Sensuous Practice and Navigability

From raw feeling to observed intersubjectivity.

Calibration: Does the world really need more philosophy? I cannot help but ask that question as I travel through Europe delivering talks and presentations at philosophical and scientific conferences about Way-making and Navigability. Those of you who listen to the podcast and watch the Love and Philosophy channel can likely already guess that my answer to this question is not yes and not no.

The answer is in holding the paradox.

There is nothing new under the sun. All the philosophy we need is already present to someone somewhere (maybe even to you), though many of us are still searching for connective links.

We each hold a part of the pattern, but it takes communication to notice that pattern and move into a better one.

The practice of philosophy is how we find those patterns and learn to notice and observe them. Always anew. Opening, sharing and connecting with what David Abram illustrates in The Spell of the Sensuous: We do need a new philosophy, and we already have all we need.

Holding subjectivity with objectivity: Spells of the sensuous

David Abram published The Spell of the Sensuous in 1996, but it has yet to fully resonate. The book is rich and layered and deserves multiple readings. It offers a gentle, rigorous way to begin our discovery: When it comes to discussions of phenomenology, it is accessible, sensual and immediate, and it offers a good summary of the primary sources. In coming posts, I’ll go further into those primary sources, and also introduce other ones—Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gibson, Du Bois, Hegel, Carson, Spinoza, Bateson, de Beauvoir, Camus, hooks, Sacks, Butler, Deleuze, the Zhuangzi. Today, however, I would like to appreciate Abram, as his book helps us ease into a discussion around way-making and navigability

Way-making and Navigability: A brief introduction

Way-making is a philosophy of embodied encountering.

The main practice within way-making is Navigability.

Navigability is the practice of noticing the paths one has taken and observing the landscape in which those paths emerge. It is a fractal move: One gains agency to step out of the same paths one is noticing through. This happens in different spaces, traditionally called physical, mental, emotional, social, conceptual—in navigability practice, these are all valuable and valid landscapes.

The main focus in the practice of Navigability is to observe and live into other potentials for how we define and experience mind.

Practicing navigability comes with noticing and holding the space for faced-opposites (for contradiction, for paradox) and exploring the pattern beyond what appears irreconcilable. It is experiencing these nested paths and landscapes as entangled, and finding them sourced in what scientists call raw feeling or affect (see Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms).

The Spell of the Sensuous uses and discusses language and its nested power of raw feeling (though not in those terms) to open space around faced-opposites, in this case, the faced-opposites of subjective and objective.

In philosophy and science, when something is called subjective, it means it is a first-person account, the experience you have of your own life, for example. This has historically been treated as unscientific, something like opinion, whereas the objective is supposed to be third-person, scientific, something like fact. Modern philosophy and science are finally beginning to address this differently, taking the subjective experience seriously, and this is a primary concern of my work.

(Ines Hipolito and I discuss objectivity in greater detail on the show if you would like to further engage.)

In Spell, Abram presents raw feeling as a portal of presence towards exploring where subjective and objective fractalize and nest. His writing helps us understand how both subjective and objective are not true and not false, opening intersubjectivity.

This is not easy, but it’s life-changing work.

Abram discusses it from the start as “attuning to the other presences that surround and influence daily life” (p.7).

In our ongoing encounter with ourselves and others, we develop “continually adjusted awareness.” What is wonderful is that this can be done in a spirit of delight. Being not only a philosopher and cultural ecologist but also a magician, Abrams uses magic as a potent (sometimes literal) metaphor. That the magic trick can be logically understood on some level makes it more inviting; it opens us into a never-ending shapeshifting quest:

“The traditional magician cultivates an ability to shift out of his or her common state of consciousness precisely in order to make contact with the other organic forms of sensitivity and awareness within which human existence is entwined…the ability to readily slip out of the perceptual boundaries that demarcate his or her particular culture…(his or her) magic is precisely this heightened receptivity…”(p.9).

We begin to understand our ongoing encounter as nested ways of being, as nested opportunities to shift our shape through patterns of sensuality and mind by exploring and accepting life’s invitations. This is the practice of navigability.

Intersubjectivity

Through Abram’s discussion of phenomenology (especially via Husserl and Merleau-Ponty), we begin to explore the ‘infinite between space’ that holds subjective and objective as distinctions while also understanding them as nested patterns that are shared. The term for this in phenomenology is intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity is one of the most important contributions of the phenomenological tradition, a powerful holder of paradox: What it does is open a space where, instead of choosing between subjective and objective, we practice holding those together as co-creating mutuality, as positions both distinct and entangled.

