Embodied Self and Other

Marc Applebaum, PhDSaybrook University, Itlaq

Foundation

31st Annual Congress of Psychology July 26, 2016

Yokohama, Japan

Layers of the ego

I will speak from my twenty years of studying phenomenological psychology while practicing a meditative path in Sufism

As Dr. Ferrarello told us, for Husserl, the “Ego” has multiple layers ranging from the reflective, personal, psychical ego to the underlying, pre-reflective layers which are called pre-egoic by Husserl, by which he means they are prior to the personal or psychical ego.

Self as a You

Dr. Ferrarello has said that the Self (capital “S”), is an Other for me, an Other that transcends me and to whom I am related, and which I incorporate in an ongoing way as my sense of “my self” (small “s”), what Husserl calls the personal ego.

An implication of this statement is that the essential Self is an Other—that is, it is experienced as a You, and it is in ongoing relation to this You that my sense of my “I” takes shape.

“The You is older than I”

This You could still be framed as my projection, a kind of interior object that belongs to me as a strictly bounded self. In contrast, phenomenology claims that the You is irreducible to a mental object that is still “mine,” merely the property and creation of my ego.

For this reason Strasser (1969), summarizing Husserl’s phenomenology, wrote: “The ‘you’ does not come into my world; it already is there, for the ‘you’ is older than I. More precisely speaking, we should say that the ‘you’ is already a ‘you’ with respect to me before I am an Ego” (p. 52).

Primordial empathy

Hart (1992) in his discussion of Husserl writes that being recognized as an Other by the Other grants me a full sense of my “I.” Hart writes that the Other extends himself toward me in what he (1992) refers to as a “gracious regard”: I-ness is a kind of gift given through a primordially caring relationship.

For Husserl, the origin of the I in a You is reflected in a “primordial” or “instinctual” empathy, a pre-personal empathy that is the ground for the empathic relations in everyday life between people.

Pre-egoic ground of care

Thus lived-experiences of empathy between personal Egos have, for the empathizing empirical Ego, an anonymous, pre-empirical nucleus that is enfolded within the self-narrating flow of the personal Ego.

Dr. Tanaka invited us to explore how the self and other are interlaced, and how this relates to embodied interactions. Husserl’s egology points us toward the pre-personal ground of the “I” in an instinctively caring relationality which, precisely because it is pre-egoic, makes a fundamental claim upon the human being.

Body and hyletic flow

The pre-egoic vital life of the body is embodiment par excellence: it is the hyletic (material) flow of which Dr. Ferrarello spoke--the flowing bodily and affective life of the locus of consciousness that discovers itself as this or that person at the level of the psychical ego.

Awakening of the pure ego

For Husserl, “Ego” implies layers from the personal, psychical ego to the “pure” or transcendental ego. This transcendental ego awakens through bracketing and withholding from affirming the ontological status of the personal ego and its objects of consciousness as factual “things”.

The inquirer discovers the layers underlying his personal ego when an observing dimension of his “I” turns back toward its own origin in the flux described by Ferrarello, and recognizes itself and its world as dynamically constituted in relation to a witnessing “You.” As this bracketing occurs, the locus of the inquirer’s identity shifts to other layers or strata of the Self.

Nishitani Keiji (1900-1990)

Nishitani Keiji’s work offers an example of the awakening of witnessing the personal ego from a perspective that transcends it

“The traditional view of personality has looked at personality from the point of view of personality itself: as a personality grasping itself from itself. This means that up until now, our view of personality has been constituted within a self-centered prehension of personality as its nucleus” (1982, p. 95).

A calling

An inquirer discovers the ground of his empathic relations with others by tracing the instinct back to its pre-egoic ground. The primordiality of finding oneself in relating to the Other has a strong purchase on the human person precisely because its ground is pre-egoic.

The call to caring relations in a community of others is not exclusively addressed to our person egos, but speaks to our pre-personal origins, since we are already interlaced with others at the level of our hyletic and affective lives. This call is integrated into the lives of our personal egos when we struggle with the ethical choices implied in awakening to the call of a You that is older than the “I.”

Nishida Kitaro (1870-1945)

Nishida Kitaro addressed the ethical implications of the retracing of the origins of the self to a transcending of the personal ego:

“From the perspective of objective logic, the saying of Zen masters may seem to be saying that one simply becomes nothing or loses one’s distinct identity. But to say that the self transcends itself at its own depths does not mean that it becomes nothing; rather it becomes the self-expressing point of the world, the real individual, the real self. Real knowledge and morality stem from this standpoint” (1987 p. 108)

Inquiry and mysticism

Does this make the phenomenologist into a mystic? Not if mysticism requires adhering to a particular religious dogma. Husserl remarked that as a phenomenologist he could agree with whole pages from the writings of Christian mystic Meister Eckhart—but distinguished sharply between scientific practice and mysticism

Similarly, the Nishitani (1991) reports Nishida warned him to avoid a “careless conflation” of his Zen practice with his philosophical studies (p. 21). Both sides were respected, and yet distinguished from each other.

Praxis

In my case, I have worked with my colleague phenomenologist and psychologist Yannis Toussulis for over twenty years with a group of meditative practitioners in Sufism to, alongside their meditative practice, train them in recognizing and phenomenologically describe the shifts in consciousness that occur within their practice.

The limits of time today do not allow me to describe this work in detail, except to say that its aim is wakeful communalization, to borrow a phrase from Husserl!

Contact:mapplebaum@saybrook.edu

www.phenomenologyblog.com

References

Dorion Cairns (1976). Conversations with Husserl and Fink. (Richard Zaner, Ed.). The Hague: Nartinus Nijhoff.

Nishida Kitaro (1987). Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview. (David Dilworth, Trans.). Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Nishitani Keiji (1991). Nishida Kitaro. (Yamamoto Seisaku & James Heisig, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Stephen Strasser (1969). The Idea of Dialogal Phenomenology. Duquesne University Press.