, of a science that forgets the human being who attends it – in Full Consciousness? Or does Full Consciousness necessarily remain outside the time provided by the syllabus (even if adequate to wash the dishes (Nhất Hạnh, 1994) take a break (Kabat-Zinn, 1996) contemplate a painting (André 2010; 2011) or walk in a forest…) because as soon as one begins to actually use the logical intellect as such, and therefore to think according to the sense that this term is commonly given in our time, all Fullness of Being runs away? The answer I will give to this question says that in the historically given real this possibility can germinate from a fruitful synthesis (wedding) between the practice of Full Consciousness and the theories of Phenomenology if, both animated by the vital urgency of the situation, they agree to grant the potentially logical Intellect – to Aristotle’s νοῦς, in its perceptual and deictic foundation – a more than Heideggerian second chance, miraculously capable, therefore, of giving birth to a thought that is currently rational, and yet emanating from the fullness of the Being of the one who thinks it: and therefore a Thinking Being. This wedding will take place thanks to a complete (re)rooting of the logical-mathematical word in the poetic word, at present in a state of unreconciled and secular divorce.

The Concordances between Mindfulness and Phenomenology Full Consciousness means to live fully, in attention and awakening, the this-one-here, in all its breadth and depth potentially co-extensive with the Universe in its Whole. One is everything, everything is one, the five aggregates. Interdependence. The contemplation of interdependence is a profound vision in the heart of all dharmas in order to break into their true nature and see them as parts of the great body of reality, and in order to perceive that this great body of reality is indivisible. It cannot be cut into pieces with separate existences of their own. (Nhất Hạnh, 1994, §5. My translation.) A return, then, to the simplicity of the here-and-now: dimensionless center from which radiates such a boundless horizon. “Simple – certainly – but not easy” (Kabat-Zinn, 1996, p. 25) because knowing how to really “pay attention to the present moment” in its original nakedness requires a work of mental and emotional purification that implies, inter alia – but as a premise and never as an objective in itself – an important use of our logical/critical discernment: the only possible way, of course, to remove all authority from that layer of unreflective beliefs (doxa, dogmata) that, sophisticatedly posing as “the truth” (ibid., p. 14) chain us in the Cave/Disneyland of a life only dreamed of. At the heart of this practice – its alpha-omega – however, there is not simply the “paying attention to” but the being in the present moment, that is to be present … and even better: purely and simply be, dispose and remain in the “mode of being” (ibid., pp. 53–56). A mode that is defined negatively (so much so that the “effort” of “positive thinking” is often explicitly excluded from this approach) and by contrast: on the one hand to “doing”, on the 475

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other hand to “thinking”: “beyond technique, effort and above all thought”. What generates on the one hand the “Paradox…” of a practice, and therefore certainly of an action “… of not acting” (ibid.) and on the other hand that of a presence that is well aware and discerning but not thinking (ibid., pp. 106–107; André, 2011, p. 72); above all, not “philosophical” in the sense of intellectual and reflective and, in general, scientific: “This meditation is not a discursive reflection on a philosophy of interdependence. It is a penetration of the mind into the mind itself…” (Nhất Hạnh, 1994, p. 63). Who – like the writer – has participated in retreats of the Village des Pruniers of the master Thich Nhất Hạnh, knows that this warning is a typical interlayer to say: stop the abstract elucubrations! “Practice, practice, practice!” (Kabat-Zinn, 1996). Reflection (=rumination) and reasoning (=calculation) being rather to “visualize as a waterfall, a cataract of infinite thoughts” (ibid., p. 107) from which one must imperatively detach oneself. Phenomenology shares this search for a naïve, immediate, and pre-intellectual (= prelogical/scientific) return to “what-there-is” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 9; Heidegger, 1954b, p. 4, p. 161) – the Phenomenon – as it is, in its honestly perceptive purity. Phenomenology also, then, aims to (1) overcome with a “leap” (ibid., p. 8) – in order to reach “the Thing itself” – that cascade of thoughts “in infinitum” (Husserl, 1929, p. 142) to which the demonstrative (rather than “monstrative”, deictic) mode condemns our mind; (2) to rediscover a “posture of being” as Presence/Presencing (“Wesung”, Heidegger, 1961a) and that therefore “one” (= the “One”) is finally fully (= personally) present to what-here-presentsitself letting it be what it is. VIETNAMIST ENTELEKEIA The nature of ultimate perfection. The almond tree in front of the house - An almond tree, when reality is experienced in its nature of ultimate perfection, reveals its nature in its perfect totality. The almond tree that may be in front of your house is itself truth, reality, your own being. Of all those who have passed by your house, how many have actually seen this almond tree? An artist’s heart is perhaps more sensitive: fortunately, he or she will be able to see the tree in a deeper way than most people. Thanks to a more open heart, a certain communion already exists between the artist and the tree. What is important is your own heart: if it is not veiled by false perceptions, you will be able to naturally enter into communion with the tree. The almond tree will reveal itself to you in its entirety. To see the almond tree is to see the Way. A Zen Master who had been asked to explain the wonders of reality, pointed to a cypress tree and said, “Look at this cypress”. (Nhất Hạnh, 1994, §6. My translation.) HEIDEGGERIAN MINDFULNESS - We come and stand facing a tree, before it, and the tree faces, meets us. Which one is meeting here? The tree, or we? Or both? Or neither? We come and stand just as we are, and not merely with our head or our consciousness facing the tree in bloom, and the tree faces, meets us as the tree it is.[…] For we shall forfeit everything before we know It, once the sciences of physics, physiology and psychology, not to forget scientific philosophy, display the panoply of their documents and proofs to explain to us that what we see and accept is properly not a tree but in reality a void, thinly sprinkled with electric charges here and there that race hither and yon at enormous speeds. (Heidegger, 1954b, pp. 42–43) 476

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This simple presence to that here-and-now present, because actually perceived, perfect reality (Aristotle: ἐντελέχεια) – this tree – will be then possible because we will have neutralized at the same time every thought-about-Being that is self-alienating because intellectual=abstract, and every mover (= that makes us change place) of efficiency in our “acts” understood as actions (technique, effort) of an efficient doing (Wirkung). This is in fact the vitriolic criticism that Heidegger directs against the post-Aristotelian way of interpreting Being as Wirklichkeit, that is as efficiency and effectiveness and therefore efficacy, power to obtain “tangible” fruits and results of a labor (Heidegger, 1954a, pp.  85–87). On the contrary, for Heidegger it is imperatively a matter of understanding that the Essence (Wesen) and ultimate purpose=perfection (telos) of any movement/thought – their Act as “possessing-themselves-in-the-end (ἐν-τελ-έχεια)” – lies in their being embodied by a posture of Being, a being-to-rest (Beruhigkeit) in whose bosom our Enticity (ousia) fully blossoms as “stable presentation (An-wesung) in the face”. Having-itself-within-its-end (ἐντελέχεια) is the essence of movedness (that is, it is the being of a moving being), because this repose most perfectly fulfills what οὐσία is: the intrinsically stable presencing in the face [Anwesung im Aussehen]. […]Eνέργεια, standing-in-the-work in the sense of presencing into the face, was translated by the Romans as actus, and so with one blow the Greek world was toppled. (Heidegger, 1939, p. 218) In summary, for Heidegger human thought has fallen from the peak of Aristotle’s conception of ἐντελέχεια as a luminous condition of self-presentation of all what exists in the light of its own face, at the moment in which this condition of fullness of Being is reversed in the idea of doing some-thing, operating, manipulating things in order to obtain a “result”, that will be always elsewhere than the efficient cause that produces it. So, for many phenomenologists so as for all the adepts of mindfulness, our peaceful, smiling visage must be our ultimate visée, our inner goal (en-telos): the luminous icon of our Presence to the Other and to the world. From the center of radiance of our face-icon then emanates our Essence in its full unfolding: place of coincidence, then, between the pure and simple Being and the “sharing of the-fullness-of-one’s-own-being” (Kabat-Zinn, 1996, p. 77) which the non-action-non-thought of the Full Consciousness aims at. Another, central, point of convergence between mindfulness and phenomenology is their anchoring in an effective and not affected naïveté: the naïveté most universally prevalent among common people. Indeed, it is only the intellectuals of recent times who, “winking” in their “congresses and conferences” (Heidegger, 1954b, pp.  82–84) agree on the expulsion of Being in the fullness of its meaning as a notion and its presence as a reality, from any philosophically and scientifically legitimate discourse; on the other hand, if Full Consciousness is “accessible to all” (), this is because its insistence on a rebirth of Being as Presence at the expense of any thought/manipulation of the same, is perfectly understandable and common: “Being as being present. This interpretation of Being has been current so long that we regard it as self-evident” (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 102). And finally, Full Consciousness and Phenomenology agree on a conception of the human spirit – of Man in his Being – irreducibly narrative and poetic. Actually, as in the case of Nhất Hạnh’s artist, it is always and again the intensity of artistic expression – and in particular the poetic and narrative metaphor embodied in a speaking voice or from the lines of 477

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an artistically curated and illustrated page (Kabat-Zinn, 2015), but also that of the plastic arts, and of music (André, 2010, 2011) – that in MBSR approaches guides the practitioner’s listening toward his or her own silence. In the same way, the voice of the phenomenologist who tries to lead again the learner/student of the 20th century toward that wonder, θαυμάζειν in front of Being (Plato, 1966, 155c; Aristotle, 1988, Metaphysics, 982b), that admiration as a passion (Descartes, 2010, §70–§77), as an awakened receptivity of our soul surprised by the enigma of Existence, leans totally toward poetry and narrativity to draw the “revealing words” (Zhuang-zi §27, §33, p. 315) necessary to open our ears asleep from the blabla of a deaf and treacherous thought. Memory, Mother of the Muses! The thinking back to what is to be thought is the source and ground of poesy. This is why poesy is the water that at times flows backward toward the source, toward thinking as a thinking back, a recollection. Surely, as long as we take the view that logic gives us any information about what thinking is, we shall never be able to think how much all poesy rests upon thinking back, recollection. Poetry wells up only from de voted thought thinking back, recollecting”. (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 11) The common Way to (re)draw on one’s own Being-Present is therefore that of faithfulness in listening: to the Word understood – Mnemosyne muse of poets and An-denken as faithful thought (ibid., pp.  31–32) – as well as to the (not-acting-)Action here-and-now accomplished: “when you eat a tangerine, eat a tangerine” (Nhất Hạnh, 1994, pp. 17–18). Quite at the opposite, the way techno-science that is taught to our pupils and students concatenates its “reasonings” (= computations) is so deaf to the sense of the words used and never really understood (said/heard), and so indifferent to the duty to keep the given word – i.e., to the (tauto-)logical need not to change the sense of what is meant in the course of one’s “reasonings” –… that Mindfulness recommends not to think if this is the “thought”; while Heidegger does not hesitate to say that this science – and in it the Logistic (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 21) that in the meantime claims to grasp the Structures of Thought in general (Piaget, 1941, 1942, 1953) – does not think. Science itself does not think, and cannot think – which is its good fortune, here meaning the assurance of its own appointed course. Science does not think. This is a shocking statement. Let the statement be shocking, even though we immediately add the supplementary statement that nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking. (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 8) Before highlighting the common limits of both these approaches to the posed problem – how to transport within scientific activity the whole and authentic being of those who practise it, making him a thinking being – let’s examine an example of science that does not think.

Thou Shall Spontaneously Not Think To concretely understand what Heidegger means by saying that (1) “Science doesn’t think” and 2) “nonetheless science always and in its own fashion has to do with thinking”… and 478

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then with Being of Human Being – because we are and always shall be animales rationales – let’s consider an example taken from ordinary teaching of mathematics at school, where “man as animal rationale, meant in the sense of the working being… gets fixed as the labouring animal” (Heidegger, 1954a, pp. 85–87). Everywhere on Earth our pupils learn basic arithmetics as a practice of manipulating things to accumulate-decumulate according with the so-called “four operations”. From Condillac (1821, pp. 8–12) to Dedekind (1872, p. 4) to Bourbaki (1970, p. 1) … until now, nothing has changed, as Gottlob Frege said by condemning this “aggregative mechanical thought” which pretends “that numbers are formed in some peculiarly mechanical way, as sand, say, is formed out of quartz granules” to make calculating man “speak like a parrot”, that certainly “doesn’t think” because “mathematical notation has, as a result of genuine thought, been so developed that it does the thinking for us, so to speak” (Frege, 1884, pp. XV–XVI). On the basis of this conception of numbers – as “quartz granules”– and of the mathematical truths about them as “operations” = actions on them, causae efficientes to realize a certain effect – every pupil knowing that 2+2=2+2=22=4 will get spontaneously, naturally astonished facing “2°=1”. That’s why our mathematical teaching that doesn’t aim to educate thinking beings but to breed “labouring animals” (“Shut up and compute!”2; “Minus times minus is plus/The reason for this we need not discuss!”) (Gelman and Gallistel, 1978, p. 180) so “explains” these wondering expressions: Based on our definition of operation of power [as a faster multiplication, then as an even faster addition=cumulation of at least two thinks] the writing a1 would be meaningless. It is then assumed by convention that this is equal to a, namely a1 = a. Now suppose a0, and consider the identity an: an= 1. If in the equality that expresses the quoted property [am: an=am-n] we set m=n, we get an: an=an-n=a0, which is a formally meaningless writing. Then, since we found that an: an= 1, it is spontaneous to posit the convention a0= 1. (Chiellini & Santoboni, 1981, pp. 85–88. My translation.) This way of proceeding is the rule without exception in the practice and didactics of science Heidegger speaks about in saying that “science does not think”. Faced with dazzling mathematical enigmas that, as Plato says (1965, Rep.VII, 523c–527c) here-and-now naturally “awaken” (ἐγερτικὰ) our intelligence and “invite” it (“παρακαλοῦντα τὴν νόησιν”) to think by “attracting it towards Being”, Truth and Meaning through the spontaneous question: “but what damn is it τί οὖν ποτ᾽ἐστὶ… what does it mean - τί ποτε σημαίνει… what I’m contemplating (2°=1) … since, as it stands, it is perfectly meaningless???” … our manuals and our functionaries-teachers actively inhibit the student from this purely contemplative questioning. They silence and obscure this sonorous and luminous call to be a Thinking Being in thinking about Being. “Since a to the power 0 is 1 and this is something perfectly senseless, we decide by convention that thou shall do so as long as you do it spontaneously, that is, without thinking”. It is this, therefore, the science that does not think because it actively and systematically inhibits thought by breeding mechanized “labouring (=operating) animals” like the machines they have to produce. However, this does not alter the fact that man is a rational animal, and that mathematics is a direct emanation of his existence as a thinking being. This is why Heidegger states: “However, science always has to do with thinking”. The 479

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consequence is that this injunction not to think that “invalidates”3 (Laing) as meaningless and trivial any intimate experience of pure, contemplative thought as such quite devoid of “tangible results”, often becomes, in the pupil, a real “mental torture”. Mathematics is my main regret from my schooldays. I had one mathematics teacher till the end of the third year called “the Bull”, and “Hutch” from fourth through to sixth. I was going along fine until “the Bull” left, and suddenly I was plunged into mathematical idiocy. I could calculate arithmetically, but often made mistakes. And I could not understand what I was doing. I could not understand multiplication, division, even addition. I could not understand how the distance between two infinitely divisible points could be said to be the same as the distance between any two points. Worse, still I could not understand what a number was. What is a number? I kept on trying to imagine what a number was but there are unimaginable numbers. And so on. It was a terrible nightmare and I was so relieved when I sat my last paper in mathematics and never again had to put my mind through such real mental pain, perplexity, bewilderment. (Laing, 1985, p. 45)4 The functionary-teacher who, in front of a0=1 or √−1=i, invalidates in the pupil the purely contemplative question about the Being of Number – “What [f***] is a number???” (Laing)… Was sind [denn!] die Zahlen??? (Dedekind) – suddenly transfigures, in his eyes, into a “Bull” or a “Rabbit”. Why? Because the guy feels the urgency to escape the infernal “double bind” (Bateson, 1956, pp. 253–256) of two existences that – facing a logical nonsense that both must swallow without discussion – look at each other menacingly, in a duel to life or death. In the ears of the pupils, the “metacommunication” (ibid.) that resonates in the teacher’s invalidating injunction “a0 is 1… the reason for this we need not discuss” is actually “I [teacher] can’t go on. You [pupil] are arguing for the pleasure of triumphing over me. At best, you win an argument. In the worst case, an argument is lost. I am arguing to preserve my existence” (Laing, 1959, Chap. 3, on “Engulfment”5). It is this metacommunication that transforms a functionary-teacher of mathematics that commands to accept the meaningless 2°=1 in a Bull or a Rabbit and so pushes his pupils either toward school phobia/truancy,6 or to become as many little bulls and rabbits who, they first, command School to instruct them only and exclusively as laboring, functioning animals that execute “operations” without knowing nor asking what they are doing.

The Limits What is then the common limit to Mindfulness and Phenomenology as to the possibility that from these premises a form of full consciousness – a Presence – can be generated, capable of accompanying and generating a logical-analytical and structured thought like the one of the scientific subjects taught at school? This: that the posture/discipline of listening to the “what the words say” (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 130) proposed to the meditator so that his heart may open to the “silent voice” (ibid.) of the Being/Thought from which he arises and which resonates in him, stops before that Word/Thought becomes Logic. In Husserl’s terms, it is a matter of being able to “reactivate the identity of meaning” of the living and “original evidences” that from the bosom of the “world of life” generated geometric thought. The idealist mathematician Husserl, however, was quite pessimistic 480

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about the possibility that this reactivation could occur immediately – and thus in the present here-and-now of actual mathematical practice. And Heidegger was as pessimistic as Husserl concerning the possibility that the Being of Mathematics, of mathematical objects and then of the mathematician – a Being that nonetheless “is not to be gotten around” [Unumgängliche] – could become accessible [zugänglich] from within the concrete mathematical activity. It is entirely denied to science scientifically to arrive at its own essence: then the sciences are utterly incapable of gaining access to that which is not to be gotten around holding sway in their essence. Here something disturbing manifests itself. That which in the sciences is not at any time to be gotten around – nature, man, history, language – is, as that which is not to be gotten around [Unumgängliche] intractable and inaccessible [unzugänglich] for the sciences and through the sciences. (Heidegger, 1954c, p. 177) An absolute discontinuity separates therefore, in this perspective, Mathematics/Physics (natural/hard sciences) and Metaphysics. The two fronts of thought of our epoch – (neo-) positivism/analytic philosophy and phenomenology – agree on the reciprocal invalidation: for the former, Metaphysics – and in general the ambition of pre-logical thought to grasp Being in its immediacy and reality – is not science, for the latter, Logi(sti)c is not thought. For Heidegger, only a leap outside of sciences can exceed the “unbridgeable” Abgrund between scientific thinking and its own Being That fashion, however, is genuine and consequently fruitful only after the gulf has become visible that lies between thinking and the sciences, lies there unbridgeably. There is no bridge here-only the leap. Hence there is nothing but mischief in all the makeshift ties and asses’ bridges by which men today would set up a comfortable commerce between thinking and the sciences. (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 8) Once this leap is done we are no more, for Heidegger as for Mindfulness, in the world of scientific activity but in that of poetic listening of the Voice of Being, who speaks a language that is pre-logic but not proto-logic: without any “bridgeable” connexion with effective implementation of operational science. It is therefore a question of (re)building this bridge, that could establish a continuity between these two dimensions of the life of an adolescent whose being calls his consciousness to think of a new world, and therefore a new science.

