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itself, the act to which the concept refers. We have to carry the experience along with us. Experiencing never becomes a concept. Since experienc-ing cannot be represented, the concepts can only indicate various kinds of relations between experiencing and conceptual patterns. I will present a few such concepts here. An enormous gap called postmodernism has recently been created be-tween experiencing and concepts. I want not only to examine the nature of this gap, but also to attempt to move beyond it. Of course there are many strands of postmodernism. It is best known for denying that there is any truth, or that one can claim to ground any statement in experience. Postmodernism is right in that one can not claim to represent or copy experiencing. But this does not mean that what we say has no relationship to what we experience - that there is no truth, that everything we say is arbitrary. In contrast to postmodernism, I show that we can have direct access to experiencing through our bodies (Gendlin 1992). I maintain that bodily experience can not he reduced to language and culture. Our bodily sense of situations is a concretely sensed interaction process that always exceeds culture, history, and language.
The living body consists of interactions with others in the world. "Perception" appears only before or to a body. But the body is an interaction also in that it breathes, not only in that it senses the cold of the air. It feeds; it does not only see and smell food. It grows and sweats. It walks; it does not only perceive the hard resistance of the ground. And it walks not just as a displacement between two points in empty space, rather to go somewhere. The body senses the whole situation, and it implies, it urges, it implicitly shapes our next action. It senses itself living the situation in its whole context. We act in every situation, not just on the basis of colors and smells (not even all five senses crossed so each is in the others), nor just by motions in geometric space. Rather, we act from the bodily sense of each situation. Without the bodily sense of the situation we would not know where we are or what we are doing.
we feel how the body now functions, always in a much wider way than language. The body functions in crucial ways, and in ways that are trans-historical. It is not the five senses but the sentient bodily interaction that takes on language and history - and then always still exceeds them. Let me show this.
is part of what we mean and so that we can think further from it. Then we can also think further from the specific (.....) at any juncture of any topic, if we let a felt sense come at that juncture. Notice that a (.....) is implicitly intricate. It is more than what is already formed or distinguished. In my example it includes many alternative moves, but more: the (.....) implies a next move - the body is the imply-ing of - a next move, but after-and-with all that it includes, that move is as yet unformed. The (.....) is interaction. It is the body's way of living its situation. Your situation and you are not two things, as if the external things were a situ-ation without you. Nor is your bodily sense only internal. It is certainly not just an emotional reaction to the danger. It is that, but it also includes more of the intricacy of your situation than you can see or think. Your bodily (.....) is your situation. It is not a perceived object before you or even behind you. The situation isn't the things that are there, nor some-thing internal inside you. Your intricate involvement with others is not inside you, and it is not outside you, so it is also not those two things together. The body-sense is the situation. It is inherently an interaction, not a mix of two things. The living body is an ongoing interaction with its environment. Therefore, of course, it contains environmental information. The bodily (.....) also implies a further step which may not yet be capable of being done or said. We need to conceive of the living body in a new way, so as to be able to understand how it can contain (or be) information, and also be the implying of the next bit of living. It is not the usual use of the word "body." As we have seen, the body is not just an orienting center of per-ceiving, nor only a center of motions, but also of acting and speaking in situations. The bodily felt sense of situation can also be related to Heidegger's (1927) concept of "beingin-the-world." The early Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty wrote powerfully about what is inherently implicit, prethematic. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger presented a fascinating analysis of being-in-the-world that always included feeling, understand-ing, explication, and speech. He re-understood each and showed that they are "equally basic" to each other, and always in each other. Heidegger argued that in our felt understanding we know our reasons for an action "further than cognition can reach." According to his hyphenated conception of the being-in-the-world, the human mode of being is really a "being in." It is a being in situations with others. Heidegger stopped here, however, and unfortunately did not understand this in a bodily way. We can go further. "Being-in" situations with others applies to the embodied and sentient person. The person is interaction, and this includes our bodies. It can be seen in many ways. For example, the infant emerges, sucking the air, searching for the breast. The breast in turn has to be pumped if there is no infant. Thus, we are inherently interactional. This does not mean, as
post-modernists say, that there is no person, just dialogue. The current rage for dialogue is an overreaction to the previous view that assumed that the person is an internal structure cut-off from interaction. Actually a person's self-responding happens within an interaction context, and is strongly affected by this context. But interpersonal relating happens within the context of a person's self-responding and is strongly affected thereby. Each can exceed the other. Therefore we try to provide maxi-mum personal closeness with minimal intrusion of content. We call this "Focusing-oriented psychotherapy" (Gendlin 1996). You know that there is someone there in you. And when another person looks at you, you can see that they know you are there. Sartre (1943) understood this very well. In Being and Nothingness he referred to it as "the look." In our theoretical concepts about persons, a person's concrete presence - and your own - have to be sensed and referred to as such. Concepts, structure, content, experience - none of these things look at you. Sartre also quite rightly said that "existence precedes essence." This is a slogan which implies that what is sitting there in the chair looking at me is more fundamental and earlier than whatever we are going to say about it. But if we take this (.....) along as we think, we can say quite a lot about it.
