Phenomenology of Radical Temporality: Heidegger, Derrida, Husserl and Gendlin A critique of phenomenologies of embodied intersubjectivity informed by the radically temporal perspectives of Heidegger, Gendlin, Husserl and Derrida Joshua Soffer, Chicago,Il. joshsoffer1@gmail.com (comments and criticism welcome!) Welcome to my philosophy page. In recent years , a community of interlinked approaches in philosophy and psychology has emerged, known by such labels as situated cognition, constructivism, 4EA (Embodied, Embedded, Enactive, Extended, and Affective) and corporeal intersubjectivity. Representatives of these overlapping approaches such as Francisco Varela (autopoietic self-organizing systems), Shaun Gallagher, Evan Thompson, Matthew Ratcliffe, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, Dan Zahavi, Hanne De Jaegher, Alva Noe and Thomas Fuchs(enactive, embodied('4EA') cognition), John Protevi(Deleuzian biopolitics) and Jan Slaby (critical neuroscience) purport to have assimilated the central phenomenological insights of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl and Eugene Gendlin concerning such matters as the nature of affectivity, intersubjectivity and temporality. I argue in the following papers, however, that Derrida, Heidegger, Husserl, Gendlin and George Kelly interpret the concept of temporality in a radical manner that embodied enactivist writers like Gallagher, Zahavi, Ratcliffe, Thompson and Fuchs fail to take into account in their readings of phenomenology. As a result , the latter's accounts of affectivity, intentionality, empathy and intersubjectivity remain burdened by traditional presuppositions that the radically temporal phenomenologies of Heidegger, Gendlin et al put into question. TOWARD A NEW ERA IN THINKING A Phenomenological Critique of Existential Feeling: Affect as Temporality Abstract: Matthew Ratcliffe's model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are relative to the changing structural coherence of felt bodily and inter-socially shaped schemes of interaction. And yet, from the phenomenological vantages of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin and Heidegger, Ratcliffe's approach retains the metaphysical presupposition of subject-object dualism as interacting bodies, with a separate causative glue necessary to provide for the means of their relation. Ratcliffe re-purposed Damasio's concept of background feeling and dressed it up in the garb of phenomenology , but it remains a reciprocal causal model of psychological function. What Heidegger's Being-in-the-World, Merleau-Ponty's figure-background structure of corporeal inter-subjectivity, Gendlin's implicit intricacy and Husserl's reduced transcendental ego have in common is a radicalized notion of temporality that overcomes the split between subject and object informing Ratcliffe's understanding of being 'immersed in' and connected to a world, and thus abandons the need to posit bodily feeling as a 'glue' organizing and maintaining the meaningful structure of consciousness of a world. Temporality , not the empirically causal body, provides the basis of affect, cognition and the organizational glue for structures of meaning. Read the full paper at https://www.academia.edu/42097007/A_Phenomenological_Critique_of_Existential_Feeling_Af fect_as_Temporality A Phenomenological Critique of Mindfulness Abstract: In The Embodied Mind, Varela and Thompson assert that Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger's phenomenologies produce 'after the fact' theoretical reflections that miss the richness of immediate concrete pre-reflective experience as present in the here-and-now. But Varela and Thompson's separating of being and becoming in their empirical approach leads them to misread these phenomenologists, and as a result to mistakenly give preference to mindfulness approaches which fall short of the radicality of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty. Varela and Thompson follow Husserl's method of reduction up to a point, stripping away acquired concepts associated with a naive belief in the independence of subject and object. They don't complete the reduction though, allowing subject and object to occupy separate moments. Varela and Thompson succeed in reducing materialist physicalism to fundamental co-dependency, but still find it necessary to ground intentional processes in a foundation of temporary self-inhering objectivities (the "arising and subsiding, emergence and decay" of transitional forms which inhere in themselves for a moment before relating to an outside). Varela and Thompson found the affectively, valuatively felt contingency of particular acts of other-relatedness in what they presume to be a primordial neutral point of pre-reflective conscious auto-affective awareness. But the phenomenologists show that attention, as a species of intention, is sense-making, which means it is sense-changing. Attention is affectively, valuatively and meaningfully implicated in what it attends to as co-participant in the synthesis, creation, constitution of objects of regard. As auto-affection turns reflexively back toward itself, what it finds is not the normative sameness and constancy of a neutral positivity(blissful, selfless compassion and benevolence toward all phenomena) but a newly sensing being. Mindful self-reflexivity, expecting to find only what it put there, instead is confronted with the self-displacement of its being exposed to and affected by an other. The basis of our awareness of a world isn't simply compassionate, empathic relational co-determinacy, but the motivated experience of disturbing CHANGE in relational co-determinacy. Husserl's Challenge to Merleau-Ponty's Embodied Intersubjectivity Abstract: In this paper, I show how Husserl, via the method of the epoche, dissolves Merleau-Ponty's starting point in the gestalt structuralism of primary corporeal intersubjectivity, revealing a more radically temporal foundation that has nothing of gestalt form in it. Whereas for Merleau-Ponty, the dependency of the parts belonging to a whole is a presupposed unity, for Husserl, a whole instantiates a temporal story unfolding each of its parts out of the others associatively-synthetically as the furthering of a continuous progression or enrichment of sense. As a consequence of the deconstruction of the gestalt, Husserl's notion of the foreign must be understood in different terms than that of corporeal otherness. He offers an otherness to self that manifests itself as a thematic belonging to self whose self-similarity presupposes and is built from this irreducible foreignness. This is not a privileging the same over the different , but rather a situating of the binary in a more insubstantial and therefore more intimate space of relationship than that of corporeal embodiment. The Meaning of Feeling: Heidegger Against Embodied Cognition(Joshua Soffer,2006) Abstract: This article(Janus Head 2008) suggests how, with the aid of Derrida, Heidegger and Eugene Gendlin, we may take a bold step beyond current embodied cognitive approaches in psychology, and effectively challenge the phenomenological thinking of Merleau-Ponty. Abstract: Current approaches in psychology have replaced the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a diffuse system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded. However, the failure of contemporary perspectives to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may result in the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. In this paper I show how Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin help us think from this more intimate process to transform current views of metaphor, the unconscious, and the relation between affect and cognition. Where Is The Social?A Critique of Social Constructionism) Abstract: This paper critiques, with the help of Derrida and Gendlin, social constructionism's (Kenneth Gergen, John Shotter, Foucault) explanation of the basis of the social and of language, not by championing one of the current embodied cognitive psychologies, but by offering a way of thinking which transcends the limitations of both social constructionism and today's embodied cognitive approaches. (Revision of my article in 'Theory and Psychology'(V11/5/2001)). Heidegger and Derrida on Structure, Form and State Abstract: Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structuraltranscendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm. Heidegger and Derrida argue instead that in their essence, Beings don't HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation, (transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not form but difference. Heidegger, Will to Power and Gestell Abstract: For Heidegger Nietzsche is the last metaphysician because he determines truth in relation to the establishment of value-scheme. Heidegger argues that beginning from schematism and its overcoming is starting too late. Starting from beings as value-structures turns Will to Power itself into a value, the highest value. What Nietzsche fails to do is think from WITHIN, that is , AS the supposed self-presencing lingering of the schematism. The fore-structuring gesture of transcendence is not what goes beyond schematism, or before it as its condition of possibility, but what is 'built into' it, what happens IN the 'is', AS the 'is. Reading Heidegger Against Levinas Abstract: A prevalent interpretation of Heidegger today is what I will call for the sake of convenience, the Levinasian reading. According to this perspective, Heidegger's Being as Ontological Difference grapples with the contradiction between the subjectivism of representationality and the absolute other to representation. But the concept of Being as Ontological difference risks being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Derrida argues that the Levinas reading mistakes the ontic for the ontological. Being is not a concept, the ontological difference is not the difference between the subjective and the empirical, but difference WITHIN the subjective and the empirical. Reading Derrida against Jean-Luc Nancy Abstract: Jean-Luc Nancy would appear to have avoided the aura of conceptual determinativeness plaguing John Caputo's reading of Derrida. His rendering of the interweaving of experience is vigilant at depriving us of the ability to capture and possess a temporary presence in the event itself. In 'Elliptical Sense' (Research in Phenomenology,pp.175-190) and `Differance' (Sense of the World, pp.34-36) he thinks Derrida's quasi-transcendental as a being-singular-plural. But is Nancy's differential communication of events understanding itself as Derridean differance? Nancy himself reminds (Ellipsis34) that while there is a great proximity between his work and Derrida, it is not a complicity. What might Nancy not be apprehending of Derrida's thought? Reading Derrida Against Geoffrey Bennington Abstract: One may locate in Geoffrey Bennington's reading of Derrida a formalization of deconstructive terms reminiscent of Caputo's thematizing of the moment of the sign. In Bennington's hands, Derrida's differance seems to be thought as a conceptual form programmatically configuring subjective, or `actual', events. Bennington reads Derrida's possible-impossible hinge, the `perhaps', as pertaining to definitive events which either conform to convention or break away from those norms. Bennington's quasi-transcendental, in thinking itself via the pure structurality of internal relation, unknowingly succumbs to a deconstructive destabilization before it can even think the first instance of its own `contingently realized' form. An internally unitary principle or form, even if thought only in the instant of its contingent application to an empirical event, cannot justify its momentary identicality, and so the supposed determinativeness of the event as the `as such' of its internal structure is revealed as a phantasm repressing a more intimate effect. Reading Derrida Against John Caputo Abstract: If for Caputo the universality of desire as self-appropriation and the singularity of the gift as desire-beyond-desire depend on and interweave with each other, they nevertheless do so as the communication between discrete and separable moments, that of the `sensible, rational circle of time' and the `exceeding and surpassing of ourselves'. The subject for Caputo seems to function as the temporary self-identity of construct. It is the "desire for restitution, fulfillment, reappropriation, well being". This agent-subject "always intends to act for its own good". He says without this willing well-being "the subject/agent would never do a thing, nothing would happen or eventuate". Caputo's equating of the subject with a moment of re-appropriation ( he says `making an exhibit of ourselves', but can we make an exhibit of ourselves without unintentionally exiting from ourselves?) exemplifies the attempt to retain a remnant of a structuralist center as only the instant of contingency itself. In so doing, Caputo reifies what Derrida puts into question. What Is A Number: Re-Thinking Derrida's Concept of Infinity Abastract: Iterability, the repetition which alters the idealization it reproduces, is the engine of deconstructive movement. The fact that all experience is transformative-dissimulative in its essence does not, however, mean that the momentum of change is the same for all situations. Derrida adapts Husserl's distinction between a bound and a free ideality to draw up a contrast between mechanical mathematical calculation, whose in-principle infinite enumerability is supposedly meaningless, empty of content, and therefore not in itself subject to alteration through contextual change, and idealities such as spoken or written language which are directly animated by a meaning-to-say and are thus immediately affected by context. Derrida associates the dangers of cultural stagnation, paralysis and irresponsibility with the emptiness of programmatic, mechanical, formulaic thinking. This paper endeavors to show that enumerative calculation is not context-independent in itself but is instead immediately infused with alteration, thereby making incoherent Derrida's claim to distinguish between a free and bound ideality. Along with the presumed formal basis of numeric infinitization, Derrida's non-dialectical distinction between forms of mechanical or programmatic thinking (the Same) and truly inventive experience (the absolute Other) loses its justification. In the place of a distinction between bound and free idealities is proposed a distinction between two poles of novelty; the first form of novel experience would be characterized by affectivites of unintelligibility, confusion and vacuity, and the second by affectivities of anticipatory continuity and intimacy. This is the first chapter of my book, 'Sense and Affect', (available online below) introducing a philosophy after Derrida. ______________________________________________________________________________ ____________ SENSE AND AFFECT My book Sense and Affect (2002) exposes the limits of important recent strands in continental philosophy. It questions the necessity of a certain language of violence, otherness, disruption and pathos saturating Jacques Derrida's texts and the texts of those having a proximity to Derrida's deconstructionist project. This book establishes a connection between such affective terminology and a common, if heterogeneously expressed, theoretical inadequacy binding Derrida and writers such as Heidegger, Foucault, Caputo and Nancy. Their failure to penetrate a presumed irreducibility of suffering in the world is shown to be linked to their dependence on the assumption of an irreducible tension at the origin of meaning. This book develops a fresh method of thought thoroughly unraveling the presuppositions of deconstructive orientations and uncovering a finer silt of the world than is seen via such discourses. Download PDF of Sense and Affect from my academia.edu page *********************************************************************** A Phenomenological Critique of Existential Feeling: Affect as Temporality Abstract: Matthew Ratcliffe's model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are relative to the changing structural coherence of felt bodily and inter-socially shaped schemes of interaction. And yet, from the phenomenological vantages of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin and Heidegger, Ratcliffe's approach retains the metaphysical presupposition of subject-object dualism as interacting bodies, with a separate causative glue necessary to provide for the means of their relation. Ratcliffe re-purposed Damasio's concept of background feeling and dressed it up in the garb of phenomenology , but it remains a reciprocal causal model of psychological function. What Heidegger's Being-in-the -World, Merleau-Ponty's figure-background structure of corporeal inter-subjectivity, Gendlin's implicit intricacy and Husserl's reduced transcendental ego have in common is a radicalized notion of temporality that overcomes the split between subject and object informing Ratcliffe's understanding of being 'immersed in' and connected to a world, and thus abandons the need to posit bodily feeling as a 'glue' organizing and maintaining the meaningful structure of consciousness of a world. Temporality , not the empirically causal body, provides the basis of affect, cognition and the organizational glue for structures of meaning. Introduction Matthew Ratcliffe's model of existential feelings can be seen as a critical engagement with perspectives common to analytic, theory of mind and psychological orientations that view psychological functions such as cognition and affectivity within normative objective propositional frameworks in which affect is either peripheral to cognitive processes or only directed toward internal bodily feeling. Ratcliffe takes a step back from and re-situates objective reifications within an interactive subject-object matrix inclusive of the body and the interpersonal world. In doing so, he turns a mono-normative thinking into a poly-normative one, in which determinations of meaning and significance are oriented by the changing structural coherence of world-directed felt bodily and inter-socially shaped schemes of interaction. The aim of this paper is to show that while Ratcliffe's existential feeling significantly transforms Damasio's concept of background feeling, in dressing it up in the garb of phenomenological philosophical conceptions, he neglects to follow Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin and Heidegger in establishing a radicalized concept of temporality as the ground of affectivity. Whereas the above phenomenologists fuse affect and intention within the moment of time itself as tripartite structure of temporal becoming, Ratcliffe founds affect and intention as distinguishable structural aspects of a reciprocally causal model . As a result, Ratcliffe substitutes polarizing , semi-arbitrary conditionings for a more intimate, intricate and unitary process of affective-connative meaning creation. Existential Feeling as Global Situatedness: In the early 2000's Ratcliffe introduced the outlines of what was to become his model of existential feelings, incorporating elements of Damasio's background feeling. " According to Damasio, background feelings are ever-present, although ordinarily tacit. They serve to structure the everyday ways in which we encounter the world, the basic ways in which we find ourselves in the world:Ratcliffe 2002, p.298) Damasio wrote:". . . I am postulating another variety of feeling which I suspect preceded the others in evolution. I call it background feeling because it originates in "background" body states rather than in emotional states. It is not the Verdi of grand emotion, nor the Stravinsky of intellectualized emotion but rather a minimalist in tone and beat, the feeling of life itself, the sense of being." (1995, p. 150) Ratcliffe fleshed out his approach with elements drawn from the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger: "Both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty add that localized experiences of possibility presuppose a more-enveloping orientation, a sense of belonging to the world. When I see or think about something, when I am afraid of something, and when I am in a bad mood about a wider situation, I already find myself in the world, in a way than differs in kind from intentional experiences in one or another modality (e.g. imagining, perceiving, or remembering something). This 'world' is presupposed by intentional states of whatever kind with whatever content. We can think of it in terms of a possibility space, a receptivity to types of possibility.""Things are experienced as significant to us, as mattering to us, in various different ways, something that involves a sense of the possibilities they offer." (Ratcliffe, 2020) "...what Heidegger in Being and Time calls 'Being-in-the-world' is exactly what we gain reflective access to by performing the phenomenological reduction...This conveys much the same broad conception of 'world' that we find in Husserl and Merleau-Ponty:...something that we are already practically, unreflectively immersed in when we experience something, think about it or act upon it." These globally structured patterns of existential feeling amount to " 'ways of finding oneself in the world'. As such, they are what we might call 'pre-intentional', meaning that they determine the kinds of intentional states we are capable of adopting, amounting to a 'shape' that all experience takes on." (Ratcliffe 2015) The Affective 'glue' organizing existential feeling: If for Ratcliffe, a global structure of feeling orients the significance for us of the objects and persons we interact with in the world, how is this structure organized and sustained? What is the 'glue' that holds it together? Ratcliffe's causal reinforcement-based model of affect assigns it the role of biasing appraisal via selectively guiding attention toward a heightening or lowering of perceived significance of various world events. The role of affective attunement is to produce "changes in the types of significant possibility to which one is receptive'. (Ratcliffe 2016) "...existential feelings determine the kinds of noetic and noematic feelings that one is open to. "...the existential feeling sets the parameters for the kinds of more localized experience one is capable of having."(2016). "Emotions "tune us to the world, making it relevant to us by opening up certain possibilities for explicit deliberation and closing off others. "(Ratcliffe 2002) Bodily dispositions can actively direct one toward salient objects in one's world, but are "equally implicated in feeling unable to act upon something. Passivity in the face of threat may involve inclinations to withdraw, to retreat, along with the absence of any other salient possibilities." (Ratcliffe 2015). For instance, in depression one cannot find the motivation to act to change one's situation ( a confident 'I can' becomes 'I can't'). Solipsistic self-perpetuating narratives, reinforced and organized by feelings of avoidance and reduced salience, tell one why they shouldn't or can't connect with others. " In any experience, only certain possibilities are offered up and only some of these appear especially salient. According to both Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the possibilities that show up are constituted by bodily dispositions. These dispositions shape all experience and show up as potentialities that belong to objects. The different ways in which the body responds to things amount to different systems of concrete possibilities. "(Ratcliffe 2010) In order to situate Ratcliffe's orientation relative to the phenomenologists whose ideas he incorporates, it is helpful to see how he makes use of Damasio's neuroscience-inspired theorizing on the relations of affect and intention. "...emotions play a role in constraining and structuring the realm of explicit deliberation, restricting deliberation to a small number of options and structuring patterns of reasoning, so that we remain focused and relevant in our activities, able to act towards goals without becoming distracted by trivia. Thus emotions and feelings serve to constrain and focus our attention, so that we only consider from a pre-structured set of options. Damasio's (1995, 1996) more specific hypothesis is that emotions are cognitively mediated body states. He christens this theory the "somatic marker hypothesis". The idea is that somatic (body) signals are associated with perceptual stimuli, either as a result of innate or learned neural connections, and thus "mark" those stimuli. Different perceptions can be associated with various kinds of body states, which may serve as alarm signals or, alternatively, as enticing invitations. According to Damasio, a complex of such signals focuses and structures our cognitive interactions with the world. Once we incorporate complex learned associations between perceptions and body states, a vast web of somatic markers can develop. These signals serve to eliminate certain possibilities, which feel bad, from a choice set and focus deliberation upon other feel good signals. Thus cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states."(Ratcliffe 2002) Slaby provides this useful elaboration of how bodily feeling can be world-oriented: " feeling bad emotionally (as opposed to feeling bad due to physical illness or injury) is not a disembodied, intellectual appreciation of things going badly although it surely is some kind of appreciation of things going badly. It is also and essentially a bodily experience. If you are angry and feel offended by your colleague, you have a self-disclosing bodily feeling. It is not easy to describe it exactly, but I think you have the physical impression of being "pushed down", of being literally "oppressed" by an external force. In this way, emotional pain is essentially bodily. Its bodily nature is not a separable "aspect" that is merely added on to an otherwise purely intellectual appreciation of what's going on; rather, it is the very core of the painful emotional experience. "(Slaby 2008) Let me encapsulate Ratcliffe's perspective on the role of affect in determining the ways that the world can make sense to us. Ratcliffe says emotion and embodiment are "'incorporated as essential components in cognition", but emotion and cognition are clearly not identical; "...emotions and moods are not explicitly cognitive but neither are they independent of cognition"(Ratcliffe 2002, p.299). They originate as bodily sensations structuring cognition from outside of it. Emotion and cognition can 'conflict' and emotion can "override cognitive judgement"(p.299). Ratcliffe cites Ramachandran's clinical observations of individuals with anosognosia, who apparently distort environmental information which contradicts an internally generated narrative. Ramachandran and Ratcliffe attribute this behavior to damage to connections between emotion and cognitive centers. Ratcliffe concludes from this that, in typically functioning persons, emotion signals from the body are presumed to pack a contentful punch large enough to break through a psychological narrative's resistances where weaker percepts from the environment cannot. It seems, then, that for Ratcliffe , intention is a capacity for manipulating objects of thought, but emotion, as conditioning valuative valence, provides the criteria for such processing. He is apparently not able to find the resources strictly within what he thinks of as intentional thought to de-center thinking processes, because he treats cognition as tending to form temporarily self-perpetuating narratives which can distort or keep out contradictory input from the world. So he relies on the body, in the form of emotion cues, to come to the rescue and bring the stalled cognitive apparatus back in touch with a dynamically changing world. The mechanism of emotion is assumed to intervene in order to infuse a stagnant narrative with a new direction and meaning. (FOOTNOTE: For Ratcliffe emotions selectively organize cognition not just by prompting the interruption of a current narrative, but also by facilitating the assimilation of new events into an ongoing context. Ratcliffe(2002) cites Ramachandran's account of individuals with Capgras syndrome as evidence that affect can serve to inform the cognitive system that a previously experienced object is similar or identical to a current one.) Ratcliffe(2002) asserts: "Without emotional responses, one is not uprooted from a coherent interpretation of events..."