The Way The way that can join poetic listening of the Voice of Being and logic construction of mathematical evidence is that of a return to the here above quoted method of Husserlian “reactivation” of mathematical evidences proposed by Plato: an “awakening” as “diaporetic” practice of the “high sciences” expressly conceived to “attract towards Being”. But neither Husserl nor Plato are enough: our reactivation-method must not be an idealist one, it must not be a dialectic movement of thought “from ideas, through ideas, and ending in ideas” (Plato, 1965, Rep. VI, 511b) with no more contact with the concrete, embodied, and here-and-now perceived world. Then, it must be a conscious reacquisition 481

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of Aristotle’s inductive and deictic posture – state of mind, aspectus mentis – in the face of this-here present truths (ταδὶ; 2002, Posterior Analytics, 72a) that any really embodied mathematician7 must of necessity always have currently in view as a perceived object 1, 2, 3,….8 Thus the non-dialectical and anti-idealist intention of this return to the inductive here-and-now of every real demonstration as an embodied event, orients us toward a reacquisition more complete than the Heideggerian one of Aristotle’s intuitive νοῦς. That is of human intelligence understood as a power of our soul – = an essential mode of our Being – not only of knowing, but which – more deeply and intensely – can actualize itself as rational contemplation (logistiké theoria, Ethics to Nicomachus, VI) of the reality only insofar as it loves and desires it, as a thinkable actuality – Bedenkliche Wirklichkeit – that presents itself to our senses and naturally calls us to think. Then, this Intellect capable of Logic but not logical as such, is not a Kantian metarepresentational and already judging “function-of-unity-to-be-used” (Kant, 1787) by our Ego; and is not the obsessive “thought” (“infinite cascade”) deaf and disembodied rightly repudiated by mindfulness. Its proceeding is – as Heidegger reminds us – scandalously inductive9 precisely because it is inductively rooted in the here-and-now-present World as the only possible beginning of any investigation, that as such must be infinitely open to the infinite horizon beyond the perceived object. According to Aristotle, the fact that all beings from φύσις are in motion or at rest is evident: δῆλον δ’ ἐκ τῆς ἐπαγωγῆς. […] Ἐπαγωγὴ does not mean running through individual facts and series of facts in order to conclude something common and “general” from their similar properties. “Ἐπαγωγὴ” means “leading toward” what comes into view insofar as we have previously looked away, over and beyond individual beings. At what? At being. (Heidegger 1939, p. 187) Now, what Word will speak in this contemplative environment of awakening of thought before the enigma of science? In perfect harmony with the mindfulness-Heideggerian sensibility, it will be a quite scientific word but currently aware of its here-and-now living and acting poetic, narrative, and metaphorical origin, as Aristotle argues in Metaphysics and in Poetics. “By nature, all men love knowledge…” – Aristotle says – … and for this reason we all love the act – ἐντελέχεια – of pure and simple contemplation, for the sake of it (1988, Metaphysics 1, §1). But… what first, at the beginning, draws our contemplative attention? What wonders and amazes us, because we did not expect it. For this reason, Aristotle continues, the philosophos is born and remains, in its cognitive roots, philomythos: It is owing to their wonder (thaumasia) that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; […] And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant; whence even the lover of myth (philomythos) is in a sense a lover of Wisdom (philosophos), for the myth is composed of wonders. (1988, Metaphysics 1, §2) Therefore, if Laing’s distressed “perplexity and bewilderment” is nothing else than the Socratic/Platonic/Aristotelian condition of aporia which cries in his philosophical “What is a number???”, this state of mind arises from the originally narrative structure10 of our 482

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intelligence, νοῦς. Eager to know, this latter naturally leaps (Luke, 1.41) before a περιπέτεια, a Reversal of the Situation (Aristotle, 1922, §11) as “a0=1”, that here-and-now occurs in the implicit story that our soul uninterruptedly writes about the reality in which we live, and that will be followed – if the narrator knows his job – by the ἀναγνώρισις: Recognition (“change from ignorance to knowledge”, ibid.): “οὗτος ἐκεῖνος: Ah, that is he!”. I’m speaking here of the poetic/narrative pulsation at the heart of every “contemplating learning or inferring”: Poetry in general seems to have sprung from two causes, each of them lying deep in our nature. First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood […] and through imitation learns his earliest lessons; and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. […] The cause of this again is that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general […] Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ (ὅτι συμβαίνει θεωροῦντας μανθάνειν καὶ συλλογίζεσθαι τί ἕκαστον, οἷον ὅτι οὗτος ἐκεῖνος) (Aristotle, 1922, Poetics, §4) But this “Ah, that is he!” structures not only the original narrative/analogical architecture of reasoning, but also, more profoundly, the metaphorical forging of new words or of unexplored senses of the same word, as Ricoeur (1975, I, §5, pp.  51–61) highlights in showing – in Aristotle’s Poetics – the imbrication between poiesis and physis in the phenomenon – immanent to the evolution of science – of linguistic creation. This shows (1) that human intelligence is, in its Being, in perfect continuity with Nature and Life; (2) that its actualization (ἐντελεχείᾳ εἶναι) as contemplation of reality (ἐντελεχείᾳ εἶναι) – a state of mind free from any practical finality – remains one and the same starting from its first poetic-narrative roots, passing through the complex of theoretical sciences (mathematics, physics, biology, psychology) up to the most rarefied peaks of the metaphysical grasping of the Pure Act of Being. It is then possible to read the Aristotelian ἐντελεχείᾳ εἶναι as, certainly, the “perfection of Being” of Nhất Hạnh’s almond, but also, at the same time, as the perfection of Thought, which is the eminent fruit of Human Tree. We can then understand it (understand our understanding) more hopefully than Heidegger does, when he condemns our poetic and scientific intelligence to an irremediable divorce. But better yet: this is not just a possibility, but something already actualized, and that crosses like an underground river the entire history of science. To keep us to the mathematics of 0 let’s consider George Boole, the father of the 0–1 language of informatics. The Boolean arithmetization of the logical links of truth, and therefore of probability, within the Demonstration, finds its first object to “quantify” – Boole was here inspired by the works of W.B. Hamilton – not in the space/time extensions that inhabit the natural world (“the Logic regarded from without” – Boole, 1847, p. 1) but in the expressive intensity of the natural word, as it eminently acts in poetry (“the Logic regarded from within” – ibid.). It is actually in this purely linguistic domain that from simple inversions of order between subject and predicate – “onoma-rhema” – emanate at the same time flashes of aesthetic beauty and the evidence of a structural non-commutativity: the action of that orienting and irreversible Force of Sinngebung which is the proprium of the Logical Truth. As for the flashes of aesthetic beauty generated by the friction of these 483

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logical reversals, W.B. Hamilton gives us Pindarian and Biblical examples: “First Olympiad of Pindar: ‘Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ: Best is water’, and the Vulgate has ‘Magna est Veritas et pravalebit’” (Hamilton, 1858, II, pp. 514–516); whereas Boole – to explain the linguistic root of his not-algebraic law “xy=yx” – chooses a Miltonian example – “Offspring of heaven first-born./The rising world of waters dark and deep./Bright effluence of bright essence increate” – which is not just – says Boole – the simple fact of a “poetic license”, but the “natural expressions of a freedom sanctioned by the intimate laws of thought” (1854, p. 21). The world from the bosom of which Boolean mathematization of Logic arises is then the free (=poetic) universe of human listening/creation of the sense of our words: this very space of Interpretation – ἑρμηνεία – where Aristotle hears the interior language – ἔσω λόγος – of our soul (“Demonstrations, are not addressed to external language but rather to interior language of soul” Posteriors Analytics, 76b) absolutely necessary to perform a correct reasoning in the exterior world of ours linguistic interactions with other human beings. “From within” this interior space, Boolean mind makes the experience of her power of Sinngebung, and here “0” means “the Nothing” as potentiality, because for an awaken mind no-thing means nothing but the lowest limit of all possible manifestation of something: “In fact, Nothing [0] and Universe [1] are the two limits of class extension, for they are the limits of the possible interpretations of general names” (Boole, 1854, p. 33). The Boolean continuous range of values – from 0 to 1 – that a “general name” can get – is then the pure expression of the power that our mind has to give a [=1] sense to its uni[1]verse [= 1 sense]: falsehood being then nothing else than “the infinite degree of tardity of truth”, as well as in the Galilean “perfect, yea most perfect” World’s body (Galilei, 1632, p. 6) “state of rest” is only the “the infinite degree of tardity of motion” – velocity = 0 – that is, nothing but the begin of all its possible propulsion (ibid., p. 11); and as well Brahamagupta’s “0/0” (where 0=sunya = the Void) is not at all a “meaningless writing” (as it is for our nihilist mathematical teaching) but the symbolic expression of this not-yet-determined but quite meaningful state of mind that is prior but synchronic (as the “empty set”, one and the same belonging to any other numerical set) to all possible numerical determination = interpretation of Things. This is what “the Bull” or “the Rabbit” could at least poetically suggest to his distressed pupil, bewildered by a0=1 and a1=a: that “0” doesn’t mean a wasted land where no-thing can grow up, nor “1” means “only-one-thing” that cannot be cumulated with itself… but that “0” is the First Degree of Power, the Seed – one=1 and the same – of the Tree of Life (than of Numbers), from which numbers grow up as his fruits, showing first their own different faces – act of “presencing in to the face, Eνέργεια…” – only at the Second Degree of Power, δύναμις –“1” – of this very same Big Tree.11 The Brahmaguptian state of mind “0/0” as spiritual condition of silence and awakened attention – Presence, Anwesung, ψυχῆς ἐντελέχεια – is precisely that in which the pupil perplexed in front of the meaningless a0=1 would keep his wondered soul finally open to any new word resonating in his ears, or to any new sense that one may creatively – = poetically – assign to old words – such as “number”, “nothing”, “power” – eager for a new life, that is a new meaningfulness. And this mind’s opening to meaningfulness of new and unknown facts of Being, of Life, of Mind, is mindfulness in science education. Not by chance, a luminous example of this kind of science pedagogy is offered by George Boole’s wife – Mary Boole Everest – in her amazing book The preparation of the child for

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science – whose dedication to her cousin Ethel Gertrude Everest clearly shows that my yoga interpretation of Boole/Brahmagupta’s 0 is not an arbitrary one: My Dear Cousin – Three-quarters of a century ago your father, during a visit to his native land, infused into the minds of a few young mathematicians, among whom where Charles Babbage and J. Herschell, certain ideas about the nature of man’s relation to Unknown Truth which underlay all science in ancient Asia, and which he had learned from Brahman teachers. The seed which he then sowed has borne abundant fruit in English Mathematics. Of his subsequent work in India some have sought to express their appreciation by giving his name to a great inaccessible snow-peak. You and I think that we shall more truly fulfil his ambitions by making as accessible as we can to little children in all parts of the Empire that open gateway to the Unseen at which he stood in perpetual adoration to the last hours of his life. (M. Everest Boole to Ethel Gertrude Everest. The preparation of the child for science) The reality at the bottom of all this is that there is only one human mind that – since by its own Being and destination it loves and desires knowledge – produces under the same celestial sphere the two hemispheres of Poetry and Science, of Analogy and Logic, of literacy and numeracy. On one condition, however: that in the heart of the human spirit is reactivated what Plato calls the “Desire of Being” (orexia tou ontos; 1975, Phaedo) and that Human Being – in order not to become extinct – begins again to rejoice and wonder (which in the Greek of the koiné is called “to exist”: “Ἐξίσταντο δὲ πάντες καὶ ἐθαύμαζον…And they were all amazed and marveled”,12 Acts 2.7) rather than to be an-orexic, distressed or nauseated before the miraculous “uproar about Being and Existence” (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 217).

Notes 1 “When we hear our question ‘What is called thinking?’ in the sense that it asks, ‘What is it that appeals to us to think?’ we then are asking: ‘What is it that enjoins our nature to think, and thus lets our nature reach thought, arrive in thinking, there to keep it safe?’ […] ‘What makes a call upon us that we should think and, by thinking, be who we are?’” (Heidegger, 1954b, p. 118, p. 115). 2 Feynman’s famous motto to silence philosophical questions raised from quantum mechanics. 3 V. The negation of experience – Jack may act upon Jill in many ways. He may make her feel guilty for keeping on “bringing it up”. He may invalidate her experience. This can be done-more or less radically. He can indicate merely that it is unimportant or trivial […]; he can shift the modality of her experience from memory to imagination: “It’s all in your imagination.” […] he can invalidate the content. “It never happened that way.” Finally, he can invalidate not only the significance, modality, and content, but her very capacity to remember at all… And so on (Laing 1967, Ch. I, §V). 4 On Ronald Laing’s ambivalent relationship with mathematics, see Caianiello (2012). 5 I.3. Ontological insecurity §1. Engulfment. An argument occurred between two patients in the course of a session in an analytic group. Suddenly, one of the protagonists broke off the argument to say, “I can’t go on…. etc. ” (Laing, 1959, p. 43). 6 On school phobia/truancy and its essential (not “translated”) relationship to child’s grasping of symbols, see Caianiello (2010b, §4), Dalla paura della scuola alla speranza nella scuola; and Caianiello (2011b). 7 On this, see Caianiello (2011a), Première Partie. Réincarner les mathématiques. In this sense Merleau-Ponty provided valuable reading tools. See for example the way in which Phenomenology of Perception shows how the “act of constructing” proper to geometric demonstration is rooted in

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Eduardo Caianiello the embodied being of the mathematician “in action” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945, p. 385). A precedent for this conception is in Schopenhauer (1813, §36-§39; 1819, §15), who anti-idealistically reroots the intuiting intellection of the “reason of being” manifested by mathematical evidence in our bodily proprioception, as the only effective giver of meaning to perceived symbols. 8 On the strictly perceptual beginning of mathematical induction, cf. Caianiello (2022), Appendice B Sur les nombres naturels, les nombres artificiels et l’indution mathématique. 9 For my own defence of an anti-baconian/popperian induction, see Caianiello (2022), Appendice D. Sur l’induction. 10 On the originally narrative structure of the infant’s mind, cf. my Caianiello (2008) where I argue that the “infant’s metaphysics” (Xu & Carey, 1996) has primarily its roots in the event / state of things, within which there are also physical bodies (Baillargeon et al., 1985; Baillargeon 1994) but not only. On the other hand, on the essentially narrative structure of Galileo’s mathematized physics, see Caianiello (2011a, §10.1) Le temps palindrome du pendule. On choking of the “voix de l’événement” at the present age, see Caianiello (2010a). 11 In this case, I propose a not only analogical way of interpreting the mathematical notion of Power, unlike Aristotle (1988, Metaph. IX, 1046a). 12 On wonder in Socrates and in the biblical tradition, see Caianiello (2013).

References André, C. (2010). Méditer, jour après jour. Paris: L’Iconoclaste. André, C. (2011). De l’art du bonheur. Paris: L’Iconoclaste. Aristotle. (1922). Poetics. London. London: Macmillan And Co. Aristotle. (1988). Metaphysics. New York: Penguin Books. Aristotle. (2002). Posterior Analytics. London: Oxford Clarendon Press. Baillargeon, R. (1994). How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science 3, 133–140. Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E.S., & Waesserman, S. (1985). Object permanence in 5 months old infant. Cognition 20 (3), 191–208. Bateson, G. (1956). Toward a theory of schizophrenia. Behavioral Science 1 (4), 251–264. Boole, G. (1847). A Mathematical Analysis of Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Boole, G. (1854). An Investigation of the Laws of Thought. London: Walton & Maberly. Boole Everest, M. (1904). The Preparation of Child for Science. London: Oxford Clarendon Press. Bourbaki, N. (1970). Éléments de mathématique Vol. I. Paris: Dunod. Caianiello, E. (2008). Les prolégomènes de l’enfant à toute métaphysique future: le sens de l’identité numérique, l’identité numérique du sens. Dogma. Caianiello, E. (2010a). la science et la voix de l’événement. A la recherche du sens (A. Philonenko, Pref.). Paris: Harmattan. Caianiello, E. (2010b). Sperare nella scuola. Una nuova educazione alla scienza nel sistema dei licei (J. Dhombres, B. D’Amore, Pref.) Roma: Aracne. Caianiello, E. (2011a). La génèse des mathématiques et la puissance dynamique du mental humain. Une démonstration d’existence. (B. D’Amore, G. Vergnaud, Pref.) Sarrebruck: EUE. Caianiello, E. (2011b). La peur des mathématiqus et la fée aux cheveux bleues. QRDM, Quaderni di ricerca in didattica della matematica, Università di Palermo, 21(1). Caianiello, E. (2012). L’Io indivisibile e la psichiatria divisa di R. Laing, G. Bateson & C. Bollettino di Studi Sartriani VIII, 221–252. Caianiello, E. (2013). Du symbole au sacrément. D’une pédagogie à une mystagogie de la science. THÈMES, Revue de la Bibliothèque de Philosophie Comparée (www.philosophiedudroit.org). Caianiello, E. (2022). Intelligence de la nature, nature de l’intelligence. Le chiasme poétique comme base expressive d’une mathématisation de l’intelligence humaine (M. Marraffa, Pre-Posface). Roma: Aracne. Chiellini, A., & Santoboni, L. (1981). Elementi di algebra. Torino: Petrini. Condillac, E.B. (1821). La Logique ou les premiers développements de l’art de penser, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. IX. Paris: Lecointe et Durey. Dedekind, R. (1872). Continuity and irrational numbers. In Essays Theory of Numbers. London: Agents Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd. 1901.

