EVOLUTION = CARRYING FORWARD = TRUSTING YOUR ENVIRONMENT - Part 2

ACTION STEPS, BIRDS, DIRECT REFERENT AND PERCEPTION

Photo credit: Suzanne Noel 2024

After the beautiful comments in the Focusing list on my previous blog and my clarifying remarks - please see the comments to Part one - I am now ready to delve deeper into the question of what is a Gendlian action step. I will do so by examining again the transcript of my 2015 conversation with Gendlin.

How did the action step "come" to Gendlin? It is very clear from the transcript that it did not come from within, as words or images come to symbolize the felt sense, but it came from outside, with me in the role of an empathetic storyteller. 

The release of tension, the "it gives me a breath" takes place in the conversation after my interpolation of the behaviour sequence  when they feel hunger, they have to rise from the chair and go at least to the kitchen closet to get a can of something in order to eat. Right? And that is already an action step. 

This interpolation carries forward the process (makes the process evolve) in a very peculiar way: it changes the meaning of "action step" from something that should be added to a Focusing process to something that has the power to stop a Focusing process. 

The behaviour sequence is a series of images that work by reminding Gendlin of how often he forgets to eat concrete food in order to attend what I presume to be other more interesting, intellectual endeavours. In other words, the interpolated behaviour sparks a moment of truth, not just a felt shift after felt-sensing (or "sense feeling",  an expression I prefer). 

A "moment of truth" is a revelation, i.e. a sudden moment of transition from not-knowing to knowing, as when something veiled becomes unveiled. 

Its bodily correlates  are positive feelings ranging from release of tension to excitement. If we do not offer resistance, a moment of truth is likely to lead to an action step, i.e. a simple behavioural sequence or the beginning of a more complex, coherent and persistent behavioural sequence. This is because it often comes with the powerful bodily conclusions "I can", "I must", "I want" ... to act in order to pursue or avoid the behaviour revealed in the moment of truth.

Thus, during the conversation with me,  Gendlin has a moment of truth that reveals that he can step into action by listening to his feeling of hunger from a previous position where hunger was either not felt or disregarded in order to continue with "business as usual" (even if business as usual means to follow the flow of some very valuable intellectual endeavour).

Revelation = Recognition = a "re" that takes away a veil, an obstacle, a block and reconstitutes the context of a healthy relationship with the environment. 

Thus, an action step implies behaviour, and behaviour for Gendlin means the construction that we see in A Process Model Chapter VI, one where the feeling of hunger motivates a cat to track a bird (in order to eat it, even if this aspect remains "unsaid" in the narrative), and for the first time in our evolutionary history a central nervous system puts the whole body into a sequence flee or fight. And this in turn, requires that objects that come and go (like the sun for a plant or the mother for the nursing baby) become stable objects to be seized and reached by our animal perceptive eye. 

In tribute to the pair Deleuze-Bergson of the movement-image, using the Galilean inertial systems principle (the cat starts to run in order to stabilize a running object, but if the earth was moving there would be no need for the cat's running), to the several Gestalt principles of constancy of forms and closure, Gendlin depicts the perception of the cat's eye through one of his most original constructions: the stable (permanent, eternal) object as "falling out" from a string of contexts that are reconstituted by its presence. 

The "reconstituted" context can be said to "fall out" from the sequence as truly as the object does. The cat runs in a scene that is perceived as steady and even unmoving, despite the fact that it whizzes by and bops up and down! (Kant already remarked on this difference between subjective and objective perception.) The "reconstituted" scene is the steady one, the "kept same" one, in which the cat runs after the bird.  (APM, 146-47). 

I am now in the position to ask, quite pragmatically: how can a more-than-Focusing process bring to the feeling of hunger or to a moment of truth? 

In Chapter VI of APM, Gendlin calls "pyramiding" the process through which a newer sequence of behavior does not cancel out the previous ones but lets them become implicit in the "behavior space" where animals move. 

A great many sequences are pyramided under the usual repertoire of every animal. They might not have formed in a great many generations. (A certain bird from the Atlantic Ocean has no mating dance. A similar species from the Pacific still does it. If a Pacific bird is presented to an Atlantic one, it will do a mating dance that specie hasn't done in thousands of years).   
The behavior space is inherited along with the body-structure. The individual organism never actually sequences most of the implicit behaviors that are pyramided over. But the common behaviors are also formed in a pyramided way, over each other.  APM, 103.

