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Gendlin, E.T. (2004). The new phenomenology of carrying forward. Continental Philosophy Review, 37(1), 127-151. From https://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2228.html

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The new phenomenology of carrying forward

E.T. Gendlin

Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5801 S. Ellis Ave., Chicago, IL 60637, USA (e-mail: [email protected])

In this paper I show a new approach to what phenomenologists call "phenomena," a deliberate way to think and speak with what is more than categories (concepts, theories, assumptions, distinctions ...). Some categories are always implicit in language, and language is always implicit in any human experiencing. So what I just called the "more" cannot be separated from implicit categories and language. This is well known. What is little known is that experiencing always goes freshly beyond the categories and the common phrases. I have been establishing a deliberate way to think with more. This is crucially needed in philosophy, but it has seemed impossible. We can reformulate the problems it involves.

Most philosophers gave up on phenomenology long ago, because it was recognized that neutral description is impossible. Description involves categories. Sartre's dialectical categories differed from Merleau-Ponty's functional approach. Therefore their "descriptions" differed from each other and from Husserl's. It was soon said that phenomenology finds no phenomena at all, only the same philosophical issues that have always been contested. The phenomena seemed to depend entirely on the categories (through history, culture, and common language forms). Philosophers were tempted, like Heidegger in the years after Being and Time, to deal with categories apart from phenomenology, from the top down. Everyone can now see that working with the categories alone is not at all hopeful. None are ultimate and their use always involves an "excess" which fits neither within categories nor can it be had separately. This impasse has led to the dead-end aspect of postmodernism. It frees us from any privileged set of categories, but leaves us only with an aporia, still only on the level of concepts. But if one recognizes that language is inherently metaphorical and not controlled by concepts, then there need be no dead end.

It is now evident that philosophy needs to employ more than conceptuality, but the current "return" to phenomenology need not be a retreat from postmodernism. Phenomenology need not back away from the problem of the relativity of descriptive categories and approaches. We have ways to think with the so-called "excess." I have shown that it is much more than a texture of [Page 128] old concepts. What I call "experiencing" is not separable from concepts, but it plays crucial, directly demonstrable roles in ongoing thinking. It performs functions that concepts cannot perform.

The "excess" is our situated experiencing in the world, in situations with others. It does not utterly depend on categories. History and culture are insufficient to handle even an ordinary day. The common phrases do not limit our next steps of action and thought. Applying different categories does indeed bring forth different phenomena, but the direct experiencing of whatever we study always responds very precisely, always just so and not otherwise, and always with more than what could follow just from our categories. Experiencing is a "responsive order," as I call it. [1] This order is always unfinished in regard to further conceptual form, but always more finely organized than any conceptual forms. If you are willing to think with the "excess" rather than leaving it behind, you can attend to it directly at any juncture of thinking. Then you can notice that it will not permit you to say most of the cogent things you can easily say. It will stay opaque, stuck and mum unless and until just certain sentences "come" to open it. Such freshly formed, often metaphorical sentences show that language is deeply rooted in experiencing and not controlled by extant concepts or categories. If we think from where these arise, we can examine and redirect some of the functions which implicit experiencing provides at that particular juncture of thought.

I am summarizing what I call a "reversal of the usual philosophical order" in my philosophical work. Philosophies have long claimed a basis in experience, but "experience" was always construed according to the concepts and categories of that philosophy. The concepts were always read into experience. This is still done today when the "excess" is understood as just a texture of old concepts. Only a phenomenology can employ the functions of experiencing beyond the variety of concepts. In works I summarize here, one can find a philosophical way to show and directly employ some of its functions in thinking and speaking.

We find neither objectivism nor indeterminacy. Where others see indeterminacy, we find intricacy – an always unfinished order that cannot be represented, but has to be taken along as we think. It is a much finer, more organic order that always provides implicit functions, whether we attend to them or not. I will try to show some of these functions in the first part of my paper.

To speak with and from what is more than the categories, we employ the capacity of language for new sentences. This capacity of language is rooted in the human body as reflexively sensed from inside. The reflexivity is currently being missed, because attention is understood along the lines of perception, as if a neutral and unexamined person over here directs a neutral beam at some already separate object over there. If we attend to experiencing directly we find [Page 129] that we live with situational bodies which always sense themselves in sensing anything else. So the first half of my paper concerns the functions of what is more than categories, especially the inherent interrelations of language, situations, and the human body. The second half of my paper concerns the reflexivity of attention, self-consciousness and first-person process.

1.

Phenomenology as I understand it, determines its own use of language. It can develop new categories of description. It can examine and direct the use of logic and theory. Phenomenology for me is not the small phenomenology which understands itself as only describing conscious experiences cut off from the universe, from other persons, and from the "unconscious" depths of person and body. I will touch on these topics to show that they are not beyond phenomenology as I have always understood it. Phenomenology is small when it accepts a small corner within the world-picture of the reductive sciences.

A philosophy that can think with more does not assume the science picture. It does not assume, in Russell's words, that logic is the "furniture of the world." We want to derive and understand the great power of logic and science, and grasp how these are embedded in more than themselves. We badly need to add a new and different kind of science to augment that world-picture. Husserl's refusal to assume the reductive ontology was sound, and we can go much further in the direction he opened. We can derive this and also other ontologies in and from phenomenology.

In use, all concepts involve more than their clean logical patterns. But if we do not pay more attention to this, then we seem to have nothing left, when the concepts fail. There is no new road, only arbitrariness where the concepts break. We find ourselves in a welter of conceptual possibilities, a mix of all the concepts and theories we have read and thought. We can move in all sorts of possible directions, old and new. Many analytic distinctions can always be made, and need not be foolish. In this plethora what we choose to say is arbitrary.

Where I wish to point is a little further. The welter of old concepts is here, but they do not alone determine what we find. Let me ask you: When no concept seems to work, what more do you find here? I think you find that you are still here, of course, in midst of your situation, and you can still find your hope for something from your foray into the topic. Perhaps you were pursuing an unclear lead, the sense of something promising. In that case this is also still here. Along with this you feel implicitly all you ever learned and [Page 130] thought, but not as a welter, rather as it relates in a focal way to what you are tracking. None of this goes away.

What you find is not disorder, not limbo, not just flow, not some concept together with the opposite of that concept. Rather, you find an intricacy, pregnant, implicitly ordered, perhaps partly opaque. From this intricacy you may at times be unable to go on, at least for a while. This implicit intricacy is quite different than the welter of analytic concepts and possibilities.