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Thinking Being Descartes, R. (2010). Les passions de l’âme. Paris: Vrin. Frege, G. (1884). The Foundation of Arithmetics. New York: Harper & Brothers 1960. Galilei, G. (1632). Dialogues on Two World Systems. London: William Leybourne 1661. Gelman, R., & Gallistel, C. R. (1978). The child’s Understanding of Number. Cambridge/London: Harvard University Press. Hamilton, W.B. (1858). Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic I-II. New York: Sheldon and Company. Heidegger, M. (1939) On the essence and concept of physis. Heidegger, M. (1954a). Overcoming Metaphysics. Heidegger. 1973. Heidegger, M. (1954b). What Is Called Thinking?. New York, Evanston and London: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1968. Heidegger, M. (1954c). Science and Reflection. Heidegger. 1977. Heidegger, M. (1961a). Metaphysics as History of Being. Heidegger. 1973. Heidegger, M. (1973). The End of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. (1977). The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York & London: Garland Publishing, Inc. Heidegger, M. (2010). Pathmarks. Cambridge: Cambridge Un. Press. Husserl, E. (1929). Formale und transzendentale Logik. Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1996). Où tu vas, tu es. Paris: Jean Claude Lattès. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2015). 100 expériences de pleine conscience. Paris: J’ai lu. Kant, I. (1784). An Answer to the Question “What Is Enlightenment?”. London: Penguin Books, 1990. Kant, I. (1787). Critic of Pure Raison. London: Henry G. Bohn 1855. Laing, R. (1959). The Divided Self. London: Penguin Books 1990. Laing R. (1985). Wisdom, madness & folly. The Making of a Psychiatrist. London: MacMillan. Laing R. (1967). The Politics of Experience. London: Stock. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge 2011. Nhất Hạnh, T. (1994). Le miracle de la pleine conscience. Paris: L’espace bleu. Piaget, J. (1941). Le mécanisme du développement mental et les lois du groupement des opérations. Archives De Psychologie XXVIII (112), 215–285. Piaget, J. (1942). Classes, relations et nombres. Paris: Vrin. Piaget, J. (1953). Structures opérationnelles et cybernétique. L’année Psychologique 53 (1), 379–388. Plato (1965). Res Publica. Oxonii: E. Typographeo Clarendoniano. Plato (1966). Theaetetus. Oxonii: E. Typographeo Clarendoniano. Plato (1975). Phaedo. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1975). La métaphore vive. Paris: Éd. du Seuil. Schopenhauer, A. (1813). On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and on the Will in Nature. Two Essays. London: George Bell And Sons 1903. Schopenhauer. (1819). The World as Will and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2010. Xu, F., & Carey, S. (1996). Infants’ metaphysics: The case of numerical identity. Cognitive Psychology 30, 111–153.

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PART VII

Conclusion: Mindfulness and Phenomenology?

33 PHENOMENOLOGY AND MINDFULNESS-AWARENESS Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol

Introduction In their article “Phenomenology and Mindfulness” published in 2021 in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi make three claims about phenomenology and Buddhism, which are strongly interconnected.1 1 Phenomenology is a philosophical theoretical discipline uniquely concerned with the “mind-world” correlation; 2 Buddhist meditative practice is a practice of paying attention defined as mindfulness; 3 The comparison between phenomenology and Buddhism would better be situated on the philosophical level, between philosophical phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy, and not on the level of their experiential praxis. All three claims are not entirely false, but their share of truth remains poor and reductionist, so that they avoid an effective fruitful confrontation and cooperation between phenomenology and Buddhism. Furthermore, they delineate a narrow exclusive understanding of phenomenology, of Buddhism, and of their way of relating to each other. In the following contribution, we will show that not only are the authors misled in their claims, but they end up contending a reductionist view of phenomenology, of Buddhism, and of their relation. In order to do so, we will contend a more complex understanding of phenomenology as a passive receptive, co-embodied and generative oriented approach, of Buddhism as awareness (vipashyana), as self-other equalizing (lojong-tonglen) and as a practice of impermanence and emptiness (shunyata), which will allow us in turn to unfold a relation between phenomenology and Buddhism situated on its experiential praxis proper, as an indispensable condition for its situation on a theoretical-philosophical level.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003350668-41

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From the Mind-World Correlation to the Receptive Co-Embodied Generative Phenomenology Husserl’s work is the model of an unresolved, embarrassed, crossed out, arborescent work; this is why many researchers have found their own way (…) because they extended a line masterfully initiated by the founder, and no less masterfully crossed out by him. Phenomenology is to a large extent a history of Husserlian heresies. The structure of the master’s work implied that there could not be a Husserlian orthodoxy. (Ricœur, 1986, p. 156) The French philosopher Paul Ricœur makes such a pluralistic claim in an essay entitled “Sur la phénoménologie” first published in 1953.2 And he further writes, in another article he published in 1967: (…) phenomenology is a vast project that does not close on a specific work or group of works. Indeed, it is less a doctrine than a method capable of multiple incarnations (…) Husserl abandoned along the way as many paths as he cleared. So that phenomenology broadly speaking is the sum of the Husserlian work and the heresies stemming from Husserl; it is also the sum of the variations of Husserl himself and in particular the sum of the properly phenomenological descriptions and the philosophical interpretations by which he reflects and systematizes his method. (Ricœur, 1986, pp. 8–9)3 We would like to place our contribution under the aegis of Paul Ricœur’s statement. His open-minded, pluralistic, and inclusive understanding of phenomenology is indeed genuinely faithful to the philosophical view of the founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl. In short, the mind-world correlation is an extremely limited view to define phenomenology. Furthermore, our claim is that it is methodologically questionable to start with intentionality as the core of phenomenology and to subsequently add embodied intersubjectivity, passivity as receptivity and generativity, as if we had to do with a grounding property (intentionality) to which we would join supplements. This is quite a static, hierarchical authoritarian view of phenomenology. Instead, we suggest a systemic horizontal democratic dynamic circulation between these different dimensions.

Intentionality Here is how Stone and Zahavi define phenomenology: “The aim of phenomenology is precisely not to investigate either the subject or the object, either the mind or the world, but to investigate both in their interrelation or correlation” (2021, p. 173). And also: “(…) phenomenology should not be conceived merely as a theory about the structure of subjectivity nor is it merely a theory about how we understand and perceive the world, rather its proper theme is the mind-world dyad” (ibid.). So, for the authors, phenomenology equates the investigation of the correlation qua interrelation between subject and object, or mind and world, what they call in the second quote “the mind-world dyad”. First, it is questionable to identify object and world on the one hand, subject and mind on the other hand. Why? It amounts to fold over each other, or even crush on each other, object and world which belong to contrasting understandings of phenomenology: Husserl on the one hand, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty on the other hand. 492

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For instance, according to Merleau-Ponty: “The natural world is the horizon of all horizons, the style of all possible styles, which guarantees for my experiences a given, not a willed, unity underlying all the disruptions of my personal and historical life”4 (2002, p. 285). This characterization of the world, qua horizon and style that underpins every experience, is as far from a concept of object as one can go, and it is then utterly wrong to conflate them in any case. Besides, while identifying subject and mind, Stone and Zahavi present a definition of subjectivity deprived of its bodily life and of its intersubjective dynamics, which are precisely the new phenomenological properties Husserl puts forward against the Cartesian solipsistic bodiless concept of the subject, especially in Ideas II, where the lived body (Leib) IS the very egoic center of orientation, what Husserl calls the “zero-point” (Nullpunkt): “The Body (Leib) has, for its particular Ego, the unique distinction of bearing in itself the zero point of all the orientations. (…) The ‘far’ is far from me, from my Body, e.g., to my right hand. (…) The Body of the subject (Subjektleib) ‘alters its position’ in space; the things appearing in the environment are constantly oriented thereby”5 (Husserl, 1989, p. 166). Stone and Zahavi’s understanding of the subject therefore means a move backward mapping again Husserl upon Descartes. How is it possible? Finally, the word “dyad” is also highly problematic: it suggests a dualistic understanding of intentionality, whereas, in contrast to that, Husserl sought to think the very unitary dynamics of a consciousness understood as an openness to the other, as it is very well-known in the standard and referential definition of intentionality in the §14 of Cartesian Meditations: “(…) every conscious process is, in itself, consciousness of such and such, regardless of what the rightful actuality-status of this objective such-and-such may be (…)”6 (Husserl, 1982, p. 33). By narrowing down the task of phenomenology to articulating two verbally separated terms, Stone and Zahavi run the risk of trivializing phenomenology. Their formulations may suggest misleadingly to philosophers, who are not specialists of phenomenology, that this discipline is little more than an appendix of some standard epistemology that seeks to articulate the mind and the “external” world by way of justified beliefs about the latter. But as it is well-known, a large part of Husserl’s effort was devoted to a devastating critique of the ordinary concept of an “objective world” that is unreflectively adduced by those scientists and philosophers who have hardened the “natural attitude” into a doctrine. “Los[ing] the world by epoché”, and then “regain[ing] it by a universal self-examination”7 (Husserl, 1960, p. 33) (that crucially includes the sense of embodiment), is a core gesture for Husserlian phenomenology. And selfexamination reveals that: “Objective world does not, in the proper sense, transcend that sphere [of ownness], but rather inheres in it as an ‘immanent’ transcendency”8 (Husserl, 1989, p. 157). The duality of the “dyad” is here absorbed into the unique plane of immanence. In short, the very understanding of intentionality provided by the authors as what would be the core of phenomenology is not only poor, limited, that is, reductionist, but it does not do justice to the properties Husserl himself put to the fore as being inherently included in his new understanding of consciousness, that is, an embodied and intersubjective openness to the other.

Epoché But there is more. Stone and Zahavi astonishingly decide to favor intentionality and to dismiss the relevance of the very method of phenomenology, that is, epoché. This is a weird interpretation, since intentionality is considered by Husserl himself as belonging to the level of a descriptive psychology, while epoché opens up the true level of transcendental phenomenology. 493

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They argue that: “Logical investigations was a resounding success and basically triggered the launch of the phenomenological movement. The work, however, contains no reference to the epoché or the phenomenological reduction”9 (Stone, Zahavi, art. cit., p. 169). And they add: “Neither Heidegger nor Merleau-Ponty made many references to the epoché and the reduction. (…) As for Sartre, he only mentions the epoché once in Being and Nothingness”10 (ibid.). True or not, it is really astonishing to seek to prove that epoché is not a necessary methodological component of phenomenology while “counting” occurrences, as if statistics and quantitative measurements were a reliable assessment for the definition of phenomenology. Are Stone and Zahavi not changing phenomenology into a measurable science? Furthermore, they suggest an extremely limited view of Husserlian phenomenology narrowly equated to the Logical Investigations. Now, even in 1901, in the Logical Investigations, as the contemporary French Husserl scholar Jean-François Lavigne remarkably showed in his masterpiece book Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (2005),11 the reduction operates on the psychological facts, even though it does not yet involve a reduction concerning the eidos. It can easily be recognized in sentences such as this one: “This analysis aims to break down the experiences of internal perception by taking them in themselves (…) without taking into account what they signify outside of themselves, and what they may stand for”12 (Husserl, 2013, pp. 411–412). As for the eidetic intuition applied to the lived experience, it is already present at the time of the Logical Investigations, even though in an embryonic way. Furthermore, the reduction will appear explicitly a few years later in 1906–1907, in the Introductory book entitled The Idea of phenomenology, which, according to Lavigne,13 indicates that it was already implied earlier, maybe even back to 1901: “(…) to every psychological experience there corresponds, by way of the phenomenological reduction, a pure phenomenon that exhibits its immanent essence (taken individually) as an absolute givenness”14 (Husserl, 2001, p. 34). But there is still more: How about the transcendental phenomenology unfolded from 1913 onward? How about the genetic and generative phenomenology, central to the Husserlian philosophy in the twenties and in the thirties, and where the epoché both as suspension of preconceptions and as a critical radical ethical attitude is crucial? Are they not central concepts and constitutive operations of phenomenology? Let us move also beyond Husserl himself: Heidegger defines in his book Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie of 1927 the phenomenological reduction as a “turning away from what is (Seiende) and allowing oneself to be led back to its being (Sein)”15 This means that, according to Heidegger, the phenomenological reduction is tantamount to acknowledging the “ontological difference” between Seiende and Sein. Since the “ontological difference” is arguably the central concept of Heidegger’s philosophy, can one still say that the phenomenological reduction is absent or unimportant in his work?16 At the end of What is Metaphysics?, in 1929, Heidegger further clarified a sequential methodological gesture that can easily be recognized as a form of epoché: “To accomplish [this Einsprung], one must: first give space to being in its entirety, then abandon oneself in the nothing, that is to say free oneself from the idols that each of us possesses, […] finally let go of the oscillations of this state of suspense”17 (Heidegger, 1993, p. 110). 494

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As for Jean-Paul Sartre, contrary to what is claimed by Stone and Zahavi, his mentions of the epoché are by no means restricted to one single occurrence in Being and Nothingness. There is another essential occurrence in his early work La transcendance de l’Ego, which was published in 1934, and moreover the epoché is the pivotal theme of his novel La nausée (Nausea). The way the young Sartre presented the epoché in La transcendance de l’Ego is also a plea in favor of the crucial role it is bound to play in his philosophy. Indeed, according to him: “If the natural attitude is an effort that consciousness makes to escape itself … the epoché is no longer a miracle, it is no longer an intellectual method …: it is an anguish which is imposed on us and which we cannot avoid”18 (Sartre, 1965, pp. 83–84). Sartre here claims that the epoché is an effortless (but anxiety inducing) “accident” that inevitably occurs whenever one relaxes the dualizing effort of the so-called “natural attitude”. Such an “accident” was likely suffered by himself, and the main character of the novel La nausée, called Roquentin, is probably expressing his own experience of spontaneous epoché. Can we thus say that the epoché was marginal for Sartre? Quite the contrary! The epoché so permanently conditioned Sartre’s insights that mentioning it repeatedly would have been unnecessarily redundant. Finally, one feature that is here completely absent from the definition of phenomenology by Stone and Zahavi is the theory of passivity and the method of genetic constitution, which are crucial pieces of Husserl’s revolution in his understanding of consciousness as embodied and situated in the world. Truly, it is amazing that Stone and Zahavi choose to “forget” such crucial and outstanding dimensions of phenomenology as a new philosophical method.

From Mindfulness to Awareness and Self-Other Equalizing In the first part of this chapter, we showed how phenomenology is presented by Stone and Zahavi as quite a narrow reductionist approach. The presentation of Buddhism is still much more problematic. In short, it is reduced to an experience of paying attention. It is obvious that no Buddhist practitioner would recognize herself in such a limited view of Buddhism. Again, some will say that it is not strictly false, but it is so reductionist that it becomes highly unfair to what Buddhism has offered in its 2500 years ancient and multifarious tradition spread out in India, China, Tibet, and Japan, but also in the western cultures today.

Mindfulness Is Nothing without Awareness Stone and Zahavi define the Buddhist approach as being mindful. I quote: Consider the claim that mindfulness amounts to paying attention… to what is ‘present in experience’. A recurrent problem is that such references to experience often fail to distinguish between the intentional object and the intentional act. Does mindfulness amount to a distinct type of (reflective or self-reflexive) self-presence, or does it rather afford a particular kind of presence of (or to) the experienced world?. (2001, p. 163) Truly the shamatha meditative practice (nowadays translated with the word “mindfulness”) refers to a practice of cultivating one’s attention to what is happening, mostly focused on my bodily breathing in and out, itself related to the flow of my emerging and vanishing thoughts. 495

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When Stone and Zahavi describe, even shortly, the shamatha practice, one can notice that they are not interested in the experiential practice itself, but only in the conceptual distinctions at work. Their questions in the above quotation show it: they desperately want to map the shamatha practice with reflexivity and intentional presence to the object, while shamatha clearly refers to a practice favoring micro bodily attentional processes at once anchored in breathing and emerging inner moves. So their approach violently conceptualizes what is first and foremost an experiencing dynamics, a lived process and not at first an objective result. In order to “prove” their goodwill to situate themselves on a concrete level of experience, they refer to J. Kabat-Zinn’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction meditational approach.19 I quote: “Jon Kabat-Zinn’s famous MBSR exercise in which subjects are instructed to mindfully eat a raisin, carefully attending to its colour, texture and flavor as one brings it to one’s lips and chews, is arguably a case in point, in favor of the presence to the experienced world” (Stone & Zahavi, 2021, p. 164). Even though the above description is based on a situated lived experience potentially able to initiate a (micro)-phenomenological description of what is going on as far as some acts of consciousness are concerned when achieving the daily act of eating a raisin, it does not take account the full span of Kabat-Zinn’s concern with mindful meditation. Indeed, the latter defines mindfulness meditation as: “the awareness that arises from paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment and non-judgmentally”20 (Kabat-Zinn, 2003, p. 145). By focusing on breath, the idea is to cultivate attention on the body and mind as it is from moment to moment, both physical and emotional. Now, Stone and Zahavi do not take into account the breathing bodily-emotional experience, which is crucial in meditation. In the raisin exercise, indeed one is not meant to analyze the raisin qua object, unlike what they strongly suggest. One is offered (1) a theme for training in attention; (2) an introduction to the realm of full experience, where sensory, emotive, cognitive components are all to be carefully attended to. Furthermore, as it is clearly noted by Kabat-Zinn, shamatha (mindfulness) is nothing without vipashyana (awareness). Or, again, the focused attention on breathing and thoughts (mindfulness) is nothing without the panoramic open attention at work in awareness (vispashyana). A panoramic attention that opens up the whole field of what manifests, well beyond the narrowly focused presentation of some object (be it the raisin). Kabat-Zinn explicitly unites both gestures in a single practice, and it is obvious that Stone and Zahavi are sadly not “aware” of such an interdependent link between mindfulness and awareness. Besides, it is not for nothing that we talk in meditation about the shamatha-vipashyana practice: mindfulness straightaway includes in itself a panoramic kind of attention, in which the very distinction between the act and the object, between self-presence and presence to the world, fades away and becomes irrelevant: either intentional directedness is suspended, or the very polarity of act and object becomes porous. As it is remarkably formulated by Erol Čopelj: “As I attempt to tune-in to naturenaturing, being-in-the-world absorbs me back into itself. When that takes place, the task is to, gently and patiently, tune-out of whatever project I have become entangled in and to tune-in to the possibilities of the breath”21 (Čopelj, 2023, p. 21). Interestingly enough, this is the very move of the phenomenological reduction in its process of turning away from the absorption into objects (including the raisin!) and its turning back to the lived experience itself. So the moves of tuning-out and tuning-in in Čopelj should not be understood as the restoration of an “interiority” as distinct from the “outside world”, but as the very process of emergent and vanishing thoughts along with the fluctuation of my breathing. This is also what is at stake in the genetic move of phenomenology, 496

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which focuses on the emerging process of the lived experience itself and contributes to make porous the distinction between the subject and the object.

