Process Model of action-intuition and direct-referent

Tadayuki Murasato Teikyoheisei University I feel great to be able to make presentation today. I want to discuss a possibility of crossing of Gendlins philosophy and Nishidas one. . In the introduction to the Japanese edition of Focusing- Oriented Psychotherapy Gendlin writes that he thinks Focusing is more familiar in Japan than in West and the philosophy which produced Focusing is also familiar to the Japanese traditional culture. I want to make it clear why this is true, from the view point of Japanese traditional culture and especially the representative philosopher of modern Japan, Nishidas philosophy. Gendlin said Focusing and TAE(Thinking At the Edge: quite a new way of creative thinking which often uses Focusing) are produced from his philosophy of the implicit in our body. I have practiced and taught Focusing and TAE in Japan and read his philosophy and Nishidas one for more than ten years. There seems to be a kind of the coincidence of things between their philosophies. I found it a need to overcome difficulties of modern Western culture. Kitaro Nishida18701945and Eugene T. Gendlin( 1926) are thought to have felt a historical requirement from their own contexts to find a breakthrough of the difficulties arising from Western modern thoughts and technology. They sought to get a solid ground on which we can build a new house we live in without anxiety namely not with understanding ourselves as things but with a new, sound understanding of ourselves. Nishida started from his pure experience, which means an experience before thinking, which he believed to be a basis on which we make our understandings of ourselves and our world. Since the Meiji Restoration Modern Japan had had a difficulty to integrate its success in introducing Western technologies and its traditional self-understanding. Those days, Japan was in the crisis of its identity. It is said that only in Nishida Eastern cultural tradition truly met Western reflection for the first time. His philosophical aim was to explain everything from the viewpoint that the pure experiences are the only one reality. I think it was a highly practical philosophy in the

sense that he inquired a new and profounder basis or an openness in which we can truly have both Western values and Japanese culture. He said In the Eastern culture there seems to be a profound difference. When Western culture and Eastern tradition (which meant Western modern philosophy and practicing Zen Buddhism for Nishida) can find a profounder basis on which both can truly live, we might be able to fully develop our humanity through them supplementing each other. He developed his thought persistently and made his terms such as jikaku(self consciousness),basyo(place or space)etc. These terms were carefully prepared through a rather long period of his contemplation to open the openness and make his concepts build the basis in it. Let me explain these terms by mainly using Ueda Shizuteru, a good interpreter of Nishidas philosophy. Our self as a predicative unity( whose self is monadological individual as historical body and the selves are the elements as an individual against another individual who form our world) isinbasyo(a place or a space), which is both a place of being (our world)and a place of an absolute nothing(infinite margin of our world), whose mode of being is action intuition and the logic of the basyo is absolute contradictory- self-identity These terms of his philosophy are quite difficult to understand, but I think it is because they came from his difficult trial to find his way. His way of thinking was metaphysical but it was so practical to keep connection to the real world. In this point it has very nearness to Gendlins philosophy. Gendlin also uses the words monad, body, space as his important terms. I think that Nishidas other terms are also very close to Gendlins terms in their contents, for example a predicative unity to the implicit, action intuition to felt sense or direct referent etc. Merleau-Ponty once referred to a wild sphere which is not involved by its own culture and therefore can be crossed to each other. This wild sphere seems to be the pure experience , basyo( a place or a space in our body) by Nishida and the implicit, the body by Gendlin. And what functions in the body is action intuition by Nishida and direct referent or felt sense by Gendlin. I want to explain Gendlins philosophy, especially his A Process Model by giving you a rough sketch of his context. His context was a difficulty which Western contemporary philosophies have confronted. Two main streams of Western philosophy, analytic and existential, seem to have both run aground to an aporia which might be called

