Following Steve’s contribution, I find myself wondering whether first-person investigation is intrinsically value-laden. Human experience cannot be emotion-free. This seems to me to have been in the background of a number of contributions to the meeting – I think of Walt’s particularly. I also find myself thinking about something Nick pointed out: that many of us seemed to be rather at an angle to the conventional direction of research.Perhaps this is because we share a feeling that the objectification of mental life has limits. Now there is a wider historical perspective to this objectification, namely the rise of science and technology. The damaging technological explosion unleashed in the last few centuries in Europe is possibly the major ethical/political/spiritual issue of our time. This is value laden though perhaps in a more obvious sense than that Steve was exploring.Â
Does first-person psychology have anything to say here? If it is merely phenomenology with attitude, then no. If, though, it helps to shift the focus of psychological inquiry towards the embodied encounter with the world, then yes. This encounter is usually with the urban environment in which an increasing majority of the world’s population live. But the encounter of with the world as it stands prior to human intervention is a deeper matter.
Here, I think of James Hillman’s claim that there’s only one core issue for psychology, which is, in his words: “Where does ‘me’ stop and ‘the other’ begin?” This recalls Walt’s presentation again and especially his telling of his friend’s experience of ‘being lived by the All’ a feeling of unity with something greater than the self.  How are we to move on past the restrictive objectification of psychology to address what was happening there? Some links could be explored here with the ‘bodily’ poets that Susan used in her talk.
What is the purpose of first-person inquiry? There won’t be just one, but if it has nothing to say on the wider issues of the day, it begins to feel a little indulgent to me. Exploring our experience directly need not just be a Proustian exploration of our lives with others. It can also be a look into how the natural world reminds us that values do not simply arise within the human cultural arena. Exploring how we perceive the boundary between ourselves and the world would be an opportunity to focus first-person investigation.
A lst small thought is of a project that been on the back-burner for too long, namely an exploration of how Whitehead figures in some postumous work by Merleau-Ponty. It’s beyond me at the moment, but I think there’s a possible arena for broadening the study of first-person towards a pan-semiotic view of Nature a la C.S. Peirce.
John Pickering
John Pickering
I may be more conservative here than John, not necessarily on the political spectrum (?), but in terms of first-person inquiry. John says that 1st person inquiry necessarily starts by turning inward, but then must turn back out to the world, and suggests an embodied relation to the natural world as the natural move to make in light of the ethical issues confronting us.
I would like to keep the focus more on the first-person aspect. I am all in favor of questioning in a first-person way our relation to the world, and doing so along the lines of Walt’s friend (being lived by the all) is a good line of inquiry. But it should be a line of inquiry. Suppose one tried to activate this kind of experience (I lead workshops along these lines). Suppose further one had such experiences. Would this lead to being conscious differently? Would one learn something about consciousness (perhaps its limits and its potentials?)
I would like to see us moving through that intermediate question before coming out the other side with an ethical stand.
At the same time, the motivation for doing such an inquiry could well be the ethical concern. Which raises a question: from a third-person view, the motive will contaminate the results. Is that a problem?
Jack
John’s reply:
By definition, 1P must be inward looking to begin with, but it must eventually look outward if it is to be relevant to wider human concerns.
These, now, are dominated by the question of how we are to manage our impact on the world and to live more sustainably. I don’t know if anyone else feels that we as a group have any special duty to engage with these matters, but I feel that examining how we experience the boundary between ourselves and the world must be relevant here. Without signing up uncritically to the Ecopsychology, we can take our work in this direction. Steve’s ethical point can extend to include our relationship to the environment (Buber, Heidegger). The later Merleau-Ponty, along with Whitehead and C.S. Peirce, suggests an ontological framework for 1P that, roughly, amounts to monist intersubjectivity. Also, using 1P to explore our sense of relationship with the world, natural and artificial, reminds me of Walt’s friend’s experience of being ‘lived by the All’.
I like transhumanism but primarily as a stimulus to engaging more deeply with the human condition. Technological enhancement of the human condition does not strike me as offering anything to help us with the geopolitical issues that face us.
Susan’s comment:
I’d like to respond to a couple of the points you raise in relation to exploring how we might pursue first-person investigation by examining how we perceive the boundary between ourselves and the world, and with reference to Steve’s talk you brought us back to asking whether first-person investigation is intrinsically value- laden, and you mention Hillman’s question “Where does ‘me’ stop and ‘the other’ begin?”.
I throw these out to the group as first responses and look forward to hearing what you think.
I imagine this would depend on your metaphysics, for example, whether you adopt a deep ecological perspective with a monist intrasubjectivity as your foundation, or an intersubjective enactive perspective which is moving towards a non-dualist metaphysics, or a dualist metaphysics (whether substance or property-based), or a pluralism, or any number of other possibilities.
A further approach might be to examine, though not necessarily from a transhumanist perspective, the blurring of self and other boundaries caused by cyber implants. A great example of this is the motor cortical implant that enables quadriplegics to control prosthetic limbs or move cursors on computer screens. Actually prosthetic limbs themselves pose a very interesting problem; if we get to the point where we forget that the limb is there – so, it becomes ready-to-hand
– then maybe it ceases to be ‘other’.
In relation to Steve’s concerns: with an intersubjective enactivism I think our conception of `external’ science as distinct from `internal’ ethics will be unsustainable because our lives and how we live them would have to be acknowledged as inseparable from the biological facts about our living.