From the Tonglen-Lojong Intersubjective Opening as Included in Vipashyana to Shunyata, the Radical Emergence of the Field of Experience In that respect, the general move in advanced Buddhist meditation leads to a gradual diminishing of the barriers between the space around me and my inner space. The vipashyana-awareness meditation lies in opening up my attention to the surroundings and thus ex-centering myself, so that I do not remain only focused on my breathing and thoughts, but I welcome the space around me as part of the space within myself. Vipashyana therefore spontaneously leads to the tonglen-lojong practice, which consists in welcoming the other in myself as being both an other and an inner part of myself. In Tibetan, tonglen means give-welcome and it refers to a practice of training one’s mind (lojong) meant to favor compassion. More precisely, I learn to reverse the standard egocentric logic and to open up to the other qua part of a broadened myself. To refer to the 85 years old Tibetan nun Pema Chödron, with each in-breath, we take in others’ pain. With each out-breath, we send them relief.22 The Tibetan monk Chögyam Trungpa also describes this intersubjective compassionate practice as an equalizing process and an exchange of places between the other’s suffering and myself’s appeasement.23 The following step in the discovery of the porosity of self and other refers to the more advanced dzogchen practices, which directly cultivate emptiness and impermanence, in tibetan, shunyata.24 So shunyata is the absence of substantial identity. In a positive way, it is the dynamics of experience that self-manifests as a succession of events pertaining to our intimate mental life, within a spacious background which embraces the totality of appearances, without there being any more distinction between inside and outside. Let us quote Francisco Varela in his 1997 article “For a phenomenology of śūnyatā I”: (…) the nature of the self is precisely its non-findability. There is nothing to grasp that would make persons and phenomena what they are (in Sanskrit: anātman; in Tibetan: bdag med gnyis). (…) The usual translation of anātman is “non-self”, or “empty of self”. However, we are again too close to the original Buddhist language. (…) For the practitioner, anātman is manifest, experienced as superabundant: it is a non-knowing which holds a host of surprises.25 What clearly results from the exploration of the different steps of meditational experience as a practice is the following: Stone and Zahavi so much shrank the lived experience of Buddhist meditation to a mere act of paying attention, that it ends up being reduced to a trickle, or, as we say in French, to a “peau de chagrin” (skin of sorrow). From what we showed above, it should be obvious that Buddhism can in no way be simply equated to paying attention: it inherently includes a spacious openness to the other, intersubjective compassion and a radical emerging process which suspends every founding and identifying move. In summary, contrary to what Stone and Zahavi claim, the investigation of the mindworld correlation is truly at the heart of Buddhist meditative practice, and of the philosophy that was born from it. But in the latter perspective, the structure of the mind-world correlation is not an explanatory a priori model of experience, its understanding emerges from 497

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the exploration of very experience itself. So its investigation is not an a priori philosophical reflection that would be initiated by a theoretical suspension of the natural attitude, e.g. the belief in the mind-independent existence of the world. It is an experiential process which precisely results in turn in the dissolution of the mind-world structure. This process, which consists in releasing absorption into the objects of experience, from the coarsest to the most subtle, results in the progressive “subtilization” of the subjectobject couple, and finally in the vanishing of both subject and object. This subtilization is inseparable from an increasingly clear awareness, not only of “how the world shows up for the subject (…), how and as what worldly objects are given to us”,26 but also of how the experience of a subject distinct and distant from worldly objects emerges. This awareness consists in understanding, not only “how objectivities are constituted”,27 but the process of co-constitution of the subject-object couple. In other words, the fading of the subject-object structure is concomitant with an increasingly refined awareness of their co-emergence. In that respect, more than phenomenology alone, which remains at a coarse level of experience given its not taking into account a singular hic et nunc experience but stating about the structure of experience, micro-phenomenology offers the right level of expertise in order to access more subtle processes and in fine the very process of the subtilization of the subject-object couple.28 The investigation of the processes of constitution and disappearance of the subject-object structure is therefore at the heart of Buddhist meditative practice since its origins, as evidenced by this very ancient sutra: “Thus, monks, the Tathâgata29, when seeing what is to be seen, does not construe an [object] seen. (…) He does not construe a seer. When hearing (…). When feeling (…). When cognizing what is to be cognized, he does not construe an [object] cognized. He does not construe a cognizer”30 (Kalakarama sutta, Anguttara-nikâya, IV.24). It is thus quite inaccurate to claim that Buddhist meditation as a practice is not interested in the issue of the subject-object correlation. Moreover, Buddhist philosophy (as it is developed, e.g., in the Mâdhyamika and Yogâcâra schools) being a conceptual elaboration emerging from the experiential understanding of this process (and not existing a priori as a theoretical statement), it would be vain to try, as Stone and Zahavi suggest, to compare Buddhist philosophy to phenomenological philosophy, disregarding its experiential basis.

Conclusion The experiential phenomenology is a true way of bringing together Buddhism and phenomenology. From what we said, it clearly appears that only an experiential embodied first person approach of phenomenology provides us with a coherent common ground between phenomenology and Buddhism. Let us quote again Francisco Varela: In his late manuscripts, Husserl examines skills and habits that correlate with a flow of consciousness and an original ‘I’ (Ur-Ich). This ‘I’ operates outside of a context that has its own spontaneous movement, but it remains within my sphere of experience and can be examined through a radicalized reduction. Husserl died as he struggled with those questions that the meditative tradition addresses. (…) The skillful means provided by the tradition of vajrayāna touch precisely on the exploration of this original self.31 (Varela, 2000, pp. 143–144) 498

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Husserl’s Quelle indeed designates the source-point of experience, an original outpouring free of any categorial framework. His late work on time consciousness thus thematizes the temporalization process as a nunc stans, that is, as a dynamics within the unmoving now.32 The 2003 book On becoming aware. A pragmatics of experiencing, a book that N. Depraz jointly wrote with F. Varela and P. Vermersch,33 offers a careful statement of the methods required to inquire into experience. In its last chapter, titled “Wisdom traditions and the ways of reduction”, F. Varela and N. Depraz offer a careful comparative inquiry of the different progressive levels of cultivating and exploring our lived experience. It presents the different Buddhist gestures of shamatha (mindfulness) and conversely of the focused attentional attitude, of vipashyana (awareness) and of the open panoramic attentional attitude, of tonglen-lojong as an intersubjective compassion attitude and of shunyata as epoché, that is, as a practical experiential suspension of preconceptions and beliefs. The chapter shows how they are finely related. It seems obvious that Stone and Zahavi’s option regarding the relation between phenomenology and Buddhism is strictly orthogonal and even contradictory with our view of phenomenology as an experiential praxis, of Buddhism as a meditational cultivation of the body-mind, and of their relation based on the common ground of their practice. Furthermore, the authors delineate a view of phenomenology as a philosophical approach that has little to do with its experiential basis, even though it was from the start Husserl’s claim and innovation to promote an approach putting the experience of the subject to the fore. Finally, they suggest a general view stressing differences and even oppositions between phenomenology and Buddhism, thus impoverishing both. Our view on the contrary means to show how relating the two approaches paves the way for enriching our understanding of both one through the other.

Notes 1 O. Stone and D. Zahavi, “Phenomenology and Mindfulness”, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 28, 2021, 3–4, pp. 158–185. 2 Our translation. P. Ricœur, A l’école de la phénoménologie, Paris, Vrin, 1986, p. 156: “L’œuvre de Husserl est le type de l’œuvre non-résolue, embarrassée, raturée, arborescente ; c’est pourquoi bien des chercheurs ont trouvé leur propre voie (…) parce qu’ils prolongeaient une ligne magistralement amorcée par le fondateur et non moins magistralement biffée par lui. La phénoménologie est pour une bonne part l’histoire des hérésies husserliennes. La structure de l’œuvre du maître impliquait qu’il n’y eût pas d’orthodoxie husserlienne.” 3 Our translation. P. Ricœur, op. cit., pp. 8–9: “(…) la phénoménologie est un vaste projet qui ne se referme pas sur une œuvre ou un groupe d’œuvres précises ; elle est en effet moins une doctrine qu’une méthode capable d’incarnations multiples (…) Husserl a abandonné en cours de route autant de voies qu’il en a frayées. Si bien que la phénoménologie au sens large est la somme de l’œuvre husserlienne et des hérésies issues de Husserl ; c’est aussi la somme des variations de Husserl lui-même et en particulier la somme des descriptions proprement phénoménologiques et des interprétations philosophiques par lesquelles il réfléchit et systématise sa méthode.” 4 M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 2002, p. 385. 5 E. Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a pure phenomenology and to a phenomenological philosophy. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (1912–1915), Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1989, 2000, Part II: The constitution of animal nature, §41, a), p. 166 [Hua IV (1952), pp. 58–59]. 6 E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology (1929–1932), Dordrecht, Kluwer, 1960, 1982, Second Meditation: The stream of cogitationes: cogito and cogitatum, §14, p. 33. 7 E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., Conclusion, p. 157. 8 E. Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., 5th Meditation, §49, p. 107.

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Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol 9 O. Stone, D. Zahavi, art. cit., p. 169. 10 Ibidem. 11 J.-F. Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900–1913), Paris, P.U.F., Épiméthée, 2005. 12 E. Husserl, Logical Investigations, London, Routledge (1970), 2013, vol. II, 5th Investigation, §16, HUA XIX/1, p. 411–412. Quoted by J.-F. Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900–1913), Chapitre premier. Le premier essai d’une théorie phénoménologique de la connaissance : l’échec des recherches logiques. 13 J.-F. Lavigne, Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900–1913), Introduction. 14 E. Husserl, The Idea of Phenomenology, Dordrecht, Kluwer, 2001, p. 34. See also pp., 35, 43, 45 and 63–68. 15 M. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Alfred Hofstadter, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988. 16 In a pioneering and referential book Heidegger et la phénoménologie (Paris, P.U.F., Épiméthée, 1992, pp. 229–234), the French philosopher Jean-François Courtine remarkably demonstrated the explicit presence of the phenomenological reduction in Being and Time: “Dans SuZ, c’est l’analyse de l’angoisse qui constitue comme la ‘répétition’ de la problématique husserlienne de l’epoché et de la réduction phénoménologique transcendantale” (op. cit., p. 234). 17 M. Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?”, translated by D. F. Krell, in D. F. Krell (ed.)  Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, revised and expanded edition, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 110. 18 J.-P. Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego, Paris, Vrin, 1965, pp. 83–84. 19 They refer to: Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994) Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life, London: Piatkus; (2005a) Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, New York: Delta Trade; and to (2005b) Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness, New York: Hyperion. 20 J. Kabat-Zinn, “Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Context: Past, Present, and Future », Clinical Psychology, Volume 10(2), 144–156, 2003, here p. 145. 21 E. Čopelj, “Mindfulness is Not a way of being in the world”, Philosophy East and West, 73:1, January 2023, forthcoming. See also E. Čopelj, Mindfulness: Phenomenological Reflections on Mindfulness in the Buddhist Tradition, Routledge, 2022. 22 Pema Chödron, Compassion Cards: Teachings for Awakening the Heart in Everyday Life, Shambhala Publications, 2016. 23 Ch. Trungpa, Training the mind, And Cultivating Loving-Kindness, Shambhala, 1993. 24 F. Varela, “For a phenomenology of śūnyatā I”, publ. in French, with the title “Pour une phénoménologie de la śūnyatā I” in: N. Depraz et J.-F. Marquet (dir.), La Gnose, une question philosophique. Pour une phénoménologie de l’invisible, Paris, Cerf, 2000, pp. 121–148, reprinted in: F. Varela, Le cercle créateur. Écrits (1976–2001), Paris, Seuil, 2017, sous la responsabilité de Michel Bitbol, avec le concours d’Amy Cohen-Varela, Jean-Pierre Dupuy et Jean Petitot, pp. 381–416. 25 F. Varela, “For a phenomenology of śūnyatā I”, art. cit., 2000, p. 134 ; 2017, p. 398. 26 O. Stone, D. Zahavi, art. cit. p. 172. 27 Ibidem. 28 Micro-phenomenology is a concrete method of investigation of experience which, through skillful means different from those of Buddhist meditative practice, including interview processes allowing a fine verbal description of experience, elicits the release of absorption into the objects of experience. Interestingly, in micro-phenomenological practice this release also has the effect of weakening the solidity of the subject-object couple. (On this matter, see Cl. Petitmengin, “On the Veiling and Unveiling of Experience: A Comparison Between the Micro-Phenomenological Method and the Practice of Meditation“, in : Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 52, 2021, pp. 36–77, which provides a comparison of the releasing gestures, their effect, and the skillful means used in meditation and micro-phenomenology to elicit them.) 29 In Sanskrit, the Buddha is also called the Tathâgata, “the one who has thus gone”. 30 Kalakarama sutta, Anguttara-nikâya, IV.24 Translated from the Pâli by Thanissaro Bhikku in Kala Sutta: At Kalaka’s Park. Access to Insight, BCBS Edition 30 November 2013 (http://accesstoinsight.org/tripitaka/an/an04/an04.024.tah.html. 31 F. Varela, “For a phenomenology of śūnyatā I”, art. cit., 2000, pp. 143–144 ; 2017, p. 410.

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Phenomenology and Mindfulness-Awareness 32 On this late Husserlian meditation on time, see N. Depraz, “Kinetic and Hyletic Facticity and World Creation”, More Phenomenology of Time Conference (co-organized J. Brough, L. Embree, Florida University, nov. 1995), in: The Many Faces of Times, Kluwer, Contributions to Phenomenology, 2000, pp. 25–36. 33 N. Depraz, F. Varela, P. Vermersch, On becoming aware. An experiential pragmatics, Boston/ Amsterdam, Benjamins Press, “Advances in Consciousness Research”, 2003; French text: A l’épreuve de l’expérience. Pour une pratique phénoménologique, Bucharest, Zeta Books, 2011.

References Chödron, P. (2016). Compassion Cards: Teachings for Awakening the Heart in Everyday Life. Boulder, CO: Shambhala Publications. Čopelj, E. (2023). Mindfulness is Not a way of being in the world. Philosophy East and West 72 (4), 884–902. Čopelj, E. (2022). Mindfulness: Phenomenological Reflections on Mindfulness in the Buddhist Tradition. London: Routledge. Courtine, J-F. (1992). Heidegger et la phénoménologie. Paris: Épiméthée. Depraz, N. (2000). Kinetic and Hyletic Facticity and World Creation. In J. B. Brough & L. Embree (Eds.), The Many Faces of Times. Contributions to Phenomenology. Kluwer, pp. 25–36. Depraz, N., Varela, F., Vermersch P. (2003). On Becoming Aware. An Experiential Pragmatics. Boston/Amsterdam: Benjamins Press. Heidegger, M. (1988). The Basic Problems of Phenomenology. trans. Hofstadter, A., Trans.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1993). What is Metaphysics? In D. F. Krell (Ed.), Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings. London: Routledge, pp. 89–110 Husserl, E. (1982). Cartesian Meditations. An Introduction to Phenomenology (1929–1932). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, E. (1989). Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book. Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (1912–1915). Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, E. (2001). The Idea of Phenomenology. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Husserl, E. (2013). Logical Investigations. London: Routledge. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1994). Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation for Everyday Life. London: Piatkus. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005a). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. New York, NY: Delta Trade. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2005b). Coming to Our Senses: Healing Ourselves and the World through Mindfulness. New York: Hyperion. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Context: Past, Present, and Future. Clinical Psychology 10 (2), 144–156. Kalakarama sutta, Anguttara-nikâya, IV.24 Translated from the Pâli by Thanissaro Bhikku in Kala Sutta: At Kalaka’s Park. Access to Insight, BCBS Edition 30 November 2013(http://accesstoinsight.org/tripitaka/an/an04/an04.024.tah.html) Lavigne, J.-F. (2005). Husserl et la naissance de la phénoménologie (1900–1913). Paris: Épiméthée. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002). Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge. Petitmengin, C. (2021). On the Veiling and Unveiling of Experience: A Comparison Between the Micro-Phenomenological Method and the Practice of Meditation. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 52, 36–77. Ricœur, P. (1986). A l’école de la phénoménologie. Paris: Vrin. Sartre, J.-P. (1965). La transcendance de l’ego. Paris: Vrin. Stone, O. & Zahavi D. (2021). Phenomenology and Mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies28 (3–4), 158–185. Trungpa, C. (1993). Training the mind, And Cultivating Loving-Kindness. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala. Varela, F. (2000). Pour une phénoménologie de la śūnyatā I. In N. Depraz & J.-F. Marquet (Eds.), La Gnose, une question philosophique. Pour une phénoménologie de l’invisible. Paris: Cerf.

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34 MINDLESS OBFUSCATION A Reply to Depraz, Petitmengin, and Bitbol Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi

In an article entitled “Phenomenology and mindfulness” published in Journal of Consciousness Studies in 2021, we criticized recent attempts to define phenomenology as a kind of meditative practice, one that, like certain forms of mindfulness, aims to observe our experience in careful detail in order to describe it. As we argued, to do so is to miss out on the proper philosophical character of phenomenology. In their chapter “Phenomenology and mindfulness-awareness”, Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol, henceforth abbreviated as DPB, take us to task and accuse us of promoting a “reductionist”, “poor”, “extremely limited”, and “trivializing” understanding of both phenomenology and Buddhism. We are grateful to the editors of The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness Susi Ferrarello and Christos Hadjioannou for allowing us to briefly reply to this reproach. Let us in turn reply to the criticism of our understanding of (1) phenomenology and (2) Buddhism and mindfulness.