Postmodernism. The former seemed to get to nothingness and the latter to arbitrariness. Gendlin and his philosophical friends held a Conference on After Postmodernism in Chicago University in1997. I pick up some sentences from A Report as a kind of results of the conference: We are developing a language across the texts. Theory and practice open each other. Human bodies know by inhabiting their interactional situations and the universe. New conceptual models are welcome as tools within a wider context. A new kind of truth and objectivity These are able to be looked on as Gendlins way of thinking too. In his late main book, A Process Model he wrote we can speak from living, and we can make rudimentary concepts from speaking-from, and especially from Focusing and from the process of explication. And the 14 steps into which he makes this is TAE. Cambell Purton interprets as follows: Gendlin believes that our current ways of thinking dont really allow for the existence of human beings in the world. Our current ways of thinking separate the world from what the world means to us. So to make room for us in the world, the world has to be re-thought. Gendlins concepts constitute a framework for this re- thinking. And A Process Model and Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, his early main book and his many other works are the instances of this re- thinking. There is a marvelous consistency among them. And I want to emphasize that Nishidas philosophy which built a firm bridge over the deep gulf between Western rational reflection and Eastern body-wisdom is one of the new ways of thinking Gendlin imagines. Of course there are clear differences between them. They have had different contexts in their thinking, G is in the Western tradition of Philosophy namely philosophy of Being. On the other hand,Nishida was in the Eastern tradition, the philosophy of Nothingness. But we can find their nearness to each other between their terms seemingly opposite or different such as Gs evolution and Ns historical work , or Gs Being and Ns Negation or Nothingness etc. Therefore we can expect an important crossing will occur between the two philosophies. To use Gendlin s terms, we can say the two philosophies have their own implying or possibility and can make an important crossing in our history. However,

why does things like this happen? I want to explain this using Nishidas terms and Gendlins ones. Our selves are individuals against individuals and have their own implyings into which things occur. They respond or cross to their environments or the universe. Our environments, histories and the universe also cross to us through our bodies. If we are close to our profounder wild sphere, which might be difficult for us to be so, our interactions will come to be more alive and coincidences of things will come to be there. And the work of its crossing has been left for us to do ourselves, as Gendlin invites us to do so. We might be able to change our world into a better one to live in through practicing their philosophies.

. I want to make a closer examination into their thoughts, especially on action-intuition and direct refernt. A Japanese Philosopher,Yujiro Nakamura wrote: Nishidas action-intuition has deep connections with clinical knowing in a broader sense. In three respects Action-intuition will contribute to making foundation of the clinical knowing. First: It understands action and intuition not as one way activity but as interaction between this and that. Second: looking through action is actually looking through body, through which one can find most concrete knowing such as radical experiences. Third: Looking through action and body is accomplished by historical body (the concept is one of Nishidas philosophicalterms. History refers to not only that of human beings but also that of organisms and this concept corresponds to Gs evolution in PM. Action-intuition itself is carried out only in its historical world. Therefore Nishidas action-intuition not only influenced the broader view of biology structured by Kinji Imanishi but also gives clues to finding of hidden meanings of clinical knowing in the fields of clinical psychology and cultural anthropology etc. and making of their theoretical foundations.(Kinji Imanishi is a famous biologist in Japan. He believed Nishidas concepts such as pure experience or action-intuition to be very useful tools for his biological study) Nishida wrote in his essay titled action-intuition: Action-intuition: not Plotinos intuition nor Bergsons pure sequences but a basis for truly actual knowing and all empirical knowledge.

To establish objective knowledge, action-intuition should inevitably let the knowing occur in the historical world(in Nishidas term). Our action must have developed historically from instinctive behavior through interactions between a subject and its environments in the way of the unity of opposites. This unity of opposites ( literally translated as Absolutely-opposite-self identity) form s and creates everything new in the historical view, and action occurs since we live in the world of things, which must be seen in relation to Dialectic(For this purpose, Nishida modified Hegels .dialectic.) The world as a historical present is thoroughly determined by its past but contains self-negation in itself and goes from the present to the present, in which our action occurs. Our actions are inherently species-specific and occur since we look things with our action-intuition. In this historically proceeding world subjective individuals define their environments and the environments define the individuals. Species make their environments means that they as individuals govern themselves in their environments and the species themselves are altered and denied by their environments, respectively and that the world, what soecies and environments make up together, in turn, makes itself individually. There our body is constructed and we as historical individuals see things with our action-intuition. Inevitably we must live up for constructing historically ourselves and our environments.In other words, to be as human beings is in our historical makings. Nishida started his long and difficult way of thinking with his terms pure experience and its logic the unity of the opposites. His project to find the basis on which human beings either in East or West can stand in spite of their traditional differences. Then he got to the theory of Basyo(place or space in which pure experiences and the unity of the opposites occur ) and action-intuition, which corresponds to poiesis and praxsis.