is to consider any one kind of truth as the only kind. It is not a problem that there is more than one kind of truth. If there were, the world would be greatly impoverished. Yet postmodernists keep say-ing there isn't any truth. It is as though everybody just assumed that there is either just one kind of truth or no truth at all. In fact we are always standing in a gigantic, open possibility. If you take almost anything in an experiential way and then go in a little further, it becomes much more intricate. It would really be rather boring if there were only one kind of truth. Why would anyone want that?
Conclusion
First, psychologists and their public have discovered experience, but do not sufficiently recognize the role of culture, history, and language that informs our experience. Sophisticated intellectuals know this but go to the other, postmodern extreme, and argue that everything comes from culture, history, and language. Philosophically I think there needs to be a further step. The step forward would be to recognize what is with and after language. The body is always in a fresh situational interaction that exceeds culture, history and language. Second, currently some thinkers are searching for "emergent" con-cepts and knowledge. To find this requires finding the direct access to ongoing bodily experiencing. The direct access exceeds the common phrases. But language is inherent in all human experiencing. New facets of experiencing rearrange the implicit language and can generate new sentences. These do not copy; rather they carry experiencing forward. Naive observers believe they can "match" experience with something they say. Many postmodernists know that it is impossible to "represent," capture, or copy experience, but they take this to mean that everything is up to arbitrary interpretation. A philosophical advance is provided if we notice that we can speakfrom direct access to experiencing. We can recognize the difference when we are speakingfrom our direct access, and when we are not. Third, to speak-from direct access to experience leads to a zig-zag process between speaking and access, in which experience changes, but not arbitrarily. This occurs in a sequence of small bodily sensed shifts. Fourth, living bodies have a holistic life-forward direction that is usu-ally called "adaptive" as if they only fit themselves to external require-ments. But in fact the living systems create new and more intricate meanings and actions. The experiencing process I have described has its own coherence. It took me a long time to affirm that the ongoing bodily experiencing has its own inherent life-forwarding implying.
The little steps that arise at the edge are creative, imaginative, and always in some positive direction. The life process is self-organizing, but much more intricately than we can conceptualize. A great undivided multiplicity is always at work. The higher animals live quite complex lives without culture. Culture does not create; it elaborates. Then we live creatively much further with and after culture. To think that we are the creation of culture is not a view one can maintain if one senses ongoing bodily experiencing directly. Culture is crude and inhuman in comparison with what we find directly. The intri-cacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have con-tributed to you. With focusing we discover that we are much more organized from the inside out. Direct access to this intricacy enables us to think-from much more than the usual concepts and assumptions. Routledge 2003 This page was last modified on 01 December 2003 Home | Learn Focusing | Focusing Partnership | Philosophy of the Implicit | Thinking At the Edge | Felt Community | Focusing and ... | Store | Contact Us | Site Map | Search All contents Copyright 2003 by The Focusing Institute Email comments to webmaster