Phenomenology In our article, we criticized two prevalent views regarding the aim of phenomenology. According to the first, phenomenology seeks to effectuate an unprejudiced turn toward the world, one freed from prior theoretical knowledge. According to the second, the aim of phenomenology is to effectuate a subjective turn, a turn away from the world toward experience. We criticized both and argued that the aim of phenomenology isn’t to either study the mind or the world, but to study both in their interrelation. We also wrote that the proper theme of phenomenology is the mind-world dyad and not either of these relata in isolation. According to DPB, making this argument doesn’t merely commit us to a dualistic separation between mind and world and to the idea of an external objective world that can only be reached by the mind via justified beliefs; it also shows that we hold onto the idea that subjectivity is disembodied and solipsistic, and that we consequently ignore the role of embodiment and intersubjectivity. DPB further claim that we in our article dismiss the very method of the phenomenological epoché and ignore its significance for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. 502

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It beggars belief how DPB have been able to reach these conclusions, since we say nothing to such effect anywhere in our article. When highlighting the importance of the mind-world dyad, we never claimed that phenomenology was solely preoccupied with the mind-world correlation. Rather, our emphasis on that correlation should, of course, be seen in the context of the positions we were rejecting, namely the views that phenomenology is only concerned with either the mind or the world. It is true that we don’t say much about embodiment and intersubjectivity (just as we don’t discuss the lifeworld, empathy, pre-reflective self-consciousness, or imagination) in our article, but one cannot infer from the fact that we do not address certain topics that we thereby deny their importance to phenomenology. At one point, DPB criticize our use of the term “mind” and claim that it shows that we deprive subjectivity of its bodily life (p. 7). But that conclusion would only follow if one were from the outset committed to a purely disembodied conception of the mind, i.e., a conception that would turn a book title like The Embodied Mind into a contradictio in adjecto. The position that DPB criticize is a strawman. There is nothing in our text that suggests that we should endorse the views they ascribe to us. But that is not the worst of it. What is even more problematic is that they perfectly well know that we don’t harbor these views. One of us, Dan Zahavi, has for close to 30 years argued that the epoché (and the reduction) is essential to phenomenological philosophy, that Husserl’s account of intentionality eventually led him to a form of transcendental idealism that exceeds any mind-world dualism, and that we in Husserl find an account of lived subjectivity that recognizes the centrality of embodiment and intersubjectivity. A few years after having defended his dissertation on Husserl’s theory of intersubjectivity, he even co-edited a volume with Natalie Depraz that highlighted the dimensions of facticity, passivity, alterity, and ethics in Husserl’s thinking (Depraz and Zahavi, 1998). In articles and books such as “Husserl’s phenomenology of the body” (1994), Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity (Zahavi, 2001), Husserl’s Phenomenology (Zahavi, 2003), Husserl’s Legacy (Zahavi, 2017), and Phenomenology: The Basics (Zahavi, 2019), Zahavi has consistently defended views that are diametrically opposed to those that DPB now ascribe to him. Here are a few quotes: “In order to understand Husserl’s final position it is […] not sufficient simply to operate with the subjectivity-world dyad. Intersubjectivity must also be taken into regard as the third indispensable element. As we have already seen, Husserl takes self and world-constitution to go hand in hand, but he would also claim that the world- and self-constitution takes place intersubjectively” (Zahavi, 2003, p. 76); “[B]oth Husserl and the French phenomenologists grant the body a special status, since it is taken to be deeply implicated in our relation to the world, in our relation to others, and in our self-relation” (Zahavi, 2019, p. 84); “[O]ne of the distinctive features of Husserl’s interest in the transcendental significance of embodiment and intersubjectivity was that it led him to an exploration of the social, historical, cultural, and linguistic domains and made him engage philosophically with issues such as generativity, historicity, and normality” (Zahavi, 2017, p.  169). As for the issue of method, Zahavi has repeatedly insisted on the philosophical significance of the epoché and reduction. His first book argued that Husserl’s early phenomenology is philosophically limited precisely because it doesn’t involve a transcendental turn and doesn’t employ the epoché and reduction (1992, pp.  112–113, p.  146). As for the importance of the phenomenological method for both Husserl and post-Husserlian phenomenologists, here is just one quote among many: “The epoché and the reduction are precisely Husserl’s terms for the reflective move that is needed 503

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in order to attain the stance of transcendental philosophy. Despite the disagreements they might have with the details of Husserl’s program, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are fully committed to this reflective move” (Zahavi, 2008, p. 671). Perhaps the reader might ask, if this is indeed our view, why didn’t we then just say it in “Phenomenology and Mindfulness”. Well, we did. Here is the relevant quote: “After all, none would dispute that the epoché and reduction play an absolutely fundamental role in the work of the later Husserl. For him, they were indeed essential to phenomenological philosophizing” (Stone and Zahavi 2021, p. 170).1 One might again wonder how given such an unequivocal statement, DPB can accuse us of claiming the opposite. There are plenty of other mistakes in their criticism of our discussion of phenomenology. For example, they misunderstand what we are saying about Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre – we don’t deny that they employ the epoché and the reduction, but merely insist that this is something that must be argued for, since there are scholars who deny it.2 But it seems pointless to address all of their misreadings.

Buddhism and Mindfulness Let us instead now turn to the part of DPB’s chapter that concerns Buddhism and mindfulness. Unfortunately, here we find a similar pattern. According to DPB, we endorse the following claim: “Buddhist meditative practice is a practice of paying attention defined as mindfulness” (p. 3). Later, they write that while our presentation of phenomenology is dubious enough, our presentation of Buddhism is still much more problematic. In short, it is reduced to an experience of paying attention. It is obvious that no Buddhist practitioner would recognise herself in such a limited view of Buddhism. Again, some will say that it is not strictly false, but it is so reductionist that it becomes highly unfair to what Buddhism has offered in its 2500 years ancient and multifarious tradition spread out in India, China, Tibet and Japan, but also in the western cultures today. (p. 14) The suggestion that one could reduce Buddhism to mindfulness (especially defined as the practice or experience of paying attention) would indeed be deeply unfair to Buddhism. We would certainly regard it as “strictly false”, if not as nonsense. Buddhism is a religion which like other religions includes various practices (including meditation), monasticism, scripture, as well as a rich intellectual and philosophical tradition, and so forth. Buddhism is also, of course, far from homogenous. What is more, the modern emphasis on the idea that meditation is the heart of Buddhism has recently been criticized by Buddhist scholars, who have argued that meditation has been far less common in Buddhism as a lived, historical tradition than is sometimes supposed (McMahan, 2008, §7; Sharf, 1995). Moreover, it is perfectly true that Buddhist meditation should not be equated with mindfulness. The major problem with DPB’s criticism is that nowhere in our article do we make the claim that Buddhism or Buddhist practice should be reduced to mindfulness. Nor do we say anything that could reasonably be interpreted in this way. Our article is not about Buddhism, it is about mindfulness. In the quote that DBP cite from our text, we aren’t defining “the Buddhist approach” (p. 14.) (Incidentally, we aren’t even defining mindfulness.) Furthermore, in our conclusion, we cite with approval Buddhist philosophers who have been vocal 504

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in criticizing the problematic tendency in some circles to identify Buddhism with Buddhist meditation, Buddhist meditation with mindfulness, and mindfulness with either nonjudgmental present-centered awareness or “bare attention”. This reductive move is an example of what Buddhist scholars and historians call Buddhist Modernism (Gleig, 2019; Lopez, 2008; McMahan, 2008; Sharf, 1995; Thompson, 2020; Braun, 2013), and is a move that should be rejected. As we also make clear, we wanted to encourage a shift away from the narrow focus on comparing phenomenology and Buddhist meditation toward further mutual engagement between phenomenology and Buddhist philosophy (e.g., Coseru, 2012; MacKenzie, 2022; Siderits, Thompson, and Zahavi, 2011). This wouldn’t make much sense if we also at the same time thought Buddhism could somehow be reduced to mindfulness. What about the claim that we equate mindfulness with (the experience or practice of) paying attention? This would also be highly problematic, especially if it were supposed to be a definitive take on Buddhist mindfulness. One reason for this is that there are multiple, sometimes incompatible, definitions and accounts of mindfulness in the Buddhist tradition (Dunne, 2011, 2015; Gethin, 2015; Shaw, 2020). From a scholarly perspective, none of these can be thought of as the “authoritative” or “authentic” account (although Buddhists might claim otherwise). The situation is made even more complex when we factor in the effects of Buddhist Modernism. DPB make it sound as if we are pretending to give such a definitive account; but nowhere in our text do we do this. As for the claim that we equate (any form of) mindfulness specifically with paying attention, we don’t do that either. We focus primarily on what we call the contemporary presentation of mindfulness (which is shaped by Buddhist Modernism), but even here we don’t equate it with paying attention. DPB’s main concern is that we overlook the important role in Tibetan Buddhist meditation played by what they call awareness, a term they use as a translation of vipaśyanā, and which they understand as a kind of open, panoramic awareness of the whole field of experience. Once again, this isn’t the case; here is one quote from our article: “a form of ‘objectless’ meditation—sometimes called choiceless awareness—is recommended. This involves dropping the prescription to attend to any particular meditation object and instead ‘just sitting with awareness of whatever comes up, not looking for anything in particular to focus on… simply being receptive to whatever unfolds in each moment’ (quoting Kabat-Zinn), ‘completely open and receptive to whatever comes into the field of awareness’ (quoting Kabat-Zinn)” (Stone and Zahavi, 2021, p. 161).3 Perhaps DPB’s point would be better formulated as the (much weaker) claim that we don’t emphasize this kind of awareness enough. However, in our view, highlighting the role of open, panoramic awareness doesn’t address the central criticisms we raise of the idea that phenomenology and mindfulness are equivalent enterprises. So, the major charges DPB bring against us do not stick. However, it would be remiss of us not to point out that DPB’s own discussion of Buddhism exhibits some of the troubling tendencies we have been highlighting. For example, although they say they want to do justice to Buddhism as an “ancient and multifarious tradition”, the positive proposal that they make is that we ought to focus on a handful of Tibetan meditative practices. And the Buddhist sources they rely on here are the writings of popular (and controversial) Buddhist Modernist meditation teachers in the West, namely, Chögyam Trungpa and Pema Chödrön. Moreover, whereas we do not say what Buddhism is, since our chapter is not about Buddhism, DPB do, and their own formulations are problematic, as scholars of Buddhism would be quick to point out. Consider for instance their sweeping generalization that “Buddhism [is] a meditational cultivation of the body-mind” (p. 23). DPB also 505

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claim that one cannot engage in Buddhist philosophy while “disregarding” its “experiential basis”. But all of this is objectionable. First, as mentioned, we shouldn’t equate Buddhism with meditation or claim that meditation is the essence of Buddhism. Second, the idea that the development of Indo-Tibetan Buddhist philosophy is based on meditation is highly contentious in the field of Buddhist studies (Lopez, 2008, p. 210; Thompson, 2017, p. xxiii). What’s more, many people currently working in the field of Buddhist philosophy would not claim that what they are doing is based on meditative experience or insight (e.g., Ganeri, 2017; Garfield, 2015; Carpenter, 2014; Coseru, 2012; MacKenzie, 2022). If DBP were right, this work would not really count as Buddhist philosophy at all. We are deeply puzzled by DPB’s attack on us. Ultimately, the extent and nature of their misreadings of our article is so extreme that it makes us wonder whether the wish to foster a proper scholarly debate is among their motives.

Notes 1 In a recent article, Zahavi has questioned whether the epoché is a conditio sine qua non for any non-philosophical engagement with phenomenology (in, say, nursing, counseling, education, etc.), but he has never doubted its relevance for phenomenological philosophy proper. As he writes: “I do think that the epoché and the reduction are essential to philosophical phenomenology […]. I just don’t think this also holds true for every non-philosophical application of phenomenology” (Zahavi, 2021, p. 270). 2 Some of the passages that DPB appeal to in order to show that Heidegger employed something akin to the phenomenological reduction were already highlighted by Zahavi in earlier publications (2008, p. 671; 2017, p. 67). Furthermore, when DPB claim that we say that Sartre only mentions the epoché once in his writings, they are again misreading us. What we write is that Sartre only mentions the epoché once in Being and Nothingness. 3 Oddly, the characterization of mindfulness as (the experience or practice of) paying attention better fits what DPB write than what we write. DPB declare that mindfulness is a translation of śamatha, which they understand as a kind of focused attention meditation, and use awareness as a translation of vipaśyanā, understood as open, panoramic awareness. These terms and their cognates are used in different ways in the literature. However, DPB’s statement is highly misleading. By far the most common word mindfulness translates is not śamatha but sati/smṛti, though it is sometimes also used to refer to the joint operation of sati/smṛti and sampajañña/saṃprajanya (clear comprehension/meta-awareness). In any case, we don’t use the word mindfulness as DPB do. The key point here is that one must be careful with terminology. To give another particularly striking example in the present context, Jon Kabat-Zinn (who DPB themselves cite) sometimes uses the words mindfulness and awareness in the opposite way to DPB. In particular, he sometimes uses mindfulness to refer to a kind of open, panoramic awareness. See Lutz et al. (2007, p. 501) for this point (cf. Gethin, 2015, p. 32).

References Braun, E. (2013). The Birth of Insight. London: The University of Chicago Press. Carpenter, A. (2014). Indian Buddhist Philosophy. London: Routledge. Coseru, C. (2012). Perceiving Reality: Consciousness, Intentionality and Cognition in Buddhist Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Depraz, N., & Zahavi, D. (eds.). (1998). Alterity and facticity: New perspectives on Husserl. Phaenomenologica 148. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Dunne, J. (2011). Toward an understanding of non-dual mindfulness. Contemporary Buddhism 12 (01), 71–88. Dunne, J. (2015). ‘Buddhist styles of mindfulness’. In B. Ostafin, M. Robinson, P. Brian (eds.), Handbook of Mindfulness and Self-Regulation (pp. 257–220) New York: Springer. Ganeri, J. (2017). Attention, Not Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Mindless Obfuscation Garfield, J. (2015). Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gethin, R. (2015). ‘Buddhist conceptualizations of mindfulness’. In K.W. Brown, J. Creswell, R.M. Ryan (eds.), The Handbook of Mindfulness: Theory, Research, Practice (pp.  9–41). London: Guilford. Gleig, A. (2019). American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lopez, D. (2008). Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lutz, A., Dunne, J. & Davidson, R. (2007) ‘Meditation and the neuroscience of consciousness’. In P. Zelazo, M. Moscovitch, & E. Thompson (eds.) The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness (pp. 449–554). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacKenzie, M. (2022). Buddhist Philosophy and the Embodied Mind: A Constructive Engagement. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield. McMahan, M. (2008). The Making of Buddhist Modernism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, S. (2020). Mindfulness: Where It comes from, and What It Means. Colorado: Shambhala. Sharf, R. (1995). Buddhist modernism and the rhetoric of meditative experience. Numen 42 (3), 228–283. Siderits, M., Thompson, E., & Zahavi, D. (eds.). (2011). Self, No Self? Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological, & Indian Traditions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, O., & Zahavi, D. (2021). Phenomenology and mindfulness. Journal of Consciousness Studies 28 (3-4), 158–185. Thompson, E. (2017). ‘Introduction to the revised edition’. In F. Varela, E. Thompson, E. Rosch (eds.), The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thompson, E. (2020). Why I Am Not a Buddhist. London: Yale University Press. Zahavi, D. (1992). Intentionalität und Konstitution. Eine Einführung in Husserls Logische Untersuchungen. Kopenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press. Zahavi, D. (1994). Husserl’s phenomenology of the body. Études Phénoménologiques 19, 63–84. Zahavi, D. (2001). Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity: A Response to the LinguisticPragmatic Critique. Trans. E. A. Behnke. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Zahavi, D. (2003). Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2008). ‘Phenomenology’. In D. Moran (ed.), Routledge Companion to TwentiethCentury Philosophy (pp. 661–692). London: Routledge. Zahavi, D. (2017). Husserl’s Legacy: Phenomenology, Metaphysics, and Transcendental Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zahavi, D. (2019). Phenomenology: The Basics. London: Routledge. Zahavi, D. (2021). Applied phenomenology: Why it is safe to ignore the epoché. Continental Philosophy Review 54, 259–273.

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35 MINDFUL CLARIFICATION Why It Is Necessary to Reply Once Again to Stone and Zahavi Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol

We are grateful to Odysseus Stone and Dan Zahavi1 to have brought a series of useful clarifications, based on their former extensive work. They thus carry out a welcome (though partial) correction of the narrow characterization of both phenomenology and Buddhism that underpinned their criticism of our former reflections. First, phenomenology. According to their reply, Stone and Zahavi did not really claim that phenomenology is “solely preoccupied with the mind-world correlation”, and therefore they did not fall into the trap of an abstract dualistic separation between mind and world. This inflection opens the way to a richer construal of phenomenology, which is thus more likely to become commensurable with Buddhism. Besides, they remind us that Dan Zahavi has rightly argued for decades that the epoché and reduction are “essential to phenomenological philosophy”. This latter remark strongly mitigates the original claim Stone and Zahavi made in their “Phenomenology and mindfulness” that epoché and reduction are not “indispensable” to “phenomenology broadly speaking”, but only to “Husserl’s mature phenomenology”. What are we to think of such important restatements of the original conception of Stone and Zahavi as expressed in their “Phenomenology and mindfulness”? We consider that these are more than just elucidations of their former claims: they deeply change the terms of the debate, and they completely undermine the arguments Stone and Zahavi initially adduced against our comparisons between Phenomenology and Buddhism at the level of their experiential practices. Let’s start with the issue of mind-world correlation, which (according to their reply) remains a central but not exclusive concern. Three problems arise at this point. The first problem is that embodiment and intersubjectivity are still dealt with as “further topics” rather than elements of the very definition of phenomenology, that thereby remains impoverished. Their complete absence in Stone and Zahavi’s original article testified to an insufficient interest for them. Furthermore, it suggests a hierarchical axiological conception of phenomenology characterized by different levels of rigor: the sole rigorous core-level remaining the mind-world correlation, intersubjectivity and embodiment (just as much as passivity, historicity, affectivity, which are also completely absent here) being only additions which do not 508

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structure from inside nor transform the so-called core static correlational phenomenology. Now, numerous studies have established the accurate embodied and relational methodology of genetic and generative phenomenology, which is presented as at least equally rigorous than the static, and anyway far more methodologically integrative.2 The second problem is that the mind-world correlation is taken as (one more) purely conceptual issue, with no reference to what practical experiential investigation of our lived experience can teach us about its genesis,3 nor about its porosity or even collapse in certain states of consciousness.4 The third problem is that, while Zahavi’s persistent hyper-focus on intentionality and the “mind-world dyad” supports his unequivocal distinction between phenomenology and flat subjectivism, it symmetrically exposes him to criticism for having imperfectly distinguished phenomenology from a variety of realism. Certain formulations of Zahavi (such as his reference to the “disclosure of things”) irresistibly suggest to non-specialists that, at the end of the day, Husserl tended to think that things exist completely independent of consciousness. Indeed, as Setlakwe Blouin (2023) recently pointed out: the thesis according to which consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the disclosure of things entails twice that things exist independently of consciousness, since (1) the very concept of a disclosure implies that that which is disclosed existed prior to and independently of the act of disclosure and (2) insisting that consciousness is only a necessary but not sufficient condition for the disclosure of things emphasizes once more the ontological independence of things relative to consciousness—for where would the missing condition(s) come from if not from a reality independent of consciousness? Besides its dubiousness, this suggested realist bias would be sufficient to make artificially difficult any comparison between phenomenology thus interpreted and some dominant trends of Buddhist philosophy (especially its Mahāyāna branches). But conversely, if this bias is avoided, a parallel between phenomenology on the one side, and Cittamātra or Madhyamaka Buddhist approaches on the other side, ceases to be irrelevant. The issue of the epoché is even more important to our debate; we are convinced that it is decisive. Let’s indeed suppose that “the epoché (and the reduction) is essential to phenomenological philosophy” as a whole, as Stone and Zahavi finally acknowledge in their reply; let’s then suppose that it is not only “in the work of the later Husserl” that the epoché holds a prominent role, unlike what Stone and Zahavi wrote restrictively in their original paper. Then, one key argument Stone and Zahavi adduced against us in their “Phenomenology and Mindfulness” entirely collapses. To see this, let’s quote extensively from this original paper. Stone and Zahavi there declare: Those who compare phenomenology and the phenomenological method with mindfulness practice often refer to the epoché and the phenomenological reduction and often take it for granted that both notions — whatever they actually mean — are crucial to the practice of phenomenology. But is this actually something that all (or even most) leading phenomenologists would agree to? Not really. Now, conversely, if one accepts (as Stone and Zahavi themselves do in their reply!) that the practice of phenomenology is (or should be) actually underpinned by a practice of 509