Now I want to follow Gendlins Direct Referent in of PM. After his philosophical hard work on symbolic process and proto-language,G. opens of PM with the quotation from Isadora Duncan s MY LIFE. Duncan was seeking something in her body. What was she seeking? Something which would make her dance in quite a new way. Of course she could dance in the traditional way of dancing, which belongs to the world of that is related to our traditional culture. Duncan was seeking the sequence which could CF the whole situation of her dance. An sequence carries the whole forward and is the having of the whole. There is also the new feel of the whole. G. argued the details of the case especially DR and the space in which DR comes phenomenologically in a sense. To open this new sequence one must stop the sequences of .( I suggest that for Nishida this stoppage represents Negation) But where does it happen? In a new space generated by this new kind of sequences.But A direct referent does not always form. Direct referent comes,It can come only if we let come. the new sequence does not begin with the DR. DR is a datum,a new kind of object ,which forms, falls out from the sequence. ( Nishida wrote before that a thing came and illuminated him. And Where is he who is illuminated? Where does the occurring like this occurs? Nishida answered in Basyo Basho means a place or a space in the ordinary meaning but it is an important term of Nishidas philosophy. I think this parallels to a space in of PM. Anyway, in the both cases what comes is important to the person and we can say that here occurred the two phenomena close to each other. G.wrote: When a person does engage in direct referent formation and then speaks, we can understand and recognize not literally what was there before, but more exactly, what now forms from what was there. .pays tribute to the wholeness of a problem in DR formation and the whole carries forward namely the solution of the problem.

Each bit of our new sequence changes everything, and from this string of changed versions, the new feel, the direct referent falls out and is had, felt. Holding the situation, relevance, the point, the sense of the whole thing, the same and waiting and letting the felt sense come is the attitude we must keep. Gendlin continues his thorough explanations on DR, which occupies most of of PM. He has made a model on the coming of DR and the space into which DR comes, the occurring as its result etc. with his radical experiences and insistent and strong thinking. I think we have not had thinking about the implicit like this. G. seems to be helped by his experiences in the field of clinical psychology in the respect that his thinking is both phenomenal and metaphysical, and both sides made the other side stronger each other. Nishidas way is much more metaphysical and abstract and sometimes seems to lack concrete and detail elements to be used.

I continue my quotation from The direct referent is a perfect feedback object. The self corresponds to the space , not the object merely. The body-feeling as DR is now the object, the perception, the specific facet of the environment. But the body implies the whole new kind of environment, the whole space. G uses monad and explain it: Monad is the term I use for how a DR applies to everything. (It reminds me that N used it as a self : the self, as a monad, is mirroring the world.) G claims the newuniversality of the DR. The DR can be an illustration or example of countless generalities, new categories.( this is an example IOFI principle. Without Direct-refernt-formation, one cannot state the problem or be aware of the lack that one is instancing. There is a quite clear difference between novelty in and . A novelty is quite slow in and cultural contexts last so long and individual cannot change by deliberate planning and decision alone.It will all instance the problem rather than instancing a

solution. ( we have to remember the sentence : the whole (of DR) carries forward namely the solution of the problem. ) A DR can monad only because of jelledness, i.e. having fallen out from -carring-forward. IOFI space is not without this DR-formation. Self is separate from the content being carried forward,in the space of the sequence. From any DR-formation very many new universals can form, but any of these in some use a new DR-formation can occur too. G .asks to himself : But what did it mean, how can we bring it home to ourselves, to say that monading from all DRs is true, or valid? I mean that it can be lived in the world, that the world can be changed and lived in this way; I mean at least that. G closes his PM with an impressive heading, Conclusion and Begging He say s that the PM will continue to develop many terms to solve the problems we now have. And he thinks of an old way of thinking and its concepts by Plato and Aristotle. That is Platos Dialectic and this is Aristotles beautiful system of fundamental concepts such as time and space, motion, life-process, self and other, individual and society, history and art etc. He says: I wish to be my own Plato and Aristotle. He needs both method and concepts and he thinks it is possible for us to establish our model and prevent beautiful concepts from containing ourselves within . Referring to Heidegger he continues :Heidegger, having completed his consistent model(Being and Time) refused to use it and proceeded instead to the generation of new concepts, vague and vital. But it was a great error. He ought to have done or invited the job I have done here. He did not solve the problem of how to have, if you like this way of saying it, continuous philosophy , that is to say a continuous undercutting and re-examining, a continuous concept-formation, fresh emergence of form and also still have consistent connected bodies of knowledge.

Id like to conclude my presentation on the possibility to cross two philosophers thinking by sharing with you that nearness of their thoughts in several respects suggests me the beginning of the crossing. Nishidas context of thinking and G.s one are quite different of course, but we can also find the nearness between their thoughts in several profound respects. Our age might have implicitly asked someone of us to open the heavy door to quite a new and deep life of human beings , in which we can live our inherent possibility. They are both a radical empiricist to find the profound basis on which we can live. I think they are such a person who feel themselves happy when they can open a heavy door to our human beings better life. And this makes me happy too. Thank you. Now Ill be grateful to have comments, questions from the floor.