There are phenomenological variables at this "edge." Sometimes the sense of such an edge is already there, calling for our attention, but usually we need a quiet minute of attending to where it can come. And when it has come, if we leave it even for a moment, then we only remember it. We need another quiet minute to find it again. When it comes, it may be open to be spoken-from. Or, it may be closed and opaque, requiring us to return repeatedly before it opens. It may be a diffuse sense from which many strands can be articulated. Or, there may be one single focal implying like a felt lead or an insistent sense of something. In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, I found interesting relations among these variables. [2] Much work has since been done on this kind of datum.

I have been speaking about concepts breaking down, but even when they work well, we can always go to the implicit intricacy. It is a more organic order, a more precise and more demanding kind of order, a very finely determined order, very different from logic, yet responsive to logic. It contains a great many implicit distinctions and entities, but you can easily assure yourself that it has much more order than these, and an order of a different kind.

Now I must point to the mode of language I have already used here. Can I really use words such as "organic," "order," "precise," "kind," "determined," and "different," to speak of more than conceptual distinctions? These words seem to mean certain conceptual distinctions. Does not "order" always consist of discrete entities and patterns? Does not "organic" refer to certain defined entities? But in my sentences the words have not remained within their old meanings. When we speak from the intricacy, the sentences can add to the meanings of the words. We notice this especially when we have trouble finding words. Then we can sense the physical strain as the implicit words rearrange themselves in our bodies, so that when they come, they arrive newly arranged. Words can acquire more meaning when they come in sentences that come freshly at the edge of the implicit intricacy.

You need not be a philosopher to find yourself at such an edge. You might be tracking a half-formed new observation in any field. Or, you might be in midst of writing a poem. Or, you might find yourself in a troubling situation which no obvious action can resolve. With the usual view of the body as a machine, it may seem surprising that the body can feel a situation, and what [Page 131] is more, can imply and demand a next step of speech or action that has never been seen before. But we are familiar with this bodily "knowledge" from many practical situations. We know that we cannot base our actions just on what we can conceptualize. We have to use our implicit bodily sense of the whole situation. We may find a way that resolves our bodily unease, or not. We decide when we must, but perhaps a large discomfort remains hanging there. This bodily discomfort "knows" some of the intricacy which the decision did not take account of. But when a decision does sit right in our bodies, how well we sleep that night!

Right now, for example, where do you sense your reaction to what I am saying? If you have not stopped to articulate it, then it is still only a physical sense of implicit meaning, perhaps excitement, perhaps discomfort, at any rate a bodily sense which only a philosophical body could create. It is not an emotion, not a mere feeling about this discussion, but an implicit intricacy, a cluster of implicit philosophical thoughts.

But I am getting too far ahead. Let me choose one example and go into some detail. I hope the example will let me point to the close relation between language and the body. In my example you will note the physical "coming" of words. The example should also show how we can find where the implicit intricacy opens. Thirdly it should show how we recognize when we did not speak from the implicit intricacy, and when we did.

Say you are writing a poem. You have six or eight lines but the poem is not finished. It wants to go on. In an implicit way you feel (sense, have, live, are ...) what should be said next, but you do not know what to say. The phrases that come do not precisely say it. You reject one phrase after another. How are you able to do this? You do not know what to say, but you recognize that these phrases do not say it. Something implicit is functioning in your rejection of them. Lovely phrases come. Some are so good, you save them for another poem. But THIS demanding implicit sense still hangs there.

You may be distracted for a moment. Now the demanding sense is gone. You quietly re-read the poem so far, and there, at the end of what you have, there it is again! And you still cannot say it.

What or where is "that," which is there again? It is so stubborn and precise. Your body understands the phrases that come. It knows the language and demands – I say implies – something more precise.

Your hand rotates in midair, your body knows what needs to be said and has never as yet been said in the history of the world (if it is a good poem).

Eventually the right phrases come!

What does the word "come" say here? How do words come to us? This "coming" needs to be studied. How do the right phrases come and how are they recognized?

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As a poet you need not worry over these questions. Poets work in what Husserl called the "natural attitude." But as philosophers and phenomenologists we want to think with, from, and into this unclear but more precise demanding edge, and think into this coming of words. When we then speak from there, these three words "language," "concept," and "body" will have acquired more meanings.

As philosopher observing yourself as poet, you find that THIS, which needs to be said, is more precise than the common phrases. How or where do you have this? Your rotating hand almost says it. Your whole body demands (implies) THIS. But now the word "body" speaks from your body as sensed from inside, not only your externally observable body.

The implicit meaning does not exist before or without language. In animals the inwardly sensed body exists before language. But the human body is never before language. But the implied meaning is not the result only of language. The relation of language to the body is more intricate than just with or without. Your body understands well the language and the phrases it rejects. But it can generate a bodily implying that goes beyond what the already-shared common meanings could imply. The body knows the language, and it always moves on freshly again, beyond the already existing meanings.

The body physically rearranges the same old words, so that they come to us already arranged in new phrases and sentences. This is so in all ordinary speech, not only in fresh thinking. We do not look up single words and paste them together. If we hear ourselves saying the wrong thing, we can only stop, regain the implicit sense of what we were about to say, and wait for another set of words to come.

The "coming" of words is bodily, like the coming of tears, sleep, orgasm, improvisation, and how the muse comes. But here we have to be careful. The higher animals also sleep and have orgasms, and very complex lives even without language. But language is implicit in the whole human body (not only in our brains). Language is implicit in our muscular movements and in every organ. It is implicit in what rouses or spoils our appetites, and in what disturbs our sleep. The language is part of culture and history, but the body is always freshly here again, and can say "no," even when culture and reason say "yes." If you enter there, you find a finely ordered cluster of strands, far more intricate than culture. The body can insist on some new and more sophisticated way that has never as yet been found, and may never be found. We often need to find our way beyond the cultural forms. Similarly, improvisation and the muse come in a bodily way beyond the already existing forms.

Although what we called "you" does not control what comes, the implying is not an otherness (not an "alterity"), not another self, not unreachable. Rather, what comes in this way feels more deeply and uncensoredly from yourself, [Page 133] than anything that you could construct. Now the words "you" and "self" tell of degrees of selfness, since we are most ourselves when there is a fresh and surprising coming through the body.

