[Published in Psychosis and Spirituality: Exploring the New Frontier, edited by Isabel Clarke, pub. Whurr, 2001, pp 143-162]
Chris Clarke, Faculty of Mathematical Studies, University of Southampton
Introduction
Isabel Clarke’s theory of the construed and unconstrued ways of experiencing, which forms the stimulus for this volume, has its roots in an extensive philosophical development of ideas of "reality." In this chapter I will place her theory within this historical context. I shall outline the Realist and Kantian views of reality from the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which dominate current scientific thinking, noting that they are in conflict with the concept of unconstrued experiencing. I shall then introduce the substantial criticism that has been levelled at these views over the years, leading to the phenomenalist approach introduced this century, which does have a place for unconstrued experiencing.
Following a comparison with some ideas from modern physics which motivate the development, I then focus on the modern form of phenomenalism known as the participatory view of reality, and draw out the consequences of this for researching into the connection between spirituality and psychosis.
Scientific realism and the Cartesian view
The key issue before us is: does the concept of "unconstrued experiencing" make sense; and, if so, how are we to think of it? Let me elucidate at the outset that in talking of "experiencing" I am not merely alluding to some aspect of experience that does not fit within our concepts, as a sort of emotional noise on the margins, but to "experiencing" as a participle that expects a subject; an experiencing of … And so the idea immediately points beyond to the person to the Other: what is the object of this experiencing? And this in turn brings us straight into the question of the relation between the self and the surrounding world, and the way in which we construe experiencing of this world.
The idea of construal, central in psychology, is closely connected with philosophical issues concerning the relation of experienced phenomena to "reality," and the main aim of this chapter is to explore this. We recall that the notion of a distinction between phenomena and reality goes back to Plato. In his myth of the cave he described how everyday experiencing could be likened to the perceptions of a group of prisoners shackled within a cave, able only to look at the back wall, where shadows were cast of the comings and goings of beings in an outside world of which they were unaware. Similarly, the objects that we see around us with our senses are unreal "shadows" of the real eternal archetypes on which they are based. Plato made explicit and dramatic what had hitherto been implicit in the intertwined areas of philosophy and spirituality: that normal experience (phenomena, which in the Greek original meant "appearances") was a degraded representation of a much greater reality. From Plato’s time onwards, the relation between appearances and reality, and the possibilities of connecting the two, characterised different world-views. Plato believed that it was possible for a spiritually enlightened person to release themselves from their shackles and turn towards the light of the world outside the cave. This is analogous to the interpretation that most physical scientists place on their work, regarding the senses as being extended through scientific apparatus, and the understanding through mathematical formalism, so as to discover the reality underlying appearances.
This modern view, underpinning the physical sciences and forming the background to much modern psychology, is usually expressed as some form of Scientific Realism, often associated with the name of Descartes ¾ though this can be a misleading attribution. On this view, there is a well-defined Real World, and we know a sound methodology for discovering more and more of it by the application of logic and the scientific method. The Real World is more or less what science tells us it is, after making allowance for the minor corrections that will be introduced by future refinements of science. At any given stage there is an area that has been well mapped by science, separated by an expanding coal-face from an area that has not yet been mapped, but presumably consists of more of the same sort of thing. Human experience, on this world-view, is very much a secondary construction, a product of sensory input which is elaborated into the perceived world by neurological processes within the brain so as to generate all the diverse qualities that make the world interesting. Although these processes are not at present wholly understood in detail, their main structures are becoming clear and (so this view usually runs) no radically new principles will be required to complete the neurological picture.
Thus the brain essentially lies within the "known" region of reality, the region that is totally mapped and understood.. Consequently the only areas that lie beyond our grasp, beyond the expanding coal-face of the scientific knowledge of reality, are the remoter vistas of particle physics and cosmology which are in any case of no direct relevance to human experience. On this view, "unconstrued experiencing" could be a valuable category of thinking to bring to therapeutic practice, or to neurophysiology, but it tells us nothing about reality and is only of individual personal significance. Reality is what physics tells us it is, and so it always will be.
