A friend sent me an off-print of his which referred to Eugene Gendlin as someone who has explored implicit understanding a great deal. At the same time I was reading Alexis Shotwell’s intriguing Knowing Otherwise, which also explores how we have an implicit, bodily-based grasp of things that forms a great deal of our take on ourselves and others. Nearly the same day, Amazon.com was recommending that I pre-order Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, of which Publisher’s Weekly says:
“The mind is a hilariously muddled compromise between incompatible modes of thought in this fascinating treatise by a giant in the field of decision research. Nobel-winning psychologist Kahneman (Attention and Effort) posits a brain governed by two clashing decision-making processes. The largely unconscious System 1, he contends, makes intuitive snap judgments based on emotion, memory, and hard-wired rules of thumb; the painfully conscious System 2 laboriously checks the facts and does the math, but is so “lazy” and distractible that it usually defers to System 1.
Kahneman’s unconscious System 1 is at least aimed at implicit understanding. And then Read Montague’s work has recently turned to what seems to me to be a fascinating example of implicit bias, first described by Ann Harvey, who is in his lab.
So on reading Gendlin on accessing this level, I wondered what sort of role employing the unconscious/implicit understanding has for philosophers today. Here in fact is a description from Gendlin of what such accessing is like. I suspect that if it plays a significant role in your cognition as a philosopher, then you’ll recognize it, even if the description definitely does not come from an analytically trained philosopher:
You have a bodily orienting sense. You know who you are and how you come to be reading this page. To know this you don’t need to think. The knowing is physically sensed in your body and can easily be found. But this bodily knowing can extend much more deeply. You can learn how to let a deeper bodily felt sense come in relation to any problem or situation. Your body “knows” the whole of each context, vastly more aspects of it than you can enumerate separately.
You can sense your living body directly under your thoughts and memories and under your familiar feelings. Focusing happens at a deeper level than your feelings. Under them you can discover a physically sensed “murky zone” which is concretely there. This is a source from which new steps emerge.
At first, this murky “something” may seem opaque. Although concretely there, it may not seem promising. With certain teachable steps of bodily attention it opens. How you sense the situation shifts. New possibilities for fresh thinking and action arise beyond the already-given alternatives. The whole scene changes. An intricate territory of factors, events, conditions, and new questions emerges where there was only a slight bodily sense at the start.
If you’ve followed so far, and you work as a professional philosopher in the sense of producing work you have or would like to see published as academic philosophy, it would be wonderful if you would take the poll:
I’m not sure I understand the division of these into separate “systems” (in Kahneman’s terms), which results in my not really understanding the question that you’ve asked here in the poll. It seems to me that our bodily awareness/feelings *are* playing a role in the ways that we “think” about things–and do “philosophy”–whether we’re consciously aware of it or not. I suspect that white, male, able-bodied, heterosexual (and so on) persons are often under the illusion that their bodies, emotions, and social situations are *not* playing a role in their thinking and their theories, when in fact they *are* playing a role.
So I’d be inclined to think that one who claims that implicit understanding (and some sort of bodily awareness) plays “no” role in their philosophizing is wrong about that. They’re just not aware of the role that it’s playing.
I haven’t read Gendlin, but I have read some of the literature on implicit bias. The talk of two different “systems” has confused (and I guess bothered) me since it made it sound as if only one “part” of our reasoning process is infected by implicit bias–as if there’s another “pure” and unaffected system of reasoning that we also employ. And that just seems wrong to me–it strikes me as a very artificial separation. But maybe there’s something I’m not understanding…?
Hmm. I feel like I don’t have the self-knowledge that would allow me to answer such a quesiton.