There has been no established word for this kind of bodily datum. The words "perception," "idea," "emotion," "feeling," "affective," "kinesthetic," "proprioceptive" all mean something else. Do not call it by an old word; people will not be able to find it. Let it generate an odd fresh phrase. It is a felt meaning, a felt sense, the direct referent, the implicit demanding.

All known concepts are available, but their patterns are not what we find here. If we had nothing else, we would be in limbo. But we have much more than the concepts – we have language forming freshly and oddly to say all this. And we have what language can freshly speak from, which is anything but indeterminate. What comes in this way from the intricacy is more finely organized, usually on a new plane, skew and around the corner from the common meanings. Now let me consider the great question which must obviously be asked here: How are we able to recognize when we are speaking from the implicit intricacy, and when not? We want to grasp how. The fact that objective observers can reliably distinguish it is now well established. We have a good deal of research to support this claim. [3]

But how do we recognize carrying forward? How does the poet recognize the right line when it comes? The poet in the "natural attitude" need not explain this, but it is now our turn as philosophers to speak from this. Implicitly we "know" the answer, but we cannot easily say it. People say that the words "match" the feeling, but words and feeling have no common shape like two congruent triangles. When people in the natural attitude say "match," this is sufficient for them to "know" what they mean, but if we examine what they mean, we find that this word "match" does not speak-from what happens. It speaks from the usual concepts of representation, of a match or copy which is impossible here. A sentence is not a copy of a feeling.

But can we say what does happen? Or can we only negate the old notion of representation? Do we have more here than the old concepts? Of course we have more here. We have what happens, and also the power of language which can speak freshly from what happens. Let us permit the language to do this, and also observe how it does this.

Instead of the word "match" we invite fresh whole sentences. The poet rejected the many lines because the more precise implying continued to hang there. None of those lines could take it along. Now it no longer hangs there, because that special line has carried the implying forward.

Was the new line already hidden in the implying? No, the line came from, but was not in the implying. The pattern we spoke of as: "came from but was [Page 134] not in" is more complex than representation. We are speaking from it; we are taking it along.

Does the implying become explicit? No, not at all! The implying does not become words, even after the newly-phrased words arrive. The implying never turns into something explicit, as if now it is no longer there. If the implying were no longer there, the poet would not know to prefer just these words. Rather, these words carry the implying along with it. They bring it. They carry it forward. They take it along. They bring this implying with them, which is how the poet knows to keep just this line.

At last the poet knows what the implying "was," but is this quite the same implying that was there before? We cannot say yes because the poet didn't quite know what was implied. We cannot say no because then there would be no connection and no reason to keep these lines. Here again the old concepts break, and again I point to the more intricate pattern we find, and to the power of fresh language to speak from it. We can do much more than deny that the implying is the same or different. As philosophers we recognize the "same and different" as the arch principles of the logical use of concepts.

In commenting on my philosophy, Mohanty wanted to divide carrying forward. He wanted to know which part was there before and which part is new and different. Instead, let us speak from the pattern that we do find here. [4]

The fresh language of "no longer hanging there" and "carried forward" now becomes a new concept, but also an instance of a new way to use concepts. Fresh language leads to a new concept when there is a pattern, something we can see also in many other places. I think you will find yourself using the concept of "carrying forward" at many junctures. There has been no way to speak from this relation between implying and words, but now there is.

As a concept, "carrying forward" does also have the usual kind of pattern, a structure, a kind of diagram in empty space. It contains the spatial pattern of forward (and backward), and also the pattern of "carrying," i.e., something taken and moved by something else. But this alone says very little. The concept means our use of it at this juncture, where words (it could be actions) let a precise implying no longer hang there, but take it along. Without taking this juncture along, the concept does not say much. So it does not substitute for the role which the implicit intricacy plays here. We do not substitute the concept for the intricacy; rather we take the intricacy along so that the concept can speak-from this intricate juncture.

But is not something a "concept" only because its pattern goes free from the juncture at which it first arises, so that it is applicable elsewhere? But the pattern of this concept is not only a separable spatial diagram. The pattern is also its relation to the carried-forward intricacy. When we apply "carrying [Page 135] forward" elsewhere, we apply this juncture. Let me explain how such a concept is applicable at other junctures.

Concepts that carry their implicit junctures with them are much more precise. They mean what they do at that juncture in that situation. When applied elsewhere they bring their first implicit juncture into the new implicit juncture. So they do not have the same effect there, nor just a different effect, but again more than same or different. Can language say what we do find? The concept's first implicit juncture "crosses" with the new juncture, to produce just this next change at this new juncture. We can enter into its effect. Then we find that crossing opens every concept so that it can do more than before. We also find that it opens each new juncture so that there is more there than before. The crossing of two junctures does not bring the lowest common denominator but rather a great deal that is new to both of the two that cross.

In a logical order every additional meaning is a further limitation of the result. It decreases the "degrees of freedom." But intricacy has the responsive order in which, the more requirements have been formulated, the more further possibilities are thereby opened. I was able to show this in Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning.

When two patterns function only logically, they do limit each other down to their lowest commonality. Our capacity for logical patterns is an enormously valuable human power, but we do not lose it if we also use the kind of pattern which happens with intricacy. "Carrying forward" and "crossing" are two more-than-logical concepts I have introduced. In the crossing of two intricacies, each becomes implicit in the other insofar as it can. This is an extremely precise implicit process. When we enter into this implicit effect, we find that the new possibilities are much more precisely differentiated than what we had before.

(See C&D for this philosophy of language and word-use.)

For example, earlier I distinguished experiencing from the arbitrary analytic plethora. This distinction has its meaning just at that juncture, in order to find both. I said only: "If you go further, what do you find you have there?" Other than for the sake of finding them, I did not distinguish them. Even so I had to say that the analytic one is already implicit in the experiential one. So this was not the separable pattern of "two." When we apply this odd diad elsewhere, we can expect it to do more there, than can follow from it here. But concepts really always bring their intricacy along. When we apply any concept elsewhere, we can enter the intricacy to find what effect it has had there.

Things do not come separately with external relations between already- cut units. Experiencing precedes units. We create units. We fashion them retroactively, and thereby gain the powers of logical inference. We can create [Page 136] logical theory without assuming a reality that consists of logical units. And, we can always re-enter the intricacy after any logical inference.

It has long been known that concepts bring their implicit junctures and are not the same in different contexts, but this was always considered a terrible limitation which has to be ignored if we want to make sense. Concepts were therefore said to "drop out" all their intricacy, as if the actual intricacy consisted only of "particulars" subsumed under them. But concepts do not drop out their intricacy, and the intricacy does not consist only of subsumed detail. When concepts are treated as empty patterns, they seem to close the intricacy which is always there and can always be entered. Although this closing is vital for logic, it has given concepts a bad reputation as if they must always close us to more. This is not so.