Kant
The philosophical critique of the "Cartesian" position received its most decisive contribution from Kant. He grasped the nettle of the sceptical, empirical thinking that had preceded him, and recognised that, since everything that we perceived was finally filtered to us through the senses and (more importantly) through the limitations of our thought, it was fundamentally and inevitably impossible for us to know the reality of "things in themselves." The scientific world-view was a splendid and secure edifice, of which humanity could justly be proud, but it could never be equated with reality. Everything comes ultimately from our senses and our neural processing and everything, including science, is construction. Where Kant differed from his predecessors, however, was in arguing that this basic limitation, once accepted, was in fact very positive. He claimed that the limitations of our thought could be precisely characterised in terms of fundamental a priori categories (such as "space" and "time") which were essential to any thinking at all. Thus the task of the philosopher was to elucidate these categories, which would then provide the solid ground on which any subsequent knowledge had to stand. Once this was done, the discoveries of science were as good as "reality": they rested on unshakeable foundations, even though these foundations were ultimately in ourselves rather than outside ourselves.
As a result, provided that one’s sensory/propositional system is working properly, one’s perceptions will necessarily conform to the world of consensual reality. He would have agreed with Descartes that any other form of experience would therefore be traceable to some sort of malfunction in senses or reasoning.
On Kantian and post-Kantian views, there is a clear dichotomy between a construable realm (phenomena) and an unconstruable realm (things-in-themselves); but the dichotomy is essentially different from Clarke’s, in that for the Kantian the latter realm must remain for ever outside our experience. The notion of "unconstrued experience" would for Kant be self-contradictory. There is no way of jumping the barrier of our intrinsic limitations between phenomena and things-in-themselves. On the other hand, once one raises, on the basis of clinical and personal experience, the possibility of unconstrued experiencing, then this Kantian barrier is fundamentally undermined.
One might say that all subsequent philosophy has been carried out in the shadow of the Kantian programme. Even though it has become clear that Kant’s a priori categories are not the last word on the capacity of thought, and that absolute categories of thought are no more to be found than are ultimate particles of matter, his idea of a division between what is ultimately and inevitably unknowable (things-in-themselves), and what can be established with reasonable certainty as a foundation for everything that we can know, has lived on in many forms. Indeed, for practical purposes, the Kantian position and the scientific realist positions are very close. For both there are clear rational foundations for what is knowable, with no way of getting beyond them. The only difference is that, for the scientific realist these foundations are "reality" revealed by the scientific method, while for the Kantian they are the a priori categories of anything that can be thought, within which any scientific theory must fit. Kant goes deeper, on a more clearly reasoned basis, but the net result is the same in putting in place a solid rational foundation for the experienced world and declaring as pathological and abnormal anything that deviates from it.
Criticism of realism after Kant
The Kantian position and the scientific realist position in a sense mutually complement each other. The existence of a priori categories as a foundation for our world is supported by the modern reductionist view that all experience derives from the classical (i.e. non-quantum) mechanical operation of neural processing, which imposes precisely defined limits to our thinking capacity. On the other hand this mechanistic approach depends on a world view in which we can be sure of a fundamental ground on which the (knowable) world is based. Kant regarded Newtonian physics as the ideal of what human knowledge should be, and his "Critique of Pure Reason is a masterly description of what the structure of the human mind should be, in order to account for the existence of a Newtonian conception of Nature." (Gilson, 1938; quoted in Wilber, 1996)
In recent years this argument, and the whole argument for scientific realism, has come under increasing attack as lacking any empirical foundation. The fact is that we do not fully understand what goes on in the brain, and only a physicist ignorant of neurophysiology would claim that we do. Moreover, the assertion that the whole of experience is mechanistically explicable is not merely an assumption with no clear warrant, but an assumption that has been claimed to be fundamentally untenable by authors such as Chalmers (1995). He argues that consciousness cannot in principle be so explained because it involves quite different categories of being. Coming from a different direction, Penrose (1994) has argued that creativity requires more than classical physics, placing experiencing beyond the area that science has charted. The certainty that science is moving towards a grand synthesis on rational foundations certainly has many adherents, but it is far from clear that all phenomena can be derived from fundamental particle interactions, because the large-scale behaviour of the world appears to be under-determined by these small-scale laws—particularly in view of the difficulties involved in passing from a quantum description to a classical one. Lockwood (1989) argues that a theory of mind (of unspecified form) has to be included along with the physical foundations, and Zeh (1996) makes a weaker point from the point of view of the more modern approach to quantum theory, though this is contested by Omnès (1999).
The general assumption that science is making steady progress towards grasping absolute reality has been discussed by Quine, Duhem (Vuillemin, 1986), Cartwright (1983) and others. As Wallace (1996) puts it:
Phenomenalism
All this argues that scientific realism cannot be taken as unshakeable dogma. It is one strand in a varied philosophical tradition, and its basis is far from certain. Thus the way seems to be open to us to look for an alternative philosophical context, within which the idea of unconstrued experiencing might be not only possible, but natural.
