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Gendlin, E.T. (1993). Human nature and concepts. In J. Braun (Ed.), Psychological concepts of modernity, (pp. 3-16). Westport, CT: Praeger/Greenwood. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2060.html
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Human Nature
Is there a universal human nature? Yes, certainly, but it is not something that just is. It is still developing and is the sort of thing that can always develop further. The fact that the human infant can learn and can variously complete its body's behavior patterns is a greater degree of organization. But, in Western science, when something is incomplete, it looks less organized, indeterminate. We have no good concepts, as yet, for an order that is inherently incomplete not because it lacks organization but because it can further organize itself and do so variously. So we must move past two simplistic notions. What is universal in human nature cannot be found just by itself, separated out. Human nature always occurs in its particularized versions, this way or that way. We will not see the complex order of human nature by looking for what is common. That would miss the order that enables various ways of carrying forward. Second, it is equally simplistic to conclude that there is nothing universal, as if cultural variety were imposed on just nothing, as if the human body had
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no organization of its own with which to create, learn, and perform culture. In that view, the various cultures float, dropped down by divine decree, so that there is an utter gap between culture and body. The present patterns do play some role in how it can be carried further, but not by simply determining that there is always also a human nature that could have been carried forward otherwise and what is more important can now be carried forward differently than would be possible in accord with the pattern alone.
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cultural completions or rather, ways of carrying forward cannot be understood just as themselves, just as patterns, imposed on nothing. To be lived, they involve the body. They are always a carrying forward of body-life, and they need to be understood as processes of body-life in situation. We are bodies and animals, but in this regard, the difficulty for our Western science is that we think of bodies as mere machines, organized by abstract, mathematical, science-imposed patterns. Along with this view of the body, animals were/are considered mere machines. This is not because scientists never talk to their dogs when they get home. Rather, it is because we have had no concepts for animal life. What people assert about the body comes from the type of concept in use; it is always a flat, complete pattern, imposed by science or by culture. With this type of concept, animals have not been understood at all, and this gross lack dramatizes, and plays a large role in, our lack of scientific understanding of ourselves. The great complexity and near person-character of animals have not functioned as a concept in our theoretical thinking of ourselves. The findings of ethology have not been thought or used in theories of human nature. I say "the findings" there is no good theory of ethology. Let the findings function as concepts. A mother duck will roll an egg back into the nest, if one has rolled out. It's not easy, with her narrow bill. She has to adjust to the unevenness of the ground, moving the egg in a zigzag. This behavior is inherited, and if no egg
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ever rolls out, she performs it eventually, anyway. Only, without an egg she moves her bill easily, in a perfectly straight line. Shall we say that her body simply lacks complexities that only the uneven ground gives her? Or is it more organization than any one pattern, that she can incorporate any pattern of the ground? The straight line might seem like an empty page, less organized than a page of print. But the computer's empty screen, ready to have anything written on it, is more organized than a page of print. The human body can further develop in a variety of ways, and it has already done that. Some of the variety it has developed is called "cultures." The human infant arrives less fully formed than any other species. The duckling can walk from the start; at birth it actually walks out of its egg. The human infant arrives with an organization that is more complexly open for further development. We need such concepts of animal life; otherwise it can seem that everything human is first given by culture and given to a behaviorless, merely mechanical body. It is right enough to say that all human meanings are elaborated and reorganized by culture, but it is nonsense to say that only language and culture create meaning, social interaction, or complex living. It omits the obvious fact of the complex life of animals.
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interpretations or perceptions that make reality various; rather it is our various ways of living in, and with, it. No, we never get reality as such; we always get our being in it and with it, we digest it or fail to digest it, swim or drown in it, walk on it or sink into it. Science consists of the results of operations, not just a catalog of the green and the dry. Concepts and interpretations have to be thought of as special cases of living in, and interacting with, reality. To understand concepts as operations is quite familiar to us, but with our Western habits we begin with conceptual and interpretive operations and skip all the interactions that come before. Interaction is firstthat's a quick way of making this point. It is better to let reality itself be interaction process. Even the prefix inter still assumes that
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the two things precede. But if we are not innocent about assumptions of reality, why keep the simplistic assumption that reality must be like a thing in space that first exists separately and only then interacts? Perhaps reality includes processes from which only later the things separate out, which we then say "interacted." Perhaps life-interaction is real. Since we're here, this wouldn't be the wildest assumption. So I propose that human nature, living bodies, and reality be thought of neither as a separately given order nor as simply lacking in any order but an order that is carried forward by the variety of livings we observe, as well as in many other ways that have never as yet happened.
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bodily sensed complexity of a situation. Articulated concepts also carry forward our bodily-situational living. Either way, understanding consists of an implicitly complex bodily sense of "Oh, yes, . . . . . , sure." The bodily lived complexity of the situation is carried forward and thereby self-understood, in the action or in the concept. Each culture further patterns the bodily lived complexity of the situations, so that quite different actions and concepts carry us forward and thereby make sense. "Really" to understand another culture's (or person's) concepts and lifeways, we must grasp how these carry forward those people's body-life in situations. Therefore I think we need to use both the networks of conceptual relations and also how concepts make sense by carrying forward situational living.