(p.306). Although these emotion cues are claimed to be inseparably linked with conceptual processes, this linkage amounts to more of a concatenation between pre-existing states than a more radical indissociability. This may be due to the belief that feeling originates developmentally within the individual independently from cognition, as action readiness circuits that, Panksepp(1998) claims, are "completely biological and affective but..., through innumerable sensory-perceptual interactions with our environments, [become] inextricably mixed with learning and world events"(p.303) For all their differences, Ratcliffe shares with other contemporary accounts of affect and emotion what I call the 'adaptationist' presumption that meaning is shaped in a semi-arbitrary way by inputs which come to influence it from a pre-existing outside. I don't think Ratcliffe's model of affectivity has abandoned the naturalist pre-suppositions animating Damasio's (2000) claim: "...as a result of powerful learning mechanisms such as conditioning, emotions of all shades eventually help connect homeostatic regulation and survival values to numerous events and objects in our autobiographical experience"(p.54). According to this thinking, physiological processes of feeling adapt and co-ordinate with a partially independent cogitative environment, authorizing adaptationism as a causal explanation of origins. Viewed as an adaptation, emotion is linked to a milieu outside of itself (cognition) and with which the logic of the bond is indirect, partially arbitrary in the sense that it is capable of being made irrational, as is supposedly the case with nonadaptive mutations. There is a partial independence assumed between the participant aspects of reciprocally adaptive interactions. The cobbling can be uncobbled unilaterally. Emotion can aid reason, but can also be dysfunctional. Husserl's Transcendental Affect Ratcliffe insists that affectivity and intentionality are inseparable, And yet, it is significant that he still finds it coherent to imagine what a situation might be like in which affect was absent from our experience of the world. "...affect binds us to things, making them relevant and 'lighting up' aspects of the world in such a way as to call forth actions and thoughts. Without the world-structuring orientation that they provide, we are disoriented, cut off from the world, which no longer solicits thoughts and actions and is consequently devoid of value. In effect, [William] James is saying that our very sense of reality is constituted by world-orienting feelings that bind us to things ." (Ratcliffe 2005) " The absence of emotion comprises a state of cognitive and behavioural paralysis rather than fully functional cognition, stripped of 'mere' affect. A phenomenology without affect is a phenomenology that guts the world of all its significance. he experienced world is ordinarily enriched by the feelings that we sew into it, that imbue it with value and light it up as an arena of cognitive and behavioural possibilities. So cognition without affect is not, according to James, in any sense complete. It is an extreme phenomenological privation that strips the world of all meaning, a state of depression or 'melancholia'. In such a state, James describes how 'the world now looks remote, strange, sinister, uncanny. Its color is gone, its breath is cold, there is no speculation in the eyes it glares with'" (James 1902: p. 151), (Ratcliffe 2005). Slaby concurs: "Nothing but "neutral states of intellectual perception" would remain, as William James famously put it, when we "try to abstract from consciousness [of an emotion] all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms" (James 1884, 193)." "Not all human experience is clearly marked as hedonic, and so not all human experience is affective. "(Slaby 2008) In sum, the experienced world without affect is an 'extreme privation', a world of paralysis, meaninglessness, disorientation. Even if Ratcliffe conjures the idea of affectless cognition only as a purely hypothetical thought experiment or limit case, the fact that he can associate any qualities at all with such a world indicates that he is operating from a concept of affect that does not treat it as a philosophical a priori. But what would such a philosophically grounding approach to affect look like? Imagine that instead of hypothesizing awareness without affect, we were to place time out of bounds. It is immediately clear that any attempt to describe the qualitative features of one's experience of such a world (meaningless, paralyzed, disoriented, etc) would be pointless, since without time there could be no awareness and no world. If we were to re-construe affect in such a way that it became as irreducible to experience as time, then it would no longer be a matter of deriving feeling, mood, emotion and other forms of affectivity from adaptive patterns of contingent interactive bodily and interpersonal schemes, but of locating their origin in the basis of being itself. This is what Husserl attempted with his model of temporal constitution. Husserl's grounding of affectivity in temporality is a transcendental grounding, not a naturalistic one. Underlying and founding all strata of bodily and interpersonal dynamics is the assimilative basis of temporal constitution as retention, primal impression and protention. This is Husserl's primordial pre-condition for any world , any being. The subjective and objective sides of the structure of temporal synthesis are not separate entities but only poles of a single act of intentional sense. In this synthesis, both the subject and the object pole contribute their own quality of feeling to what 'an object is for the subject' in its valuative , affective sense. The energetic dynamism of feeling isn't something added to a content of perception from outside of it, in causal relation with it as agent of reinforcement. Meaning content implies its own affective force, the affective signature is intrinsic to the objective and subjective sides. This is what constitutes the 'life' in what Husserl calls the living present. The affective qualities contributed by the objective pole (noema) are its vivacity. Husserl describes the affective allure contributed by the objective pole as "that varying vivacity of a lived experience, of a datum of consciousness."(Passive and Active Synthesis, p.214) And an affective signature is intrinsic to the subject, in the form of desires, tendencies, strivings, anticipations, aimed at the objective pole. As Husserl says, there are rays emanating from subjective side to the objective side and vice-versa. Both affects originating on the subjective side and those originating on the objective side are implied in all intentional meaning. The always present affective qualities of the object (beautiful, pleasurable, unpleasant) are not made thematic in objectivating acts (perceiving a spatial object), but they are in valuative acts. And one's affective, hedonic attitude toward the object of an intention (disappointed, depressed, elated, bored, frightened) may not be thematized in theoretical interest, but will appear in our practical attitude toward the world. Husserl's starting point in the retention-impression-protention triad of time consciousness is already a self-othering, thus an exposure to the foreign from within the resources of subjectivity, prior to any configurational-corporeal constitution. Natural bodily structures are not the basis of affect for Husserl. If one wants to still talk about a body, what remains of the body for Husserl once one has dug beneath all the sedimented layers of constituted meaning, would be the 'body' of the retention-impression-protention triad of time consciousness. This is already a self-othering, thus an exposure to the foreign from within the resources of subjectivity, prior to any configurational-corporeal constitution, prior to any empirically defined physiological or psychological structures, prior to human beings, but presupposed by them. Affect is not an evolutionary device, it is synonymous with entity, being, existence, object, subject. Being as the moment of experience is simultaneously the feeling of being affected and the feeling of anticipatory striving. These precede the notion of a body as biological organism, and instead is a pre-condition for being of any sort. Feeling, understood most primordially, is simply movement (not in empirical but subjective space), transition, becoming, time. Footnote: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone's (2011) grounding of affectivity in activity recalls Husserl, but her rendering of it in terms of spatio-temporal movement and kinesthesia remains at the level of empirical space and time and fails to ground feeling relative to more primordial notions of internal temporality and spatiality common to Husserl, Gendlin, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. Husserl introduces a a primordial motivational principle in which noetic anticipatory assimilation dominates the foreignness of the noematic object pole. This means that the capacity of experiences to delight or disturb us, particularly when it comes to profoundly self-affecting valuative concerns, is much more a function of the relation of the event to our strivings and anticipations than it is to whatever qualitites of feeling (enticement, allure, vivacity) are contributed by the object pole in itself. If we were simply to conclude that an anticipatory tendency, a general striving toward 'possibilities' of fulfillment, characterizes at all levels Husserl's project, then we could justifiably claim that he has this in common with Ratcliffe, whose approach also is oriented around anticipatory temporality and possibilities. But it is not simply that Husserl claims protention as a general going beyond itself of one's experience of an object, rather that this going beyond itself has the character of a peculiar implicative consistency. We strive to assimilate experiences. We see the centrality of similarity manifest itself at all levels of constitution, in the subjective achievement of synthetic unities, analogical apperceptive pairing, associative relationality, correlations, harmonious fulfillments, subjective 'mineness', variations, flowing multiplicities, congruities, nexuses, coherences, etc. Even in difference, negation, senselessness, irrationality, alienation there is no experience in consciousness that is not in an overarching way variation on a thematics (which are already associative syntheses of variations on variations) for Husserl , a similarity-in-difference. Protention and retention are included in what Husserl calls a "universal drive intentionality (TreibintentionalitÃ¤t)." Experience is being affected and changed by what one anticipatorily aims at through striving. As Bernet says " this originary process, as a life-process, is not simply an automatic process; it has a goal and the tendency to draw near to this goal."( Bernet 2010, p.16). Striving as desire "is striving after, or driving away from, shunning, that is, it has its positivity and negativity.""Its fulfillment is a relaxation that results from realizing [the striving, etc.], in the change into the corresponding joy of fulfillment." On the other hand, because "expectations can really only be fulfilled through perceptions, they are also essentially susceptible to disappointment in all circumstances." "...something new can be a slap in the face to all expectation." (Husserl 1989) How does this anticipatory receptivity on the part of the subjective, or Ego pole of experience compare with Ratcliffe's claim that bodily felt dispositions constrain and orient our receptivity to the world? Ratcliffe explains: "I have argued drawing on the work of Husserl (1989), amongst others that experience of worldly possibilities is inextricable from a sense of bodily dispositions... loss of enticing possibilities from the world is bound up with a lethargic body that is not stirred into action by its surroundings. Again and again, first-person reports by psychiatric patients convey pervasive experiential changes, where an alteration in how the body feels is at the same time a shift in how the world appears and in how one relates to it. " The dependence of our perceptions on bodily dispositions that Ratcliffe credits Husserl for revealing to us is a correlation that appears when we are approaching the world within the natural attitude. It represents that stratum of constitution within which the world opens up for us in terms of physical objects, subjective sensations, and casual relations between the psychical and the physical. Included within this naturalistic stratum of thinking are psychophysical relations intertwining my feeling sensate body with my felt physical body. Ratcliffe's account of bodily felt dispositions as a complex of learned associations between perceptions and body states belongs to this natural causal stratum. However, Husserl asserts that making sense of intersubjective experiences such as affect, feeling, valuation, emotion and mood requires a shift from the natural attitude to what he calls the personal or spiritual attitude. Within this higher stratum, natural causation is replaced by intentional motivation. "...when we speak of the spiritual or personal Ego, that is to be understood as the subject of intentionality, and we see that motivation is the lawfulness of the life of the spirit."" The" because-so" of motivation has a totally different sense than causality in the sense of nature."(Ideas II, p. 231) My bodily felt dispositions lose their character as causal conditionings when I relate to the world as a valuing, intending social participant, and instead are fused with and subordinated to the motivated valuative intentionalities driven by the dynamics of my social interactions. Only when I shift back to the natural attitude do mood dispositions appear for me again in terms of causal bodily feelings and sensations (lethargic, constricted, closed off, energized, aroused, etc). But noticing 'how my body feels' only contributes to the elucidation of intentional moods when transferred from the naturalistic to the personalistic sphere as a metaphor. For example, my personalistic sense of my depression infuses and animates my feeling of bodily lethargy with the corresponding affective intentional meaning of feeling 'down in the dumps'. Without this interpretive animation coming from the higher intentional stratum, fusing with and lending metaphorical significance to the bodily data, my corporeal sensations of lethargy would bear no direct relevance to my being in the world as depressed. No pattern of organization of causally intertwined perception and corporeal feeling would ever be able turn bodily sensations like generic lethargy into intentionally significant moods, values or emotions. "To be sure, I find the stratum of sensation to be localized in the Body, including therefore physical pleasure and physical pain; but that only shows that this stratum does not belong to the realm of what properly pertains to the Ego." (Husserl, Ideas II p.223) "...in my theoretical, emotional, and practical behavior-in my theoretical experience and thinking, in my position-taking as to pleasure, enjoyment, hoping, wishing, desiring, wanting-l feel myself conditioned by the matter in question, though this obviously does not mean psychophysically conditioned... For this realizing apprehension, the psychophysical relations do not play, obviously, any actual essential role. I apprehend myself as dependent in my behavior, in my acts, on the things themselves, on their beautiful color, on their special form, on their pleasant or dangerous properties. I do not therein apprehend myself as dependent on my Body or on my history." (Ideas II p.148) Husserl allows that an intention can address and modify a more or less global background of pragmatic valuative concerns, or else be confined to only one detail of experience. A perceptual object can appear in its normal shape and color, but feel unreal or unenticing when we are depressed. The affective and valuative aspects most narrowly associated with a perception do not reflect one's depressed state because they are not directly implicated in the global changes in ones comportment toward the world ,whereas higher strata of valuative feelings related to ones interpersonal engagements and expectations are directly affected. The key point is that the integrated structure of experience is such for Husserl that both higher and lower strata of valuative intentional constitution are engaged in such globally self-implicating experiences as depression and grief. Mood and emotion do not shape or condition as causal reinforcements, but instead express the relative anticipatory integrity of motivated position takings, drawing on a habitual history of valuative position-takings. The constitution of intentional sense pertaining to one aspect of one's life does not occur in isolation from all other aspects of one's mental processes. For Husserl, the anticipatory nature of intentionality provides mental processes with a hierarchicizing organizational tendency. As Husserl puts it, a part demands a whole. And larger wholes demand even larger wholes within which to associate themselves in intentional syntheses. Relatively trivial perceptual meanings are motivated and framed in relation to more subordinate concerns and these are motivationally oriented in relation to ones most important self-involving goals . Experiences such as severe depression have their encompassing effects by virtue of the interlocking organization of meaning implications. Depression is a sweeping disappointment and loss at the highest, most integrative level of anticipative self-regard in relation to the interpersonal world. The fact that Husserl's starting point is transcendental does not mean that a naturalized account of affect like that of Ratcliffe could not complement Husserl's a priori one. I don't mean to enter into a debate concerning whether insights of phenomenological philosophies of authors such as Husserl and Heidegger can be naturalized. There is no one notion of the natural. The history of empiricism is a genealogy of changing philosophies of the empirical and the natural. Eugene Gendlin's process model is an example of a naturalistic approach which accords in many ways with Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. My interest in this paper is to persuade that Ratcliffe's particular naturalized interpretation of Merleau-Ponty, Husserl and Heidegger lacks a core concept defining the latter's approaches, the fusion of affectivity, ,conation, intention and temporality. The organization principle underlying Ratcliffe's natural model implies a different philosophical ground than that of Husserl's, one more aligned with pragmatism and hermeneutics ( and the phenomenologies of Sartre, Scheler and Stein) than Husserl, Merleau-Ponty Heidegger or Gendlin. Husserl offers a model of recursivity uniting self-referential continuity and absolute alterity, the subjective and the objective, the affective and the intentional, in the same intentional moment. Husserl's general notion of affect, applying to such terms as emotion, feeling and desire as well, determines that every experienced event of any kind (bodily-sensory, perceptual, conceptual, practical-valuative ) is an affect, and every affect is a change in affect. If every event of meaning is an advent of qualitative novelty, then cognition is affective not simply in the sense that a background affective tonality, mood or attunement frames the activity as a whole, as "a kind of cradle within which cognition rests"(Ratcliffe,2002,p.296), but in that each moment of engagement is an inseparable inter-bleeding between a prior context of attunement or thematics, and a change in that attunement. Heidegger on Attunement and Understanding: In Heidegger's Befindlichkeit, which has been variously and imperfectly translated as attunement, mood, self-finding and state of mind, we find the most thoroughgoing phenomenological articulation of the inseparable relation of affect, intention and temporality. Temporality is the well-spring out of which Dasein as Being in the world emerges. Temporality, the way the world discloses itself to Dasein, is structured as the equi-primordial gestures of care, understanding, attunement and discourse. Since his earliest writings on background dispositions of feeling, Ratcliffe has used Heidegger's Befindichkiet as a source of inspiration. But Heidegger follows Husserl in grounding the orienting capacity of affective attunement in a radical notion of temporality rather than in a schematic causal interaction between body states and meaning intentions. Ratcliffe writes: "...a mood is not an intentional state but a condition of possibility for intentionality ." "According to Heidegger, moods are not intentional states that encompass a wide range of objects. Rather, they are modes of Befindlichkeit, ways of finding oneself in the world. This, he says, is presupposed by the intelligibility of intentionally directed experiences, thoughts and activities: â ž: "The mood has already disclosed, in every case, Being-in-the-world as a whole, and makes it possible first of all to direct oneself towards something" (Heidegger, 1962, p.176/ 137). A central characteristic of Befindlichkeit, in its various modes, is that it determines the ways in which things can matter to us and, therefore, the kinds of intentional state we can adopt." (Ratcliffe 2012) There is a crucial difference between Ratcliffe's understanding of intention as directedness toward an object and what Heidegger means when he talks about directing oneself toward something. For Heidegger, 'directedness toward' does not mean connecting with a pre-existing object in a propositional stance but constituting an 'object' from the synthesis of past , present and future as a projective forehaving. This projective disclosing does not mean, as Ratcliffe seems to think, an anticipation of possible happenings in the future. Ratcliffe says Heideggerian Care is "the way that we are anchored in the past (facticity), situated in the present (fallenness) and forever looking to the future (projection)" (Ratcliffe 2002)). But the past, present and future don't operate for Heidegger as distinct modes. They interpenetrate each other so completely that all three are inseparably implicated in facticity, fallenness and projection. As Gendlin(1997b) explains, "the past functions to "interpret" the present,...the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in"(p.37 ). What the past functions in comes toward Dasein from the future. Dasein "occurs out of its future"."Da-sein, as existing, always already comes toward itself, that is, is futural in its being in general." "Only because Da-sein in general IS as I AM-having-been, can it come futurally toward itself in such a way that it comes-back." Thus, "Having been arises from the future".(Being and Time, p.299) Contra Ratcliffe, Heidegger differentiates his use of the word 'possibility' from a conventional (and Husserl's), understanding of it : "The being-possible, which Da-sein always is existentially, is ... distinguished from empty, logical possibility and from the contingency of something objectively present, where this or that can "happen" to it. As a modal category of objective presence, possibility means what is not yet real and not always necessary. It characterizes what is only possible. Ontologically, it is less than reality and necessity. "(Being and Time p.135) "Every understanding has its mood. Every attunement understands. " "...what is encountered in the world is always already in a relevance which is disclosed in the understanding of world." "'As this understanding, it "knows" what is going on, that is, what its potentiality of being is. Da-sein is not something objectively present which then has as an addition the ability to do something, but is rather primarily being-possible. Da-sein is always what it can be and how it is its possibility."(p.134) The attuned understanding projecting itself upon possibilities is not a future possibility as a hypothetical present that has not happened yet. A possibility is a relevant field of meaning happening now as implicit, veiled, undifferentiated meaning . It is the present in the mode of undifferentiated, implicit , but actually existing possibilities that the past has projected itself into NOW. Explicit relations with equipment and other Da-seins emerge out of the implicit, veiled, undifferentiated field of relevance which Heidegger calls a possibility. "...what is encountered in the world is always already in a relevance which is disclosed in the understanding of world, a relevance which is made explicit by interpretation." "When something is understood but still veiled, it becomes unveiled by an act of appropriation..." "the world which has already been understood is interpreted. What is at hand comes explicitly before sight that understands. "(Heidegger 2010) Footnote: Slaby refers to his model of affect as 'radical situatedness' and yet shares Ratcliffe's traditional, inauthentic understanding of affective temporality as causal dispositional state taking place in time, which is to say that, contrary to Heideggerian temporality, for Slaby time is divided into separate phases: the present as what is happening now, the future as what is not yet now, and the past as what is no longer now. Slaby says factual situatedness "is situatedness in a place and a time, synchronic and diachronic". "Affectivity ultimately is time, namely the factual past in the form of sedimented remainders that infuse, burden, and potentially suffocate ongoing comportment." " The existential task of affective disclosure is circumscribed by this essential tension: A tension between what is already apprehended, articulated, and made sense of, and what is furthermore "out there," beyond us, yet weighing on us and determining our situation in unforeseeable ways." (Slaby 2017). This is an important point, because Heideggerian projection conveys the idea that the structure of temporality marks each present experience, each 'NOW', as a global shift of existential feeling. "Attunement is grounded in thrownness",... and, as thrown, Da-sein is thrown into the mode of being of projecting." This means that each moment is a change in one's way of being in the world. Even as moods maintain a loose ongoing thematic consistency over time, nevertheless each interpretive moment of attuned understanding unravels and subtly but globally 'reframes the frame'. Affectivity is not an existential state (there are no actual states, frames, representations, schemas, dispositions of existence for Heidegger, neither attuned nor intentional), not a background orientation of mood that frames particular intentions and emotions as a whole, as "a kind of cradle within which cognition rests"(Ratcliffe,2002,p.296) but simultaneously a change in affectivity, sense and understanding which for Heidegger is nothing other than the experienced equi-primordiality of the ecstasies of past present and future as the becoming of the NOW. Attunement is disclosive, not as a pre-deliberative, pre-reflective evaluative backdrop to intentional deliberation, a pre-given disposition as an already existing frame which shapes not yet actual possibilities. It is self-changing projective being-assailed by the world , always in a new way, every new moment, whose ongoing anticipatory continuity as 'this particular mood' is at the same time a moment-to-moment self-reinvention born of thrownness. Being-affected always totals, addresses and modifies all of ones prior experience. For both Heidegger and Gendlin(whose work will be addressed later in this paper), the totality of one's past pragmatic-valuative-affective comportment toward the world functions and changes as a single unity, with all of its 'parts' always implying each other. One's comportment in fact only exists through its being changed moment to moment as attunement-intention. When Heidegger says that, in attunement, Dasein "is disclosed to itself before all cognition and willing and beyond their scope of disclosure" this is not a validation of Ratcliffe's claim that propositional intentionality is an activity oriented within and framed by mood. The distinction Ratcliffe makes between existential and intentional structures of experience does not exist for Heidegger. While attunement, as an ontological concept, is a more primordial notion than will or cognition, it is not as if the latter simply act as variable moves within a more or less stable orienting background situatedness .On the contrary, such ontic concepts as cognition, willing, intending are inauthentic modes of 'letting things be encountered', and letting things be encountered IS being affected or moved by them freshly moment to moment. In other words, each intention as it appears subtly reinvents the attunement that it occurs into. Against Heidegger's explicit determination of attunement as equi-primordial with discourse and understanding , meaning that none of these modes has priority over the others in a valuative, genetic or ontological sense, Ratcliffe wants to prioritize attunement. "..it is mood that has primacy over understanding, as mood is responsible for determining the kinds of possibility that are presupposed by understanding. What Heidegger calls "discourse " (Rede ) similarly depends upon mood ." (Ratcliffe 2012) We can see why it may be important for Ratcliffe to give mood a formative role that is not accorded to understanding or discourse, based on what has been presented so far concerning his distinction between existential feeling and intentionality, Briefly stated, Ratcliffe reads Heidegger's account of attunement as akin to the role of existential feeling, a, global interactive scheme composed of reciprocally causal innate and learned associations between perceptions and body states. Understanding, as propositional intentionality, is a particular relational structure within that orienting disposition. "...cognition is constrained, enabled and structured by a background of emotion-perception correlations, that manifest themselves as a changing background of implicit representations of body states."(Ratcliffe 2002). Heidegger, in contrast, explicitly warns against interpreting Understanding as the thematic propositional grasping of intentional meaning, insisting that such a misreading "degrades it to the level of a given, intended content."