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the epoché throughout, the comparison between the “phenomenological method” and the “mindfulness practice” becomes plausible again. Stone and Zahavi’s clarification is therefore tantamount to a reductio ad absurdum of their own former criticisms of our positions. It is true that one can still argue (as Stone and Zahavi further did in their original paper) that the phenomenological epoché is little more than a bracketing of our “prejudices and theoretical assumptions”, which makes it wholly foreign to the practices of meditation (yet not, admittedly, to the Madhyamaka deconstruction of prejudices and theoretical views). But is this narrowly intellectualist conception of the epoché tenable at all? What about Husserl’s claim that “the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché belonging to it are destined in essence to effect, at first, a complete personal transformation, comparable in the beginning to a religious conversion, which then … bears within itself the significance of the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as such”?5 Is this compatible with Stone and Zahavi’s cold-blooded construal according to which the epoché is just an element “in a philosophical reflection, the purpose of which is to liberate us from our natural dogmatism”? What about Husserl’s insistence on the necessity to train, to practice and to embody the act of reduction and epochè?6 And what about Husserl’s statement that “In the epoché, I direct my interest towards my subjectivity, in the life of which a world has obtained for me its validity”?7 Does this fit squarely with Stone and Zahavi’s claim that “By adopting the phenomenological attitude, we do not focus exclusively on subjective acts”? Last but not least, what about Patočka’s remark that “The epoché (allows) access, not to what appears, but to appearance as such (…) We bring appearance as such to appearing”?8 Is this not compatible with the unformal characterization of the epoché and reduction (criticized by Stone and Zahavi in their original paper) as “a reorientation of our attention towards the how (rather than the what) of experience”, precisely in the sense of an attention to the very source of emergence and arising of objects, that is, to appearing as such, as a process cleared out of subject and object? These remarks about the phenomenological epoché take us a considerable way toward restoring the soundness of our attempt to compare phenomenology and Buddhism at their deepest level of relevance, namely their practices of/in embodied lived experience. Let’s now turn to the Buddhist side of the comparison. In their reply, Stone and Zahavi reject the common tendency of “Buddhist modernists” to “identify Buddhism with Buddhist meditation”. So far so good. After all, Buddhism cannot be entirely dissociated from its ritual and anthropological aspects. But Stone and Zahavi then also “object” to the idea “that one cannot engage in Buddhist philosophy whilst ‘disregarding’ its ‘experiential basis’”. This objection sounds very strange to us. That philosophy is usually independent of the experience and existential concerns of philosophers is already questionable in the Western, post-Greek, domain. Just think of Pierre Hadot’s discovery of the practical and existential basis of ancient Greek philosophies.9 Remember Fichte, who asked: “Turn your gaze away from everything around you and turn it towards your interiority; such is the first requirement of philosophy with regard to its disciple”.10 Remember also Husserl, according to whom: “To be interested in philosophy, to reflect occasionally on questions of truth and even to work at it continually, is not yet to be a philosopher […]. What is missing is the radicalism of the will ready for the ultimate exigency”.11 Faced with such testimony from philosophers of the past, the idea that (any) philosophy can be reduced to abstract and dispassionate rational mulling (close to algorithmic symbol crunching) appears to be a whim of those we may call “Analytic modernists”. That the original Buddhist philosophy is completely independent of meditative practice, Vipassana examination of the 510

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arising and vanishing of any phenomena, embodiment and ethical know-how through exertion to compassion, is even more improbable, not to say absurd. In Buddhism, instead, the implicit or explicit references to the meditative basis of philosophizing abound. A paramount example is Śāntarakṣita, a master of the Indo-Tibetan yogacāramadhyamaka synthesis in the 8th century. To him, an intellectual “view” with no connection with meditative experience was just unthinkable. Instead, he characterized the various schools of Buddhist thought by way of the kind of relation with the practice of meditation they tended to privilege, or by way of the position of their discourse with respect to the time in which they practiced meditation. The divergences between some of these schools were repeatedly ascribed to their preference for thought directly arising from the present process of meditative practice, or, instead, for thought elaborated from retrospectively pondering on past meditation. But nothing at all is said about the (putative) thesis of a “pure” thinker who would ignore meditative experience altogether! Here is a sample: While being appropriate for different needs and temperaments, the approaches of the Prasangika and Svatantrikas converge. The latter is ancillary to the former. With regard to the ultimate truth in itself—the object of primordial wisdom experienced by the Aryas in meditative equipoise—Prasangikas and Svatantrikas are alike in making no assertions. But when in the postmeditation period distinctions are made, it is easier to divide the ultimate truth into two categories as the Svatantrikas do.12 Even the seemingly most abstract Buddhist philosophical treatises, like those of Nāgārjuna, the founder of the Madhyamaka school, have a practical and soteriological anchoring and aim, as Candrakirti, their most eminent commentator (6th century), points out very strongly: “In the treaty, Nāgārjuna does not argue for the love of controversy, he shows suchness (tathatā) in the view of liberation.”13 This being granted, the path is cleared on both sides for a comparison between Phenomenology and Buddhism qua experiential practices, not (only) qua intellectual systems. That this comparison can even bring synergy between the two disciplines has already been demonstrated by some remarkable phenomenological approaches to Buddhism, such as Iso Kern’s and Alexis Lavis’.14 To put it another way, finally, it is completely nonsensical to want to compare phenomenology and Buddhism while situating oneself at the sole level of philosophical theories. It does not do justice to the one nor to the other. Phenomenology and Buddhism share as a crucial life-involvement a struggle for getting philosophers out of the dead-end of disembodied concepts and speculative scholastic reasoning thus helping to re-humanize philosophy. Stone and Zahavi’s attempt to disembody them despite their explicit existential and ethical claim and struggle is both saddening and wrong.

Notes 1 Contrary to our colleagues, we won’t abbreviate their names, in order not to reduce their person to anonymous abstract letters. We will keep the conversation embodied while keeping their full names in the text… 2 As emblematic exemples, A. Steinbock, Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl, Northwestern, 1995, and quite recently, Generative Worlds. New Phenomenological Perspectives on Space and Time, ed. L. Ascarate & Q. Gailhac, Lexington books, 2023. 3 Petitmengin (2017).

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Natalie Depraz, Claire Petitmengin, and Michel Bitbol 4 Again, as it is meticulously described by Husserl himself in his theory of passivity as receptivity in the twenties (Husserl, 2001a). 5 Husserl (1970, p. 137 (§35). 6 “Die Praxis steht überall und immer voran der ‘Theorie’” (Husserl, 2001b Hua XIV, n° 3, p. 61); “It is here that the following question arises with urgency: can I understand the phenomenological reduction of another human being without exercising (üben) myself the phenomenological reduction? (…) Can a phenomenological reduction therefore occur for me in the world without my having actually exercised it myself (wirklich geübt)?” (Hua XV, n° 31, p. 537, 1933); “[...] the realm of perception in the flesh, which confers on carnal movements the sense of movements carried out egoically, presents itself to us as a praxis of the self (Ichpraxis) in the world and, to tell the truth, as an originary praxis (Urpraxis) which co-operates (leistet) and has already operated in advance for any other praxis, which must at the same time be exercised only with regard to the flesh-body (Leibkörper) as an originally practical object.” (Hua XV, n°18, p. 328)  E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Hua XIV; Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, Hua XV, Heidelberg, Springer. 7 Husserl (2007, p. 96). 8 J. Patočka, Qu’est-ce que la phénoménologie ? Jérôme Millon (2002, p. 226). 9 Hadot (1995). 10 Fichte (1999, p. 1). 11 Husserl (1972), Introduction. 12 Śāntarakṣita (2011, p. 88). 13 Candrakīrti (1985, p. 261). 14 Kern (1988) and Lavis (2018).

References Candrakīrti. (1985). L’Entrée au Milieu (Madhyamakavatara). Traduit du tibétain par G. Driessens. Editions Dharma. Fichte J. G. (1999). Nouvelle présentation de la doctrine de la science (1797/1798). Paris: Vrin. Hadot P. (1995). Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? Paris: Gallimard. Husserl E. (1970). The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Husserl E. (1972). Philosophie première (deuxième Partie). Paris: Vrin. Husserl E. (2001a). Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis. Lectures on Transcendental Logic, trans. A. Steinbock, Kluwer Academic Publishers. Husserl E. (2001b). Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Zweiter Teil: 1921–1928, Hua XIV; Dritter Teil: 1929–1935, Hua XV, Heidelberg, Springer, fr. trans N. Depraz, PUF Epiméthée, entitled Sur l’intersubjectivité I and II. Husserl E. (2007), De la réduction phénoménologique (1926–1935), Grenoble: Jérôme Millon. Kern I. (1988). The structure of consciousness according to xuanzang. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 19: 282–295. Lavis A. (2018). La conscience à l’épreuve de l’éveil. Paris: Édition du Cerf. Patočka J. (2002). Qu’est- que la phénoménologie?. Jérôme Millon. Petitmengin C. (2017). Enaction as a lived experience. Towards a radical neurophenomenology. Constructivist Foundations 12 (2): 139–147. Śāntarakṣita (2011). The Adornment of the Middle Way. Boston: Shambala. Setlakwe Blouin P. (2023). Husserl’s phenomenalism: A rejoinder to the philipse-zahavi debate. Husserl Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10743-023-09328-6 Steinbock A. (1995). Home and Beyond. Generative Phenomenology after Husserl. Northwestern.

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INDEX

Note: - Page references with Italics refer to the figures and with “n” refer to the endnotes. Abgeschiedenheit 8, 231, 233, 236, 237, 239–243 Abram, D. 76 absence 113; in clinical setting 362–363; as negation of presence 11; of phenomenological restraint 272; and potential for transformation 362–363; and presence 11, 318, 321, 323, 325–326, 362–363; of religious context 275; of substantial identity 497 absolute mediation 193–194, 196 absolute nothingness 123, 126; Other-power of 193; place of 127–128; role of 191; self-determination of 128; selflessness of 193; as ultimate reality 129 absolute time 128 Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) 23 active attention 295–299 act of meaning 55–56 adoxastōs 20 Aenesidemus of Knossos 19 Aeschylus 208, 213–215 aesthetics: arts 131; contemplation 416; empathy 420; Merleau-Ponty on 413; of objects 132, 415–416; phenomenology of 413–423; of sensitization 133; space 420 affection 31, 87, 309; described 298; passive 297; self-affection 294–295 affective “colors” 310 affective experience 285, 419 affectivity 114, 310, 379, 425–426, 429

Agamben, G. 201 agentive awareness 296–297, 299–300 The Age of The World Image (Heidegger) 315 aikidō (the way of encounter/contact) 124–125, 131, 133–134 Akbari Sufism 153–156, 161, 166–167 Alcoff, L.M. 455 alètheia 210, 215, 318 Alexandrova, A. 109, 117n10 alienation 115, 138, 215, 226–227, 417, 434 Alvis, J. W. 158 Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (Husserl) 306, 309 Analytic modernists 510 anamnēsis 101, 102, 442, 461 ancient folktales 131 ancient Greeks 24, 27, 112, 218, 319, 328, 458 Anglophone scholarship 190 angst 111, 113–115, 280, 285, 335 Anonymity (Natanson) 449 anticipatory resoluteness 113, 115 Antigone (Sophocles) 213, 217 anti-philosophical skepticism 25 anxiety 106, 113, 115, 162, 175, 280, 286, 307 apatheia 110–111 Arendt, H. 12, 374 Aristotle 15, 25, 26–27, 108–109, 117n8, 127, 210, 339, 459, 482–483 Arnkoff, D. B. 256 artist 223; aesthetic empathy 420; vs. viewer 421–422 Asian philosophical traditions 190, 280 Asian philosophy 190, 353

513

Index attention: active 295–299; bare 80–82, 419; ethics of 253; focused 462; open 9, 261–262, 264; reflective function of 312; self-regulation of 311 attentional modification 295 attentiveness 12, 86–87; concepts of 13; embodied 373; phenomenology 81; sliding transition of 75 attentive perception 298, 354, 356–358 attentive presence 87, 163, 354, 361–362 attentive recollection 80–82 Aubert, Emmanuel de Saint 353 Augenblick 280, 285, 319, 469 Aurelius, M. 369 authentic existence 286 authenticity 111–112, 113–116, 447; angst 113–115; and homelikeness 115–116; unhomelikeness 113–115 authoritative summation 462 Autrui (Lévinas) 272 average everydayness 282–284 Balthasar, Hans Ur Von 235 Barbaras, R. 56 bare attention 80–82, 419 Basho (Nishida) 127 Batchelor, S. 400 Baxter, D. 179 Beckwith, C. I. 34n6 Beierwaltes, W. 235, 238, 242 being 210–211; enigmatic essence of 11; naked 9; respiratory openness to 341; truth of 223 Being and Time (Heidegger) 12, 24, 69, 95, 111, 113, 115, 117n5, 191, 222, 226, 234, 282–283, 315, 317–318, 321, 323, 333n10, 336n32, 371, 447–450 being-in-the-world 26–29, 112; and Pyrrhonism 29–33 bellows breath (bastrika pranayama) 148 Berger, G. 158, 169n25 Bernasconi, R. 62 Besinnung (Heidegger) 7, 48n1, 190, 194, 195–196, 232, 317–318, 325, 334–335n23 Between East and West: From Singularity to Community (Irigaray) 337 Bewußtsein überhaupt 127 Bhikkhu Bodhi 175 Bishop, S. R. 258, 262, 311 Bitbol, M. 39–40, 263, 353, 455, 502 Blouin, S. 509 body babbling 138; see also yoga bodyfulness 373–374 body image 146 body scan meditation 258

body schema 146–147 Boethius 368–369 Boole, G. 483–484 bound lotus pose (baddha padmasana) 144, 144–146 Bovary Syndrome 75 breathing (pranayama) 147–149; bellows breath (bastrika pranayama) 148; humming bee breath (bhramari pranayama) 148; ontologies of 149; phenomenological ontology of 338–340; retention of breath (kumbhaka) 148 breathlessness 148–149 Brentano, F. 446, 460 Brown, K. W. 2, 257, 262 Buddha 12, 338, 380; dukkha 340–346; mindful phenomenology of breathing 338–340; nirvana 340–348; respiratory quest 337–338; “the Tathāgata’s dwelling” 346–348 Buddhaghosa, B. 62 Buddhism 2, 22, 59, 86, 124, 131, 133–134, 152, 190, 231, 353, 355, 369, 378, 379, 380, 382, 394, 416, 418, 491, 511; as awareness (vipashyana) 491; described 83; goal of 22; Mahayana 128; in mindful meditation 79; and mindfulness 504–506; mindfulness-based therapy 23; monastic paths in 154; non-judgmental mindfulness in 22; phenomenological attitude 446; principle of 281; zombified form of 176 Buddhist: ethical religious attitude 85; meditation 40; mindfulness 22, 39; nonjudgment in, tradition 21; philosophy 41; problematization 22; self-analysis 85; sutras 22; tradition 1 Buddhist Eightfold Path 9 Buddhist meditation 380–383 Buddhist meditational practices 354 Buddhist Modernism 505 Buddhist pedigree 175 Buddhist Yogacara tradition 6 Burnyeat, M. 20 Burry, R. 20 Büttner, Hermann 236 Cairns, D. 47, 50n18, 82, 395n2 calculative thinking 239, 317, 324–326, 328 Caldwell, C. 373 The Cambridge Companion to Levinas (Levinas) 62 Caputo, John D. 236 Carbone, M. 375 Carel, H. 148 Caring-Lobel, A. 220

514

Index Carman, T. 334n20 Carnap, R. 317, 321–324 Carr, D. 439 Cartesian Meditations (Husserl) 144, 158, 439, 441 Cassaniti, J. L. 63 The Center for Mindfulness at UMass Memorial Medical Center 1 Cezanne’s Doubt (Merleau-Ponty) 413–414 chadō (the way of tea) 131–133 charge of inactivity (apraxia) 20–21 Chin-Ping, Liao 191–192 Chittick, W. 155 Chödrön, P. 279, 282, 497, 505 Chrétien, J.-L. 353 Christianity 380, 382 Christian religiosity 83 Chrysippus 107, 111 Churchill, S. D. 161 Cicero 110 civilizational transformation 395 classical Sufism 6; see also sufism classical yoga 139 Clément, B. 63 Coe, C. D. 63 cognitive: approaches 368–370; defusion 23; hygiene 108; katharsis 108; mindfulness 376 Cognitive Behavioural Therapy 368 Cohen-Levinas, D. 63 Collins, S. 168n1 Colombetti, G. 295 common sense, non-philosophical 30 complete human (insan al-kamil) 154, 155 comportment: modes of 445; phenomenological attitude 445; skillful absorption 445 Conant, Jim 323–324 conducive to suffering (duḥkha) 80 Confucian etiquette 131 Confucianism 177 connectedness 125 consciousness 58, 71, 177; auto-constitution of 441; formal, structural feature of 294; Freud on 428; full 474–475, 478; human 85; marginal 15, 467; negative image of 427; primacy of 427 “Consciousness, Being and Life” (Bitbol) 40 contemporary mindfulness 175–177, 459–461 contradictory self-identity 128–130, 136n9 “The Controversy Concerning Truth: Towards a Prehistory of Phenomenology” (Held) 25 Conventional Truth 181–183 Conversations on a Country Path (Heidegger) 237, 238 Čopelj, E. 496

Cornell, V. J. 154 corporate mindfulness 220–221 corpse pose (shavasana) 143 Country Path Conversations 371 Craig, M. 62–63 Crawford, M. 73, 76 creative willing 434 creativity 435; intersubjective character of 432; and mindfulness 425–436; Rank on 434 Creswell, J. D. 2 Crisis of European Sciences (Husserl) 24, 159, 169n28 Crisp, R. 117n8 criticisms 502; hesitation about mindfulness 54–55; of Pyrrhonists 4 critique: damning 54; philosophical 54–55; of writing 99–101, 105n5 Crowther, P. 423 “cultivation of breathing” 337 culture: defined 430; Henry’s study of 432; high 430 Daisetsu Teitarō Suzuki 133 Daitokuji 132 Daly, A. 76 Dao 177–181, 187n3 Daoism 6–7, 177, 187n3, 190, 354, 355 Daoist mindfulness 177–181 Daoist Yin-Yang balance 131 Dasein 10, 111, 114, 222, 282–283, 447–448, 450; analysis of 24; existence as beingin-the-world 28 Dasein 210, 280, 282 David, R. 152 Davids, T. W. R. 79 Davidson, L. 159, 167, 170n37 Davis, B. 236 Davis, Bret 247n2, 370–371 daydreaming: the directing spectator 466; as dual intentionality 468; example of 465; habitual subject-world standpoint 465; imaginary subject-world scenario 465; and lucidity 469–471; and meditation 469–471; phenomenology of 463–467; synchronic structure of 465 deconstruction of mindfulness 189–201 De docta ignorantia (Cusanus) 232, 241 de Gaultier, Jules 75 dehiscence 143, 150n3 De Interpretatione (Aristotle) 27 deluded mindfulness 7, 177, 183, 185–187 Depraz, N. 39–40, 49n10, 51n33, 63, 78, 80, 85–87, 353, 499, 502, 503 Der Abgeschiedene 233