I have designed "Miniatures of evolution" to let emerge more primitive sequences of behavior than those we have at hand now, in our technology shaped western societies. These sequences  come into play in the abduction process, when we cross human gestures  (action intentions)  with animal and plant behaviour.  If the subliminal process works out, the result should be universals hybridazing together our gestures and the wisdom coming from ancestors closer to the roots of the tree of life (Darwin's way to sketch the relations among different species).  The process is not linear and the outcome cannot be predicted: in Gendlian terms, it is a "direct referent formation" that crosses different contexts.  In fact - if I understand what Gendlin says on this point - crossed universals differ from "birds" because crossing is not a sequence in time but happens suddenly (as a revelation does).

For us "falls out" always means the whole context is implicit in what falls out. We say universals fall out from crossed contexts they reconstitute. Similarly, the bird cannot be an object without the scene--the bird falls out from a series of scenes which must be present too--so the universal cannot be had except as all its contexts that it reconstitutes. But the relation is not exactly the same, because the scene-changes which let the bird fall out are a string, whereas the collected context(s) are crossed and reconstituted together. But birds and universals are both often taken as if they were objects that exist without their contexts  (APM, 196).

... as soon as we try to think newly, or to understand something for ourselves, however old it may be, we must allow the functioning of this texture of crossed instances, as well as crossed clusters of interaction contexts, themselves bodily elaborations of behavior and life process (APM, 196). 

If the abductive rule of inference works out - no guarantee indeed-,  it works both as a verification of the principle that "everything is interconnected" and as a bodily solution to a problem that we could not solve by ourselves. The bodily solution amounts to a moment of truth, as if evolution itself had decided for us, on a way that we have only paved through our gestures of care.  In Gendlin's language the rule works  as a creative sequence in VII (the level of creativity and culture) by delivering a Direct-Referent formation in VIII,  the tier of wisdom:  

If I wish to move in a certain direction, in VII this means I know and define this direction. In VIII it means that I know in advance that this direction will change in Direct-Referent-formation. From the VII point of view this means only that I don't know what the direction will be after Direct-Referent-formation. But in VIII I do know--I know more than the direction I defined, I know that plus the openness I leave for the "change" which a Direct-Referent-formation can make in carrying the whole context forward. (...)

Yet VIII-carrying-forward fulfills the implying in a new way, through a new medium. Therefore much is involved in the carrying forward which cannot happen in VII and of which it would not be meaningful even to ask if it could happen in terms of the actions, interactions, and symbolizations of VII. In that sense VIII-carrying-forward transcends the requirements of VII, and arrives at a bodily solution which takes account of all the requirements of VII, but in a new way that must then still be sequenced creatively within VII. Such changes cannot of course be delineated in advance in VII. Therefore it would be foolish for me to decide the "direction" in which a solution to a problem must lie, before I solve it. Such a decision would only instance the problem. Yet I sense a direction and could say what it is. Instead I want this direction, but not as definable in VII, rather as about-to-be "changed" in an VIII carrying forward.  (APM 230-31).

All this said, I wish to close by circling back to the role of perception and my sentence from abduction, i.e. Evolution = trusting your environment. If perception is a sort of self-deception, a tricky way our hungry animal body manages to transform a bird flying away from us  into a bird that "falls out" for us, how much trust should we put in this transformative process? And if images fascinate us and stimulate behavior without direct attention to body sense,  how much trust should we place in a behavior that is so stimulated?

It appears that Gendlin was not troubled by these ideas. He had an unshakable confidence in the body power to tell right from wrong and to send us the right signals on how to go on, even in the presence of very difficult problems such as the ecological crisis we now face.

I am perhaps less confident than he was. That is why with "Miniatures of evolution",  I want to make sure that one of the two premises of the mini-theories of evolution come from objective facts that anyone can observe in nature, at least when the latter is seen through the lenses of scientific discoveries and third person science. The abductive rule of inference has a lot of serendipity halo around it anyway, and thus it does not need more "magic" intrusions into the very delicate process of forming an evolutionary action step. In other words, I do not wish that a tool that can be very effective in the re-subjectivazion of the human away from anthropocentrism gets mistaken for a tool to inject more confidence into our unilateral visions of the world, of nature, of the planet.