(Being and Time, p.145) Intentionally directed experiences don't simply occur within the larger framework of a specific attunement. As factical experiences of interpretation, they are themselves changes in our global attunement. The mode of interpretation, which is where one can locate activities of perception, intention and interpersonal interaction in general, is not a modality conforming to a specific theme of significance of a prior attunement. As a development of understanding, it is a particular way of changing ones attunement as a whole. Thus, if attuned understanding determines the kinds of intentional meanings we are capable of adopting, then intentional meanings as they arise in circumspective relevance out of previous ones reshape the kinds of attuned understanding we are capable of having. On the one hand, variation in modes of attunement is as continuous as time itself. On the other hand, a thematic continuity holds for Dasein throughout its moment to moment global shifts in sense and feeling such that relatively stable ongoing modes of comportment toward the world are discernable. Ratcliffe believes he can prioritize attunement over understanding because, as we have seen, his schematic feeling model begins from a split between the subjective (body feeling state) and objective (perceptual and propositional intentional meaning) poles of experience. As a result of this split, the affective and perceptual-conative components are treated as if they are separate aspects in states of variable relationality. When bodily feeling states function to enhance our engagement with the world, according to Ratcliffe, we experience ourselves more intimately situated in the world. On the other hand, affective relevance ("the sense of being situated in a world" (Existential Feeling 2017) can be profoundly diminished, leaving propositional intentionality intact but devoid of adaptive orientation. One is still aware of a world moment to moment, one still has perceptions and memories, and yet this world is denuded of felt relevance and we are inclined to avoid social interaction. For instance, Ratcliffe claims that anxiety is intrinsically 'alienating' or 'externalising'. It can alienate us from its objects (Ratcliffe and Wilkinson 2016). Ratcliffe considers the most extreme cases of erosion of situatedness , of the ability and capacity to experience types of possibility and to contemplate certain relevant options, to be a form of decision-making impairment and incompetence (Ratcliffe, forthcoming). Fernandenz, along with Ratcliffe, believes that psycho-pathologies like depression involve "a general degradation in our ability to be affectively situated in and attuned to our world" and perhaps even the complete loss of affective situatedness. "... the degree to which one is attuned to and situated in a world through moods can itself undergo change. .. Some cases of people diagnosed with depression are best understood not as an erosion of a particular mood, or as the emergence of a new mood, but instead as an erosion of the category of moods as a whole; that is to say, as an erosion of the structure of situatedness. " "Alfred Kraus also characterizes melancholic depression as a loss of moods and feelings: "At its core, the melancholic mood alteration is-paradoxically formulated-rather a lack of mood" (Kraus 2003, 208, Fernandez 2014)." Ratcliffe's understanding of situatedness differs from Heidegger's in a number of crucial ways. First, unlike Heidegger's account, Ratciffe's Befindlichkiet is not an irreducible apriori of affective experience, but instead is the contingent product of a complex configuration of bodily and perceptual elements. Affective attunement for him is the achievement of a concatenating process. When we delve beneath Ratcliffe's global schemes to locate the invariant and essential condition of possibility of his feeling-perceptual concatenations, we arrive at a reciprocally casual model of co-determinative interactive bits. But having arrived at this neo-Kantian 'apriori', we are not yet in the vicinity of Heidegger's Befindhlichkeit.. Befindlichkeit is not the product of an orienting device, adaptation or conditioning scheme, and not the ground of any reciprocally causal schematic structure, except as that structure be understood as a derived abstraction concealing its own basis in temporality. In order to understand primordial situatedness, we have to bracket Ratcliffe's causal naturalist model in its entirety, and think prior to the split between feeling and thinking that it presupposes What is essential and invariant in the Heideggerian structure of situatedness as temporality is that each moment is the disclosure of the now as affectingly foreign-familiar. For Heidegger not only is there no self and no world prior to relationship, but the self is nothing BUT this between. Being situated in a world is not a contingent accomplishment of a scheme of reinforcements, but a presupposition of Being. Heidegger offers: "We can see once more that attunements never emerge in the empty space of the soul and then disappear again; rather, Dasein as Dasein is always already attuned in its very grounds. There is only ever a change of attunement. We stated in a provisional and rough and ready manner that attunements are the 'presupposition' for, and 'medium' of thinking and acting. That means as much as to say that they reach more primordially back into our essence, that in them we first meet ourselves-as being-there, as a Da-sein." (Heidegger 1995, p.68) Dasein is always fundamentally affectively situated in that it is thrown into its NOW as surprised familiarity. This means that attunement is not a relationship between self and world that can be broken or diminished, as Ratcliffe asserts, regardless of what mood one is in. The most intractably severe depression is still, moment to moment, an awareness of being thrown into continual affective transformation and transition, as long as it is an awareness of anything at all. And as self-transforming, the affective basis of ongoing experience is always at the same time a projecting fore-having that anticipates into what surprises or disappoints or depresses it. The world of the depressive that appears unreal, insignificant, irrelevant, un-engaging, is meaningful precisely in its unreality and deficiency as disorienting, confusing, strange, uncanny, un-engageable, numbing. Experience of ongoing deprivation, lack and loss is not the degeneration of the structure of situatedness as projective-thrownness, but situatedness as always a new but at the same time anticipated sense of loss and absence. Heidegger tells us: "Dasein in itself is essentially Being-with" "Being-with existentially determines Da-sein even when an other is not factically present and perceived. The being-alone of Da-sein, too, is being-with in the world. The other can be lacking only in and for a being-with. Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with, its possibility is a proof for the latter." When one feels alone in a crowd, "Their Mitda-sein is encountered in the mode of indifference and being alien. Lacking and "being away" are modes of Mitda-sein...[Being-with-others]". (Being and Time, p.113) I want to make clear that the essential issue between Heidegger and Ratcliffe I am attempting to articulate does not rest on whether we deem the nightmarish existential experience of severe depression, as well as other alterations of affective significance, in qualitative vs quantitative terms. After all, Heidegger uses a variety of adjectives (distorted, flattened, blind to itself, led astray, confused, closed off, obscuring, forgetful, deficient) to describe inauthentic modes of Dasein, and their associated moods, which can just as well be interpreted in terms of a lessening of the fluidity of existential movement as they can via a positive qualitative shift in modality of comportment. The key point here is that however we prefer to characterize the organizational characteristics of mood marking the devastation of depression and other pathologies of world significance, we must understand such variation as taking place within the structure of a primordial situatedness whose essential features are invariant throughout such vicissitudes of mood. Specifically, what remains essential regardless of the severity of states of trauma. melancholia or depersonalization, is the underlying temporal-affective-intentional 'glue' of Befindlichkeit. To be radically, irreducibly , primordially situated in a world is to be guaranteed , at every moment, a world that feelingly, creatively impinges on me anew as foreign. And it is simultaneously, to feel a belonging (familiarity) to what impinges on me in its foreignness due to the anticipative, projective futural aspect of temporality. In this way, affectivity as temporality constitutes the essence of the fundamental, irreducibly situated felt significance and relevance a world always already has for me, a meaningfulness within whose bounds pathological conditions such as depression appear as modifications, but whose basis they can never undermine.(Heidegger would say that their possibility as deficiencies or privations is proof for the essentiality of Befindlichkeit.). Such experiences are predicaments within affective situatedness rather than crises of situatedness. The supposed crisis of situatedness which leads to what Ratcliffe calls an impairment and even incompetence in capacity to experience significant meaningfulness (Ratcliffe, forthcoming) only appears as a possibility when one begins from a split between affect and intention. When one instead begins from the fusion of self and world that radical temporality instantiates, there can be only existential predicaments, not disorders of situatedness. Since I am always already relevantly involved in a world via thrownness, depression has to do with the kind of relevance I experience, not my capacity or competence to experience it . And contra Ratcliffe, anxiety doesn't 'cause' alienation, it is the attempt to mitigate the loss of coherence that alienating, threatening events portend. Heidegger says anxiety is a form of fear, and "fear is a fear of something threatening-of something that is detrimental to the factical potentiality-of-being of Da-sein" "What is encountered has the relevant nature of harmfulness." (Being and Time p.313). Thus it is the situation, not the emotion, that is alienating, and anxious attunement is the anticipation of, and incipient comportment away from, an impeding event that holds within itself the specter of the alien, the unassimilable and thus the unanticipatable. In order for Ratcliffe to be convinced that attunement and understanding are truly equi-primordial, he would have to find a way to relate the affective and cognitive aspects of experience more intricately than he has been able to. For Heidegger, mood and understanding are equi-primordial because the objective and subjective poles of experience are inseparable in each moment of experience. That is to say, Heideigger's notion of temporality makes movement, becoming, transition, the in-between, prior to any beings, bodies, states, entities, schemes that supposedly exist for a moment as in-themselves entities and then undergo change. The in-between IS affect and feeling itself, as well as sense, as the being affected by what one projectively discloses ahead of oneself (reminiscent of Husserl's inseparable objective-subjective contributions to feeling). For Heidegger, affect, emotion and feeling are not bodily structures reporting, interpreting or reacting to change, they are change itself as the structure of temporality. Heidegger captures this in-between with his notion of authentic anxiety, the essence of being changed by what is disclosed , abstracted from all contingent features of world context. Authentic anxiety , not as selective scheme of bodily reinforcement, but as temporality in its essence, underlies all and is implied by all particular moods, since every moment of time is both of familiarity (forehaving) and surprise (thrownness), relation and foreignness. "Uncanniness is the fundamental kind of being-in-the-world, although it is covered over in everydayness. Tranquillized, familiar being-in-the-world is a mode of the uncanniness of Dasein, not the other way around. Not-being-at-home must be conceived existentially and ontologically as the more primordial phenomenon." "The publicness of the they suppresses everything unfamiliar" "Even as covered over, the familiar is a mode of the unfamiliar."(Heidegger 2010) The inseparable co-dependence of the foreign and the familiar (the essence of affectivity as well as sense) is implicit in the radical temporal understanding common to the phenomenologies of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Gendlin. With his concept of primordial anxiety, Heidegger's intention is not to give preference to alienation and disconnection over relational integrity. He is re-situating the identity-difference , same -other, subject -object, affect-intentional binary (which appears for Ratciffe in the guise of reciprocal objective causality) in a more primordial way. The fact that the foreign-familiar binary of primordial anxiety underlies all particular attunements of situatedness doesn't deprive Heidegger's model of the relative ongoing meaningful stability over time that is rendered in Ratcliffe's perspective. Rather, it grounds Ratcliffe's structures within a more intricate dynamic. Even the most confident, effectively anticipatory and harmonious schematic comportment toward the world pre-supposes Heideggerian 'anxiety', the projective-surprised being-affected by the world in general, in each moment of its instantiation. The paradox of Heidegger's radically temporal thinking is that it enacts a carrying-forward which re-invents its direction, sense and past every moment, beyond conscious control, without rending the intimate fabric of its anticipative continuity. Heideggerian attunement exposes a relentless global self and world-transformational mobility within every moment of, but invisible to, Ratcliffe's supposed schematic existential states, and at the same time imparts to our ongoing world situatedness an irreducible integrity and intimacy which no pathology can undermine. Gendlin's Model of Temporality and Implicit Intricacy: My attempt at a direct comparison between Ratcliffe's naturalized, embodied approach and Heidegger's ontological project has been somewhat hampered by the fact that Heidegger made little reference in his work to the status and role of the body in relation to situatedness and affectivity. It may be helpful , then , to turn to Eugene Gendlin's process model. Like Ratcliffe's existential feeling, Gendlin's approach offers a naturalized account of embodied affect. But Gendlin rejects Ratcliffe's causal conditioning model, and its reliance on conventional notions of time, in favor of a reading of Heideggerian temporality consonant with the one I have been advancing in this paper. In various writings, he distinguishes his Heideggerian account of affective situatedness from phenomenologically-influenced causal interactionist readings such as those of Gallagher , Varela, Fuchs and Sheets-Johnstone (See Gendlin 2008, 2012). Gendlin's approach has elements that seem to fall within the causal adaptationist orbit characterizing Ratcliffe's approach. Like Ratcliffe, Gendlin sees emotion as an evolutionary adaptation that specifically organizes behavior by selectively altering attention. But Gendlin differentiates emotion form bodily feeling, what he calls felt sensing. Here we have an articulation of bodily feeling as an organized totality whose motivational principle is not that of an interactional casusality between feeling and knowing states, but an implicitly feeling-knowing sense. Gendlin's account superficially resembles Ratcliffe's embodied cognitive approach in its rejection of symbolic representationalism and decoupleability, but there are crucial differences. In Ratcliffe's model, interaction spreads in a reciprocally causal fashion from point to point, whereas for Gendlin, each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow "knows about", belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part. And this happens before a part can simply be said to exist in itself(even if just for an instant). What kind of odd understanding concerning the interface between identity and relation could justify Gendlin's insistence that the inter-affection between parts of a psychological organization precedes the existence of individual entities? As Gendlin(1997b) argues, 'The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because such a continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it..."(p.71). For instance, fresh intentional experience does not simply sit alongside a prior context; it explicates the immediate past [Gendlin characterizes this past as an implicatory whole]. "In the old model something (say a particle or a body) exists, defined as filling space and time. Then it also goes through some process. Or it does not. It is defined as "it" regardless of the process "it" goes through. "It" is separate from a system of changes and relationships that are "possible" for "it."(p.50)...'In the old model one assumes that there must first be "it" as one unit, separate from how its effects in turn affect it...In the process we are looking at there is no separate "it," no linear cause-effect sequence with "it" coming before its effects determine what happens. So there is something odd here, about the time sequence. How can "it" be already affected by affecting something, if it did not do the affecting before it is in turn affected?...With the old assumption of fixed units that retain their identity, one assumes a division between it, and its effects on others. (This "it" might be a part, a process, or a difference made.) In the old model it is only later, that the difference made to other units can in turn affect "it."(p.40) Speaking to Ratcliffe's causal interaffecting organizational model of existential feeling, Gendlin explains: If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly..."Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they(p.22). Gendlin's organizational principle of radical interaffecting, made possible by his Heideggerian approach to temporality, exposes the concept of states , dispositions, and causal interactions between felt and intentional factors founding Ratcliffe's model as an abstraction derived from a more primary, intricate and intimate process in which feelings and intentions, like Heidegger's attunement and understanding, are equi-primordial rather than one being causally oriented by the other. On the one hand, cognition, often conceived as propositional intentionality, is not simply directedness toward or an aiming at an object, or being about something. It is a transformation and enrichment of a prior meaning context, a creative alteration of sense. (Ratcliffe claims bodily feeling and intentional state are two sides of the same coin, but nevertheless he still separates them . For instance: "some instances of diagnosed depression will most likely conform to cognitive approaches, that they will involve systems of intentional states rather than existential feelings." ) "Supposedly cognizing the "external" things does not change them. Cognizing is only about them. This "only about" assumes that our cognition does not change the behavior context, the situation including what our scientific work is about. But I will argue that it does change the behavior space...It has not been clear how cognition is a bodily process. "Only about" has meant that cognition happens in representations." (Gendlin 2008) On the other hand, bodily feeling is already a cognate sensing."Currently it still clashes with our habits of language to say "we think with the body." Gendlin doesn't need to employ a notion of feeling as selective hedonic reinforcement of intentional organization, since it is temporality that organizes implicit bodily meaning. Feeling, as meaningful "sensed complexity", "implicit understanding sensed in living", makes reference to implicit bodily organizational process and by doing so contributes to the process as a further change within it. "To feel something as an inner object is a change.., not just a representation; feeling something makes a change in it."(Emotions in Therapy) "We feel the change made by the actual environment occurring into the body's implied behavior context. The feedback occurs into the implying which carries the sequence forward into further implying and occurring, as our little model says. Behavior forms only as perceptions and feelings of this kind."(2008) "Implying is not an occurring that will happen. It is not an occurring-not-yet. It does not occupy a different time-position than the occurring. Rather, one implying encompasses all three linear time positions, and does not occupy an additional linear time position of its own. (See A Process Model, IVB. This is a more intricate model of time. It includes a kind of "future" and a kind of "past" that are not linear positions. This time model can be reduced back to the liner model by considering just occurring-occurring-occurring as if it were cut off from implying. " Gendlin's understanding of the body as sense creating via radical temporal organization locates his proximity not only to Heidegger and Husserl, but to Merleau-Ponty. As Roald, Levin, and KÃ ppe 2018 explain in their Merleau-Pontian challenge to bodily theories of emotion: "The body is inherently involved in the production of meaning, and subjectivity is constituted intersubjectively or dialectically; thus there is always an element of alterity and familiarity in experience. [The body] forms and informs consciousness and produces not just the constraint conditions for consciousness, that is, sets limits for what it can be, but takes part in creating its form." Affective Incarnations: Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Challenge to Bodily Theories of Emotion (Roald, T., Levin, K., & KÃ ppe, S. (2018)) Merleau-Ponty defines an emotion as " a variation in our relations with others and the world which is expressed in our bodily attitude" (1964b, p. 53)." Ratcliffe interprets this to mean that emotion is a change in one's habitual mode of existential feeling. "This points to a distinction between an emotional disturbance and a more mundane experience of something as significant relative to some project or set of projects. "(Ratcliffe 2019) However, for Merleau-Ponty, there is no pre-intentional disposition orienting experience, because being disposed or oriented ( as figure-ground structure of a gestalt field) only exists in intention, as variation. Perception, as the ground of experience, only has being as self-transforming action. Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, as for Husserl, Gendlin and Heidegger, temporality is the driving force of affectivity and intentionality. " In all uses of the word sens, we find the same fundamental notion of a being orientated or polarized in the direction of what he is not, and thus we are always brought back to a conception of the subject as ek-stase, and to a relationship of active transcendence between the subject and the world." (Phenomenology of Perception, p.499). "Action is, by definition, the violent transition from what I have to what I aim to have, from what I am to what I intend to be.", "When I say that I know and like someone, I aim, beyond his qualities, at an inexhaustible ground which may one day shatter the image that I have formed of him. This is the price for there being things and 'other people' for us, not as the result of some illusion, but as the result of a violent act which is perception itself. " (Phenomenology of Perception, p.444)). Merleau-Ponty equates intention with attention: "Attention is "a change of the structure of consciousness, the establishment of a new dimension of experience, the setting forth of an a priori... To pay attention is not merely further to elucidate pre-existing data, it is to bring about a new articulation of them by taking them as figures. "(p.35) "The miracle of consciousness consists in its bringing to light, through attention, phenomena which re-establish the unity of the object in a new dimension at the very moment when they destroy it. Thus attention is neither an association of images, nor the return to itself of thought already in control of its objects, but the active constitution of a new object which makes explicit and articulate what was until then presented as no more than an indeterminate horizon."(p.35) Conclusion: I have argued in this paper that affective and intentional situatedness, understood by Ratcliffe as globally patterned inter-causal states (existential feeling), functions as a structure of entrenchment and self-conservation, inhering in itself and resisting its own transformation. A global change in bodily feeling is thus required to infuse supposedly stagnant affective-intentional narratives with a new direction and meaning, disrupt entrenched patterns, dissolve the conditioning glue holding them together, reveal their contingency and open up new possibilities. Ratcliffe sees the role of Husserl's transcendental reduction and Heidegger's primordial anxiety as such disrupters. I have claimed, instead, that rather than a contingent island of static structure in a sea of indeterminacy, an affective intentional attunement is the essence of temporal becoming as self-transformative dynamic, hiding within the supposedly static moment of Ratcliffe's existential feeling state. The role of the epoche and authentic anxiety is to reveal this intimate, intricate foreign-familiar binary of movement concealed within naive naturalized models of psychological functioning. If the purpose of the epoche and primordial anxiety is, as Ratcliffe says, to bring us face to face with indeterminacy, then it is not an indeterminacy outside of, before, after, or surrounding stable structures of situatedness, but rather an indeterminacy at the core of those structures themselves. But Befindlichkeit at the same time evinces a radical self-belonging and irreducible world-connectedness obscured by and undiscoverable when thought in terms of Ratcliffe's schematisms. In failing to ground affective experience in radical temporality , Ratcliffe's conception of mood as causally configured state renders his approach an outsider's view. By the time Ratcliffe has noticed what he calls a shift in mood, an intricate process of change of felt meaning has already taken place, both within thematically harmonious and confused temporally unfolding episodes of affective experience. Not recognizing this fundamental co-dependence between transitivity and identity leads to reification of each pole of experience. If dispositions to act and acts themselves, being and becoming, feeling and intention, can be treated as separate moments, then their relations are rendered secondary and arbitrary, requiring causations and glues to piece them together. Ratcliffe writes: "This default 'style' (minimal self) of anticipation is not specific to any particular life-structure, any particular configuration of cares, concerns, commitments, projects, and pastimes. It is, if you like, the glue needed to hold any such structure together, any kind of world."(Trauma, Language and Trust, forthcoming) The glue that holds together Ratcliffe's minimal self, interaffecting causation, is a secondary concept of organization, a naturalized abstraction derived from the primary termporal structuration of affectivity-connation-intention. What DeJaegher, critiquing Gallagher's primary intersubjectity account , writes in that narrower context, could apply to Ratcliffe's general orientation,; " first we carve nature up at artificial joints we split mind and body apart and then we need to fasten the two together again, a task for which the notion of embodiment is, according to Sheets-Johnstone's assessment, used as a kind of glue . But glueing the two back together does not bring back the original ''integrity and nature of the whole" (De Jaegher 2009, Sheets-Johnstone ,in press). Unlike first generation cognitivims, Ratcliffe begins from interaction, but an interaction that is grounded in separated moments of subject and object, feeling and intention, being and becoming, time and stasis. The radically temporal account of affect introduced by Husserl and transformed in different ways by Merleau-Ponty, Gendlin and Heidegger, implies a rejection of two long-standing assumptions supporting the depiction of affect and cognition as distinct states. Contrary to these assumptions: 1) Intentional experience does not need to be pushed or pulled into action, or change of direction, by extrinsic reinforcement contingencies. Every moment of experience is already intrinsically affective (qualitatively self-displacing), assuring that even the most apparently non-emotive, 'rational', reflective type of awareness, such as supposedly characterizes affectively neutral empirical accounts, qualitatively, intuitively, hedonically transforms the meaning of what it references. Feelings belong to, operate within, carry forward, and transform what are called conceptual meanings . This qualitatively transformative effect in moment to moment experience is often subtle enough to go unnoticed, explaining the apparent analytical stability and inter-subjective objectivity attributed to empirical phenomena, the allegedly self-perpetuating coherence of linguistic narratives, and even the illusion of a stable ongoing pre-reflective self-awareness, minimal self or reflexive 'feeling of being'. 