To find our way to this, we need to look at experiencing itself through more philosophical eyes, without presuppositions of the "real" and "unreal." On the Cartesian (or scientific realist) view there is a simple classification of experience into primary qualities (such as position in space) which are "real" and secondary qualities (such as beauty and colour) which are "unreal" in being synthesised in the brain as a result of particular physical inputs. Such a division, however, is rendered untenable by Kant’s argument that all perception must on this way of speaking be regarded as "secondary." In order to go beyond metaphysical assumptions of reality, we need to look to experience itself for a disclosure of as much as we can ever call reality, recognising that it will always be open-ended and provisional.
For the remainder of this chapter I will argue that the phenomenalist school of philosophy, including the distinctive direction that it took in the hands of Heidegger, provides the needed philosophical context for understanding such experiences. On this approach, there is no pretence of talking about a true Reality, whether of things-in-themselves or of the scientific ground of existence. By contrast, phenomenalism accepts that what we call reality is a consequence of the totality of our experience as it is disclosed to us in introspection. The world is to be discovered by going with understanding into this experience, not by imposing on it a priori categories of "primary" and "secondary."
For a physical scientist such as myself (though perhaps not for some psychologists) it comes at first as a shock to suggest that the world is disclosed in experience—which of course includes our experience as scientists—and not in theory. For example, theory, well grounded in careful experimentation, reveals that the neural processes involved in seeing detect certain elementary features of the visual scene, such as the presence of edges at various angles between areas of colour, and process these elementary properties to build up more complex ones. But there is nothing of this in our experience of seeing. The phenomenalist approach would argue that the analysis of neural processes, while it may illuminate the particular mode in which we humans see, will never give any understanding of the core conscious experience of seeing, which is not a process of synthesis of elements, but of grasping and construing an entity that is encountered as Other, in a kind of dialogue. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p 214) describes this dialogue as follows:
Although this is applied to "ordinary" perception, as opposed to spiritual or psychotic perception, is still contains within it the idea of encountering something which is initially unconstrued, although it is swiftly brought within the compass of a standard construction. The distinction between construction and reality is at the same time blurred: what emerges from the open ended dialogue is (provisionally) reality, but has only achieved this by passing from the status of unconstrued reality to construed reality.
Both Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger (another philosopher strongly influenced by the phenomenalist tradition) accept that the everyday world is construed, but that its ground is a pre-conceptual experience of Being-in-the-world, of presence. Unlike the Cartesian picture, the ground of experience is not sensations (the elements revealed by neurophysiology, though this was unknown to these authors) but this encounter with a totality. Conceptualisation as an experiential phenomenon (construing) is not a synthesis of elements (even though such a synthesis is the physical, neurological vehicle for the experience) but a discrimination and structuring of parts. For these authors, unconstrued experience underlies the human condition, and so it is natural that in some circumstances we can access it directly.
While these authors come closest to providing a basis for understanding unconstrued experience, they still do not fully match up with what seems to be needed. This is indicated by the emotional tone of the human response being described by Merleau-Ponty, which is very different from that of psychosis, though it does have some echoes in positive religious experience ("abandon myself to it and plunge into this mystery"). We catch more of the tone of psychosis, and discover deeper metaphysical layers, if we move to Heidegger. He is less interested in the constructive process whereby a percept is formed, than in the analytic process, as a philosophical method, whereby we can enter more deeply into our experience to discover the layers of "being" that it holds. For Heidegger, Being is the key to uncovering the Other in whose presence we stand in every perception, a being that lies beneath the layers of culturally conditioned construction which we have put upon the thing encountered. The task of penetrating to Being is accompanied by fundamental emotions. Our basic response to Being, colouring much of our life, is the experience of "fleeing" (Heidegger, 1957, p184) together with the encounter with a reality that is experienced as "uncanny" (ibid. p 188) and that evokes the emotion of "Angst" (weakened to "anxiety" in the usual translation). Once one has penetrated below the level of constructions, the world is ‘nothing’ ¾ no construed thing is there to be thought. For instance,
a passage very reminiscent of Clarke’s conception of the terror of such an encounter, though it differs in not having any sense of the elation that the encounter often carries at first. For Heidegger, "The reason for Angst is Being-in-the-world as such," meaning that Angst is inevitably occasioned by the discomfort of moving to an authentic way of being, as opposed to our normal superficial substitute for this. Thus Heidegger tends to emphasise exclusively the negative, in contrast to the positivity of the Merleau-Pony passage quoted above: whereas the "flip" between the two is an important new ingredient with Clarke.