In contrast to spatial patterns which have no inherent value-direction, we find that experiential implying has a life-enhancing, forward-moving character. The implied new steps (of language or action) are in a life-forwarding direction. What we usually call the "direction" is defined by some external aim or mark. The externally-defined "direction" can change at each step, but in its implicit intricate meaning we say, looking back, that the surprising steps of carrying forward were in "the same" direction all along. The body's organic direction is prior to the externally defined "direction." As a society we must be careful that the great progress of the logically reductive sciences does not lead us to lose this little-understood characteristic of body process.

We see that language, body, and situational interaction are a single system together. Every situation consists of hundreds of possibilities for actions and speech-acts. Those are culturally given routines, but an individual body can sense not only the routine patterns, but also new life-enhancing steps beyond the forms and routines.

Experiencing is always a sequence. If we apply "carrying forward" to a whole sequence, the concept has a new effect. We can think of the sequence as a constant carrying forward of implying into new implying which is in turn carried forward into still newer implying. This process is a "zig-zag" between what is implied on the one hand, and statements or actions on the other. Implying and occurring respond to each other.

If we employ the zig-zag, we can monitor whether we are speaking from the implicit intricacy, or not. Suppose you have some half-formed new ideas for a paper, and now you have a chance to talk about it with someone. You have a rich implicit sense of what you want to say, but nothing written. Talking about such an implicit sense may kill it. You seem to have had only two dull ideas. But we know that talking about it can also maximize and expand it. Then you are amazed to find so many strands, all still developing. What does this depend on?

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My point here is: You need not wait till you get home, and either deplore speaking prematurely, or happily laud the power of dialogue. If you keep returning to the implicit, you can check step by step whether the implicit is being carried forward. If it shrivels, quickly discard the statement. Better words will come.

This example will now help me to discuss a far-reaching conclusion: Whether you will say retroactively that you "had" a rich idea or a thin one depends not only on what you had, but also on whether it was carried forward or not. Carrying forward has two past times, both the recorded time behind it, and the retroactive past looking back from now. In the recorded past you might remember how it seemed before you began speaking. In the retroactive time you now say what the implying really "was." Neither is invented. Both are very precisely just what they are.

The carrying-forward sequence gives us a new concept of time. For example, the new line lets the poet know what was "really meant" by the previous lines. Now they may need revising, but this will be a sharpening, not just a change. The process has reached back behind itself to carry forward what the previous lines "meant." Retroactively one can now explain just what it "was" in the earlier lines that has led to this new one. There is not only the remembered past, but also a new past, a second past which is experienced from the present, back, but very precisely, not arbitrarily. [5]

I call the carrying forward sequence "nonlaplacian." Laplace said if he could know all the particles and their velocity at any one moment, he could tell us everything about the past and the future. The zig-zag stands in contrast to the Laplacian logic. We need both. Logical inference is indispensable and arrives where nothing else can. You might often want to pursue 39 purely logical steps in a row, but after that, or at any point, you can institute the zig-zag process in which each step can revise the whole.

Action and speech-acts occur into implying so that it becomes a next implying. The present is constantly also the going back behind itself to bring the past implying into the newly implied future. This pattern is more intricate than linear time. It is a time of internal relations, rather than the usual time which consists of perfectly present positions that are not related to each other unless an observer externally relates them.

What I have presented are small samples, small bits from a philosophy. My intention is only to indicate a new way in which we can do phenomenology of language, phenomenology of the body, and phenomenology of concepts.

To move to the second section of this paper, I must rely largely on references to the detailed philosophic work I have written elsewhere. I have to mention it and then skip it.

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I could show only a little here. We have become able to employ and (by means of the employment also characterize) many of the ways in which the intricacy functions in thinking, in language, and in action, as well as in logic and science.

Thereby the philosophy has also developed several practices which are being widely taught. I will mention them at the end.

In addition to "carrying forward" and "crossing" we have developed other such more-than-logical concepts, for example "implicit governing," and "unseparated multiplicity."

We have also found certain characteristics of more-than-logical processes. The one I mentioned is that more conditions increase the degrees of freedom.

I have already mentioned the Process Model in which the carrying forward process exhibits itself and develops concepts with which to understand itself. These non-Laplacian concepts are both internally and logically connected. They are inherently phenomenological, but also have the powers of logical inference. They consist partly of the implicit functions themselves, but they can also serve as purely logical concepts which can apply to the data of the reductive sciences. This makes it possible to augment the latter so that we can think also about living things and human beings. [6]

This philosophy provides a new way to go on from where most philosophers stop. Of course they all employ the intricacy. Philosophy sharpens and usually repositions the main terms, which can happen only because terms work in the intricacy. Some philosophers also point to the intricacy. We can stand on their shoulders and go on from their work, both because we can enter the intricacy, and because we can let fresh language speak from it in new sentences and with new patterns. In this way we can employ a philosopher's contribution more effectively. Also in this way we can go on from Husserl.

2.

Husserl discovered what I call "the intricacy." And then he did not stop short of it, as so many others did. He entered it and classified a thousand or so facets, like Adam in Paradise naming all the animals.

In his way, Husserl already found that the present occurs into the previous implying and brings it forward as the new implying. He denied that time consists only of pure presents. He found that there is always also a protention of the not-yet. For example, as I now begin this very sentence, you are already ... Yes. And, if I stop, you feel as if we had stopped in midst of a broad jump. Phrased in my terms, he found that the present happens into a previous protention, and is also a new protention. If we enter further into the intricacy here, we find carrying forward.

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Husserl also found that the intricacy cannot be exhausted. He says:

dass jede noch so weitgespannte Erfahrungsmannigfaltigkeit noch nähere und neue Dingbestimmungen offen lässt, und so in infinitum. [7]

that every manifold of experience, however far extended, leaves open still closer and new determinations of things and so ad infinitum.

He says as I just did, that the application of a concept requires us to enter into the intricacy again, to find what the concept did there:

Der Ausdruck ist nicht so etwas wie . . . ein darübergezogenes Kleid; er ist eine geistige Formung, die an der intentionalen Unterschicht neue intentionale Funktionen übt, und von ihr korrelativ intentionale Funktionen erfahrt. Was dieses neue Bild wieder besagt, das muss an den Phänomenen selbst . . . studiert werden (Ideen I, para 124, p. 307).