515

Index Derrida, J. 95, 101–103 Derrida, the Subject and the Other: Surviving, Translating and the Impossible (Foran) 228 Der Spiegel 327 Descartes, R. 87–88, 357, 359 Desire of Being 485 detachment 243–246 Dharmakīrti 293 Die Frage nach der Technik (Heidegger) 222 Die Philosophie des Meister Eckhart (Oltmanns) 234 Die Weltalter (Höfele) 233 Dionysius the Areopagite 231 the directing spectator, daydreaming 466 discontinuous continuity 129–131 “dispositions” (Gesinnungen) 309 distant observation 445 distorted thinking 418 Ditrich, T. 340 Divine 153 divine nothingness 232, 245–246 dream censor 471n4 Dreyfus, G. 63 dual intentionality 467, 468 Dubost, M. 63 Dufrenne, M. 13, 415–416, 420, 422–423 dukkha 340–346 Dunne, J. D. 78, 81, 89n4, 90n6, 291–292, 293, 296 Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (von Eckartsberg) 406 Duquesne University 6 dzog chen or mahamudra 355 Early Buddhism: A New Approach (Hamilton) 340 Eckhart, M. 231–246; concepts of Gelassenheit 239–243 Eckhartian mindfulness 232 ego-cogito-cogitatum 84 Eichorn, R. 30 The Embodied Mind (Varela) 39–40, 503 embodied mindfulness 372–375; and bodyfulness 373; and temporality 373–375; unselfing 372–373, 374, 376 embodied souls 103–104 embracing nothingness 243–245 eM Life 220 Emmanuel Levinas et les territoires de la pensée (Cohen-Levinas and Clément) 62 Emmanuel Levinas: la trace du féminin (Kayser) 63 emotional dispositions: emergence of 309–310 emotional expectations (Gemütserwartungen) 305, 306, 308; Husserl on 305–309

“emotional experiences” (Gemütserlebnisse) 307 emotional regulation emotions 310–315; approval of 314; possibility of assessing “adequation” of 314; possibility of observing 312–314 emotions and notions of temporality 279–288; escaping autopilot 284–287; living on autopilot 280–284; overview 279–280 empathy 401; aesthetic 420; defined 13; phenomenological approach to 406–407; as second-person access 402–404 empty (bahya kumbhaka) 148 enframing 222–225 Engaged Buddhism 401 Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy (Garfield) 342 Engberg-Pedersen, Tr 108–110 Englander, M. 161 Enlightenment 340, 381, 474 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Hume) 20 epoché 86–87, 493–495; described 85; solipsistic 91n23; transcendental 385–386; as transcendental transformation 386–389; universal ethical 385–386 “Epoché in Light of Samatha-Vipassanā Meditation” (Depraz) 40 equanimity 4, 57 equipollence (isostheneia) 19 Ereignis 125, 213, 218 Eriugena, Johannes Scottus 231–232 eternal present 127–128 ethical comportment 198 ethical practice 266–275; diachronic view of mindfulness 267–271; in intersubjective relation 271–273; mindfulness as an 273–274; overview 266–267 ethical renewal 87–88 ethical skepticism 379, 381, 384 ethical universality 386 ethics: of attention 253; of freedom 199; in intersubjective relation 271–273; of intersubjective responsibility 275; of letting-be 198–200; of mediation 199; of pathologization 199 The Ethics of Emmanuel Levinas (Perpich) 63 eudaimonia as well-being 108–109 eudaimonia Buddha 88 eupatheiai 111 European philosophy 394 Everest, E. G. 485 Everest, M. B. 484–485 exhalation 148

516

Index existential guilt 287 experience 312; anticipatory character of 305–309 Experience and Judgment (Husserl) 81 experiential ontology 126, 128 exteriority 143 exteroceptive senses of vision and touch 143 Eye & Mind (Merleau-Ponty) 413–414 Farin, I. 403 Feldwegsgespräch (Heidegger) 238 Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (Chanter) 63 Ferrarello, S. 502 Festschrift (Heidegger) 191 Fink, E. 4, 6, 39, 47–48, 50n20, 50n22, 52n34, 82, 85, 153, 156–160, 166, 378, 395n2; theory of motivation 44–47 First Philosophy (Husserl) 24–25, 44, 50n18, 384, 386 Fisher, C. 108 Flanagan, O. 88 Flintoff, J. P. 22 focused attention 462 foreground-background consciousness 385 “forgetting of breathing” 337 Foucault, M. 189 Fournier, H.-A. 75 Four Noble Truths 181, 338 Franck, D. 57 Frankfurt School Social Theory 200–201 Frede, M. 20 freedom 222–225 freedom from images 243–245 Frege, G. 479 Freud, S. 425; on consciousness 428; psychoanalytic theory of 426; views on emotion 433 “Freud After Henry” (Welten) 436 Freudian psychoanalysis 13, 425; Henry’s critical reading of 426–428; internal inconsistencies 428; Rank on 433 Friedman, M. 321, 332n1 Fuhaku Kawakami 124 full consciousness 15, 474–475, 478 Fullness of Being 15 Gadamer, H.-G. 236 Galabru, S. 63 Gallagher, S. 3, 146–147, 353 Galvin, K. 115–116 Garfield, Jay L. 342, 343 Gautama, Siddharta see Buddha Geiger, M. 313, 315 Gelassenheit (Heidegger) 12, 116, 220, 225, 227, 231–247, 325, 334–335n23, 353; mindfulness as 370–372

Gellman, J. 169n16 Gelven, M. 286 Gemüt 307 genetic phenomenology 440 ‘German mandarin’ 328 Gestalt theory 358, 467 Gestell 225, 227, 239, 329 gestures 132, 163, 193, 404, 499 Gethin, R. 168n1, 176 Gheranda Samhita (Mallinson) 139 Giorgi, A. 463 Glass, C. R. 256 Goldstein, J. 419 Gotama, S. 267, 275 Gradualism 60 grafting model 460 Greek philosophy 380 Greek tragedy 207–210, 215 Grossman, P. 88 groundlessness 286 Grundprobleme der Phanomenologie (Heidegger) 494 Guenther, L. 364n9 Gurwitsch, A. 467 “habitual emotional properties” (habituelle Gemütseigenschaften) 309 “habitual feeling orientations” (habituelle Gefühlsrichtungen) 309 habitual subject-world standpoint, daydreaming 465 Hadjioannou, C. 502 Hadot, P. 108 Hamilton, S. 340 Hamilton, W.B. 483–484 Harrington, A. 78 Hart, J. G. 158, 170n33, 403 Harvey, P. 346 hatha yoga 138–139, 149, 150n2; see also yoga Hatha Yoga Pradipika (Patanjali) 139 Hayes, J. 115 The Heart of Buddhist Meditation (Nyanaponika) 82 Heaton, J. 21, 26 Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida: The Question of Difference (Foran) 228 Heidegger, M. 7, 8, 10–11, 14, 24, 56–57, 73, 76, 95, 101–103, 106, 189–192, 210, 219–228, 231–246, 279, 283–284, 317, 353, 445–447, 492, 504; alleged individualistic existentialism 190; analysis of Dasein by 24; on beingin-the-world 26–29; deconstruction of subjectivity through mindfulness (Besinnung) 194–201; on enframing 222–225; ethics of letting-be 198–200;

517

Index existential phenomenology 26, 285; on freedom 222–225; hermeneutical phenomenology 190; on judgment 26–29; machination 194–195; meaning of world 450–451; ‘Memorial Address’ 326; notion of das Man 447; phenomenology 279–288; radical historicism/rendering history inoperative 196–197; role of the self 448; subjectivity 194–195; technicity 194–195; on truth 222–225 Heideggerian mindfulness 5, 111–116, 476–478; anticipatory resoluteness 113; authenticity 111–112, 113–116; wellbeing 111–113 Heidegger: The Critique of Logic (Fay) 332n1 Heim, M. 62 Held, K. 25–26, 91n19 Helga 259–261 Henry, M. 13 Henry, Michel 353, 425–426; critical reading of Freudian psychoanalysis 426–428; phenomenology of life on psychoanalysis 428–432; and Rank 432–435 heroism 57 Higgins, J. 258 high culture 430 Hinduism 379, 394 historical mindfulness 14 historical realization 193–194 historical trauma 442 historical turn 439 history: meaning of 439; phenomenology of 438–443; singularity in 438; thinking 439 History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Lukács) 448 Hölzel, B. K. 256 homelikeness 115–116 Honesty-Humility and Agreeableness (HEXACO Personality InventoryRevised) 401 horizonality (Horizonthaftigkeit) 309 Hubbard, E. 419 Hubbard, Elbert 419 human being (insan) 154, 210, 213 human condition 154 human consciousness 85 human existence 26–27, 29, 31, 33–34 human facticity 29, 31–34 Human Resources 221 human souls, nature of 97–99 Hume, D. 3–4, 20, 21, 29, 34 humming bee breath (bhramari pranayama) 148 Husserl, E. 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 24–26, 39–42, 48n3, 52n37, 56, 59, 74, 76, 90n12,

144, 153, 156–160, 163, 166, 169n23, 169n27, 170n36, 269, 271, 279, 297–299, 401, 403–404, 438, 441, 445, 492–493, 503–504; actualisation of potentialities 440; anticipatory character of experience 305–309; attending to emotions 310–315; attending to present 310–315; attentiveness 86–87; on Buddhism 82–83; comparison of epoché with mindfulness 85–86; comparison of epoché with samatha 85; concept of intentionality 55; decisive philosophical contributions 84; on emotional expectations 305–309; Entourage 380–381; epoché 86–87; historical reflection 439; logic of sacrifice 442; on mindfulness 78–89; and mindfulness debates 310–315; natural attitude 83–85; in phenomenological psychology 86–87; solipsism 86–87; theory and practice of epoché 83; theory of epoché 83–85; theory of motivation 42–44, 47; transcendental and time 83–85; transcendental phenomenology 14, 42, 139, 494, 502; understanding of time 83; Vienna Lectures 86 Husserl and Transcendental Intersubjectivity (Zahavi) 503 Husserl et la naissance de la phenomenologie (Lavigne) 494 Husserlian meditation 380–383 Husserlian phenomenology 10, 40, 42, 439, 441, 446, 451 Husserl’s Legacy (Zahavi) 503 Husserl’s Phenomenology (Zahavi) 503 hyper-reflection 355–356, 364n5 hypokeimenon (kitai) 127 Ibn ‘Arabi 156, 168n15 The Idea of phenomenology (Husserl) 494 Ierodiakonou, K. 107–108 Ikkyū Sōjun 131 imaginary subject-world scenario, daydreaming 465 impermanence and emptiness (shunyata) 491 impermanent (anitya/anicca) 80 inauthentic existence 286 inauthenticity 447 Indian Buddhist philosophy 82 Indian meditation traditions: and phenomenology 457–459 Indian philosophy 380, 394 Indian Sankara 246 individuality 192–193 infant’s metaphysics 486n10 Ingram, D. 161

518

Index inhalation 147–148 initial saying 218 An Inquiry into the Good (Nishida) 126 instrumental value 287 intellectual expectations (intellektuelle Erwartungen) 306 intellectualism 55 intentionality 55, 379, 430, 492–493 interiority 143 International Journal of Philosophical Studies 228 intrusive negative emotions 304 ipseity 360 Irigaray, L. 337–338 isolation 24 “Is there a phenomenology of ethical meaningfulness?” (Pradelle) 63 Jacobs, H. 90n11 James, W. 62 Janicaud, D. 353 Jansen, J. 297 Japan 123, 131 Japanese Zen Buddhism 246 Jaspers, K. 11, 234, 359 Jingxi Zhanran 181 Jones, R. 169n16 Journal of Consciousness Studies 491, 502 Kabat-Zinn, J. 1–2, 21, 54, 58, 63, 67, 81, 88, 117n7, 123–124, 127, 129–131, 135, 219, 221, 255, 262, 279, 281, 311, 341, 401, 419, 462, 496 Kant, I. 355, 393 Kantian transcendental philosophy 393 Katz, S. T. 161 Kayser, P. 63 Kearney, R. 353 Keiji Nishitani 190 Kern, I. 49n6 Khoury, B. 369–370, 376 ki-energy 134 Kirkland, K. 401, 402 Kleinberg-Levin, D. 338 knowledge economy 73 Koichi Tsujimura 201n3 Kornfield, J. 281 Kramer, R. 433–434 Kreutzer, C. 237 Kroc, R. 221 Kuki Shuzo 190–191 Kuzminski, A. 22 Laertius, D. 22, 32 La nausee (Nausea) (Sartre) 495 Lane, E. 168n3

language: modality of 27; Pāli 79; subject-object distinction 27 Laoureux, S. 429 Lavigne, J.-F. 494 Lectures on the Phenomenology of Inner Time Consciousness (Husserl) 305 Legrand, D. 294 letting-be 223 Lévinas, E. 4, 9, 54–63, 95, 275n1, 315, 353; contending with critique 61–62; critique of phenomenology 54–55; ethics in intersubjective relation 271–273; hermeneutical circle of 57; heroism 57; literature 62–63; method of pleonasm 57; narcissism 57; suspicion of 55–57 Levinas, Storytelling and Anti-Storytelling (Buckingham) 63 Levinas and Asian Thought (Kalmanson) 63 liberation (moksha) 138, 152–153 Logical Investigations (Husserl) 83, 308, 378, 494 Logic of Place (basho no ronri) 6, 123–126, 129, 130, 131, 135 The Logic of Place and Religious Worldview (Nishida) 129 logic of sacrifice 442 logos 27, 212–213, 443; dimensions of 96–97; embodied 103–104; and Eros 98–99; free-floating 102; identification of 27 “Logos and Psyche: A Hermeneutics of Breathing” (Kleinberg-Levin) 338 Loy, D. 78 Lübcke, P. 90n11 lucidity 461, 466; and daydreaming 469–471; and meditation 469–471; in phenomenological literature 467–469 Luft, S. 49n12 Lukács, G. 448 lungs full (antara kumbhaka) 148 Lutz, A. 81, 292, 297 Lysias 96, 99, 102–104 machination 194–195 Macquarrie, John 242 Mādhyamaka Buddhism 22, 181 Mahāmudrā meditation 90n6 Mahāsī Sayādaw 82 Mahayana Buddhism 128 Maître Eckhart et la joie errante (Schürmann) 234 maqam la maqam 169n20 Marcuse, H. 226, 449 marginal consciousness 15, 467 Marion, J.-L. 353 martial arts 131, 133–134, 458 Marx, K. 219–220, 225–227

519

Index Maslow, A. 421 Mattes, J. 23 Mayo, E. 220 McDowell, J. 72 McEvilley, T. 22, 458–459 McFerrin, B. 130 McGuirk, J. 90n11 McMindfulness 60, 78 McNiff, S. 421 Medieval Christian Mysticism 231 meditation 131; body scan 258; Buddhist 22, 40, 80, 380–383; criticisms 54; and daydreaming 469–471; Eastern traditions of 38; Husserlian 380–383; Indian meditation traditions 457–459; and lucidity 469–471; Mahāmudrā 90n6; mindfulness see mindfulness meditation; modalities of 462–463; phenomenology of 461–462; practice 353–355; process of learning and practicing 15; samatha-vipassanā 40, 80, 86; single-pointed 15; Vipassana 79–80 meditative practice (samatha) 67, 78, 80–81, 87, 162; in Akbari Sufism 153–154; anticipation 87; of Buddhist tradition 225; interpreting phenomenologically 161; in Sufi 153, 170n32 meditative remembrance 6, 155 meditative thinking 328 meditators 161–162 Meltzoff, A. N. 138 Mercer, R. 160 Merleau-Ponty, M. 5, 13, 33, 49n8, 56, 143, 144, 149, 150n3, 186, 271, 338, 353, 370, 404, 413–415, 420, 422–423, 445, 467–468, 492, 493, 504; hyperreflection 355–356; on mindfulness 66–76; “Some Immense Exterior Lung” 347–348; surréflexion 355–356 Merry, D. 63 Merton, T. 460 meta-awareness (saṃprajanya) 292–293 metanoetics 193–194 metanoia 193 method of pleonasm 4, 57 Micali, S. 311 micro-phenomenology 500n28 Middle Truth 182–186 Mike 163–164 Milinda, King 79 Miller, J. P. 359, 362 Milne, A. A. 75 Minar, E. 24 mindful clarification 508–511 mindfulness 324–326, 367; as an ethical practice 273–274; and awareness 9,

495–498; bare attention and attentive recollection 80–82; and bodyfulness 373; bottom-up/top-down approaches 369–370; and Buddhism 504–506; Buddhist 1–2, 22, 39, 369; cognitive approaches 368–370; concept of 255–257; contemporary 459–461; corporate 220–221; and creativity 425–436; criticisms 54–63; defined 2, 58, 123, 253, 257–259; diachronic view of 267–271; embodied 372–375; as ethical practice 266–275; forms of 2; as Gelassenheit (releasement) 370–372; hesitation about 54–55; history 1–2; as indifferent phenomenology 58–60; interventions 219; limits 480–481; meaning of 79–80; meditation 58, 62, 256; meditative remembrance 6; as motivation for phenomenological reduction 38–48; noncognitive approaches 368–370; non-judgment/ non-judgmental 21–22; as open and reflective attention 252–264; phenomenological characters of 259–261; phenomenological practice of 454–455; and phenomenology 3, 4, 39–41, 43, 368, 416–420, 475–478; and phenomenology of aesthetics 413–423; and Pyrrhonism 21–24; as reflective attention 262–264; as science-based strategy 281; and self-consciousness 291–293; Stoic account 368–369; and temporality 373–375; in Western societies 1 mindfulness-awareness: and phenomenology 491–499 mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) 1, 106, 221, 304 mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) 221, 255, 267–268, 281, 413, 417–419, 421 Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) 1, 88, 221, 281, 496 mindfulness-based therapy: non-judgment/nonjudgmental 21; and Pyrrhonism 23 “Mindfulness-Based Therapy in Modern Psychology: Convergence and Divergence from Early Buddhist Thought” (Murphy) 63 mindfulness meditation 399, 400–401, 417, 419, 496 mindful perception 417 mindful phenomenology of breathing 338–340 mindless: obfuscation 502–506 mind-world correlation 492–495 Mine Hideki 201n6 minimal self 450