2) 'Raw' affect is intrinsically intentional. So-called bodily sensations of feeling not only manifest the characteristics of metaphoricity and narrative consistency traditionally associated with conceptual thought, but in fact are not categorically distinguishable from what has been called conceptual meaning in any stable way. Prior to any notion of cognition and affect as distinguishable constructs, within and beyond such terms as cognitive states and bodily affective signs, lies a universe of self-exceeding senses, modulations, aspects, variations, ways of working. Not variations or modulations of STATES but modulations of modulations. If feeling, understood this new way, IS the very core of so-called conceptual and perceptual thought, merging narrative-thematic consistency and global self-transformation, the subjective and the objective, the felt and the understood, in the same gesture, then the presumed partial independence of rationality and affect vanishes, and the distinction re-emerges as aspects inherent in each event. The inter-affecting of context and novelty which defines an event simultaneously produces a fresh, particular modulation of change (empirical aspect) and a unique momentum (hedonic component) of self-transformation. From this vantage, the valuative, hedonic (the perceived goodness or badness of things), aesthetic aspect of experience, underlying 'non-emotional' appraisals as well as our sadnesses, fears and joys, simply IS our vicissitudes of momentum of sense-making through situations, rather than arising from causal feedback loops. Affective valences are contractions and expansions, coherences and incoherences, accelerations and regressions, consonances and dissonances, expressing how intimately and harmoniously we are able to anticipate and relate to, and thus how densely, richly, intensely we are able to move through, new experience. If we can believe that a unique qualitative moment of momentum, ranging from the confused paralysis of unintelligibility to the exhilaration of dense transformative movement, is intrinsic to ALL events, then perhaps there is no need to attribute the origin of aesthetic pleasures and pains to the functioning of a limited class of entities like bodily affects, even if it is understandable why this kind of assumption has survived for so long in psychology . From the standpoint of verbal expressivity, what has traditionally been called emotion often appears to be a minimalist art, because it is the situational momentum of experiencing slowing or accelerating so rapidly that feelings seem to distill meaning down to a bare inarticulate essence. When the momentum of our reflective thought shifts in such dramatic ways (acceleratively enriched in joyful comprehension, impoverished in grief, ambivalent in fear, alternately disappointed and confident in anger), such so-called emotional events may appear to be a species apart from conceptual reason, a blind intuitive force (surge, glow, twinge, sensation, arousal, energy) invading, conditioning and orienting perceptual and conceptual thought from without as a background field. It is said that such 'raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, passive, something we are overcome by. At other times, situational change may be intermediate, just modulated and gradual enough that content seems to perpetuate itself in self-cohering narratives. Such situations have been called rational, voluntary, factual, reflective, stable, conceptual, propositional, rational, logical, theoretical, non-aesthetic. However, as I have said, these dichotomies: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus pre-reflective bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as reciprocally causal innate and learned associations between perceptions and body states; they are relative variations in the momentum of a contextually unfolding process which is always, at the same time, within the same event, intentional and affective. Am I suggesting that emotion be thought as a 'cognitive' appraisal, cut off from bodily sensation, movement and expression? On the contrary, it is precisely the treatment of cognition, bodily sensation and expression as separately pre-existing processes (even when treated as mutually structuring each other via 'intentional-affective' syntheses) which I am questioning. The point isn't that bodily responses to experience via such avenues as the endocrine, autonomic nervous system and the motor pathways are irrelevant or peripheral to the intentional experience of emotion, feeling and mood, but that, whether we talking about the experience of so-called conceptual appraisal or bodily sensation, the phenomenological scene of affect (or any other aspect of bio-psycho-social functioning) does not depend on an arbitrary concatenation or mutual conditioning between discrete components. Prinz(2004), Colombetti and Thompson(2006), Damasio(1999) and others deny such a thing as a totally disembodied emotion, arguing that the feeling of emotion is affected in degrees concordantly with the severity of damage to avenues of connection with the body. I support their larger claim that experiential processes, including what are called cognitive and affective, function as radically, contextually inter-relational. However, I want to turn their views around a bit. Feeling does not depend on the fact that the brain, as a spatial locale and repository of temporary states of content, always has some access to the body, as a separate locale with semi-independent contents. I have said that feeling functions from within so-called reflective thought, and that bodily affect is intentional. But if both the former and latter are true , it is not because body sensation structures cognition(or vice-versa). Rather, it is because these stratifying abstractions are but inadequately formulated moments of a process of sense-making uniting the hedonic and the intentional prior to any distinction between, or intertwining of, mind and body. Before I could speak of the occurrence of emotion as mental appraisals structured and conditioned by a background field of physiological energetics and behavioral expressions, I would have to re-figure all of these modes, what would be referred to as the "motoric", the "sensate", the "cognitive", as unstable metaphorical figures emerging contextually out of each other over the course of an indissociably intentive-affective global movement of experience which would imply the unraveling of the basis of categorical distinctions currently orienting the understanding of these terms. When I am frightened, whether I focus on my attitude toward the world, my rapid heartbeat, my facial expression or bodily preparation for action, each of these aspects emerge out of each other as a fully reflective, metaphoric carrying forward and further transforming of the deepening implications of this tentative, confused situation. All these aspects already belong to, and in fact have their meaning ENTIRELY defined as variations-continuations of the thematic unfolding of my sense of the emerging threat, subtly remaking my entire past while always maintaining a sense, no matter how surprising, unpredictable or disturbing a new present appears, of implicatory belonging to this prior history. Intermingled with my wandering in and out of significant shifts in experiential momentum, from doubts, terrors, and confusions to later confidences and contentments, will be more subtly self-transforming moments whose continual intuitive shifts of meaning, purpose and affective momentum are hidden so effectively that it may fool me into believing that this more plodding progress of comprehension represents the appearance of a different species from that of pronounced feeling, the realm of affectively neutral (or constant) cognitive states. However, such entities as narrative schemes and conceptual forms may in fact have no actual status other than as empty abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the hedonically felt senses operating within (and defining) such abstractions in subtle but global ways. Feeling, the event, the inter-bleeding of subject and object, transformation without form: all of these terms reference the same irreducible 'unit' of experience, concealed by but overrunning what bodies, dispositions and other states are supposed to do. A 'single' state (whether so-called conceptual or bodily-affective) is already a panoply of intimately changing variations and momenta of felt meanings, in(as) the instant it is accessed, infusing the allegedly conceptual with feeling (and the sensate with intentionality) from within its very core, embodied before any consultation wit h a separate bodily 'outside'. 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Midwest Studies in Philosophy Â September 2017 ______________________________________________________________________________ ___________ THE MEANING OF FEELING: (BANISHING THE HOMUNCULUS FROM PSYCHOLOGY) Introduction Interaction Before Identity The Literal is Metaphoric Consciousness As Its Own Exceeding My Norms Are Not Your Norms The Meaning of Feeling Conclusion INTRODUCTION: Psychological theorizing today, in dialogue with the results of researches in phenomenological and pragmatist philosophy and anthropology, points to an important re-envisioning of the role of concepts such as inter-subjectivity, metaphor, the unconscious and emotion in the functioning of a psychological organization. While today's diverse embodied approaches (Clark(1997), Damasio(2000), Galagher(2005), Lakoff & Johnson(1999), Ratcliffe(2007), Varela, Thompson, and Rosch(1991)) have made significant advances over the more traditional perspectives in psychology which they target(1st generation cognitivism, symbolic computationalism), I suggest that these newer perspectives have failed to depart sufficiently from older approaches in one important respect. Specifically, I will argue in this paper that the capacity of contemporary psychologies to depict a meaning-making organization generating thoroughgoing affectation, interaction and novelty may be hampered by their reliance on a notion of psycho-biological and interpersonal entities as discrete states. Residing within each of the myriad temporary subagents and bits comprising a psychological system is a supposed literal, albeit near-meaningless, identity. While the role of identity in embodied approaches is less prominent than in classical cognitivist frameworks (newer approaches replace the idea of a centralized, self-present identity with that of a reciprocal system of contextually changing states distributed ecologically as psychologically embodied and socially embedded), I allege that a failure of current approaches to banish the lingering notion of a literal, if fleeting, status residing within the parts of a psycho-bio-social organization may be responsible for the covering over of a rich, profoundly intricate process of change within the assumed frozen space of each part. What could be the basis of my claim that the diverse assortment of embodied models offered by researchers like Gallagher, Varela, Clark, Damasio and Johnson have in common the treatment of the parts of a psychological organization as ossified centers resistant to novelty, considering that the dynamical properties in many of these approaches specifically determine psychological processes as non-representational and non-decoupleable "...variables changing continuously, concurrently and interdependently over quantitative time..."(Van Gelder,1999,p.244)? And what is a 'part' anyway? Interaction Before Identity: Let me begin by suggesting the following thought experiment: What if, rather than an element of meaning (perceptual, conceptual, physiological) being juxtaposed or coinciding with what preceded and conditioned it in the manner of contact between two distinct entities, we were to imagine that the context of a prior event and the presencing of a new event indissociably belonged to the same event? I do not have in mind a simple compacting together of past and present as distinct and separable things, but a way of looking at the relation between a meaning and its background which sees not just the interaction BETWEEN things but the things, entities, parts, bodies THEMSELVES as already kinds of qualitative change, not states but passages, a non-contradictory way of intending beyond what is intended. I want you to entertain the notion that the primordial 'unit' of experience is not a form that is transformed by contact with another entity, not a presence that is changed by a separate encounter with another presence, but an experience already other, more than itself in the very moment of being itself, not a form, presence or shining OCCUPYING space but already a self-exceeding, a transit, a being-otherwise. What I am suggesting is that there are no such things as discrete entities. The irreducible basis of experience is the EVENT (many events can unfold within the supposed space of a single so-called entity). Events do not follow one another in time (or in parallel) as hermetically sealed links of a chain. Each event does not only bear the mark of influence of previous events, but carries them within it even as it transforms them. An event is a synthetic unity, a dynamic structure devoid of simply identity. Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm. It is this presumed schematic internality of eventness, the power of abstractive multiplicity given to the sign, which causes experience to be treated as resistant to its dislocation, as a lingering or resistant form, pattern, configuration, infrastructure. Of the numerous philosophers since Hegel who have attempted to resuce the subject-object scheme-content relation from metaphysical domination (Kierkegaard, Gadmaer, Levinas, Nietzsche), Heidegger and Derrida are among the first to question and dismantle the very possibility of structure-pattern-scheme as subject or object. How so? Let us examine the phenomenon of structure more closely. How is structure composed? What is the structurality of structure? Contemporary philosophical thinking outside of Heidegger and Derrida tends to think the spatial frame of structure as enclosure of co-present elements. It is an internality, full presence, a resting in itself and an auto-affection. Structure would be a pattern framing a finite array of elements . It would be a system of classification, a vector or center of organization. We can think pattern in abstract(the structure of democracy) or concrete( the structure of a house) terms. A structure has properties in the minimal sense that it is defined by its center, that which organizes and, determines it thematically as that which is the bearer of its attributes, that according to which its elements are aligned. Structure is plurality of the identical. If a structure is an organization of elements, those elements themselves are structures. The object is structure in that it is self-presence, its turning back to itself in order to be itself as presence, subsistence, auto-affection, the 'this as itself'. Therefore structure would be irreducible. It would be the primordial basis of beings as objects (point of presence, fixed origin) as internality, space as frame, subsistence, pure auto-affection, representation , category, law, self-presence itself. Also value, will, norm. So much rides on where we begin from in thinking about beginnings. In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure. "Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences."(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352) "The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc p53)." In their essence, Beings don't HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation, (transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not form but difference. Each of the elements in the array that define a structure are differences .They do not belong to a structure . They are their own differentiation. There is no gathering, cobbling , synthesis, relating together, only a repetition of differentiation such that what would have been called a form or structure is a being the same differently from one to the next. Not a simultaneity but a sequence. So one could not say that form of nature is the way in which nature transitions through and places itself into the forms and states that, from a schematic perspective, constitute the path of its movement, and nature turns into natural things, and vice versa. Nature would not transition through forms and states, Nature, as difference itself, transitions though differential transitions. Differences are not forms. Forms are enclosures of elements organized according to a rule. Forms give direction. Difference does not give direction, it only changes direction. What are commonly called forms are a temporally unfolding system of differences with no organizing rule, no temporary 'it'. The transformation is from one differential to the next before one ever gets to a form. Schemes, conceptual, forms, intentions, willings have no actual status other than as empty abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the senses operating within (and defining) such abstractions in subtle but global ways concealed by but overrunning what symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to be. The briefest identification of a so-called state is an unknowing experiencing of temporally unfolding multiplicity of differences. In Being and Time, 'What is a Thing' and other writings, Heidegger describes a structure-thing as the bearer of properties and underlies qualities. A thing is a nucleus around which many changing qualities are grouped, or a bearer upon which the qualities rest, something that possesses something in itself. It has an internal organization. But Heidegger doesn't settle for this present to hand account. In a gesture allied with Derrida, he thinks the structurality of structure as the Being of beings. But he doesn't do this by conceiving Being via the transitioning through and placing itself into, the turning toward and away from, structures, forms, schemes. This would be to pre-suppose the metaphysical concept of structure as present to hand state, and thus leave it unquestioned. Heidegger locates transformation within structure, as Derrida does in his own way. Heidegger's discussion of propositional statements in BT sec 33 is key here. In this section he derives the apophantic 'as' structure of propositional logic from the hermeneutical 'as'. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating. Heidegger instead describes the 'as' as a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together." Transcendence locates itself in this way within the very heart of the theoretical concept. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It "understands, interprets, and articulates", and thereby "takes apart" and changes what it affirms by merely pointing at it, by merely having it happen to 'BE' itself. Heidegger's hermeneutical 'as' functions as Derrida's differential system of signs. Something is something only as differential . Articulation of the 'is' transforms in order to articulate. That is, articulation, hinge, IS the 'in order to'. Thus, the problem of the primordial grounding of the 'is', and the analysis of the logos are the same problem. Heidegger writes: "The "is" here speaks transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that coming-over." "That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other."(Identity and Difference.p.64) This is the method of Heidegger's decentering thinking of the structurality of structure. The thinking of structure as a singularity implies a multiplicity of supposed 'parts' captured in an instant of time. But the assumption that we think this parallel existence of differences at the 'same time', as the 'same space', organized and centered as a 'THIS', must unravel with the knowledge that each differential singular is born of and belongs irreducibly to, even as it is a transformation of, an immediately prior element . Two different elements cannot be presumed to exist at the same time because each single element is its own time(the hinged time of the pairing of a passed event with the presencing of a new event) as a change of place. Thus, whenever we think that we are theorizing two events at the same time, we are unknowingly engaging in a process of temporal enchainment and spatial re-contextualization. The assumption of a spatial frame depends on the ability to return to a previous element without the contaminating effect of time. How can we know that elements of meaning are of the same spatial frame unless each is assumed to refer back to the same 'pre-existing' structure? The same goes for the fixing of a point of presence as a singular object. This pointing to, and fixing of, an itself as itself is a thematic centering that brings with it all the metaphysical implications of the thinking of a structural center. Heidegger's 'as'(which is not a structure in itself but a differential) explains, derives and deconstructs form, structure, thing before it can ever establish itself as a 'this'. The issue here centers on the understanding of the phenomenological experience of time, the philosophical discussion of which has been ongoing since Aristotle. This conversation has recently been joined by a number of psychologists (See Gallagher(1998) , Van Gelder(1996) and Varela(1999b)), who support the idea of the nowness of the present as differentiated within itself. They recognize that the present is not properly understood as an isolated 'now' point; it involves not just the current event but also the prior context framing the new entity. We don't hear sequences of notes in a piece of music as isolated tones but recognize them as elements of an unfolding context. As James(1978) wrote:"...earlier and later are present to each other in an experience that feels either only on condition of feeling both together" ( p.77). The key question is how this 'both together' is to be construed. Is the basis of change within a bodily organization, interpersonal interaction, and even the phenomenal experience of time itself, the function of a collision between a separately constituted context and present entities? Or does my dynamic 'now' consist of a very different form of intentionality, a strange coupling of a past and present already changed by each other, radically interbled or interaffected such that it can no longer be said that they have any separable aspects at all? I contend that, even taking into account a significant diversity of views within the contemporary scene concerning the nature of time-consciousness, including critiques of James' perspective, current psychologies conceive the 'both-together' of the pairing of past and present as a conjunction of separate, adjacent phases or aspects: the past which conditions the present entity or event, and the present object which supplements that past. I am not suggesting that these phases are considered as unrelated, only that they each are presumed to carve out their own temporary identities. (FOOTNOTE:I support Husserl's depiction of experience as an indeterminate intersubjective movement of temporality. However, I agree with the argument, made in different ways by commentators such as such as Gallagher(1998), Derrida(1973), Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, that Husserl's retentional-protentional model of time-consciousnesss slighted the genetic and historical in favor of a transparent present and a historicist time.) For instance, Zahavi(1999), following Husserl, views the internally differentiated structure of 'now' awareness as consisting of a retentional, primal impressional, and protentional phase. While he denies that these phases are "different and separate elements"(p.90), claiming them instead as an immediately given, ecstatic unity, their status as opposing identities is suggested by his depiction of the association between past and present as a fracturing, "... namely, the fracture between Self and Other, between immanence and transcendence"(p.134). This Husserlian thematic, rendering past and present as an indissociable-but-fractured interaction between subject and object, inside and outside, reappears within a varied host of naturalized psychological approaches that link self-affection to an embodied neural organization of reciprocally causal relations among non-decoupleable parts or subprocesses. While these components interact constantly (Varela(1996b) says "...in brain and behavior there is never a stopping or dwelling cognitive state, but only permanent change punctuated by transient [stabilities] underlying a momentary act"(p.291) , it doesn't seem as if one could go so far as to claim that the very SENSE of each participant in a neural organization is intrinsically and immediately dependent on the meanings of the others. I suggest it would be more accurate to claim that each affects and is affected by the others as a temporary homunculus (little man) or self perceives an object. Varela(1999a) offers "...lots of simple agents having simple properties may be brought together, even in a haphazard way, to give rise to what appears to an observer as a purposeful and integrated whole"(p.52 ). The bare existence of each of these agents may be said to PRECEDE its interaction with other agents, in that each agent occupies and inheres in its own state, presenting its own instantaneous properties for a moment, apart from, even as it is considered conjoined to, the context which conditions it and the future which is conditioned by it. Perhaps I am misreading Varela and other enactivist proponents . Am I saying that these contemporary accounts necessarily disagree with Merleau-Ponty's(1968) critique of the idea of the object-in-itself? ...the identity of the thing with itself, that sort of established position of its own, of rest in itself, that plenitude and that positivity that we have recognized in it already exceed the experience, are already a second interpretation of the experience...we arrive at the thing-object, at the In Itself, at the thing identical with itself, only by imposing upon experience an abstract dilemma which experience ignores(p.162). On the contrary, as different as Merleau-Ponty's and various enactivist accounts may be in other respects, it seems to me that they share a rejection of the idea of a constituted subjectivity encountering and representing an independent in-itself. Mark C. Taylor(2001) characterizes the enactivist ethos thusly; "Contrary to popular opinion and many philosophical epistemologies, knowledge does not involve the union or synthesis of an already existing subject and an independent object"( p.208). In a very general sense, what is articulated by Varela, Gallagher and others as the reciprocal, nondecoupleable interconnections within a dynamical system functions for Merleau-Ponty as the 'flesh' of the world; the site of reciprocal intertwining between an In Itself and a For Itself, subject and object, consciousness and the pre-noetic, activity and passivity, the sensible and the sentient, the touching and the touched. My point is that current accounts may also have in common with Merleau-Ponty the belief that subjective context and objective sense reciprocally determine each other as an oppositional relation or communication (Merleau-Ponty calls it an abyss, thickness or chiasm) between discrete contents. "...that difference without contradiction, that divergence between the within and without ... is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication(Merleau-Ponty 1968 ,p.135)." By contrast, I assert that the 'now' structure of an event is not an intertwining relation between contingent, non-decoupleable identities, states, phases, but an odd kind of intersecting implicating perhaps a new understanding of intentionality; intentional object and background context are not adjacent regions(a within and a without) in space or time; they have already been contaminated by each other such that they are inseparably co-implied as a single edge (Try to imagine separating the 'parts' of an edge. Attempting to do so only conjures a new edge). Time itself must be seen in this way as immediately both real and ideal. Events don't speak with their surrounds. They ARE their surrounds; the current context of an event is not a system of relations but an indivisible gesture of passage. (FOOTNOTE: This gesture cannot be reduced to either a subjective mechanism of consciousness or to objective relations between particles. Like the idea of the inter-penetration of fact and value informing phenomenological philosophical perspectives, this is a quasi-transcendental(simultaneously subjective and empirical) claim concerning the irreducible nature of reality and time itself, and operates both as a pre-condition and a re-envisioning of subjective consciousness and empirical bodies.) Gendlin(1997b), in his groundbreaking book 'A Process Model', offers an account of the nature of psychological organization which I consider in many respects closely compatible with my own. He explains: In the old model something (say a particle or a body) exists, defined as filling space and time. Then it also goes through some process. Or it does not. It is defined as "it" regardless of the process "it" goes through. "It" is separate from a system of changes and relationships that are "possible" for "it."(p.50)...'In the old model one assumes that there must first be "it" as one unit, separate from how its effects in turn affect it...In the process we are looking at there is no separate "it," no linear cause-effect sequence with "it" coming before its effects determine what happens. So there is something odd here, about the time sequence. How can "it" be already affected by affecting something, if it did not do the affecting before it is in turn affected?...With the old assumption of fixed units that retain their identity, one assumes a division between it, and its effects on others. (This "it" might be a part, a process, or a difference made.) In the old model it is only later, that the difference made to other units can in turn affect "it."(p.40) If one assumes separate events, processes, or systems, one must then add their co-ordinations as one finds them, as if unexpectedly..."Inter-affecting" and "coordination" are words that bring the old assumption of a simple multiplicity, things that exist as themselves and are only then also related. So we need a phrase that does not make sense in that old way. Let us call the pattern we have been formulating "original inter-affecting". This makes sense only if one grasps that "they" inter-affect each other before they are a they(p.22). Gendlin's account somewhat resembles embodied cognitive and dynamical systems approaches in its rejection of symbolic representationalism and decoupleability, but I believe there are crucial differences. For instance, in current models, interaction spreads in a reciprocally causal fashion from point to point, whereas for Gendlin, each point somehow implies each other point; each part of a meaning organization somehow "knows about", belongs to and depends intrinsically on each other part. And this happens before a part can simply be said to exist in itself(even if just for an instant). What kind of odd understanding concerning the interface between identity and relation could justify Gendlin's insistence that the inter-affection between parts of a psychological organization precedes the existence of individual entities? Allow me to creatively interweave Gendlin's text with my own, and suggest that an 'entity' can never be understood as OCCUPYING a present state, even for a moment. Its very identity is differential not simply because its relevance is defined by its relation to its context (embodied cognitive notions of the subject-object relation), but because the essence of the event IS this intersection. What is other than, more than an event (its just-past) is built into its own center in such a way that the relation between events is never an arbitrary conditioning the way it seems to be allowed to be in current accounts( as I will discuss in more detail later). That is why an event is better conceived as a transit than a state. The most important implication of this way of thinking about the organization of meaning and intention is that the interaction between events can be seen as maintaining a radical continuity and mutual dependency of implication. To say that an event exceeds itself , in the same moment and the same space, as both past and present, is not simply to think the now as immediately a differential between the new and a prior context. It is to envision a new event and the context out of which it arises as BELONGING to, PART OF each other's senses in a radical way, rather than just as externally cobbled together spatially or temporally as a mutual grafting, mapping, mirroring, conditioning between little bodies. This duality within the event is not to be understood as a fracture, opposition or chiasm between an already composed past carried over from previous experience, and an arbitrary element of novelty related to this past across a divide of thickness. As Gendlin(1997b) argues, 'The continuity of time cannot first be made by things next to each other, because such a continuity is passive; each bit IS alone, and must depend on some other continuity to relate it to what is next to it..."