An expression is not as one might suppose . . . like a covering dress; it is a psychic formation which performs new functions at the intentional underlayer, and experiences correlative functions from it. The import of this new picture must be . . . studied at the phenomena themselves.

Husserl approached the intricacy with certain unquestioned categories, for example his top divisions between perceiving, feeling, and willing. He did not question linear time, geometric space, and mathematical logic, because it was his project to derive these from the intricacy. He saw that he could derive the clear and stable forms. He considered that his project would be completed if he could find all that is involved in deriving these. And, he also assumes that the intricacy is finite in this regard:

Der Ausdruck is vollständig, wenn er alle synthetischen Formen und Materien der Unterschicht begrifflich-bedeutungsmässig ausprägt; (Ideen I, para 126, p. 309, my italics).

An expression is complete when it conceptually and meaningfully explicates all synthetic forms and materials of the underlayer.

Here I find in the margin my own note from when I first read this text many years ago. It says: "Is there an 'all'?"

Even in regard to any one concern, the intricacy can always lead further, and can enrich and complicate the earlier findings. But that never makes them wrong or useless. Unless one finds an error (which is something distinctly different, but this demands another intricate and unfinishable discussion), one retains the earlier steps, although the further intricacy becomes implicit in them.

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Had Husserl not so often re-entered, he would have thought early on that he had completed the work and made everything clear that could be clear. But he was frustrated in his assumption that phenomenology reveals a single realm of permanent objects and relationships. Whenever he returned where he had found all his specific detail, he found that it had opened and developed further. Now he had to write a more differentiated description. "Others build edifices" he said, "whereas I only dig further and further into the ground." In other words, he found carrying forward and the responsive order, but did not recognize it as an inherent characteristic of experiencing and phenomenological speaking-from.

If we enter the intricacy at any of the junctures Husserl opened, and if we are not bound by his logical concern and his categories, we can go further at any point. We cannot go further just with his concepts and essences alone, but we can, if we let them take the intricacy along, if we think not just with his concepts but rather with the intricacy and the concepts.

With old habits we might wrongly assume that such a spot is entirely the result of his categories, so that it would disappear if we question them. But this is not so. As Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning shows, the intricacy we find by means of concepts and categories is not controlled by the concepts and categories. In the intricacy they do not act as if they were logical premises which control what we will find. What we find with them does not need to remain consistent with them. What we directly find at any juncture where we apply concepts, can immediately require a further differentiation in the very concepts which led to it. The intricacy is not determined by any hierarchy of concepts. Even the smallest detail, seemingly subsumed under a lower concept, can lead to an experiential differentiation which reformulates the top categories. I showed this "reversal" in Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning and in a new procedure, "thinking at the edge" (TAE). [8]

Husserl found the implicit too, but he thought of it as a "halo" around the edges of clear perceptions, like peripheral vision. He assumed that if he looked directly at anything implicit, there would be only clear perceptions there. We need not assume this. Husserl extended this perceptual model to all other reports from the reflective phenomenological level.

The highest honor we can bestow on a philosophy is to make it fruitful and significant in the future, by thinking further with it, across its limitations. For Husserl the unclear halo is only at the edge of what we perceive. This is largely true for perception, although Merleau-Ponty showed that even a head-on perception can include much that is not clear. But with perception what is unclear is usually at the periphery. If instead of perception we consider language and meaning, we find, instead, that the "halo" is the center. To find what a statement means, we have to understand its implicit meaning.

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This is the central meaning, not the edge. Words mean the change they make when they are said. The change happens implicitly in the situation. If we examine what it is that functions as the statement's meaning, what difference it makes to say it, what the point of it is, we discover that the implicit intricacy is what actually functions when a statement functions. When we say "I understand it," the understanding is an implicit intricacy. When we do not understand a statement, we can only repeat the statement. We repeat its form of words. But when we understand the statement, we can speak from it in many ways.

For philosophy the model of clear perceptual objects found over there and capable of being formulated alone, utterly breaks down. We cannot use perception as the model for language or most everything else. An implicit intricacy functions centrally, and we have to study how speech, thought, and action function in relation to it. Philosophy cannot model itself on the reception of "external" perceptual objects. It has to study the process by which the external/internal distinction comes about (A Process Model, VIIB).

The limitation of the model of perception is related to the problem about the categories of description. The two problems go together. With perception as the basic model, the categories of thinking, feeling, and willing seem apt. A percept seems to be a mere apprehension. It seems to split itself off from our affect about it, and our will to do something about it.

Husserl's work is phenomenological in that he always begins from the intricacy and finds much more there, than can follow from what he brought. But, by reentering one can follow how the intricacy differentiates itself further.

Husserl knew not to attempt one logically coherent system from his many independent articulations from intricacy. Each of these provides access to reenter the intricacy. It is because Husserl enters the experienced intricacy that he can generate so many new terms and distinctions at points where there had been only a supposedly simple pattern before. But it is also for this reason that he does not make analytically desirable distinctions when he does not directly find them.

For example, among the many questions Zahavi very justly raises, it seems true to me that Husserl does not make the following distinctions. Zahavi says:

Ultimately Husserl tends to equate (1) the first-personal mode of givenness, (2) self-awareness, (3) a certain basic sense of ego-centricity, and (4) the very life of consciousness. [9]

The phrase "tends to equate" says a little too much, but I think Zahavi is right that Husserl does not make the distinction which would set apart how the ego's self-awareness is a structural characteristic inherent in all experience. Zahavi [Page 142] is also right to argue that this is Husserl's view. Self-awareness is structurally inherent, not merely the perceiving of, or the "presence" to experiences. Zahavi is pursuing a cogent line of argument against Pothast, who seems to reduce Husserl's account just to the I's perception and ownership of experiences. Zahavi writes:

If the ego is conceived as something standing opposed to or above the experience, it is difficult to understand why the ego's awareness of the experience should count as a case of self-awareness. [In] Husserl's discussion . . . the ego . . . is not [just] something standing apart from the stream of consciousness, but is a structural part of its givenness (my italics)

I think Zahavi is right, that Husserl did not construe the "I" only as a presence over against experiences. But given the juncture at which Husserl describes what is directly experienced, and given Husserl's logical categories, I think that Husserl is right not to make the distinctions which Zahavi makes in (1)-(4) above. As Zahavi says, Husserl finds and says that self-experience is inherent in the very structure of any experience. There are many places where Husserl obviously speaks-from more than mere ownership. But I think one cannot distinguish the inherent self-consciousness with the language and kind of concepts Husserl had available.