This is the holding of the paradox I mention so often, and it can be tough stuff to put words around:

“That tree bending in the wind, this cliff wall, the cloud drifting overhead: these are not merely subjective; they are intersubjective phenomena—phenomena experienced by a multiplicity of sensing subjects.”

Our senses are entangled intersubjectively—with one another and with whatever infuses them, with the tree and the cliff wall and the cloud as we are present and sensing them. We come to ourselves through this relation. As Abram puts it later in the book:

“Ordinary seeing, then, involves the convergence of two views into a single dynamic vision; divergent parts of myself are drawn together by the object, and I thus meet up with myself over there, at that tree or that spider upon which I focus. Vision itself, in other words, is already a kind of synesthesia, a collaboration of different sensory channels or organs” (p.126).

This helps us hold the paradox we have inherited of mind and body as well. We are taught —or the world around us assumes and so we do too—that mind is something other than physical, something different from body. But mind is no more distinct from body than the senses are from self, than the objective is from the subjective. This makes mind more magical, not less: The “human mind is not some otherworldly essence that comes to house itself inside our physiology. Rather, it is instilled and provoked by the sensorial field itself, induced by the tensions and participations between the human body and the animate earth” (p.262).

Lifeworld

This opens us into another important phenomenological term, that of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt) which is the intersubjective encountering as experienced from a particular point of assessment, such as from the embodied position we call self. Abrams writes of it as:

“the living dimension in which all of our endeavors are rooted” (p.40).

He goes on to discuss the layered nature of lifeworld, of how each person and their relations with other persons nests into different layers of experience in different geographies, be those physical, emotional, or cultural. We cannot take anything for granted because this lifeworld is not static and is always aligning and realigning according to its observation and assessing.

As Merleau-Ponty brings out in his work and as Abrams further elucidates, perception is “this reciprocity, the ongoing interchange” between the body and its encountering:

“As we return to our senses, we gradually discover our sensory perceptions to be simply our part of a vast, interpenetrating webwork of perceptions and sensations borne by countless other bodies—supported, that is, not just by ourselves, but by icy streams tumbling down granitic slopes, by owl wings and lichens, and by the unseen, imperturbable wind” (p.65).

Edmund Husserl popularized the term lifeworld with his book The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, published in 1936 in Germany, when he was being persecuted for his Jewishness. He begins to develop a theme that way-making and navigability extend, namely that each person’s development and history afford them a unique intimacy with lifeworld at the very same time that lifeworld is not an individual phenomenon.

As Husserl writes:

“In whatever way we may be conscious of the world …all of us together, belong to the world as living with one another in the world; and the world is our world, valid for our consciousness as existing precisely through this 'living together” (p. 108).

Here we have the phenomenological attempt of describing our ongoing encountering beyond the paradox, living into both sides without discounting their differences, what I see as the revolutionary turn taken in phenomenology, and what I present as the main unifying element in all phenomenological scholarship.

We can think of the intersubjective lifeworld as the air, the water, the space that is holding us even as we observe and model it from unique positions of assessment.

Lifeworld is the landscape and horizon and root system of experience.

Husserl’s articulation and the furthering of the term in Abram’s work is an attempt to hold the tradition of Kant and Descartes (subjective vs. objective) and move beyond dichotomy even while allowing dichotomy to remain crucial to our philosophical toolkit.

Through The Spell of the Sensuous, intersubjective lifeworld nests out of raw feeling and observing it helps us further feel into and understand ourselves through our ecology. There would be much more to say of the book but instead I will suggest you read it and write to me at wayandlifeworld@gmail.com if you are interested in discussing it further in a book group.

Calibration: In this post I introduce one of my favorite books, The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram, towards unpacking some of the main terms of phenomenology as oriented through the philosophy of way-making and navigability.

The purpose of this post was to introduce intersubjectivity and connect it with lifeworld through the example of the subjective and objective. We then feel into what we discussed in the first post, the idea of holding the paradox as a means of living into further scales of sensuality and perception.

This will help us with the practice of navigability as we proceed forward.

All of this is a work in progress and I invite you to advise, criticise, offer suggestions, and so forth at any time. Here or at wayandlifeworld@gmail.com

Arles, France

References:

Abram, David, 1957-. The Spell of the Sensuous : Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York :Pantheon Books, 1996.

Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology : An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy. . Translated by David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

#waymaking #navigability #andreahiott #davidabram #spellofthesensuous #magic #love #philosophy #holdingtheparadox #animism #newmaterialism