(p.71). For instance, fresh intentional experience does not simply sit alongside a prior context; it explicates the immediate past ( Gendlin characterizes this past as an an implicatory whole): ...explication is not a representation of what "was" implicit; rather explication carries the implying with it and carries it forward. An explication does not replace what it explicates. If one divided them, one could try to divide between what is new and what is from before. Then one part of the explication would be representational, and the other part would be arbitrary. An occurring that carries forward is an explicating. It is neither the same nor just different. What is the same cannot be divided from what is different (p.71). What does it mean to say that what is the same can't be divided from what is different? I would like to suggest that the very being of an event of meaning already is composed partly of that which it is not, that which it is no longer. The role which this 'no-longer' plays isn't just as a duplication of 'what it was' . It is a fresh, never before experienced version of my past which forms part of the essence of a new event for me. What do I mean by this? Not only does a fresh event belong to, carry forward, imply the immediate context which it transforms, but this inter-contamination between past and present operates at the same time in the opposite direction. The carried-forward past which, as I have said, inseparably belongs to a new event, is already affected by this fresh present. What does this imply? Gendlin(1997b) explains, "When the past functions to "interpret" the present, the past is changed by so functioning. This needs to be put even more strongly: The past functions not as itself, but as already changed by what it functions in"(p.37 ). It is not as if other accounts do not recognize the transformative character of recollection. It would be pointed out by any psychologist who had digested Merleau-Ponty's lessons concerning reflection that the attempt to return repeatedly to an object of attention in order to preserve its identity hopelessly contaminates the purity of that identity with the sediments of new context. (FOOTNOTE:Mark C. Taylor writes:"Neither complete nor finished, the past is repeatedly recast by a future that can never be anticipated in a present that cannot be fixed. Anticipation re-figures recollection as much as recollection shapes expectation."(The Moment of Complexity,2001,p.198)). My claim is not, however, that the past is partially or eventually affected by the present, but that its modification is globally and immediately implied by present experience. The past is inseparable from the future which is framed by it. Because all meanings are referential, they don't appear out of thin air but from a prior context. On the other hand, the past in its entirety is at the same time implied and transformed in present context. There is no past available to us to retrieve as an archive of presumably temporarily or partially preserved events of meaning. As we will see, this view may run counter to current approaches according to which habitual pre-noetic bodily, linguistic and cultural schemas are presumed to shape experiential processes("...the body in its habitual schemas retains a [pre-noetic] past....that helps to define the present"(Gallagher,1997,p.144)), and thus to constrain and structure the experience of novelty, without themselves being immediately and globally refashioned in accord with the self-changing direction of intentional movement. The Literal is Metaphoric: To this point it may strike readers that the argument being made amounts to a quibble. Even if it were to be accepted as correct, what of theoretical and practical advantage is gained over dynamical, embodied approaches by reworking the relationship between an element and its context in the way I am suggesting? How does this amount to more than a shuffling around of dimensional concepts? It is important to understand that it is not just dimensional slots that are being questioned here but the central characteristics of what are considered entities (conceptual, bodily, interpersonal), their alleged power to arbitrarily and polarizingly condition each other as well as, paradoxically, to resist the advent of novelty. To criticize a system in continuous inter-relational motion for resisting novelty, merely because it is depicted as interactions among innumerable, dumb bits which may only exist for an instant of time, may seem to be a spurious accusation to make. But as I hope to show, this seemingly insignificant property of stasis built into these dumb bits of a dynamical, embodied and embedded ecological system expresses itself at a macro level as homunculi-like schemes, assemblies and narratives (sensory-motor, emotive, perceptual, conceptual and interpersonal) whose creative interplay and thematic consistency may be restricted by the presumption of a distinction between their existence and interaction.(Varela(1991) describes these bits as "...a whole army of neurallike, simple, unintelligent components, which, when appropriately connected, have interesting global properties. These global properties embody and express the cognitive capacities being sought" (p.87). A prime example of what I mean when I allege that a separation between the existence and interaction of components of such systems polarizes their functioning can be found in the way that current embodied approaches attempt to explain the mechanism of conceptual metaphor. For instance, Lakoff and Johnson(1999) , in their effort to overturn the older view of metaphor as a secondary and inferior linguistic form in comparison with literal meaning, depict metaphor as a rich and indispensable component of abstract conceptualization. FOOTNOTE:For related models, see Glucksberg and Keysar's(1990) attributive categorization approach, Gentner's(Gentner, D., Bowdle, B., Wolff, P., & Boronat, C. (2001)) structure mapping model, and Lakoff' and Johnson's(1980) conceptual metaphor theory. Briefly , a metaphor is a correlation between conceptual domains, projecting patterns from the source domain onto the target domain. Neurologically, metaphor originates in a conflation between domains, a simultaneous activation of neural schemes in both the source and target. Johnson insists that metaphors are not formal structures, but embodied and situational. The cognitive domains, or "frames," out of which metaphors are formed "are not fixed structures or images, but rather dynamic patterns of our interactions within various evolving environments" (Johnson,1997, p.156). Even if frames are not permanently fixed schemes, they do have the ability to conserve their structure over time. It is this conservative power that allows frames to define, contain, mirror, map onto, apply to and correlate with particular new experiences. "Conceptual metaphorical mappings appear to preserve image-schematic structure, and , in so doing, they map spatial inference patterns onto abstract inference patterns"(p.156). Lakoff and Johnson(1999) explain: Abstract concepts have two parts:1) an inherent, literal, non-metaphorical skeleton, which is simply not rich enough to serve as a full-fledged concept; and 2) a collection of stable, conventional metaphorical extensions that flesh out the conceptual skeleton in a variety of ways (often inconsistently with one another)(p.128). In general, central senses of words are arbitrary; non-central senses are motivated but rarely predictable. Since there are many more non-central senses than central senses of words, there is more motivation in a language than arbitrariness(p.465). While Lakoff-Johnson believe everyday thought is largely metaphorical, they don't accept that all meanings are metaphorical ("...all basic sensorimotor concepts are literal"(p.58)). We can extract the following points from Lakoff-Johnson's model: 1)Metaphors are not discrete concepts themselves but correlations between two pre-existing conceptual domains. 2)Metaphors preserve the structure of the source domains that they borrow from. 3) Metaphors enrich a concept's non-central senses with motivated meaning, but a concept's central senses are arbitrary. 4)Not all concepts are metaphorical. We can trace the logic of these points back to the belief, maintained in different ways across a diversity of psychological perspectives, that a concept has an 'inherent, literal, non-metaphorical skeleton'. As Lakoff and Johnson affirm, an entity which inheres as its own state is arbitrary at its core, and can relate to another meaning only in a separate move. Metaphor considered in this way is not an intrinsic property of concepts, but a secondary function that may or may not apply to a particular concept. And when it does apply, metaphor doesn't so much transcend the semantic gap between concepts as co-opt it by grafting meaning comparisons and mirrorings onto originally arbitrary, pre-existing conceptual cores. To re-think the notion of an intrinsic conceptual state as the differential structure of transit I have delineated in this paper is to change and enlarge the role of metaphor(and to re-define intentionality) in important ways. I have argued that an event(whether conceived as conceptual or bodily-physiological) is itself, at one time and in one gesture, the interbleeding between a prior context(source) and novel content(target). Gendlin(1995) says, in such a crossing of source and target, "each functions as already cross-affected by the other. Each is determined by, and also determines the other(p.555)". Thus, the weak and ambivalent integrative function accomplished by Lakoff and Johnson's model of metaphor as a correlation between conceptual domains may conceal a more fundamental integration working WITHIN and BEYOND so-called concepts. By this reckoning, all events are metaphorical in themselves, as a mutual inter-affecting of source and target escaping the binary of representation and arbitrariness. Gendlin(1997a) explains, Contrary to a long history, I have argued that a metaphor does not consist of two situations, a "source domain" and a "target domain". There is only one situation, the one in which the word is now used. What the word brings from elsewhere is not a situation; rather it brings a use-family, a great many situations. To understand an ordinary word, its use-family must cross with the present situation. This crossing has been noticed only in odd uses which are called "metaphors"...all word-use requires this metaphorical crossing(p.169). Let's spell out the larger implications of this argument. All events of intentional meaning in-themselves accomplish the powerful integrative function that has traditionally been attributed to metaphoric relations between concepts, not by grafting or mapping one pre-existing state onto another but by bringing the outside inside as the intimate self-transfiguration that is an event's gesture.By contrast, current embodied psychologies appear to maintain an opposition between inside and outside, subject and object, context and novelty, which not even the operation of metaphor (or other narrative structures) can overcome. The integrative potential of conceptual-linguistic consciousness is limited from the outset by the presumption of an irreducibly arbitrary, literal core within entities. Of course, one could argue that, whether or not Lakoff-Johnson's model explicitly indicates it, dynamical embodiment approaches imply that there could be never such a thing as a 'strictly' literal meaning, since a conceptual element only conveys meaning though non-decoupleable, differential relations with other elements in a process with no permanent or transcendent center of origin. As Mark Taylor(2001) explains "Each symbol within these networks is a node in a web of relations. Indeed, a symbol is nothing other than the intersection of relations knotted in nodes"(p.211). In this sense a kind of quasi-metaphoricity already obtains for so-called literal concepts. However, I have hypothesized that for current approaches this relation between a concept and its wider context is conceived as a conjoining of discrete contents, thereby preserving the primacy of a literal core at the heart of this quasi-metaphorical intersecting. Consciousness As Its Own Exceeding: How might my claim concerning the intrinsic metaphoricity of intentional consciousness help to shed new light on the wider realms of interactions within which intentionality is embedded, encompassing such processes as the unconscious, bodily affectivities, and interpersonal interactions? Not surprisingly, contemporary approaches seem to view these wider interactive functions shaping intentionality in the same disjunctive terms that they apply to linguistic processes . Gallagher(1998) writes:'There are many pre-noetic [outside of awareness] limitations on intentionality: the effects of the unconscious, embodiment, language, historical traditions, political and social structures, and so on"(p.160). He refers to these as "...happenings that go beyond intentional experience and yet condition that very experience"(p.160). Descriptions from blindsight(See footnote on blindsight), split-brain, perceptual priming, hypnosis and other dissociative studies have been employed to lend support to this idea of a partial independence among processes which are otherwise claimed to be thoroughly interactive. As was the case with metaphor, what is at stake in all these examples is the question of whether what is presumed to come at intentionality from an 'outside' in the form of semi-arbitrary conditionings, (whether that outside is located as the quasi-metaphoric graftings between conceptual states, the unconscious, the body, or the interpersonal world) is not better understood as arising out of hitherto undiscovered resources concealed within so-called intention itself. Rather than originating in an invasive, displacing outside, I suggest that psychological processes seemingly unavailable to explicit consciousness are nevertheless implied by and belong to it (and vice-versa), not in the sense of a content that arbitrarily contributes to awareness in the manner of interactions between partially independent regions, but as an integral bodily background intrinsic to, but not directly articulated in, each moment of awareness. In this view, the 'hidden hand' of the unconscious, the body and culture conditions awareness not as a separate outside, but rather exceeds conscious control from within each experienced event, as the hidden hand of integral background context (intra-noetic rather than pre-noetic) See footnote on driving a car .Gendlin(2000) puts it this way; "The puzzle about the body knowing our decisions before we consciously know them might make us miss the fact that there is an inwardly experienced body, and that the reflective and bodily-sentient person is much wider than conscious control"(p.110). While it is easy to identify a present experience in terms of what appears fresh and unique about it, to superficially disassociate its function and sense from a concurrent environment of activity, it is much more difficult to detect the often exceedingly subtle way in which what appears as a break from its context is always partly composed of a modified version of that outside and carries that defining coloration and thematics within itself via its metaphoric structure. This is why "...there can be no division between awareness and events that could supposely happen without it"(Gendlin,2004,p.146).(Contrast this view with Neisser's(2006) model of unconscious subjectivity). The influence of language, culture, memory and biological inheritance don't operate behind the back of consciousness but are carried forward with it as an intricate implicatory whole; in each moment this inheritance insinuates itself into but (this is very important) is simultaneously and indissociably re-contextualized by its participation within and as the present event (thus it is always a new variation of this inheritance which participates in the event). An experienced event carries forward, knows and modifies one's entire history, leaving nothing of the original behind. The way that each aspect of psychological functioning (including what would be called intentional, bodily-sensate and intersubjective processes) implicates and belongs inextricably to each other part, generates a dynamic network of intersections of intersections, metaphors of metaphors, guaranteeing that the person as a whole always functions as an implicatory unity at the very edge of experience. Consciousness, body and world intersect in this single gesture, co-implicating continuity and qualitative transformation in such a way that intentional experience maintains a unity which recognizes itself, at every moment, the 'same differently'. Simply in struggling to write a single line of text on a page, such as what I've written here, I find myself experiencing in oh so subtle a fashion a whole universe of moods, thoughts, sensations , distractions that intervene to interrupt the supposed thematic continuity of the writing. This I do in a shifting of attention in myriad ways from what is on a page to what is not and everything in between; in a transit from awareness of conceptualization to sensation to recollection to emotion to action to dreaming, when I seemingly lose my train of thought and, succumbing to creative fatigue, find myself observing visual textures of my surroundings, listening distractedly to ambient sounds, noting the touch of cool air blowing on my skin from a fan. But how is this bouncing from mode to mode of awareness to be understood? Gallagher(1998), echoing sentiments of other enactive cognitive researchers, understands linguistic consciousness to be organized into separated fragments of schematized linear narratives which jostle, interrupt and transform each other via parallel interactions. He says that rather than simply being an "orderly successive flow" under conscious control, consciousness is a "hodgepodge of multiple serialities that often disrupt one another"(p.194). I suggest it is not quite either of the two. The apparent interruptedness and randomness of the multitude of apprehensions intervening in the attempt to read the words you see on this page is not the haphazard competing, clashing or inter-conditioning among schematically organized narrative meanings. It is rather an integral temporal continuation of the already self-transforming thread which constitutes the wandering thematics of my thesis. To be distracted from the narrative text at hand is not to break with the peculiarly integral nature of moment to moment experience, whose continuity is not that of an 'orderly successive flow ' if such an order is understood as logical derivations of an already composed scheme. It is instead a carrying-forward which re-invents its direction, sense and past every moment, beyond conscious control, without rending the intimate fabric of its anticipative continuity. Thought has the feel of at the same time a completion and a thorough qualitative alteration not just of what immediately preceded it, but of my entire history. My most precious and defining superordinate concerns, including my core sense of myself in relation to my past and to others, my ethical and spiritual beliefs, are implied, carried into and through (as always an absolutely new version of them!) all situations and activities, an ongoing silent background which participates implicitly in (and is simultaneously completely, if subtly, reinvented by) the meaning of even my most trivial experiences. Simply to repeat a word, mark, gesture, object of sense 'identically' is to generate both a new sense of itself and a new philosophy of the world, of myself, in some way (installing non-propositional reflectivity and interpretation at the very heart of so-called pre-reflective self and inter-self-awareness). (FOOTNOTE: See Gallagher(2005)Phenomenological Approaches to Self-consciousness, for a sympathetic review of the concept of pre-reflective self-awareness in psychology and philosophy.) The otherness of culture intervenes in each supposed repetition of the `same' word, and this comes from within that event's own resources as simultaneously empirical(introducing novelty) and subjective(carrying forward my history), embodied and embedded before any conditioning by a 'separate' outside, whether that outside be formulated as mind, body or world. No activity, no matter how apparently trivial, redundant or solipsistic, fails to redefine in some small but complete way my most global perspective of myself, leaving nothing left over of a would-be original pre-noetic past to schematically control the present from behind and outside of it. FOOTNOTE ON BLINDSIGHT: Laura Chivers writes 'Blindsight is seen clinically as a contrast between a lack of declarative knowledge about a stimulus and a high rate of correct answers to questions about the stimulus . People suffering from blindsight claim to see nothing, and are therefore unable to reach spontaneously for stimuli, cannot decide whether or not stimuli are present, and do not know what objects look like. In this sense, they are blind. However, they are able to give correct answers when asked to decide between given alternatives. Studies done with subjects who exhibit blindsight have shown that they are able to guess reliably only about certain features of stimuli having to do with motion, location and direction of stimuli. They are also able to discriminate simple forms, and can shape their hands in a way appropriate to grasping the object when asked to try. Some may show color discrimination as well . Subjects also show visual capacities, including reflexes (e.g. the pupil reacts to changes in light), implicit reactions and voluntary responses. People suffering from blindsight are not "blind" because their eyes do not function. Rather they suffer from cortical blindness. People suffering from cortical blindness receive sensory information but do not process it correctly, usually due to damage in some part of the brain. The damage in blindsight patients has been shown to be in the striate cortex, which is part of the visual cortex. The striate cortex is often called the primary visual cortex , and is thought to be the primary locus of visual processing . Destruction or disconnection of the striate cortex produces a scotoma, or a region of blindness, in the part of the visual field that maps to the damaged area of the cortex . Depending on the extent of the lesion, vision can be absent in anywhere between a very small section of stimulus field and the entire field . The person is unable to process the sensory input to the striate cortex, and does not recognize having seen the object. ' Cognitive theorists conclude from clinical examples of blindsight that consciousness is only a part of what goes on in the brain, and that consciousness is not needed for behavior. To argue that blindsightedness is not an example of unconscious processing (experience occuring in parallel with, but independent of conscious awareness) requires a new and different sensitivity to content of experience, and to the understanding of awareness. If there is no 'feeling of seeing' in blindsightedness, as is claimed, then there is feeling of a different sort, a quality of meaning that is overlooked by contemporary approaches to cognition and affect because of its subtlety. Familiarization with Gendlin's focusing techniques is one way to develop sensitivity to what for most is a world they have never articulated. This is the important point; phenomena such as blindsightedness evince not unconscious but inarticulate experience. One would need , of course, to analyze the aspects of the experience in blindsightedness. One has before one a task involving an intention to see, which implies the involvement of a certain concept of vision that the perceiver expects to encounter. If the claim for blindsightedness were simply that this experience involves a different aspect of what is involved in seeing than one normally expects of a visual situation, (for instance, if one expects contrast, color, perspective, one gets instead a vague or incipient meaning that is not recognizable as seeing even though it in fact is normally part of all visual experiences), then I would be in agreement. If, however, the claim is that whatever meaning or information is prompting the blindsighted behavior is independent of the conscious experience(conscious and unconscious events as independent, parallel meanings), then I disagree. My claim is that the experience mistakenly called blindsight is an incipient or intuitive feel that is consciously, intentionally-metaphorically continuous with the ongoing flow of awareness. Blindsightedness is not an illustration of the partial independence of psychological subsystems, but of the fact that the most primordial 'unit' of awareness is something other than , and more subtle, than either contentful cognitive or empty affective identities. Just because something is not articulated does not mean that it is not fully experienced. The nature of the experience in blindsightedness would not be unlike the way that the 'same' object that one observes over the course of a few seconds or minutes continues to be the 'same' differently even though it is typically reported to be self-identical over that interval. A changing sense of a thing is not noticed until it becomes an intense affect, and then it is ossified as an abstract 'state'. From the perspective of awareness, cognitivism seems to order experiences hierarchically, privileging what is considered conceptual content over affectivity by virtue of its supposed repeatability, and valuing both of these over other events that are labeled unconscious because they are assumed to be devoid of any conscious content. Blindsight involves a barely discernable shift of sense in an ongoing experience of regularity. There would be not only blindsight, but deaf-hearing, numb-tactility and non-conceptual conceptuality. The test of consciousness of a thing:'Can one see that thing emerging from a field of perceived sameness?' is wrongheaded because it doesn't recognize that the field of supposed sameness is already a movement of changing meanings. The conscious-unconscious binary should be re-configured as a spectrum of meaningfulness). My Norms Are Not Your Norms: Once the radically self-transformational, already fully 'social' character of so-called solitary self-reflection is recognized, it becomes clear that my experiences of direct interaction with other persons are but (categorically indistinct) extensions of this primary intersubjectivity. Thus, just as in my private experience, in interacting with others in the world I do not rely on detached internal schemes, in the form of a canned 'folk psychology'(Dennett) or theory of mind (Baron-Cohen), in order to make the actions of others intelligible to me. Instead, interpersonal understanding, like solitary reflection, is an on-the-fly, non-autonomous, contextually created process. A number of cognitive researchers( Bruner, Gallagher, Ratcliffe, etc) may claim that their own critiques of folk psychology and theory of mind approaches, guided by their advocacy of socially embedded models of psychological processes, demonstrate their having moved beyond the essentialistic tendencies I have cited in this paper . Gallagher writes:" a set of cultural norms is learned through practice such that these become second nature. By this means common expectations that are meant to apply to all, equally, are established. By learning how I ought to behave in such and such a circumstance, I learn how you ought to behave as well. And this supplies a ready guide to your behavior in so far as you do not behave abnormally. Such learning does not take the form of internalizing explicit rules (at least not as a set of theoretical propositions), nor does it depend on applying ones that are somehow built-in sub-personally. It involves becoming accustomed to local norms, coming to embody them, as it were, through habit and practice. " Ratcliffe(2007) suggests that "many thoughts, interpretations and viewpoints ...belong to nobody in particular and are shared products of interaction"(Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation, Palgrave Macmillan, p..175). In furtherance of this thinking of shared products of interaction, Gallagher embraces a notion of socially distributed cognition. " What my initial individual intention might have been can change through this communicative process into an intention that is not reducible to just my or your individual intention. There's no problem here of speaking about a collectively formed intention. But we can ask, "where" does a collectively formed intention reside? In our individual minds? Or in what can be called a socially extended mind, or institution (Gallagher 2013), or what Alessandro Duranti (2015) calls a socially distributed cognition (Duranti 2015: 219). Such institutions go beyond individual cognitive processes or habits: they include communicative practices, and more established institutions include rituals and traditions that generate actions, preserve memories, solve problems. These are distributed processes supported by artifacts, tools, technologies, environments, institutional structures, etc."