Let me first cite the evidence to support Zahavi's reading, and then show what would be needed to provide phenomenologically the distinction which Zahavi proposes.

Husserl includes (without making a distinction) not just the presence of experiences to the "I," but also "my 'what I do and suffer'" along with "my consciousness."

Husserl says:

Auch mein Leib ist mir gegenüber als Körper, aber nicht als Leib; der Stoss, der . . . meinen Leib trifft, trifft "mich." (Beilage VI of Ideen II)

Also my body is over against me as Körper but not as Leib. The blow which hits . . . my Leib hits 'me.' A stab into my hand: I am stabbed.

It is interesting here to compare Wittgenstein on the relation of person and pain in the body. [10]

The blow to Husserl's "Leib" which reaches what he calls "mich" clearly goes beyond what is presented over against his "I." I might see my knees and feet over against me, but the stab reaches not just my hand but me. It opens the body directly to phenomenology, not just as a mere pre-condition, as Merleau-Ponty usually discusses it. And it supports my reading of his "my 'what I [Page 143] do and suffer'" which I quoted above. In reading Husserl we can definitely establish his finding of an "I" that goes beyond mere consciousness-of (mere presence to, ownership of), although one has to search for special spots. As Zahavi says, Husserl gives no distinct account of how the "I" is inherent in the very formation of experiencing rather than only present to experiences.

Husserl puts his self-observations in quotation marks because he maintains the reflective stand of the pure phenomenological "I," but what he finds within the quotes is his "me" which includes much more than this supposedly pure "I." I don't agree that the reflective phenomenological reporter is a pure perceiving, but I can credit the report on the bodily "I" as much more than what is perceptually presented in front of us.

Zahavi rightly seeks an account of the "I" as a self-awareness that is inherent in every experience. But on what phenomenological grounds could we devise such an account? Of course we would not want just to invent one of many possible purely analytic theories. To go further we need to:

(a) return to Husserl's source, the implicit intricacy where he found what he wrote about,
(b) enter further into the intricacy which opens at this edge,
(c) let language form itself newly in relation to the intricacy, and
(d) allow the language to speak-from nonlogical patterns which (by applying them) we can elevate to the role of new concepts.

The intricacy will respond variously to various kinds of attention and distinctions. If we come with the familiar distinctions and look for the familiar result, we can find the old familiar things once again. Of course one can find the familiar, already entitized packages such as memory, imagery, emotions, perception, feeling, and willing. So we can surely also find the way in which all "experiences" are inherently mine. Experiences are not things that exist alone.

We easily find the "I" which issues our "ray" of attention. And as Husserl says, we can indeed shift this attentional "viewing beam" (Blickstrahl). We just did this by shifting our attention to the body from inside. But do we find these many "experiences" there? For example, take "yesterday." Is yesterday an experience, or is an experience rather that moment yesterday when . . ., or perhaps just only one of the many strands of relevances and consequences which went into that moment? Now we can say that experiences are not waiting there, in advance of our attention. They are not pre-cut.

Any way of attending to an experience or experiences is already a carrying forward from the implicit intricacy. What seemed to be one experience can become articulated into several, and each can be further articulated into many more directly experienced strands. The common philosophical language has [Page 144] no way to speak of an implicit multiplicity, a multiplicity that is not already separated. If we speak from what we just found in new phrases, we can call experiencing an "unseparated multiplicity." This is a third non-atomic concept we need.

By shifting the relevance implicit in our attending, we can take the smallest most specific "experience" and find inside of it myriad strands which could each again be "an experience." In this respect "this moment" or "yesterday" do not contain less than what we can come to notice in "life" or "the human condition."

Now we can say that there are no "experiences" as an already separated multiplicity like stamps in an album or marbles in a bag. Experiencing is variously and endlessly differentiable not only by speech and action, but also by attending to this, rather than to that. "Mere attention" is not mere. What attending lifts out is a product. Attention has the same power to lift something out, as any distinction in a phenomenological treatise does. Attention is an active symbolizing, but never arbitrary. The response to it can surprise us and force us to change our categories.

What attention brings is not arbitrary because experiencing is always symbolized at least by the events that led up to this moment, and it almost always implies, demands, and pre-figures a next step. Attention, (consciousness, awareness, presence-to, . . .) is no merely neutral beam of light, although in some respects this can be said of it. It is always also a special kind of further symbolizing and entitizing.

Of course the categories and concerns we bring are not just arbitrary either. We respond within an ongoing continuity, or to an implicit demand. We can evaluate this by entering into the implicit sense of it. Or, if such a demand is not already there we attend with the project of letting such a demand form so that we might know what to do next. No attention operates alone. It always comes from and with a mesh of physically sensed relevance just as any other kind of symbolizing does, and it is therefore questionable, relative, and various, and yet also always in a precise and demanding relation to the implicit intricacy which motivates it.

The attentional "beam" emerges from an intricate mesh of knowing, bodily feeling, and doing which are not separate departments. When this mesh changes, what attention can possibly bring, changes as well. We can enter this mesh at any time and carry forward some of what "was" functioning in it.

We can study various kinds of attention. Rather than imposing some old classification, we can know that there will never be one final list of kinds. Instead, we can let newly relevant "kinds" emerge here, as I will do now.

Rarely although very pleasantly, we attend just in a neutral way, just being and looking. We might manage such neutral attending for some time. Usually [Page 145] we soon "notice" a distinct this or that. This is a second kind of attention. We feel our felt intricacy being carried forward into the constellation of just this detail. And as we attend to it, it may become insignificant, or grow and develop. This is a third kind of attention.

More often our attention is not a peaceful neutral just being and looking. Rather, we attend in order to search for something or keep track of something. We attend only in a certain relevance, which is part of our situation and which we "know" and feel without going into it. Recall Sartre in a restaurant looking everywhere for the absent Pierre, thereby seeing none of the people who were there.

We have already discussed the kind of attention which turns to a bodily sense of implicit intricacy. Sometimes we find that it is already there (as in my poetry example). But usually a felt sense comes in the body only if we attend to its bodily coming before it comes. This is easy once one is familiar with this kind of attention, but when new it seems odd and difficult.