520

Index The Mirror of Simple Souls (Porette) 233 Miyamoto Musashi 133 modernity: Analytic 510; and contemporary mindfulness 459–461 Modern Postural Yoga 139, 149; see also hatha yoga Mohanty, J. N. 378 Mohler, Armin 449 “moods” (Stimmungen) 309 Moore, I. A. 236, 239 Moore, M. K. 138 Moran, D. 24–25, 353 Morihei Ueshiba 133 Morley, J. 139 motivation for phenomenological reduction 38–48; Fink’s theory of motivation 44–47; Husserl’s theory of motivation 42–44; and mindfulness 39–41; theory and practice 41–42 Muhyiddin Ibn al-’Arabi 153 Mulhall, S. 450 Münsterberg, H. 384 Murdoch, I. 12, 253, 262, 372, 373, 376 Murphy, A. 63 Mysterium tremendum 61 myth of Theuth 100, 101–103 Nachträglichkeit 87 nada yoga (sound yoga) 149 Nāgārjuna 181–182, 511 narcissism 56, 57 narrow-mindedness 462 Natorp, P. 233 natural attitude 59 naturalism 169n27 Nature Review Neurosciences 256 Neale, M. 221 negation of the “will to live” 383–386; ethical skepticism 384; problem 383–384; solution of the problem 384–385; transcendental epoché 385–386; universal ethical epoché 385–386 negative emotional expectations 314–315 negative theology (theologia negativa) 231–232 Nelson, B. 332n1, 360 neologisms 129 Neumann, K. 12, 82–83 New Spirit of Capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello) 449 Nicholas of Cusa 231–232, 241 Nietzsche, F. 8, 207–208, 217, 353, 380, 381 nirvāṇa 182, 340–348 Nishida Kitarō 6, 123–135, 190–191, 364n3 Noble Truths 267 noetic feelings 296 noncognitive approaches 368–370

non-judgmental mindfulness 22 non-philosophical common sense 30 nonpropostional meta-awareness 296 Notes on the Doctrine of Attention and Interest (Husserl) 306, 313 nothingness 286; absolute 126; divine 232, 245–246; embracing 243–245 Nur al-’Arabi 155 Nurriya Malamiyya 155 Nussbaum, M. 110–111 Nyanaponika 82 objective attitude 445 objects: presence with 358–359 Odysseus 211 oikeiōsis 109–110 Oldenberg, H. 380, 395n5 Olendski, A. 88 Olendzki, A. 258 Oltmanns, K. 8, 234, 247n6 On becoming aware. An experiential pragmatics (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch) 40, 499 On Detachment (Eckhart) 233, 240–243, 245 One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse) 449 ontological monism 426, 429 ontologies of breath 149 ontology: phenomenology as 446–447 “Ontology: Hermeneutics of Facticity Lectures” (Heidegger) 191 open attention 9, 261–262, 264 opening and closing philosophical systems 62–63 open monitoring 462 open system 157 Opus tripartitum (Eckhart) 236 The Origin of the Work of Art (Heidegger) 452 Ōsawa Kisaburō 131, 134 Otherness 55–57, 60 Other-power 197–198, 199 Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus) 19, 31, 34n1 Overgaard, S. 371 painting 13, 413–414 Pāli 79, 82 Pali Canon 82–83 Pāli Texts Society 79 parallel lives 12; Plato/Husserl 389–395; Socrates/Buddha 389–395 Parfit, D. 109 Parkes, G. 191 Parmenides (Heidegger) 211, 214 Patanjali 6, 139 pedagogy 59 Pentzopoulou-Valala, T. 26, 30

521

Index perception 403; Merleau-Ponty on 418; mindful 417 performative body 294 “permanent emotional dispositions” 309 Perniola, M. 86, 90n11 Perpich, D. 63 pessimism 381 Petitmengin, C. 353, 400, 502 Pfänder, A. 315 Phaedo (Plato) 103 Phaedrus 5, 96, 98, 104 Phaedrus (Plato) 5, 95–104 pharmakon 101, 103 phenomenological: methodology 353–355; ontology of breathing 338–340; reformulation of negation of the “will to live” 383–386 phenomenological attitude 445–446 phenomenological investigation 41 Phenomenological Ontology of Breathing: The Respiratory Primacy of Being (Berndtson) 338, 347 phenomenological perspective 252–264; characters of mindfulness 259–261; concept of mindfulness 255–257; mindfulness as open attention 261–262; mindfulness as reflective attention 262–264; operative definition of mindfulness 257–259; overview 252–255 phenomenologists 38 phenomenology 23, 502–504; Buddhist Yogacara tradition 6; of daydreaming 463–467; defined 492; forms of 2–3; of history 438–443; Husserlian see Husserlian phenomenology; and Indian meditation traditions 457–459; of life on psychoanalysis 428–432; limits 480–481; of meditation 461–462; and meditative experience 156–160; and mindfulness 3, 4, 39–41, 368, 416–420, 475–478; and mindfulnessawareness 491–499; as ontology 446–447; post-Husserlian 315; proto-phenomenological approach 4; and Pyrrhonism 24–26; receptive co-embodied generative 492–495; theoretical possibility of 42; theoretical strength of 41; transcendental 6, 14 “Phenomenology and Mindfulness” (Stone and Zahavi) 41 The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Dufrenne) 415, 420 phenomenology of aesthetics: and mindfulness 413–423; overview 413 Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty) 66, 69, 339, 355, 420, 445, 467

Phenomenology: The Basics (Zahavi) 503 Philipse, H. 334n20 philologos 96–97, 99 philosophical critique 54–55 Philosophical Manuscripts (Marx) 226 philosophical phenomenology 169n26 philosophos 96 Philosophy as Metanoetics (Tanabe) 191 physis 224 Pigliucci, M. 107, 117n7 Pirsig, R. 73 Plato 5, 24, 25, 44, 95–104, 339, 380, 459, 479, 481, 485; vs. Socrates 390–393 Platonic myth 98 Plato’s Sophist (Heidegger) 95 poetic thinking 8, 332n1 poiesis 223–224, 227 political-ontological machine 201 Porette, M. 233 Posner, M. I. 256 post-Husserlian phenomenology 315 posture (asana) 140–147; tree pose (virkasana) 140–141, 141 The Power of Now (Tolle) 373 The preparation of the child for science (Everest) 484–485 pre-reflective self-awareness 147 pre-reflective self-consciousness 291, 293–295 presence 310–315; and attentive perception 356–358; in clinical setting 362–363; with objects 358–359; with other subjects 358–359; refusal of 359–361; symptoms as failure of 359–361 “presentifications” (Vergegenwärtigungen) 306 the primacy of breathing 340 prima facie 294 procedural meta-cognition 296 “Project of the Investigations” (Husserl) 438 Prolegomena 381, 382 prosochē 107–108 prosocial value orientation (SVO) 401 proto-phenomenological approach 4 Proust, J. 296, 298 psychoanalysis 425–436; phenomenology of life on 428–432 psychological flexibility 23 psychological rigidity 23 psychologism 24, 157 Puc, J. 63 pure experience 126–127 Purser, R. 78, 221 Pyrrhonian scholarship 20 Pyrrhonian skepticism 3–4, 19, 25, 30; aspects of 22; described 19; goal of 22; interpretation of 21;

522

Index proto-phenomenological elements in 21; suspension of judgment (epoché) 19–20 Pyrrhonism: and being-in-the-world 29–33; Cartesian method of doubt 29; challenges 26; disturbance (tarache) in 22; and Eastern philosophies 22; and mindfulness 21–24; and phenomenology 24–26; philanthropic element of 22; by Sextus Empiricus 19–21; suspension of judgment (epoché) in 23; therapeutic aspects of 23 Pyrrhonists 3–4, 20–21, 22, 29–30; capability 30; experience of 31; historical criticisms of 4; as thinker 30 Pyrrho of Elis 19, 22 Quelle (Husserl) 499 The Question Concerning Technology (Heidegger) 452 The Questions of King Milinda (Davids) 79 quomodo 42 Qur’an 154 radical historicism/rendering history inoperative 196–197 radical relationality 6, 123–135; absolute nothingness 127–128; aikidō (the way of encounter/contact) 133–134; chadō (the way of tea) 131–133; contradictory self-identity 128–130; eternal present 127–128; logic of 125–130; overview 123–125; pure experience 126–127; selfawareness 126–127 radical scepticism 359 Rahula, W. 267 Ramanuja 156 Ram-Prasad, C. 62 Rank, O. 13, 425–426; on Freudian psychoanalysis 433; and Henry 432–435; on neurotic 434; personality types 433 rational belief (Vernunftglaube) 309 Ratnayake, S. 63 realism 86, 186, 446, 509 receptive co-embodied generative phenomenology 492–495 Reckwitz, A. 449 reflective function of attention 312 reflective self-consciousness 290 reflexive awareness (svasaṃvedana) 291–292, 293 refusal of power 197–198 relationality 126; see also radical relationality releasement 454 religious motivation 46–47, 51n32

Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia (Cassaniti) 63 remembrance (dhikr) 6, 153–155, 167, 168n12 renewal 315–316n4 resolute decision 285 resoluteness 453 respiratory difference 337 respiratory openness to Being 341 retention of breath (kumbhaka) 148 reverse-engineering 354 reversibility within attentive presence 361–362 Rhys Davids, T. W. 342 Ricoeur, P. 157–158, 161, 169n22, 170n31, 279, 353, 492 right mindfulness 419 Rimpoche, M. 87 Ritunanno, Rita 361–362 Robertson, D. 117n2, 368 Romano, C. 63 Rosch, E. 39, 87 Rosenberg, L. 127 Rosenzweig, F. 55 The Routledge Handbook of Phenomenology of Mindfulness (Ferrarello and Hadjioannou) 502 Ruin, H. 247n11 rupa (form, body and material/physical form) 343 Ryan, R. M. 2, 257, 262 Sallis, J. 104 samatha (quiescence, calm abiding) 364n4 samatha-vipassana 354 samjna (perception) 343 sampajanna/saṃprajanya 292 samskara (volitional formations) 182, 343 Sartre, J. P. 279, 290, 294, 495 Sarvimäki 115 Sass, L. 360 sati 1, 79, 80, 152, 168n1 Sattipaṭṭhāna Sutta 90n5 sattva 461 Sauer, J. 236 Scheler, M. 233, 315, 353, 401 Schimmel, A. 155 Schmitt, R. 90n11 Schooler, J. 296 Schopenhauer, A. 353, 380, 381–383, 385–386, 394 Schürmann, R. 234–235, 242, 247n8, 247n9 Schutz, A. 404–406 scientific ideal 42 scientific self-reflection 42 scientism 457 Sebbah, F. D. 4, 57 Segal, Z. 1, 279

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Index Sein und Zeit (Heidegger) 237 Seishirō Endō 133–134 “Selbstsein” (being a self) 450 self-acquaintance/self-presence 290 self-awareness 126–127; pre-reflective 147 self-consciousness 124, 290–300; and agentive character of active attention 295–299; and mindfulness 291–293; overview 290–291; pre-reflective 291, 293–295; reflective 290 self-help techniques 152 selfing 127 selfless (anātman/anatta) 80 selflessness 87, 131, 193 self-luminosity 291 self-negation 193 self-optimization 449 self-other equalizing (lojong-tonglen) 491 self-power 197–198 self-reflection (Selbstbesinnung) 38, 44–46, 48n1 self-regulation of attention 311 self-sentient 74 Sen no Rikyū 132 Sepp, H. R. 48n3 serene indifference 57 Sextus Empiricus 19–23, 29, 31–33, 34n1, 35n13 Shaikh, S. 154 shamatha (calm abiding) 355, 495–496 Shantideva 401 Shapiro, S. 255–256 Sharf, R. 168n1 Shayer, S. 85 Shaykh al-Akbar 153 sheshin 87 shihan 131 Shinto purification rituals 131 shu-ha-ri 124 shunyata 497–498 Siegel, R. D. 256, 262 Siff, J. 470 Silesius, A. 233 single-pointed focus 462 Sixth Cartesian Meditation (Fink) 44 skandhas 343 skepticism 24; anti-philosophical 25 skillful absorption 445 Škof, Lenart 337 smarati 79 Smart, N. 156 social mindfulness (SoMi) 399–400, 407–408; psychology of 401–402 social pathology 200 Socrates 5, 8, 12, 19, 24, 96–98, 99–104, 207–209, 380; and Buddha 393–395; vs. Plato 390–393

Socrates-Buddha 47, 85 solipsism 86–87 solipsistic epoché 91n23 Solloway, S. G. 359 Sophocles 208, 213 Sorabji, R. 117n12 The Sovereignty of Good (Murdoch) 253 species 192–193 Stace, W. T. 168n6 state of tranquility (ataraxia) 19, 22, 29 static phenomenology 440 Stede, W. 342 Stein, E. 401, 404 Steiner, R. 460 Stoicism 106 Stoic mindfulness 107–111; apatheia 110–111; eudaimonia as well-being 108–109; oikeiōsis 109–110; prosochē 107–108 Stoic model 5 Stoics and mindfulness 368–369 Stone, O. 23, 34, 41, 63, 90n8, 491–496, 508, 510 Ströker, E. 91n19 The Structure of Behaviour (Merleau-Ponty) 66 Studies on the Structure of Consciousness 306 subjective object 459 subjectivity 194–195 sufism 152–167; Akbari Sufism 154–156; excerpts 162–166; goal of 154; meditative experience 156–160; meditators 161–162; phenomenological inquiry 156–160; phenomenology 161 sukha 150n1, 344–346, 348 sundial pose (surya yantrasana) 144–146, 145 suri ashi 131 Surréflexion 355–356 suspension of judgment (epoché) 19–20, 24, 29, 42, 83; act of self-determination 84; practical possibility of 42 suspicion 55–57; possibility of escaping 60–61 Suzuki, D.T 340 Svenaeus, F. 112, 115, 117n14 symptoms as failure/refusal of presence 359–361 system of phenomenological philosophy 45 tacit cogito 15 Taminiaux, J. 83 Tanabe Hajime 7, 189–192, 197, 199; approach to mindfulness and subjectivity 192–194; historical realization 193–194; individuality 192–193; metanoetics 193–194; metanoia 193; self-negation 193; species 192–193 Tang, Y. -Y. 256

524

Index “the Tathāgata’s dwelling” 346–348 tea person 133 Teasdale, J. 1, 221, 279 techne-poiesis 224 technicity 194–195 technological age 326–331 temporality: mindfulness and 373–375 Thamus, mythical King of Egypt 100 ‘theological turn’ 353 theory of epoché 83–85 theory of eudaimonia 109 theory of mind (ToM) 402 theory of motivation 42–47 Theravada Buddhist meditation 152–153 Thích Nhất Hạnh 257, 268, 279, 401 thinking: distorted 418; full consciousness 474–475; reasons/causes of 474–475; and spontaneity 478–480 Thompson, E. 39, 87, 296, 400 Thought of Being 14 Thoughts are not the enemy (Siff) 470 Thou-Psychology 434 Tiantai 7 Tiantai Buddhism 175, 177, 181–182, 185–186 Tiantai mindfulness 181–185 Tiantai Zhiyi 181 Tibetan Buddhist 505 Tibetan Kagyü lineage 80 Tibetan Mahāmudrā 292 Todres, L. 115–116 Tolle, Eckhart 373 tonglen-lojong intersubjective opening 497–498 Toshihiko Itzuzu 132 Totality and Infinity (Lévinas) 57, 315 tragedy: as destiny 213–215; Greek 207–210; at individual level 215–218; pre-classical age of 207 transcendental ego 159 transcendental epoché 385–386; absolute 386; universal 386 transcendental imagination 430 transcendental immanence 461 transcendental insight 46 transcendentalism 42, 47 transcendental phenomenology 6, 14, 42, 139, 494, 502 transcendental philosophy 42 transcendental radicalism 50n23 transcendental theory of motivation 4 “transcendental transformation”: epoché as 386–389 trataka (single point staring) 149 tree pose (virkasana) 140–141, 141 Trudy 164–166 Trungpa, C. 80 Trungpa, Chögyam 497, 505

truth(s) 26–27, 222–225; essence of 27; metaphysical 21–22; as unhiddenness/ unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of beings 27 truth of being 223 Ultimate Truth 181–183 uncanny feeling 285 Under the Net (Murdoch) 253, 257, 260, 262 unhiddenness/unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) of beings 27 unhomelikeness 113–115 unitive mystical experience 153, 155–156, 168n5, 169n17 universal ethical epoché 385–386 universal questionability 46 Unlearning meditation: what to do when instructions get in the way (Siff) 470 unrealizability 201 unselfing 372–373, 374, 376 upward bow pose (urdhva dhanurasana) 142, 142–143 Urpraxis 88 “valueception” (Wertnehmung) 308 Van Doesum, N.J. 401 Varela, F. 497–499 Varela, F. J. 39, 87, 89, 448 Vásquez, G. H. 50n18 vedana (feeling or sensation) 343 Vermersch, P. 499 viewer vs. artist 421–422 vijnana (consciousness) 343 Viktor 162–163 vinyasa asana practice 147 vipashyana-awareness meditation 497–498 vipassanā meditation 79–80, 88, 355, 505; see also meditation The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty) 275n1, 413 visual perception 413 Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification) (Buddhaghosa) 62 von Eckartsberg, R. 406 Von Hermann, W. 236 von Hildebrandt, D. 315 Wallace, A. B. 263 Walther, G. 234 wandering mind 280–282 Watzl, S. 297, 298 well-being 87–88, 111–113, 116; as disposition (Befindlichkeit) 112–113 Welte, B. 234 Welten, R. 436 we-relation 404–406

525

Index Western Electric Company (WEC) 220 Western metaphysical tradition 328 Western metaphysics 317, 320 Western ocularcentric philosophical tradition 339 Western philosophy 8, 353, 394 What I Call the Self-Aware Determination of Absolute Nothingness (Nishida) 128 What is Metaphysics? (Heidegger) 494 “What is the question to which ‘substitution’ is the answer?” (Bernasconi) 62 Wheeler, M. S. 256 wheel pose (chakrasana) 142–143; see also upward bow pose (urdhva dhanurasana) White, D. G. 457 Williams, M. 279 Wohlbefinden 112 Wollheim, R. 421 Wood, E. 349 worker-hammer relation 31 Wrathall, M. 330, 336n30 Wrenn, M. V. 220

147–149; minimal self 146–147; overview 138–140; posture (asana) 140–147; sundial pose (surya yantrasana) 144–146, 145; tree pose (virkasana) 140–141, 141; upward bow pose (urdhva dhanurasana) 142, 142–143; vinyasa 147 Yoga (Wood) 349 yoga nidra (yoga sleep) 149 yogic science 458 Yoko Arisaka 124

yanas 40 Yan Hui 177 Yazdi, M. H. 156 yoga 6, 138–149; body schema 146–147; bound lotus pose (baddha padmasana) 144, 144–146; breathing (pranayama)

Zahavi, D. 3, 23, 34, 41, 63, 90n8, 146–147, 294, 295, 401, 450, 491–496, 503, 508–509, 510 Zajonc, A. 462 Zen-Buddhism 354 see Buddhism Zen Koans 88 Zeno 107, 111 zettai mu no basho (place of absolute nothingness) 128 Zhanran 181, 183–185 Zhili, S. 181, 183, 185 Zhuang Zhou 187n1 Zhuangzi 7, 177–181, 187n1, 190 Ziarek, K. 272 Ziporyn, B. 177, 180, 183, 186, 187n2 Zjanoc, A. 461 Zur Phänomenologie der Mystik (Walther) 234

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