Clarke’s approach has both similarities and differences to that of Heidegger. As just noted, the similarity lies in the fact that there is such a thing as the unconstrued, and that encounter with it is a source of negative emotion because its very lack of construction renders it "uncanny." The difference is that for Clarke this emotion also seems to be the result of the challenge posed by the consequent feelings of loss of boundaries between the self and the world; whereas for Heidegger the angst is if anything more a consequence of having to face the reality of ones inner self. On the other hand, once we are in this area of experience, in which for Heidegger self and world collapse onto the composite Being-in-the-world, it is debatable whether this apparent contrast has any actual meaning. There is also an obvious difference in the style of approach. While Heidegger has much to offer metaphysically, at the psychological level he seems more to reflect his own particular processes than to offer a general insight into psychology. (This is also echoed in his use of terms which¾ despite his insistence that he using them in specialist philosophical senses¾ are drawn from protestant theology: "fallenness," "Being-guilty," "care," "idle talk" and so on.)
A physical analogy
How can we move forward to develop a philosophical perspective that draws on the insights of these phenomenalists, but is more open both to modern science, including physiology, and to modern psychological analysis? The problem that I find in my own experience is that the scientific-realist position has become so dominant that it is very hard to understand the very different position of phenomenalism. When we speak of "the Other" I have an immediate picture of a distinct thing standing over against myself, and a physical process of perception engaging with this thing; yet this picture, derived from scientific realism, is precisely what is being denied by phenomenalism: the "thing" is not prior to perception, but is given with perception; and perception is not at bottom physical, but phenomenal, with the "physical" simply being an aspect of the phenomena. In order to break away from the scientific realist mind-set and understand more what the phenomenalists are talking about, I have found it invaluable to make an analogy with recent developments in quantum theory. Although this requires a slight digression, it is worth the reward of enlarging our range of concepts. I shall use "quantum theory" to refer to the general structure of concepts involved, and "quantum mechanics" to refer to particular instances of this applied to, for instance, the theory of electrons or the theory of light. I have in mind particularly here the discipline of quantum cosmology, in which quantum theory is applied not to microscopic events, but to the whole universe (with us in it).
In classical (i.e. non-quantum) theory the basic elements are particles and space. In quantum theory the basic elements are states. At the level of quantum theory this is a purely abstract notion: states are only given a concrete specification in the quantum mechanics of particular theories, such as the theory of the electron. One can use quantum mechanics to talk about classical physics, in which case a state is just a specification of the positions and velocities of all the particles in space. Some states correspond to things that we actually see around us; I shall call these states-of-affairs. In classical physics, which can be described in quantum mechanical language if one wishes, every state is a state-of-affairs. In (non-classical) quantum theory, on the other hand, there are many more states than there are states-of-affairs.
Classical physics is deterministic. Given a state-of-affairs at a time t1 there is precisely one possible state-of-affairs that will be present at a later time t2 . But quantum theory is not like this: given a state-of-affairs at a time t1 there is a whole range of states-of-affairs that might be found at the later time. So quantum theory is concerned with the probability that a state-of-affairs S1 at a time t1 will be followed by a state-of-affairs S2 at a later time t2. This probability depends on the possible sequences of states (not just states-of-affairs) lying between S1 and S2. The modern formulation of quantum theory (Omnès, 1999) generalises this to the probability of a whole history in the sense of a sequence of states-of-affairs S1, S2, … , Sn at times t1, t2, …, tn .
Now, with apologies again for the digression, we can start to return to phenomenalism. When Isham (1994) generalised the above history approach to quantum cosmology (where time has no absolute meaning) he generalised the idea of a state-of-affairs at a particular time to the state-of-affairs from a particular viewpoint in space-time. I shall call this a perspective. And this naturally led to the generalisation of a history to a network of interpenetrating perspectives. But this then means that this fully articulated formulation of quantum cosmology, which contains within it as special cases all the usual quantum theory of atoms and particles (and cats), is precisely what the universe of phenomenalism consists of. Merleau-Ponty (1962, p417) says that "Time is not a line but a network of intentionalities" where we are to understand these intentionalities as overlapping, each expressing the subjectivity of a particular perspective. When we pass from time to space-time, then the overlapping network includes both the overlaps of our presences and the overlaps of each of our worlds. The objective world is precisely that which we hold in common within these overlaps. Each overlap is a (limited) representation of a fragment of being-in-the-world. We have an almost precise correspondence between the formal overlapping perspectives defined for different regions of space-time in physics, and the less formal and subjectively structured overlapping beings-in-the-world of phenomenalism. We can thus easily borrow concepts about probabilities, indeterminism and observer-dependence from the quantum case to make sense of and develop the philosophical situation.