Gendlin spoke at my grad institution when I was working toward my PhD in Philosophy–some of us (grad students) kept up with him after the talk and would work with him on our own writing, getting “unstuck” in places where we were having trouble thinking in our own work through his method of focusing. We would drive out just to talk with him once a month. The method is an extremely generous form of listening (and if you do it with yourself it is a generous form of listening to and being patient with yourself). In essence, he would ask us (or one would ask oneself) where are you running into a wall in trying to figure out what you want to say? or where is the “edge” (i.e. “beyond here lies something but I have no idea what to say…”) in your thinking? We would talk a bit, he would listen carefully, and then say, “so is this what you are trying to say…?” if the way he rephrased what we had said didn’t “feel” right, we would say, “no it’s more like this…” and then he would try to rephrase what we had said again, going back and forth until it felt right–yes! that’s it, that’s what I’ve been trying to say! It is a much more cooperative way of honing in on something (and one that actively requires attention to one’s body) than traditional style argument. I’ve done it with students in search of a thesis for paper assignments (even when they are responding to a prompt, they still need to formulate a thesis)–and it helps students to be more precise in articulating what it is they want to say–without me “telling” them what to say (which often they want, but then that misses the whole point).
I’ve found that folks working in the pragmatist tradition (which Gendlin does–he is very philosophically minded) sometimes do this without thinking about it. I say, “geez, I’m having trouble figuring out this philosophical issue” and then pragmatist friend says, “but you just answered yourself, you said x, y, and z when you were describing the problem, isn’t that the answer” and I am floored because it is. I would also say that Gendlin’s way of thinking is akin to Wittgensteinian method (of the PI variety a la Cavell)–acknowledging our dis-ease, and working with it in order to “find the truth in it”.
Looking back at what I just wrote I feel compelled to add that Gendlin really does add bodily practice where it is not in Wittgenstein–so my connection there is probably too loose to be helpful. The connection may be more about a method that isn’t trying to direct you to it’s own answer, but to what you already know/sense (in a way) or already do.
G, that’s so interesting. The teacher I had whom I’d most associate with this approach is Elizabeth Anscombe, a student of Wittgenstein’s as you will know. The person who sent me the reference to Gendlin is also very much a Wittgensteinian, educated in a Wittgenstein-influenced Oxford as an undergrad.
It is also the case the Elizabeth would deeply listen in single or group conversations. I can hardly say, though, that she always had a positive reaction to what someone said (“That is a very stupid thing to say; you cannot possibly mean it”). Of course, that could drive one deeper, but it could also shatter one.
I think the kind of thing the methodology led one to accept as philosophically relevant is somewhat distinctive. Certainly, one did not compare the pros and cons of different philosophical approaches. (I remember someone at Philippa’s memorial defending a notion Philippa thought highly problematic – that of internal mental representations – with the remark “It has proved useful in a lot of philosophy.” I doubt any student of Philippa’s or Elizabeth’s ever said anything like that more than once.)
The methodology is more congenial, I think, to thinking of theories in terms of conditions of adequacy, for example.. “Any theory of intention should allow these three uses employ the same concept,” to probably misquote a famous line from “Intention,” though not entirely mangle it, I hope.
You are definitely right that Gendlin adds a lot to theory to what might have been more a methodology, though perhaps it is hard to have a sense that one can find an answer in one’s self without have a quasi-spatial sense of turning inward.
Helenesch, Kahneman may just be a red herring here. Still, he certainly does think that System II can make errors, but the origin of a bigoted error might not lie in the system itself. I haven’t read that much of his after his Nobel lecture, but perhaps he would say that’s a case of System II deferring to System I. System II is suppose to be conscious, and it could be that it employs a premise such as, “Women just can’t do philosophy,” but with implicit bias that premise is not supposed to be conscious, is it? I realize I’m not sure about that, but people usually count implicit bias as effectively unknown to its possessor.
Jender, your remark makes me think that I may just not have managed to describe the idea well enough. Unfortunately, I suspect trying to do better might just make it worse. Still, maybe we could distinguish between two different ways of responding to a remark like the one about one sense of “intention.” One reaction might be to get a sense of whether that felt right. Another might be to say something like, “Well, is that really true? There are a number of possibilities we can list; we should look at them and see what’s to be said for and against them. For example, perhaps “doing X intentionally” has no deep link with “having the intention to do X, etc, etc.”
I think this might be getting more confusing and unhelpful, not to say a bit a bit self-indulgent….