(The Narrative Sense of Others 2017 p467-473). Notice that the claim by Gallagher and others that individual behavior in social situations is guided by narrative norms, reciprocities, shared practices and social constraints implies the belief that essentially the same social signs are available to all who interrelate within a particular community, that there are such things as non-person-specific meanings, originating in an impersonal expressive agency . This is not to say that these accounts deny any role to individual psychological history in the reception of social signs, only that such accounts allow for a sort of cobbling , mapping, mirroring or co-ordination between personal history and cultural signs in which the 'joints' of such interactive bodily-mental and social practices are treated as pre-metaphorical objects-in-themselves. That social interaction for these writers depends on a grafting of one content onto another is suggested by the argument(Gallagher and Hutto(in press), Ratcliffe(2007), Gopnick and Mettzoff(1997)) that linguistic-cultural intersubjectivity is derived from a more primary intersubjectivity , an innately structured 'intermodal tie' between one's proprioceptive bodily feedback and one's perception of another that is supposedly direct and unmediated. Gallagher cites mirror neuron studies in support of the view that "we innately map the visually perceived motions of others onto our own kinesthetic sensations"(Gopnick and Metzoff ,1997,p.129). I maintain that what is implicated for me in an interpersonal social situation is not `the' social forms as shared homunculi, based on what Gallagher calls a 'common body intentionality' between perceived and perceiver, but aspects hidden within these so-called forms which one could say are unique to the implicative thrust of my own construing, belonging to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity. For even the most apparently trivial cultural routine (getting on a plane, ordering in a restaurant), what I perceive as socially `permitted', 'constrained', 'regulated' or 'normed' behavior and understanding of signs is already qualitatively distinctive in relation to what other participants recognize. Each individual who feels belonging to an extent in a larger ethico-political collectivity perceives that collectivity's functions in a unique, but peculiarly coherent way relative to their own history(which is itself reshaped by its participation in these situations) , even when they believe that their interpersonal interactions are guided by the constraints imposed by essentially the `same' discursive conventions as the others in their language community. I'm aware that this resistance of my thinking to would-be interpersonal norms risks being misread as a retreat from a model of full social embeddedness into a person-centered solipsistic essentialism of rule-based mental modules. In fact, Gallagher misconstrues Heidegger's Beinginthe world, which I embrace as an ally in the deconstruction of embodied intersubjectivity, as a deficient pragmatic formalization depriving one of a direct exposure to the world. Gallagher argues that the perception-based relationships of primary intersubjectivity are more direct than the 'pragmatic contexts' of what he understands as 'secondary intersubjectivity' that determine meaning for Heidegger. "Trevarthan's developmental concept of secondary intersubjectivity was already foreshadowed by the phenomenological analyses of Heidegger (1968) and Gurwitsch (1931), and these are analyses that have also been taken up by Dreyfus. Understanding the meaning of something is dependent on pragmatic contexts. Aron Gurwitsch, following Heidegger's analysis of equipment and circumspective engagement with the surrounding environment, and the larger action contexts of human existence, indicates that our understanding of the other's expressive movements depends on meaningful instrumental/pragmatic contexts. Things and situations provide scaffolds for understanding the actions of others and in those pragmatic contexts we see and come to learn and imitate what they do. For both Heidegger and Gurwitsch, our encounters with others are primarily through these pragmatic contexts. In effect, they overlook the effects of primary intersubjectivity which give us a more direct, perception-based relationship with others. Accordingly, they give priority to the pragmatic as a basis for the social other people appear with meaning only on the basis of pragmatic contexts. As Gurwitsch puts it, 'we continuously encounter fellow human beings in a determined horizon. â |' (1931, p. 36). 'In these horizonal situations the "co-included" others appear. That they come to light in this situation, and are not "near by" or "merely beside" it, signifies that they appear as belonging to the situation in their specific roles and functions' (p. 97). Here Gurwitsch suggests that our understanding of others is from the beginning framed in terms of the roles that they play in relation to our projects. 'But it is always a matter of a person in his role. Understanding is yielded here by virtue of the situation and is, therefore, limited to what is inherent in it' (p. 114). For Trevarthan, and for several phenomenologists (other than Heidegger and Gurwitsch), however, secondary intersubjectivity is dependent upon the development of primary intersubjectivity. Primary intersubjectivity characterizes infancy but continues to be primary in terms of how we interact with others. We perceive the intentions of others their meaning in the embodied expression of movements, gestures, facial expression, and so forth. These primary intersubjective processes are based on what Merleau-Ponty (1962) calls intercorporeality a natural interaction of bodies that generates meaning in so far as we see the intentions of others in their expressive movements. I live in the facial expressions of the other, as I feel him living in mine â |(Merleau-Ponty, 2003, p. 218). The very first of all cultural objects, and the one by which all the rest exist, is the body of the other person as the vehicle of a form of behavior (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 348). Primary and secondary intersubjectivities together give us access to a shared world, and allow us to enter into its meaning in a pragmatic way. Insofar as I have sensory functions â | I am already in communication with others â |. No sooner has my gaze fallen upon a living body in the process of acting than the objects surrounding it immediately take on a fresh layer of significance (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 353)." (Gallagher:Moral Agency, Self-Consciousness, and Practical Wisdom). When Gallagher reads Heidegger saying that Dasein is Being-with even if there are no others in the world, he sees this as a solipsism, because Gallagher's intersubjective model is a relating of bodies, understood as auto-affecting self-presences. Heidegger and Derrida locate a dehiscience within auto-affection, dividing the concept of body before it can simply be itself as identity. An identity is already a 'difference from itself' , Being as Being-with, and so is the origin of the social , before other bodies. At the same time this self-dehiscience is a 'belongingness to what it differs from'. What Gallagher sees as direct personal contact in the form of primary intersubjectivity is, on a certain reading of Heidegger, the product of a derived abstraction subsisting in the cobbling of identities. Eugene Gendlin's re-envisioning of the body as radical interaffecting, thinking along with Heidegger's Being-with, locates the genesis of meaning-making as always beyond the reach of normative socially distributed narrative processes. "We can speak freshly because our bodily situation is always different and much more intricate than the cultural generalities. A situation is a bodily happening, not just generalities. Language doesn't consist just of standard sayings. Language is part of the human body's implying of behaviour possibilities. Our own situation always consists of more intricate implyings. Our situation implies much more than the cultural kinds. The usual view is mistaken, that the individual can do no more than choose among the cultural scenarios, or add mere nuances. The 'nuances' are not mere details. Since what is culturally appropriate has only a general meaning, it is the so-called 'nuances' that tell us what we really want to know. They indicate what the standard saying really means here, this time, from this person. Speech coming directly from implicit understanding is trans-cultural. Every individual incorporates but far transcends culture, as becomes evident from direct reference. Thinking is both individual and social. The current theory of a one-way determination by society is too simple. The relation is much more complex. Individuals do require channels of information, public discourses, instruments and machines, economic support, and associations for action. The individual must also find ways to relate to the public attitudes so as to be neither captured nor isolated. In all these ways the individual is highly controlled. Nevertheless, individual thinking constantly exceeds society." For Heidegger, Derrida, Gendlin and myself, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal 'I' or interpersonal 'we', there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings. The Meaning of Feeling: How can I more precisely convey the nature of this process, this world of integrally and holistically interaffecting texturizations which I say operates from within and exceeds what have been assumed as the irreducible units of bio-psycho-social meanings? I believe it is not possible to adequately grasp its dynamics without coming to terms with its central character as 'felt' or affective. What do I mean here by feeling? The notion I have in mind involves bringing together in a new way traditional understandings of thought and affect. I am certainly not alone in advocating a view of affect and cognition as inseparable processes. While more traditional approaches in philosophy and psychology treated affective phenomena as at best peripheral to, and typically disruptive of, rational processes, embodied cognitive theories such as those of Panksepp(1998), Damasio(2000), Varela(1999b), Johnson(1993), Ratcliffe(2002), Colombetti and Thompson(2006) and Ellis(1995), take pains to present emotion and thought as an indissociable interaction. According to current accounts, cognitive and affective processes are closely interdependent, with affect, emotion and sensation functioning in multiple ways and at multiple levels to situate or attune the context of our conceptual dealings with the world . According to the newer thinking, affective tonality is never absent from cognition. As Ratcliffe(2002) puts it, "moods are no longer a subjective window-dressing on privileged theoretical perspectives but a background that constitutes the sense of all intentionalities, whether theoretical or practical"(p.290). In affecting reason, feeling affects itself. I am in agreement with these sentiments, as far as they go. However, I am prevented from enlisting the aid of these ideas in support of my own position by my suspicion that the supposed inseparable relation between reason and affect functions for these writers as a polarity between cognitive states and affective activations, analogously to the treatment of the operations of metaphor I discussed earlier in this paper. In other words, I am fearful that their conceptualization of the role of affect may uphold the very idea of homucular identity that my notion of feeling is meant to undermine, thereby acting as a monumental obstacle to grasping a more radical account of affectivity. In any case, the weight of entrenched suppositions burdening the topic of feeling must be lifted in order to illuminate the delicate terrain I am aiming at. It is therefore crucial that I address commonalities among these accounts before I can mark out a route from their thinking to mine. Let me begin with Francisco Varela's characterization of affect. Varela(1999b) suggests that affective dynamics initiate gestalt shifts in thought and action. Unlike older views, for Varela intentionality is not assumed to rely on an outside mechanism in order to stir itself into motion. Nevertheless, cognition still relies on such intervention in order to significantly change its direction of movement. The general understanding Varela indicates of the relation between affective movement and the thinking which it affects seems to depend on the idea of emotion as the change of a temporarily persisting stance (scheme, state, dispositional attitude). Conceptual narratives are assumed to have a self-perpetuating schematic tendency about them, requiring outside intervention from time to time to produce qualitative change. The processes within a living system, including psychological functions, cannot be counted on to be intrinsically transformational in a way that is optimally adaptive, but must be channelized into changes in direction of action and conceptualization by extrinsic motivating sources. We find a similar account of the role of emotion in Ratcliffe's(2002) synthesis of Heidegger and neurophysiology. Ratcliffe says emotion and embodiment are "'incorporated as essential components in cognition", but emotion and cognition are clearly not identical; "...emotions and moods are not explicitly cognitive but neither are they independent of cognition"(p.299). They originate as bodily sensations structuring cognition from outside of it. Emotion and cognition can 'conflict' and emotion can "override cognitive judgement"(p.299). Ratcliffe cites Ramachandran's clinical observations of individuals with anosognosia, who apparently distort environmental information which contradicts an internally generated narrative. Ramachandran and Ratcliffe attribute this behavior to damage to connections between emotion and cognitive centers. Ratcliffe concludes from this that, in typically functioning persons, emotion signals from the body are presumed to pack a contentful punch large enough to break through a psychological narrative's resistances where weaker percepts from the environment cannot. It seems, then, that for Ratcliffe and Varela, intention is a capacity for manipulating objects of thought, but emotion, as valuative valence, provides the criteria for such processing. They are apparenty not able to find the resources strictly within what they think of as intentional thought to de-center thinking processes, because they treat cognition as tending to form temporarily self-perpetuating narratives which can distort or keep out contradictory input from the world. So they rely on the body, in the form of emotion cues, to come to the rescue and bring the stalled cognitive apparatus back in touch with a dynamically changing world. The mechanism of emotion is assumed to intervene in order to infuse a stagnant narrative with a new direction and meaning. (FOOTNOTE:For Ratcliffe emotions selectively organize cognition not just by prompting the interruption of a current narrative, but also by facilitating the assimilation of new events into an ongoing context. Ratcliffe(2002) cites Ramachandran's account of individuals with Capgras syndrome as evidence that affect can serve to inform the cognitive system that a previously experienced object is similar or identical to a current one.) Ratcliffe(2002) asserts: "Without emotional responses, one is not uprooted from a coherent interpretations of events..."(p.306). Although these emotion cues are claimed to be inseparably linked with conceptual processes, this linkage amounts to more of a concatenation between pre-existing states than a more radical indissociability. This may be due to the belief that feeling originates developmentally within the individual independently from cognition, as action readiness circuits that, Panksepp(1998) claims, are "completely biological and affective but..., through innumerable sensory-perceptual interactions with our environments, [become] inextricably mixed with learning and world events"(p.303). For all their differences, I claim that Ratcliffe and Varela share with other contemporary accounts of affect and emotion what I call the 'adaptationist' presumption that meaning is shaped in a semi-arbitrary way by inputs which come to influence it from a pre-existing outside. The same assumption determining the structuration of metaphoric intentionality, the relation between consciousness and the unconscious, and even narrative intersubjectivity as arbitrary mapping, mirroring or conditioning functions between literal, schematic states, guides the relation between affect and perception-conception. Damasio(2000) puts it this way: "...as a result of powerful learning mechanisms such as conditioning, emotions of all shades eventually help connect homeostatic regulation and survival values to numerous events and objects in our autobiographical experience"(p.54). According to this thinking, physiological processes of feeling adapt and co-ordinate with a partially independent cogitative environment, authorizing adaptationism as a causal explanation of origins. Viewed as an adaptation, emotion is linked to a milieu outside of itself (cognition) and with which the logic of the bond is indirect, partially arbitrary in the sense that it is capable of being made irrational, as is supposedly the case with nonadaptive mutations. There is a partial independence assumed between the participant aspects of reciprocally adaptive interactions. The cobbling can be uncobbled unilaterally. Emotion can aid reason, but can also be dysfunctional. Damasio(2000) summarizes: Emotions are curious adaptations that are part and parcel of the machinery with which organisms regulate survival. In short, for certain classes of clearly dangerous or clearly valuable stimuli in the internal or external environment, evolution has assembled a matching answer in the form of emotion"(p.54). In sum, with regard to affectivity, Ratcliffe, Varela, Panksepp and Damasio appear to treat as reified content what could be better understood as transformative process. Hypostasizing and abstracting the intricate movement of experiencing into emotion `signals' and self-perpetuating narratives, relating to each other in quasi-arbitrary brain-body interactions, misses the internal integrity of meaning processes. An emotion viewed as a schematic signal or cue originating outside of cognition can only be presumed to significantly modify and structure cognitive meaning if one profoundly under-appreciates a more primary mobility structuring (and exceeding) so-called cognitive control from within itself. Specifically, what confirms and reinforces a thinking also always alters the direction and sense of that thinking in a subtle but global way. So-called symbolic processes find their meaning reshaped well before any exposure to a separate bodily, conceptual or interpersonal outside. By the same token, what would be considered transformational or disturbing to a particular way of thinking could only have sense relative to the orientation of that thinking itself; any modifications of thinking would have to emerge out of the resources of that thinking in a way that preserved an always ongoing integrity and implicatory self-consistency in the movement of experience. What disturbs a perspective belongs to it; the disturbance is born intimately from it. In intending, I am not simply being directed toward 'objects', in the sense of revisiting something that was already there. Experiences don't come at me, they unfold from me and into each other as both a carrying forward of an intentional thematic and a subtle, but global, re-defining of me(and them). I believe what is needed is a model of recursivity uniting self-referential continuity and absolute alterity, the so-called pre-reflective and the reflective, in the same structure, the same moment. Not a model which looks for the impetus for subversive novelty in supposed effects which are grafted onto and condition states of meaning from outside of them, but as the very core of an event. Let us, then, venture the following definition of affect, applying to such terms as emotion, feeling and desire as well: Every experienced event of any kind (perceptual, conceptual, bodily-sensory) is an affect, and every affect is a change in affect. If every event of meaning is an advent of qualitative novelty, then cognition is affective not simply in the sense that a background affective tonality, mood or attunement frames the activity as a whole, as "a kind of cradle within which cognition rests"(Ratcliffe,2002,p.296), but in that each moment of engagement is an inseparable interbleeding between the continuation (not as a duplicative representation but as an already modified version) of a prior context of attunement or thematics, and a change in that atunement. This implies a rejection of two long-standing assumptions supporting the depiction of affect and cognition as distinct states. Contrary to these assumptions: 1) Intentional experience does not need to be pushed or pulled into action, or change of direction, by extrinsic (pre-noetic) forces. Every moment of experience is already intrinsically affective (self-displacing), assuring that even the most apparently non-emotive, 'rational', reflective type of awareness, such as supposedly characterizes affectively neutral empirical accounts, qualitatively, intuitively, hedonically transforms the meaning of what it references. Feelings belong to, operate within, carry forward, and transform what are called conceptual meanings even before any specific experience of bodily activitation. This qualitatively transformative effect in moment to moment experience is often subtle enough to go unnoticed, explaining the apparent analytical stability and inter-subjective objectivity attributed to empirical phenomena, the allegedly self-perpetuating coherence of linguistic narratives, and even the illusion of a stable ongoing pre-reflective self-awareness. 2) 'Raw' affect is an intrinsically (non-representational, non-propositional) reflective intentionality. So-called bodily sensations of feeling not only manifest the characteristics of metaphoricity and narrative consistency traditionally associated with conceptual thought, but in fact are not categorically distinguishable from what has been called conceptual meaning in any stable way. Let me elaborate on my first assertion. What do I mean by my claim that what has been called symbolic, rational thought is inherently qualitatively transformational? What finer, more mobile process may be obscured by current notions of linguistic reasoning? Penetrating the veil of the homuncular permeating our language of the things within us and around us is not a matter of discovering smaller, faster, dumber, more interactive 'bits' within the units of current approaches, for that would simply displace the issues we've discussed onto a miniaturized scale. It is a matter of revealing perhaps an entirely different notion of the basis of entities than that of the freeze-frame state. This is where a finely-tuned detection of feeling-in-thought becomes crucial. Many researchers may agree that, even apart from the specific contribution of the body as they understand it, intentional entities have a qualitative 'feel' in the sense of representing a meaning which is in some measure unique to the individual('the feeling of what it is like'). It is widely understood today (see Putnam(1990)) that objective fact and subjective valuation are inseparably intertwined such that an inter-subjective, third person science can never entirely eliminate interpretive gaps in communication. I am trying to convey a different way of understanding the 'feel' of things than this idea of a supposedly 'pre-reflective' self-awareness of qualitative meaning. What I have in mind is a notion of feeling which combines and redetermines current understandings of thought, affect and expression. Prior to any notion of cognition and affect as distinguishable constructs, this idea of feeling as event has its entire effect exhausted in its being just barely more than itself, as just the most insignificant and gentle whiff, feel, tinge of novelty. Within and beyond such terms as cognitive states and bodily affective signs, lies a universe of barely self-exceeding accents, modulations, aspects, variations, ways of working. Not variations or modulations of STATES but modulations of modulations. (FOOTNOTE: This should not be confused with Husserl's perspectival variations in the perception of an object . It is not just in 'deliberately' reflecting upon or changing position with respect to perceptual entities that we modify their content; I suggest that even a certain phenomenological notion of pre-reflective perceptual self-awareness may amount to an abstraction derived from, but blind to, an intricate fabric of contingent reflective change WITHIN the space of a so-called perceptual aspect.) The subpersonal, personal and interpersonal worlds generated from (but never overtaking) this intricate process may be clumsily described via the 'homuncular' terminology of patterned interactions between discrete parts, but at the cost of missing the profound ongoing internal relatedness and immediacy of this underlying, overflowing movement. Count from one to ten and discover how the intent and meaning of this supposed repetition of identical increments shifts in very subtle ways as soon as you begin . Look at the period at the end of this sentence. Notice how the feel, the sense of it (and you) changes immediately and constantly as you continue to gaze as it for a few moments. Can you sense-feel this 'it' undergoing change not as a series of different freeze frame states ('what it is') but as self-exceedings of self-exceedings('how it changes'), trans-formations without form? Even the most momentary identification of a so-called state conceals a whole journey of feeling transformations, colorations, hedonic tonalities, remaking each moment my entire past (bodily, linguistic, cultural) along with my whole sense of myself. Yet we name this auto-multiplication 'a' sign . In doing so are we painting a whole vicinity of varying affective textures with one brush? No, the brush itself is experienced implicitly AS this multiplicity even when we are not explicitly aware that we are accessing more than a uniform state. It is precisely the way that a name, a sign continues to be the same differently (meaning that what IT is, and who WE are, is utterly and completely transformed, but in the most exquisitely subtle way, moment to moment, and WITHIN a single instantaneous moment) in our experience of it that allows us to see a name, sign, concept, percept as an apparent unity across these changes, and to communicate it to someone else the same differently as further developments of it, and they to receive the information from us the same differently as even further self-variations, and share it interpersonally, empirically, 'objectively', the same differently (I suggest that the precision of science, as well as the illusion of a constant, pre-reflective self-awareness, rests on this mobile continuity within, between and beyond so-called signs). To overtly RECOGNIZE what had traditionally been assumed as a unity as this ever-developing multiplicity is not to go from stasis to motion but to FURTHER ENRICH an already ongoing process. Now my second point may become clearer . I asserted that affect is an intrinsically (non-propositional) reflective, quasi-thematically unfolding intentionality. My depiction of the little 'I' implied by a concept as an illusionary effect of an intricate texturizing sequence of affective variations of variations, metaphors of metaphors, gently reinventing itself and me (and undermining, from within itself, the alleged constancy of 'pre-reflective' self-awareness) moment to moment the same differently, establishes a gentle tapestry of feeling transformations as the hidden basis of what have been called concepts, BEFORE the participation of specific bodily sensation. And when an evolving situation brings into play the experience of bodily affects, such activations don't add any special capacities of hedonic-aesthetic feeling not already involved in the utterly contextual structuration of thought from the start. What so-called specific bodily sensation contributes is a meaningful quasi-thematic elaboration of the already richly felt, globally self-transforming, fully embodied-embedded unfolding of intentional experience. If feeling, understood this new way, IS the very core of so-called conceptual and perceptual thought, merging narrative-thematic consistency and global self-transformation, the pre-noetic and the noetic, in the same gesture, then the presumed partial independence of rationality and affect vanishes, and the distinction re-emerges as aspects inherent in each event. The interaffecting of context and novelty which defines an event simultaneously produces a fresh, particular modulation of change (empirical aspect) and a unique momentum (hedonic component) of self-transformation. From this vantage, the valuative, hedonic (the perceived goodness or badness of things), aesthetic aspect of experience, underlying 'non-emotional' appraisals as well as our sadnesses, fears and joys, simply IS our vicissitudes of momentum of sense-making through new situations, rather than arising from the content of special objects. Affective valences are contractions and expansions, coherences and incoherences, accelerations and regressions, consonances and dissonances, expressing how effectively we are able to anticipate and relate to, and thus how densely, richly, intensely we are able to move through, new experience. If we can believe that a unique qualitative moment of momentum, ranging from the confused paralysis of unintelligibility to the exhilaration of dense transformative movement, is intrinsic to ALL events, then perhaps there is no need to attribute the origin of aesthetic pleasures and pains to the functioning of a limited class of entities like bodily affects, even if it is understandable why this kind of assumption has survived for so long in psychology . (FOOTNOTE:Damasio(1996) writes: We came to life with a preorganized mechanism to give us the experiences of pain and of pleasure. Culture and individual history may change the threshold at which