A special kind which we have discussed, is attention to the sense of an unresolved philosophical problem. A forward step, sometimes a whole series of such steps, may come if we "just" keep our attention on it. But if we enter what is happening at such times we find that fresh philosophical thinking involves an amazingly sophisticated type of attention. It involves making a bodily change in which we "set ourselves" in a certain way. Now we will reject the endless streams of distractions. We will constantly return to just this pregnant spot. Each time we check again: Have we returned? Do we indeed have back again that unresolved physical sense for the problem? We are very stubborn and deliberate about holding our attention there, and yet also very delicate and permissive to allow whatever comes to come, so long as it comes from "it."

In an experiment by Vermersch you are asked to do three things which require your attention at the same time. [11] You find you cannot do it – until you place them into a rhythm so that they really become one thing, one pattern of activity. You discover that the "beam" of attention is not loose. It cannot oscillate quickly. You discover why. The reason is yourself! The beam is YOU and you cannot bring yourself so quickly back and forth.

The fact that so much – and especially we ourselves – are implicitly involved in the humble "beam" of attention can now come together with what I have said about experiencing as a "carrying forward" process, and about internal time. We might miss the inherent togetherness of self-consciousness and the internal time of carrying forward, because we are so accustomed to read the model of perception into everything, as if our consciousness were only a perceiver, added on to percepts. But here we have been pursuing a philosophical lead, the sense that self-consciousness is structurally inherent in the very making of experiencing, not just the perceiver of it.

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Experiencing, I argue, is inherently a process of carrying forward, occurring into implying, reaching back behind itself in going forward. The carried-forward implying is also the present and also the next implying. The sequence generates itself by means of the carrying forward relation.

Carrying forward is the continuous recognition that what is happening is what "was" implied. Experiencing involves the inherent re-reception of itself from moment to moment, a re-having of experiencing internal to the self-generating of experiencing.

Now we can enter directly into our experiencing of what we call "mere attention," to see if we have spoken from it, and if it responds with more. Is this intricacy carried forward if we say that attention is also a self-reception? "Of course," I find myself saying, "I always felt implicitly that I was meant by "pay attention!" If I was "not paying attention," it meant that I myself had wandered away inside, and was not there with the event. So, of course.

The concept of "carrying forward" lets us think how we differ from machines. The process of constant re-recognition of the implying differs from mere reception considered as mere impact, for example on a film in a camera. The film does not "know" that it received anything. There is only impact. Of course there is impact also in experiencing, but the reaching behind itself in going forward constitutes a re-reception, a reception of the fact of reception, which is also the further implying that brings the further occurring. In my model the feedback generates the next step so that awareness is inherent in the moment to moment genesis of behavior. There can be no division between awareness and events that could supposedly happen without it. In the animal world, even the lower animals, such event series do not exist. I have developed a conceptual model in which the usual flat "is" and the separated "of" are replaced by a single implying-occurring pattern. We can build sophisticated concepts using this pattern which we actually find when we articulate experiencing. Phenomenology can develop its own concepts, and become able to think beyond the inanimate model of time-space-fillers.

Without the continuous recognition inherent in carrying forward we would not be there. There would not be consciousness or attention, only some hypothesized third-person events. Rather than a merely added light, consciousness is the self-generating of experiencing.

I must point out the sharp difference between this reflexive re-reception internal to experiencing, on the one hand, and what we call "reflection" on the other hand. The reflexive re-reception generates the process. It generates each next bit of process. A first-person process happens through this reflexive re-reception. On the other hand, when we reflect, we take a separate stand in relation to the past. The reflexivity of carrying forward is not the past, [Page 147] not reflection. It is the self-generating of the present. "Reflexivity" is a more complex concept of the present.

Now we must ask: Is that what a person is, a bodily-situational mesh generating itself by its implying into occurring, its self-sensing? Is that you? Is that me? I go to see directly: The concept does indeed speak-from how I am always there again having already been there before. This is certainly enough reason to keep the concept and the intricacy it carries forward. It has powerful logical implications despite not consisting of logical units itself. I think you will find it a very useful concept. But of course it is only a thin little pattern, very far from carrying me forward in my myriad ways that I sense implicitly as me. So, of course, when we think about ourselves or self-consciousness, we think from THAT, and not just from this concept, or just from any concept. We think from the intricacy from which it speaks, which is always capable of much that cannot follow from the concept.

Leibnitz said that each person is a different mirror of the whole. Nobody else can replace you. You cannot define you. A person is anoematic. You cannot become an object of your knowledge. To think about what a person is, you have to think you.

I want to conclude by touching on the topics I mentioned at the outset, to show that phenomenology can be basic to them and is certainly not excluded from them.

Levinas said that another person is not just your other, not alive to fit you or to frustrate you by being other than you need. The other person is not your other. Another person is alive in different dimensions, another life with its own issues, and not what the issues seem to you to be, not how they seem to be other-than yours. Levinas is right about this. But this does not mean that you are not connected. The other person is already inherent in your bodily carrying forward of your situation. How you are a self remains mysterious; how you are the other people and the things is obvious.

The reality of the other person who keeps me company is not based on "same" or "other." Implicit intricacy gets past the old notions. Another person keeps me the most company when we touch or look at each other silently and implicitly. Each of us is a thick implicit process. If we relate to each other from there, then we can be very close with very little content shared. Or, we can share a lot but the company is thick only if we relate from there. Of course another person may not choose to interact from the implicit level. Then we are at a distance. Even so I can relate to that implicit level, since it is there.

Phenomenology has no problem going beyond a single person's private experiencing, because experiencing is inherently an interaction process in a situation with other people and things. What appears is neither internal nor external, neither just private nor just interactional. My situation is not [Page 148] "subjective" since the others in it are more than I can experience, but neither is it "objective" since my situation does not exist apart from me. My situation is a function of me, although the other people and things in it are not a function of me. Again we find a pattern that is more complex than "subjective" or "objective," or a combination of these artificial two. Rather, our interpersonal interactions are patterned so that we count on the ways in which the others have "private" experiencing, while the process of private experiencing is itself always the carrying forward of situations with the others. This is a more complex pattern than can be reduced to logical units. Yet it is totally familiar. Each is inherently implicit in what the other is.

"My" body is a situational body-environment interaction. Rather than just a structure in space and time, every organ of the human body is better thought of as a carrying forward. The body is situational, suffused by "me" and how I live in my situations.

Phenomenology does not exclude "the unconscious." A few steps into implicit intricacy reveal what we then say "was" implicit. After many "zig-zag" steps we can look back and apply the phrase "was unconscious," knowing of course that this is the retroactive past from here. About the earlier time we know that "it" was not there as it is now formed, but whatever was there could give rise to these steps through which it has now appeared.