Note also that, whereas Merleau-Ponty restricted his attention to purely human perspectives, there would seem to be no reason to include a whole gamut of sentient beings in the formation of the world, though their influence on the probabilities of different histories would become less important as one descended the evolutionary scale, and with it the scope of awareness of the organisms. But we might expect some influence to continue even with "inanimate" objects, a factor that is important in building up the permanence of the physical world. These need not directly impinge on our own perspectives, but are bound up in the hierarchical physical system that constitutes the material world and which includes ourselves within it.
I am not suggesting that quantum mechanics as it now is will be an adequate framework for doing psychology; but it does provide us with a conceptual scheme for imagining a world that does not start from isolated individuals (subjects) observing an independent external reality (objects). Instead, subject-object is a polarity that lies within each being-in-the-world; "the analysis of time," says Merleau-Ponty (1962, p430) ¾ and I would add, even more, of space-time ¾ "discloses subject and object as two abstract ‘moments’ of a unique structure which is presence."
Participatory reality
The development in the last section allows us to start making some headway with understanding the spectrum of non-consensual perception which includes religious and psychotic states. Using the language of perspectives, we borrow from quantum mechanics the fact that, in principle, there is nothing to say that two perspectives should agree about the content of some region of space-time where they overlap. In quantum mechanics agreement is only brought about by the particular rules that determine what the probability is for a particular network. Consistency is not a matter of brute existence, but a matter of the interplay of particular physical dynamical laws. In most cases considered in laboratory physics the probability becomes zero for inconsistent networks. One could, however, construct dynamics where different people disagreed (at least momentarily) about the external world. So, comparing the physical analogy with psychology, we can ask what light is shed on various forms of non-shared reality (commonly called hallucinations), either in the case of an individual whose (apparent) perceptions of an external thing is not shared by anyone else, or in the case of a group of people who agree among themselves but not with anyone outside the group (as in the case of some religiously meaningful apparent perceptions, such as moving or weeping statues).
To stress the difference from conventional philosophical positions, from the point of view of overlapping perspectives we no longer have a metaphysics in which there exist independent external objects which are perceived either correctly or incorrectly. Instead, the consistency or otherwise of perspectives is determined by the overall dynamics of the universe. (At this point the inclusion of the perspectives of inanimate objects may be important in ensuring that the universe is indeed the sort of universe that we live in ¾ in much the same way as Penrose, 1994, allows the quantum state to be determined by any sufficiently massive object).
The objective world is regarded as the part of our perspectives that is held in common. This part of my perspective is constrained by being shared with others, unlike the unshared part which is freely malleable, and so the idea of sharing and objectivity leads on to the idea of not-self (shared, fixed) and self (not-shared, malleable). It is then precisely those things that are outside my body which are also accessible, and shared by others, and which are thus not-self; and so the self/not-self division comes to be identical with the internal/external division. From this point of view, individual and group "hallucinations" become simply processes in the world that somehow slip through the mechanisms for establishing this identity of sharedness and externality.
One point that should be noted in this section, to be taken up later, is the issue of presence. We have already described this in terms of the encounter with the Other that is the starting point of phenomenology, and we find it in spiritual experience where it is much more the raw presence of the divine, rather than any characteristic of it, that is described in the experience. The concept of "overlap" (of perspectives) hardly matches, however, the reality of presence, indicating that there is something missing in this physical analogy. In some ways, the physical realist picture has more of an element of presence, in that the thing-in-itself is present in the universe. But the thing-in-itself is, in the realist picture, in no way present to me; I only receive sensory rumours of its being. And thus we are still looking for a picture which is rich enough to encompass the network of overlaps and also the felt reality of presence.
The physical analogy of the last section, while it does something to get us away from the conventional scientific realist picture which is such an obstacle to understanding the idea of unconstrued experience, is inadequate in that it omits the dynamic element of actual human life; it omits true temporality. As Langer (1989, p128) remarks, although the time of phenomenalism is "a chain of interlocking fields of presence," yet "we can never juxtapose the links of the chain" because to do that would be to imagine them as simultaneously given. The picture of interpenetrating perspectives abstracts from the reality of our human embeddedness in the flux of the universe, and tries to take a "view from nowhere" (Nagel, 1986) in which all the perspectives lie spread out before us. Such a view, however, immediately destroys the essence of what we want to talk about, which is the particular encounter with the Other as experienced but unknown, not yet assimilated into the structure of being-in-the-world, and hence not yet either subjective or objective. This challenging of the subjective-objective polarisation, the confusion between internal and external with the external invading the mind like an alien broadcast, is one of the most salient characteristics of psychosis.