it begins to be triggered, or its intensity, or provide us with means to dampen it. But the essential device is a given(p.264). While I agree with Damasio that the capacity for physical and emotional sensation is certainly dependent upon the existence of particular physiological structures, I suggest that the actual functioning of pain and pleasure is not the production of any sort of pre-existing device or content, but is instead the purely contextual expression of the rhythms of momentum of organismic experiencing.) From the standpoint of verbal expressivity, what has traditionally been called emotion often appears to be a minimalist art, because it is the situational momentum of experiencing slowing or accelerating so rapidly that feelings seem to distill meaning down to a bare inarticulate essence. When the momentum of our reflective thought shifts in such dramatic ways (acceleratively enriched in joyful comprehension, impoverished in grief, ambivalent in fear, alternately disappointed and confident in anger), such so-called emotional events may appear to be a species apart from conceptual reason, a blind intuitive force (surge, glow, twinge, sensation, arousal, energy) invading, conditioning and structuring perceptual and conceptual thought from without as a background field. It is said that such 'raw' or primitive feeling is bodily-physiological, pre-reflective and non-conceptual, contentless hedonic valuation, innate, passive, something we are overcome by. At other times, situational change may be intermediate, just modulated and gradual enough that content seems to perpetuate itself in self-cohering narratives. Such situations have been called rational, voluntary, factual, reflective, stable, conceptual, non-aesthetic. However, as I have said, these dichotomies: hedonic versus reflective, voluntary versus involuntary, conceptual versus pre-reflective bodily-affective, are not effectively understood as interacting states of being; they are relative variations in the momentum of a contextually unfolding process which is always, at the same time, within the same event, intentional-reflective and intuitive-affective. Am I suggesting that emotion be thought as a 'cognitive' appraisal, cut off from bodily sensation, movement and expression? On the contrary, it is precisely the treatment of cognition, bodily sensation and expression as separately pre-existing processes(even when treated as mutually structuring each other via 'intentional-affective' syntheses) which I am questioning.The point isn't that bodily responses to experience via such avenues as the endocrine, autonomic nervous system and the motor pathways are irrelevant or peripheral to the intentional experience of emotion, but that, whether we talking about the experience of so-called conceptual appraisal or bodily sensation, the phenomenological scene of emotion(or any other aspect of bio-psycho-social functioning) does not depend on an arbitrary concatenation or mutual conditioning between discrete components. Prinz(2004), Colombetti and Thompson(2006), Damasio(1999) and others deny such a thing as a totally disembodied emotion, arguing that the feeling of emotion is affected in degrees concordantly with the severity of damage to avenues of connection with the body. I support their larger claim that experiential processes, including what are called cognitive and affective, function as radically, contextually inter-relational. However, I want to turn their views around a bit. Feeling does not depend on the fact that the brain, as a spatial locale and repository of temporary states of content, always has some access to the body, as a separate locale with semi-independent contents. I have said that feeling functions from within so-called reflective thought, and that bodily affect is intentional. But if both the former and latter are true , it is not because body sensation structures cognition(or vice-versa). Rather, it is because these stratifying abstractions are but inadequately formulated moments of a process of sense-making uniting the hedonic and the intentional prior to any distinction between, or intertwining of, mind and body. Before I could speak of the occurrence of emotion as mental appraisals structured and conditioned by a background field of physiological energetics and behavioral expressions, I would have to re-figure all of these modes, what would be referred to as the "motoric", the "sensate", the "cognitive", as unstable metaphorical figures emerging contextually out of each other over the course of an indissociably reflective-affective global movement of experience which would imply the unraveling of the basis of categorical distinctions currently orienting the understanding of these terms. When I am frightened, whether I focus on my attitude toward the world, my rapid heartbeat, my facial expression or bodily preparation for action, each of these aspects emerge out of each other as a fully reflective, metaphoric carrying forward and further transforming of the deepening implications of this tentative, confused situation. All these aspects already belong to, and in fact have their meaning ENTIRELY defined as variations-continuations of the thematic unfolding of my sense of the emerging threat, subtly remaking my entire past while always maintaining a sense, no matter how surprising, unpredictable or disturbing a new present appears, of implicatory belonging to this prior history. Intermingled with my wandering in and out of significant shifts in experiential momentum, from doubts, terrors, and confusions to later confidences and contentments, will be more subtly self-transforming moments whose continual intuitive shifts of meaning, purpose and affective momentum are hidden so effectively that it may fool me into believing that this more plodding progress of comprhension represents the appearance of a different species from that of pronounced feeling, the realm of affectively neutral (or constant) cognitive states. However, such entities as narrative schemes and conceptual forms may in fact have no actual status other than as empty abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the hedonically felt senses operating within (and defining) such abstractions in subtle but global ways. Feeling, the event, the interbleeding of subject and object, transformation without form: all of these terms reference the same irreducible 'unit' of experience, concealed by but overrunning what symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to do. A 'single' sign (whether so-called conceptual or bodily-affective) is already a panoply of intimately changing variations and momenta of felt meanings, in(as) the instant it is accessed, infusing the allegedly conceptual with feeling (and the sensate with intentionality) from within its very core, embodied before any consultation with a separate bodily 'outside'. Conclusion: In conclusion, I suppose the coherence of this paper's claims concerning metaphor, the relation between consciousness and the unconscious, the basis of interpersonal understanding, cognition and emotion ultimately hinges on the reader's detection of what I have inadequately described here as a world of integrally and globally inter-affecting textures of felt sense-making hidden within, and functioning beyond, what have been assumed as the irreducible units of bio-psycho-social meaning. FOOTNOTE: Gendlin(1991) has named this more-than-conceptual realm 'the implicit intricacy'. An interesting difference in our approaches is that, according to Gendlin, concepts and this wider experiential intricacy depend on each other. I suggest, instead, that what are called concepts are but an illusory effect of the more fundamental process of experiencing. Leaving aside many other questions left unanswered by my very preliminary sketch, I anticipate that resistance on the part of readers to entertaining the possibility of a fine realm of experience alleging itself to be both more intrinsically self-transformative and implicatively self-consistent than current views allow for will be tied less to its transformative impetus than its integrative aspect. That is, the claim for the sort of intricate order I have been making cannot fail to arouse the suspicion that, despite my protestations, a closet irealism, idealism or subjectivism must be operating behind the scenes to justify the radically implicative internal belonging I have emphasized for this perspective. To the anticipated charge of essentialism I can only answer that, from my vantage, it is current psychologies which appear burdened with the weight of an idealism: their belief in temporary discrete states stifles the intimately interactive potential of their embodied, embedded approaches, by making the whole works dependent on irreducible units of formal resistance and polarization. Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential process. (FOOTNOTE:The focus of this article being psychological texts, I have made little mention of philosophers in the phenomenological tradition such as Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger, whose writing has been increasingly appreciated as anticipating recent trends in psychological theorizing. The case can also be made that the post-structuralist philosophies of Lyotard, Derrida and Deleuze have strong resonances with the overarching aims of current psychologies(See Gallagher(1997),(1998), Lyotard(1991)). Gendlin's (1985), (1991) critiques of many of these philosophers supports my contention that none of these authors are immune to the homuncular critique I present in this paper.) References Clark, A. (1997). Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again. MIT Press: Cambridge. Colombetti, G. and Thompson, E. (2007). The Feeling Body: Toward an Enactive Approach to Emotion . In Developmental Perspectives on Embodiment and Consciousness, W.F. Overton, U. Miller, & J. Newman(Eds).New York:Lawrence Erlbaum. Damasio, A. (1994). Descartes' Error .New York:Avon. Damasio, A. (2000). The Feeling of What Happens:Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness. London:Vintage. Derrida, J.(1973). Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans.D.B. Allison. Evanston:Northwestern University Press. Ellis, R. (1995). Questioning Consciousness:The Interplay of Imagery, Cognition and Emotion in the Human Brain .Amsterdam & Philadelphia:John Benjamins. Gallagher,S.(1997).On the pre-noetic reality of time. In M.Dillon (Ed.). Ecart and differance:Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on Seeing and Writing(pp.134-48).Altantic Highlands:Humanities Press. Gallagher,S. (1998). The Inordinance of Time.Evanston,Il:Northwestern University Press. Gallagher, S. (2005).How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford: Clarendon. Press. Gallagher, S. and Zahavi, D. (2005). Phenomenological approaches to self-consciousness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Gallagher, S. and Hutto, D. (in press). Understanding others through primary interaction and narrative practice. In: J. Zlatev, T. Racine, C. Sinha and E. Itkonen (eds). The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gendlin, E.T. (1985). Nonlogical Moves and Nature Metaphors. In A.T. Tymiecka(ed.)Analecta Husserliana, XIX,383-400. D.Reidel. Gendlin, E.T. (1991). Thinking beyond patterns:Body, language and situations, In B.DenOuden & M.Moen (Eds), The Presence of Feeling in Thought.New York:Peter Lang. Gendlin, E.T. (1995). Crossing and Dipping: Some Terms for Approaching the Interface between Natural Understanding and Logical Formulation. Mind and Machines, 5, pp.547-60. Gendlin, E.T. (1997a).Reply to Johnson. In D.M. Levin(ed.) Language Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin's Philosophy. Evanston.Il: Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Gendlin, E.T. (1997b). A Process Model. 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Prinz, J.J.(2004).Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford:Oxford University Press. Putnam, Hilary (1990). Realism With A Human Face. Cambridge:Harvard University Press. Ratcliffe, M. (2002). Heidegger's attunement and the neuropsychology of emotion. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.1:pp.287-312. Ratcliffe, M.(2007). Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation, Palgrave Macmillan. Solomon, R. (1977). The Passions New York;Anchor. Taylor, Mark C. (2001). The Moment of Complexity .Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Van Gelder, T. (1996). Wooden Iron? Husserlian Phenomenology Meets Cognitive Science.Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science. Ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud, Jean-Michel Roy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Van Gelder, T.(1999). Dynamic approaches to cognition, In R. Wilson & F. Keil ed., The MIT Encyclopedia of Cognitive Sciences ( pp.244-6). Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Varela, F., Thompson, E. and Rosch,E.(1991). The Embodied Mind:Cognitive Science and Human Experience . Cambridge MA:MIT Press. Varela, F. (1999a). Ethical Knowhow:Action, Wisdom, and Cognition.Trans. Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Junior University. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press. Varela, F. (1999b). The specious present;a neurophenomenology of time consciousness.Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, Ed. Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela, Bernard Pachoud, Jean-Michel Roy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Zahavi, D.(1999). Self-Awareness and Alterity:A Phenomenological Investigation. Evanston,Il:Northwestern University Press. FOOTNOTE ON DRIVING A CAR: What takes place during absent-minded driving? What is the `good thing' if there is any, about what cognitivists characterize as automatic, unconscious or unattended to actions? What is the proper analogy to be used here? First of all, we have to understand that each freshly experienced event already addresses the entirely of what came before it in the sense that the meaning of any individual awareness is nothing but the qualitative modification of what immediately preceded it in awareness. (And even speaking of something being `IN' awareness gives the wrong impression, since sensing is not a place or region alongside other regions). This being the case, an action, thought, perception carries forward and knows one's entire history. Motor behaviors associated with driving belong to the same text as thoughts seemingly having nothing to do with the act of driving when operating a car. Whether one seemingly interrupts one's daydreaming in order to focus on one's movements at the wheel or to attend to the visual scene of road and signs up ahead, or has no memory of having paid attention to those movements or visual scene, in either case the movements and visual scene further the daydreaming and vice-versa. Cognitive theories of unconscious, automatic gestures in driving, or seeming absence of conscious awareness of the visual scene one has just driven through, rely on the notion of a schema whose meaning is a independent of whatever it is one is claiming to be attending to. In other words, if one aspect of mentation is apparently not concerning itself with the schematic processing of kinesthetic-motor aspects of driving, then another aspect of mentation is doing the job independently of the first. But what we need to understand is that the meaning of the visuo-spatial landscape in front of us, or motor schema that appears to us to be out of conscious awareness as we drive absent-mindedly, even though we obviously must have processed the details of the road at some level, is not at all processed independently of what we remember attending to. The meaning of the landscape and one's movements BECOME whatever one is daydreaming about. That is to say, they further, elaborate the day-dream , but in a form that makes it difficult for us to tease these task-related aspects of the situation apart from the absent-minded day-dreaming activity. These visual, kinesthetic and sensory-motor events that seem hidden to us in absent-mindedness are the continuance of, belong to the conceptual, reflective, recollective thought of the day-dreaming mode of attention, and vice-versa. When one performs a so-called well learned activity, such as rollerblading, typing or driving, it seems as though one pares down the repertoire of consciously selected choreography, that one telegraphs a whole complex of movements (which initially needed to be performed effortfully, consciously, sequentially) via a highly condensed set of intended patterns. But one need not think of these intended patterns as meta-commands, that is, as elegant scaffolding covering a complex suborganization of invisible, automated motor skills. The `well' learned' skill isn't enjoyable because of something supposedly behind or under it, but because of what it is in itself, namely, a fluid and rich unfolding of self-referential change. Generally, when one says that one has `paid attention to the driving' on one occasion and not another, he is really saying that he has paid attention to additional features of the visual scene, or his own movements, beyond that necessary for a direct contribution to the driving itself. If one crashes as a result of daydreaming while driving, it is not necessary to conclude that this indicates a dis-coordination between a prior schematic constraint and one's cognitive processes. An accident does not represent a failure of coordination between two temporally co-present systems or realities. The actions we think of as automatic and unconscious when we perform a well-learn task like driving a car are in fact NOT unavailable to explicit conscious attention. Like the example of blindsight, they represent a kind of TRANSFORMED awareness, wherein we only conclude that our performance has been guided by unseen processes of thought because we are looking for the sorts of separated, labored actions that characterized our behaviors when we were first learning to master the driving of a car. But the well-learned behaviors implicated in so-called 'automatic' driving are explicit awarenesses whose meaning is now oriented around, and imbedded within, the parts of a scene we have more obvious awareness of as we drive(the scenery, what's on the radio, our thoughts about work, conversation with passengers). To say that these well-learned actions are embedded within current awareness is not to imply that they are hidden. Rather, they are SUBTLE aspects of our experience that are easily missed. There are many, many behaviors like these which belong to our explicit attention which we don't recognize as such. As I wrote about blindsight, if there is no 'feeling of attention' to the movements involved in well-learned driving, as is claimed, then there is feeling of a different sort, a quality of meaning that is overlooked by contemporary approaches to cognition and affect because of its subtlety. Familiarization with Gendlin's focusing techniques is one way to develop sensitivity to what for most is a world they have never articulated. This is the important point; phenomena such as the actions of well-learned driving evince not unconscious but inarticulate experience. One would need , of course, to analyze the aspects of the experience in driving. When a person is asked to recall their awareness of actions in driving, they have before them a task involving the expectation of a certain concept of kinesthetic experience. If the claim for the unconsciousness of driving were simply that this experience involves a different aspect of what is involved in experiencing one's movements than one normally expects of such a situation, (for instance, if I expect to identify the flexing of muscle groups and the feedback from the steering wheel and pedals on my skin and joints, I have to settle instead for an incipient meaning that would not be recognizable as kinesthetic feedback, but rather serves as a metaphoric elaboration of whatever I AM focusing on while driving), then I would be in agreement. If, however, the claim is that whatever actions are guiding the behavior of driving is independent of the conscious experience(conscious and unconscious events as independent, parallel meanings), then I disagree. My claim is that the experience mistakenly called unconscious driving is an incipient or intuitive feel that is consciously, intentionally-metaphorically continuous with the ongoing flow of awareness. Well-learned drving is not an illustration of the partial independence of psychological subsystems, but of the fact that the most primordial 'unit' of awareness is something other than , and more subtle, than either contentful cognitive or empty affective identities. Just because something is not articulated does not mean that it is not fully experienced. Return to index ____________________________________________________________________________ Heidegger, Derrida and Gendlin on Structure, Form and State. As a subject constructs and organizes an object via a valuative account, the object is conditioned by this subjective activity. But if that were the end of it, we would not move past Kant's conditions of possibility. The subject must in turn be reciprocally conditioned by the object. The object grounded by the subject and the subject grounded by the object is a non-grounded grounding, or more precisely, an activity of reciprocal transformation. Philosophers in the post Hegel era, from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, have recognized that Being, if it is to overcome metaphysics, must take into account, imply, differentiate from, structural beings while not being a structure itself. Heidegger was committed to forging a path of thinking integrating, without succumbing to, the dominant philosophical traditions of the 20th century(dialectical and Neo-Kantian subjectivism and positivist empiricism). Heidegger laid the groundwork for this path in Being and Time. Being distinguishes itself as the unity of the mutual carrying out and trans-formative nature of beings-being. BT's challenge was to formulate the Ontological-Ontic Difference in such a way as to avoid rendering Being as grounding condition of possibility for beings, as unconditioned master concept, a first principle. Via the ontological difference, "Being grounds beings, and beings, as what IS most of all, account for Being. One comes over the other, one arrives in the other. Overwhelming and arrival appear in each other" (Heidegger, Identity and Difference). With the era initiated by the Kehre, Heidegger further developed a way to think the overcoming of the self-contradiction of a grounding concept that seeks to overcome objectification. Ereignis performs the unity of the difference between Being and Beings as differentiating event. If Heideggerian Being takes into account, implies, differentiates from, structural beings while not being a structure itself, what does it mean for beings to 'have a structure'? Words like rote and mechanical depict the effects of structure as generator of process of repetition of a dominating theme. And this is what many scholars target in Heidegger's critique of technology and Gestell. But what is a structure in and of itself, prior to and outside of its production-reproduction? What is the meaning of structure as momentary state, before it is thought as programmatic process, as conversion, formulaic self-unfolding? Writers endorsing a general account of meaning as non-recuperable or non-coincidental from one instantiation to the next may nonetheless treat the heterogeneous contacts between instants of experience as transformations of fleeting forms, states, logics, structures, outlines, surfaces, presences, organizations, patterns, procedures, frames, standpoints. When thought as pattern, the structural-transcendental moment of eventness upholds a certain logic of internal relation; the elements of the configuration mutually signify each other and the structure presents itself as a fleeting identity, a gathered field. The particularity of eventness is not allowed to split the presumed (temporary) identity of the internal configuration that defines the structure as structure. History would be the endless reframing of a frame, the infinite shifting from paradigm to paradigm. It is this presumed schematic internality of eventness, the power of abstractive multiplicity given to the sign, which causes experience to be treated as resistant to its dislocation, as a lingering or resistant form, pattern, configuration, infrastructure. Of the numerous philosophers since Hegel who have attempted to resuce the subject-object scheme-content relation from metaphysical domination(Kierkegaard, Gadmaer, Levinas, Nietzsche), Heidegger and Derrida are the first to question and dismantle the very possibility of structure-pattern-scheme as subject or object. How so? Let us examine the phenomenon of structure more closely. How is structure composed? What is the structurality of structure? Contemporary philosophical thinking outside of Heidegger and Derrida tends to think the spatial frame of structure as enclosure of co-present elements. It is an internality, full presence, a resting in itself and an auto-affection. Structure would be a pattern framing a finite array of elements . It would be a system of classification, a vector or center of organization. We can think pattern in abstract(the structure of democracy) or concrete( the structure of a house) terms. A structure has properties in the minimal sense that it is defined by its center, that which organizes and, determines it thematically as that which is the bearer of its attributes, that according to which its elements are aligned. Structure is plurality of the identical. If a structure is an organization of elements, those elements themselves are structures. The object is structure in that it is self-presence, its turning back to itself in order to be itself as presence, subsistence, auto-affection, the 'this as itself'. Therefore structure would be irreducible. It would be the primordial basis of beings as objects (point of presence, fixed origin) as internality, space as frame, subsistence, pure auto-affection, representation , category, law, self-presence itself. Also value, will, norm. So much rides on where we begin from in thinking about beginnings. In various writings Derrida deconstructs the notion of structure. He argues that structure implies center, and at the center, transformation of elements is forbidden. But he says in fact there is no center, just the desire for center. If there is no center, there is no such singular thing as structure, only the decentering thinking of the structurality of structure. "Henceforth, it was necessary to begin thinking that there was no center, that the center could not be thought in the form of a present-being, that the center had no natural site, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This was the moment when language invaded the universal problematic, the moment when, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word-that is to say, a system in which the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences."(Sign, Structure and Play, Writing and Difference p352) "The iterability of an element divides its own identity a priori, even without taking into account that this identity can only determine or delimit itself through differential relations to other elements and hence that it bears the mark of this difference. It is because this iterability is differential, within each individual "element" as well as between "elements", because it splits each element while constituting it, because it marks it with an articulatory break, that the remainder, although indispensable, is never that of a full or fulfilling presence; it is a differential structure escaping the logic of presence..