Richard Shweder
Richard Shweder, too, wants to grasp how people in other cultures think about things, but he also wants to reveal the intentional world of the other and what has been dogmatically hidden away (Stigler, Shweder, and Herdt, 1990). He argues that the alien concepts we bring can often let us understand something better. It seems to me that this is also true, but we have to ask what "better" means. If I had to mediate that difference, I would argue that Marriott is totally right first. I agree with him that nothing much will work, as long as we cannot grasp how a culture articulates and understands itself. As long as we
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map the culture on our own understandings, we won't get it on our map at all. Only when at least some of its self-understandings have been grasped might it be possible to judge that our further understanding with different concepts is better. Of course, we can't dictate this time-order, since we come with our alien concepts and lifeways first, and these may instantly let us understand something better. We can't postpone such better understandings, but we can postpone the judgment of "better" until we have understood and developed the inherent concepts. Then, I would grant, we have at least a chance of judging which alien understandings are better.
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strip off how we are already patterned, it must be that our selves and our lives and bodies are not only by the patterns but something that can be carried further by other patterns, even though as patterns they cannot fit together. Since the first set can't be stripped off, making sense of oneself in another culture is also a further understanding of one's own culture. I admit, of course, that if one grasps oneself in an Indian situation, that doesn't yet constitute an Indian social science of the West. But I am serious about that possibility. I asked Marriott if he agrees that the social science he develops from Indian concepts can be used to shed light on our own or any other culture we truly live in provided we grasp it first in its own terms. I think he said yes. Of course, Marriott would know that this cross-application of Indian concepts to the West is going on implicitly in him and that it could, in principle, be extended, so that Indian concepts could be used here and the concepts of any culture could be used in grasping any other. Shweder pursues this point and makes it central. For example, he says that the elaborate Indian concepts and rituals concerning a man's sisters-in-law reveal human possibilities that we keep quiet about and don't develop overtly in our culture. So the revealing goes both ways: some indigenously hidden human possibilities in both cultures are revealed by coming from the one into the other. He says that selfishness is elaborated and made overt here, and altruism in India, but both exist in both cultures. Therefore, what goes on in each culture can be
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illuminated by the elaborations it lacks, which can be found in the other. Shweder invokes Ruth Benedict's "arc of human possibilities" and he makes it all sound rather as if there were a given set of human possibilities, just as there will always be some relations, ritualized or not, between a wife's husband and her sisters. But I don't want to take this as if human possibilities were given in advance and only left to be articulated or not. It seems so, because the marriage pattern is somewhat similar in both cultures. But where the cultures are father apart, there is not a neatly similar category differing only in "articulation." So I can fault Shweder for sounding as if human possibilities are given and only the articulations vary. On the other hand, Shweder also says, "Experience follows belief." Now I can fault him for sounding all the other way, as if there is nothing human across; there is only the variety of beliefs, which make the experiences. But instead of criticizing both times, I would rather pull these two sides together into one concept: "carrying forward."
The arc of human possibilitiesit seems, at best, that one might find an empty spot between two others on that arc. It seems to me, rather, that the more we develop, the more further development is enabled. The degrees of freedom increase; we don't use them up. Carrying forward is neither determined nor indeterminate, but theoretically that sounds odd, unspeakable, and unthinkable. Yet, it is much less speculative and much more familiar than the notion of fixed reality. The phrase carrying forward says something most familiar. Most human events are not just finished things. Rather, what an event or a situation is, has to do with what will happen furtherunless we do something now to change what will happen. Just about every bit of living is for carrying forward, neither a determined set of choices, nor just anything we like.
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Of course, Marriott is right to let Indian and Western conceptual manners carry each other forward. In our culture we have highly developed conceptual relations and logical theory. We neither can nor should lose these. It is part of the fact that if we understand anything foreign at all, we cannot help understanding it better. My proposed manner of using concepts can be contrasted with the more familiar one of speaking only about logical, conceptual relations. In that familiar mode the bodily carrying forward of the situational mesh has been "dogmatically hidden away" so that it is underdeveloped, lacking an overt way to be thought. I propose an approach for the empirical study of this mesh.
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whether you spend years living in another culture or not. I am arguing, rather, that our concepts must refer to the manner of process of the people
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we study. In that regard I propose a strategy for asking what I think are crucial empirical questions. We have to ask, in each case, just how the given concepts, ritual, or way of life functions to carry these people's bodies and lives forward. If we do that, we come upon vital differences in how whatever we study functions.