These circumstances pose profound challenges to ourselves as enquirers. The conceptual background to scientific enquiry, scientific realism, is a view from nowhere in which reality is spread out before us and we, situated nowhere, are the perfect observers who see but do not participate. Yet we are here faced with a philosophical position which, in order to make sense of human experience, requires a view from somewhere, the view of a participant. I now want to describe the implications of this, implications which several authors have characterised by the phrase "participatory reality."
The starting point is the emergence of reality from the interaction of a primordial Other and the web of perceiving beings. Heron and Reason (1997) vividly describe this:
However, while mind (not necessarily conceived in any dualistic or transcendental sense) is the agent of this construction of reality, this does not mean that it is merely subjective. There is objectivity as well, arising from the fact that participation is not merely individual but extends to the web of life. Heron and Reason term this ontology "subjective-objective."
Heron (1998) describes this achievement of objectivity through the broader web of intersubjectivity:
The participation that Heron is here describing is a dynamic extension of the overlap-agreement between perspectives that I was describing in the last section. The important change, in passing from a physical analogy to actual phenomenological experience, is that the agreement being negotiated between one perspective and another is now not achieved by an external dynamic, but by the interaction of human subjects engaging intersubjectively with each other. And while "language" is mentioned in this context, this needs to be understood not merely in the sense of words, but in the sense of all the interplay of signs that are involved in human communication. Indeed, I would speculate that there are vital dimensions of human communication involved here¾ specifically those pertaining to the implicational cognitive subsystem described by Clarke¾ which establish empathy between persons, and which can no longer be described as "language" in a useful sense because there is no identifiable intervening sign.
When Heron goes on to extend this system to nature, he is again following and extending the line of argument that I established earlier in this section. Interaction within a network including the perspectives of animal and of non-living systems is an essential part of the stability of our world. Yet here Heron follows the experience of Abram (1997), that this interaction can be a "reciprocity," in being perceived as having the same empathic character as our interactions with other people. Abram, describing how one explores with the gaze the contours of a bowl, for instance, reveals how
Participation at this level suggests that we can play a role with other objects in negotiating their appearance, just as in conversation or communion with another person we negotiate our joint way of being.
In the next section I want to move on to the implications of this for scientific methodology; but before doing that I will return to Heidegger for an alternative approach to this idea of participation. We have already noted his key focus on Being, which for him has the character of a verb. Our Being is our active participation. In his late lecture (Heidegger, 1969) he gives an account of time that shares the general scheme of Merleau-Ponty which we have just described, but where the aspects of Being and presence take on a crucial role:
This concentrated paragraph starts with presence, or presencing, as an activity where I am myself present as being-in-the-world. Heidegger then identifies as "concern" that active, attractive connectivity which Merleau-Ponty had cited in his earlier account of the start of the transaction that is perception, but which Heidegger is bringing forward as something that precedes the appearance of any particular thing. There follows a two-stage process of perceiving and receiving/accepting; not merely passively registering, but incorporating presence within the scope of our own being. This particular form of participation is then expounded as not the isolated work of the individual (for it is prior to that concept) but as more cosmic in origin: it arises from our active immersion in, our "standing within" the fundamental reality of time itself.
For all the writers being examined here, participation implies a continual open-ended-ness of the disclosure that comes in our dialogue with the Other as it is encountered. This means that what we know at any stage is only a kind of "slice" through a much greater undisclosed potential, which is encountered at the level of mystery (in the sense of unconstrued awareness).
Scientific consequences
Finally I will discuss the possible implications of a phenomenological perspective for the methodology of an investigation into unconstrued experience.
Spirituality and psychosis
We have already noted that, on the Scientific Realist and Kantian views, any experience that is apparently inconsistent with consensual reality should be traced to specific neurological malfunctioning. This would be the case, irrespective of whether the experience played a life-enhancing (spiritual?) or life-contracting (psychotic?) role. This volume contains many arguments against the therapeutic use of such a position, suggesting that the Cartesian and Kantian views are inappropriate here. Note also that the scientific study of non-consensual experience, on these Cartesian/Kantian views, would be focused on finding the malfunction, and hence on investigating the person having the experience as an ‘object’ to be dispassionately observed via physical measurements and verbal reports.