We can phenomenologically study how we use logic – for example in philosophical analysis, or in computing our bank account. We do it by holding the implicit intricacy aside, it is always there. We "know" why we are pursuing this logical chain just now, and what it means for our philosophy or our finances. We keep all this aside so as to follow "only" the logic. Without this implicit holding-aside, the logical thinking would not be possible. Logic brings out what nothing else can. [12] Logic has remade the world so that it can support six billion people. But logical analysis must always be positioned by someone, and it can be repositioned. The results of the logical chain have their meaning within the context that is being kept aside. Logic does not control where it begins and ends. It also does not control the creation of the defined units it requires. One slight shift in the implicit meaning of any one unit can utterly undo a logical conclusion. By entering the implicit directly, we can generate a whole territory of distinctions and new entities, and then position the logical analysis where it is informed by the implicit intricacy. We can much better use the great human power of logic when we can enter the implicit and consider where to position and re-position the logic, and how to create its units. We do not need the assumption that reality consists of defined units.

Phenomenology does not exclude science; rather it derives the forms of science as well as alternatives to them. One of the major implications of my argument concerns what I call "third-person science," especially the relation [Page 149] of consciousness to neurology. I argue that third-person events supposedly just filling empty space and time constitute an obvious construction, a wild assumption, floating as they seem to do over there at separate points alone, requiring an "idealized observer" to interconnect them. This kind of science has made more progress than any other in human history, but we can surely add another kind of science which can also employ a more complex first-person model. We have developed such a model far enough to show its possibility.

I have been arguing against the assumption that consciousness is a mere addition to events considered as if they could happen in the same way without consciousness. The reflexivity of the person is not a mere "consciousness-of," not an addition to perceived things, as if percepts existed as mechanical events, leaving consciousness an empty "of," which can seem unnecessary. The current concept of "consciousness" is the poor remainder that is left-over when reductive science defines the content as if it consisted of events that can occur alone. To split the things away makes us a mere "of," of events in a third-person world without us. The third-person science needs to be augmented by a first-person science. [13]

From this philosophy of the implicit have come two practices. Yes, philosophy now comes with practices, just as philosophy did in ancient times. What is now called "Focusing" consists of simple steps to attend in the body where the implying can come. We have a lot of phenomenology on how this is done. Focusing is useful in many ways, and has now generated a world-wide network of trained teachers and focusing partners. Focusing is often done alone, but is also practiced regularly with a listening partner. One need not understand the philosophy to do this practice. It enables one to find and enter the intricacy.

A second practice has developed just in the last three years. It enables one to find that use of language which brings fresh phrasing, not caught within the old assumptions. It is called "TAE." As in focusing, one takes turns with a listening partner. We find that most people have a deep response to the following question:

In your professional field or in your life, what do you 'know' and cannot yet say, that wants to be said?

When we enter the implicit we find not just a plethora of unseparated strands, but also something "known" that seems in need of being said, something demanding which could not be said, something that was perhaps "hanging there" for many years. People find no words to say it. Each word that is attempted could bring some vital strand, but of course the word means something else and would be misunderstood. By letting whole sentences come from what [Page 150] they wish this old word could mean, people soon find fresh phrases coming from several strands of what had been one dark knot. These new sentences do not say something else. They cannot be misunderstood. If they make sense at all to someone, they say their new sense.

If TAE is followed all the way, it leads to the formation of a theory, by which I mean a set of concepts that are implicitly-emergent and also logically interlinked. Most people do not come so far, but they find it exciting and politically empowering to become able to speak and think from what had been a mute knowing. The usual report after TAE is "I've been talking about it ever since!!" Also, "I love being able to think. I did not know I could think."

For us as philosophers, the process develops concepts. Any topic that is articulated from the implicit will go much further into that topic.

The directly sensed intricacy vastly exceeds the common generalities. In any field almost anything we wish to think about lies waiting with its much finer intricate order. If we make our home at the edge of the implicit intricacy, we can employ all formulations, all logic and mathematics, all measurements and third-person variables, and we can then also enter the implicit intricacy to which they have just led.

Speaking-from implicit intricacy can revolutionize most any topic. One can transform any topic by thinking with, – and also about – how the implicit functions in that topic. Once you know how to let this datum come from the implicit, you can use it in anything you are investigating. You can find some of what was hidden in what seemed clear. You can find what needs to be said and has not been possible to say, a gift and a demand. Then your body's language can rearrange its words to speak from it.

Notes

[1] "The Responsive Order: A New Empiricism," Man and World 30/3 (1997): 383-411.

[2] Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (New York: Free Press, Macmillan, 1962); 2nd paperback edition (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997).

[3] See www.focusing.org for an overview of the research. Twenty-seven successive studies have shown that higher levels on the Experiencing Scale (applied to the tape-recorded interviews) correlate with more successful outcome in therapy. The philosophy has led to wide applications in psychotherapy and other fields.

[4] "Reply to Mohanty," in Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin's Philosophy, ed. David M. Levin (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997). See also "Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the Interface Between Natural Understanding and Logical Formation," Minds and Machines 5/4 (1995): 547-560; and "Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language and Situations, in "The Presence of Feeling in Thought, ed. B. den Ouden and M. Moen (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 25-151, also at www.focusing.org.

[5] For the new time model, see A Process Model, IV, V (available at www.focusing.org, [Page 151] printed from Focusing Institute, 1997), here, IVB.

[6] Much of the philosophy is available at www.focusing.org, click philosophy.

[7] Edmund Husserl, Ideen I and II (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1950 and 1952), Ideen I, para 3.

[8] "Introduction to Thinking At The Edge" (TAE), The Focusing Folio, 2004.

[9] Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, Evanston, 1999).

[10] "If someone has a pain in his hand . . . one does not comfort the hand, but the sufferer: One looks into his face" (Philosophical Investigations 286). See also my "What Happens When Wittgenstein Asks: 'What Happens When ...?"' in "Zur Sprache Kommen: Die Ordnung und das Offene nach Wittgenstein," [conference paper, University of Potsdam, 1996] Philosophical Forum 28/3 (1997), also at www.focusing.org.

[11] Pierre Vermersch, Carbondale Conference, Southern Illinois University, 2001.

[12] See the power of patterns, derived in A Process Model, VIIA.

[13] See First-Person Science, www.focusing.org.

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