Example: Psychotherapy
We scaled a difference in process-manner for tape-recorded psychotherapy interviews. Rather than studying what was said, we studied the manner, in this case the degree of direct reference to directly sensed experience We found improvement correlated with the extent to which people work not only with how their problems are patterned just then but also with their directly felt body-sense of what they are talking about. Change-steps arise from the bodily sense of a problem. In contrast, little change comes from how a person's problem seems to be patternedfrom the patterns as such. Patterns often seem to show only how one is and must remain. There are many other variables of process-manner. Each thing we study has its own such variables.
to struggle to defend their choice! The choice is possible only for some. Others must work, because two paychecks bring only what one brought, 20 years ago. I argue that without inquiring into the manner of process, one wouldn't know much about the old or new female roles in our society. Would process-manner predict differences on other variables? Surely. How could it not? Many measures, from global satisfaction to very specific stress-indexes, family
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But I would also ask another kind of question: how does the Virgin Mary cult function in carrying forward these people's bodies and lives? I would ask, How would the image of the Virgin Mary's self-sacrifice function to carry forward people's bodies and lives? I predict that very different manners of process will be found to coexist in a culture. The spiritual approach to suffering can restore health and give energy, but it can also be used to stifle oneself and make everything seem only superficially all right. It would surprise me a lot if this difference and finer shades of it were not to be found. It is unlikely that such a symbol would never realize a human possibility and equally unlikely that every person would find this possibility. But what are the percentages? That would matter a lot, and I cannot even guess. It is an empirical question! It should not be hard to differentiate a process-manner that gives serious value, health, and energy to a mother from a manner of functioning that makes for repression, smoldering anger, and the castrating of those around her. The castration and resentment of sons can be measured with our psychometrics. Perhaps there are no differences in this result that is an empirical question. The mothers' interview transcripts would have to be reliably differentiable as between repressive theological garbage and reports of physically felt, experiential sustenance. That should be possible, if the right questions are asked.
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This would not resolve the inherent intricacy of various conceptual interpretations. For example, we would still be concerned about social oppression, and we would still affirm that it is mirrored in the prevalence of the Mary cult, even if it were found that for a sizable proportion of mothers the spiritual concepts open genuine human resources. That would not justify the oppressionanymore than I choose suffering just to advance my personal development. Nor would it deny that the social arrangements are the reason for the emphasis on the Mary image. But now we would not just invoke the general concept that symbols "mirror" social arrangements. Keeping this, we would know something about how such "mirroring" works. I think poverty and the infant mortality rate have everything to do with whatever we study, and they must always be considered. For someone who has not experienced it, it is hard to understand a person whose little child dies, and then another, and perhaps another. Yet this was the human condition in all ages until now, and it is still the condition in many places. To grasp human nature and its possibilities, it is worthwhile to understand how people manage to go on, both repressively by an inward closing and in another way, if there is one. Such understanding would never justify these conditions, which are no longer unavoidable. So the intricate mesh of various concepts and strategies would continue, but it would change and become always more informed.
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same" across different patterns. Here it is the concept of the manner of the process. This program consultant has a simple touchstone here ("They aren't angry; it's protective"), but it marks a whole different complexity, a different manner of process that makes all the content very different.
opens a bodily experience of infinity. Certainly, the social value put on it disposes some people to open themselves to find the desirable experience. In one manner of process, trying to find it makes it more likely. But there's also a different kind of "trying," which immunizes. Some people had to sit in silence on hard chairs as children taken to concerts. Their bodies will not open to this music. The influence of social values is not only straightforward; it can build blockages. Nor are there only two manners of process here. Rather, some people lack only the experience. Others force themselves, put themselves down, or insist inside themselves on some substitute they find. In short, there are also serious ways of violating oneself. Is it possible that a culture would talk about an experience that exists only in a repressive, substitutional mode, an experience that simply cannot be found? I think so, but I would like to know! Can it sometimes be found, but only in a negligible percentage of special people? Or does the experience exist, but only in others? I mean that a merely substitutional experience might be pushed on some people, for the sake of something held desirable by others, as binding women's feet made the women into upper-class luxuries but for whom? Don't we need to know which of such different manners of process obtain? Or shall we report only the pattern that is highly valued? There are those whose Bach-listening process extends just to recognizing it. This is Bach, they love to say, and they've had it. Similarly, in the art museum these people run through, pointing: a Van Gogh, a Vermeer, and so on. It is different to spend a long while in front of a Vermeer and see the light reflected from each upholstery nail. These differences can be differentiated empirically, although one must always know that people have heard the kind of talk that indicates the desirable experience, and to some extent they can reproduce it. One has to ask more deeply. For example, if we ask about the upholstery nails in the painting, we might get beyond the mere transmission of canned talk.
CONCLUSION
Cross-cultural understanding is one rather rare way in which our human nature bodies and lives can be carried forward. I argue that our nature, bodies, and experiences have an order that is much more intricate than the overt patterns, cultural or personal. That order is for further carrying forward by different patterns, and sometimes creative of different patterns. Cultural patterns or any patterns must never be treated as if they were axioms, as if experience just derives from them. The higher animals already live
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much more complexly than could ever be derived from our cultural patterns alone. The cultural patterns only modify and elaborate our bodily living and carry it forward. I argue that we have to look how they do that in various manners of process.
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