On the phenomenological view, the discontinuity with consensual reality occurs when the reality-construction of the "chain of interlocking fields of intention" (which normally takes place below consciousness, automatically, within the web of intersubjectivity that is the world) no longer happens smoothly, building gently on our existing constructs, but erupts into an awareness of the presence of the unconstrued, challenging our constructions as an Other that is calling us into an unknown dialogue. Panicked into premature construction, the psyche may arrive at an idiosyncratic reality that is not shared with others or with the greater fabric of the cosmos; or, alternatively, the experience might be held, still unconstrued, as an intrapsychic mystery to be assimilated gradually; or again it might be taken up within the construct system of a religious group when it may become part of the sub-reality of this group.
There are two extreme instances of this process within the phenomenalist framework, corresponding to stretching the framework towards the realist, or towards the idealist end of its continuum. The first case is where the issue concerns different cultural contexts and an encompassing reality can be defined which contains the unconstrued experience. Here, encounter is with an Other initially unconstrued that can subsequently, or from a different cultural perspective, be regarded as a reality in its own right. An example might be the (possibly apocryphal) account of the reaction of some indigenous peoples to the arrival of a large sailing ship off their coast, which they simply could not see because of its incompatibility with what was at that time their construct system. Supposing, for the sake of argument, that this was the case, then we would have an example of what most Westerners would regard as concrete reality (a sailing ship) being a numinous unconstrued apparition for a different culture, which subsequently became construed and assimilated. In this case it is equally possible to adopt a realist account: the ship really is there, but the conceptual apparatus of the indigenous person is not adequate to perceiving it fully.
Other examples of the same case, where the roles of Western and indigenous culture are reversed, occur where a materialist Westerner enters a religious ritual and as a result has perceptual experiences which they are unable to make sense of. The result may be the denial of the experience entirely (as with the inability to see the ship in the previous example), usually followed by a withdrawal of the Westerner from the investigation; or it may lead to a study of the relevant social context, leading the Westerner to construe the experience in terms, for instance, of "spirit possession" or a similar construct. If we were to follow the pattern of the previous example, we would suppose that this was an enlargement of the Westerner’s limit reality to a greater reality which included spirits. Interestingly, this interpretation is rather rarely applied by Westerners.
The second case, at the other extreme, occurs in advanced mystical experiences, where the subjects, even though they may have an extensive construct system for the general area of the states of consciousness involved, find themselves totally unable to construe what they encounter, and where they report that it is something of its nature humanly unconstruable. Wittgenstein (1974) in the last chapter of the Tractatus which runs (in its entirety)
advocated keeping silence on this area of the mystical. But mystics, believing that these experiences are both life-enhancing and society-building, have spurned this advice and made great efforts to point towards these experiences by means of analogies. Wilber (1996) has drawn attention to the importance of distinguishing the very different sorts of language used in handling the construed and the unconstruable, calling the first empirical (in the case of practical or physical objects) or hermeneutical (in the case of the social or mental world), and the second mandalic. Mandalic language, because it is concerned with analogical pointing rather than the representational modelling of the early Wittgenstein’s advocated use of language, is not constrained by the normal laws of logic. It is marked by paradox. The point is that, since conventional logic depends essentially on language and construal, it is necessarily the case that the unconstrued cannot be handled by normal logic.
Importantly, the paradoxical use of language is precisely a characteristic also of the psychotic ¾ I would postulate, for the same reason as it is of the mystic. In his analysis of this, Matte Blanco (1975) analyses in detail the discourse of psychotics in terms of the interleaving (a bi-logic) of conventional logic with anaclitic logic, which is distinguished by the principle that all relations are symmetric. Thus if John is the father of Bill, it follows that Bill is the father of John. If a banana is a fruit, it follows that fruit is banana (from which it is a corollary that an apple is a banana) … and so on. This logic is not, however, confined to psychotics but is a characteristic of (in Matte Blanco’s Freudian framework) the unconscious generally which only comes inappropriately to the fore in psychosis. He describes how this logic is present at the preliminary stage (pointed to by Merleau-Ponty) of perceptions before construal sets in, and how it is present throughout the handling of emotion. This analysis parallels Clarke’s observation (this volume) that "[i]n both psychotic material, and accounts of spiritual experience and religious ideas from different faiths, a parallel logic can be discerned that is strikingly different from, and frequently opposite to, commonsense and scientific logic…," which she associates with the implicational cognitive subsystems of Teasdale’s classification. This subsystem "deals in relatively undifferentiated wholes and cannot manage fine discrimination" - a necessary consequence of anaclitic logic.