(Limited Inc p53)." In their essence, Beings don't HAVE structure or constitution. There is no such THING as a form, a structure, a state. There is no trans-formation but rather a trans-differentiation, (transformation without form, articulation as dislocation) What is being transcended is not form but difference. Each of the elements in the array that define a structure are differences .They do not belong to a structure . They are their own differentiation. There is no gathering, cobbling , synthesis, relating together, only a repetition of differentiation such that what would have been called a form or structure is a being the same differently from one to the next. Not a simultaneity but a sequence. So one could not say that form of nature is the way in which nature transitions through and places itself into the forms and states that, from a schematic perspective, constitute the path of its movement, and nature turns into natural things, and vice versa. Nature would not transition through forms and states, Nature, as difference itself, transitions though differential transitions. Differences are not forms. Forms are enclosures of elements organized according to a rule. Forms give direction. Difference does not give direction, it only changes direction. What are commonly called forms are a temporally unfolding system of differences with no organizing rule, no temporary 'it'. The transformation is from one differential to the next before one ever gets to a form. Schemes, conceptual, forms, intentions, willings have no actual status other than as empty ontic abstractions invoked by individuals who nevertheless, in their actual use of these terms, immediately and unknowingly transform the senses operating within (and defining) such abstractions in subtle but global ways concealed by but overrunning what ontically understood symbols, bits, assemblies, bodies, frames and other states are supposed to be , even if (and especially when) Ereignis as transformative event names the overturning of being as Ge-stell. The briefest identification of a so-called state is an unknowing experiencing of temporally unfolding multiplicity of differences. This is the ontological being of the ontic notion of structure, in the service of which Heidegger puts the old word to work as its deconstruction. In Heidegger's fundamental ontological 'forms' one finds nothing like a structure in any commonly understood sense, only what would be difference as the hermeneutical 'as', heedful association, 'being underway', producing, project, existing, care, the 'is', temporality, disclosiveness. In BT, 'What is a Thing' and other writings, Heidegger describes a structure-thing as the bearer of properties and underlies qualities. A thing is a nucleus around which many changing qualities are grouped, or a bearer upon which the qualities rest, something that possesses something in itself. It has an internal organization. But Heidegger doesn't settle for this present to hand account. In a gesture allied with Derrida, he thinks the structurality of structure as the Being of beings. But he doesn't do this by conceiving Being via the transitioning through and placing itself into, the turning toward and away from, structures, forms, schemes. This would be to pre-suppose the metaphysical concept of structure as present to hand state, and thus leave it unquestioned. It would not only leave it unquestioned , but confuse ontological-ontic difference with ontic-ontic difference. What I see Heidegger doing is locating transformation within structure, as Derrida does in his own way. Heidegger's discussion of propositional statements in BT sec 33 is key here. In this section he derives the apophantic 'as' structure of propositional logic from the hermeneutical 'as'. As an "ontologically insufficient interpretation of the logos", what the mode of interpretation of propositional statement doesn't understand about itself is that thinking of itself as external 'relating' makes the propositional 'is' an inert synthesis, and conceals its ontological basis as attuned, relevant taking of 'something AS something'. In accordance with this affected-affecting care structure, something is understood WITH REGARD TO something else. This means that it is taken together with it, but not in the manner of a synthesizing relating. Heidegger instead describes the 'as' as a "confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, [and] at the same time takes apart what has been put together." Transcendence locates itself in this way within the very heart of the theoretical concept. Simply determining something AS something is a transforming-performing. It "understands, interprets, and articulates", and thereby "takes apart" and changes what it affirms by merely pointing at it, by merely having it happen to 'BE' itself. Heidegger's hermeneutical 'as' functions as Derrida's differential system of signs. Something is something only as differential . Articulation of the 'is' transforms in order to articulate. That is, articulation, hinge, IS the 'in order to'. Thus, the problem of the primordial grounding of the 'is', and the analysis of the logos are the same problem. Heidegger writes: "...if the formal characteristics of "relation" and "binding" cannot contribute anything phenomenally to the factual structural analysis of the logos, the phenomenon intended with the term copula finally has nothing to do with bond and binding."(BT,p160) "The "is" here speaks transitively, in transition. Being here becomes present in the manner of a transition to beings. But Being does not leave its own place and go over to beings, as though beings were first without Being and could be approached by Being subsequently. Being transits (that), comes unconcealingly over (that) which arrives as something of itself unconcealed only by that coming-over." "That differentiation alone grants and holds apart the "between," in which the overwhelming and the arrival are held toward one another, are borne away from and toward each other."(Identity and Difference.p.64) This is the method of Heidegger's decentering thinking of the structurality of structure. The thinking of structure as a singularity implies a multiplicity of supposed 'parts' captured in an instant of time. But the assumption that we think this parallel existence of differences at the 'same time', as the 'same space', organized and centered as a 'THIS', must unravel with the knowledge that each differential singular is born of and belongs irreducibly to, even as it is a transformation of, an immediately prior element . Two different elements cannot be presumed to exist at the same time because each single element is its own time(the hinged time of the pairing of a passed event with the presencing of a new event) as a change of place. Thus, whenever we think that we are theorizing two events at the same time, we are unknowingly engaging in a process of temporal enchainment and spatial recontextualization. The assumption of a spatial frame depends on the ability to return to a previous element without the contaminating effect of time. How can we know that elements of meaning are of the same spatial frame unless each is assumed to refer back to the same 'pre-existing' structure? The same goes for the fixing of a point of presence as a singular object. This pointing to, and fixing of, an itself as itself is a thematic centering that brings with it all the metaphysical implications of the thinking of a structural center. Heidegger's 'as'(which is not a structure in itself but a differential) explains, derives and deconstructs form, structure, thing before it can ever establish itself as a 'this'. The issue here centers on the understanding of Heideggerian temporality. Is there a notion of transformation, transcendence, differentiation, event , performance that doesn't 'take time' but also avoids being a state, concept, intention, presence, structure? Is it possible to think of such a notion without inadvertently lapsing into metaphysical totalization? To fail to deconstruct the concept of structure is to conceive the 'both-together' of past-present-future as a conjunction of separate, adjacent phases or aspects: the past which conditions the present entity or event, and the present object which supplements that past. It is not that these phases are considered as unrelated, only that they each must are presumed to carve out their own temporary identities in order to arrive at a notion of stricture-pattern-scheme as an identity. The association between past and present would be a fracturing, the fracture between Self and Other, between immanence and transcendence, rather than Heidegger's ecstatic unity. Ontological-Ontic difference is misread as difference between presences. As the overcoming-arriving difference of Heideggerian temporality, it is difference WITHIN presence. Temporality as a 'split' within will, intention, presence is misread if it is thought as smaller bits of presence. Penetrating the veil of the formal permeating our language of the things within us and around us is not a matter of discovering smaller, faster, dumber, more interactive 'bits' within the unities of current approaches, for that would simply displace the issues we've discussed onto a miniaturized scale. It is a matter of revealing perhaps an entirely different notion of the basis of entities than that of the freeze-frame state. Being is not an interiority or enclosure(or in between enclosure and overcoming as the event of their differentiation). On the contrary, it exposes and subverts the presumed interiority of conceptuality, representation, will from within its own resources, in the same moment. To read Being and Time starting from the 'is', not as conceptual binding but as the transit of 'overwhelming and arrival', de-thrones logos, structure, concept and representation, relegating them to where and how we actually find them in BT, as special derived modifications of the hermeneutical 'as'. How are we to do we understand Heidegger's admonitions concerning the dangers of Gestell? What does one make of those who have not read Heidegger, who have not grasped what he was aiming at, who battle against what they see as the dangerous 'antiscience' relativisms of postmodern thinking, who contribute to the universal objectification of being? As Heidegger points out in Identity and Difference, "the manner in which the matter of thinking-Being-comports itself, remains a unique state of affairs. The inauthentic modes of the ready-to-hand, the present-to-hand, average everydayness, authentic Being, Ereignis all mark different factical experiences. Yet what is common to all possible modes of Being is a certain radical mobility. This means that there is, every moment , within the thinking of each individual who participates in the most apparently rigidly schematic orientations, a radical mobility WITHIN the will to conceptual schematism* that is easy to miss (and in fact has been missed for most of Western history , according to Heidegger). Even if the effect of this mobility is subtle enough that it appears for all intents and purposes as though the reign of the dominating objectivizing scheme were absolute, it is crucial to recognize that even in such situations that seem to exemplify the a priori neutralization of otherness, a more originary but radically self-dissimulating a priori, that of Being, is in play, always right now, this instant. Within and beyond states, forms and structures, lies a universe of barely self-exceeding accents, modulations, aspects, variations, ways of working. Not variations or modulations of STATES but modulations of modulations. The worlds generated from (but never overtaking) this intricate process may be clumsily described via the terminology of patterned interactions between states, but at the cost of missing the profound ongoing internal relatedness and immediacy of this underlying, overflowing movement. Heidegger reveals Being as an interface both more intrinsically self-transformative and implicatively self-consistent than current views allow for. The belief in temporary discrete states stifles the intimately interactive potential of their approaches by making the whole works dependent on irreducible units of formal resistance and polarization. Rather than originating in an invasive, displacing outside. of interactions between partially independent regions, the 'isness' of Being is already articulated as intersections of intersections, metaphors of metaphors(as metaphoricity itself), guaranteeing that the person as a whole always functions as an implicatory unity at the very edge of experience. Before there is self or world , there would be this single-split gesture, co-implicating continuity and qualitative transformation in such a way that existing maintains a unity which recognizes itself, at every moment, the 'same differently'. Aspects hidden within so-called present forms and structures, unique to the implicative thrust of my own existing, belong to me in a fashion that exceeds my own calculative grasp even as it transcends strictly shared social normativity. On the contrary, the radically inseparable interaffecting between my history and new experience exposes me to the world in an immediate, constant and thoroughgoing manner, producing every moment a global reshaping of my sense of myself and others outpacing the transformative impetus realized via a narrative conception of socialization. I am not arguing that the meaning of social cues is simply person-specific rather than located intersubjectively as an impersonal expressive agency. Before there is a pre-reflective personal 'I' or interpersonal 'we', there is already within what would be considered THE person a fully social site of simultaneously subjective-objective process overtaking attempts to understand human action based on either within-person constancies or between-person conditionings (recent examples of such intersubjective 'cobbling' include enactive, embodied, embedded accounts put forth by writers like Shaun Gallagher, Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson, which posit distributed cognition and affect, inter-corporeal co-creation of meaning, participatory sense-making). Events understood as interaffectings of interaffectings, working within and beyond relations among presumed temporary essences (conceptual, affective-bodily, interpersonal), do not achieve their gentle integrative continuity through any positive internal power. On the contrary, they simply lack the formidability of static identity necessary to impose the arbitrariness of conditioning, mapping, mirroring, grafting and cobbling, on the movement of experiential process. Most readings of Heidegger (Gadamer, Levinas, Evan Thompson) view the mutual carrying out and trans-formative nature of beings-being as implying, including, and carrying along with it rather than erasing the internal composition of a structure of a being-to-be-modified. Being for them is substance and movement . Being is nature itself as the transformative substance and movement that goes across and beyond formation. Being is the 'in between' the subjective conditioning of the object and the objective conditioning of the subject. So the array of elements that are organized and thought together, at once, thematically as this structure-form are carried into their trans-formation(we could also say trans-structuration). But I have argued here that the purpose of Heidegger's investigation of propositionality is not to identify theoretical objects as ontological givens for Being, but to establish propositional object, concept, representation, Gestell, as ontic existents in order to reveal them more rigorously as grounded ontologically (in the sense of fundamental ontology) in primordial unconcealment. Most readings of Heidegger do the reverse, attempting to ground fundamental ontology, and all of the modal analyses which spring from it, in what for Heidegger is the ontic plane of propositional representation. In other words, they reduce the ontological difference to a difference between two ontic determinations. Being conceived as the performative difference between schematism and existence is a difference between two ontic determinations and therefore is itself on the ontic plane of propositionality. It is a present to hand thinking masquerading as post-metaphysical. When one begins from the subjectivism of representationality, the way of out of Kantian a priorism must stand as the absolute other to representation; that is to say, it must arrive in the guise of the performance of the differentiation between Subjective structuring and Objective determination. Only in this way can the empirically conditioned and contingent beginning of thought avoid being mistaken for a Kantian unconditioned ground of possibility. Even the radicality of Deleuzian difference begins from a thinking of structure-state as irreducible. Heidegger and Derrida give us a way to avoid grounding fundamental ontology in the performative difference between schematism and existence as its condition of possibility. Gendlin and Heidegger on Logic, Proposition, Concept, Pattern: The greatest challenge to philosophical thinking today is to become aware of how deeply entrenched traditional notions of logic remain, in the extent to which they still govern approaches from Nietzsche and Gadamer to Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty. In recognition of the daunting task of dismantling the metaphysics of propositional thinking, Heidegger spoke of the necessity, in a confrontation with the tradition, to "revolutionarily shake up the notion of logic" from the ground up (Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language). As an illustration of the difficulty of achieving a revolution in our thinking of logic, I want to bring the work of Eugene Gendlin into the discussion. Drawing from diverse influences spanning hermeneutics, existentialism, pragmatism and phenomenology, Gendlin has submitted the problematic of structure-state-pattern to a fundamental questioning that nearly approaches the radicality of Heidegger and Derrida in its situating the genesis of meaning-making in an always-already self-temporalizing interaffecting whose unfolding precedes and overflows any notion of state or form. Reminiscent of Heidegger's analysis of propositional statements, Gendlin writes concerning structurality "The notion of an imposed order splits everything into two sides: The order is considered as if it were independent. On the other side there is something passive and unordered, upon which order is imposed, something that does not feed back, because it has no order of its own." The essence of a pattern for Gendlin is the self-identicality of representation. "An imposed order is the sort of order that can be the same, here or there, so that it does not depend on what it is imposed upon. The very notion of "order" has come to mean the sort that can be imposed, that is to say it is assumed to function like a pattern. An order that can be imposed is inherently abstract, since it is the same in many places. So it is independent of the places and can omit everything that does not fit it. Therefore it can be put on something that did not have it from itself. Such an order seems to work alone." (Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations). So far Gendlin's idea of form, pattern and rule as cutting itself off from its meaning-giving context of relevance jibes with Heidegger's notion of statement as a limiting derivative modification of primordial ontological interpretation. But Gendlin stops short of deriving logical form from his generative implicit order. Whereas for both Heidegger and Gendlin logical forms derive their originating meaning from a framing context (circumspection, attunement and the ready to hand for Heidegger, the bodily implicit order for Gendlin), the former's forms and patterns are irreducibly primordial in their internal structure, prior to their enbeddedness in a larger implicit order. Gendlin's wider implict order doesn't reveal the perceived self-identicality of his distinctions, forms, grids, patterns, schemes, categories to be a distortion or covering over of a more fundamental meaning-making, but instead reifies them by having them function alongside and feeding back into that wider, more intricate order. Gendlin says "Rules and forms are always at work; they are implicit in all our situations and our bodily experience how we interact, eat, sleep, feel, and perceive. If there is a bodily order, we will see it functioning with, not without them.""Much of our living needs to be done within steady existing forms. But it is important to know that this intricacy is always there. At certain junctures it is vital to let it function."""[Implicit intricacy] is more demanding than logic. The working, changing, and coming of words is a function not just of extant forms but also of the implicit intricacy"(Thinking Beyond Patterns: Body, Language, and Situations). "We need to go back and forth between logic and bodily-felt understanding. They build upon each other. It would be wrong to make an ideology of lauding one and pretending to do without the other."...patterns work-in another, more intricate order which talks back..."(The Time of the Explicating Process: A Comment on Thomas Fuchs' "Body Memory"). "To study the role played by implicit understanding in the coming of new concepts will not undermine the concepts we already have. Those concepts work explicitly, with logical implications. Logic is their own power for precise consequences. To use their power we must let them work as if they were alone, without us. Logical inference requires that we don't let anything upset the concepts. For example, while calculating our bank account we don't double one deposit because it came from a special source. All our technology depends on logical inference. Seven billion of us couldn't all live on the planet without it. To undermine logic and explicit concepts is not sensible. Of course we know that we operate the concepts. How they work 'alone' is something we let them do. This isn't very puzzling. Whatever else concepts are, they are tools. For example, a screwdriver must be allowed to keep its own narrow head, and to engage the screw with it. We are holding it, of course, but the screwdriver's own pattern turns the screw. Obviously, more complex machines produce their own results. Concepts similarly have their own logical inferences, quite apart from what is implicitly involved in the coming and having of concepts. We keep the system of existing concepts inviolate and separate. Then we can also have a second system in which we study how something implicit works in the coming of new concepts. We will be concerned throughout with the necessary separation, contrast, and relationship between the system of explicitly formed concepts and our second system about how something functions implicitly. Far from being in conflict, this article will show that if the two systems stay separate, they expand each other reciprocally."(What First and Third Person Processes Really Are). Would Heidegger agree that concepts are tools that consist in their 'own' patterns and logical inferences, 'quite apart from what is implicitly involved in the coming and having of concepts'(Gendlin 2009)? The point for Heidegger would be that this apparent apartness of explicit logic from implicit experience is a kind of distortion of primordial Dasein's interpretive signification. Contrary to the 'precise consequences' Gendlin lauds in logical calculation, Heidegger says "the ontological presuppositions of historiographical knowledge transcend in principle the idea of rigor of the most exact sciences. Mathematics is not more exact than historiographical, but only narrower with regard to the scope of the existential foundations relevant to it." "The first, constant, and last task [of primordial understanding] is not to let fore-having, fore-sight, and fore-conception be given to it by chance ideas and popular conceptions, but to guarantee the scientific theme by developing these in terms of the things themselves." Heidegger's analysis of Aristotle's concept of logos would seem to apply to Gendlin's distinctions and patterns. "Aristotle had a more radical view [than Plato]; every logos is synthesis and diairesis at the same time, not either the one-say, as a "positive judgment"-or the other-as a "negative judgment." Rather, every statement, whether affirmative or negative, whether false or true, is equiprimordially synthesis and diairesis. Pointing out is putting together and taking apart. However, Aristotle did not pursue this analytical question further to a problem: what phenomenon is it then within the structure of the logos that allows and requires us to characterize every statement as synthesis and diairesis? What is to be got at phenomenally with the formal structures of "binding" and "separating," more precisely, with the unity of the two, is the phenomenon of "something as something." In accordance with this structure, something is understood with regard to something else, it is taken together with it, so that this confrontation that understands, interprets, and articulates, at the same time takes apart what has been put together. If the phenomenon of the "as" is covered over and above all veiled in its existential origin from the hermeneutical "as," Aristotle's phenomenological point of departure disintegrates to the analysis of logos in an external "theory of judgment," according to which judgment is a binding or separating of representations and concepts. Thus binding and separating can be further formalized to mean a "relating." Logistically, the judgment is dissolved into a system of "coordinations," it becomes the object of "calculation," but not a theme of ontological interpretation." "If the kind of being of the terms of the relation is understood without differentiation as merely objectively present things, then the relation shows itself as the objectively present conformity of two objectively present things."(BT 206) "In the first and authentic instance, this "as" is not the "as" of predication qua predication but is prior to it in such a way that it makes possible the very structure of predication at all. Predication has the as-structure, but in a derived way, and it has it only because the as-structure is predication within a [wider] experience. But why is it that this as-structure is already present in a direct act of dealing with something? The most immediate state of affairs is, in fact, that we simply see and take things as they are: board, bench, house, policeman. Yes, of course. However, this taking is always a taking within the context of dealing-with something, and therefore is always a taking-as, but in such a way that the as-character does not become explicit in the act. The non-explicitness of this "as" is precisely what constitutes the act's so-called directness. Yes, the thing that is understood can be apprehended directly as it is in itself. But this directness regarding the thing apprehended does not inhibit the act from having a developed structure. Moreover, what is structural and necessary in the act of [direct] understanding need not be found, or co-apprehended, or expressly named in the thing understood. I repeat: The [primary] as-structure does not belong to something thematically understood. It certainly can be understood, but not directly in the process of focally understanding a table, a chair, or the like. Acts of directly taking something, having something, dealing with it "as something," are so original that trying to understand anything without employing the "as" requires (if it's possible at all) a peculiar inversion of the natural order. Understanding something without the "as"-in a pure sensation, for example-can be carried out only "reductively," by "pulling back" from an as-structured experience. And we must say: far from being primordial, we have to designate it as an artificially worked-up act. Most important, such an experience is per se possible only as the privation of an as-structured experience. It occurs only within an as-structured experience and by prescinding from the "as"which is the same as admitting that as-structured experience is primary, since it is what one must first of all prescind from." (Logic, The Question of Truth,p.122). The minute one considers something like a form or distinction as a capacity to impose 'itself' on something or someone else, one is assuming calculability, representationalism and self-identical repetition. If, instead, a distinction always already distinguishes itself from what it relates itself to as a new 'this way' of relevant relating, then it would never have the chance to simply impose itself; it would always be itself as a new relevant distinction. In Gendlin's example of the screwdriver's 'own logical pattern' turning the screw, the shape of a screwdriver's head may be understood in any variety of ways, but each possible account is understood primordially for Heidegger as a unique and particular relevant sense in relation to one's current involvements, via the hermeneutical 'as' structure. This is also true of the screw and its relationship with the screwdriver head, in terms of the precision of fit between the two or any other respect that is encountered in relation to our concernful dealings with screwdriver and screw as tools . Most of the examples of logical patterns that Gendlin mentions in his writings involve public language rather than calculative machines, and as we saw with the use of screwdriver and screw, Gendlin posits an independence of logical relationships from his underlying implicit generating process. The former feed back into, but are not derived from the latter. Language concepts have "their own logical inferences, quite apart from what is implicitly involved in the coming and having of concepts", Heidegger refers to such public language in terms of the average everydayness of idle talk. He says "We encounter the vagueness and vacuity of meanings, which are not in fact grasped as meanings, in the way everyday talk pursues its themes. This impoverished ontological structure of the said and the talk that is governed by it must not prompt us to view language as a matter of tone or sound in the first instance. The vagueness of meaning is a specific quality, namely the routinized intelligibility of well-worn everyday talk....it may also pervade and govern the treatment of problems within scientific disciplines."(The Concept of Time 1924)." For Heidegger everyday communication can only be taken as an impoverished leveling down of primordial understanding precisely because the very basis of language is the primordiality of the hermeneutical 'as' structure. Thus, contrary to Gendlin, there is nothing about the logical functioning of language , or of tool use in general , that is independent of this generating impetus. We don't go back and forth between logic and bodily-felt understanding as independent systems of meaning. Rather, logic, as the derived modality of the present-to-hand, never departs from the fundamental dynamics of Being as attuned, discursive temporality. In conclusion, Gendlin's struggle to jettison the remnants of the metaphysical foundations of logic led him to a compromise between Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger. He had taken a step beyond discourses of intersubjective cobbling, such as that of enactive, embodied extended cognitive theorists and Deleuzian bio-politics, by rethinking their arbitrary inter-relational schematics more fundamentally as the implicit intricacy of bodily intraffectimg. Yet, rather than grounding logical forms, structures and states in this interaffecting, he left the basis of logic undeconstructed, thereby forcing his generating process to accommodate itself to and operate alongside rules and forms. *The will never has a grasp of itself that is not a being beyond itself. When we think of intention as grasping toward objects, we don't see the underlying alterity that always makes desire want otherwise than what it wants in the very instant of desiring. Desire is only a willing of what it wills if thought of as a being-for-itself, auto-affection, the contingent self-identicality of the moment of a program. Intention-will-desire must be thought this way as long as it thinks itself grounded via structure, form, and state. Only when thought in this way does the problem arise of extricating ourselves from the temporary solipsism of the event (We MUST keep reason in play). Heidegger's critique of Will to Power, as I see it, faults Nietzsche for not departing radically enough from a Levinasian thinking of intentionality as the 'grasp of the Will'. ______________________________________________________________________________