There are distinctions to be made here, however. Wilber claims that in the case of mysticism there is a form of thinking (contemplative insight) which is entirely adequate to it, and that mandalic thinking suffers from paradox only because it is a poor substitute for the appropriate form of thinking. I imagine he would claim that the thinking of psychotic is likewise a poor substitute for the "correct" propositional thinking applied to ordinary experience, and that this is the only similarity. The contrary view, however, would be that unconstrued experiencing is an integral category of human life, entering at a pre-conscious level all the time. If this is the case, then we are all instinctively adept at handling part of this realm, and have an implicit familiarity with its anaclitic logic ¾ whether or not there are more sophisticated contemplative ways of handling it in the mystical case.
Methodology
I want to end by discussing the implications of the viewpoint for research into these areas. The key point is that attention shifts from the question of the physical origins of perception from an existing reality, and subsequent processing of thought, to the construction of reality through a process of intersubjective participation. The participative viewpoint now allows us to ask, can there be an objective aspect to the unconstrued thoughts of the psychotic, and to the apprehensions within religious experience, and might these be related? This becomes the reformulation within this viewpoint of the original question, of whether there can be such a thing as unconstrued experiencing, as a word taking an object. In Realist science "objective" is equated with non-subjective. But we have seen that in the participatory viewpoint reality has a joint objective-subjective character. We do not deny that the experiences in question are strongly subjective; but we can enquire as to whether they are sufficiently shared to have a significant degree of objectivity, sufficient, that is, for us to learn something useful from making the investigation into their objectivity.
Any investigation of this nature, however, immediately stumbles upon the problem of anaclitic logic and the failure of normal language. How can I investigate a person’s experiences if we are both deprived, by its very nature, of the normal means of discussing it? It seems to me that this can be answered at two levels. At a minimal level (and this may be precisely what is required clinically) one can rest with the participatory framework which affirms that experience is experience, and the business of living is about working with others concerning what is construed and shared, and working with oneself concerning the rest, and not confusing the two. All experience is thereby affirmed as a real part of oneself, without rigid labels of "right" or "real," and the boundaries for making sense of the situation are accordingly opened up.
At a more adventurous level, however, which might be called for in the religious context, one can ask for ways of overcoming the linguistic problem in order to discover experimentally the extent of objectivity of experiences. To do this requires the experimenters themselves to have the experiences, or their analogues. If I myself have the experience, then I do not need language to convey it to me. It might be objected that if we are investigating the extent of overlap of experiences then we are back to the problem of comparing my experience with yours, which requires language; but this is to misunderstand the intersubjectivity that is the core of the phenomenological and particpatory viewpoints. My experiences are not restricted to my skull, and so are thereby necessary separated from your experiences, as is the case with realist views. My experiences are my world, and if our worlds overlap then they are the same experiences as yours, at least in some respects. (Even identity is no longer a rigid category here.) When we stand together watching a sunset, we are not exchanging signals about two different perceived sunsets in our separate skulls, but we are participating in a single sun setting over a single horizon. Phenomenalism places this fact of human life before its exegesis in terms of materialistic science (even though that exegesis provides further valuable insight into the links that underpin this participation). Thus we start our investigation with the given, that we are in intersubjective connection with each other and this is in fact the basis out of which construct our objective world as social beings.
Taking this starting point then radically alters our concept of investigative methodology. There is no longer a separation between experimenter and subject. We require a methodology which starts from a co-operative conception of inquiring into the commonality of experience, and we are thus necessarily led to what Heron (1996) has called co-operative enquiry. It is unfortunately only possible to touch on this here. A flavour of the relevance of the method is given by Heron and Reason (2000).
Thus the fundamental problems of the failure of language as both a means of communication and a logical system for establishing validity are circumvented: first, by rooting the methodology in an experiential epistemology (using the commonality of experience in the phenomenological picture) which is linked through progressive stages to the propositional level; and, second, by adopting a flexible system of validity criteria which do not demand objectivity in the sense of non-subjectivity. The method is still in its infancy, but it offers the best likelihood of extending scientific investigation to the area of this book.
Conclusion
I hope to have demonstrated that the notion of unconstrued experiencing is indeed radical in that it challenges some of the fundamental philosophical assumptions behind much of current science. Yet it is not thereby outside the scope of science. On the contrary, it fits within the new philosophical framework that has been emerging through this century in response to the logical inadequacies of the old, and in response to many similar challenges coming from attempts to grasp our experience. And it fits within one of the most promising projects for the extension of the scientific method to a wider range of human experience. The way is thus open for research that could for the first time bring an empirically based understanding into an area that could form the core of the human condition.
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